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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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This pitch would go over a lot better if you were to focus on girls, rather than women, and in more of a family and school context, rather than a romantic context. While it's true that an anxious and depressed girl is going to have all kinds of romantic trouble, focusing on that from the perspective of the man who would have liked to have dated her but now can't is way less socially acceptable. You can say they shouldn't be, but you're not going to change centuries of social programming, it's not a fence that's worth removing.

People actually are worried about the girls, and a lot of the negative affects set in in adolescence, especially among teenage girls. People like Abigail Shrier and Johnathan Haidt talk about that a lot, and there isn't all that much pushback about Haidt being a man, since forming young minds has been his area of interest for decades, and now he's interested in these depressed teenage girls; makes sense.