In Bed With The Right - Episode 5： Crisis of Masculinity

00:00:00.000 There's a lot of ways that being a human being is really frustrating and hard, but like, fellas, 0.80

00:00:05.520 you don't need an anti-feminist moral panic. You need to form a union and get a dog and go 0.87

00:00:12.980 make some friends.

00:00:14.360 i'm adrian dob and i'm moira dotigan and whether we like it or not we are in bed with the right

00:00:32.740 and today we are talking about a subject very near and dear to my heart the crisis of masculinity

00:00:38.880 wait is there a crisis of masculinity is this why i'm getting you didn't hear about this is

00:00:43.220 Is this why I'm getting all these ads about testosterone supplements?

00:00:46.720 It's all I get.

00:00:49.660 You may be feeling side effects, including insecurity, nostalgia, like latent homophobia.

00:00:58.520 You know, a lot of stuff is coming up.

00:01:00.580 I am having all of these things.

00:01:02.860 I'm not.

00:01:04.040 Listeners, I'm not.

00:01:05.700 Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about the crisis of masculinity because it's kind of like in the air.

00:01:12.860 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, columnist like Michelle Goldberg, David French, David Brooks have all weighed in on this.

00:01:32.820 the new yorker did a big piece sort of politico for virginia heffernan and it's a sort of topic

00:01:40.060 like what are men are men okay we think men are probably not okay yeah that has sort of been the

00:01:46.240 subject of a ton of media attention this summer yeah i mean not to gender stereotype but i definitely 0.99

00:01:51.060 want to have masculinity explained to me by sweater wearing motherfuckers named david so 0.96

00:01:56.060 you know i'm on board already i'm loving it there's no shortage of guys named david who want 0.99

00:02:01.800 to tell you that you're doing manhood wrong that you are not okay and that no men in your

00:02:08.580 generation are okay it's true and of course it's partly because we have the wrong research assistants

00:02:13.200 that's a brutal joke but i'll be here all week folks good stuff um no but like this is on it's

00:02:23.580 it's like it's like nominally this new cycle has been pegged to a book that came out last year by

00:02:31.720 richard reeves because called of boys and men reeves is a think tank guy he's like a center

00:02:37.520 right economist at the brookings institution so you know not like a radical or out there yeah yeah

00:02:43.020 he is a british conservative which makes him like basically a communist in the united states so it's

00:02:50.380 like where you put richard reeves on the political spectrum is like subject to some debate but he

00:02:55.960 works for a series of liberal democrat politicians in the uk which is a party that sort of i know

00:03:02.920 reminds me of like maybe the position is similar like mitt romney's in the in the us and reeves is

00:03:07.740 a technocrat and he went through for this book a big series of data showing that men and boys are

00:03:14.340 like nominally falling behind right they're not getting college or high school diplomas at quite

00:03:18.440 the same rates that women are their incomes aren't rising as quickly as women are and his book cost

00:03:24.280 a huge, you know, it was like a fiery success among sort of like think tank people. It's not

00:03:31.020 clear to me how well it's actually selling, but it's the kind of thing that people really love

00:03:34.220 to talk about. And it was paired with a book on manhood by Senator Josh Hawley. And these are

00:03:40.740 sort of like the, I think these are like two ends of the discourse on masculinity right now. There's

00:03:45.920 like the center right and the far right. And the center right is picking off a lot of liberal

00:03:49.840 intellectuals and the far right is sort of like shoring up this other base but josh harley's book

00:03:55.900 on manhood is much more religious and it claims that you know men need to sort of like re-discipline

00:04:04.860 themselves into compliance with biblical masculine virtues which he talks about as things like

00:04:10.760 leadership headship protection decision making endurance and you know but he talks about all

00:04:18.900 these things about being a leader, protecting the more vulnerable. And he doesn't say women,

00:04:23.580 right? But that's who he means, right? He's talking about this biblical vision of men as 1.00

00:04:29.220 sort of ordained leaders of humanity that almost requires a, I mean, does require a subordinated 0.98

00:04:36.820 weaker class, right? Like you can't be a leadership over only yourself. You need other people to be 0.93

00:04:42.120 following you. I like the idea of Genesis-based masculinity, you know, guys, what's keeping you 0.99

00:04:47.760 from parting the red sea one thing that i wanted to point out that i think i'm sure you're going

00:04:53.020 to tell me more about but that i kind of wanted to flag for our listeners because i think you know

00:04:56.980 full disclosure this is going to be the first of several episodes we're going to dedicate to this

00:05:01.200 question like the reeves position right like i i read years ago patricia sexton's the feminized

00:05:07.600 male which is from 1970 which does the same thing with data so this is i'm starting to see why we're

00:05:12.300 why you're leading me down this path it's and it was quite convincing then uh and here we are 50

00:05:16.660 years later and like it was like oh we are in an acute crisis of of masculinity is like have we

00:05:23.300 been out of it oh no this is also like something that is i think really interesting to talk about

00:05:28.560 with you adrian who's you know a scholar of the 19th century and somebody was really immersed

00:05:33.860 in history and the history of thinking about gender because it's like so recurring right

00:05:38.580 the crisis of masculinity is something we keep coming back to and the data i think is a really

00:05:44.860 interesting point because reeves is a very heavily data book holly's like not really at all right but

00:05:50.260 the data is kind of interesting because it's trying to grapple with large large trends that

00:05:56.760 are like maybe difficult to measure or define right like falling behind and status right and

00:06:02.560 it's trying to do that with literally half of the people right so how that data gets cut up how it

00:06:09.320 gets measured how it gets presented is i think like very interesting because it's trying to make

00:06:13.220 a specific point about a whole lot of people yeah yeah but i think it's also interesting because

00:06:17.580 like we see this right-wing masculine turn and a pretty like explicit ideological yeah embrace of

00:06:25.100 like more traditional masculinity on the right and in our like show notes i tried to this maybe

00:06:29.360 was a little tangential but i did sort of like taxonomize three kinds of right-wing masculinity

00:06:34.380 oh please and well i think like you need the you need trump right and trump sort of represents like 0.99

00:06:41.560 the boar who's a misogynist in an overly sexual prurient right grab ass kind of way 0.99

00:06:49.680 anti-puritan masculinity oh yeah it's a libertine libertarian masculinity that's all about sexual 1.00

00:06:56.320 freedom at least for him pervasive sexual access it's like more frat boy sexist than preacher 0.97

00:07:01.880 sexist yeah yeah and the boorish version of masculinity that trump is sort of like the 0.99

00:07:07.320 poster boy for it's been taken up by guys like andrew tate this like pimp influencer like rape 0.91

00:07:13.140 profiteer guy who's got a huge audience and then i'm also really interested in this figure named

00:07:18.040 dave portnoy right have you been exposed to dave portnoy the uh yep founder of barstool sports

00:07:23.680 the sports site and betting site who's like also got a ton of sexual assault allegations and is

00:07:30.020 sort of like this like he's like a howling vulgarity you know it's like if boston was a

00:07:35.080 human being uh he is from boston that's not even like that's not just slander uh and these guys

00:07:42.240 have really rose into prominence specifically in response to me too right there was a rejection of

00:07:49.600 male sexual entitlement and they represent a reassertion of male sexual entitlement and

00:07:56.440 sexual abuse of women specifically as a way to demonstrate your manhood to other men interesting

00:08:02.660 So I haven't read the Hawley book, but the Hawley book, I know that our friends over at Know Your Enemy kind of talked about that a little bit.

00:08:08.780 And they made it sound like Hawley, kind of semi to his credit, calls these guys out, right?

00:08:13.820 Like his book is partly written in response and reaction to them.

00:08:16.620 Is that right?

00:08:17.200 He does have like a pretty more extensive than I was expecting takedown of Andrew Tate, right?

00:08:23.920 And he's like trying to steer what he assumes is this young white male audience away from the boorish kind of misogyny.

00:08:31.560 But I think like what Hawley represents is like sort of our second barrel, which is the puritanical kind of misogyny.

00:08:38.780 There's this like anti-sex preacher model man of the Christian right.

00:08:45.420 And he is seeking to like, so the boar and the preacher are both trying to control women's sexuality, but they're trying to control them for different ends. 0.89

00:08:53.780 right the trump bore like andrew tate model guy they're trying to force sex and this sort of 0.59

00:09:00.820 josh hawley guy is trying to force chastity yeah right and this is like mike pence is the one i

00:09:06.040 think of yeah back in the day rick santorum right yeah model yeah and you see a lot of these now

00:09:11.680 newly sort of emboldened and newly visible after dobbs and sort of you know there was a panel of

00:09:19.500 you know all male quote-unquote abortion abolitionists who are proposing the death

00:09:23.200 penalty for women who have abortions things like that they're very much in the christian sphere

00:09:28.020 and they're sort of two kinds of the same coin these are guys who hate each other but have a

00:09:33.040 lot of the same sort of fundamental understandings about gender which is that manhood is defined by

00:09:37.920 control and domination right of women particularly women's like sexual functions and then there's

00:09:42.840 also this emerging genre that i wanted to ask you about oh i can i think are we talking about

00:09:49.400 a particular fist fight that might or might not i'm thinking of the creep right and this is like

00:09:55.740 oh yeah a guy who i like i mean elon musk is the paradigmatic oh yeah creep masculinity he's sort

00:10:02.000 of and and it sort of overlaps with both of the others this is not like a exact taxonomy these

00:10:06.740 groups sort of borrow a lot from each other right but this like kind of masculinity that's

00:10:11.020 emerging largely out of silicon valley it's like sort of self-identified nerds guys who might have

00:10:16.880 you know dipped into some incel rhetoric guys who you know might be sort of curious about

00:10:23.560 race science i mean in my head they're all really into token you know um they concoct elaborate

00:10:30.260 esoteric justifications for male supremacy right and these like complex mythologies

00:10:35.020 of masculine virtue so i also think of jordan peterson as sort of being an emblem of this genre

00:10:40.960 or at least someone they draw on very clearly yeah right yeah and then there's like you know

00:10:45.620 people like peter thiel who might be kind of the founding figure of the creep masculinity model

00:10:51.480 who's he's interesting obviously because he's not heterosexual he doesn't seem interested in

00:10:57.320 reading his own like positive eugenics program the way elon musk has like reportedly been

00:11:02.820 interested in doing but he does have you know opposition to the 19th amendment uh famous and a

00:11:08.940 a lot of interest in race science which you know leads this kind of genre of guy to embrace the

00:11:16.440 likes of charles murray and famously just recently richard hanania the sort of right-wing

00:11:21.280 intellectual who was revealed to be a eugenicist race scientist it's just sort of like the least

00:11:27.380 surprising thing ever because he he does it pretty avowedly yeah frequent poster on certain uh

00:11:32.620 subreddits that uh seem to engage in more than the usual amount of craniometry

00:11:38.580 But can you tell me a little bit about this guy?

00:11:40.960 Am I basically hitting the notes of him?

00:11:42.620 Because I feel like you know more about this genre of dude than I do.

00:11:46.020 So yeah, I would call this nerd masculinity, right?

00:11:48.820 It needs this scientific backing. 0.98

00:11:51.380 It understands itself as kind of calling bullshit on societal conventions. 0.98

00:11:56.100 And it thrives. 0.91

00:11:57.300 And I think Peterson really hits that pretty nicely,

00:11:59.920 even though he obviously isn't part of that set.

00:12:01.760 It always understands itself as oppositional, right?

00:12:04.520 these people silicon valley is super good at basically running our lives and at the same time

00:12:09.820 still telling itself that it's kind of like it comes out of this underdog position right like 0.97

00:12:14.160 and that's what makes someone like musk so incredibly annoying right that like if you're 0.99

00:12:19.000 powerful and you're an asshole about it but at least you're aware you're both powerful and an 1.00

00:12:23.540 asshole that's one thing but but there is this kind of underdog which of course comes with nerd 1.00

00:12:28.560 territory right like these are often like guys that you feel like probably did get beaten up at 0.94

00:12:33.500 some point in their lives and you know that sort of inflects their understanding of manhood at the

00:12:38.760 same time even if they're not i think that like there's something about there's an entitlement

00:12:42.360 you said earlier right these are two groups of men the first two groups that you identified

00:12:46.360 who feel entitled to women i think that the silicon valley creep feels entitled to way more

00:12:52.080 than just women right and has a far more far broader range of things that enrage him when

00:12:59.540 they're being withheld right like elon musk spent what is it 44 billion dollars to force us to find

00:13:05.960 him cool right like that is the most remarkable monument to that particular style of masculinity

00:13:13.200 imagine right and that it also reminds me a little bit of this like figure now the billionaire who

00:13:17.740 wants to be young forever who keeps being profiled ad nauseum i couldn't tell you what his name is

00:13:24.120 but I keep seeing his like hard leathery face which five years ago was a relatively handsome

00:13:29.640 30 something face yeah the the before pictures of this billionaire who refuses to age who's got this

00:13:35.360 like rigid pleasure denying daily regimen of like eating the worst things possible and and putting

00:13:43.520 himself to bed at like 2 p.m uh and he's making this big display about his own yeah triumph over

00:13:52.340 mortality which is about the most insecure thing i can think of possibly doing uh and he looks very

00:13:58.220 strange and so yeah i take your point that there's something in the air about masculinity because like

00:14:03.080 on the one hand right like finding a rich guy who went off the deep end after getting super rich like

00:14:07.860 you probably can find that anytime and anywhere but the fact that we keep hearing from this dude

00:14:12.800 someone is like oh you know who's in whose face we should push a microphone the never aging guy

00:14:18.940 right like is really remarkable we focus on these men and on masculinity in this big way and obviously

00:14:24.980 like some of that sport pointing at them and laughing at them but at the same time it does

00:14:29.620 feel like the intellectual justifications with which they back up their visions of manhood are

00:14:34.720 something that like are getting at least a lot of airtime right like even if people are like

00:14:38.860 ultimately dismissing it right i don't think peterson after a brief honeymoon with like people

00:14:43.860 like david brooks has like gotten the best press right like i feel like dunking on jordan peterson

00:14:48.740 right after soccer is like the most the most popular global sport but like like he just i 0.97

00:14:55.820 mean the sheer amount of oxygen that motherfucker like absorbs is astonishing right and that alone 0.96

00:15:02.040 tells you something we are for better of a worse fascinated with these men trying to sort of 0.98

00:15:07.820 articulate their visions of manhood instead of like honestly my first instinct which is like

00:15:13.000 not to pay any attention. 1.00

00:15:16.780 Oh, I mean, I'm looking at it, I feel like a little bit like when you rubberneck because 0.99

00:15:20.460 there's a car wreck on the side of the highway and suddenly you're like, you know, you're

00:15:24.260 driving like 10 miles an hour.

00:15:25.820 It's a gruesome impulse, but one that I understand.

00:15:29.940 But, you know, I think it's interesting that there are all these men in the media behaving

00:15:37.060 in ways that are pointed and strange and articulated as an ideological expression.

00:15:43.040 And the ideological expression is specifically about their gender.

00:15:46.400 It's about manhood. 0.96

00:15:47.880 They are contrasting themselves to women. 0.91

00:15:49.500 They are contrasting themselves to other men who are insufficiently manly.

00:15:53.340 And at the same time, we have this rise of like sort of the pop social science book

00:15:57.740 that is really drawing a lot of attention to this claim that men are in crisis.

00:16:04.680 men are suffering as men men as men are social victims yeah right we should also throw in here

00:16:12.400 just for a second i mean this is maybe not going to be our topic today but we should talk we'll

00:16:16.380 talk about it at some point also men who are too manly right or the wrong kind of men who are still

00:16:21.460 men right there is a kind of clash of civilization clash of cultures narrative often here where it's

00:16:26.160 like oh it's western men who have lost this and like meanwhile right like insert anything that

00:16:32.020 like republicans are scared of outside of our borders right or inside of our borders and like

00:16:36.500 those are people who like live masculinity in these traditional ways but that's still that's

00:16:40.820 also not right because they shouldn't or they can't or it's they know who knows whatever right

00:16:45.320 so that's interesting too that like there's this kind of fear of like hyper masculinity too as long

00:16:51.020 as it's not yours right now one thing that we might say very very briefly is that like as you

00:16:56.180 can already tell we've talked for 20 minutes just introducing this topic this isn't the end of the

00:17:02.280 story we're thinking about really doing a whole deep dive series about masculinity talking you

00:17:08.600 through yeah this like at least 200 year story about like crises of masculinity maybe we'll

00:17:15.240 mention a couple of names so we're gonna be talking about Friedrich Nietzsche we're gonna

00:17:18.540 be talking about Otto Weininger who's someone that I think a lot of people know about but hardly

00:17:23.400 anyone reads the 600 page tome that is sex and character. Who else are we going to be talking

00:17:29.400 about? Talked about talking about Jordan Peterson and the influence of Carl Jung on masculinity

00:17:33.860 thinkers. We're thinking about talking about Foucault and the concept of biopower. We'll also

00:17:39.340 hopefully devote one episode to people who are very near and dear to my heart, even though 1.00

00:17:44.000 they're the most rebarbative people you'll ever read. But there are these sort of like early 20th 1.00

00:17:49.640 century followers of Nietzsche who Nietzsche himself likely would have disavowed he would 0.97

00:17:53.540 be like these guys are idiots but like they are fascinating I really can't wait to have you read 0.97

00:17:58.320 them because like they read like Jordan Peterson it's so fascinating like you're gonna you're 0.99

00:18:03.700 gonna be like what the fuck is this from 1923 or from 2023 I'm very excited about this and well

00:18:10.720 as people can tell like it's still evolving but it's gonna be it's gonna be long I'm thinking of 0.90

00:18:15.320 this I don't know do you ever watch Arrested Development are you a fan oh yeah I love Arrested

00:18:19.040 development you know that plot line where tobias funke tries to be an understudy for the blue man

00:18:23.600 group but ends up in a uh in a in a accidentally in a support group for sad men i'm thinking of

00:18:30.860 this group as our this is our blue man group uh series we're gonna talk about blue men in the

00:18:36.180 words of dr tobias funke author of the man in me we will blue ourselves and then we'll have a bit

00:18:42.500 of a mess up on our hands well something i love about you know doing a little research for this

00:18:47.960 episode and reading some of the things you've been pointing me to as we like embark on this

00:18:51.520 masculinity series is realizing that like what the content of masculinity means what it's supposed

00:18:57.380 to denote is actually very historically contingent it changes a lot but the thing that's kind of

00:19:02.300 constant or one of the things that's very constant about it is that men are doing it wrong and they

00:19:08.560 are tortured by their inability to do it correctly i think there's a lot there yeah and and what's

00:19:13.760 interesting right like we're going to be talking about that actually today a little bit with with

00:19:17.360 some of our examples but like it's always interesting which conclusions are not reached

00:19:21.360 right like that is absolutely true that men suffer from their inability to live up to 0.96

00:19:25.260 these standards right like when we look at women we always say like well that seems like the 0.83

00:19:29.860 standards are a problem right we talk about beauty standards we talk about right like gendered

00:19:34.000 hierarchies all the time but somehow with men like the idea like huh maybe we should abandon these 0.99

00:19:38.580 stupid outdated notions like that's the road that they can't take right be like well maybe 0.99

00:19:43.380 fuck masculinity maybe it turns out any gender concept that like tries to straight jacket what 1.00

00:19:49.280 you do and say and how you do and say it is ultimately not super good for you but that's 0.98

00:19:53.740 not what they take it's like no no guys guys we should double down on on these unreachable

00:19:59.200 on these unreachable goals and then feel extra bad because like it's destroying civilization

00:20:05.580 when we don't reach them like you'll see you'll feel so much better just chop more wood that's

00:20:10.800 all you have to do yeah sing more about men north of richmond oh my god i finally listened to that

00:20:17.980 i haven't listened to that guy you haven't listened to it no i'm i'm trying to be the

00:20:21.540 last dude on the internet who has not i heard it this morning in preparation for this podcast this

00:20:26.680 viral country song about right-wing resentment against the welfare state uh primarily and

00:20:35.180 yeah it's uh it's not a bop it's not like a fun to listen to it's really like it's like a dirge

00:20:41.860 it's sad and slow and it's pretty just transparently coded as anti-semitic right the

00:20:48.000 like title of the song is rich men north of richmond yeah which to me just read as like one

00:20:52.980 that that's just like a long way around the barn yeah quite quite possibly uh so i haven't listened

00:20:58.220 to it i did look at the lyrics after people sort of made fun of it online or wrote about it online

00:21:03.520 And 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?

00:21:10.660 Like Matt Walsh, you know, noted anti-trans bigot, kind of like keeps gushing on Twitter about how authentic it is, right?

00:21:16.840 And that's the other thing, right?

00:21:18.460 That like talking about masculinity at a time when cis men are having to share masculinity with trans men, right?

00:21:25.480 We're like, and it's not a shocker that like a lot of the 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?

00:21:35.120 And then like, if other people, you know, live masculine, it's like, well, not like that. 0.96

00:21:39.720 You know, no, no, trans people, that would be, that would be phony, right? 0.92

00:21:42.720 It's like, I don't know, man, like you keep giving me ads about how I like need to up my testosterone. 1.00

00:21:46.600 own feels like this is not as natural as you're claiming you're you're you're prescribing me

00:21:53.780 hormone therapy uh which in other contexts you profess to hate uh and there's something about

00:21:59.140 incoherence about this take on masculinity that is clearly also suffused with the panic over

00:22:04.700 transgender people right i mean trans people non-binary people and feminism broadly have all

00:22:10.260 like sort of challenge the idea of gender including masculinity as being sort of innate natural by

00:22:17.440 extension easy and fixed and you know hierarchical right and these are anxieties that are stemming

00:22:24.860 from a feminist moment i think when we get to our historical rundown we'll be able to point out 0.86

00:22:29.580 pretty clearly that historical crises of masculinity like media rhetoric around a crisis of masculinity

00:22:34.760 peaks at moments where there has been a big feminist advance which i think in our moment we

00:22:40.400 can still point to as being me too and then also in moments when there's like a big change to the

00:22:46.560 productive economy and those two things feminist advance and economic changes often come together 1.00

00:22:51.860 which is like a little bit of the interesting little bit of the secret so we've like articulated

00:22:57.560 that there is a media consensus emerging that men are in unique state of emergency

00:23:02.940 that they are suffering as men and that something has to be done about it right but like what

00:23:08.520 exactly is the content of this supposed crisis of masculinity and they're like a couple of like

00:23:13.780 buckets that people claim like the masculinity crisis is an umbrella term right now that is

00:23:20.620 being used in the media to denote like a lot of different complaints so one bucket is that like

00:23:26.400 men are uniquely lonely right that they are deprived of friendship companionship and 0.78

00:23:32.120 relationships with like non-related peers in ways that women are not right so like women have 0.80

00:23:37.240 friends men don't have friends interesting and and the so the claim is yeah women have friends

00:23:41.660 men don't have friends it's not social media is making all of us lonely but we only care when it's

00:23:47.020 when it's men i mean like there's like kind of what i've noticed is that people go oh actually

00:23:51.880 it's a gender neutral phenomenon right when you point out like hey why are you only talking about

00:23:58.000 men they go i'm not talking about men it's like well a second ago you were just saying it was

00:24:01.100 uniquely male problem so like gender neutrality becomes like a kind of plausible deniability in

00:24:06.760 this in this discourse yeah but then there's this other bucket where it's like okay it's educational

00:24:11.600 attainment right so there are gaps in the high school graduation rate between boys and girls 0.91

00:24:18.220 and women tend to earn more college degrees like associates bachelors degrees it's also frequently

00:24:26.540 noted that men's wages are not growing as quickly as women's are david brooks in his column on the

00:24:34.060 crisis of masculinity laments that quote pretty much all the income gains that middle-class

00:24:38.900 american families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women's earnings so one

00:24:44.020 of that is like work and money and then there's this other sort of anxiety around increased

00:24:49.260 presence of women's in positions of academic or professional esteem so in that same column brooks

00:24:54.560 is like very alarmed that of the 16 highest ranked law schools in the country all of their

00:25:00.080 law reviews are edited by women students um i would like to know i would like to know how long

00:25:06.440 all of those law reviews were uh edited by male students and it was not a problem uh this feels

00:25:11.660 so cherry-picked oh yeah no no it's all very like it's a broad claim supported by an incredibly

00:25:17.680 specific anecdote right that's the whole thing and we're gonna get more into like sort of the data

00:25:22.600 I mean, that to me, I mean, I am, fun fact about me, familiar with the work of David Brooks.

00:25:31.440 This feels like there was like 15 data points he discounted because they didn't prove his thesis. 1.00

00:25:35.860 And then he went with this fucking shit. 1.00

00:25:38.040 Like, what the hell? 1.00

00:25:39.340 Like, oh, my God, this is so, this is. 0.60

00:25:41.720 I am sitting right now in my office.

00:25:43.220 That's about a four minute walk away from Stanford Law. 0.99

00:25:46.080 And somewhere in that building, there's a woman law student who stole her law review place from a more deserving, yeah, from a more deserving man, you know. 0.84

00:25:55.880 So this is like also it obviously mirrors complaints about affirmative action, right?

00:26:00.780 And we can talk more about like the question of gender affirmative action in higher education.

00:26:05.980 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.

00:26:16.480 And that's the suicide rate.

00:26:17.560 The suicide rate is and has long been higher among men than among women.

00:26:22.640 So like these things are sort of what gets taken together to suggest that men are worse off than women are. 0.84

00:26:28.120 So I'm picking up on a theme here.

00:26:29.300 So the trend lines you're describing could be read in one of two ways, right?

00:26:33.500 Either men are stalling and women are making massive gains.

00:26:38.020 That could mean that men are in crisis, or it could mean that, and I'm just going to

00:26:42.080 take a wild stab here, that there are previous inequalities that are historically being at

00:26:47.620 least partly righted.

00:26:48.740 Am I onto something here?

00:26:50.380 Yes, let me take you into the debunking phase of our data section, which is that, for instance,

00:26:57.480 that David Brooks points out that pretty much all of the income gains that middle-class

00:27:02.040 American families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women's earnings. Now,

00:27:06.980 it's true that middle class incomes have stagnated over the past several decades.

00:27:11.440 But what happened before 1970, you might ask? Well, women were not in the workforce in anything 1.00

00:27:17.960 like comparable numbers. And when they were in paid work, they were relegated to lower paid, 0.72

00:27:25.040 lower skilled, lower status positions. They, in fact, still are relegated to lower paid,

00:27:29.540 lower skilled lower status positions but there have been degrees of advancement and enforcement

00:27:34.620 of uh like anti-discrimination law that weren't in place uh before 1970 right so this is like an 0.98

00:27:41.560 artificial depression of women's income imposed by exclusion by bigotry by the absence of civil 1.00

00:27:49.600 rights law by exclusive quote-unquote protective laws around women's work that had to be like

00:27:54.720 dismantled in this era and is now being used against women and like listen not to be all like

00:28:00.940 hillary clinton here but women on the whole earn 83 cents to men's dollar the idea that like men

00:28:06.020 are falling behind women economically when in fact they just earn more money uh yeah it's like

00:28:12.900 kind of insane i mean the very comparison is kind of amazing right that like oh back at a time when 0.93

00:28:19.940 women were legally not allowed to own a credit card or have a pay account like they were like

00:28:26.440 they've made financial gains since like well yeah i mean i would it would stand to reason they would 0.90

00:28:32.460 be truly bonkers if not of course like we can talk about historic stagnations but like yeah this is

00:28:37.580 about the about men's status relative to women right right it's about men's status relative to

00:28:43.100 women sometimes i'll talk about men's status relative to other men and say well you know

00:28:47.700 relative wages have gone down i'm like well relative wages have gone down if you don't if

00:28:52.420 you if you want to look at a woman who was able to be in the workforce in that era right right like

00:28:56.960 she is also earning probably comparatively a little bit more than another woman of her age

00:29:02.460 in this generation right this is actually a cross gender trend that is being applied as if it only

00:29:09.380 applies to men so that's like income right and then there's like all these things it's like well

00:29:13.940 they do better in school girls seem to score a little bit higher on reading in their early

00:29:20.420 grades that's like a pretty broad-based phenomenon it's like unclear exactly why but there are some

00:29:28.380 suggestions that make it seem like a the difference is not as dramatic as it is made out to be and b

00:29:34.280 it might be caused by what we could interpret from a feminist perspective as uh like products 0.99

00:29:39.960 of women's oppression for so like girls uh are trained by their parents to be physically still 1.00

00:29:47.280 right and much more conscious of their bodies and appearance and less much less physically

00:29:51.220 expressive which lends itself to uh more success in the classroom if that's a skill you have uh

00:29:57.900 you're going to do better at a situation where you have to sit still for hours a day they're also

00:30:01.660 like much more socialized to solicit adult approval like you know we train little girls to uh solicit

00:30:08.560 praise to sort of try and justify their own presence. And little boys are not burdened

00:30:13.280 that way. And so they don't do as well in environments that reward that kind of

00:30:19.000 solicitation. But also like high school and college graduation rates are something I really

00:30:23.460 want to hone in on because data from Reeves' own Brookings Institution sort of like undermines the

00:30:29.160 claim that there's like a broad base difference in graduation rates. So like there are like

00:30:34.900 basically across racial groups, girls graduate high school on time in greater numbers than boys

00:30:40.420 do. But there's a vast difference between racial groups and how great that is. So I believe for

00:30:47.100 Asian kids, it's like a three-point difference. For white kids, it's a four-point difference.

00:30:52.280 And for black kids, it's like a nine-point difference. And that suggests to me that 0.78

00:30:56.140 there's something happening to black boys. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the criminal justice system, 0.68

00:31:00.260 right it's the right exactly the school to prison pipeline taking its toll which yeah it is gendered 0.56

00:31:05.240 clearly the u.s justice system polices above all black men yeah so this is like a racist intervention

00:31:11.960 based on a specific gender group which is a crisis i'd be very happy to address but it's not the

00:31:17.220 crisis they claim to be addressing yeah but that's not what they're talking about they're saying it's

00:31:21.120 men qua men not black men as black men right there's also like the disparity in college degrees

00:31:27.840 First of all, when we say college degrees, that encompasses a bunch of different things.

00:31:32.340 It means a four-year private institution where you spend a lot of time reading Ovid and not

00:31:38.360 gaining any vocational skills.

00:31:40.560 That's what I did.

00:31:41.380 It was lovely.

00:31:42.360 But it also means what most people do, which is getting an associate's degree while you

00:31:47.060 work full-time. 0.61

00:31:48.280 And just across the board, it feels like women are more, it doesn't feel like it is empirically 0.61

00:31:53.800 supported to say that women are more incentivized to earn any degree because they need more

00:32:00.040 credentials to get to the same level of professional advancement than men do it's like if you want to

00:32:04.920 incentivize boys and men to stay in school i don't know what to tell you maybe discriminate

00:32:10.340 against them more because they're just getting they're getting promoted anyway it's just so

00:32:14.820 amazing to me i am like you know hearing about these cherry-picked data points from from people

00:32:19.340 like david brooks when like what your eyes tell you is that like nevertheless a lot of the fields

00:32:24.520 in which these people are trained in colleges are dominated by men still are and in fact those that

00:32:30.520 become dominated by women have one of two things happen to them either famously you know quote

00:32:35.840 feminization leads to the decline in wages and relative wages this happens in certain 0.65

00:32:40.780 fields of medicine it is also happens in academic disciplines so that's that would be something like

00:32:45.280 literature uh or english departments which are i think pretty close to parity well those are some

00:32:50.420 of the lowest paid professors you can meet their labor is not rewarded or remunerated at the same 0.91

00:32:55.980 level or we might add the ones that are truly dominated by women such as gender studies they 0.62

00:33:00.540 just get cut so you know uh as just happened in florida so it's just amazing to me that like you

00:33:05.440 know why would you go to a data point like as richard she is like who's running the you know

00:33:11.060 Cornell Law Review or something like that, when you can just go to a department website and be like,

00:33:17.100 that's a lot of dudes. There are more men named Bill here than there are women.

00:33:21.280 Yeah. And it's interesting if we are focusing, as Brooks seems interested in doing, on elite

00:33:29.420 positions, elite institutions, when private R1 colleges like Stanford, for instance, have an

00:33:37.500 excess, a disproportionate excess of female applicants, what they tend to do, and they're

00:33:43.820 quite open about this, is lower their standards for male applicants, right? And they don't talk 1.00

00:33:48.520 about this as a kind of affirmative action. They talk about it as like trying to create a better

00:33:53.380 social environment. They talk about it in terms of like, well, we know our students are going to

00:33:57.560 want to like meet people and date and get married. It's not talked about as preserving men's access

00:34:02.820 to these opportunities or their status is talked about as preserving sort of like the virtue of

00:34:08.700 the institution, right? Yeah. It also has the kind of student dining hall effect. There's that famous

00:34:16.000 sort of conservative talking points about like, oh, you know, students of color will sit together

00:34:20.560 in the dining hall. And that shows how like our schools fail at integration. This is something

00:34:24.720 that like, you know, I think Alan Bloom sort of spearheaded, but like people have been yelling

00:34:29.620 about that for like 30, 40 years at this point. There's empirical data that shows that that's not

00:34:34.780 true. That the thing that you think is happening, namely that of course the white majority tends to

00:34:41.460 cluster more to itself. It's just numbers, right? Like 60% of a campus is white. You have a 60%

00:34:47.980 chance of like a random person sitting next to you in the dining hall or being assigned to your

00:34:52.940 hall or whatever, like being white. So that's of course happening. But what sort of creates the 0.86

00:34:58.120 impression is that all white tables aren't noticed as being unusual by these usually white writers

00:35:04.560 whereas an all black table is suddenly noticed as something aberrant and potentially scary or at

00:35:11.980 least in some way meaningful right and you know an institution dominated by men feels i guess to

00:35:18.660 someone like david brooks natural one that happens to have decided differently in their hiring

00:35:24.320 processes and maybe through not even an overt policy, just recruited predominantly women

00:35:29.940 for whatever reasons, right?

00:35:31.460 Like that to him will suddenly seem significant and a sign of a crisis.

00:35:36.040 And I find that so fascinating.

00:35:38.220 What they're really tracing is less a decline in men's status or tracing specific status

00:35:43.660 or men's status relative to women.

00:35:46.280 They're seeing women's advance, right? 0.61

00:35:48.740 They're seeing something that looks more like equality and they're treating equality as a demotion of sorts.

00:35:56.980 So that brings us finally to men's often cited higher suicide rate.

00:36:02.860 And I think this is like maybe a moment for a content note because like there's just no way to talk about this.

00:36:07.340 It's not quite gruesome.

00:36:08.520 Yeah, I can imagine where this is going and that is depressing.

00:36:11.740 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? They're killing themselves.

00:36:34.720 That's horrible. Yeah.

00:36:35.680 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.

00:36:47.900 Yeah, but they don't use guns, I'm guessing. 0.97

00:36:49.480 Exactly. There's a lot of suicide methods that are basically evenly 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. 1.00

00:37:03.520 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.

00:37:23.860 oh wow oh wow so that's it's a it's not a measure of you know deeper feeling or greater capacity for

00:37:31.460 despair or like deeper social crisis among men like everybody's in crisis this mental health

00:37:38.020 and this country is deteriorating in ways that i think cause like tremendous amount of

00:37:42.880 tragedy but it's a measure of gun ownership and it's like it makes me very sad and honestly very

00:37:48.800 angry to see suicide weaponized that way against women's claims for equality because i just don't

00:37:55.320 think it helps anyone can i ask i mean i don't want to put you on the spot if you don't have

00:37:58.740 this data but do we have numbers from from countries where gun access is a pretty rare thing

00:38:05.480 i don't know uh it wouldn't shock me if there are other kinds of like similarities just because

00:38:12.980 of greater weapons access of a lot of different kinds of weapons among men so it wouldn't shock

00:38:18.300 me if you go look at data in like australia for instance and see that there's like also

00:38:23.180 like a gender disparity in suicide completion uh even though australia has like decent like pretty

00:38:28.560 more than decent good gun control but i don't i don't know i don't have that data yeah it wouldn't

00:38:32.840 necessarily disprove anything because of course it's just true that largely gun ownership has

00:38:39.720 been woven into the mythology of masculinity in the united states it's not to say that there aren't

00:38:43.780 women who are absolute gun nuts and who appear to love their guns, but it is definitely interwoven

00:38:49.800 with a kind of cult of masculinity, meaning that in a moment of despair, what means you choose 0.99

00:38:57.440 for what, for all intents and purposes, is the last significant decision you will make in your

00:39:03.420 life, right, would be entangled with your own sense of a gendered self, right? Yeah, it makes

00:39:09.760 sense that people would do the things that are more in line with their identity. I think it's

00:39:13.400 also worth noting that a lot of suicides are impulse right impulsive they're crimes of

00:39:18.960 opportunity right you can make yourself throw up you can't put that bullet back in the gun yeah

00:39:23.420 exactly well that's bleak bleak moving on uh so like you know that's kind of the end of our

00:39:29.460 empirical debunking section there's a lot of cherry-picked data there's a lot of small parts

00:39:36.400 that are made to stand in for a whole and there's a lot of like creative interpretation made to make

00:39:41.340 like quite definitive, specific proclamations about half of people who actually live, you know,

00:39:49.420 like people under living under the category men are actually quite different from one another.

00:39:54.420 They tend to disagree on a lot of things. They have a lot of different characters. They have a

00:39:57.560 lot of different emotional states. They have a lot of different factors contributing to their

00:40:01.660 success or their failure. Right. And it's, there's this tendency to try and give statements about

00:40:09.360 gender and about the sense of how gender should be ordered or is best ordered the legitimacy of

00:40:15.120 empiricism through like cherry picking this data but it's not it's not actually reflective of a

00:40:20.080 reality that's a lot more complicated but that's sort of like when the crisis of masculinity is

00:40:25.360 given empirical backing because a lot of times it's not it's spoken of like much more as a vibe

00:40:33.100 so like some of the terms i've noticed are things like loneliness that's a common refrain but i've

00:40:41.200 also noticed a lot of the words being used to describe the crisis of masculinity as a sense of

00:40:46.500 anomie or like general malaise or demoralization these are like things that michelle goldberg

00:40:54.920 david brooks french christine emba they've all like used this and and reeves goes into it as

00:41:00.800 well and holly goes into it it's like half of people have a bad vibe is the is the claim the

00:41:07.480 other half's fault yeah yes and and the implicit or like often implicit claim is that this is

00:41:14.200 because uh feminism has targeted men or women have sort of abandoned their duty of care sort

00:41:22.940 of cruelly or they've displaced men arrogantly and one way or another men have been hurt by women

00:41:29.480 it's striking me like that talking about a crisis of masculinity is this way of like not talking

00:41:52.920 about other things and like just the list that you just gave right like that like to say like

00:41:56.920 oh, I'm getting this vibe

00:41:58.500 where there's a demoralization of men

00:42:00.460 and that's the crisis, right?

00:42:02.540 This kind of moralistic kind of argument

00:42:04.820 is a way to not talk about,

00:42:06.780 I mean, like just to go through your four

00:42:08.020 sort of bullet points,

00:42:08.980 it's a way to not talk about

00:42:10.480 the decline of the middle class.

00:42:11.840 It's a way to not talk about race.

00:42:13.500 It's a way not to talk about guns.

00:42:15.140 Like, oh my God,

00:42:16.200 like I'm starting to see why they go for this

00:42:18.540 because it's just a catch-all, right?

00:42:20.880 Like the trends that I would think of

00:42:23.100 as the most significant in shaping

00:42:24.720 the various culminating american crises like you don't have to talk about any of them you can just

00:42:30.260 be like yeah dudes are not being allowed to be dudes yeah weren't things better in the past

00:42:35.600 they're forbidden truck nuts by yeah no it takes all these like really confounding problems like

00:42:43.660 yeah rising economic inequality like drug addiction like mental health crises like the

00:42:49.940 decline of third spaces and the like inability like right to have non-work activities and

00:42:57.340 non-related peer friends like it takes all of this and makes it a specific to only one half

00:43:03.680 of the population right when in fact it's hurting people of all genders and b it blames it on the

00:43:11.300 erosion of a traditional hierarchy that people are very comfortable with right right it's like

00:43:16.500 what if instead of grappling with these confounding structural problems that are 0.96

00:43:23.000 imposing all this suffering what if all we had to really do was just kick at like feminists who

00:43:28.520 nobody likes anyway and restore this thing that we're all most comfortable with so like i think

00:43:36.400 josh holly is maybe a good guy to go to here because he gave you know his book is very much

00:43:44.460 focused on this like a vibe based sense of men's decline not an empiricist josh hawley yes no not

00:43:52.900 really uh and he quite explicitly blames feminism at least on the stump right it's not he doesn't

00:44:00.640 really sort of like deign to talk about it as much in his book although he does but he gave a speech

00:44:07.260 claiming feminism is driving men to video games and pornography he's sort of like pointing to

00:44:13.300 these two signifiers of like men's failure to become adults right like and um self-indulgence

00:44:20.620 and then going this is actually women's fault yeah and also i mean this is where you and i might

00:44:25.880 differ but like also i'd say like what's wrong with that i feel like as far as crises of anything 0.82

00:44:33.260 go like so you you do some super mario and you watch some porn like it could be far worse you

00:44:39.640 know i know i know it's like of all the things that men could be doing with their time yeah i

00:44:44.340 think it's they'll probably become much more likely to hurt somebody if they spend an afternoon

00:44:48.100 of josh halley rally than if they spend an afternoon like beating off and and like playing

00:44:53.540 xbox or whatever the kids do now yeah uh and those are also things you do in the house right

00:44:59.040 right they're like feminizingly domestic that's right he's picturing a kid in the mom's basement

00:45:04.240 yeah exactly yeah yeah like not going out and building a log cabin and you know breeding a 0.67

00:45:11.220 brood of uh white children so like yeah but there's also like this other version of this

00:45:16.500 that's sort of like the far right version and then the center right center left version the 1.00

00:45:20.740 more respectable restatement is that okay well feminism demonized traditionally male traits 1.00

00:45:27.220 as toxic right you're not allowed to be masculine anymore because now that's toxic yeah it's like

00:45:32.640 it's cancel culture right in reverse or like political correctness it's politically incorrect

00:45:36.760 to be a man yeah in this way that we're not going to define but we're going to sort of like just 0.88

00:45:41.020 gesture at and you know feminists have scared men out of their sort of birthright identity i mean 1.00

00:45:48.980 part of feminism's project was exactly to you know to denaturalize certain toxic aspects of 1.00

00:45:55.320 masculinity that's that's true as far as it goes same time it's important to note that like first 1.00

00:46:01.000 stuff this this claim is so fucking old right and like when exactly is this supposed to have happened

00:46:06.500 right like what are we talking about right like because it's always like it has this sort of 0.83

00:46:13.040 kids these days kind of dynamic where it's like well back when i was you know 20 like you know 0.98

00:46:18.820 men were still real men but now this new generation it's like yeah that they said the same shit about 0.96

00:46:23.740 you right like right i mean not to get all freudian but that's that's the oedipus complex 0.97

00:46:28.500 you're all logan roy like crushing his children basically right like there's just i'm sorry but 0.91

00:46:35.340 when this is supposed to fucking happen like do toxic displays of masculinity evoke more discourse 0.98

00:46:40.600 today than they might have from from women specifically than they might have you know in 0.97

00:46:45.220 the 1950s sure but like first of it's not true that like society ever really celebrated the

00:46:52.340 traits that we think of today as toxic masculinity certain aspects of it might have but like you know

00:46:57.380 and then like these these historic constructions of masculinity are all these weird mashups it's

00:47:01.560 like oh the you know caveman plus you know like the big game hunter plus like the ad man from

00:47:09.200 the 1960s like these are all different forms of masculinity like yeah and there are parts of it

00:47:16.160 that we fucking celebrate the hell out of still right like talk about silicon valley right we 0.87

00:47:21.640 spent i mean now that elon musk is fucking embarrassing like or that how embarrassing 0.96

00:47:26.220 is become evident like people are kind of ragging on the dude but like y'all spent like 15 years 0.95

00:47:31.920 like celebrating that dude like we absolutely we as a society tend to kind of valorize toxic

00:47:39.640 masculinity right like and it really like requires a herculean effort to kind of point that out and

00:47:45.980 be like yeah this is actually really bad yeah i mean i'll be real and say that i don't use the

00:47:52.620 term toxic masculinity because i don't quite know what it means it's like a slippery signifier and

00:47:57.820 like that's part of why it works for holly's purposes right it's like it's like woke that

00:48:02.420 way and that it can mean anything that you want to defend or that a conservative wants to defend

00:48:07.840 he can like sort of ventriloquize his opposition like ventriloquize feminism attacking

00:48:15.360 yeah well you know the masculinity that you call that they call toxic i'm going to defend it for

00:48:20.180 you and then like what that means it's like it doesn't really have its own content it just kind

00:48:24.460 of only signifies the straw man right but like i do think you know a recurring trope you get is

00:48:30.060 like okay these like male role models are lacking and this isn't just in the holly this is like a

00:48:34.900 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

00:48:40.640 like male role models have been like deemed socially unacceptable for some reason that's 0.64

00:48:44.400 dubious fucking claim uh like i think like what exactly would be an example of this like i don't 0.96

00:48:50.520 know like leave it to beaver i don't i'm not sure yeah is it like is it like oh feminists got mad 1.00

00:48:55.440 at me because i held the door for them or something like that like it's it's here's the

00:48:58.680 thing is like the imprecision is it chivalry what what is it is it john wayne is it is it rocky like

00:49:05.540 these are all like different styles of masculinity and like what is it what is it that they mean like

00:49:10.180 here's the thing they don't want to say what they actually mean because it would be socially

00:49:13.580 and acceptable for them to say that what they're pointing to is men's social dominance across like

00:49:19.120 family life in particular and professional and institutional life specifically right they like

00:49:24.200 that's what they actually mean but they don't want to say that so they're speaking in these euphemisms

00:49:27.760 that don't actually mean anything but like let me tell you like if you want to talk to somebody

00:49:32.980 like if you are actually a young man despairing i don't know how to live my life i like i think

00:49:38.120 the person you should talk to who has like encountered gender roles that don't align

00:49:44.480 with their values and tried to like forge their own way without them is like any woman who has

00:49:49.660 entered a male dominated field or like any woman who has like decided not to have children like

00:49:55.020 this is like building lives outside of the sort of gendered prescription that no longer suits

00:50:02.780 a modern life or an honorable life as the individual sees it is like a huge part of 1.00

00:50:07.580 feminist project and this is you know a hard confusing courageous uncertain task that like 1.00

00:50:17.240 tons and tons of feminists have embarked on before yeah but like these people these like 1.00

00:50:22.360 crisis of masculinity purveyors like never suggest that women's struggles are equal in dignity to 0.78

00:50:30.460 men's. What women are doing to shake off gender is irrelevant, annoying, marginal. What men are

00:50:40.800 doing is the stuff of civilization. Exactly. I'd never thought of this, but I think you're

00:50:47.120 drawing it up really nicely. What they can't abide is that masculinity and femininity might

00:50:53.260 be in this way analogous and might be able to learn something from each other because ultimately

00:51:00.360 they're working with a complementary model of course they think women can teach men something 0.88

00:51:04.880 right they can be the mitigating influence on his masculine you know overflow of emotion and of 1.00

00:51:12.060 and of and of power right and she can be like oh honey don't worry about it right like it's a

00:51:16.780 complementarity picture whereas like hey how do you live your gender maybe i could learn something 1.00

00:51:22.520 from that is exactly the opposite of that so saying like well society forces into these dumb 0.93

00:51:27.560 ass roles it seems like we can't get entirely out of them uh can i ask how you made that work for

00:51:33.300 yourself or not right like that's the thing that that cannot be and i mean like it's here it's

00:51:37.820 always like right like fathers have to be in the picture i mean we're gonna be doing an episode on

00:51:42.240 the moynihan report at some point for sure but like right like it's always like fathers have to

00:51:47.360 be in the picture to teach the boys about masculinity right like and it's just like maybe

00:51:52.000 it's just that i'm one of two men raising a daughter that i'm like that that cannot be right

00:51:56.420 I hope it's not right that like yeah mothers can teach you about masculinity absolutely and fathers

00:52:01.340 can teach you about care absolutely you know like this is like it is it is a vision of yeah you're

00:52:06.620 right to point out complementarianism which is definitely part of holly's ideology avowedly I

00:52:12.280 think it's sort of an implicit assumption or advancement and a lot of like sort of the center

00:52:16.860 left pundits who are yeah like going off about this crisis of masculinity is like the idea that

00:52:21.780 it has to be different. There's a line in the Washington Post long piece that says,

00:52:25.940 nobody wants an androgynous world. And it's like, well, listen, we actually already live in an

00:52:31.300 androgynous world. And we're constantly trying to sort people back into these categories that

00:52:36.320 they don't fit into and won't stay in. So what does androgyny mean in that sense?

00:52:41.120 I mean, yes, in an art historical sense, or in a literary sense where androgyny has its own

00:52:48.080 kind of essence right like where it basically combines features of masculinity and femininity

00:52:52.980 traditionally conceived i could see that but like isn't it just that we are living that we are

00:52:58.560 accentuating different aspects of our gender performance and like is a weird ideology of

00:53:03.440 masculinity and femininity that says like this is the essence of it rather than to say like hey

00:53:07.400 there's a bunch of things that sort of fall into this general bucket you pick and you choose and

00:53:11.680 you refuse some of it but like you live in a society that has these gender systems of meaning 0.99

00:53:16.020 making and it's a lot of work to refuse all of them and so you might be like ah fuck it and just 0.60

00:53:20.360 like you know do some of them right it's almost as if it's an iterative customizable process 0.96

00:53:26.800 you should talk to someone in practice yeah um you going about like awful like what even is

00:53:33.060 androgyny reminds me of those like gender neutral clothing brands where you go into the store and

00:53:38.640 it's just like a very underweight white person wearing the like ugliest oversized t-shirt you've 0.89

00:53:44.620 ever seen always always makes me think of that infamous time cover right the future face of

00:53:50.080 america which basically was like they had a computer like composite every race together

00:53:53.940 right and it's like yeah chief that ain't it uh

00:53:58.200 we're kind of touching on how like unstable all these definitions are right and how they sort of

00:54:06.780 they just turn to dust if you press just a little bit of critical scrutiny on them yeah i think

00:54:12.000 that's a really interesting point to pivot on because like the thing about the crisis of

00:54:18.500 masculinity is that as it's been used throughout history it has also meant different things at

00:54:22.860 different times what masculinity is and also like what is in crisis shocker so like sometimes the

00:54:31.080 crisis of masculinity is that men are failures they're not manly enough anymore they're you 0.88

00:54:37.700 know masturbating and playing video games sometimes it's that men are victims they've been forced to 0.99

00:54:44.600 masturbate and play video games by the feminists they've been uh emasculated good work if you can 0.98

00:54:50.720 get it yeah oh god uh the pay isn't great but people no no um or like you know that like it's 0.91

00:55:00.500 it's something has made them less manly and that this is like a moral uh emergency that it's

00:55:06.940 happens to men so it can be it's usually feminists or women more broadly but it's also things like 0.99

00:55:12.440 urbanization it's things like like different kinds of work you know when we talk about the

00:55:17.920 19th century we'll see that there's a real a huge eugenicist element there too right like

00:55:22.300 it's all about the things they're not doing yeah we'll talk about that at some other time when we

00:55:25.920 talk about biopower i want to dig in but like the term okay so but one thing that is kind of

00:55:30.480 yeah when we just walk me through that when does someone first say there's a crisis of masculinity

00:55:35.060 like in those words all right so this is like a this is a contested term but the first usage i was

00:55:41.480 able to find comes from 1965 oh okay from a historian and the historian who uses the term

00:55:47.740 crisis of masculinity is talking about the 1890s okay yeah so american historians were writing

00:55:53.760 about america at the end of the 19th century and they were seeking to describe the psychic change

00:55:59.760 in conceptions of white american manhood that followed the closing of the american frontier

00:56:06.000 and the era of the first wave feminist movement which arose more in like the beginning decades

00:56:13.420 of the 20th century but also it was like beginning to gather steam in the 1890s so they're like

00:56:18.720 specifically talking about like 1890 is i believe the year that the railroad closes i might have

00:56:24.720 that wrong the transcontinental railroad silver spike yeah i don't know leland stanford put it in

00:56:30.840 we should know we should know the year um but you know the railroad connects the coasts of north

00:56:37.480 america and this model of american manhood the pioneer he's you know he's alone or he's largely

00:56:46.460 alone and he's bravely forging ahead into the unfamiliar westward places and making his way

00:56:52.160 into the uncertain future through like arduous work and courage and he's bringing the whole

00:56:58.900 destiny of the nation along with him that was always kind of a myth but it really ceased to be

00:57:04.000 i was gonna say like for one thing like as you point out like masculinity makes sense only with

00:57:09.900 respect to some kind of compliment or kind of some kind of other and like i'm guessing that like

00:57:14.920 pioneer women were not exactly shrinking violets themselves right like i mean like you have to be 0.75

00:57:19.440 tough as nails to do any of that stuff so like odd i mean the whole closing frontier historiography 0.86

00:57:24.600 that was a big deal at a certain point in american history but on the other hand like especially when

00:57:29.820 it comes to masculinity it seems really question-baking honestly and it's also like i'm

00:57:35.120 glad that you point out how like narrow and exclusive this vision of masculinity is because

00:57:39.340 it was also not really accessible for like black men who could not go out and be pioneers in

00:57:45.720 territories where it was legal to enslave them and you know indians also had a very different

00:57:50.860 understanding of what the pioneer man was doing so this was always a contested and uh specific

00:57:57.860 vision but like when it became no longer possible or no longer really imaginable for white american

00:58:04.880 men these historians were contending that that created a crisis and that that crisis was also

00:58:10.500 precipitated by like women beginning to contest male monopoly on the public sphere so things like 1.00

00:58:16.180 the lobbying for public toilets was all about women's ability to like live full days out of

00:58:22.500 the house yeah and then also uh women started learning jujitsu this is i mean this is like 0.98

00:58:28.060 i'm sorry what oh my god yeah like 19 in the 19 teens and uh 1910s uh women white women started

00:58:35.180 learning specifically jujitsu which was wrapped up in a sense of like a racist sense of asian

00:58:41.500 masculinity as being particularly like potent and dangerous but also in it was about uh self-defense

00:58:47.640 and access to public sphere they're like this is how you are able to stay out later in public all

00:58:53.440 day and defend yourself and defend your honor and these things sort of like made men question

00:58:58.900 supposedly like what their role was what it meant to be a man if women if you know you can't go like

00:59:05.160 bring your country into the wilderness and women don't need you to defend them anymore and you're

00:59:11.460 not the only person like living out in the public world in your household like what does that mean

00:59:16.120 so like its first use of the term crisis of masculinity appears to be by george frederickson

00:59:21.380 in 1965 this is according to thomas winter the historian whose paper i'm relying on here but the

00:59:26.980 term became really popular used by historians throughout the 1960s 70s and early 80s and what

00:59:35.040 else was happening during that time that may have brought masculinity to these the front of

00:59:40.000 these historians some kind of wave i'm getting some kind of wave or something not but not a first

00:59:44.640 second yeah a second wave yeah you know so like the crisis of masculinity like this is first of

00:59:51.480 all like it's almost always looking at the past right there's an imagined past when men were men

00:59:56.300 it's interesting that arose in history right because it's almost necessarily a historical

01:00:01.300 impulse like things were fine for men and for masculinity and now they're in crisis and

01:00:06.600 everything's all fucked up and it's somebody's fault but it also like it is a nostalgia for 0.51

01:00:11.440 the past that arises at specific historical moments and it's often when there's been like 0.98

01:00:18.220 a moment of heightened feminist activism or when there's like a moment of women thinking about how

01:00:25.740 they want to live their gender it doesn't like strike me as a total coincidence that this crisis

01:00:31.380 of masculinity and reeves book are all coming out like six years after me too and one year

01:00:36.260 after dobbs right just from like the experience of somebody who's worked in the media for a long

01:00:41.240 time when you've been doing one trend or one story editors get a lot of hunger for something

01:00:47.740 contradictory and it's like how can we recast men as the social victims of gender because the

01:00:55.720 truth about abortion bans about endemic rape about the crisis in child care about the maternal

01:01:03.440 mortality crisis about domestic violence like the just like brutal repetitive ongoingness

01:01:10.200 of what patriarchy is actually doing to the people it's actually doing it to

01:01:14.420 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

01:01:21.080 and the crisis of masculinity offers an interruption even if it's like not particularly

01:01:27.080 original one yeah i mean one other thing to point out here and this is going back to kind of the

01:01:32.040 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

01:01:36.080 like there's this interesting thing right like there's of course also and i never thought about

01:01:39.400 this in the crisis of masculinity stories they're historical in a second way in the sense that

01:01:44.320 what happens to men is what history is what happens to women is always the same women's 0.74

01:01:49.360 lot is ahistorical right like for at least that was the greek conception right like the woman 0.89

01:01:53.740 belonged to the household the oikos and was therefore right like concerned with circular

01:01:59.280 time you just kind of go about your day you do your chores and like history is made by men 0.87

01:02:06.120 housework never ends yeah it's about creatureliness it's about about repetition right

01:02:11.300 and men go out and they they do anti-cyclical right like think of the odyssey or something

01:02:15.880 like that right like which is all about like what does she do she knits every day and then then pulls

01:02:20.900 apart at night what she has made and then meanwhile Odysseus is like forging a path like back to

01:02:26.440 Ithaca where he wants to go I mean it's obviously like I don't want to want to say that that's all

01:02:30.060 that's happening here but like the bias to assume that history is what's happening to men is

01:02:34.400 extremely extremely tempting and has a long tradition in the field of history that historians

01:02:39.520 or have tried very hard and commendably

01:02:42.180 so to kind of offset and off center

01:02:45.120 over the last 50, 60 years.

01:02:47.640 But like that's playing here too,

01:02:49.220 that like in some way a crisis of femininity

01:02:51.360 almost wouldn't have made sense to someone in 1965, right?

01:02:54.660 Like there's just like was no,

01:02:56.740 there was something inappropriate

01:02:58.540 or something contradictory in terms there. 1.00

01:03:01.780 There also needs to be feminist intervention in history 1.00

01:03:04.840 for masculinity to be denaturalized, right? 1.00

01:03:09.080 yeah so um walk me through it like how so you're saying attracts closely with with feminist

01:03:15.860 organizing with feminist as you just said uh kind of self-assertions in his in the historical

01:03:21.160 record can we map that more closely like after the 60s like after the second wave right i mean

01:03:26.620 like you're right dobbs happened last year and we're getting these books now like can we trace

01:03:31.440 this in the 70s 80s 90s well susan faludi does a lot of this in her book backlash and then sort

01:03:37.560 of like in maybe a little bit of like too precise irony her book after backlash was all about men

01:03:43.280 um but like i actually wanted to go a little even further back because even though the term

01:03:49.020 crisis of masculinity was coined in 1965 to the best of our knowledge like the idea of a gender

01:03:58.960 crisis that is being sort of fomented in the media as like a little bit of a moral panic goes back

01:04:05.860 way longer and i wanted to draw your attention to this compilation of media clips by paul ferry

01:04:12.880 who's a political scientist at the university of calgary who has this like beautiful twitter thread

01:04:17.960 called a brief history of men today are too feminine and women are too masculine nice and

01:04:23.520 it's kind of amazing he's got in 1886 the sexes are changing places men becoming feminine in

01:04:31.060 their bearing and women grow more dashing there is 1902 no feminine men wanted i noticed a certain

01:04:39.100 style among young men in almost every locality a style so repulsive and weak as to shock the

01:04:45.440 intelligence of refined people the hateful style of parting the hair in the middle oh no yeah too

01:04:51.600 girly oh i like this love making a lost art men and women of the stage today do not employ good

01:04:58.420 old methods of generation ago where's that from uh it doesn't even say i've got 1932 are men

01:05:04.720 becoming feminine and are women to blame that's from the ironwood times if you speed forward into

01:05:12.820 later in the 20th century in 1965 the men are becoming feminine was the motion debated

01:05:20.020 by chelsea and wilden young liberals at the college of saint mark and saint john chelsea last

01:05:25.320 week that's from 1965 in london in 1977 woman in new zealand reported that skyscrapers make men

01:05:35.200 too effeminate oh yeah i've said the same thing many times 1984 are american men wimpier now than

01:05:43.160 men writes in a reader i'm an older woman and i believe in equal rights and all that and all that 0.54

01:05:49.160 a very telling expression of sincerity uh oh yeah but don't you think all this women's lib stuff

01:05:54.900 has contributed to the wimping of american men am i just imagining it or is today's man less manly

01:06:00.640 than those i grew up with well so so i mean on the one hand like obviously like nostalgia is a

01:06:08.660 hell of a drug and this incredibly repetitive pattern there's something really interesting

01:06:12.220 though about like maybe there's something that people are picking up on that is in fact

01:06:16.480 hesitate to say objective but basically right like there's that book by katherine bond stockton

01:06:21.520 the queer child where she sort of points out that like you know children have been coded ever since

01:06:26.520 society really took bigger note of them and thought of them as something other than little 0.99

01:06:30.620 adults as kind of queer they're they're malleable they don't quite do things right and they don't do 0.96

01:06:36.480 gender correctly and this idea the young aren't gendered enough is of course a way it's a way to 0.96

01:06:43.360 respond to the fact that like the young will read a little i don't know a little gay to you that

01:06:48.820 they're not doing gender the way you remember it and that it is your job as an older person 0.71

01:06:53.820 to browbeat them right into it right like there's an important disciplinary aspect to these kinds of

01:06:59.500 headlines isn't there to kind of encourage people to crack down on the potentiality of youth which

01:07:05.860 really could sort of go into many directions that could kind of crack up the old codes right with

01:07:11.460 where you know this is something that goes right back to the 19th century where we had waves of

01:07:15.720 people sort of trying to live masculinity and femininity differently and this i mean brings us

01:07:19.760 right back to jordan peterson who i believe i might be confusing him with somebody else but

01:07:23.760 didn't jordan peterson orchestrate his own firing from the university of toronto because he refused

01:07:29.040 to use his students pronouns right he understood himself as having a disciplinary responsibility

01:07:34.380 to the gender of his students and he's like i'm not going to call you you know whatever it is that

01:07:39.620 you're called because as a principled stance and as a moral stance yeah and think of like cancel

01:07:43.980 culture entrepreneurs like, I don't know, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, right? The coddling

01:07:49.320 of the American mind, why do you worry about that? Why do they worry about the American mind being

01:07:53.880 coddled, by which they mean young people, college students, right? Well, because it doesn't prepare

01:07:58.760 you for, quote unquote, the real world. It's like the anxiety is right there on the surface. It is

01:08:03.800 young people are living their lives differently and young people seem to contain the seeds of

01:08:10.180 a different way of conceptualizing the world, that's coddling. That's an over-feminization, 0.66

01:08:15.440 right? And that you can see something of that same anxiety in like this summer's media moral panic

01:08:24.380 about men in crisis, right? There's this idea that they have been made by feminism into creatures

01:08:33.040 who are sort of not functional, too weak for the real world. They're insufficiently masculine,

01:08:39.560 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.

01:09:00.240 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.

01:09:13.200 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 being seen to threaten that dominance, which is here feminists and women more broadly.

01:09:36.920 Yeah. And even when they're not, I think the way that you talked about drawing sympathy is 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?

01:09:58.860 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.

01:10:14.380 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 it wasn't in the right place in the first place, right?

01:10:38.920 Like, I mean, same like with the Trump election 2016, right? 0.97

01:10:41.220 Like it was a welcome reason not to ask black people questions anymore, but only like white 0.96

01:10:46.460 dudes in their seventies in Ohio diners, right?

01:10:48.820 Like, I think a lot of people working for the New York Times didn't like think that

01:10:52.660 like LGBT people or black people had caused Donald Trump, but like it activated an instinct

01:10:57.220 in them, which was to say, why don't we put attention as a society where we're accustomed

01:11:01.620 to put attention?

01:11:02.620 Didn't it feel a little weird how we kept asking questions of all these people that 0.99

01:11:05.820 like we usually tell to shut the fuck up, right? 0.96

01:11:08.260 And even among people who probably wouldn't subscribe to the overt misogyny of what you're 0.96

01:11:14.140 describing, this shifting of the attention economy can do very, very similar work on

01:11:19.660 a much more hidden way.

01:11:20.860 Yeah, yeah.

01:11:21.240 Right.

01:11:21.440 It's the passive misogyny.

01:11:23.040 It's a passive misogyny of reverting to that traditional hierarchy, right?

01:11:27.460 That is more comfortable.

01:11:28.780 And look, I'm going to shock listeners and maybe ruin my brand by saying that I actually

01:11:34.040 have a lot of sympathy for young men in crisis.

01:11:36.060 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.

01:11:47.080 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, 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.

01:12:13.160 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. 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.

01:12:43.160 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?

01:13:02.500 Like we mentioned, Jordan Peterson is basically, he's like, what would happen if you read Carl Jung after huffing a bunch of glue.

01:13:08.780 These weird Nietzsche acolytes that Nietzsche himself would have been like, Jesus Christ, what's wrong with these people?

01:13:15.320 Like, they could be published today, honestly.

01:13:18.940 It's like, it absolutely feeds into our panics today.

01:13:22.120 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.

01:13:29.780 Maybe he's no longer cell or whatever.

01:13:31.420 basically she highlighted this expression that he used and i was like that's arthur schopenhauer

01:13:36.240 that's from 1819 i believe like these incels do read which is kind of shocking like um so this is

01:13:44.080 the other reason i think why these things are are important to know that on the one hand they as

01:13:48.700 more as pointing out they come under the guise of diagnosing a very recent phenomenon it's happening 0.92

01:13:53.280 now and you need to care about it now and then they turn right around and they crib shit from 0.95

01:13:59.160 at a time when people were delivering the mail by horse, right? 0.99

01:14:04.760 And that's their solution.

01:14:07.560 So I do think that the look back is going to be super fascinating.

01:14:10.420 And it also happens to be where my own area of research focuses.

01:14:13.560 So I'm excited about that.

01:14:15.220 That's next time on In Bed with a Right.

01:14:18.240 See you then.

01:14:24.340 In Bed with a Right would like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute

01:14:27.180 for Gender Research for generous support.

01:14:29.380 Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

01:14:31.820 Our theme music is by Katie Lau.

01:14:33.520 Our producer is Megan Kalthus.

In Bed With The Right - August 24, 2023

Episode 5： Crisis of Masculinity

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