This article feels tone deaf to me. Yes there's a real crisis going on that is impacting men. Let's make progress fixing it. But let's put more than one sentence towards the acknowledgement that the girls are not all right and have not been all right since the history of time. We need to fix things for both of them, not go on a disproportionate crusade to fix the world for boys. Perhaps we stop attributing as much as we do to "gender" and see how things start to improve?
"Helping boys and men succeed should be a priority for all our society’s institutions. Schools that have succeeded in keeping boys on track should be expanded, by both increasing the number of students they serve and exporting their methods to other schools. Vocational education and opportunities should be redoubled; the nation’s public school system should start the process for early age groups, and apprenticeship programs should be supported by the federal government. Nonprofits helping boys and men — such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the YMCA — should receive more investment." -- This whole paragraph is advocating for far more than we've done for women. We're still out here fighting for reproductive rights, the fairness in considering women when designing society, city planning, healthcare and pharmaceutical research studies, car safety tests. Let's put all of that on the agenda alongside Yang's plan to invest in institutions that better serve boys shall we?
"we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic" -- we're not defining masculinity as toxic. We're defining toxic masculinity as toxic. There's a difference. And boys have full agency to display healthy, positive masculinity instead of the toxic kind.
"Here’s the simple truth I’ve heard from many men: We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves. We deal with idleness terribly." -- Literally nobody is forcing men to be idle. And historically, men have had the least constraints imposed on them to do whatever they wanted to do. I imagine if a boy did not want to be idle today, they would have plenty of opportunity to not be. At least more than a girl typically has had.