Again, great stuff from Rob. But reading this I found myself in disagreement with an important point.
I think most males are biologically predisposed to be the warrior and protector unless they are prevented by society/culture or otherwise face developmental challenges from bad parenting. I disagree that apathy and laziness are the default, but I think they are a byproduct of a collectivist matriarchal system replacing the previous libertarian paternal system that was the actual system design for democratic societies for most of history.
Come on man, just consider the grade school energy that bursts out in boys when released to the playground, and what games they gravitate to... except when the female-dominated power of the schools puts down all those rules to "make everyone safe".
Joseph Cambell also noted this need for mother's child to father's child and then adult progression. in all successful cultures and lamented that the West did not have it and was drifting toward a deletion of the father's child step leading to societal catastrophe as males would grow dysfunctional and fail to have any productive role in society.
My son did not handle college well... could not muster the discipline to set still in a classroom. He was smoking too much pot and drinking too much and seemed unmotivated. After trying for four years, he enrolled in the Army and picked a six-year MOS at age 22. Almost immediately he blossomed. At his basic training graduation, he complained that it was not physically challenging enough... claiming that the military had reduced the requirements due to more females and out of shape recruits. He went on to become a non-commissioned sergeant within his first year of duty as he earned the leadership responsibility.
My assessment of his situation... too much matriarchal control in the education system, and too much mothering from my wonderful wife. She was going to call his commanding officer at one point to try and get them to overturn a decline of leave during the holiday. I regret not being a bigger part of both my son's development in their early and later teenage years as I focused so much on my career.
The school system has always been this way but has gotten worse. With the rise of a female dominate society, when we have gutted male careers and more females get college degrees and end up the primary bread winner... and then take their toxic feminism movement into general society and upend our culture... males are shutting down due to both the depletion of male role models combined with restrictions and depletions of paths for them to actually be the males that their biology compels them to be.
I don't see this as a natural state for males. The apathetic, lazy and directionless male that screams for socialism and Universal Basic Income and demonstrates so much depression and psychological unwellness that manifests in things like gender identity confusion... he has been damaged by his mother, the education system and societal and cultural drift that is anti-real-male.
Excuse my French, but fuck feminism and everything it represents today.
The average boy has a surplus of aggressive energy and a drive to take risks to impress peers and girls. That raw material has to be shaped into something positive. Otherwise it will express itself in random troublemaking, get channeled into video games, or at best, shape itself into gangs.
I think you're largely right that feminism went and did wrong, but having been a girl in the 1950s, I dread the remedy for men being seen as the re-suppression of women. This does not need to be a zero-sum war, as many feminists and antifeminists tend to make it. We're one species, two sexes, and eight-plus billion individuals. Only two sizes do not fit all.
The only quibble is the opinion that males naturally gravitate toward apathy and laziness. I argue that is their unnatural state. I do agree that without direction they will just go do their warrior thing but risk it being destructive instead of productive. Or, if they shutdown, play video games and rant on the Inernet as incels. There is also a scientific point in the reduction of testosterone in males.
In other social primate species, testosterone level is responsive to rises and falls in social status. A male who ascends in the group hierarchy experiences a rise, a defeated rival a fall. No doubt this is true in humans too. While environmental factors may contribute, feelings of defeat, depression and uselessness are definitely causes at least as much as effects of low T. It’s a vicious cycle.
I was not aware of that biological explanation, but it makes sense. Jordan Peterson points out the lobster analogy where the male that wins grows bigger and with stronger claws, and the loser is smaller.
I see that feminists think they like this process of diminished males while they stay attracted to those with high testosterone. It is weird broken-biology behavior.
There are a few legitimate resentments feminism (and its excesses) sprang from. At least the first is biologically rooted, but civilization can to a degree choose to restrain them.
1) Men’s greater physical strength can be used to protect women, but also to confine, police, and intimidate them. A man can threaten you directly if you “get out of line,” or he can be the good man who keeps you at home or in purdah to protect you from the bad men who are unquestionably out there. (The implicit threat of their physical power is men’s trump card against women’s sexual and emotional power over them. Jealousy and “mate guarding,” which serve the biological purpose of protecting one’s genetic and energetic investment, are traditionally turned by human males into the moralistic law of the land. Stone that adulteress!)
2) A man being defined as “not a woman” and then as “better than a woman” in all the ways that count is demeaning and stunting. To build men up, women were put down. (Feminists have exacted payback for that, which is equally stupid, but not more so.) Women may be earning more of the college degrees now, but when I was a kid we were dismissed as intellectually and spiritually second-rate at best, by nature. Those are arguably not gendered human qualities, though the drive to develop them is more conflicted for most women because of motherhood.
In other words, feminism isn’t coming out of nowhere. In many ways, the deck was stacked against women for millennia (if in other ways against men). But, as you say, even feminists aren’t happy with the results of their revenge. Will men be delighted with the results of theirs? As a famous photographer of Marilyn Monroe once said to me, “Women were more fun before they were people.”
I was listening to a great podcast by Scott Burns, the screen writer for the hit Contagion, using AI to work on a sequel. It is fascinating... I highly recommend it.
My idea would be for a group of tech nerd incels to use DNA technology to create a lab virus or bacteria that only infected and killed females to satiate their anger and resentment over what they think females have done to their lives, and the resulting loss in female population creates a new dystopia of a world without enough females. This would play both sides of the gender war that everyone forgets... that we need each other and demeaning and destroying the other gender is about the most stupid human pursuit that any have derived.
The thing about your comparison is that there are a minority of power-abusing men, and there have always been a minority of females that wanted to be allowed freedom of choice for their life. We achieved significantly almost an elimination of the former (#MeToo and all the laws protect females beyond anything any early feminists could have imagined), and also materially achieved the latter if not exceeded it.
So then why do 3rd wave feminists even still exist? If men do end up taking it out on females, and I see this as the wave of anti-DEI in hiring and firing has impacted female jobs more so than male, then don't females deserve it?
I know for a fact that many career females want their cake and eat it to. Just my history. Fit, athletic, 6' 3" 205 lbs., have been told I am attractive, with a very good career... many of the career women I know and have worked with have made it clear they would sleep with me in an instant and I am a catch they dreamed of. I have been married to the love of my life for 42 years... she works but was mostly a stay-at-home mother while our kids were young. These controlling girlboss women are the least attractive to me, and I know most men in my position feel the same.
Many of these women that are married their husband is subordinate to her control and career, and in all cases, she has no respect for him and treats him like shit.
So, there is this disconnect with career women wanting a high-T man owning ambition and career who will let her dominate and will favor her career over his. WTF?
It would be fantastic if all marriages where complete partnerships, but someone always dominates. I think most intelligent and self-confident men would accept an equal partnership, but there is something in the female DNA that causes her to exploit her position to gain control. If in the weaker economic position she will use affection/sex as the weapon... but she will use any weapon at her disposal... including her financial superiority. Men might leverage their financial superiority, but affections/sex, etc. was always the power the females had over males, and never really the other way around. Now females have both and a lot of men are livid about it.
“we need each other and demeaning and destroying the other gender is about the most stupid human pursuit that any have derived.”
I’m slowly reading Diné Bahane’, the Navajo Creation Story, translated by Paul Zolbrod, and there is near the beginning an incredible story about a huge fight between the men and the women in which they separated and tried to live apart on opposite sides of a river.
“They were sure they would thrive without women to make them angry. And their spirits were high, at least at first, it is said. … It is also said that the women, too, were in high spirits at first. …”
After a couple of years women are jumping in the river to try to swim back to the men, and getting swept away by the current.
“[T]he men longed for the women just as badly as the women longed for them. That longing grew, in fact, on both sides of the stream. …”
Recommended reading. Often very funny, often astonishing.
“a new dystopia of a world without enough females”
China, and India actually created that dystopia, by aborting female fetuses once sex determination became possible. (Before that, female newborns were sometimes killed or abandoned.) China had the one-child policy, but in India people also traditionally preferred boys. And apparently still do.
"affections/sex, etc. was always the power the females had over males, and never really the other way around." That's not at all true of most women I know, and it doesn't sound like it's true of your wife, but maybe it is true of the narcissistic beauties that men masochistically desire.
I imagine that you’d name the military, unlike higher education, as a positive rite of passage for young men wanting to cultivate a mature masculinity. Do you have thoughts on other, non-military rites of passage to cultivate collective, purposeful masculinity? (I’ve been influenced by Sam Pressler’s writing of the collective service of WWII combined with the economic mobility of the GI bill. Today we seem stuck on SAT tutors and elite private schools.)
Bring back vocational education! I've fixed code (with good pay), but there is nothing like the sense of accomplishment from fixing something physical. Except maybe the accomplishment of building it in the first place.
Like Rob, I also joined the military at 17. Higher education was fantastic for me. I didn’t have the experience most describe but I also studied math, modern philosophy, and science more than anything. The biggest influence on my personal sense of right and wrong were classes where I read Steinbeck and Kant. Maybe I am just different but the big deal everyone makes about higher education I failed to experience at all.
I would say that the military and high education were both important in the development of my masculinity.
So glad Rob that you understood your mother's explanation about sharing responsibility and contributing to the common good at 13 years old. This is usually expected of girls from a very early age to help washing dishes, setting table, cooking, caring for younger siblings, laundry, etc. On the farm we also had to work outdoors; to weed the garden, gather eggs, etc. This work gave us a sense of worth as a valued member of our family, pulling our own weight in a small way. It also taught us skills, how to take care of ourselves. Those who don't get that sense of integration and usefulness tend to flounder in later life and expect others make up for their shortcomings. Boys tend to stay with their parents longer because they often get their chores done for them; like laundry and cooking, and they have more freedom to stay out late at night, while girls are usually expected to help with the cooking, laundry etc and get in at a "decent" hour at night. So for girls leaving the family home feels like more freedom.
I remember walking with my (single) mother as a young child with some toy weapon, and a man saying that there goes my mothers protector. I liked my toy, but that role had not occurred to me, and I remember to this day the pride I felt. This makes me think there is something there to be nurtured that culture hooks up with, and that can of course be culturally unfulfilled. Most cultures have apparently found that there is something there to work with.
While it is true that things are constructed it is curious to me why this would be negative.
I see that others use this as a basis to demean or use to increase their own power. So I can see and I agree with the premise.
My confusion is why is construction is negative at all. No one seems to complain about movable type but it is entirely constructed. As is the concept of a written language. Some cultures got along fine without a written language for thousands of years.
I have yet to meet the person who complains about running water based on the idea it is constructed but if it is to their advantage I am sure somone would. Is masculinity and femininity any different?
The whole idea is that constructed things that are physical or generally advantageous are good. Things that drive differences in power or status are open to being a problem if they are constructed. Never mind if they work.
I feel like this is different than fixing problems. No one wants to do this but they want to tear systems down and remake it in their own image for their own advantage.
Isn’t the redefinition of some things being constructed as bad a luxury belief? It gives the person who views something as bad power at the expensive of others.
This article was a real eye opener for me. I am more constructed than I thought. It made me wonder again about the interface between human nature and the family/society.
I was thinking of the role of biology relative to social pressure. I am in agreement with Rob that the default for men is apathy and laziness. It is definitely true that one with dangerously low testosterone only sits and stares at the wall, which is telling. These individuals require medical intervention not be unmotivated to do anything.
I believe that simple ideas are wildly off but I do wonder about the effect of biology relative to society.
For example, if the model Gilmore is completely correct then we should expect this is switch between cultures as there is no real reason to choose on sex or another for masculine roles.
However, this is certainly not the case as there is no culture I am aware of who has a different model. Say there was a 10% (likely less) advantage to men typically occupying masculine roles then we would see a larger differentiation between men and women occupying different roles in the ancient past, then a transition to the current observation. However, no such culture has been found indicating the preference is strong for men to occupy masculine roles and women to occupy feminine roles.
Is the biological basis just a difference in strength? Gilmore’s premise, based on cultures with low differentiation, would refute this interpretation. Any other ideas?
As someone who has experienced this firsthand, I 100% agree. Whenever people say something is a social construct, it's always treated like it's a bad thing and it needs to be changed. It shouldn't be a surprise that I hear that line of argumentation when it comes to lowering the age of consent. Don't look up which philosophers wanted to lower the age of consent in France in the late 70s.
Great description of a worthwhile rite of passage we seem to be casting totally aside. My question now is how to get my 14 yr old grandson to read either your column or the book. Many thanks.
I'm so grateful to Shelly for her wisdom when 17yo Rob set a course for his life. I think girls should have similar, not necessarily identical, opportunities to develop courage. They want dads to be proud of them too.
Again, great stuff from Rob. But reading this I found myself in disagreement with an important point.
I think most males are biologically predisposed to be the warrior and protector unless they are prevented by society/culture or otherwise face developmental challenges from bad parenting. I disagree that apathy and laziness are the default, but I think they are a byproduct of a collectivist matriarchal system replacing the previous libertarian paternal system that was the actual system design for democratic societies for most of history.
Come on man, just consider the grade school energy that bursts out in boys when released to the playground, and what games they gravitate to... except when the female-dominated power of the schools puts down all those rules to "make everyone safe".
Joseph Cambell also noted this need for mother's child to father's child and then adult progression. in all successful cultures and lamented that the West did not have it and was drifting toward a deletion of the father's child step leading to societal catastrophe as males would grow dysfunctional and fail to have any productive role in society.
My son did not handle college well... could not muster the discipline to set still in a classroom. He was smoking too much pot and drinking too much and seemed unmotivated. After trying for four years, he enrolled in the Army and picked a six-year MOS at age 22. Almost immediately he blossomed. At his basic training graduation, he complained that it was not physically challenging enough... claiming that the military had reduced the requirements due to more females and out of shape recruits. He went on to become a non-commissioned sergeant within his first year of duty as he earned the leadership responsibility.
My assessment of his situation... too much matriarchal control in the education system, and too much mothering from my wonderful wife. She was going to call his commanding officer at one point to try and get them to overturn a decline of leave during the holiday. I regret not being a bigger part of both my son's development in their early and later teenage years as I focused so much on my career.
The school system has always been this way but has gotten worse. With the rise of a female dominate society, when we have gutted male careers and more females get college degrees and end up the primary bread winner... and then take their toxic feminism movement into general society and upend our culture... males are shutting down due to both the depletion of male role models combined with restrictions and depletions of paths for them to actually be the males that their biology compels them to be.
I don't see this as a natural state for males. The apathetic, lazy and directionless male that screams for socialism and Universal Basic Income and demonstrates so much depression and psychological unwellness that manifests in things like gender identity confusion... he has been damaged by his mother, the education system and societal and cultural drift that is anti-real-male.
Excuse my French, but fuck feminism and everything it represents today.
I think you just exactly proved Rob's point!
The average boy has a surplus of aggressive energy and a drive to take risks to impress peers and girls. That raw material has to be shaped into something positive. Otherwise it will express itself in random troublemaking, get channeled into video games, or at best, shape itself into gangs.
I think you're largely right that feminism went and did wrong, but having been a girl in the 1950s, I dread the remedy for men being seen as the re-suppression of women. This does not need to be a zero-sum war, as many feminists and antifeminists tend to make it. We're one species, two sexes, and eight-plus billion individuals. Only two sizes do not fit all.
The only quibble is the opinion that males naturally gravitate toward apathy and laziness. I argue that is their unnatural state. I do agree that without direction they will just go do their warrior thing but risk it being destructive instead of productive. Or, if they shutdown, play video games and rant on the Inernet as incels. There is also a scientific point in the reduction of testosterone in males.
In other social primate species, testosterone level is responsive to rises and falls in social status. A male who ascends in the group hierarchy experiences a rise, a defeated rival a fall. No doubt this is true in humans too. While environmental factors may contribute, feelings of defeat, depression and uselessness are definitely causes at least as much as effects of low T. It’s a vicious cycle.
I was not aware of that biological explanation, but it makes sense. Jordan Peterson points out the lobster analogy where the male that wins grows bigger and with stronger claws, and the loser is smaller.
I see that feminists think they like this process of diminished males while they stay attracted to those with high testosterone. It is weird broken-biology behavior.
There are a few legitimate resentments feminism (and its excesses) sprang from. At least the first is biologically rooted, but civilization can to a degree choose to restrain them.
1) Men’s greater physical strength can be used to protect women, but also to confine, police, and intimidate them. A man can threaten you directly if you “get out of line,” or he can be the good man who keeps you at home or in purdah to protect you from the bad men who are unquestionably out there. (The implicit threat of their physical power is men’s trump card against women’s sexual and emotional power over them. Jealousy and “mate guarding,” which serve the biological purpose of protecting one’s genetic and energetic investment, are traditionally turned by human males into the moralistic law of the land. Stone that adulteress!)
2) A man being defined as “not a woman” and then as “better than a woman” in all the ways that count is demeaning and stunting. To build men up, women were put down. (Feminists have exacted payback for that, which is equally stupid, but not more so.) Women may be earning more of the college degrees now, but when I was a kid we were dismissed as intellectually and spiritually second-rate at best, by nature. Those are arguably not gendered human qualities, though the drive to develop them is more conflicted for most women because of motherhood.
In other words, feminism isn’t coming out of nowhere. In many ways, the deck was stacked against women for millennia (if in other ways against men). But, as you say, even feminists aren’t happy with the results of their revenge. Will men be delighted with the results of theirs? As a famous photographer of Marilyn Monroe once said to me, “Women were more fun before they were people.”
I was listening to a great podcast by Scott Burns, the screen writer for the hit Contagion, using AI to work on a sequel. It is fascinating... I highly recommend it.
My idea would be for a group of tech nerd incels to use DNA technology to create a lab virus or bacteria that only infected and killed females to satiate their anger and resentment over what they think females have done to their lives, and the resulting loss in female population creates a new dystopia of a world without enough females. This would play both sides of the gender war that everyone forgets... that we need each other and demeaning and destroying the other gender is about the most stupid human pursuit that any have derived.
The thing about your comparison is that there are a minority of power-abusing men, and there have always been a minority of females that wanted to be allowed freedom of choice for their life. We achieved significantly almost an elimination of the former (#MeToo and all the laws protect females beyond anything any early feminists could have imagined), and also materially achieved the latter if not exceeded it.
So then why do 3rd wave feminists even still exist? If men do end up taking it out on females, and I see this as the wave of anti-DEI in hiring and firing has impacted female jobs more so than male, then don't females deserve it?
I know for a fact that many career females want their cake and eat it to. Just my history. Fit, athletic, 6' 3" 205 lbs., have been told I am attractive, with a very good career... many of the career women I know and have worked with have made it clear they would sleep with me in an instant and I am a catch they dreamed of. I have been married to the love of my life for 42 years... she works but was mostly a stay-at-home mother while our kids were young. These controlling girlboss women are the least attractive to me, and I know most men in my position feel the same.
Many of these women that are married their husband is subordinate to her control and career, and in all cases, she has no respect for him and treats him like shit.
So, there is this disconnect with career women wanting a high-T man owning ambition and career who will let her dominate and will favor her career over his. WTF?
It would be fantastic if all marriages where complete partnerships, but someone always dominates. I think most intelligent and self-confident men would accept an equal partnership, but there is something in the female DNA that causes her to exploit her position to gain control. If in the weaker economic position she will use affection/sex as the weapon... but she will use any weapon at her disposal... including her financial superiority. Men might leverage their financial superiority, but affections/sex, etc. was always the power the females had over males, and never really the other way around. Now females have both and a lot of men are livid about it.
“we need each other and demeaning and destroying the other gender is about the most stupid human pursuit that any have derived.”
I’m slowly reading Diné Bahane’, the Navajo Creation Story, translated by Paul Zolbrod, and there is near the beginning an incredible story about a huge fight between the men and the women in which they separated and tried to live apart on opposite sides of a river.
“They were sure they would thrive without women to make them angry. And their spirits were high, at least at first, it is said. … It is also said that the women, too, were in high spirits at first. …”
After a couple of years women are jumping in the river to try to swim back to the men, and getting swept away by the current.
“[T]he men longed for the women just as badly as the women longed for them. That longing grew, in fact, on both sides of the stream. …”
Recommended reading. Often very funny, often astonishing.
“a new dystopia of a world without enough females”
China, and India actually created that dystopia, by aborting female fetuses once sex determination became possible. (Before that, female newborns were sometimes killed or abandoned.) China had the one-child policy, but in India people also traditionally preferred boys. And apparently still do.
Beautiful
"affections/sex, etc. was always the power the females had over males, and never really the other way around." That's not at all true of most women I know, and it doesn't sound like it's true of your wife, but maybe it is true of the narcissistic beauties that men masochistically desire.
I think in general men, like most male animals, are motivated for sex more so than is a female.
I imagine that you’d name the military, unlike higher education, as a positive rite of passage for young men wanting to cultivate a mature masculinity. Do you have thoughts on other, non-military rites of passage to cultivate collective, purposeful masculinity? (I’ve been influenced by Sam Pressler’s writing of the collective service of WWII combined with the economic mobility of the GI bill. Today we seem stuck on SAT tutors and elite private schools.)
Scouts, Outward Bound, Sports Clubs, more and more varied phys ed in public education. Just suggestions, all have pros and cons no doubt.
Bring back vocational education! I've fixed code (with good pay), but there is nothing like the sense of accomplishment from fixing something physical. Except maybe the accomplishment of building it in the first place.
Like Rob, I also joined the military at 17. Higher education was fantastic for me. I didn’t have the experience most describe but I also studied math, modern philosophy, and science more than anything. The biggest influence on my personal sense of right and wrong were classes where I read Steinbeck and Kant. Maybe I am just different but the big deal everyone makes about higher education I failed to experience at all.
I would say that the military and high education were both important in the development of my masculinity.
So glad Rob that you understood your mother's explanation about sharing responsibility and contributing to the common good at 13 years old. This is usually expected of girls from a very early age to help washing dishes, setting table, cooking, caring for younger siblings, laundry, etc. On the farm we also had to work outdoors; to weed the garden, gather eggs, etc. This work gave us a sense of worth as a valued member of our family, pulling our own weight in a small way. It also taught us skills, how to take care of ourselves. Those who don't get that sense of integration and usefulness tend to flounder in later life and expect others make up for their shortcomings. Boys tend to stay with their parents longer because they often get their chores done for them; like laundry and cooking, and they have more freedom to stay out late at night, while girls are usually expected to help with the cooking, laundry etc and get in at a "decent" hour at night. So for girls leaving the family home feels like more freedom.
I remember walking with my (single) mother as a young child with some toy weapon, and a man saying that there goes my mothers protector. I liked my toy, but that role had not occurred to me, and I remember to this day the pride I felt. This makes me think there is something there to be nurtured that culture hooks up with, and that can of course be culturally unfulfilled. Most cultures have apparently found that there is something there to work with.
While it is true that things are constructed it is curious to me why this would be negative.
I see that others use this as a basis to demean or use to increase their own power. So I can see and I agree with the premise.
My confusion is why is construction is negative at all. No one seems to complain about movable type but it is entirely constructed. As is the concept of a written language. Some cultures got along fine without a written language for thousands of years.
I have yet to meet the person who complains about running water based on the idea it is constructed but if it is to their advantage I am sure somone would. Is masculinity and femininity any different?
The whole idea is that constructed things that are physical or generally advantageous are good. Things that drive differences in power or status are open to being a problem if they are constructed. Never mind if they work.
I feel like this is different than fixing problems. No one wants to do this but they want to tear systems down and remake it in their own image for their own advantage.
Isn’t the redefinition of some things being constructed as bad a luxury belief? It gives the person who views something as bad power at the expensive of others.
This article was a real eye opener for me. I am more constructed than I thought. It made me wonder again about the interface between human nature and the family/society.
I was thinking of the role of biology relative to social pressure. I am in agreement with Rob that the default for men is apathy and laziness. It is definitely true that one with dangerously low testosterone only sits and stares at the wall, which is telling. These individuals require medical intervention not be unmotivated to do anything.
I believe that simple ideas are wildly off but I do wonder about the effect of biology relative to society.
For example, if the model Gilmore is completely correct then we should expect this is switch between cultures as there is no real reason to choose on sex or another for masculine roles.
However, this is certainly not the case as there is no culture I am aware of who has a different model. Say there was a 10% (likely less) advantage to men typically occupying masculine roles then we would see a larger differentiation between men and women occupying different roles in the ancient past, then a transition to the current observation. However, no such culture has been found indicating the preference is strong for men to occupy masculine roles and women to occupy feminine roles.
Is the biological basis just a difference in strength? Gilmore’s premise, based on cultures with low differentiation, would refute this interpretation. Any other ideas?
As someone who has experienced this firsthand, I 100% agree. Whenever people say something is a social construct, it's always treated like it's a bad thing and it needs to be changed. It shouldn't be a surprise that I hear that line of argumentation when it comes to lowering the age of consent. Don't look up which philosophers wanted to lower the age of consent in France in the late 70s.
Great description of a worthwhile rite of passage we seem to be casting totally aside. My question now is how to get my 14 yr old grandson to read either your column or the book. Many thanks.
I'm so grateful to Shelly for her wisdom when 17yo Rob set a course for his life. I think girls should have similar, not necessarily identical, opportunities to develop courage. They want dads to be proud of them too.
Might this be the subject of your next book?