I like your argument and you make it persuasively. I do wonder what is supposed to be special about _twenty-first century_ authoritarianism? Performative, blustering masculinity seems to be a common element of authoritarianism everywhere and everywhen. Would the authoritarian movements of interwar Europe support the same causal attribution to gender resentment? They certainly didn't lack for performative masculinity.
The other thing is that you have chosen the competing explanations carefully and perhaps unfairly. For example, Joseph Heath (a colleague of yours at U of T) would say that:
"People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma."
Your explanations are similar, except that whereas you would say that rebellion against "cognitive elites" is an aspect of masculine resentment, he would put it the other way around. How would you propose to discriminate between these two models?
Brad DeLong, on the other hand, tells an economic and cultural story that I don't recognize in your summary. He would say that the very same factors that have produced a rate of economic growth fast enough to escape Malthusianism undermine their own political support because they are achieved by changes in the mode of production that come so fast, they abrogate the social contract that people think they agreed to live under.
There is something to all three of these explanations. To some extent, they differ only in the matter of emphasis. But the emphasis matters, I think.
yeah, masculine anxiety was always a big part of fascist politics. but the specific trigger of women's entry into economic/ political life is new, not the case then. All that Heath and DeLong stuff, I'm in agreement that these also drive resentments, but I think explaining the specific *form* of that resentment requires taking gender into account. Like if the problem were purely cognitive or economic, you'd expect the backlash to be gender-neutral or at least not so consistently organized around strongman theatrics, feminization of enemies, restoration of male authority. gender explains the form if not entirely the existence of the backlash.
That's what I was driving at: the emancipation of women can't be the only causal factor for these politics, because we have had them without it. On the other hand, there has been a very long delay between the onset of women's liberation and the putative reaction to it; All in the Family was showing in the 70's! So it might not be a sufficient factor either.
Not that this means you are wrong: of the four corners of the causal compass, "neither necessary nor sufficient" has almost all of the interesting problems. Everything is just more complicated than we would like it to be.
But Trump rose in direct response to the prospect of a woman potus. Even many men who consider themselves liberal, or at least not sexist, declared themselves unable to vote for her. (Not no woman, but not this woman!)
It does parallel Germany in that full civil rights for Jews, complete in 1871, was fuel for Nazi grievance, while full civil rights for women (&others) has shaped ours. It takes a generation or two for that emancipation to be widely felt & to intersect with other crises. (It’s a little bit hard to split off race bc Obama & racism played a role in all this too.) But sexism worked well in 2016 & even better in 2024, when Trump largely downplayed race, & went all in on bro culture, banking on the sexism of black & Latino men to damage Harris. And it worked, again.
"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" is what I'm pushing back against. Trump arose during the prospect of a woman POTUS, but how do we know that he arose because of that? For one thing, Clinton got more votes than Trump! Being a woman must have hurt Harris, but how do we know being black didn't hurt her more? In any case, she outperformed the modal Democratic candidate in relative terms. The majority of American voters are firmly attached to their respective camps and so elections are decided by a minority of weirdos who are largely illegible to rational thought. Anybody can project their favourite explanation onto the outcome of an American election, and just about everybody does.
Anyway, while misogynistic resentment does a great job of explaining the performative masculinity, it isn't so good on the leadership front. Meloni, Le Pen, Weidel, Purra, and Støjberg are all doing quite well. Historically, Thatcher had spectacular success at the dawn of the era.
I take your point that Nazi support can be construed as status resentment, but that fits the more generic economic and cultural explanations that Seva is arguing against here.
ETA: I will say that the fact that the first two of Trump's cabinet fires were women is strongly suggestive.
Maybe most non-progressive voters are not voting because of sex or skin color.
Progressives keep assuming most voters, like them, are motivated by identity politics. Then they build from that assumption to explain how people who disagree with them are "obviously" sexist and racist.
There are issues that have no room for disagreement, at least a reasonable dialectic. Equality for all genders is a natural widening of the promise of the Constitution. This may manifest as identity politics but it appears so because progressives are trying to respond to a hegemonic movement that would deny rights to classes of people that they claim to despise. In truth, the right-wing does not really despise at all, but finds it convenient to foment hatred against easy targets (e.g. Vance, et. al., claiming, for purely polemical facility, that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating "good" people's pets in Ohio.). Why are transgender persons the brunt of the right's jeremiads? What "danger" do they present? Are trans women lurking in women's public restrooms, lying in wait to commit sexual assaults? The right would have you believe this nonsense, conveniently eliding the huge number of sexual crimes against women committed by hetero men. There are not two sides to freedom, liberty, human rights, etc. Progressives do not castigate as racist or homophobic the conservative radicals that have ascended to power now; they merely call out what they see - hate, discrimination, the need for dominance and the fear they wish to inculcate in their followers.
What's interesting about the strongman/incel is that both reject the traditional sentimental/moral functions of "pre-political" femininity and motherhood--care work has no role in moral formation because men don't need moral formation at all, just dominance over a feminized underclass.
I am still contemplating why these facets of masculinity, violence, aggression, and bravura, are being elevated now. Other traditional aspects of masculinity were discipline, logic, stoicism, patience, respect, and professionalism. Taking care of the weak and vulnerable used to be valued, even for head patriarchs. Disciplined decision making and long range planning were cited as being valued over gut decisions. I could see caring in general (e.g. recognizing negative externalities, harms to non-dominant parties) as being coded feminine now but I do not see why something as key as discipline and logic as falling out of favour of important traditional masculine norms.
Other authors have touched on Trump, in particular, giving a permission slip to being poorly behaved and childish. What has driven that rebellion?
Ignorant, White male anger. Because for as much as this is all rooted in gender, it is equally rooted in race.
Talentless, clueless, astonishingly ignorant White men have, for centuries, assumed the hubris of believing that they deserve to live like kings and be accountable to no one simply because they are White.
But like everything in this reality, they exist within a cycle - a cycle in which they sped a period of time in anxious expectation of their due, which eventually gives way, for some, to the realization of anticipated rewards. But even for those who do manage to cash in, it usually doesn't last and certain ruin is almost always where they end up - Aggrieved, naturally, at having been robbed of all they didn't work very hard for but felt entitled to anyway.
For others, there is only disappointment after disappointment and a world full of people who don't understand that Life - and everybody who's alive - owes them. What is it that they believe they are owed? Everything, obviously. Why are they owed? Because they're White men.
Outside of christian nationalists, White men are the most delusional subpopulation in the US.
It's beyond race though. The article, in citing "nostalgia flavored masculinity", cited South Korea and their have been inroads across many ethnic groups for this undisciplined and irrational behaviour. What happened to the expectation that the adults, in this case father figures, be adults?
But this assumes that South Koreans can't be racist, and/or that racism is only an issue in the US.
Every ethnic group has a racial hierarchy and men of every ethnicity know who amongst them holds and has held the power. In every case, it is this self-appointed upper echelon of men who are cosplaying at being the biggest victims in their society, whatever their race or culture.
This is a hallmark of facism as much as gender - the projection of a victimized image by the racial group doing the most high-level, clandestine, institutional victimizing.
As for the vanishing idea that adults have a responsibility to act like adults, it's the rage. The rage is the excuse. In their minds, their rage justifies anything and everything they do.
No one likes this answer but it's the truth:
Their untreated, unconfronted rage has twisted into a disease of the mind that directly impacts their ability to reason or even remember the standards and values they may have once had.
They act like animals because they are animals.
Many will argue for the idea that they are still human or bear some stamp of humanity.
I tend to think that when we're talking about individuals/groups acting only for their own benefit in full awareness of the pain and suffering they are causing others, questions like "Why are they acting this way?" and "What happened to the old positive standards of what it means to be a man or even an adult?" give them more credit than they are due.
Do we ask why the cat stalks and kills the bird?
When you know something is an animal and a predator, you know all you need to know.
I know this because because Whiteness, like Blackness, isn't simply one static thing. Whitness is a color, a category, an identity, and an ideology at minimum. These are
observations, not assumptions. Both poc and non-poc's are perfectly capable of maintaining the delusion that some people "may as well be white."
Who gets designated as such depends on context, culture, economics, politics - so many things - and has changed over time. Sociologists have documented this for decades.
I raised three daughters and seven sons from 1990 until now (youngest is 19).
For the ways our society has failed boys and men during this time, see the scholar Richard Reeves' work. He seeks to support boys and men without taking support away from girls and women. This is a welcome contrast to most public messaging of the past several decades, which cast life as a zero-sum game, where only one sex could come out "on top."
Boys learned that they should not exhibit "toxic masculinity" (never defined), but no one helped them learn what healthy masculinity was. Many had unsupportive or absent fathers, and no grandfathers or uncles. Those unsupportive fathers were often failed by their own fathers. The Boy Scouts used to give them close contact with male leaders, but that is now co-ed.
Referring to young men as "incels" dehumanizes them. This is precisely why they do not trust the political and cultural left: they're labeled and dehumanized.
Young men I know who are Trump supporters are choosing the lesser of two evils. Articles lecturing them and telling them how dumb they are will not accomplish your goal. When better alternatives offer them respect, they will listen.
Finally: what does it mean for men to "feel masculine"? This "data" cited is weak. Correlation does not equal causation. This is poor scholarship, and dehumanizing to young men.
Moreover: theories based on weak data are not reality.
"Progressives" are not going to attract more men to their cause by telling them how sexist and stupid they are.
I hope there are moderates out there who respect both men and women.
As someone who's never voted R in his life, I fully support what you're saying here. I've been screaming at Progressives for the last decade to stop demonizing men in general.
"Men who experience anxiety about whether they measure up to masculine ideals are significantly more likely to support aggressive political leaders and policies." This is a key point since few in this bunch would have likely survived the average day of a Viking raider or among the Mongol hordes.
But, in today's meta-modernism where there is an oscillation between idealism (or hyperreal ideal masculinity) and post modern irony, along with calculated algorithms finding vulnerable young men (by sussing out sadness, rage, insecurities or lack of male role models) this becomes an odd, toxic brew of cosplay, meme culture, and widespread devotion to manosphere influencers. But could these men articulate that they are rejecting a century or so of gains in women's rights (especially without these influencers in their ears)? I don't even think that the ones I've met even think clearly in terms of wanting their sisters or mothers etc to lose the right to vote or reproductive rights etc. Most seem more like nihilists than true idealogues and simply need a place to belong or receive attention even if negative.
My mother actually met the young man who ran over the woman at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. He was a military reject who lived with his mother until right before the incident, grew up with no father and spent a lot of time playing video games and in online forums. The groups that would accept him dared him to do something radical, calling to mind Goebbel's explanation of how to mobilize young men by essentially shaming them into action by calling them weak or cowardly, exploiting their desire to prove their bravery. That is one isolated example but my overall sense is that a lot of the gendered grievance of so called incels today is more a result of post modern untethered relativism, needing to belong, and loads of time on an internet wired for outrage. Add in rampant addictions to video games and gamer culture, porn, and drugs (in many part of rural America, there are dispensaries on every block doing fairly well next to boarded up businesses) and a general sense of ontological insecurity and you have a perfect storm. Especially when you add in the economic piece of the puzzle.
So I guess I am leaning more into the cultural explanation, although the internet is truly an unprecedented phenomenon creating something that I think is beyond culture, explaining in part why you see these attitudes internationally. I think its massive influence cannot be understated. I appreciate your perspective Seva and all the contributions to this discussion.
Anecdotal, but the manosphere folks I've talked to generally fall into a few categories. The contrarian, passed over for a opportunity in favor of a minority, they learned it from their family, and the traditionalist. I have only met one guy with a real coherent political belief system. The rest were kinda along for the ride besides vague or broad beliefs on like immigration and isolationism.
But 'meta-modernism' and 'hyperreal' are some fancy words... I dig it!
This tracks with my experience also - and agree that most are along for the ride with fairly vague beliefs. I might even say that most are some version of contrarian or troll.
I'm very curious about traditionalists. If someone had this idea that life was better 75-125 years ago when “respectable” men would go to church every Sunday, be the sole breadwinner able to support a stay at home wife and several children, participate in civic organizations, work in the community in an upstanding field, and on and on like many of our grandfathers did, I think most would be daunted by this level of responsibility and would prefer much more free time. I’d love to know if there are men that genuinely want this and not the modern fantasy version of pretending to be farmers or 1950s 3pc suit-wearing businessmen while the “trad” wife vlogs about it and earns the family’s living. ha
Sorry if my words seemed a bit much though! I just wanted to share my thoughts as clearly as I could and some of those terms are useful. I was leaning on the idea of meta-modernism because I think there are some sincere concerns coming from men today as they engage with an uncertain future in an often disorienting, multicultural society with rapidly changing norms and technology, but that the attitudes also kind of swing back to deep skepticism and irony (hence the memes and trolling) which I suspect is often a cover for the bewilderment. And the hyperreality I think largely from the simulated and highly curated social media landscape that blurs the boundaries between what is real and what is virtual. These realities are challenging to everyone, especially young people, but perhaps men and women express the confusion differently or look for different supports when navigating this terrain?
To what degree is the rise of the incel and the manosphere due to feminism as we understood it in the '60s, '70s and '80s, and the world that created full of successful, accomplished women, and to what extent is it due to the critical justice movement and the associated identity politics? I suspect that the answer depends on the underlying society, but I think that in North America the critical social justice movement bears much (not all) of the blame.
problem with this argument is backlash is also strong in countries where critical social justice discourse doesn't really matter, e.g. South Korea, Turkey, Hungary. university DEI offices are not driving the politics there. but they do have rising female workforce participation, education, etc. So I suspect the trigger is material not discursive.
Yes there is a strong link between “the manosphere” and right wing authoritarian populism. You imply that gender conflict is the driver for this. However, gender conflict is merely another expression of the set of psychological predispositions that they share, and THAT is the link.
Moral Foundations Theory makes it clear. An individual who strongly identifies as a man and regards women as a separate group has a psychological tendency to strongly emphasise identity boundaries, and regard immigrants and LGBQT+ as “outgroups”, and will at the same time value order based on hierarchy and authority, and regard the taking of taxes for social justice as unfair.
Gender grievance is not the root cause but just one of the manifestations of a broader moral–psychological profile that also underpins authoritarian populist attitudes.
Wow, brilliant analysis! You formulated so well my thoughts too. For the sake of our survival as humanity I wish not a partial, but a full "feminization" of traditional social structures. The whole system based on dominance as the organizing principle of our civilization is not working anymore.
I would disagree that masculinity is a driver. To me, it's more of a symptom stemming from propaganda. I watched the Clavicular Channel 5 interview, and came away pretty sympathetic for Clav. He just seems overly concerned with aesthetics as like the primary social interface. To a point he's right, but mostly just with the explicit context of the internet. It's no shocker the manosphere is anti-social and anti-complexity, which are both really good for propaganda. The people I've talked to that follow the masculine-thinking mostly have a core gripe with how convoluted and exhausting the social world is to navigate nowadays, and they latch onto this masculine-thinking because it gives them a simplified lens to view the world (propaganda basically) while also antagonizing this group of social progressives that have caused them hardship.
What connects the manosphere to Trump (Idk enough to speak on the others) is the aestheticization of that masculine-thought as anti-social and anti-complexity propaganda imo. Trump had the right-timing to criticize certain macro-problems in very simplistic, transactional ways over social media. Which, going back to Clavicular, worked well because of how concerned we are about aesthetics. Just like how the Nazis used their style to supplement their Aryan mythos, Trump used social media as a medium to push his nostalgic American revisionism as a political platform.
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Thus it has been for a century. The prototype incel was Nietzsche! Sickly, no woman would marry him, lived off his mother, and a tiny income from teaching and his books. Only made famous after his death by his mother and sister.
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about how the violence coming from the left intersects with, if at all, any masculine ideals/tropes/grievances. I suspect men on the left act of out frustration that they cannot, as men, do anything about the situation at hand, rather than frustration that they were not given something which they as men deserved.
that’s interesting. historically left-wing political violence has been less male-monopolized than right-wing violence. I also wonder if aggrieved entitlement is focused on a specific problem and frustration of the kind you’re talking about is more diffuse, i.e. feelings of helplessness may not lead to violence the same way. Thinking about, like, Luigi - definitely a feeling of frustrated helplessness, not sure it’s masculinized the same way
I like your argument and you make it persuasively. I do wonder what is supposed to be special about _twenty-first century_ authoritarianism? Performative, blustering masculinity seems to be a common element of authoritarianism everywhere and everywhen. Would the authoritarian movements of interwar Europe support the same causal attribution to gender resentment? They certainly didn't lack for performative masculinity.
The other thing is that you have chosen the competing explanations carefully and perhaps unfairly. For example, Joseph Heath (a colleague of yours at U of T) would say that:
"People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma."
(from https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow).
Your explanations are similar, except that whereas you would say that rebellion against "cognitive elites" is an aspect of masculine resentment, he would put it the other way around. How would you propose to discriminate between these two models?
Brad DeLong, on the other hand, tells an economic and cultural story that I don't recognize in your summary. He would say that the very same factors that have produced a rate of economic growth fast enough to escape Malthusianism undermine their own political support because they are achieved by changes in the mode of production that come so fast, they abrogate the social contract that people think they agreed to live under.
There is something to all three of these explanations. To some extent, they differ only in the matter of emphasis. But the emphasis matters, I think.
yeah, masculine anxiety was always a big part of fascist politics. but the specific trigger of women's entry into economic/ political life is new, not the case then. All that Heath and DeLong stuff, I'm in agreement that these also drive resentments, but I think explaining the specific *form* of that resentment requires taking gender into account. Like if the problem were purely cognitive or economic, you'd expect the backlash to be gender-neutral or at least not so consistently organized around strongman theatrics, feminization of enemies, restoration of male authority. gender explains the form if not entirely the existence of the backlash.
That's what I was driving at: the emancipation of women can't be the only causal factor for these politics, because we have had them without it. On the other hand, there has been a very long delay between the onset of women's liberation and the putative reaction to it; All in the Family was showing in the 70's! So it might not be a sufficient factor either.
Not that this means you are wrong: of the four corners of the causal compass, "neither necessary nor sufficient" has almost all of the interesting problems. Everything is just more complicated than we would like it to be.
for sure - no monocausal explanation here
But Trump rose in direct response to the prospect of a woman potus. Even many men who consider themselves liberal, or at least not sexist, declared themselves unable to vote for her. (Not no woman, but not this woman!)
It does parallel Germany in that full civil rights for Jews, complete in 1871, was fuel for Nazi grievance, while full civil rights for women (&others) has shaped ours. It takes a generation or two for that emancipation to be widely felt & to intersect with other crises. (It’s a little bit hard to split off race bc Obama & racism played a role in all this too.) But sexism worked well in 2016 & even better in 2024, when Trump largely downplayed race, & went all in on bro culture, banking on the sexism of black & Latino men to damage Harris. And it worked, again.
"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" is what I'm pushing back against. Trump arose during the prospect of a woman POTUS, but how do we know that he arose because of that? For one thing, Clinton got more votes than Trump! Being a woman must have hurt Harris, but how do we know being black didn't hurt her more? In any case, she outperformed the modal Democratic candidate in relative terms. The majority of American voters are firmly attached to their respective camps and so elections are decided by a minority of weirdos who are largely illegible to rational thought. Anybody can project their favourite explanation onto the outcome of an American election, and just about everybody does.
Anyway, while misogynistic resentment does a great job of explaining the performative masculinity, it isn't so good on the leadership front. Meloni, Le Pen, Weidel, Purra, and Støjberg are all doing quite well. Historically, Thatcher had spectacular success at the dawn of the era.
I take your point that Nazi support can be construed as status resentment, but that fits the more generic economic and cultural explanations that Seva is arguing against here.
ETA: I will say that the fact that the first two of Trump's cabinet fires were women is strongly suggestive.
Maybe most non-progressive voters are not voting because of sex or skin color.
Progressives keep assuming most voters, like them, are motivated by identity politics. Then they build from that assumption to explain how people who disagree with them are "obviously" sexist and racist.
There are issues that have no room for disagreement, at least a reasonable dialectic. Equality for all genders is a natural widening of the promise of the Constitution. This may manifest as identity politics but it appears so because progressives are trying to respond to a hegemonic movement that would deny rights to classes of people that they claim to despise. In truth, the right-wing does not really despise at all, but finds it convenient to foment hatred against easy targets (e.g. Vance, et. al., claiming, for purely polemical facility, that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating "good" people's pets in Ohio.). Why are transgender persons the brunt of the right's jeremiads? What "danger" do they present? Are trans women lurking in women's public restrooms, lying in wait to commit sexual assaults? The right would have you believe this nonsense, conveniently eliding the huge number of sexual crimes against women committed by hetero men. There are not two sides to freedom, liberty, human rights, etc. Progressives do not castigate as racist or homophobic the conservative radicals that have ascended to power now; they merely call out what they see - hate, discrimination, the need for dominance and the fear they wish to inculcate in their followers.
Trump ONLY beat women. He NEVER beat a man. Trump being Trump, this truth must enrage him beyond all reckoning.
What's interesting about the strongman/incel is that both reject the traditional sentimental/moral functions of "pre-political" femininity and motherhood--care work has no role in moral formation because men don't need moral formation at all, just dominance over a feminized underclass.
I wish this analysis was obvious, but it's not.
so thank you for spelling it out
I am still contemplating why these facets of masculinity, violence, aggression, and bravura, are being elevated now. Other traditional aspects of masculinity were discipline, logic, stoicism, patience, respect, and professionalism. Taking care of the weak and vulnerable used to be valued, even for head patriarchs. Disciplined decision making and long range planning were cited as being valued over gut decisions. I could see caring in general (e.g. recognizing negative externalities, harms to non-dominant parties) as being coded feminine now but I do not see why something as key as discipline and logic as falling out of favour of important traditional masculine norms.
Other authors have touched on Trump, in particular, giving a permission slip to being poorly behaved and childish. What has driven that rebellion?
Ignorant, White male anger. Because for as much as this is all rooted in gender, it is equally rooted in race.
Talentless, clueless, astonishingly ignorant White men have, for centuries, assumed the hubris of believing that they deserve to live like kings and be accountable to no one simply because they are White.
But like everything in this reality, they exist within a cycle - a cycle in which they sped a period of time in anxious expectation of their due, which eventually gives way, for some, to the realization of anticipated rewards. But even for those who do manage to cash in, it usually doesn't last and certain ruin is almost always where they end up - Aggrieved, naturally, at having been robbed of all they didn't work very hard for but felt entitled to anyway.
For others, there is only disappointment after disappointment and a world full of people who don't understand that Life - and everybody who's alive - owes them. What is it that they believe they are owed? Everything, obviously. Why are they owed? Because they're White men.
Outside of christian nationalists, White men are the most delusional subpopulation in the US.
It's beyond race though. The article, in citing "nostalgia flavored masculinity", cited South Korea and their have been inroads across many ethnic groups for this undisciplined and irrational behaviour. What happened to the expectation that the adults, in this case father figures, be adults?
But this assumes that South Koreans can't be racist, and/or that racism is only an issue in the US.
Every ethnic group has a racial hierarchy and men of every ethnicity know who amongst them holds and has held the power. In every case, it is this self-appointed upper echelon of men who are cosplaying at being the biggest victims in their society, whatever their race or culture.
This is a hallmark of facism as much as gender - the projection of a victimized image by the racial group doing the most high-level, clandestine, institutional victimizing.
As for the vanishing idea that adults have a responsibility to act like adults, it's the rage. The rage is the excuse. In their minds, their rage justifies anything and everything they do.
No one likes this answer but it's the truth:
Their untreated, unconfronted rage has twisted into a disease of the mind that directly impacts their ability to reason or even remember the standards and values they may have once had.
They act like animals because they are animals.
Many will argue for the idea that they are still human or bear some stamp of humanity.
I tend to think that when we're talking about individuals/groups acting only for their own benefit in full awareness of the pain and suffering they are causing others, questions like "Why are they acting this way?" and "What happened to the old positive standards of what it means to be a man or even an adult?" give them more credit than they are due.
Do we ask why the cat stalks and kills the bird?
When you know something is an animal and a predator, you know all you need to know.
Idk about this. Fuentes, Tate, Gaines are all “minorities”…
Lol. Not in their minds they're not.
How do you know this?
The problem with this column, and many of the comments, is that you're making a guess based on sweeping generalizations.
I know this because because Whiteness, like Blackness, isn't simply one static thing. Whitness is a color, a category, an identity, and an ideology at minimum. These are
observations, not assumptions. Both poc and non-poc's are perfectly capable of maintaining the delusion that some people "may as well be white."
Who gets designated as such depends on context, culture, economics, politics - so many things - and has changed over time. Sociologists have documented this for decades.
But you're just stating opinions. Opinions are not facts, like "2+2=4."
Steph raised some solid questions. I'm going to bow out and defer to those.
great analysis, thank you for writing.
I raised three daughters and seven sons from 1990 until now (youngest is 19).
For the ways our society has failed boys and men during this time, see the scholar Richard Reeves' work. He seeks to support boys and men without taking support away from girls and women. This is a welcome contrast to most public messaging of the past several decades, which cast life as a zero-sum game, where only one sex could come out "on top."
Boys learned that they should not exhibit "toxic masculinity" (never defined), but no one helped them learn what healthy masculinity was. Many had unsupportive or absent fathers, and no grandfathers or uncles. Those unsupportive fathers were often failed by their own fathers. The Boy Scouts used to give them close contact with male leaders, but that is now co-ed.
Referring to young men as "incels" dehumanizes them. This is precisely why they do not trust the political and cultural left: they're labeled and dehumanized.
Young men I know who are Trump supporters are choosing the lesser of two evils. Articles lecturing them and telling them how dumb they are will not accomplish your goal. When better alternatives offer them respect, they will listen.
Finally: what does it mean for men to "feel masculine"? This "data" cited is weak. Correlation does not equal causation. This is poor scholarship, and dehumanizing to young men.
Moreover: theories based on weak data are not reality.
"Progressives" are not going to attract more men to their cause by telling them how sexist and stupid they are.
I hope there are moderates out there who respect both men and women.
As someone who's never voted R in his life, I fully support what you're saying here. I've been screaming at Progressives for the last decade to stop demonizing men in general.
Tristan, thank you.
You might appreciate Richard Reeves. He understands.
Warmest wishes to you in your journey as a man in this country!
"Men who experience anxiety about whether they measure up to masculine ideals are significantly more likely to support aggressive political leaders and policies." This is a key point since few in this bunch would have likely survived the average day of a Viking raider or among the Mongol hordes.
But, in today's meta-modernism where there is an oscillation between idealism (or hyperreal ideal masculinity) and post modern irony, along with calculated algorithms finding vulnerable young men (by sussing out sadness, rage, insecurities or lack of male role models) this becomes an odd, toxic brew of cosplay, meme culture, and widespread devotion to manosphere influencers. But could these men articulate that they are rejecting a century or so of gains in women's rights (especially without these influencers in their ears)? I don't even think that the ones I've met even think clearly in terms of wanting their sisters or mothers etc to lose the right to vote or reproductive rights etc. Most seem more like nihilists than true idealogues and simply need a place to belong or receive attention even if negative.
My mother actually met the young man who ran over the woman at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. He was a military reject who lived with his mother until right before the incident, grew up with no father and spent a lot of time playing video games and in online forums. The groups that would accept him dared him to do something radical, calling to mind Goebbel's explanation of how to mobilize young men by essentially shaming them into action by calling them weak or cowardly, exploiting their desire to prove their bravery. That is one isolated example but my overall sense is that a lot of the gendered grievance of so called incels today is more a result of post modern untethered relativism, needing to belong, and loads of time on an internet wired for outrage. Add in rampant addictions to video games and gamer culture, porn, and drugs (in many part of rural America, there are dispensaries on every block doing fairly well next to boarded up businesses) and a general sense of ontological insecurity and you have a perfect storm. Especially when you add in the economic piece of the puzzle.
So I guess I am leaning more into the cultural explanation, although the internet is truly an unprecedented phenomenon creating something that I think is beyond culture, explaining in part why you see these attitudes internationally. I think its massive influence cannot be understated. I appreciate your perspective Seva and all the contributions to this discussion.
Anecdotal, but the manosphere folks I've talked to generally fall into a few categories. The contrarian, passed over for a opportunity in favor of a minority, they learned it from their family, and the traditionalist. I have only met one guy with a real coherent political belief system. The rest were kinda along for the ride besides vague or broad beliefs on like immigration and isolationism.
But 'meta-modernism' and 'hyperreal' are some fancy words... I dig it!
This tracks with my experience also - and agree that most are along for the ride with fairly vague beliefs. I might even say that most are some version of contrarian or troll.
I'm very curious about traditionalists. If someone had this idea that life was better 75-125 years ago when “respectable” men would go to church every Sunday, be the sole breadwinner able to support a stay at home wife and several children, participate in civic organizations, work in the community in an upstanding field, and on and on like many of our grandfathers did, I think most would be daunted by this level of responsibility and would prefer much more free time. I’d love to know if there are men that genuinely want this and not the modern fantasy version of pretending to be farmers or 1950s 3pc suit-wearing businessmen while the “trad” wife vlogs about it and earns the family’s living. ha
Sorry if my words seemed a bit much though! I just wanted to share my thoughts as clearly as I could and some of those terms are useful. I was leaning on the idea of meta-modernism because I think there are some sincere concerns coming from men today as they engage with an uncertain future in an often disorienting, multicultural society with rapidly changing norms and technology, but that the attitudes also kind of swing back to deep skepticism and irony (hence the memes and trolling) which I suspect is often a cover for the bewilderment. And the hyperreality I think largely from the simulated and highly curated social media landscape that blurs the boundaries between what is real and what is virtual. These realities are challenging to everyone, especially young people, but perhaps men and women express the confusion differently or look for different supports when navigating this terrain?
To what degree is the rise of the incel and the manosphere due to feminism as we understood it in the '60s, '70s and '80s, and the world that created full of successful, accomplished women, and to what extent is it due to the critical justice movement and the associated identity politics? I suspect that the answer depends on the underlying society, but I think that in North America the critical social justice movement bears much (not all) of the blame.
problem with this argument is backlash is also strong in countries where critical social justice discourse doesn't really matter, e.g. South Korea, Turkey, Hungary. university DEI offices are not driving the politics there. but they do have rising female workforce participation, education, etc. So I suspect the trigger is material not discursive.
Yes there is a strong link between “the manosphere” and right wing authoritarian populism. You imply that gender conflict is the driver for this. However, gender conflict is merely another expression of the set of psychological predispositions that they share, and THAT is the link.
Moral Foundations Theory makes it clear. An individual who strongly identifies as a man and regards women as a separate group has a psychological tendency to strongly emphasise identity boundaries, and regard immigrants and LGBQT+ as “outgroups”, and will at the same time value order based on hierarchy and authority, and regard the taking of taxes for social justice as unfair.
Gender grievance is not the root cause but just one of the manifestations of a broader moral–psychological profile that also underpins authoritarian populist attitudes.
"Strongmen" by Ruth Ben-Ghiat touches on a lot of this. Very good for the layman.
Wow, brilliant analysis! You formulated so well my thoughts too. For the sake of our survival as humanity I wish not a partial, but a full "feminization" of traditional social structures. The whole system based on dominance as the organizing principle of our civilization is not working anymore.
I would disagree that masculinity is a driver. To me, it's more of a symptom stemming from propaganda. I watched the Clavicular Channel 5 interview, and came away pretty sympathetic for Clav. He just seems overly concerned with aesthetics as like the primary social interface. To a point he's right, but mostly just with the explicit context of the internet. It's no shocker the manosphere is anti-social and anti-complexity, which are both really good for propaganda. The people I've talked to that follow the masculine-thinking mostly have a core gripe with how convoluted and exhausting the social world is to navigate nowadays, and they latch onto this masculine-thinking because it gives them a simplified lens to view the world (propaganda basically) while also antagonizing this group of social progressives that have caused them hardship.
What connects the manosphere to Trump (Idk enough to speak on the others) is the aestheticization of that masculine-thought as anti-social and anti-complexity propaganda imo. Trump had the right-timing to criticize certain macro-problems in very simplistic, transactional ways over social media. Which, going back to Clavicular, worked well because of how concerned we are about aesthetics. Just like how the Nazis used their style to supplement their Aryan mythos, Trump used social media as a medium to push his nostalgic American revisionism as a political platform.
Idk if that makes sense, but just something I've been thinking about a lot recently so I had to word vomit.
Anyways, good article!
Basically Gamergate blossomed into a global political movement. Ugh
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Thus it has been for a century. The prototype incel was Nietzsche! Sickly, no woman would marry him, lived off his mother, and a tiny income from teaching and his books. Only made famous after his death by his mother and sister.
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about how the violence coming from the left intersects with, if at all, any masculine ideals/tropes/grievances. I suspect men on the left act of out frustration that they cannot, as men, do anything about the situation at hand, rather than frustration that they were not given something which they as men deserved.
that’s interesting. historically left-wing political violence has been less male-monopolized than right-wing violence. I also wonder if aggrieved entitlement is focused on a specific problem and frustration of the kind you’re talking about is more diffuse, i.e. feelings of helplessness may not lead to violence the same way. Thinking about, like, Luigi - definitely a feeling of frustrated helplessness, not sure it’s masculinized the same way