Much Ado About Men

Men are struggling. Angry ones are exacting revenge. Could helping men help women, too?

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

With Donald Trump back in office, it feels like we are reentering a period of masculine retribution. Trump’s initial win was very much about backlash to the first Black president and the possibility of the first female president. His second win feels a little more complicated, driven as it was by a whole lot of low-information voters who didn’t really seem to know what they were voting for, other than “I’m sick of the status quo.” But the aesthetic of Trump’s last campaign was very clearly one of reactionary masculinity. Men seem to be drawn to him because he gives them social permission to crass. One driver of Trump’s success is a perception of liberals and Democrats as scolds and prudes, and especially as people who are going to draw hard lines around what you can’t say — who have ramped up the social costs of being racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted, or of appearing racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted. For a lot of men, this held a lot of appeal, I think because it feels like a bit of power being restored.

Not being able to act like a jackass is not exactly the world’s most pressing problem, and lots of people argue that the accusation of liberals being prudes and scolds doesn’t reflect reality. It’s certainly possible to get people extremely riled up about nonexistent problems. But it’s much easier to get people extremely riled up about minor problems if they feel a related but more generalized sense of slippage or decline. And I suspect this is part of what’s going on with men: Their social positions really are declining relative to women; some really are doing worse in meaningful ways. And that feeling isn’t abated by the very clear reality that men, across the social and economic spectrum, still wind up better off than women by a variety of measures — they make more money, they have greater job success, and so on. The reality is complex. Yes, men dominate the top levels of just about every industry. Yes, the gender pay gap persists. Yes, what men are mad about is less being terribly oppressed and more seeing their unearned privileges scaled back. And also: Life for men, especially working-class men, really has gotten worse in measurable ways. As women have become more independent, a growing number have refused to shore up abusive, troubled, or simply difficult men; with women long being men’s social conduits, this really has made men lonelier, more isolated, and in many cases sicker. All of this may be too large to grasp. But a sense of displacement, that “I can’t talk like I used to,” is right there, and can turn into a representation of larger ills. I’m not convinced that’s rational or reasonable or admirable, and I am sure it’s not worth catering to, but it may just be.

Across racial groups, there is now a roughly ten-point gap between women with college degrees and men with college degrees; men and women haven’t been college-educated at roughly the same rate since the 1990s. Of the 10 million men with only a high school diploma, a third are out of work. Men commit suicide at four times the rate of women. They die of drug overdoses at far higher rates. They account for 70 percent of the homeless. They are almost 80 percent of murder victims and 95 percent of murderers. And while men and women both report similar rates of loneliness and similar numbers of friends, there is good reason to believe that women’s friendships are, in fact, more intimate and more emotionally sustaining: Women are 20 points more likely than men to discuss their family lives with their friends, for example, and more than twice as likely to discuss their mental health, which just 15 percent of men say they talk about with friends. What are men more likely to discuss with their friends than women? Sports and current events.

Something really is going on with men. And while it’s definitely not the job of individual women to fix it, it is the job of policy-makers, including the Democratic Party. And for purely self-interested reasons, those of us who don’t want to live in a country chock full of angry, resentful misogynists who vote should spend some time thinking about how we might make men’s lives better.