What if we treated men like adults?

a serious inquiry

According to Aaron Rabinowitz’s popular essay in The Skeptic, men are suffering from a crisis of meaning. The rise in reactionary sentiment among young men is attributable to a discrepancy between reality and mythmaking: basically, working life under capitalism is soulless and degrading, and reactionary Trumpists promise men a compelling narrative of privilege and domination. Rabinowitz’s solution, however, lies not with men and the right, but with women and the left: it’s imperative, he says, for ladies and leftists to participate in “helping men feel socially respected again” and “stop reflexively shitting on men” in left spaces.

I don’t want to pick solely on Rabinowitz here, because his article is simply the latest articulation of a set of sentiments I’ve been running across for years. Only the left (gendered female) can remake men into good democratic citizens who are decent and compassionate and brimming with solidarity; and only then will the right (gendered male) stop trying to brutally crush everybody around them. Until the left (women) make all of the correct emotional overtures, the right (men) are simply helpless to help themselves. In fact, they’re the true victims here, and we need to rescue them, like princesses from the towers of their own feelings.

Matt Bors’ famous 2018 comic “Fault Right.”

Are men indeed treated badly on the left? Rabinowitz’s claim that leftist spaces are home to the public degeneration of men “as a form of retributive punishment” is not wholly false. But it’s not very true, either. There are indeed people online who make jokes about men as a group, whether out of frustration or because misandry can be an avenue for sanctioned meanness in certain limited contexts; though my experience of IRL left spaces, I have to say, has featured far more men giving long-winded speeches and fiercely overreacting to the tiniest perceived slights. But sure, it’s definitely happened from time to time: some leftists, especially online, have indeed said nasty things about men as a group. Once in a while, this has bothered my husband and other male friends enough that they’ve mentioned it to me. They talked through their feelings, with me or with each other or alone: they worked through these negative experiences, and moved on.

What none of these guys did, however, was become fascists. Yes, they did feel briefly disrespected on the internet, and yet they didn’t change their entire moral and political worldview because of it. This is because my husband and my male friends are actual men, and not wee fucking snowflakes in cosplay. And also because hearing something nasty about your social group, and learning to breathe deep and deal with the bad feelings, is something that everybody can learn how to handle, and in fact are often forced to handle, quite a bit more often than the average man is subjected to nasty comments about men.

Online leftist spaces are also home to a lot of reflexive shitting on white women, which (in defensive moments) does occasionally bug me, especially when it seems like “white” is only thrown in at the last minute to disguise what would otherwise be a purely misogynist sentiment. But I don’t think anyone in left spaces would tolerate for a minute the idea that shitting on white women pushed white women toward Trump. This is because we live in a culture that believes women to be responsible for their own feelings and actions: that is, we believe women to be adults.¹ But when it comes to emotional control we often do not imagine men as adults,² preferring to treat women as“angel in the house” supervisors who are responsible for the behavior of their husband-children, who are also the women’s bosses.³ And women—so pundits and essayists are always telling me—are also responsible for the behavior of random men who they have never met, who are sad and feel alienated from their meaningless labor under capitalism, unlike women whose sadness and alienation from their labor is regarded only with trivialization and scorn, if it’s regarded at all.

I do agree that what we have here is a fundamental crisis of meaning—it’s just not the one that Rabinowitz thinks it is. Many men’s egos have been inflated by a myth of aggression, striving, and world-beating superiority, one which is punctured every day by the dull stupidity of bosses and commuting and half-functional technology. And the loss of any myth can be upsetting. But real life, as every adult knows, isn’t a song, or a story: the process of growing up is also the process of realizing you’re not a fictional protagonist and life isn’t a hero’s journey. In my book (I’m not even really trying to promote it anymore, it just keeps being relevant) I talk about how the most agonized-about groups of readers—the ones whose media intake has typically been the subject of public concern—are usually women and girls, or young men who get so invested in video games and other absorbing fantasies that they drop out of the workforce. But employed adult men who cry because they have desk jobs rather than fighting Sasquatch on the pages of Men’s Adventure magazine have, traditionally, not been a fretted-about group: men have rarely been considered bad readers of either fiction or reality. This remains the case when these guys engage in obvious bad reading and even contempt for reading, such as the post below which was part of an ongoing harassment campaign against a random woman academic:

I bet I could arm wrestle this fool into oblivion

When a man decides that a woman must only be getting a PhD in order to “stick it to the evil man”—i.e., her life choices were made not for herself but to insult men as a group—our popular understanding of male emotional responsibility would still hold him to be largely blameless. After all, he’s only a victim of patriarchal myths; he wouldn’t believe this if he hadn’t been so badly misled by popular fantasies. And our patriarchal myths can only be defeated when the left (women) offer men a comparable narrative role under socialism, maybe also one where they can battle mountain lions. Men purportedly need to be granted social roles where they can still be heroes and special and better than everyone else but in a somehow non-toxic and public-spirited way, like a sanitized superhero comic for kids where nothing bad can ever happen.

But of course, the left can’t create a special, mythic, heroic role for men, because the left is invested in equality for all workers. This is also why we see such strong efforts by the right to degrade women’s work and to force many women into child-bearing roles; yes, it’s a transparent ploy to create more (white) babies, and it’s also a way of buying men’s loyalty to capitalism by ensuring their special role as a better-waged worker and provider, always more respected and remunerated than their wives and women service workers. Maybe you can’t literally fight mountain lions, but at least you can maintain your small feeling of superiority. The left has failed to develop a strong answer to the desire for petty dominance because it’s hard to compete with such stupid bullshit. Solidarity with other human beings is also great and can feel wonderful—but nothing is ever going to feel as empowering as power over others, especially if you’ve decided you enjoy it, as some voters (not all men and not exclusively men) obviously do.

Okay, well enough, but we still live in the world with the reactionaries, and we need to turn them around. How do we do this? Do we need, as many have suggested, a Joe Rogan of the left? As it turns out, there are already plenty of potential left Joe Rogans: or at least, there are tons of popular podcasts featuring non-toxically masculine guys talking about traditionally male topics. My two favorite football podcasts at the moment are the Ringer Fantasy Football Show (all men) and the Shutdown Fullcast (all men and one bro-y woman.) If you like American football, both podcasts are great hangs, featuring left-leaning hosts who love talking about guys being dudes. (Spencer Hall of the Shutdown Fullcast is particularly tickled every time a college football coach makes a grunting speech about toughness, or the players start brawling on the field.) But while both of these podcasts are quite popular, it’s true that neither are popular on the level of Joe Rogan: because while these sports podcasts take joy in (and poke fun at) masculinity, neither are truly about masculinity: specifically, neither are about an aggrieved, weak, and imperiled masculinity, lamenting the time when men could be men, ruggedly hunting for brain pills in the bush.

Rogan still ostensibly talks about wrestling sometimes, and plenty of reactionary guys are interested in football, boxing, weightlifting, etc, but I have a strong suspicion that these guys aren’t interested in solely or primarily talking about sports or other traditionally masculine activities. The whining and the detachment from the usual trappings of maleness is entirely the point: these guys are interested in masculinity not as feats of strength or as some sort of tough-guy ethos but as a pure and threatened abstract concept, one which they fear they don’t properly embody. After all, crying like a bitch over disrespected masculinity is pretty much the opposite of manly behavior.⁴ I made this joke in my annoyingly prescient Baffler article about the election, but if I presented J.D. Vance with a napkin, I doubt he could draw up an easy football play. But what he can do is AI-generate a weird image of himself as Trump’s wife at Thanksgiving. Vance, for better or worse, is the definitional reactionary man: good at computer, alienated, permanently terrified, willing to submit to a more masculine authority, and happy to hurt anybody who makes jokes about it.

literally nothing has ever been more Gender

See, I actually agree that masculinity is under attack—from men like Vance. The problem is that for all their posturing, these guys don’t actually feel like men. And that’s exactly why they find the current flavor of reactionary ideology compelling. It’s not because the left is aggressively anti-men, and doesn’t provide any space for guys to be dudes or semi-dudes, but because the right—and only the right—provides a place for men to act out their insecurity about masculinity without admitting that’s exactly what they’re doing. The reactionaries could simply come to terms with their own relationship to their gender identity, whatever it happened to be, but the process would be at least a little embarrassing. And like teenagers (and not like adults), they would prefer to do absolutely anything other than be embarrassed.

I don’t know what to do here, really. I understand the impulse to blame women and the left—beyond acting as the traditional targets, it’s always been easier for progressives to exhort each other to do better than it is for us to make the right behave decently. And I do think that leftists could work on being more welcoming and less hostile in general, both online and IRL. But really I think we’re all dodging the true issue here, which is that many young men (and other American voters) have made evil choices. They aren’t ontologically evil—as in, they aren’t evil by the immutable nature of their being, they aren’t brainwashed, and they aren’t helpless. Instead they have run to do evil, which is much worse. The right offers a vision of domination of other people along the lines of gender, race, and class: misogynists and white supremacists like this because it makes them feel good. And they get away with this liking, in part, because we as a culture refuse to acknowledge that people on the right, especially men, might be responsible for their own feelings and choices: that they might be grown adults, making decisions.

Rabinowitz concludes that we can’t ask men to “‘suck it up’ and accept lives that feel meaningless to them.” But no one is asking men to do that. Or at least, no one is asking men to accept meaningless lives under capitalism who are not also asking women to accept meaningless lives under capitalism. Acknowledging solidarity with other working people is a first step that young men could take today, if they choose. Instead of giving into the myth of male helplessness—letting boys be boys—we could try asking young men to be men. We can tell them to nut up, learn how to handle their anger, and take some goddamn responsibility.

1. Insofar as critiques of “white women” as a group are indeed valid and important, they’re usually referring to the contexts in which well-off white women are socialized not to behave like adults, but like fearful demanding toddlers.

2. Obviously this is also heavily racialized and class-based; well-off white men who commit crimes often get gentle treatment in media narratives (“these nice boys were led astray”), while poor/Black men are held to be wholly and even monstrously responsible for their own behavior (often enough, even responsible for the behavior of the police who murdered them).

3. “Lyta stop bringing up the angel in the house” STOP IT FROM BEING RELEVANT EVERY FUCKING TIME THEN

4. It’s notable that the guys who are extremely defensive about masculinity often overlap with the types of Roman white-statue accounts that cry a lot about “Western Civilization” but know absolutely nothing about it. Draw me a cover-2 and recite some Yeats from memory, bitch.