What’s notable, first, is their empathy. For all Peterson’s barking and, lately, unhinged tweeting, he’s clearly on young men’s side. He validates his followers’ struggles and confusion. He also tells them why they’re still needed and why they matter. No, it’s not just you — school is tailored to girls. Yes, it does suck that a house and a family feel so out of reach! You’re right: It is harder to be a man today.This is especially compelling in a moment when many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don’t feel part of. For young men in particular, the assumption of a world built to serve their sex doesn’t align with their lived experience, where girls out-achieve them from pre-K to post-graduate studies and “men are trash” is an acceptable joke.
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The imagery might be ridiculous, but the message is clear. Even as masculinity comes under attack, real men still exist, and this — blond, chiseled, violent — is what they look like. Despite what “woke” (and, presumably, clothed) society might tell you, male dominance is the natural order of things. Without it, the world will fall apart.This is where the right-wing vision of masculinity runs off the rails.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMuch of the content in the online men’s space is misogyny masquerading as being simply pro-male, advocating a return to a strict hierarchy in which a particular kind of man deserves to rule over everyone else. Decent advice becomes an on-ramp to darker viewpoints: You can get from Tate urging his followers to work hard to his announcing that women are property within seconds.
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But then he got candid. He doesn’t really identify with the manosphere, he told me, but can understand why others might. “I feel like there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, but there’s not, in my opinion, the same room to be proudly masculine.”
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Conservatives raged. But progressives mainly shrugged. That’s because the mid-2010s were the high-water mark of anti-male sentiment in progressive spaces. As the #MeToo movement rose, with its tales of horrendous male behavior and ensuing corporate coverups, “ban men” became a rallying cry. The word “masculinity” seemed to rarely appear without the descriptor “toxic” accompanying it, blamed for everything from rape culture to climate change.Even today, some progressives react touchily to any efforts to help men as a group.
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To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight. It’s the equivalent of “learn to code!” as a solution for those struggling to adjust to a new economy: simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune.
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It’s easy to mistake attention as zero-sum, to fear that putting effort toward helping men might mean we won’t have space for women anymore.
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ichard Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtly. “I try to raise my boys” — he has three — “to have the confidence to ask a girl out, if that’s their inclination; the grace to accept no for an answer; and the responsibility to make sure that, either way, she gets home safely.” His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast.
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What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.
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In 2018, Harvard economist Raj Chetty published a groundbreaking study on race and economic opportunity. Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys. However, those boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present — even if not their own — had significantly higher chances of upward mobility.“Ultimately,” Reynolds mused, “it’s about relationships and finding older men who, you know — they’re not flashy, they’re not ‘important,’ necessarily, but they actually are living virtuous lives as men. And then being able to then learn from them.”
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What critics miss is that if there were nothing valid at the core of these constructs, they wouldn’t command this sort of popularity. People need codes for how to be human. And when those aren’t easily found, they’ll take whatever is offered, no matter what else is attached.
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