Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
What do you think about all-male or all-female social spaces?
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Earlier this week, I sent out some of your descriptions of how you interacted with peers in adolescence. Another batch of those responses is coming. But I wanted to single out one response, from Sam (edited for length and clarity):
I’m 51. Graduated from a rural PA high school in 1991. In high school we had a town pool hall run by an old Italian guy. We were allowed to smoke and chew snuff. (There were spittoons.) Lots of guys were always drunk. No girls were allowed in the place. Fighting was permitted, but only out back and you couldn’t put the shoes to a guy who was down.
He would leave sometimes. He sold hoagies and tiny pizzas so when he needed supplies he’d just open the register and go. Nobody ever stole anything. And we paid for every game. Sometimes he was gone for hours. He was a great pool player, and a card hustler. He taught us all how to play on big skate Brunswick tables. We need places like that, where boys can smoke and chew snuff and fight, with no girls allowed.
They tore it down when I was in college and put up a Rite Aid.
I’m 43. I’ve never spent significant time in any exclusively male social space, whether it be a pool hall or a cardroom or a golf club. (I am not talking here about, for example, locker rooms or day spas.) As a teen in the 1990s, I was aware that such spaces existed, but they seemed like a relic of a bygone era. I never quite understood the appeal––I enjoyed time with male friends playing sports or video games or going to the beach or driving through town, but we had plenty of time together and there was never a time we actively didn’t want girls around. And in high school and thereafter, my generation seemed to have close friendships between men and women in a way that was abnormal in the generation of my grandparents and even my parents.
So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this matter, especially from readers––of all ages––who have valued all-male or all-female social spaces. What do you think of their role today?
Theories of the Baby Bust
In Quillette, Alex Nowrasteh argues that people are having fewer children because they have more appealing ways to spend their time than they did before:
Tomorrow, I could book a flight to over 100 countries to see wondrous natural and man-made sights. There are thousands of good restaurants and bars within an hour’s drive. I could never hope to sample fully the range of tasty cuisine and alcoholic beverages available to me. The internet is at my fingertips, with billions of interesting articles, tweets, and videos that could fill my day. The number and quality of new books that I can download is difficult to even describe. Shooting ranges (I’m an American, after all), axe throwing, cigar lounges, rock climbing, and various novel and new exercise classes at gyms are close by—to say nothing of activities I’m not even aware of yet. And I have numerous friends and many potential friends who are just a phone call or text away. Streaming services bring the golden age of television and movies into my household.
These and other options mean that every choice we make has a high opportunity cost regarding our careers and entertainment options. When countries develop, fertility falls for this and other reasons.
Talk Anti-therapy
My colleague Derek Thompson argues that the way we talk about mental health online is doing more harm than good:
We may have overcorrected from an era when mental health was shameful to talk about to an era when some vulnerable people surround themselves with conversations and media about anxiety and depression, which makes them more vigilant about symptoms and problems, which makes them more likely to problematize normal daily stress, which makes them move toward a deficit model of psychopathology where they think there is always something wrong with them that needs their attention, which causes them to pull back from social engagement, which causes even more distress and anxiety.
The People on the Bus
In The Atlantic, Shahnaz Habib explains why she is glad that she rode public transportation with her baby:
Being a mother gave my wandering its own richness. The presence of a baby was like an invisibility cloak. It made me uninteresting and unavailable. Nothing to see here. Men whose eyes might have lingered before looked through me now. Only after I became imperceptible to others did I fully realize the weight I had been carrying: the burden of looking busy and indifferent, fending off attention—the pressure of being constantly looked at. In those limbo days of early motherhood, I pulled this anonymity around me while welcoming a different kind of attention.
It helped that in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the buses were full of passengers—many of them immigrants like me—whose attitude toward babies in public places was one of hospitality. Fellow riders made duck and cat noises, played peekaboo behind bulging shopping bags, and let my daughter’s little exploring hands touch their umbrellas and bags. It didn’t bother me when passengers told me the baby must be cold, the baby must be overheating, the baby must be overdressed, the baby must be hungry, the baby must be tired. I understood it to be phatic: a stranger’s way of saying I am a fellow human looking out for the youngest member of our tribe. Sharing space with strangers as a new mother was an act of faith in the world. It was also a rejoinder to the peculiarly American loneliness of nuclear-family child-raising.
We Move in Mysterious Ways
In a New York Times essay titled “The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse,” Christopher Beha writes:
The modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility … The most sincere believers I’ve known have also been the most humble … It may be that those who feel most powerfully the presence of God in their lives likewise feel most powerfully the impossibility of adequately capturing that presence in words. And it may be that those for whom God is not a symbol or a cudgel but a lived reality find this reality most mysterious.
Megan McArdle argues in The Washington Post that the world could use more jerks:
Almost no one believes the world needs more jerks … You’d have to be a bit of a jerk to suggest that we ought to have more of them … Allow me to introduce myself, then, as the jerk who thinks we need more jerks, particularly in knowledge-making fields such as journalism and academia—or at least the kind of people who get called jerks for saying things their colleagues don’t want to hear.
These professions used to be sheltered workshops for those kinds of “jerks”: naturally distrustful folks who like asking uncomfortable questions … These character traits don’t make people popular at parties, but they might well help them ferret out untruths, deconstruct popular pieties and dismantle conventional wisdom. Jerks were never the majority, which would be chaos. But they were a teaspoon of leavening that kept social pressure from compressing the range of acceptable thought into an intellectual pancake: flat, uniform and not very interesting … Human resources departments have cracked down on all manner of jerk-ish behavior—including, of course, saying things that offend one’s colleagues. But if you’re in the truth business, all this niceness comes at a cost.
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