What Do Men Want, Really?
The Long Read Tackles America's New Problem Demographic
Sigmund Freud (that snake oil peddler) was given to lament, “The great question that has never been answered, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?” How absurd that sounds in 2024, when the big grapple isn’t over what women want, but what society expects of men. There’s no easy answer to that question, but it does expose a briar patch of anxieties.
Donald Trump’s comeback has turned men into a hot cultural dilemma. MAGA’s triumph is spun as a reassertion of male privilege, a backlash against Wokeism, an unholy bro-volution. There are unironic headlines about retaliatory sex strikes. What tempting and lazy reductions of a knotty historical moment.
Trump did tap into the frustrations of many men—especially those without college educations—who feel dissed by the political and cultural establishment. Alarm bells have been going off for years: elite opinion-makers and the Democratic Party do not vibe with that diverse, scrappy constituency. The void has reportedly been filled by crypto, Joe Rogan, and Barstool Sports.
But those are incidental aspects of some men’s lives, not a distillation of American maleness (we are at a point where the New York Times discusses 49.5 percent of the population as if they were a rare variety of emu). In Atlantic essays, men are too easily shorthanded as lost and broken creatures—a problem to be solved.
A feature of this what-do-we-do-about-men debate is that few regular guys are interested in it. For them, maleness is not a construct; it is a mundane reality, not an oppressive act or grist for a position paper. The fringe right always nurtures creepy cults of manhood, but in more gentrified neighborhoods, discussions of gender are dominated by women. No intellectualized masculinism corresponds to feminism in terms of its influence.
Maleness is not a construct; it is a mundane reality, not an oppressive act or grist for a position paper.
Among the elites, ordinary male resistance to modern gender framing is provocative. The jargon of the faculty lounge and the H.R. department paints men (especially the pale, heterosexual sort) as problematic. This is not a language of equality, but one of control, and men tend to check out of it. Well, you know men! Fewer males are entering academia and a host of white-collar professions. They are not yet banging down the doors of so-called HEAL professions (health, education, administration, and literacy), where the jobs are. Grim statistics tell us boys, those hothouse flowers, are wilting.
That should worry everybody. Is there a male perspective on these woes that won’t put off women? Caring about male welfare is not synonymous with misogyny. Still, in some quarters the subject cannot be raised without squirming qualification—the dread of tumbling into that basket of deplorables. Like the Victorians, who were obsessed with codifying male virtue, today’s gatekeepers seem determined to critique and reboot masculinity. The goal seems to be less understanding than containment. In any case, men have a long track record of ditching programs intended to civilize them.
The Male Dilemma, like Freud’s Female Question, isn’t new. It surfaces in times of social and economic upheaval. The Boy Scouts and British public schools were intended to instill manly virtue when industrialization and urbanization were said to be sapping male strength. In the 1990s, the mythopoetic men’s movement, exemplified by Robert Bly’s Iron John, sought to reconnect men with archetypal masculinity, while the Promise Keepers reasserted traditional male roles in the home and church. Both were reactions to the triumphs of second-wave feminism. Whenever the earth shifts under men’s feet, social entrepreneurs try to sell a vision of manhood back to them. Occasionally, drum circles are involved.
Whenever the earth shifts under men’s feet, social entrepreneurs try to sell a vision of manhood back to them. Occasionally, drum circles are involved.
In recent years, figures such as Jordan Peterson have become preachers to new lost boys, pitching traditional responsibility and self-mastery to those who feel cast aside in a society keen on blurring binaries. Like Bly before him, Peterson speaks to a crisis of purpose. What’s on offer—venison and knightly codes, make your damn bed—may be goofy and simplistic, but it feeds a demand. Boys will yearn to become men, and the broader culture is no longer interested in showing them how.
What ought to resonate across divides is that aimless young men are trouble—to themselves, women and girls, and a well-ordered civilization. Few have articulated this better than
of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which is about as far from the unsavory manosphere as one can rove. Reeves delves into all the bleak trends: males are slipping further behind in education, workforce participation, and life expectancy. He does so while avoiding the ideological land mines littering any discussion of male struggle. There’s no whiff of backlash, but a plea to better look after half of the population in the interests of the whole.Policymakers should listen, not least because equating masculinity with poison has the opposite effect. Much of the appeal of the manosphere is that it appalls its chosen enemies. Andrew Tate and other influencers have made fortunes peddling hyper-macho cartoons—yachts, fast cars, and subjugated women—to feckless young men. Affluent women have always been at the forefront of social reform movements, which in their excess can become fixated on manners (how we say things, as opposed to what we do about them). Adolescent male pushback is the fart at that tea party.
Boys playing at being men aren’t very manly. Their manosphere swaggers and provokes, but it’s a poignant place. The acting out is fueled by the dread of the desperate, who feel they’ve been written out of the script. In petty rebellion, they hunger to be of some use. Too many men hobble along in a society that makes room for shrinking numbers of workers, that has replaced national service and industrial labor with screens. The multiracial cohort of young men who voted for Trump are not blind to crookedness, but they do appreciate being seen.
The throughline to Rogan is the message of self-improvement and skepticism of the official narrative. Critics may be appalled by the aesthetics, but they miss the obvious: There’s nothing particularly extreme about being wary of government institutions, the pharmaceutical industry, and foreign entanglements (to which young men, in their thousands, are routinely sacrificed). Such attitudes are shared by millions and were once associated with the left. MAGA will hardly fix what is broken in this country, but defending the establishment to men, or anybody else, is a losing game.
A truly popular culture might acknowledge this, but ours cannot decide whether it wants to critique men or fetishize them. In a crop of new entertainments—the film Babygirl, the series Disclaimer, the novels Don’t Be a Stranger and All Fours—successful women are tempted by volatile younger men. In the affluent and well-ordered lives of these characters, men are the monkey wrench. It’s an inversion of older narratives like Fatal Attraction, where the disruptor was the nymphette (and the victimized protagonist always seemed to be Michael Douglas). Today, it’s men who are unpredictable, mysterious, and destabilizing.
In Hollywood’s latest recapitulation of the battle of the sexes, men are the new women—feral, chaotic, lusted after, feared.
In Hollywood’s latest recapitulation of the battle of the sexes, men are the new women—feral, chaotic, lusted after, feared. What kind of society demonizes male sexuality while trumpeting confidence as Big Dick Energy? One that couldn’t reconcile itself to women for generations. The trope of man as the destabilizer reflects profound uncertainties. This culture no longer knows what to do with men, and it shows.
This goes beyond the latest culture war flap. Reeves identifies a genuine crisis—one that won’t be solved by more language policing or allyship seminars. If men are abandoning higher education, it would be useful to understand why. If they’re jettisoning entire professions, and with them a ladder to middle-class stability, it’s sensible to head off the consequences. And if they gravitate to platforms that reject the old liberal consensus, it’s past time to understand their appeal. That shouldn’t add up to a blow against female progress or an excuse for bad behavior. It’s about constructing a society where all people thrive.
We are vastly more similar than we are different, but differences stubbornly persist. Schizophrenic attitudes about masculinity exacerbate petty polarization; they may even create a species-defeating barrier. A better society would begin with mutual assumptions of good faith, in which men are not caricatures of privilege or chaos but full human beings. Men and women alike don’t need pity, but they do require dignity. The stakes are too high for anything less.
Yours Ever,
Walter Burns
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“Wags get called a lot of things, but never dull.”― Carole Lombard
“Like the Victorians, who were obsessed with codifying male virtue, today’s gatekeepers seem determined to critique and reboot masculinity. The goal seems to be less understanding than containment. In any case, men have a long track record of ditching programs intended to civilize them.”
Maybe you said this but it reminds me of temperance. There’s a fear always among my friends of the creepy male, the one who just comes up and starts talking to them like a normal person.
Women do indeed want to control men and maleness while also finding it sexually repulsive. It’s quite the bind.