Thread by @chrislhayes

A story from years ago that this piece made think of…. <1/x>

https://twitter.com/BradWilcoxIFS/status/1440747961332289544

A few years out of college, I got a part-time gig in Chicago as an adjunct professor of English composition at a community college whose study body was almost entirely immigrants from Mexico and Latin America.

I was pretty in awe of the students: they all worked full time, most had kids and they were studying to achieve English language proficiency in speaking and writing. They worked exceptionally hard.

In all my classes, I think I had maybe two men, tops. It was all women. And that was true in nearly every class. At first I thought it might be because the students were part of households where they were not working or working part time, while their spouses worked.

But not so! Basically all adults in the households were working full time and then some. And the women students were also doing the lion-share of child care (sometimes with kids in class or in a parked car watching a screen during class.)

Anyway it was *stark.* And it seems impossible to theorize this without talking about gender roles, expectations and the like. It struck me that what these women were doing in class was *deeply* humbling as an activity.

It's very hard to learn to write in a second language! And it involves lots of failure that can be extremely hard to process in the context of one's own ego and pride. It seemed very clear to me this was at least at the crux of what I was seeing in the gender differential.

Total US college enrollment is now trending in this direction, with the latest stats being 60% women, 40% men. I bet in lots of communities it's much more lopsided.

It's a really urgent project it seems to me to fashion new models for men and maleness that are freed some of the punishing psychological weight of dominance and control that is having profoundly destructive effects everywhere you look.