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Vox
2 hours ago
- Vox
AI doesn't have to reason to take your job
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. A humanoid robot shakes hands with a visitor at the Zhiyuan Robotics stand at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre in Shanghai, China, on June 18, 2025, during the first day of the Mobile World Conference. Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images In 2023, one popular perspective on AI went like this: Sure, it can generate lots of impressive text, but it can't truly reason — it's all shallow mimicry, just 'stochastic parrots' squawking. At the time, it was easy to see where this perspective was coming from. Artificial intelligence had moments of being impressive and interesting, but it also consistently failed basic tasks. Tech CEOs said they could just keep making the models bigger and better, but tech CEOs say things like that all the time, including when, behind the scenes, everything is held together with glue, duct tape, and low-wage workers. It's now 2025. I still hear this dismissive perspective a lot, particularly when I'm talking to academics in linguistics and philosophy. Many of the highest profile efforts to pop the AI bubble — like the recent Apple paper purporting to find that AIs can't truly reason — linger on the claim that the models are just bullshit generators that are not getting much better and won't get much better. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. But I increasingly think that repeating those claims is doing our readers a disservice, and that the academic world is failing to step up and grapple with AI's most important implications. I know that's a bold claim. So let me back it up. 'The illusion of thinking's' illusion of relevance The instant the Apple paper was posted online (it hasn't yet been peer reviewed), it took off. Videos explaining it racked up millions of views. People who may not generally read much about AI heard about the Apple paper. And while the paper itself acknowledged that AI performance on 'moderate difficulty' tasks was improving, many summaries of its takeaways focused on the headline claim of 'a fundamental scaling limitation in the thinking capabilities of current reasoning models.' For much of the audience, the paper confirmed something they badly wanted to believe: that generative AI doesn't really work — and that's something that won't change any time soon. The paper looks at the performance of modern, top-tier language models on 'reasoning tasks' — basically, complicated puzzles. Past a certain point, that performance becomes terrible, which the authors say demonstrates the models haven't developed true planning and problem-solving skills. 'These models fail to develop generalizable problem-solving capabilities for planning tasks, with performance collapsing to zero beyond a certain complexity threshold,' as the authors write. That was the topline conclusion many people took from the paper and the wider discussion around it. But if you dig into the details, you'll see that this finding is not surprising, and it doesn't actually say that much about AI. Much of the reason why the models fail at the given problem in the paper is not because they can't solve it, but because they can't express their answers in the specific format the authors chose to require. If you ask them to write a program that outputs the correct answer, they do so effortlessly. By contrast, if you ask them to provide the answer in text, line by line, they eventually reach their limits. That seems like an interesting limitation to current AI models, but it doesn't have a lot to do with 'generalizable problem-solving capabilities' or 'planning tasks.' Imagine someone arguing that humans can't 'really' do 'generalizable' multiplication because while we can calculate 2-digit multiplication problems with no problem, most of us will screw up somewhere along the way if we're trying to do 10-digit multiplication problems in our heads. The issue isn't that we 'aren't general reasoners.' It's that we're not evolved to juggle large numbers in our heads, largely because we never needed to do so. If the reason we care about 'whether AIs reason' is fundamentally philosophical, then exploring at what point problems get too long for them to solve is relevant, as a philosophical argument. But I think that most people care about what AI can and cannot do for far more practical reasons. AI is taking your job, whether it can 'truly reason' or not I fully expect my job to be automated in the next few years. I don't want that to happen, obviously. But I can see the writing on the wall. I regularly ask the AIs to write this newsletter — just to see where the competition is at. It's not there yet, but it's getting better all the time. Employers are doing that too. Entry-level hiring in professions like law, where entry-level tasks are AI-automatable, appears to be already contracting. The job market for recent college graduates looks ugly. The optimistic case around what's happening goes something like this: 'Sure, AI will eliminate a lot of jobs, but it'll create even more new jobs.' That more positive transition might well happen — though I don't want to count on it — but it would still mean a lot of people abruptly finding all of their skills and training suddenly useless, and therefore needing to rapidly develop a completely new skill set. It's this possibility, I think, that looms large for many people in industries like mine, which are already seeing AI replacements creep in. It's precisely because this prospect is so scary that declarations that AIs are just 'stochastic parrots' that can't really think are so appealing. We want to hear that our jobs are safe and the AIs are a nothingburger. But in fact, you can't answer the question of whether AI will take your job with reference to a thought experiment, or with reference to how it performs when asked to write down all the steps of Tower of Hanoi puzzles. The way to answer the question of whether AI will take your job is to invite it to try. And, uh, here's what I got when I asked ChatGPT to write this section of this newsletter: Is it 'truly reasoning'? Maybe not. But it doesn't need to be to render me potentially unemployable. 'Whether or not they are simulating thinking has no bearing on whether or not the machines are capable of rearranging the world for better or worse,' Cambridge professor of AI philosophy and governance Harry Law argued in a recent piece, and I think he's unambiguously right. If Vox hands me a pink slip, I don't think I'll get anywhere if I argue that I shouldn't be replaced because o3, above, can't solve a sufficiently complicated Towers of Hanoi puzzle — which, guess what, I can't do either. Critics are making themselves irrelevant when we need them most In his piece, Law surveys the state of AI criticisms and finds it fairly grim. 'Lots of recent critical writing about AI…read like extremely wishful thinking about what exactly systems can and cannot do.' This is my experience, too. Critics are often trapped in 2023, giving accounts of what AI can and cannot do that haven't been correct for two years. 'Many [academics] dislike AI, so they don't follow it closely,' Law argues. 'They don't follow it closely so they still think that the criticisms of 2023 hold water. They don't. And that's regrettable because academics have important contributions to make.' But of course, for the employment effects of AI — and in the longer run, for the global catastrophic risk concerns they may present — what matters isn't whether AIs can be induced to make silly mistakes, but what they can do when set up for success. I have my own list of 'easy' problems AIs still can't solve — they're pretty bad at chess puzzles — but I don't think that kind of work should be sold to the public as a glimpse of the 'real truth' about AI. And it definitely doesn't debunk the really quite scary future that experts increasingly believe we're headed toward.
Vox
2 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
The Supreme Court's incoherent new attack on trans rights, explained
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. A transgender rights supporter takes part in a rally outside of the US Supreme Court as the high court hears arguments in a case on transgender health rights on December 4, 2024, in Washington, was obvious, if you listened to the Supreme Court's oral argument in United States v. Skrmetti last December, that the Court would vote — most likely along party lines — to uphold state laws banning many forms of transgender health care for minors. So nothing about Chief Justice John Roberts's majority opinion in Skrmetti is really surprising. All six of the Court's Republicans voted to uphold these laws, and all three of the Court's Democrats dissented. But, as a matter of judicial craftsmanship, Roberts's opinion is disappointing even by the standards of the Roberts Court. It draws incoherent distinctions. It relies on old and widely criticized precedents to undermine legal principles that are well established by more recent cases. At times in his opinion, Roberts seems to misread statutory language that he just quoted a paragraph or two earlier. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It appears, in other words, that the six justices in the majority started with the outcome that they wanted — bans on transgender health care for minors must be upheld — and then contorted their legal reasoning to fit that result. Even if you share that goal, the decision in this case was unnecessary. As Justice Elena Kagan points out in a brief dissenting opinion, the issue before the Supreme Court Skrmetti concerned a threshold question: whether the Tennessee law at issue in this case should receive a heightened level of scrutiny from the courts before it was either upheld or discarded. The ultimate question of whether to uphold Tennessee's law was not before the justices. The Court's Republicans, in other words, could have applied existing law, sent the case back down to the lower courts to apply this 'heightened scrutiny,' and then ruled on the bans in a future case. Instead, Roberts's Skrmetti opinion went further to rule on the legality of the bans, and consists of about two dozen pages of excuses for why the Court's previous anti-discrimination decisions somehow do not apply to Tennessee's law. Related The Supreme Court just let Trump ban trans people from the military One virtue of this approach is that it minimizes the broader implications of Skrmetti. At oral arguments, several justices suggested that, in order to uphold Tennessee's law, they might make sweeping changes to the rules governing all sex-based discrimination by the government — Roberts, for example, floated giving the government broad authority to discriminate on the basis of sex in the medical context. Roberts's actual opinion contains some language suggesting that the general rule against sex discrimination is weaker when the government regulates medical practice, but those sections of his opinion are so difficult to parse that they fall short of the broad changes he discussed at oral argument. Ultimately, Roberts's Skrmetti opinion largely reveals something that close observers of this Supreme Court already know. The Court's Republican majority is impatient. They are often so eager to reach ideological or partisan results that they hand down poorly reasoned opinions and incomprehensible legal standards. Because the Skrmetti opinion is so incoherent, it is difficult to predict its broader implications for US anti-discrimination law. One thing that is certain, however, is that this decision is a historic loss for transgender Americans. So what were the precise legal questions before the Court in Skrmetti? To understand why the Skrmetti opinion is so difficult to reconcile with the Court's previous decisions, it's helpful to understand the precise legal questions before the Supreme Court. The first of two questions is whether Tennessee's ban on trans health care for minors classifies patients based on their sex assigned at birth. In United States v. Virginia (1996), the Supreme Court held that ''all gender-based classifications today' warrant 'heightened scrutiny.'' 'All' means that all laws that classify people based on their sex must receive additional scrutiny from the courts, not just some laws that do so. About half of the states have laws targeting transgender health care, but the Tennessee law at issue in Skrmetti is among the strictest. It prohibits people under the age of 18 from receiving many medical treatments to treat gender dysphoria or other conditions related to their transgender status — including bans on puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Significantly, Tennessee's law is also quite explicit that the purpose of this law is to ensure that young people do not depart from their sex assigned at birth. The law declares that its purpose is to 'encourag[e] minors to appreciate their sex' and to prevent young people from becoming 'disdainful of their sex.' That is an explicit sex-based classification. Patients who Roberts refers to as 'biological women' are allowed to fully embrace femininity in Tennessee. But a child who is assigned male at birth may not. Under Virginia, in other words, Tennessee's law — which relies on a sex-based classification — must be subject to heightened scrutiny. To be clear, the mere fact that courts must give heightened review to Tennessee's law does not mean that the law will necessarily be struck down. As the Court held in Craig v. Boren (1976), 'to withstand constitutional challenge…classifications by gender must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives.' Some laws do survive this level of scrutiny. Roberts's opinion raises several policy arguments for Tennessee's law, claiming that the procedures targeted by Tennessee are 'experimental,' that they 'can lead to later regret,' and that they carry 'risks.' A court applying heightened scrutiny could consider these arguments and whether they justify upholding the law. But Roberts bypasses this inquiry altogether, instead denying that the Tennessee law engages in sex-based classifications at all. The law, Roberts claims, only 'incorporates two classifications.' It 'classifies on the basis of age' by banning certain treatments only for minors. And it 'classifies on the basis of medical use' by prohibiting doctors from prescribing those treatments to address gender dysphoria or similar conditions affecting transgender people, while simultaneously permitting those treatments to address other conditions. Roberts is correct that Tennessee's law does draw lines based on these two classifications. But a law can do more than two things at once. And this law explicitly states that it exists to classify every child as either a boy or a girl, and then to lock them into that classification until their 18th birthday. Under Virginia, that classification demands heightened scrutiny. The second legal question before the Court in Skrmetti was whether all laws that discriminate against transgender people are themselves subject to heightened scrutiny. Roberts, however, dodges this question by claiming that Tennessee's law 'does not classify on the basis of transgender status.' Instead, he argues, the law classifies people based on whether they have conditions such as 'gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence.' Gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence are among the defining traits that make someone transgender. Roberts might as well have argued that Jim Crow laws do not discriminate on the basis of race, but instead discriminate based on the color of a person's skin. To justify this distinction, Roberts points to the Court's decision in Geduldig v. Aiello (1974), which held that discrimination against pregnant people is not a form of sex discrimination because not all women become pregnant. But, even if it is true that not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria or a similar condition, post-Geduldig decisions have long held that the government cannot evade a ban on discrimination by claiming that it is merely discriminating based on a trait that closely correlates with a particular identity. As the Court said in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic (1993), 'a tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews' — even though many Jews do not wear yarmulkes. That said, the Court's decision not to rule on whether laws that classify on the basis of transgender status must receive heightened review is probably a blessing for transgender people, even if it is a small one. While Roberts's reasoning on this question is muddled, his opinion leaves open the possibility that a future Court may resolve this question in favor of transgender people — although that is highly unlikely to happen unless the Court's membership changes significantly. Notably, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is close to the center of the current Court, wrote a separate concurring opinion arguing that discrimination against trans people does not trigger heightened scrutiny.
Vox
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vox
Why are so many straight guys so bad at gossiping?
is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic. What does it mean to be 'good' at gossip? A good gossip doesn't just tell you that Sally broke up with Joe, they tell you that Sally broke up with Joe just a week after posting a bunch of (now deleted) romantic international vacation pics to Instagram. They don't simply say 'Brittany's a bad coworker,' they tell you that no one at the office likes Britt because she microwaves her asparagus-heavy meal preps. They don't mention that Mary is having a tough time with her sister-in-law and then drop it, they explain that her brother's wife is a Disney adult who arranged for the entire family to spend their next Thanksgiving at Epcot and already sent out Venmo requests for a couple thousand dollars worth of Mickey Mouse breakfasts. According to stereotype, this is a skill men — particularly straight men — just don't have. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Their supposed inability to spin a good yarn has been a point of internet mockery, with memes and gags usually coming from the women in their lives who are forced to parse through the driest, most unsatisfying stories ever told. Like a hungry person fighting their way through a well-done steak, these tea-seekers must suffer to find a semblance of sustenance. It's hard not to laugh at the tension these skits and jokes highlight between the person wanting the entire story and the person giving them absolutely nothing. But underneath the comedy are deeper questions about the ethics, the stigma, and the history of gossip, especially who gets to participate. The way that the women who poke fun at their partner's reticence online seek (and are denied) connection speaks to larger concerns. What does dude's inability to share secrets — especially with other bros — mean for the much-discussed 'loneliness crisis' among men? Let's be clear: Men gossip! When people say that men are bad at gossiping, it might come with the assumption that men don't gossip. They can't be good at it, because they don't or only rarely partake. But that train of thought is built on a fallacy. That fallacy begins with how we define gossip. For a long time, it's had a negative connotation, the act of talking poorly about someone behind their back. But more and more recently, researchers and social scientists like Megan Robbins have begun reassessing the term, broadening it to define all the ways we talk about other people, good, bad, and neutral. Related The surprising truth about loneliness in America Robbins and her team conducted a 2019 study that examined the rates at which men and women gossip and if men and women had any differences when it comes to positive (e.g., 'John bought a pair of nice shoes!'), negative ('John bought a pair of ugly shoes!') and neutral ('John bought a pair of shoes.'). They found that men and women gossip positively and negatively at similar rates, but that women gossip neutrally more than men. 'It really corresponds with past evidence that women talk more about social topics than men,' Robbins, an associate professor in psychology at the University of California Riverside, says. 'So there's this practice element to talking about social topics, talking about people, even just in a neutral way, and men are just not doing it as much in the evidence that we have.' Robbins's study helps explain a few things. It debunks the trope that women are more inclined to disparage someone, and, at the same time, explains why people may perceive that women are better at gossiping or sharing information — if they're gossiping neutrally at a higher rate, so they have more practice. The project also shows that despite the stereotypes, men do gossip, positively and negatively. Getty Images/iStockphoto More than that, men enjoy gossip, even (and especially) when they're at the center of it. A 2025 study from professor Andrew Hales and his research team found that men, more than women, 'were consistently more open' to being talked about. 'I mean it, maybe it's as simple as men just like attention,' Hales, who teaches at the University of Mississippi, tells me. Hales's study focused on the targets of gossip, setting up a theoretical scenario in which a person leaves a party and then is asked whether they want the people who stayed to talk about them. Hales and his team found that people who were male and/or narcissistic were the most likely to want to be spoken about, even if the gossip was going to be negative. 'If you were to control for narcissism, men still are more comfortable being talked about than women are — so it's not just that men are more narcissistic, although they are,' Hales says, noting that the findings contradicted the popular ideas about how men don't enjoy gossip nor particularly like being the targets of it. The population who have been thought to like gossip the least, actually enjoy its existence as much, if not more, than everyone else. But if that's the case, why are they notoriously awful at it? Why are men bad at gossiping Comedian and podcaster Jared Freid intuitively believes what Robbins's study proves: that uninspired male gossips just haven't put in the work, like weight lifters who regularly skip leg day. 'I just don't think there's as many reps for men hearing a crazy story, and there's a lot more reps for women,' Freid, a man, tells me. 'We're just not trained, you know?' Freid primarily attributes men's unskillful gossip to a lack of cultural opportunities to yap freely. He sees things like weekend brunches, group chats, and the ample discussion fodder provided by Bravo's various reality shows as opportunities that mostly women have to sharpen their storytelling tools and observe how drama works firsthand. These conversations teach a person how to gab and, perhaps more importantly, how to respond to spicy information. Gossip is a two-way street; a question or quip can enrich the entire tale. Straight men, he says, don't have an equivalent. While men do hang out, it never gets too chatty. Freid explains that gossip feels 'messy' and, even something as simple as being curious about a story or a rumor could be construed as stirring the pot (men, he says, do not want to be seen as pot-stirrers). It's not that straight men are inherently bad at gossip, it's that they won't allow themselves to openly partake in or enjoy it. 'I don't think guys are really allowed to be messy and still have social credibility,' Freid says. Kelsey McKinney, the author of You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip and the founding host of the Normal Gossip podcast, sees this fear from men, too. 'Straight men seem to have the perception that gossip isn't talking about other people,' McKinney says. 'Gossip, to them, is a tone of voice that they avoid at all costs.' Gossip Girl (starring Blake Lively and Leighton Meester) was a TV show about popular teens terrorized by a secret, anonymous online gossip (who turned out to be a guy named Dan Humphries). The CW This attitude grows out from a misogynistic idea that gossip is a negative thing that women do, something Robbins, the social scientist, considered during her research. 'There's a stereotype that women [negatively] gossip more than men, but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence for that,' Robbins tells Vox. 'And I feel like having the stereotype that women gossip more than men, you know, serves to keep them in their place, right?' Robbins believes that social skills are valuable, and being able to discuss social topics is a necessary piece of that puzzle. Yet historically, those abilities haven't always been prized. Dismissing all social talk as gossip was a way to dismiss the women who possess those talents. Now, so many men see gossip as unbecoming as well as unmanly, they don't allow themselves to really relish the juicy morsels, nor do they tease out the savory bits. Curiously, Freid is the co-host of the Betches media-produced podcast U Up? It's a show devoted to decoding dating and relationships. His professional life revolves around piquing people's interests and recounting people's stories in hilarious ways. Does that mean the careers Freid's chosen are at odds with his manhood? 'I had to learn to be a better storyteller,' Freid tells me. To do that? He talked to women; friends, his co-host, his coworkers at Betches. A lot of women. Could gossip cure the male loneliness epidemic? Okay, so men might be less adept at gossip. Do they really need to be good at it? As Robbins indicated, continuing research shows that gossip can be a helpful social tool. Talking about other people isn't just 'not all bad,' it can be actively good. McKinney says that social scientists and psychologists have been reassessing the tropes, narratives, and stigma surrounding gossip and gossipers, and they've found that gossip brings people closer together. The idea is that the individual piece of gossip is less important than the bond that's forged when someone shares information with another person. Maybe the true measure of a friendship is the 'Can I be a bitch for a second?' texts we sent along the way. We share stories with people we think we are close to, and sharing things with other people creates intimacy. The gossip we share, arguably, is as much about our own values and beliefs and dislikes as it is about other people. At the same time, over the past half-decade or so, much has been made of what's known as the male loneliness epidemic — the idea that men are lonelier than ever and that their friendships are dwindling. If intimacy is defined, in part, by the idea of sharing stories with one another, it's not that difficult to see men who are bad at gossip hit with a lose-lose situation. They don't have the close friendships that facilitate gossip and the bond-building that comes with it, and they don't get good enough at gossip to initiate the bond-building. That's a problem, because men are disadvantaged when it comes to intimacy and communication from an early age. 'Research shows that by the time little boys are 3, we talk to them less and touch them less,' Alexandra Solomon, a relationship psychologist at Northwestern University, tells me. Solomon says that fewer conversations and less physical affection in childhood have long-lasting social effects. As boys grow up, many will tend to see communication as transactional, or directive, or a means to solving problems instead of an avenue that builds relationships. Those men see the sharing of gossip and storytelling in general as uncomfortable or a taboo, instead of intimately sharing and engaging with a story. 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself.' 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself,' Freid, the comedian and man, tells me. 'I don't hear someone telling me their story and go, Oh, good. I can tell them all my stories.' Freid says he sees male friendships and female friendships as fundamentally different, echoing Solomon's explanation of the divergent ideas about communication. Female friendships, he says, involves a give-and-go, a trading of shoulders to cry on. That 'trading' allows for deeper friendships among women — but, he suspects, also opens the door for potential rifts when someone doesn't hold up their end of the bargain. Fried takes some comfort in the idea that he never has to worry about hypothetically disappointing his buddies. 'I just have no friends where I'd be like, I can't believe they haven't called recently,' he says. It's not too hard, though, to link not expecting anyone to check in with a larger, existential problem with loneliness. Is that lack of expectation worth the lack of support? If Saturdays are proverbially for the boys, why not mix in some yapping? If straight men (statistically) gossip anyway, is there real harm in openly enjoying it, seeking it out, using it to build connections? As easy as that seems, it's asking men to share things about themselves in ways that go against how they've been conditioned. 'I would actually be out of a job if men could do that,' Solomon, the psychologist at Northwestern, tells me. 'If the trade-off is not having a career, but men talked and shared more? I would do it.'
Vox
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vox
Straight guys are 'bad' at gossip. Maybe they should learn.
is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic. What does it mean to be 'good' at gossip? A good gossip doesn't just tell you that Sally broke up with Joe, they tell you that Sally broke up with Joe just a week after posting a bunch of (now deleted) romantic international vacation pics to Instagram. They don't simply say 'Brittany's a bad coworker,' they tell you that no one at the office likes Britt because she microwaves her asparagus-heavy meal preps. They don't mention that Mary is having a tough time with her sister-in-law and then drop it, they explain that her brother's wife is a Disney adult who arranged for the entire family to spend their next Thanksgiving at Epcot and already sent out Venmo requests for a couple thousand dollars worth of Mickey Mouse breakfasts. According to stereotype, this is a skill men — particularly straight men — just don't have. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Their supposed inability to spin a good yarn has been a point of internet mockery, with memes and gags usually coming from the women in their lives who are forced to parse through the driest, most unsatisfying stories ever told. Like a hungry person fighting their way through a well-done steak, these tea-seekers must suffer to find a semblance of sustenance. It's hard not to laugh at the tension these skits and jokes highlight between the person wanting the entire story and the person giving them absolutely nothing. But underneath the comedy are deeper questions about the ethics, the stigma, and the history of gossip, especially who gets to participate. The way that the women who poke fun at their partner's reticence online seek (and are denied) connection speaks to larger concerns. What does dude's inability to share secrets — especially with other bros — mean for the much discussed 'loneliness crisis' among men? Let's be clear: Men gossip! When people say that men are bad at gossiping, it might come with the assumption that men don't gossip. They can't be good at it, because they don't or only rarely partake. But that train of thought is built on a fallacy. That fallacy begins with how we define gossip. For a long time, it's had a negative connotation, the act of talking poorly about someone behind their back. But more and more recently, researchers and social scientists like Megan Robbins have begun reassessing the term, broadening it to define all the ways we talk about other people, good, bad, and neutral. Related The surprising truth about loneliness in America Robbins and her team conducted a 2019 study that examined the rates at which men and women gossip and if men and women had any differences when it comes to positive (e.g., 'John bought a pair of nice shoes!'), negative ('John bought a pair of ugly shoes!') and neutral ('John bought a pair of shoes.'). They found that men and women gossip positively and negatively at similar rates, but that women gossip neutrally more than men. 'It really corresponds with past evidence that women talk more about social topics than men,' Robbins, an associate professor in psychology at University of California Riverside, says. 'So there's this practice element to talking about social topics, talking about people, even just in a neutral way, and men are just not doing it as much in the evidence that we have.' Robbins's study helps explain a few things. It debunks the trope that women are more inclined to disparage someone, and, at the same time, explains why people may perceive that women are better at gossiping or sharing information — if they're gossiping neutrally at a higher rate, so they have more practice. The project also shows that despite the stereotypes, men do gossip, positively and negatively. Getty Images/iStockphoto More than that, men enjoy gossip, even (and especially) when they're at the center of it. A 2025 study from professor Andrew Hales and his research team found that men, more than women, 'were consistently more open' to being talked about. 'I mean it, maybe it's as simple as men just like attention,' Hales, who teaches at the University of Mississippi, tells me. Hales's study focused on the targets of gossip, setting up a theoretical scenario in which a person leaves a party and then is asked whether they want the people who stayed to talk about them. Hales and his team found that people who were male and/or narcissistic were the most likely to want to be spoken about, even if the gossip was going to be negative. 'If you were to control for narcissism, men still are more comfortable being talked about than women are — so it's not just that men are more narcissistic, although they are,' Hales says, noting that the findings contradicted the popular ideas about how men don't enjoy gossip nor particularly like being the targets of it. The population who have been thought to like gossip the least, actually enjoy its existence as much, if not more, than everyone else. But if that's the case, why are they notoriously awful at it? Why are men bad at gossiping Comedian and podcaster Jared Freid intuitively believes what Robbins's study proves: that uninspired male gossips just haven't put in the work, like weight lifters who regularly skip leg day. 'I just don't think there's as many reps for men hearing a crazy story, and there's a lot more reps for women,' Freid, a man, tells me. 'We're just not trained, you know?' Freid primarily attributes men's unskillful gossip to a lack of cultural opportunities to yap freely. He sees things like weekend brunches, group chats, and the ample discussion fodder provided by Bravo's various reality shows as opportunities that mostly women have to sharpen their storytelling tools and observe how drama works firsthand. These conversations teach a person how to gab and, perhaps more importantly, how to respond to spicy information. Gossip is a two-way street; a question or quip can enrich the entire tale. Straight men, he says, don't have an equivalent. While men do hang out, it never gets too chatty. Freid explains that gossip feels 'messy' and, even something as simple as being curious about a story or a rumor could be construed as stirring the pot (men, he says, do not want to be seen as pot-stirrers). It's not that straight men are inherently bad at gossip, it's that they won't allow themselves to openly partake in or enjoy it. 'I don't think guys are really allowed to be messy and still have social credibility,' Freid says. Kelsey McKinney, the author of You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip and the founding host of the Normal Gossip podcast, sees this fear from men, too. 'Straight men seem to have the perception that gossip isn't talking about other people,' McKinney says. 'Gossip, to them, is a tone of voice that they avoid at all costs.' Gossip Girl (starring Blake Lively and Leighton Meester) was a TV show about popular teens terrorized by a secret, anonymous online gossip (who turned out to be a guy named Dan Humphries). The CW This attitude grows out from a misogynistic idea that gossip is a negative thing that women do, something Robbins, the social scientist, considered during her research. 'There's a stereotype that women [negatively] gossip more than men, but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence for that,' Robbins tells Vox. 'And I feel like having the stereotype that women gossip more than men, you know, serves to keep them in their place, right?' Robbins believes that social skills are valuable, and being able to discuss social topics is a necessary piece of that puzzle. Yet historically, those abilities haven't always been prized. Dismissing all social talk as gossip was a way to dismiss the women who possess those talents. Now, so many men see gossip as unbecoming as well as unmanly, they don't allow themselves to really relish the juicy morsels, nor do they tease out the savory bits. Curiously, Freid is the co-host of the Betches media-produced podcast U Up? It's a show devoted to decoding dating and relationships. His professional life revolves around piquing people's interests and recounting people's stories in hilarious ways. Does that mean the careers Freid's chosen are at odds with his manhood? 'I had to learn to be a better storyteller,' Freid tells me. To do that? He talked to women; friends, his co-host, his coworkers at Betches. A lot of women. Could gossip cure the male loneliness epidemic? Okay, so men might be less adept at gossip. Do they really need to be good at it? As Robbins indicated, continuing research shows that gossip can be a helpful social tool. Talking about other people isn't just 'not all bad,' it can be actively good. McKinney says that social scientists and psychologists have been reassessing the tropes, narratives, and stigma surrounding gossip and gossipers, and they've found that gossip brings people closer together. The idea is that the individual piece of gossip is less important than the bond that's forged when someone shares information with another person. Maybe the true measure of a friendship is the 'Can I be a bitch for a second?' texts we sent along the way. We share stories with people we think we are close to, and sharing things with other people creates intimacy. The gossip we share, arguably, is as much about our own values and beliefs and dislikes as it is about other people. At the same time, over the past half-decade or so, much has been made of what's known as the male loneliness epidemic — the idea that men are lonelier than ever and that their friendships are dwindling. If intimacy is defined, in part, by the idea of sharing stories with one another, it's not that difficult to see men who are bad at gossip hit with a lose-lose situation. They don't have the close friendships that facilitate gossip and the bond-building that comes with it, and they don't get good enough at gossip to initiate the bond-building. That's a problem, because men are disadvantaged when it comes to intimacy and communication from an early age. 'Research shows that by the time little boys are 3, we talk to them less and touch them less,' Alexandra Solomon, a relationship psychologist at Northwestern University, tells me. Solomon says that fewer conversations and less physical affection in childhood have long-lasting social effects. As boys grow up, many will tend to see communication as transactional, or directive, or a means to solving problems instead of an avenue that builds relationships. Those men see the sharing of gossip and storytelling in general as uncomfortable or a taboo, instead of intimately sharing and engaging with a story. 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself.' 'I really think there's a male fear of incriminating yourself,' Freid, the comedian and man, tells me. 'I don't hear someone telling me their story and go, Oh, good. I can tell them all my stories.' Freid says he sees male friendships and female friendships as fundamentally different, echoing Solomon's explanation of the divergent ideas about communication. Female friendships, he says, involves a give-and-go, a trading of shoulders to cry on. That 'trading' allows for deeper friendships among women — but, he suspects, also opens the door for potential rifts when someone doesn't hold up their end of the bargain. Fried takes some comfort in the idea that he never has to worry about hypothetically disappointing his buddies. 'I just have no friends where I'd be like, I can't believe they haven't called recently,' he says. It's not too hard, though, to link not expecting anyone to check in with a larger, existential problem with loneliness. Is that lack of expectation worth the lack of support? If Saturdays are proverbially for the boys, why not mix in some yapping? If straight men (statistically) gossip anyway, is there real harm in openly enjoying it, seeking it out, using it to build connections? As easy as that seems, it's asking men to share things about themselves in ways that go against how they've been conditioned. 'I would actually be out of a job if men could do that,' Solomon, the psychologist at Northwestern, tells me. 'If the trade-off is not having a career, but men talked and shared more? I would do it.'
Vox
3 days ago
- Health
- Vox
How America's ideal woman got jacked
is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. A lot of people are getting jacked these days, and it's not just who you would think. For men, muscles have always been a symbol of brute strength and power. In our current era, that's manifesting in their desire to get as chiseled as possible with a strict regimen of lifting and proteinmaxxing. But lately, muscles have also become something of a cultural battleground for women — at a time when beauty standards are dramatically in flux. The feminine body type of the moment shifts with time, from curvy to skinny and back again, but rarely, if ever, is America's ideal woman overtly strong. For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become 'bulky' (the horror!) but to do cardio instead, so that they would burn calories. For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become 'bulky' (the horror!). Three new books reckon with what it means for women to, at long last, begin to embrace strength. Casey Johnston's A Physical Education is a memoir exploring Johnston's journey from a thinness-obsessed runner to an empowered weight lifter. In How to Be Well, Amy Larocca explores the wellness imperative that pushes so many women today to relentlessly optimize their health. And in On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui explores the cultural symbolism of muscles and how they provide a way for us to think about who is allowed to be strong, and who we demand be weak. Strength training is, in theory, an empowering alternative to the pursuit of thinness. But what happens if all our old body neuroses from the skin-and-bone days transfers right on over to the new well-muscled ideal? How the thin woman became the well (and still thin) woman There is always a type of woman you are supposed to be, a hegemonic ideal who hovers just out of reach, impossible to ever quite achieve. While America's feminine ideals shift a little, writes Larocca in How to Be Well, these ideal women always have a few basic things in common: 'They are always very thin and they do not complain, no matter how many responsibilities are added to their list.' In the last 15 years, however, the ideal woman also became the 'well' woman, Larocca writes. This is a woman who, in addition to being thin, has relentlessly optimized her health: She is pure of microplastics and pesticides, she cold plunges and owns crystals, and her skin and body glow golden with utter, unimpregnable well-being. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The ideal American woman has not always been well. For a long time, she was just skinny. 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' said Kate Moss in the heroin-chic '90s, espousing a sentiment that would carry through to the virulently anti-fat 2000s. In that era, women exercised not in order to be well, but, explicitly and vocally, to be thin. In the 2010s, the body ideal began to shift just a little. As the Kardashians began their long cultural dominance, pop culture began to decide that it was better to have a body with curves than to be rail thin. At the same time, the success of body positive activism started to mainstream the intoxicating idea that it might be possible to like your body even if it didn't look like the body of a supermodel. Marketers began to update their language accordingly. The ideal American woman has not always been well. For a long time, she was just skinny. By the mid-2010s, the body ideal for women was more or less as follows: You still had to be thin, but maybe not quite as thin as Kate Moss. As penance, however, you were no longer allowed to talk about how thin you wanted to be. 'It sometimes feels,' remarks Larocca, 'as if a simple replace-all function has been applied to the entire beauty marketing machine: Alexa, find 'skinny' and replace all with 'strong'; find 'beauty' and replace all with 'glow.'' Wellness-as-health-as-beauty got more popular in 2016, after the first election of Donald Trump sent affluent liberals searching for things they could control in an ever-more chaotic world. In 2020, the pandemic came and brought the new paradigm to everyone. Now, wellness was a way of enacting control over one's body in a time that was demonstrating very clearly that we humans could control very little. Johnston found her way to strength training early in the transition of beauty culture to wellness culture, in 2014. In some ways, her journey mirrored the culture's larger shift in rhetoric. She admits she first got interested in weight lifting because of its aesthetic promises — it looked like a fun way to get hot that didn't involve starving and sprinting herself into a calorie deficit, as she had been doing since college. Over time, however, she began to take satisfaction in being strong for its own sake. 'I felt the differences that came from investing in strength training before I really understood them,' she writes. 'I was so used to distrusting myself, and that distrust included my body. Where did that come from?' Johnston wasn't alone. In 2024, weight-lifting was the fastest-growing sport among American women. Millions of women are trying to up their protein intake and talking about their weight-lifting journeys. At a recent work meeting I attended, four women swapped protein tips while the one man in attendance stared in confusion. 'Everyone's getting yoked,' he said. Who gets to have muscles? Part of why so many women are strength training now is all of those new scientific studies demonstrating how important it is for women. But muscles aren't just about health, in the same way that wellness isn't either. 'Strength as a proxy for worthiness, ability, or success has interesting legs,' writes Tsui in On Muscle. This has historically applied to men. Tsui cites the many rituals of ancient cultures that involve lifting heavy things to prove one's manhood or political strength. In the modern world, Tsui describes a venture capitalist who prefers to invest his money with founders who are also athletes, on the grounds that they 'understand how to push themselves past the point of pain.' If strength is a proxy for male worthiness, American culture tends to get nervous when it shows up in unexpected places. 'When we say someone is too strong or too muscular,' writes Tsui, 'it's often a comment on what we permit that person to be in society.' No woman is safe from being told that she is 'too muscular,' but some women are more likely to be targeted with that accusation than others. Dominant Black women athletes like Serena Williams and Simone Biles frequently face just such criticism, which ballet star Misty Copeland once described as 'code language for your skin is wrong.' The moral panic over trans women athletes, too, is built around the idea that trans women are too strong to be truly feminine. 'When a woman is deemed too muscular,' writes Tsui, 'it's often because her strength is perceived as taking away from someone else, or that her strength is somehow unseemly, unfair, or unnatural.' Instead, physical strength is seen as the natural property of men — specifically, conservative men. One 2023 study found that observers tend to assume that men with prominent upper body strength are right-wing. The stereotype might have emerged in part because we tend to see muscles as bodily and hence anti-intellectual, and conservatives tend to distrust intellectual elites. The binary follows a neat map of associations embedded below the level of conscious thought. Weight-lifting makes you strong, masculine, bodily, meatheaded, conservative. Cardio makes you small, feminine, intellectual, wiry, liberal. In real life, cardio and weight training both affect body shapes in strange and unpredictable ways, and they don't say anything about our political or intellectual goals. On the level of the symbol, though, the associations are strong — which is part of why it's so striking to see so many women start lifting weights. If strength among men codes as conservative, among women it codes as subversive, feminist, and a rejection of the male gaze. As weight lifting for women has become more mainstream, however, promoters have had to begin filing away at that last association. Perhaps that's part of why women's magazine articles urging women to strength train always come with an anxious assurance that, despite popular belief, weight training won't make you bulky and unfeminine. The optimization trap In A Physical Education, Johnston writes with relish about eating more to gain muscle mass. 'I had never deliberately gained weight before in my entire life,' she writes. Yet once she increases her daily calorie budget and muscle begins to pile on, she likes what she sees in the mirror: 'a god, radiant like a big, beautiful horse.' Body positivity or no, Johnston spends a surprising amount of time dwelling on how as she lifted more, her pants 'grew ever so slightly tighter in the legs and hips but fell away at the waist.' She writes extensively about how much more efficient weight lifting is at shrinking the waistline than cardio is, and she tracks cardios and macros with meticulous precision. Intuitive eating, or the process of eating what feels good to your body, she dismisses as 'circular doublespeak'; she's a woman who wants her every Cup Noodles logged and its nutritional content fully analyzed. In the bodybuilding world, food tracking is common and, at the elite level, necessary. Still, there's a tight parallel between Johnston's obsessive counting and Larocca's well woman, who follows her Oura sleep score with sleepless vigilance and wears a continuous glucose monitor to track her blood sugar even if she doesn't have diabetes. 'It feels irresponsible to be satisfied with 'fine,'' writes Larocca, and tracking biometrics promises to show a person how to optimize well beyond 'fine.' The seductive promise of going beyond fine is at the heart of the idea of the well woman. You might be basically healthy as you are, but is that really good enough? Can you really look after your children and loved ones if your health is just fine? Will you ever be beautiful enough or thin enough or pure enough at just fine? Wellness promises to get you there, in the same way that dieting promised to get you there in 1996. Of course, dieting hasn't stayed in 1996. It's currently rushing back into the mainstream with a vengeance. Fueled by the popularity of Ozempic, fat-shaming diet communities like SkinnyTok have begun to emerge, allowing users to share weight loss tips and 'tough love' instructions to one another to stop eating, much like the magazine voices that Johnston recalled internalizing as a college student driven to starve herself. Related The year of Ozempic bodies and Barbie Botox Strength training for women positions itself as a counterweight to communities like SkinnyTok. It's a world in which women are told in no uncertain terms that no matter what they do, they have to at least take in enough calories; a world that promises to make women bigger instead of smaller. Yet all the same, strength training does not seem to be quite enough to break the hold that the need to optimize has over us, in the same way that wellness culture didn't either. A well woman can still obsess over the pesticides and microplastics in her groceries. A woman who strength trains can still obsess over whether or not she is eating correctly. There is always a way to be absolutely correct, and it always seems to be drifting farther and farther away from us. Strength training does not seem to be quite enough to break the hold that the need to optimize has over us, in the same way that wellness culture didn't either. We are driven to politicize and optimize the muscles of our human bodies along with everything else. But our muscles can also offer us more than their symbology. In On Muscles, Tsui quotes the happiness scholar Dacher Keltner, who argues that many of our emotions are 'about' our muscles: 'Joy, for example, which often involves jumping,' he says. 'Or love, which is about embracing, postural movements. Emotions are about action.' This idea goes back to Charles Darwin, who observed in 1872 that for both humans and animals, 'under a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure, there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds.' We jump and laugh and clap with delight; dogs wriggle and bark and run in circles. When we come together to express joy as a community, we dance, jumping for joy all together as one. Our joy exists in and through and in relation to the movement of our muscles. That's a basic physical fact. We can't change it, no matter how much we optimize.
