Why?

I read the whole article and I don’t think it’s bad.

He does have some points: that masculinity itself need not be seen as inherently toxic, and therapy for men should be designed for the needs of men.

Overall, the broad ideas all seem reasonable to me.

I even read a couple more of his articles and read one of his papers.

In the one paper I think his methodology from a math perspective was a bit dated and weak from current standards (e.g. binning and grouping variables, trimming outliers, how he used PCA), but is fairly average to see in research.

One thing he focused on and I want to call out specifically was his inference that a negative coefficient on the view “masculinity is negative” implies seeing masculinity as positive is good for mental health.

That inference isn’t logically or statistically correct. It’s simply stating that men who see masculinity as inherently negative had worse mental health, it says nothing about seeing masculinity positively impacting mental health. That’s a really big distinction to me, and it wasn’t a huge factor in the analysis to be the main conclusion (and he criticizes another paper for doing the same thing).

I’d love to see his same analysis done with some improvements to the math though!

Anyways, I digress, I get too into math. His ideas are not Jordan Peterson’s ideas, they’re reasonable ideas.

Yeah, I almost didn’t post it because of that. But Peterson is a professor of psychology, and 2019 was before he went completely off the rails.

The rest of the article seems okayish, and there’s a link to the actual guidelines at the bottom if you’d rather read them directly.