Episode 5: Crisis of Masculinity

a lot of ways that being a human being is really frustrating and hard.

But, like, fellas, you don't need an anti-feminist moral panic.

You need to form a union and get a dog and go make some friends.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

And today we are talking about a subject very near and dear to my heart, the crisis of masculinity.

Wait, is there a crisis of masculinity?

Is this why I'm getting...

You didn't hear about this?

Is this why I'm getting all these ads about testosterone supplements?

It's all I get.

You may be feeling side effects, including insecurity, nostalgia, like latent homophobia.

You know, a lot of stuff is coming up.

I am having all of these things.

I'm not.

Listeners, I'm not.

Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about the crisis of masculinity because it's kind of like in the air.

There have been a ton of

pieces.

There was a long series in the New York Times.

New York Times, New York Times again, New York Times again.

I'm looking at this list of pieces I have.

New York Times again.

There was a long piece in The Washington Post by Christine Emba.

Column this, like Michelle Goldberg, David French, David Brooks have all weighed in on this.

The New Yorker did a big piece.

So did Politico for Virginia Heffernan.

And it's a sort of topic like what are men?

Are men okay?

We think men are probably not okay.

Yeah.

That has sort of been the subject of a ton of media attention this summer.

Yeah, I mean not to a gender stereotype, but I definitely want to have masculinity explained to me by a sweater wearing motherfuckers named David.

So, you know,

I'm on board already.

I'm loving it.

There's no shortage of guys named David who want to tell you that you're doing manhood wrong, that you are not okay,

and that no men in your generation are okay.

It's true.

And of course, it's partly because we have the wrong research assistant.

That's a brutal joke.

But I'm

here all week, folks.

Good stuff.

No, but like, this is on.

It's like, it's like nominally, this news cycle has been pegged to a book that came out last year by Richard Reeves

called Of Boys and Men.

Reeves is a think tank guy.

He's like a center-right economist at the Brookings Institution.

So, you know, not like a radicaler out there.

Yeah, yeah.

He is a British conservative, which makes him like basically a communist in the United States.

So it's like where you put Richard Reeves on the political spectrum is like subject to some debate, but he works for a series of liberal democrat politicians in the uk which is a party that sort of i know reminds me of like maybe the position is similar to like mitt romney's in the in the us and reeves is a technocrat and he went through for this book a big series of data showing that men and boys are like nominally falling behind right they're not getting college or high school diplomas at quite the same rates that women are their incomes aren't rising as quickly as women are and his book caused a huge you know it was like a fiery success among sort of like think tank people.

It's not clear to me how well it's actually selling, but it's the kind of thing that people really love to talk about.

And it was paired with a book on manhood by Senator Josh Hawley.

And these are sort of like the, I think these are like two ends of the discourse on masculinity right now.

There's like the center right and the far right.

And the center right is picking off a lot of liberal intellectuals and the far right is sort of like shoring up this other base.

But Josh Hawley's book on manhood is much more religious and it claims that you know men need to sort of like rediscipline themselves into compliance with biblical masculine virtues, which he talks about as things like

leadership, headship, protection, decision-making, endurance.

And, you know, but he talks about all these things about being a leader, protecting the more vulnerable.

And he doesn't say women, right?

Yeah.

But that's who he means, right?

He's talking about this biblical vision of men as sort of ordained leaders of humanity yeah that almost requires a i mean does require a subordinated weaker class right like you can't be a leadership over only yourself you need other people to be following you i like the idea of uh genesis based masculinity you know guys what's keeping you from parting the red sea

one thing that i wanted to point out that i think we i'm sure you're going to tell me more about but that i kind of wanted to flag for our listeners because i think you know full disclosure this is going to be the first of several episodes episodes we're going to dedicate to this question.

Like the Reeves position, right?

Like I read years ago, Patricia Sexton's The Feminized Male, which is from 1970, which does the same thing with data.

So this is, I'm starting to see why you're leading me down this path.

And it was quite convincing then.

And here we are 50 years later.

And like, it's like, oh, we are in an acute crisis of masculinity.

It's like, have we been out of it?

Oh, no.

This is also like something that is, I think, really interesting to talk about with you, Adrian, who's you know a scholar of the 19th century and somebody who's really immersed in history and the history of thinking about gender because it's like so recurring, right?

The crisis of masculinity is something we keep coming back to.

And the data, I think, is a really interesting point because Reed's is a very heavily data book.

Holly's like not really at all.

But the data is kind of interesting because it's trying to grapple with large, large trends that are like maybe difficult to measure or define, right?

Like falling behind and status.

And it's trying to do that with literally half of the people, right?

So how that data gets cut up, how it gets measured, how it gets presented is, I think, like very interesting because it's trying to make a specific point about a whole lot of people.

Yeah.

But I think it's also interesting because like we see this right-wing masculine turn and a pretty like explicit ideological embrace of like more traditional masculinity on the right.

And in our like show notes, I tried to, this maybe was a little tangential, tangential but i did sort of like taxonomize three kinds of right-wing masculinity oh please i love it and well i think like you need the

you need trump right and trump sort of represents like the boar who's a misogynist in an overly sexual prurient,

grab-ass kind of way.

Anti-puritan masculinity.

Oh, yeah.

It's a libertine, libertarian masculinity that's all about sexual freedom, at least for him, pervasive sexual access.

It's like more frat boy sexist than preacher sexist.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the poorish version of masculinity that Trump is sort of like the poster boy for, it's been taken up by guys like Andrew Tate, this like pimp influencer, like rape profiteer guy who's got a huge audience.

And then I'm also really interested in this figure named Dave Portnoy.

Right.

Have you been exposed to Dave Portnoy?

The

founder of Barstool Sports, the sports site and betting site who's like also got a ton of sexual assault allegations and is sort of like this like he's like a howling vulgarity you know it's like if Boston was a human being

he is from Boston that's not even like that's not just slander and these guys have really rose into prominence specifically in response to Me Too right there was a rejection of male sexual entitlement and they represent a reassertion of male sexual entitlement and sexual abuse of women specifically as a way to demonstrate your manhood to other men.

Interesting.

So I haven't read the Hawley book, but the Holly book, I know that our friends over at Know Your Enemy kind of talked about that a little bit.

And they made it sound like Hawley, kind of semi to his credit, calls these guys out, right?

Like his book is partly written in response and reaction to them.

Is that right?

He does have like a pretty more extensive than I was expecting takedown of Andrew Tate, right?

And he's like trying to steer what he assumes is this young white male audience away from the borish kind of misogyny.

But I think like what Hawley represents is like sort of our second barrel, which is the puritanical kind of misogyny.

There's this like anti-sex preacher model man of the Christian right.

And he is seeking to like, so the bore and the preacher are both trying to control women's sexuality, but they're trying to control them for different ends, right?

The Trump boar,

like Andrew Tate model guy, they're trying to force sex.

And the sort of Josh Hawley guy is trying to force chastity.

Yeah.

Right.

And this is like Mike Pence is the one I think of.

Yeah.

Back in the day, Rick Santorum.

Right.

Yeah.

Model.

Yeah.

And you see a lot of these now newly sort of emboldened and newly visible after Dobbs and sort of, you know, there was a panel of, you know, all male quote-unquote abortion abolitionists who are proposing the death penalty for women who have abortions, things like that.

They're very much in the Christian sphere.

And they're sort of two kinds of of the same coin.

These are guys who hate each other, but have a lot of the same sort of fundamental understandings about gender, which is that manhood is defined by control and domination of women, particularly women's like sexual functions.

And then there's also this emerging genre that I wanted to ask you about.

Oh, I can, I think, are we talking about a particular fist fight that might or might not be

answered?

I'm thinking of the creep, right?

And this is like

a guy who I like, I mean, Elon Musk is the paradigmatic

creep masculinity.

He's sort of, and it sort of overlaps with both of the others.

This is not like an exact taxonomy.

These groups sort of borrow a lot from each other.

Right.

But this like kind of masculinity that's emerging largely out of Silicon Valley, it's like sort of self-identified nerds, guys who might have, you know, dipped into some incel rhetoric, guys who, you know, might be sort of curious about race science.

I mean, in my head, they're all really into token, you know.

They concoct elaborate esoteric justifications for male supremacy and these like complex mythologies of masculine virtue.

So I also think of Jordan Peterson as sort of being an emblem of this genre.

Or at least someone they draw on very clearly, yeah.

Right, yeah.

And then there's like, you know, people like Peter Thiel, who might be kind of the founding figure of the creep masculinity model.

He's interesting, obviously, because he's not heterosexual.

He doesn't seem interested in reading his own like positive eugenics program the way Elon Musk has like reportedly been interested in doing.

But he does have opposition to the 19th Amendment

and a lot of interest in race science, which leads this kind of genre of guy to embrace the likes of Charles Murray and famously, just recently, Richard Hanania, the sort of right-wing intellectual who was revealed to be a eugenicist, race scientist, which is sort of like the least surprising thing ever because he does it pretty avowedly.

Yeah, Yeah, frequent poster on certain subreddits that seem to engage in more than the usual amount of craniometry.

But can it, like, can you tell me a little bit about this guy?

Am I like basically hitting the notes of him?

Because I feel like you know more about this genre of dude than I do.

So yeah, this is, I mean, I would call this nerd masculinity, right?

It like needs this scientific backing.

It understands itself as kind of calling bullshit on societal conventions and it thrives.

And I think Peterson really hits that pretty nicely, even though he obviously isn't part of that set.

It always understands itself as oppositional, right?

These people, Silicon Valley is super good at basically running our lives and at the same time still telling itself that it's kind of like it comes out of this underdog position, right?

Like, and that's what makes someone like Musk so incredibly annoying, right?

That, like, if you're powerful and you're an asshole about it, but at least you're aware you're both powerful and an asshole, that's one thing.

But, but there is this kind of underdog, which of course comes with nerd territory, right?

Like, these are often like guys that you feel like probably did get beaten up at some point in their lives.

And that sort of inflects their understanding of manhood.

At the same time, even if they're not, I think that there's something about there's an entitlement.

You said earlier, right, these are two groups of men, the first two groups that you identified, who feel entitled to women.

I think that the Silicon Valley creep feels entitled to way more than just women, right?

And has a far more, far broader range of things that enrage him when they're being withheld, right?

Like Elon Musk spent, what is it, $44 billion to force us to find him cool, right?

Like that is the most remarkable monument to that particular style of masculinity imaginable.

Right.

And it also reminds me a little bit of this like figure now, the billionaire who wants to be young forever, who keeps getting profiled ad nauseum.

I couldn't tell you what his name is, but I keep seeing his like hard, leathery face.

Which five years ago was a relatively handsome 30-something face.

Yeah, yeah, the before pictures of this billionaire who refuses to age, who's got this like rigid, pleasure-denying daily regimen of like eating the worst things possible and putting himself to bed at like 2 p.m.

And he's making this big display about his own

triumph over mortality, which is about the most insecure thing I can think of possibly doing.

And he looks very strange.

And so, yeah, I take your point that there's something in the air about masculinity because, like, on the one hand, right, like finding a rich guy who went off the deep end after getting super rich, like you probably can find that anytime and anywhere.

But the fact that we keep hearing from this dude, that someone's like, oh, you know, who's in whose face we should push a microphone?

The never-aging guy, right?

Like, is really remarkable.

We focus on these men and on masculinity in this big way.

And obviously, like, some of that sport pointing at them and laughing at them.

But at the same time, it does feel like the intellectual justifications with which they back up their visions of manhood are something that like are getting at least a lot of airtime, right?

Like even if people are like ultimately dismissing it, right?

I don't think Peterson after a brief honeymoon with like people like David Brooks has like gotten the best press, right?

Like I feel like dunking on Jordan Peterson right after soccer is like the most the most popular global sport.

But like

he just, I mean, the sheer amount of oxygen that motherfucker like absorbs is is astonishing, right?

And that alone tells you something.

We are, for better or for worse, fascinated with these men trying to sort of articulate their visions of manhood instead of like, honestly, my first instinct, which is like, not to pay any attention.

Oh, I mean, I'm looking at it, I feel like a little bit like when you rubberneck because there's a car wreck on the side of the highway and suddenly you're like, you know, you're driving like 10 miles an hour.

It's, it's a gruesome impulse, but one that I

understand.

But, you know, I think it's interesting that there are all these men in the media behaving in ways that are pointed and strange and articulated as an ideological expression.

And the ideological expression is specifically about their gender.

It's about manhood.

They are contrasting themselves to women.

They are contrasting themselves to other men who are insufficiently manly.

And at the same time, we have this rise of like sort of the pop social science book

that is really drawing a lot of attention to this claim that men are in crisis, men are suffering as men, men as men are social victims.

We should also throw in here just for a second, I mean, this is maybe not going to be our topic today, but we should talk, we'll talk about it at some point.

Also, men who are too manly, right?

Or the wrong kind of men who are still men, right?

There is a kind of clash of civilization, clash of cultures narrative often here where it's like, oh, it's Western men who have lost this.

And like, meanwhile, right, like insert anything that like Republicans are scared of outside of our borders, right?

Or inside of our borders.

And like, those are people who like live masculinity in these traditional ways, but that's still, that's also not right because they shouldn't or they can't or it's they or who knows, whatever, right?

So that's interesting too, that like, there's this kind of fear of like hyper-masculinity too.

as long as it's not yours, right?

Now, one thing that we might say very, very, very briefly is that like, as you can already tell, we've talked for 20 minutes just introducing this topic.

This isn't the end of the story.

We're thinking about really doing a whole deep dive series about masculinity, talking you through, yeah, this like at least 200-year story about like crises of masculinity.

Maybe we'll mention a couple of names.

So, we're going to be talking about Friedrich Nietzsche.

We're going to be talking about Otto Weininger, who's someone that I think a lot of people know about, but hardly anyone reads the 600-page tome that is sex and character.

Who else are we going to be talking about?

Talked about talking about Jordan Peterson and the influence of Carl Jung on masculinity thinkers.

We were thinking about talking about Foucault, the concept of biopower.

We'll also hopefully devote one episode to people who are very near and dear to my heart, even though they're the most rebarbative people you'll ever read.

But there are these sort of like early 20th century followers of Nietzsche, who Nietzsche himself likely would have disavowed.

He would have been like, these guys are idiots.

But like, they are fascinating.

I really can't wait to have you read them because like they read like Jordan Peterson.

It's so fascinating.

Like, you're gonna, you're gonna be like, what the fuck?

Is this from 1923 or from 2023?

I'm very excited about this.

And we'll, as people can tell, like, it's still evolving, but it's gonna be...

It's gonna be long.

I'm thinking of this.

I don't know.

Do you ever watch Arrested Development?

Are you a fan?

Oh, yeah.

I love Arrested Development.

You know that plot line where Tobias Fionke tries to be an understudy for the Blue Man group, but ends up in a,

in a, in a, accidentally, in a support group for sad men.

I'm thinking of this group as our, this is our blue man group series.

We're going to talk about blue men.

In the words of Dr.

Tobias Fjunke, author of The Man in Me, we will blue ourselves and then we'll have a bit of a mess on our hands.

Well, something I love about

doing a little research for this episode and reading some of the things you've been pointing me to as we like embark on this masculinity series is realizing that like what the content of masculinity means, what it's supposed to denote, is actually very historically contingent.

It changes a lot.

But the thing that's kind of constant, or one of the things that's very constant about it, is that men are doing it wrong and they are tortured by their inability to do it correctly.

I think there's a lot there.

Yeah.

And what's interesting, right?

Like, we're going to be talking about that actually today a little bit with some of our examples, but like, it's always interesting which conclusions are not reached, right?

Like, that is absolutely true that men suffer from their inability to live up to these standards, right?

Like, when we look at women, we always say, like, well, that seems like the standards are a problem, right?

We talk about beauty standards, we talk about gendered hierarchies all the time.

But somehow with men, like the idea, like, huh, maybe we should abandon these stupid, outdated notions, like that's the road that they can't take, right?

We're like, well, maybe fuck masculinity.

Maybe it turns out any gender concept that like tries to straitjacket what you do and say and how you do and say it is ultimately not super good for you.

But that's not what they take.

It's like, no, no, guys, guys, we should double down on these unreachable, on these unreachable goals and then feel extra bad because it's destroying civilization when we don't reach them.

Like, you'll see.

You'll feel so much better.

Just chop more wood.

That's all you have to do.

Sing more about men north of Richmond.

Oh, my God.

I finally listened to that.

I haven't listened to that guy.

You haven't listened to it?

No, I'm trying to be the last dude on the internet who has not.

I heard it this morning in preparation for this podcast, this viral country song about right-wing resentment against the welfare state, primarily.

And

it's not a bop.

It's not like fun to listen to.

It's really like

a dirge.

It's sad and slow.

And it's pretty just transparently coded as anti-Semitic, right?

The title of the song is Rich Men North of Richmond.

Yeah.

Which to me just read is like one, that's just like a long way around the barn.

Quite possibly.

So I haven't listened to it.

I did look at the lyrics after people sort of made fun of it online or wrote about it online.

I mean, the reason why I think it's interesting here is, of course, it is a performance of distressed masculinity very clearly, and it's being received as that, right?

Like Matt Walsh, you know, noted anti-trans bigot, kind of like keeps gushing on Twitter about how authentic it is, right?

Like, and that's the other thing, right?

That, like, talking about masculinity at a time when cis men are having to share masculinity with trans men, right?

Where like, and it's not a shocker that like a lot of the people people who are like, if you can't measure up to standards of masculinity, why don't you just fake it till you make it?

And then like, if other people, you know, live masculinity, it's like, well, not like that.

You know, no, no, trans people, that would be, that would be phony, right?

It's like, I don't know, man, like, you keep giving me ads about how I like need to up my testosterone.

Like

feels like this is not as natural as you're claiming.

You're prescribing me hormone therapy, which in other contexts you profess to hate.

And there's something about incoherence, about this take on masculinity that is clearly also suffused with the panic over transgender people.

Right.

I mean, trans people, non-binary people, and feminism broadly have all like sort of challenged the idea of gender, including masculinity, as being sort of innate, natural, by extension, easy and fixed and

hierarchical, right?

And these are anxieties that are stemming from a feminist moment.

I think when we get to our historical rundown, we'll be able to point out pretty clearly that historical crises of masculinity, like media rhetoric around a crisis of masculinity, peaks at moments where there has been a big feminist advance, which I think in our moment we can still point to as being me too.

And then also in moments when there's like a big change to the productive economy.

And those two things, feminist advance and economic changes, often come together, which is like a little bit of the

secret.

So

we've like articulated that there is a media consensus emerging that men are in a unique state of emergency, that they are suffering as men, and that something has to be done about it, right?

But like, what exactly is the content of this supposed crisis of masculinity?

And there are like a couple of like buckets that people claim.

Like, the masculinity crisis is an umbrella term right now that is being used in the media to denote like a lot of different complaints.

So, one bucket is that like men are uniquely lonely, right?

That they are deprived of friendship companionship and relationships with like non-related peers in ways that women are not right so like women have friends men don't have friends interesting and and the the so the claim is yeah women have friends men don't have friends it's not social media is making all of us lonely but we only care when it's a when it's men i mean like there's like kind of what i've noticed is that people go oh actually it's a gender neutral phenomenon, right?

When you point out like, hey, why are you only talking about men?

They go, I'm not talking about men.

It's like, well, a a second ago, you were just saying it was a uniquely male problem.

So, like, gender neutrality becomes like a kind of plausible deniability in this, in this discourse.

Yeah.

But then there's this other bucket where it's like, okay, it's educational attainment, right?

So there are gaps in the high school graduation rate between boys and girls.

And women tend to earn more college degrees, like associates, bachelor's degrees.

It's also frequently noted that men's wages are not growing as quickly as women's are.

David Brooks in his column on the crisis of masculinity laments that quote pretty much all the income gains that middle-class American families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women's earnings.

So one of that is like work and money.

And then there's this other sort of anxiety around increased presence of women in positions of academic or professional esteem.

So in that same column, Brooks is like very alarmed that of the 16 highest ranked law schools in the country, all of their their law reviews are edited by women's students.

I would like to know how long all of those law reviews were edited by male students, and it was not a problem.

This feels so cherry-picked.

Oh, yeah, no, no, no, it's all very like it's a broad claim supported by an incredibly specific anecdote, right?

That's the whole thing.

And we're going to get more into like searching for it.

I mean, that to me, I mean, I am, fun fact about me,

familiar with the work of David Brooks.

And this feels like there was like 15 data points he discounted because they didn't prove his thesis.

And then he went with this fucking shit.

Like, what the hell?

Like, oh my God, this is so, this is.

I am sitting right now in my office that's about a four-minute walk away from Stanford Law.

And somewhere in that building, there's a woman law student who stole her law review place from a more deserving woman.

Yeah.

From a more deserving man, you know.

So this is like also, it obviously mirrors complaints about affirmative action, right?

And we can talk more about like the question of gender affirmative action in higher education.

And then there's like sort of the last one, which is like sort of the last stand of every conversation you have with people who are claiming that men are being victimized as men or like sort of struggling.

And that's the suicide rate.

The suicide rate is and has long been higher among men than among women.

So like These things are sort of what gets taken together to suggest that men are worse off than women are.

So I'm picking up on a theme here.

So the trend lines you're describing could be read in one of two ways, right?

Like either men are stalling and women are making massive gains.

That could mean that men are in crisis, or it could mean that...

And I'm just going to take a wild stab here, that there are previous inequalities that are

historically being at least partly righted.

Am I onto something here?

Yes, let me take you into the debunking phase of our data section, which is that, you know, for instance, that David Brooks points out that pretty much all of the income gains that middle-class American families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women's earnings.

Now, it's true that middle-class incomes have stagnated over the past several decades, but what happened before 1970, you might ask?

Well, women were not in the workforce in anything like comparable numbers.

And when they were in paid work, they were relegated to...

lower paid, lower skilled, lower status positions.

They, in fact, still are relegated to lower paid, skilled, lower status positions, but there have been degrees of advancement and enforcement of like anti-discrimination law that weren't in place before 1970.

So this is like an artificial depression of women's income imposed by exclusion, by bigotry, by the absence of civil rights law, by exclusive quote unquote protective laws around women's work that had to be like dismantled in this era and is now being used against women.

And like, listen, not not to be all like Hillary Clinton here, but women on the whole earn 83 cents to men's dollar.

The idea that like men are falling behind women economically when, in fact, they just earn more money

is like kind of insane.

I mean, the very comparison is kind of amazing, right?

That, like, oh, back at a time when women were legally not allowed to own a credit card or have a pay account, like they were like, they've made financial gains since.

Like, well, yeah.

i mean i would it would stand to reason they would be truly bonkers if not of course like we can talk about historic stagnations but like yeah this is about the about men's status relative to women right right it's about men's status relative to women sometimes they'll talk about men's status relative to other men and say well you know relative wages have gone down i'm like well relative wages have gone down

if you don't if you if you want to look at a woman who was able to be in the workforce in that era right right like she is also earning probably comparatively a little bit more than another woman at her age in this generation, right?

This is actually a cross-gender trend that is being applied as if it only applies to men.

So that's like income, right?

And then there's like all these things.

It's like, well, they do better in school.

Girls seem to score a little bit higher on reading in their early grades.

That's like a pretty broad-based phenomenon.

It's like unclear exactly why, but there are some suggestions that make it seem like A, the difference is not as dramatic as it is made out to be, and B, it might be caused by what we could interpret from a feminist perspective as like products of women's oppression.

So, like girls are trained by their parents to be physically still and much more conscious of their bodies and appearance and less, much less physically expressive, which lends itself to more success in the classroom.

If that's a skill you have, you're going to do better at a situation where you have to sit still for hours a day.

They're also like much more socialized to solicit adult approval.

Like, you know, we train little girls to solicit praise to sort of try and justify their own presence.

And little boys are not burdened that way.

And so they don't do as well in environments that reward that's kind of solicitatiousness.

But also like high school and college graduation rates are something I really want to hone in on because data from Reeves' own Brookings institution sort of like undermines the claim that there's like a broad-based difference in graduation rates.

So, like, there are like basically across racial groups.

Girls graduate high school on time in greater numbers than boys do, but there's a vast difference between racial groups and how great that is.

So, for, I believe, for Asian kids, it's like a three-point difference.

For white kids, it's a four-point difference.

And for black kids, it's like a nine-point difference.

And that suggests to me that there's something happening to black boys.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is the criminal justice system, right?

It's the

school to prison pipeline taking its toll, which, yeah, it is gendered, clearly.

The U.S.

justice system polices above all black men.

Yeah, so this is like a racist intervention based on a specific gender group.

Which is a crisis I'd be very happy to address, but it's not the crisis they claim to be addressing.

But that's not what they're talking about.

They're saying it's men qua men, not black men as black men, right?

There's also like the disparity in college degrees.

Like, first of all, when we say college degrees, that encompasses a bunch of different things.

It means a four-year private institution where you spend a lot of time reading Ovid and not gaining any vocational skills.

That's what I did.

It was lovely.

But it also means what most people do, which is getting an associate's degree while you work full-time.

And just across the board, it feels like women are more, it not doesn't feel like it is empirically supported, to say that women are more incentivized to earn any degree because they need more credentials to get to the same level of professional advancement than men do.

It's like, if you want to incentivize boys and men to stay in school, I don't know what to tell you, maybe discriminate against them more because they're just getting

promoted anyway.

It's just so amazing to me.

I mean, like, you know, hearing about these cherry-picked data points from people like David Brooks, when like what your eyes tell you is that, like, nevertheless, a lot of the fields in which these people are trained in colleges are dominated by men, still are.

And in fact, those that become dominated by women have one of two things happen to them.

Either, famously, you know, quote-unquote, feminization leads to the decline in wages and relative wages.

This happens in certain fields of medicine.

It also happens in academic disciplines.

So that would be something like literature or English departments, which are, I think, pretty close to parity.

Well, those are some of the lowest paid professors you can meet.

Their labor is not rewarded or remunerated at the same level.

Or we might add the ones that are truly dominated by women, such as gender studies, they just get cut.

So, you know, as just happened in Florida.

So it's just amazing to me that, like, you know, why would you go to a data point like as Ray Sherchet is like, who's running the, you know, Cornell Law Review or something like that, when you can just go to a department website and be like, that's a lot of dudes.

There are more men named Bill here than there are women.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's interesting, you know, if we are focusing, as Brooks seems interested in doing, on elite positions, elite institutions, when private R1 colleges like Stanford, for instance, have an excess, a disproportionate excess of female applicants, what they tend to do, and they're quite open about this, is lower their standards for male applicants.

Right.

And they don't talk about this as a kind of affirmative action.

They talk about it as like trying to create a better social environment.

They talk about it in terms of like, well, we know our students are going to want to like meet people and date and get married.

It's not talked about as preserving men's access to these opportunities or their status.

It's talked about as preserving sort of like the virtue of the institution, right?

Yeah.

It also has the kind of

student dining hall.

effect.

There's that famous sort of conservative talking points about like, oh, you know, students of color will sit together in the dining hall.

And that shows how like our schools fail at integration.

This is something that like, you know, I think Alan Bloom sort of spearheaded, but like people have been yelling about that for like 30, 40 years at this point.

There's empirical data that shows that that's not true.

That the thing that you think is happening, namely that of course the white majority tends to cluster more to itself, it's just numbers, right?

Like if 60% of a campus is white, you have a 60% chance of like a random person sitting next to you in the dining hall or being assigned to your hall or whatever, like being white.

So that's of course happening.

But what sort of creates the impression is that all white tables aren't noticed as being unusual by these usually white writers, whereas an all-black table is suddenly noticed as something aberrant and potentially scary or at least in some way meaningful, right?

And, you know, an institution dominated by men feels, I guess, to someone like David Brooks, natural.

One that happens to have decided differently in their hiring processes and maybe through not even an overt policy just recruited predominantly women women for whatever reasons, right?

Like that to him will suddenly seem significant and a sign of a crisis.

And I find that so fascinating.

What they're really tracing is less a decline in men's status.

They're tracing specific status or men's status relative to women.

They're seeing women's advance, right?

They're seeing something that looks more like equality and they're treating equality as a demotion of sorts.

So that brings us finally

to men's often cited higher suicide rate.

And I think this is like maybe a moment for a content note because, like, there's just no way to talk about this.

It's not quite gruesome.

Yeah, I can imagine where this is going, and that is depressing.

It's just, so this is something that is often cited

in these crisis of masculinity discussions.

It is a men's rights talking point and an incel talking point.

And it's, you know, men's higher rate of suicide is presented as sort of like a moral point of legitimacy for men's crisis, right?

Like, how can you deny the suffering of men there killing themselves?

That's horrible, yeah.

And it is pretty brutal.

And it's also, it doesn't show what the crisis of masculinity claimants say that it does, because women actually do attempt suicide more often than men do.

Yeah, but they don't use guns, I'm guessing.

Exactly.

There's a lot of suicide methods that are basically evally distributed across genders, but the one that is more likely to be used by women is drug chemical overdoses, and the one that is more likely to be used by men is guns.

And this is not, it doesn't seem to be a product of anything other than like access to those methods.

But, you know, this means that men are much more likely to complete suicide because of the violence of the method, right?

So about 5% of suicide attempts use guns, and about 50% of completed suicides are done with guns.

Oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

So that's, it's not a measure of, you know, deeper feeling or greater capacity for despair or like deeper social crisis among men.

Like everybody's in crisis.

This mental health in this country is deteriorating in ways that I think cause like tremendous amount of tragedy.

But it's a measure of gun ownership.

And it's like, it makes me very sad and honestly very angry to see suicide weaponized that way against.

women's claims for equality because I just don't think it helps anyone.

Can I ask, I mean, I don't want to put you on the spot if you don't have this data, but do we have have numbers from countries where gun access is a pretty rare thing?

I don't know.

It wouldn't shock me if there are other kinds of similarities just because of greater weapons access of a lot of different kinds of weapons among men.

So it wouldn't shock me if you go look at data in like Australia, for instance, and see that there's also a gender disparity in suicide completion, even though Australia has decent, like pretty, more than decent, good gun control.

But I don't, I don't know, I don't have that data.

Yeah, it wouldn't necessarily disprove anything because, of course, it's just true that largely gun ownership has been woven into the mythology of masculinity in the United States.

It's not to say that there aren't women who are absolute gun nuts and who appear to love their guns, but it is definitely interwoven with a kind of cult of masculinity, meaning that in a moment of despair, what means you choose for what, for all intents and purposes, is the last significant decision you will make in your life, right?

Would be entangled with your own sense of a gendered self, right?

Yeah, it makes sense that people would do the things that are more in line with their identity.

I think it's also worth noting that a lot of suicides are impulse,

impulsive, they're crimes of opportunity, right?

You can make yourself throw up, you can't put that bullet back in the gun, yeah.

Exactly, that's bleak, bleak.

Moving on.

Uh, so, like, you know, that's kind of the end of our empirical debunking section.

There's a lot of cherry-picked data.

There's a lot of small parts that are made to stand in for a whole.

And there's a lot of like creative interpretation made to make like quite definitive, specific proclamations about half of people

who actually live, you know, like people under living under the category men.

are actually quite different from one another.

They tend to disagree on a lot of things.

They have a lot of different characters.

They have a lot of different emotional states.

They have a lot of different factors contributing to their success or their failure, right?

And it's there's this tendency to try and give statements about gender and about the sense of how gender should be ordered or is best ordered, the legitimacy of empiricism through like cherry-picking this data, but it's not

actually reflective of a reality that's a lot more complicated.

But that's sort of like when the crisis of masculinity is given empirical backing, because a lot of times it's not.

It's spoken of like much more as a vibe.

So,

like, some of the terms I've noticed are things like loneliness.

That's a common refrain, but I've also noticed a lot of the words being used to describe the crisis of masculinity as a sense of anomy or like general malaise or demoralization.

These are like things that Michelle Goldberg, David Brooks, French, Christina Emba, they've all like used this.

And Reeves goes into it as well.

And Holly goes into it.

It's like half of people have a bad vibe

is the claim.

The other half's fault.

Yeah.

Yes.

And the implicit or like often implicit claim is that this is because feminism has

targeted men or women have sort of abandoned their duty of care sort of cruelly or they've displaced men arrogantly.

And one way or another, men have been hurt by women.

It's striking me that talking about a crisis of masculinity is this way of not talking about other things.

And just the list that you just gave, right?

Like that, like to say, oh, there's I'm getting this vibe where there's a demoralization of men, and that's the crisis, right?

This kind of moralistic kind of argument is a way to not talk about, I mean, like, just to go through your four sort of bullet points, it's a way to not talk about the decline of the middle class, it's a way to not talk about race, it's a way not to talk about guns.

Like, oh my god, like, I'm starting to see why they go for this because it's a, it's just a catch-all, uh, right?

Like, the trends that I would think of as the most significant in shaping the various culminating American crises, like, you don't have to talk about any of them, You can just be like, Yeah, dudes are not being allowed to be dudes.

Yeah.

Weren't things better in the past?

They're forbidden truck nuts.

Yeah, no, it takes all these like really confounding problems, like rising economic inequality, like drug addiction, like mental health crises, like the decline of third spaces and the like inability, like

to have non-work activities and non-related peer friends.

Like it takes all all of this and makes it A, specific to only one half of the population, right?

When in fact it's hurting people of all genders.

And B,

it blames it on the erosion of a traditional hierarchy that people are very comfortable with, right?

It's like, what if instead of grappling with these confounding structural problems that are imposing all this suffering, what if all we had to really do was just kick at like feminists who nobody likes anyway and restore

this thing that we're all most comfortable with.

So, like, I think Josh Hawley

is

maybe a good guy to go to here because he gave, you know, his book is very much focused on this like a vibe-based sense of men's decline.

Not an empiricist, Josh Hawley, yes.

No, not really.

And he quite explicitly blames feminism, at least on the stump, right?

It's not, he doesn't really sort of like deign to talk about it as much in his book, although he does.

But he gave a speech claiming feminism is driving men to video games and pornography.

He's sort of like pointing to these two signifiers of

like men's failure to become adults, right?

Like and self-indulgence, and then going, this is actually women's fault.

Yeah.

And also, I mean, this is where you and I might differ, but like, also, I'd say, like, what's wrong with that?

I feel like

as far as as far as crises of anything go like so you you do some super mario and you watch some porn like it could be far worse you know i know i know it's like of all the things that men could be doing with their time yeah i think it's probably they'll probably become much more likely to hurt somebody if they spend an afternoon a josh holly rally than if they spend an afternoon like beating off and and and like playing xbox or whatever the kids do now yeah uh

and those are also things you do in the house right right they're like feminizingly domestic.

That's right.

He's picturing a kid in the mom's basement.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, like not going out and building a log cabin and, you know, breeding a brood of white children.

So like,

but there's also like this other version of this that's sort of like the far right version.

And then the center right, center left version, the more respectable restatement is that, okay, well, feminism demonized traditionally male traits as toxic, right?

You're not allowed to be masculine anymore because now that's toxic.

Yeah.

It's like a, it's cancel culture, right?

In reverse, or like political correctness.

It's politically incorrect to be a man in this way that we're not going to define, but we're going to sort of like just gesture at.

And, you know, feminists have scared men out of their sort of birthright identity.

I mean, part of feminism's project was exactly to, you know, to denaturalize certain toxic aspects of masculinity.

That's that's true as far as it goes.

Same time, it's important to note that, like, first off, this, this claim is so fucking old, right?

And like, when exactly is this supposed to have happened, right?

Like,

what are we talking about, right?

Like, cause it's always like, it has this sort of kids these days kind of dynamic where it's like, well, back when I was, you know, 20, like, you know, men were still real men, but now this new generation, it's like, yeah, they said the same shit about you, right?

Like, right.

I mean, not to get all Freudian, but that's, that's the Oedipus complex.

You're all Logan Roy, like, crushing his children, basically.

Right.

Like, there's just, I'm sorry, but when this is supposed to fucking happen, like, do toxic displays of masculinity evoke more discourse today than they might have, from women specifically, than they might have, you know, in the 1950s?

Sure.

But, like, first off, it's not true that like society ever really celebrated the traits that we think of today as toxic masculinity.

Certain aspects of it might have, but like, you know, and then like these, these historic constructions of masculinity are all these weird mashups.

It's like, oh, the, you know, caveman plus, you know, like the big game hunter plus like the adman from the 1960s.

Like these are all different forms of masculinity.

Like, yeah.

Ugh.

And there are parts of it that we fucking celebrate the hell out of still,

right?

Like talk about Silicon Valley, right?

We spent, I mean, now that Elon Musk is fucking embarrassing, like, or that how embarrassing he is has become evident, like people are kind of ragged on the dude.

But like, y'all spent like 15 years like celebrating that dude like we absolutely we as a society tend to kind of valorize toxic masculinity right like and it really like requires a herculean effort to kind of point that out and be like yeah this is actually really bad yeah i mean i'll be real and say that i don't use the term toxic masculinity because I don't quite know what it means.

It's like a slippery signifier.

And like, that's part of why it works for Holly's purposes, right?

It's like, it's like woke that way, and that it can mean anything that you want to defend or that a conservative wants to defend.

He can like sort of ventroloquize

his opposition, like ventroloquize feminism attacking,

you know, the masculinity that you call, that they call toxic.

I'm going to defend it for you.

And then like what that means.

It's like, it doesn't really have its own content.

It just kind of only signifies the straw man.

But like, I do think, you know, a recurring trope you get is like, okay, these like male role models are lacking.

And this isn't just in the Holly.

This is like a big thing in the Reeves.

It's in, you know, the Emba, it's in the New Yorker.

It's in like all of these.

Like, male role models have been deemed socially unacceptable for some reason.

That's a dubious fucking claim.

Like, I think, like, what exactly would be an example of this?

Like, I don't know, like, leave it to Beaver.

I don't, I'm not sure.

Yeah.

Is it like, is it like, oh, feminists got mad at me because I held the door for them or something like that?

Like, it's, it's, here's the thing: like, the impersonation.

Elijah, Is it chivalry?

What, what is it?

Is it John Wayne?

Is it Rocky?

Like, these are all like different styles of masculinity.

And, like, what is it that they mean?

Like, here's the thing.

They don't want to say what they actually mean because it would be socially unacceptable for them to say that what they're pointing to is men's social dominance across like family life in particular and professional and institutional life specifically, right?

They like, that's what they actually mean, but they don't want to say that.

So, they're speaking in these euphemisms that don't actually mean anything.

But, like, let me tell you, like, if you want to talk to somebody, like, if you are actually a young man despairing, I don't know how to live my life.

I, I think the person you should talk to who has like encountered gender roles that don't align with their values and tried to like forge their own way without them is like any woman who has entered a male-dominated field or like

any woman who has like decided not to have children like this is like building lives outside of the

sort of gendered prescription that no longer suits a modern life or an honorable life as the individual sees it is like a huge part of the feminist project.

And this is, you know, a hard, confusing, courageous, uncertain task that like tons and tons of feminists have embarked on before.

Yeah.

But like these people, these like crisis of masculinity purveyors, like never suggest that women's struggles are equal in dignity to men's.

Right.

Like what women are doing to shake off gender is irrelevant, annoying, marginal.

What men are doing is like the stuff of civilization.

Yeah, well, exactly.

And I think I'd never thought of this, but I think you're drawing it up really nicely.

What they can abide, right?

Like what they can abide is that masculinity and femininity might be in this way analogous and might be able to learn something from each other because ultimately they're working with a complementary model.

Of course they think women can teach men something, right?

They can be the mitigating influence on his masculine, you know, overflow of emotion and

of power, right?

And she can be like, oh, honey, don't worry about it.

Right.

Like it's a complementarity picture.

Whereas like, hey, how do you live your gender?

Maybe I could learn something from that is exactly the opposite of that.

It's saying like, well, society forces us into these dumbass roles.

It seems like we can't get entirely out of them uh can i ask how you made that for yourself or not right like that's the thing that that cannot be and i mean like it's here it's always like right like fathers have to be in the picture i mean we're going to be doing an episode on the moinahan report at some point for sure but like right like it's always like fathers have to be in the picture to teach the boys about masculinity, right?

Like, and it's just like, maybe it's just that I'm one of two men raising a daughter that I'm like, that cannot be right.

I hope it's not right.

That like, yeah, mothers can teach you about masculinity.

absolutely and fathers can take teach you about care absolutely you know like this is like it's just it is a vision of yeah you're right to point out complementarianism which is definitely part of polly's ideology avowedly i think it's sort of an implicit assumption or advancement and a lot of like sort of the center left pundits who are yeah like going off about this crisis of masculinity is like the idea that it has to be different.

There's a line in the Washington Post long piece that says nobody wants an androgynous world.

And it's like, well, listen, we actually already live in an androgynous world and we're constantly trying to sort people back into these categories that they don't fit into and won't stay in also what's what does androgyny mean in that sense right i mean like yes in an art historical sense or like in a literary sense where where like androgyny has its own kind of essence right like where it basically combines features of masculinity and femininity traditionally conceived

I could see that, but like, isn't it just that we are living, that we are accentuating different aspects of our gender performance?

And like, there's a weird ideology of masculinity and femininity that says, like, this is the essence of it, rather than to say, like, hey, there's a bunch of things that sort of fall into this general bucket.

You pick and you choose and you refuse some of it.

But, like, you live in a society that has these gender systems of meaning making, and it's a lot of work to refuse all of them.

And so you might be like, ah, fuck it.

And just like, you know, do some of them, right?

It's almost as if it's an iterative, customizable process

to talk to someone.

In practice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You going about like off of like, what even is androgyny reminds me of those like gender-neutral clothing brands where you go into the store and it's just like a very underweight white person wearing the like ugliest oversized t-shirt you've ever seen.

Always always makes me think of that infamous time cover, right?

The Future Face of America, which basically was like they had a computer and like composite every race together, right?

And it's like,

yeah, Chief, that ain't it.

We're kind of touching on how, like, unstable all these definitions are, right?

And how they sort of

just turn to dust if you press just a little bit of critical scrutiny on them.

I think that's a really

interesting point to pivot on because, like, the thing about the crisis of masculinity is that, as it's been used throughout history, it has also meant different things at different times.

What masculinity is, and also, like, what is in crisis.

Shocker.

So, like, sometimes the crisis of masculinity is that men are failures they're not manly enough anymore they're you know masturbating and playing video games sometimes

it's that men are victims they've been forced to masturbate and play video games by the feminists they've been uh emasculated

The pay isn't great, but people

are like, you know, that like it's, it's something has made them less manly and that this is like a moral emergency that has happened to men.

So it can be, it's usually feminists or women more broadly, but it's also things like urbanization.

It's things like different kinds of work.

You know, when we talk about the 19th century, we'll see that there's a real, a huge eugenicist element there too, right?

Like it's all about the things they're not doing.

Yeah, we'll talk about that at some other time when we talk about biopower.

I want to dig in, but like the term, okay, so but one thing that is kind of yeah, when, where does walk me through that?

When does someone first say there's a crisis of masculinity?

Like in those words?

All right, so this is like a, this is a contested term, but the first usage I was able to find comes from 1965

from a historian.

And the historian who uses the term crisis of masculinity is talking about the 1890s.

So American historians were writing about America at the end of the 19th century.

And they were seeking to describe the psychic change in conceptions of white American manhood that followed the closing of the American frontier and the era of the first wave feminist movement, which arose more in like the beginning decades of the 20th century, but also was like beginning to gather steam in the 1890s.

So they're like specifically talking about like 1890 is, I believe, the year that the railroad closes.

I might have that wrong, the Transcontinental Railroad.

Silver Spike.

Yeah, I don't know.

Leland Stanford put it in.

We should know.

We should know the year.

But, you know, the railroad connects the coasts of North America and this

model of American manhood, the pioneer.

He's, you know, he's alone or he's largely alone and he's bravely foraging ahead into the unfamiliar westward places and making his way into the uncertain future through like arduous work and courage.

And he's bringing the whole destiny of the nation along with him.

That was always kind of a myth, but it really ceased to be.

I was going to say, like, for one thing, like, as you point out, like, masculinity makes sense only with respect to some kind of complement or some kind of other.

And like, I'm guessing that like...

pioneer women were not exactly shrinking violence themselves, right?

Like, I mean, like, you have to be tough as nails to do any of that stuff.

So, like, odd.

I mean, the whole closing frontier historiography, that was a big deal at a certain point in American history.

But on the other hand, like, especially when it comes to masculinity,

it seems really question-baking, honestly.

And it's also like, I'm glad that you point out how, like, narrow and exclusive this vision of masculinity is because it was also not really accessible for like black men who could not go out and be pioneers in territories where it was legal to enslave them.

And, you know, Indians also had a very different understanding of what the pioneer man was doing.

So, you know, this was always a contested and specific vision.

But like when it became no longer possible or no longer really imaginable for white American men, these historians were contending that that created a crisis and that that crisis was also precipitated by like women beginning to contest male monopoly on the public sphere.

So, things like the lobbying for public toilets was all about women's ability to like live full days out of the house.

And then, also, women started learning jujitsu.

This is, I mean, this is like-I'm sorry, what?

Oh, my God.

Yeah, like 19, in the 19 teens and 1910s, women, white women started learning specifically jujitsu, which was wrapped up in a sense of like a racist sense of Asian masculinity as being particularly like potent and dangerous, but also in, it was about self-defense and access to public sphere.

They're like, this is how you are able to stay out in public all day and defend yourself and defend your honor.

And these things sort of like made men question supposedly like what their role was, what it meant to be a man.

If women, if you know, you can't go like bring your country into the wilderness and women don't need you to defend them anymore.

And you're not the only person like living out in the public world in your household.

Like, what does that mean?

So, like, its first use of the term crisis of masculinity appears to be by George Frederickson in 1965.

This is according to Thomas Winter, the historian whose paper I'm relying on here.

But the term became really popular used by historians throughout the 1960s 70s and early 80s and what else was happening during that time that may have brought masculinity to these the front of these historians

i'm getting some kind of wave or something

not a first second yeah a second wave yeah

you know so like the crisis of masculinity like this is First of all, like it's almost always looking at the past, right?

There's an imagined past when men were men.

It's interesting that it arose in history, right?

Because it's almost necessarily a historical impulse.

Like things were fine for men and for masculinity.

And now they're in crisis and everything's all fucked up and it's somebody's fault.

But it also like it is a nostalgia for the past that arises at specific historical moments.

And it's often when there's been like a moment of heightened feminist activism or when there's like a moment of

women thinking about how they want to live their gender.

It doesn't like strike me as a total coincidence that this crisis of masculinity and Reeves' book are all coming out like six years after Me Too and one year after Dobbs.

Just from the experience of somebody who's worked in the media for a long time, when you've been doing one trend or one story, editors get a lot of hunger for something contradictory.

And it's like, how can we recast men as the social victims of gender?

Because the truth about abortion bans, about endemic rape, about the crisis in childcare, about the maternal mortality crisis, about domestic violence, like the just like brutal, repetitive ongoingness of what patriarchy is actually doing to the people it's actually doing it to, it's not, it doesn't get, it doesn't drive traffic.

It's so, um, it's the same story over and over again.

And the crisis of masculinity offers an interruption, even if it's like not a particularly original one.

Yeah.

I mean, one other thing to point out here, and this is going back to kind of the, I mean, I don't, you know, I don't want to be one of those guys who always goes back to the Greeks, but like, there's this interesting thing, right?

Like, there's, of course, also, and I never thought about this in the Crisis of Masculinity stories, they're historical in a second way, in the sense that what happens to men is what history is.

What happens to women is always the same.

Women's lot is ahistorical, right?

Like, for at least that was the Greek conception, right?

Like, the woman belonged to the household, the oikos, and was therefore, right, like concerned with circular time.

You just kind of go about your day, you do your chores, and like history is made by men.

Housework never ends.

Yeah, it's about creatureliness, it's about repetition, right?

And men go out and they do anti-cyclical, right?

Like, think of the Odyssey or something like that, right?

Like, which is all about what does she do?

She knits every day and then pulls apart at night what she is made.

And then, meanwhile, Odysseus is like forging a path, like back to Ithaca, where he wants to go.

I mean, it's obviously like, I don't want to say that that's all that's happening here, but like the bias to assume that history is what's happening to men is extremely, extremely tempting and has a long tradition in the field of history that historians have tried very hard and commendably so to kind of offset and off-center over the last 50, 60 years.

But like that's that's playing here too, that like in some way a crisis of femininity almost wouldn't have made sense to someone in 1965, right?

Like that there's just like was no, there was something inappropriate or something something contradictory in terms there.

There also needs to be feminist intervention in history for

masculinity to be denaturalized.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So walk me through it.

So you're saying it tracks closely with...

with feminist organizing, with feminist, as you just said,

kind of self-assertions in the historical record.

Can we map that more closely like after the 60s, like after the second wave?

Right?

I mean, like, you're right.

Dobbs happened last year and we're getting these books now.

Like, can we trace this in the 70s, 80s, 90s?

Well, Susan Faludi does a lot of this in her book Backlash, and then sort of like in maybe a little bit of like too precise irony, her book after Backlash was all about men.

But like, I actually wanted to go a little even further back because even though the term crisis of masculinity was coined

in 1965, to the best of our knowledge, like the idea of a gender crisis that is being sort of fomented in the media as like a little bit of a moral panic goes back way longer.

And I wanted to draw your attention to this compilation of media clips by Paul Ferry, who's a political scientist at the University of Calgary, who has this like beautiful Twitter thread called A Brief History of Men Today Are Too Feminine and Women Are Too Masculine.

Nice.

And it's kind of amazing.

He's got in 1886, the sexes are changing places, men becoming feminine in their bearing, and women grow more dashing.

There is 1902, no feminine men wanted.

I notice a certain style among young men in almost every locality, a style so repulsive and weak as to shock the intelligence of refined people.

The hateful style of parting the hair in the middle.

Oh, no.

Yeah, too girly.

Oh, I like this.

Lovemaking a lost art.

Men and women of the stage today do not employ good old methods of generation ago.

Where's that from?

It doesn't even say I got 1932.

Are men becoming feminine and are women to blame?

That's from the Ironwood Times.

If you speed forward into later in the 20th century, in 1965, the men are becoming feminine was the motion debated by Chelsea and Wilden young liberals at the College of St.

Mark and St.

John Chelsea last week.

That's from 1965 in London.

In 1977, a woman in New Zealand reported that skyscrapers make men too effeminate.

Oh, yeah.

I've said the same thing many times.

1984, are American men wimpier now than men?

Writes in a reader.

I'm an older woman and I believe in equal rights and all that, and all that.

A very telling expression of sincerity.

Oh, yeah.

But don't you think all this women's live stuff has contributed to the wimping of American men?

Am I just imagining it?

Or is today's man less manly than those I grew up with?

Well, so, so, I mean, on the one hand, like, obviously, like, nostalgia is a hell of a drug and this incredibly repetitive pattern.

There's something really interesting, though, about like, maybe there's something that people are picking up on that is, in fact, hesitate to say objective, but basically, right, like there's that book by Catherine Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, where she sort of points out that, like, you know, children have been coded ever since society really took bigger note of them and thought of them as something other than little adults as kind of queer.

They're malleable.

They don't quite do things right and they don't do gender correctly.

And this idea the young aren't gendered enough is, of course, a way, it's a way to respond to the fact that like the young will read a little, I don't know, a little gay to you, that they're not doing gender the way you remember it, and that it is your job as an older person to browbeat them right into it, right?

Like there's an important disciplinary aspect to these kinds of headlines, isn't there?

To kind of encourage people to crack down on the potentiality of youth, which really could sort of go into many directions and could kind of crack up the old codes, right?

Where, you know, this is something that goes right back to the 19th century, where we had waves of people sort of trying to live masculinity and femininity differently.

And this, I mean, brings us right back to Jordan Peterson, who I believe I might be confusing him with somebody else, but didn't Jordan Peterson orchestrate his own firing from the University of Toronto because he refused to use his students' pronouns, right?

He understood himself as having a disciplinary responsibility to the gender of his students.

And he's like, I'm not going to call you, you know, whatever it is that you're called because as a principled stance and as a moral stance.

Yeah, and think of like cancel culture entrepreneurs like, I don't know, Greg Lukionoff and Jonathan Haight, right?

Like the coddling of the American mind.

Why do you worry about that?

Why do they worry about the American mind being coddled, by which they mean young people, college students, right?

Well, because it doesn't prepare you for, quote unquote, the real world.

It's like the anxiety is right there on the surface.

It is young people are living their lives differently, and young people seem to contain the seeds of a different way of conceptualizing the world.

That's coddling.

That's an over-feminization, right?

And that you can see something of that same anxiety in like this summer's media moral panic about men in crisis, right?

There's this idea that they have been made by feminism into creatures who are sort of not functional, too weak for the real world.

They're insufficiently masculine.

They're depressed.

They're lonely.

They're not dominating their world.

And I think that, you know, like the most dangerous moral panics, there's a grain of truth in this one, which is that there is a lot of distress.

I think that it is being falsely and cynically portrayed as exclusively male distress, but there is a lot of like people in crisis.

And they are very vulnerable, many of them, to being told that that is somebody's fault, that they have been denied their birthright as men, that they are uniquely victimized by this hierarchy that they're at the top of, you know, and the crisis of masculinity rhetoric, it does get repeated, but it also has very specific political uses, which are to draw attention, resources, sympathy to a dominant group and to delegitimize and demonize the group that is like being seen to threaten that dominance, which is here feminists and women more broadly.

Yeah.

And even when they're not, I think the way that you talked about drawing sympathy is so, so apt, because I do think that so many of these moral panics are ultimately not, they don't have the courage of their conviction and say, oh, it's women's fault, but they're basically saying, isn't it time we cared a little bit more about our boys?

It's like, ah, like, you know,

it's just, you know, who in our society deserves sympathy, right?

I mean, full disclosure for me, obviously, as a Stanford faculty member, the treatment of Brock Turner in the courtroom in Santa Clara County was a pretty molding kind of experience, just seeing the amazing amount of sympathy extended to that guy.

Now, I tend to think that we can do with more empathy in courtrooms in general, right?

It is a withdrawal of sympathy and a...

crediting of it to another person, right?

And like, even where we don't blame feminists, what we do when we talk like this, when we talk about the crisis of masculinity is to shift away the spotlight and to sort of say, maybe wasn't in the right place in the first place, right?

Like, I mean, same way with the Trump election 2016, right?

Like, it was a welcome reason not to ask black people questions anymore, but only like white dudes in their 70s and Ohio diners, right?

Like, I think a lot of people working for the New York Times didn't.

like think that like LGBT people or black people had caused Donald Trump, but like it activated an instinct in them, which was to say, why don't we put attention as a society where we're accustomed to put attention?

Didn't it feel a little weird how we kept asking questions of all these people that like we usually tell to shut the fuck up?

Right.

Like, and even among people who probably wouldn't subscribe to the, you know, overt misogyny of what you're describing, this shifting of the attention economy can do very, very similar work in a much more hidden way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

It's the passive misogyny.

It's a passive misogyny of like reverting to that traditional hierarchy, right?

That is more comfortable.

And look, like, I'm going to shock listeners and maybe ruin my brand by saying that I actually have a lot of sympathy for young men in crisis.

I just don't think that their problem is that they're men.

I think that they have a problem that is

because, you know, they're in an economy that's rigged against most people, especially the young.

There's a lot of ways that being a human being is really frustrating and hard.

But like, fellas, you don't need an anti-feminist moral panic.

You need to form a union and get a dog and go make some friends.

And it's doable without resorting to this historical privilege that is

not justifiably earned and is not going to serve you the way you want it to.

So in future episodes, we'll be moving backwards a little bit.

We kind of need to embed our modern day blue men in a much longer running series of historical manliness panics.

Like, because it's not transhistoric, right?

Like kids these days, it might be as close as we get to the transhistoric kind of development.

Like, the old are always kind of thinking that young people do youth wrong, but that's not what this is.

Like, there are real forces behind it that are shaping how people encounter each other in society across gendered lines.

Okay, but that doesn't mean that they all mean the same thing when they worry about masculinity and when they want to sort of restore it to something.

The other reason why I think this look back is interesting is because I was shocked in reading over our little history here, just how much of today's garbage is recycled from before, right?

Like we mentioned, Jordan Peterson is basically, he's like, what would happen if you read Carl Jung after huffing a bunch of glue?

These weird Nietzsche acolytes that Nietzsche himself would have been like, ah, Jesus Christ, what's wrong with these people?

Like, they could be published today, honestly.

It's like, it absolutely feeds into our panics today.

I was reading a New Republic piece years ago about some famous incel writer who sort of then disappeared again, as these people do.

I guess maybe he's no longer cell or whatever.

Basically, she highlighted this expression that he used, and I was like, that's Arthur Schopenhauer.

That's from 1819, I believe.

Like, these incels do read, which is kind of shocking.

Like, so this is the other reason I think why these things are important to know: that on the one hand, they, as Mora is pointing out, they come under the guise of diagnosing a very recent phenomenon.

It's happening now, and you need to care about it now.

And then they turn right around and they crib shit from like a time when like people were delivering the horror or the mail by horse, right?

And like

and like that's their solution.

Like and that, so I do think that the look back is going to be super fascinating.

And it also happens to be where my own area of research focuses.

So I'm excited about that.

That's next time on Embed with a Right.

See you then.

Embed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalfis.