Men are in trouble. This is the argument we’ve heard for a few years now, as girls have risen from the sidelines to outperform boys in school, and as the manufacturing economy slipped into something a little more comfortable. Service jobs either appeal more to women than to men or are associated with femininity; thus, men are edged out. A good man is hard to be—without a good job.
At the same time, an elite cultural push to feminize men, or perhaps to dispel what many assume is their acquired—not innate—toxic masculinity, has left many feeling ashamed of their sex category. They’re pressured to tamp down traditionally masculine characteristics, like assertiveness, else they’ll end up entwined with Andrew Tate.
Maybe Trump was right when he said it was “a very scary time for young men in America.”
It wasn’t long ago that girls were in trouble. In the 1960s and 70s, they battled the problem that had no name. Or they fought for the right to have credit cards in their own names or to be legally protected from marital rape. They fought to play college sports, or to not be denied jobs because of their sex.
Even as they excelled in a lot of those arenas, the 1990s saw the rise of “girl crisis” literature, a focus on eating disorders inspired by the pressures of traditional femininity. The STEM pipeline still leaked, even if it stretched all the way to the C-suite. Still, women’s ascent in the professions is undeniable, in part because it turns out they were capable of being doctors and lawyers, and in part because policies and the culture corrected the tilt toward men, hoping the needle would land on equality.
Apparently, that’s not where it landed. Instead, women rose to power, and ruined everything with their toxic femininity, manifested as censoriousness and cancel culture.
That “wokeness” unfolded concomitantly with women’s rise is the subject of The Great Feminization, an essay by Helen Andrews, who argues that women are by their nature unfit for the kinds of leadership roles they’ve assumed, and this is why things have gotten so bad. Andrews, of course, is not that kind of woman, so it’s okay for her to steer clear of the tradwife route.
I understand this argument. It’s been going around for a while. Cancel culture is catty, back-stabby. It squelches competition by tattling—feminine—instead of fisticuffs: masculine. What we need, apparently, is to reestablish the natural order, and have men at the helm. Men don’t perform institution-destroying acts like imposing speech codes and trying to shun people for wrongthink.
Except that now we have President Trump doing those exact things. The only difference that I can see is that he’s not doing it in the name of “kindness” or “inclusivity.” Biden used executive orders to impose the belief of gender identity onto the country, and Trump used them to forbid it.
We can battle endlessly about psychological differences among the sexes, and about nature versus nurture. We can accept that some of the ways we evolved have to do with changes in the landscape and technology, with the shift from nomadic culture to agriculture. We can accept that most cultures have some kind of sex-based division of labor, but it’s not exactly the same in each culture. We can accept the bimodal distributions of gendered behavior and the sex binary and the gender outliers. We could also stop insisting that there’s a man or boy or woman or girl crisis, and focus on the best way to be human in this very strange iteration of the world.
Whatever the sex of the people in charge…could they please stop acting like children? Trump siccing the justice department on his enemies is not some expression of healthy masculinity. It’s an abuse of power by someone unable to tolerate dissent or a lack of fealty to his worldview. Which is hardly different from forcing people to sign loyalty oaths disguised as diversity statements or ousting them for saying that biological sex is real.
Women may have been acting like catty little girls, but the fellas are acting like teenage bullies. What we really need are grownups to set boundaries, be able to say no to people, come up with policies that are just and fair, set high expectations, and model good citizenship.
Where are these adults and will they please take the helm of…everything?
I think acknowledging the toxic ways in which boy culture and girl culture can manifest is an important step towards finding balance in a society so we can play to our strengths and weaknesses, but of course we can’t have nice things in America so we’re doomed to ping pong back and forth between ever widening extremes —always blaming the opposite side (or, in this case, sex) for all our problems.
Such grownups tend to be very boring and conservative in the technical sense, acting to preserve received institutions The kind of people who are successful in the cultural/tech innovation of social media despise such people. Perhaps a concerted effort by "open" people such as myself to value the vast majority who just want to know the rules as we flail about trying to change them will diminish the conflict.