Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
American men and boys are in trouble, we are told. The internet is replete with tales of controlling husbands and boyfriends who neglect their hygiene and play video games all day. The stories aren’t purely anecdotal; the data suggest there is a crisis. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that although more women ages 25 to 34 have entered the workforce “in recent years,” the share of similarly aged working men “hasn’t grown in a decade.” Many young men still live at home with their parents rather than striking out on their own and say they have trouble making friends and finding dates. Their suicide rates are rising, leading some observers to attribute their struggles in part to a lack of purpose or meaning. “Young Hispanic men, and really young men in general, they want to feel valued,” Rafael Struve of the conservative Bienvenido group told the Associated Press not long after Donald Trump won reelection. A few weeks later, Richard V. Reeves of the nonpartisan American Institute for Boys and Men told the Journal, “The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society.”
Male loneliness is an opportunity for misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate. He tells millions of followers that masculinity is theirs to reclaim through the brutal oppression of women. Donald Trump offers a less explicit version of the same argument, telling young men that their prospects are threatened by “DEI,” which he defines as the advancement of women, LGBTQ+ people, and racial minorities. In 2024, young men again drifted right and toward Trump, a trend that helped put the would-be strongman back in the White House. Democrats know they have a problem. During the first episode of California governor Gavin Newsom’s podcast, the California Democrat told MAGA star Charlie Kirk that his son is a fan. Others are recalibrating their rhetoric and policies to better address the male plight. Maryland governor Wes Moore has announced a new initiative to help men and boys. “On every single indicator we care about, young men and boys are falling off,” he told Washingtonian. Last month, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan appealed directly to men and boys in a speech, saying, “The last thing any of us wants is a generation of young men falling behind their fathers and grandfathers.”
The crisis is real, to an extent. Men are in trouble, and that means everyone else is in trouble too. The return of Trump and the growth of misogyny are real political problems for women, for the economy, and for democracy itself. Alas for all of us, the debate over men has become detached from material reality. Men may lack purpose, but that dilemma is not unique to them, as women also struggle for meaning and value. The real culprit is a political economy that renders everyone powerless and insecure. As long as it endures, purpose remains a loose concept, and that allows snake oil to flourish. Sometimes this is literally true: The Black Forest supplement company promises men more than berberine and something called “turkesterone.” It also advertises community. “Together, we can continue to defy the forces that seek to suppress our true nature and empower one another to embrace our inherent masculinity,” the website says. Whether a man imbibes Tate or turkesterone, he is taking poison. He needs an antidote, and fast, but he finds it in short supply.
The answer to male pain isn’t masculinity, but a new political order, where no man or woman is an automaton or object. As analysts like Reeves have argued, it is possible to champion men and boys without sacrificing women and girls to the right-wing. Yet some liberals would rather appease violent masculinity than defeat it. Newsom didn’t just interview Kirk; he praised the far-right activist, and attacked trans athletes and “woke culture” in the same episode. Democrats like him agree that wokeness has gone too far, that trans rights and immigration are destabilizing the country and alienating male voters. In searching for common ground with Trump, they align themselves with the same reactionary forces that sell men hierarchy and call it freedom. Join us, the right-wing says, and you can use slurs. But the liberty to insult others is an ersatz version of the real thing.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the Trump administration. On Monday, the Irish MMA fighter Conor McGregor railed against immigration during an appearance at the White House, a few months after an Irish court ordered him to pay almost €250,000 to a woman who says he beat and raped her in 2018. At the same time, the administration defended the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelan men on the basis that they were all gang members and abusers of women. Trump’s masculinity is bound up with white nationalism, which has long promised white men and white women a measure of power in exchange for their obedience. A man can serve in the military, but if he is Black, he can also expect to see his contributions erased. After the Pentagon temporarily removed a story about Jackie Robinson and his military service from its website, press secretary John Ullyot said in a written statement that so-called DEI programming “Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion, and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.” Some masculinities matter more than others, while imaginary threats hide real predators from scrutiny. There is no freedom here, only levels of tyranny.
The right-wing offers men a purpose of a sort but asks him to derive his meaning from the subjugation of others. It’s an old bargain. When I was an Evangelical girl in the ’90s, thousands of men flocked to the Promise Keepers movement, which offered them camaraderie and fellowship while promoting male authority over women and denouncing homosexuality. When I later entered an Evangelical college, many classmates fawned over John and Stasi Eldredge, a pair of Christian authors who taught “complementarian” theology, or the idea that men should lead their homes and churches while women lovingly submit to them. In Wild at Heart, his 2001 best-seller, John claimed that men are innately aggressive, and that they all long for “a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to love.” The Christian church had failed men by asking them to deny their true nature, he argued. “Every man wants to play the hero,” he added.
Eldredge did not invent complementarian theology but popularized ideas that I and millions of others had already heard in our church sanctuaries and our living rooms. Now reactionaries of all stripes make similar arguments. In a February piece for The Free Press, the writer Chris Arnade claimed that “all men need to feel like the hero—if not over the course of their lifetime, then at least every now and then.” Most men “get their sense of worth from rescuing, protecting, building, solving — and for being appreciated for doing so,” he added. When society fails to grant them that opportunity, “a black market in unapproved, antisocial ones will pop up; these usually involve proving your worth through crime or violence.” Arnade blamed liberalism, which, he said, “favors the individual over the community” and tells men and women that they “can create a bespoke identity, like a tailor-made suit,” again at the expense of their true natures.
Absent from so much contemporary discourse about the crisis of men, and from centuries-old defenses of traditional masculinity, is the labor and purpose of women. Wild at Heart made the incredible claim that slavery was ended through the strength of men. (Who needed Harriet Tubman?) “Apartheid wasn’t defeated by women,” Eldredge added. Arnade’s notion of heroism is about doing, making, protecting, all of which he associates with masculinity. In real life, women find meaning in the same ways. The work of caregiving is typically carried out by women: by unpaid daughters and granddaughters and by underpaid domestic workers, who are mostly women of color. Changing a diaper is a form of protection and as necessary to society as firefighting, but a woman is rarely called heroic for doing it. Her loneliness and her need to feel valued go mostly unacknowledged. “Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all,” the late Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her 1988 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” “That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.”
Perhaps heroism itself is part of the problem. “I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off,” Le Guin wrote. “However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so.” It is, she added, “one of those damned things you have to do” in order for society to go on. Our customary definitions of heroism, and with it, our concepts of purpose and meaning, often urge men to commit acts of socially permissible violence or subject themselves to exploitation at work. But many dislike their options. At Liberal Currents, Toby Buckle wrote in response to Arnade that “heroic” professions are still available to men, if they’re interested. “The Army aggressively recruits; really any young man at any point can join. The vast majority don’t,” Buckle pointed out. “Men fantasise about being in combat scenarios but, by and large, don’t seek them out.” Liberalism never shut men out of these roles, he added, or prohibited them from the stereotypically male pleasures of grilling meat or fathering children with a stay-at-home wife. Society has not feminized nearly as much as the reactionaries claim.
Nevertheless, Arnade is right about one thing, if not for the reasons he thinks. Liberalism has failed men as much as it has failed women, though “bespoke identity” has nothing to do with it. By leaving intact the very political economy that breaks men down, liberals undermine the best and most egalitarian aspects of their political project. “Liberal freedom isn’t just about finding the life that best suits you, it’s a grand experiment in us all finding the best ways we can care for one another,” Buckle wrote. That admirable vision can’t survive in a country in thrall to the almighty free market. Our economic system depends on violence, even celebrates it, a reality that liberalism tries to dodge by inventing friendlier versions of capitalism while society fractures around them. They tell voters they will make it easier to climb the ladder when the problem is the ladder itself. Well-off men like Trump and his allies cling to the highest rungs and beat back every perceived threat with violent force. Men who are not well-off may look up at men who are and think prosperity is only possible through brutality, and they aren’t entirely wrong. Though men do bear moral responsibility for the way they vote and behave, they are operating within a system that ultimately restricts them.
Men can still join the Army, but the pursuit of meaning through violence is a dead end — both for men, who risk death, maiming, and moral injury, and for the victims they injure and kill. A man can still go to work and provide for his family, but unless he has a union job, he has few rights and little freedom. Even if he sends emails for a living and makes a comfortable salary, he is at the mercy of an employer who can probably fire him at any time for any reason. Even Eldredge complained in Wild at Heart that “corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce.” The male soul, he added, “longs for passion, for freedom, for life.” If his wage can’t pay the rent, or cover a child’s medical bill, he might well get angry. Reactionaries will tell him to blame the advancement of women and immigrants, not his boss or the hand of the market. Too often, liberals agree, opening the door for someone like Eldredge or worse. Tate tells men they deserve not just sex but wealth, as if the hustle could save them.
Feminists have always argued that patriarchy damages men in addition to women, though it is more reliably fatal for the latter. Tate once said that if a woman accuses him of cheating, “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch.” At the softer end of the scale, writers like Eldredge say they reject abuse but add that women prefer the domestic sphere because of God or their biological essence. They are all pushing a trap that will not cure loneliness but increase it. Their advice, if taken, dooms women to male domination and men to lives without friendship and love. As far as Tate is concerned, “women and property are viewed simply as financial assets,” Zoe Hu wrote in Dissent. “There is no marriage or romance, however false and abusive, in Tate’s world — just girlfriends who are allowed to stay with him for ‘extended periods of time.’” There are no easy solutions to the reactionary’s appeal or to liberalism’s failures. Misogyny is older than capitalism, and if we burned it all down tomorrow, some men would still beat their wives. Yet no one benefits from the gender debate we’re having now. When housing and health care are unaffordable for so many, and most workers lack the protection of a union, people will look for security wherever they believe they can find it. Even the wealthy suspect their power is fragile, and the accumulation of riches will never guarantee anyone the meaning we all seek. Salvation does not lie in the hustle or in heroism, but in the hard and unglamorous work of keeping society together.
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