Yeah. That article was definitely all over the place and I did cherry-pick the stuff to highlight. I agree I don’t buy the argument about that men who are rejected from sports should keep trying. Think what would have happened if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs kept trying to get picked first at dodgeball. We probably would be without PC’s. That’s a stretch, but you get the idea.

First, I thought it was all over the place. I couldn’t tell if he was arguing that it was important to play sports and not be a weirdo, or if being a weirdo was okay as long as you were “mates” with the other weirdos, or if consumerism is bad. He seems to confuse all three points.

While I would agree that Americans (and I’m probably the poster boy for this problem) believe that buying something is a substitute for feeling/making/being something, I don’t agree that being picked last for a sports team is what drives boys to play D&D or pick up the guitar or become a goth or whatever other non-sporting activity he chooses. Maybe he just doesn’t like football. Maybe I’m reading too much of myself into it, since I didn’t like sports as a kid — still don’t — and played in a band and played D&D — still do, both of them. But, I just don’t by his argument there.

I agree with the general sentiment (that American men need to be more “real” and would be better off if we were able to develop deeper relationships with other men), but I disagree with the idea that doing anything other than sports means you’re broken. If anything, my experience says the American men who played sports (i.e., the “jocks”) are more likely to have the sort of shallow social climber relationships (though maybe not by much).

Still, thanks for the link. It certainly gave me something to think about.