The Men Who Don't Want Women To Vote
Or work. Or have opinions.
Hello!
Do not adjust your newsletter—I’m dropping into your inbox a day early to tell you about the cover story I’ve written for the latest issue of The Atlantic.
In it, I look at one of the most important intellectual underpinnings of the New Right, which is, simply put, the idea that feminism has made society weak (and women unhappy).
One contention is that politics has been deformed by empathy—which is feminine, and therefore “toxic” or “suicidal”. Another is that men are better suited to political office, business success and religious leadership because their higher levels of testosterone make them risk-takers. Women, by contrast, are the HR managers of the world, always telling you stop that and don’t do this.
This ideology might be called masculinism, and it’s everywhere:
Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex. But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.
Gen Z Boss And A Mini
One story that didn’t make the final edit of the piece, but which I consider to be emblematic of the dynamics here, is the infamous “Gen Z boss and a mini” video.
In this short clip, a group of twentysomething women who work at a skincare company stand in a circle, clapping and identifying themselves by cutesy characteristics—“itty bitty titties and a bob.” The video initially went viral as an amusing example of workplace cringe, but soon hit the masculinist internet, racking up 44 million views on X, where it still provokes fury to this day.
“This is cancer,” reads a typical response. “No wonder modern women can’t get anyone to date them.”
Again, this is a skincare company. I simply do not believe that these women got DEI-ed into their roles over the heads of qualified straight white men! But something about watching young women at work being silly drove some people on the internet absolutely spare1. Cartoons Hate Her wrote a great essay about the dynamics underpinning this outpouring of hatred, framing the gender war as a class war. Women are assumed to be doing well in the modern economy, and that must be at men’s expense. How dare these women piss about and get paid for it while men are lumberjacks?
Or as I write in the piece:
The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”
Beyond The Manosphere
What I wanted to do with this piece is look beyond the “manosphere”, which is often portrayed in sensationalist terms, with a focus on the splashiest, stupidest attention-seekers. (I’m looking at you, HSTikkyTokky.)
There are also serious masculinist thinkers out there, like Charles Cornish-Dale and Helen Andrews, who argue that society is being degraded or even destroyed by “feminization”. There are policy wonks like Scott Yenor of the Heritage Foundation, who wants to introduce workplace discrimination in favour of married men (the “family wage”). And there are pastors like the Calvinist firebrand Douglas Wilson—who wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote—who have moved from the fringes to the uncancellable mainstream.
Not all of masculinism’s ideas are bad or wacky. There’s an argument to be had about the acceptability of single-sex educational institutions (I went to one) even if Yenor’s rationale is that women inevitably corrupt military colleges. American universities did go through a weird cancellation-happy phase at the same time that they massively expanded their (female dominated) bureaucratic apparatus. (Correlation or causation? Who knows.) Testosterone is associated with violence and risk-taking—this was even the argument given by Harriet Harman, once upon a time, for why we needed diversity in boardrooms. “Lehman Sisters”, she argued, wouldn’t have been so reckless.
At the same time, what I found over and over again was vibes-based handwaving presented as “common sense” or “everyone knows this, deep down.” Helen Andrews and I had an interesting exchange over her thesis that the law could not remain interested in justice if it were female-dominated, and medicine would similarly become too touchy-feely to function properly:
Later in the essay, Andrews offered a testable proposition: “If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?” As it happens, the labor economist Revana Sharfuddin has crunched the data on factories in the Second World War—one of the greatest periods of “demographic feminization” in American history—and found no evidence that they became paralyzed by cancel culture and petty HR disputes.
When I asked Andrews about this, she noted that wartime automobile and electrical factories were still essentially segregated by sex, and that even so, some managers hired counselors to help them deal with their new workforce. “For what it’s worth, the counterargument that most landed with me was the example of communism,” she wrote in an email. “Women were well represented in medicine and science in the Soviet Bloc, and their society didn’t collapse—well, it did, but probably not because of the women.”
I found this all incredibly interesting. But this is not the level at which the conversation is happening! The internet rewards tribalism, controversy and sweeping claims. Cornish-Dale’s book The Last Men is elegantly written, but his tweets as “Raw Egg Nationalist” are racially inflammatory and therefore viral. One pastor told me that he saw his internet persona:
“like the Apostle Paul arguing and lecturing in the hall of Tyrannus,” an important period of evangelism for the early Church. When I checked his X feed later, he was talking about “Jewish sodomites” and reposting an account called @IfindRetards.
Gynofascists assemble
The essay ends with a group of rightwing anons on X having a go at anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo, because he won’t agree that white men are the most oppressed group in history: “When he described this view as ‘brain damaged’ and invoked a little-known American phenomenon called slavery, he was besieged with complaints.”
Unfortunately, this is where we are. Masculinism is so popular algorithmically that it has attracted hordes of bloviators, because they can say vibesy things with no evidence, completely unchallenged.
For a recent example, here is U.S. radio personality Adam Carolla explaining to the Triggerlads that “the male brain wants to do stuff . . . women want to talk it out, have a meeting.” This leads to something he calls gynofascism, where the world is going to hell in a handcart because Donald Trump wanted to rebuild the Palisades but LA Mayor Karen Bass (a known woman) wanted to do bureaucracy instead.
This clip is such a rich text. Are we absolutely sure that we want to use Donald Trump as the exemplar of someone who Gets Stuff Done? He can destroy stuff, sure—the East Wing, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and so on—but his record on completed projects is a little bit more sketchy. Meanwhile, the “feminine” coronavirus Carolla hated so much response was led by … Justin Trudeau and Gavin Newsom (and, let’s be honest, official Covid-era president Donald Trump). So not women, then. Just left-wing men, whom you have decreed are honorary women.
Also, Carolla asserts that he has been “saying this stuff for 20 years” — in other words, since 2006, when 3% of S&P companies were led by a woman, and women made up just 16% of Congress. What is the non-zero level of female participation in public life that he doesn’t consider to be gynofascism? And that’s before we get to the sheer joy of three male podcasters (podcasters!!!) sitting around talking about how women just love yakking away without getting anything done.
A Feminine, Nervous, Hysterical, Chattering, Canting Age
During the course of my research, I found this excellent quote diagnosing the problem with the modern, feminized world:
“I am so far from thinking, as you set forth the other night, that there is not enough woman in our general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is--a very queer and partly very base mixture--that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!"
When and where is this from? These words are spoken by Basil Ransom, a character in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. It was published in 1886, back when women didn’t even have the right to vote.
You can read my whole essay here, with this gift link. (I’ve also done the audio version, if you prefer to listen.) And if you’d like to support my work, do subscribe to The Atlantic.
Helen
Inevitable codicil: this hatred was also good for sales. When I asked the brand for an interview on the backlash, their PR pointed me to comments from their co-founder Rachael Wilde in 2024: “We have seen a spike in followers for sure since the video went viral and a huge increase in web traffic to tbh Skincare. We can see that we’ve reached a whole new audience as well, particularly in the US. Since all of this happened we have also launched a “gen z boss and a mini” bundle which offers all the best selling products to newbies as a great place to start with the brand.”
The irony that all the people complaining about ‘feminisation’ are the worst bunch of gossiping *whiners* in existence. When was the last time any of them actually did something constructive? All they do is sit around and whinge about how women are doing all the work!
In the Talmud somewhere it says that 10 measures of speech were given to the world and women took 9. I would often think about this while hangry after synagogue services, waiting for my father to finish socializing so we could go home and eat. My mother was already at home, having hurried out during the last few minutes to get everything ready and laid out on the table.
Men have built up an image of what they think they ought to be. This would be fine as long as they maintained a positive image and worked toward it. Instead, it often devolves into "not a woman" and then they throw everything they consider negative into that bucket and congratulate themselves on at least not being THAT.
I'm not under the impression that in a misty past all men were men and the world was great. There were always failures, and they usually left a trail of female (and child) suffering behind them. But maybe there is something to culture creating a positive image of what a man should be and shoving it down the throats of young men. Because without it, many don't seem to know what to do with themselves.