An Elephant of One's Own

Well, that was interesting. It's not often I get to talk to people (as in "talk to", as opposed to "talk at" [my students] or "talk past" [colleagues, etc]), so of course I jumped at the chance, once it turned out that, miraculously, one of my meandering comments on YT had actually been replied to by a real human. My interlocutor was a feminist, and the topic was (once again) "toxic masculinity", but you can't have everything. It could be worse: I could have been talking to a Canadian about hockey, or someone from Missouri about the boil on his bum. The conversation chuntered along nicely, with clarifications on both sides, until this appeared onscreen (quoting from memory, I hope accurately): ""Men view themselves a certain way and this needs to be undone." You know that sinking feeling when you've been chatting to an apparently perfectly ordinary person in the pub and suddenly they casually make some outrageou...