The male grievance presidency
Welcome to the Broligarchy. Men dominate every sector of society, but you would never know from the roar of male grievance from the White House to the tech bros.
Hi new readers! If this was sent to you, can can subscribe below.
Earlier this week,
Lenz wrote about the Pete Hegseth confirmation hearings and the role of women in public life. Specifically, she wrote about the way that that Hegseth’s hearings for Secretary or Defense were thick with accusations that women—and people who are gay or trans, or people of color—have overtaken men’s spaces and are pushing them out.Hegseth has said publicly many times that he straight up doesn’t want women in combat roles in the military. I mean—he literally said “straight up” when he spoke about it: “I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal1. Has made fighting more complicated,” he said on a podcast in November.
Hegseth doesn’t think women meet the military’s standards. The irony here, as Lyz explains, is that can you guess who actually has not been meeting the military’s standards? Men. A Military.com report this month states that women are an increasingly vital recruiting tool because young men are struggling to meet eligibility requirements.
But you would never know that from the hearings, which have been peppered with Hegseth and Republican lawmakers bemoaning feminism and “woke” policies as the real danger that’s bringing the country down, lowering standards everywhere for “equity” hires.
Conservative media took up the cause, spinning a narrative of Hegseth vs. hordes of angry feminist banshees who insist on “hounding” him about his record of sexism, multiple affairs, allegations of sexual harassment documented in police reports, and having a habit of getting drunk at work at three different workplaces.
(I just have to pause here and say, can you even imagine a world where a woman known for being drunk at work could get nominated to a position like this? Can you imagine a woman who is tipsy on the job being allowed to keep any job??)
But Hegseth not only persists, he fails upward, as they say.
The upshot of the whole hearing was that what’s wrong with our country is the “feminization of America”, “a softening, a weakening, a moral rot,” as puts it.
“This is the fight of the next four years: male grievance, resentment and a sense of entitlement to the things women and minorities have and the spaces they worked hard to occupy. It’s not enough for Trump to win; women must be punished for their ascension, their qualifications, their independence.” -
Lyz’s characterization of the campaign of “male grievance” felt so spot on, and explained so much, that it stopped me as soon as I read it. She summed up the Trump campaign, Vance-Thiel, Rogan-Tate-manosphere, Elon Musk movement in one swoop.
Sometimes I feel haunted by the idea that we are experiencing a violent backlash of white male supremacy. We have had precisely one non-white President in the history of this country, and two nominated female presidential candidates, and since then it’s as though all hell has risen up. It’s as though tiny gains in equality have thrown the patriarchal world off its very axis.
As if to prove the point, Mark Zuckerberg opined last week that the corporate world also was having its “masculine energy” zapped. “I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered. I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive,” he said in his own bid to genuflect to Trump, bemoan feminization, and join the noble cause.
Hegseth is being appointed on male grievance. Mark Zuckerberg is singing the song of male grievance. Andrew Tate has launched the BRUV PARTY. This administration won in large part thanks to a message that men are being treated unfairly.
The narrative is so pervasive that you might start to wonder if male grievance is real, and men are being oppressed everywhere from the military to the office.
Are men under attack? Are men the real victims here?
As we head into this dizzying era of male grievance, let’s pause for a little reality check. Are men being oppressed—are they the victims of a “feminized” society?
A simple look around tells you that this is, um, not the case. Just for starters:
Men hold 71% of the seats in Congress and 75% of the Senate.
A stunning 94.8% of Supreme Court justices have been men (110 out of 116!).
(All Supreme Court justices were males until 1981 when Reagan appointed the first woman, Sandra Day O’Connor. 1981!! (And am I the only one shocked to learn that RBG was the second woman ever?)
Men run 90.5% of Fortune 500 companies.
Men hold just under 70% of wealth in the U.S.
Men comprise 83% of the leadership of the largest international media corporations.
100% of U.S. Presidents have been men to this day (WELP).
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. School boards? Run by men. (PTA’s, of course, are run by women.) Law firm partners? Over 70% are men (even though women make up over half of entry-level associates now). University presidents? Mainly white guys.
And on and on.
has a whole book and a great newsletter, “Invisible Women” detailing how the default for everything—from product design to medical research to crash test dummies, to how your iPhone fits in your hand2--is male. Our whole world is designed—literally—for men.Men are still dominant in virtually every aspect of American society. They handily maintain the lion’s share of power, wealth, attention. And if you look around, you see evidence of it everywhere. To argue otherwise is to argue that even small gains in equality = male oppression, as though men maintaining 80-90% of decision-making power and economic gains is just not quite enough.
This reminds me of a dinner conversation that I had with some friends of mine and their teen sons. They were talking about how there had been an outcry at their high school because a “girls only” coding club had sprung up, eliciting protests from some parents that maybe a “boys only” coding club should be started, too. The context for this is that they live in Redmond, Washington, home to Microsoft, and tech companies and tech bros galore.
My friends asked their teen sons, who are coders themselves, if they were bothered by the “girls only” club development, and they shrugged it off. When asked why not, the 17-year old thought about it for a second and said: “I guess, why would I be threatened by a girls club, when if I look around everyone in charge still looks like me?”
And honestly I think about that all the time. The 17-year old gets it! Why don’t billionaires and U.S. Senators? It’s almost as though they do know better, but spin an alternate reality to manipulate politics, and consolidate their power and fortunes and take advantage of all of us.
But if you’re not paying attention, you could almost believe that male grievance and the notion that men are being oppressed is based in reality. Because this narrative is everywhere.
It’s not just Zuck and Republicans and the manosphere running with the male grievance narrative.
The mainstream media pushes it, too.
I first noticed and wrote about this during election coverage, when legacy media, even “liberal” outlets, kept framing the election as being about “gender,” or the “gender divide” or the “gender election” as though the stakes for the election were just as high for men as they were for women.
This minimized the stakes for women—who stood to lose their rights and even their lives under a federal abortion ban—and turned the focus to young men.
I felt my spirit leave my body while listening to an episode of the New York Times “The Daily” podcast just before the election about the gender gap between Gen Z young women breaking for Harris, and Gen Z young men leaning toward Trump-Vance.
The producers interviewed college-age young women who were basically like: “We don’t want to have our futures derailed because we can’t get birth control, and we don’t want ourselves and our friends to die because it’s legal to let us bleed out while pregnant.”
The young men who are interviewed, on the other hand, were bothered that everything is so expensive, and strangely, much airtime was given to the fact that many of them have car expertise and would like car-related jobs, but car-related jobs are in short supply in this economy.
At no point do the producers ask the young men: What about the fact that their peers, the young women, stand to lose their personhood, and lives? Does the fact that young women can die factor into their voting at all?
What about the fact that they themselves could be forced into fatherhood, whether they want it or not?
No? Just more talk about car jobs and gender roles? It feels like it would be very relevant to address the life-or-death circumstances for young women with both parties. But that didn’t factor into the coverage.
This kind of gendered both-sidesing, also known as “false balance” that equates the fact that people with uteruses can lose their lives with whatever issue is on the mind of other parties—car jobs, gender roles, inflation, feeling left out—isn’t just bad journalism. It’s unethical. It’s dangerous.
And now that has segued neatly into the mainstream media’s validating male grievance era.
In the Diabolical Lies podcast episode “The Men are not Alright—Right?!”
and break down the “feminism hurts men” discourse. Katie Gatti Tassin notes the moral panic over men and boys from article after article, from WSJ headlines handwringing about “America’s men falling even further behind” to CNN segments on America “abandoning men and boys.”She notes that it’s interesting that the media framing is that men and boys are falling behind when in fact, per the previous fact check, men still hoard power in just about every conceivable sector. But it’s almost as though we take it for granted that if someone else is gaining some traction or equality, that someone has to be losing—and that someone must be men!
American individualism has such a strangle-hold that we can’t conceive that equality might actually be better for everyone. Instead, we end up with a moral panic that men are falling behind and must be saved!! From anything less than…total domination, apparently?
(The whole podcast ep is v good and gets into the Jordan Peterson of it all, and gives a a couple shout-outs to me and MR too—woot!)
But wait, you say. Men are lonely and boys are falling behind scholastically, right?
What’s the deal?
Men hold so, so much power in our patriarchal culture. And yet they are not thriving within patriarchy. Why should this be?
Actually, both women and men have become more lonely according to recent research, though headlines tend to emphasize male loneliness. But men are now nearly four times more likely to die by suicide than women. Between 2020 and 2021, data show an 8% uptick in suicides for young men of ages 15-24, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One in 10 men experiences anxiety and depression (for women it’s one in three—actually much higher), but only half of men will receive treatment for it. Nearly 15% of men under the age of 30 say they don’t have a close friend, according to 2021 data from AEI’s Center on American Life.
Boys and young men are more likely to be suspended from school, and they have falling graduation and college completion rates.
Why are men and boys failing to thrive, then, if they hold so much power as a group?
Well, for one thing, because billionaires and politicians are weaponizing “masculinity” to consolidate their own power and massive fortunes, not to actually share it with the bruvs. They thrive on the inequality they create and it hurts everyone, including men. Under capitalist patriarchy, individual men only get proximity to power, not much power to improve their lives (wait and see if Musk and Trump bring back “car jobs”…don’t hold your breath, my dudes!)
And also, because the masculinity that these guys are performing and advocating for makes men miserable. As sociologist Michael Kimmel writes: the modern American construction of masculinity is one that is impossible for the vast majority of men to live up to, much like beauty standards are constructed for women.
The American concept of “masculinity” has become a test for boys starting when they are very young, that subjects them to constant scrutiny of other men and boys, and opportunities for humiliation and violence if they fail to perform, Kimmel explains.
“Failure to embody the rules [of manhood] is a source of men’s confusion and pain..it is unrealizable for any man. But we keep trying, vainly, to measure up. American masculinity is a relentless test.”
(BTW I have to note here that Kimmel himself was accused of sexual harassment by several grad students after being celebrated as a feminist scholar for publishing this work—the effects of modern masculinity are wild, y’all!)
If you don’t think the manosphere’s version of masculinity is miserable, look no further than Zuckerberg himself.
describes Zuck’s three-hour quest for manly validation on the Joe Rogan show with perfection:“You can admit that you originally invented FaceMash because your chosen skill set (coding) wasn’t sufficient to make the alpha bros at Harvard think you were cool. You thought making a website where guys could be jerks to girls might do the trick. And in one sense it did, but in a deeper sense it didn’t at all. You’re a middle-aged man now, and not only are you still seeking approval from the frattiest guys in the world, but now you also have a fiduciary responsibility and a VC-mandate to grow, grow, grow, whatever the psychic cost.
What’s your end-game here, my guy? The chain’s not working, but that’s beside the point. Discussing whether or not the chain is working implies a world in which the chain could work, a world in which the performance of masculinity is actually a game to be won.”
If you’re one of the richest guys to ever live on Planet Earth, and you’re still looking for manly validation by wearing gold chains, and impressing manly men by talking about MMA and hunting wild pigs with bows and arrows—who can live up to this standard of masculinity? Who would even want to?
Nothing is as damning a testament against this construct of “masculinity” than these dudes themselves, and their bizarro empty lives with no concern for any living thing. Imagine having all the power and money in the world, enough to spend in 1,000 lifetimes, and being so empty that you do absolutely nothing for humanity.
Zuck, you could literally be Bruce Wayne! You could actually be cool! We are all daring you to do it!
The saddest part is that this brand of masculinity is exactly what harms men and boys—though patriarchy and the broligarchs want us to believe that it can save them.
As
mentions in her podcast, the mainstream media runs headline after headline saying that men are struggling or “falling behind,” but never unpacks why. , author of the book “Boymom,” has spent years researching the ways that society conditions boys, including her own young sons. Whippman’s research find that boys need more compassion, not strident discipline. They are “touch-starved” and need hugs and “positive touch” that validates their feelings and models vulnerability for them. Instead, from as young as kindergarten, little girls get these things, but little boys start getting cut off.The things that would boys and young men to connect are discouraged, where aggression is rewarded—which drives them away from everyone, including each other. These subtle messages “teach boys to ‘man up’, cutting them off from vulnerability deep connection, and intimacy,” writes Whippman. Which then follows them into their adult lives.
It should go without saying that when men suffer, women suffer. And vice-versa. Our lives are totally bound up with each other. But patriarchy has taught us for so long that male dominance is better for men (and better for everyone) that we fall for this trick again and again. Inequality harms all of us. Violence harms all of us. Disconnection harms all of us.
Male grievance wants us to believe that patriarchal capitalism is great for guys, but the evidence is literally everywhere that it’s just not. It makes all of us less happy, and less free.
Bonus reading:
“Zuck’s initiation into manhood” by
“Girls can be anything, but boys will be boys” by
“Why aren’t we talking about the real reason that male college enrollment is dropping?” by
“Why did we think we could beat the manosphere?” by Allison Lichter
If you’re loving MR, give us a like please share it with a friend!
Last call: You can join us in calling out male grievance and the manarchy throughout the year for a mere $39 for an annual paid subscription! (That’s only $3.25 a month!)
Paid subscribers get access to subscriber chats, all our interviews and thoughtful essays, book club, and other paid content that helps keep us sane in these times. Discount ends January 21st.
I have to say that the emphasis on the word “lethal” to describe the military made my stomach hurt. So much for conceiving of the U.S. military as a peace-keeping force, or giving service. Too feminine, I guess!
A small plea to pretty please bring back the iPhone 13—the only one small enough to comfortably fit into most women’s hands and pockets, and the only one I didn’t fumble and drop on the floor regularly.
YES, this grievance administration is gobbling up everything — the money, the rights, the attention, the air in the room. I literally feel my chest tighten just looking at photos of Pete Hegseth, for example, not to mention the gaslighting he and his team did during his testimony. I wonder how to keep breathing through all this!
I wonder: what does it do to young men to be so left out of the discourse on women's reproductive rights and rights to live in an unpoliced female body? How does this deep gender inequality shape their relationship to their own bodies? And, more specifically, how do they relate to their own capacity to cause pregnancies when this state can potentially prove so dangerous for their female friends?