Is Masculinism Holding MAGA Together?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Offline with Jon Favreau

Episode Title: Is Masculinism Holding MAGA Together?
Air Date: June 6, 2026
Host: Jon Favreau (Crooked Media)
Guest: Helen Lewis (The Atlantic)
Producer: Emma Ilech Frank

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Helen Lewis's Atlantic article, “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet,” which reveals how masculinism—a reactionary movement seeking to reverse feminist gains and reassert male primacy—has become a crucial unifying force in the American right and the MAGA movement. Jon and Helen discuss the history, present dynamics, aesthetic, and political implications of masculinism, as well as how the left and broader society could more productively respond to legitimate male grievances.

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Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. What Is Masculinism? (03:40–05:55)

• Definition:
  • Masculinism is described as “a kind of reaction to or a counter movement against feminism. It's about reasserting the primacy of men and also saying that feminism went too far.” (Helen Lewis, 03:53)
  • Differs from sexism and misogyny, as it's not necessarily driven by hatred but by the belief that society should be organized in a way that prioritizes traditional gender roles.
• Ideology vs. Prejudice:
  • “This is an ideology, right? This is an intellectual movement.” (Helen Lewis, 05:03)
  • Its proponents often claim it would benefit women, not just men.

2. Masculinism as the Glue of the MAGA Coalition (05:08–08:21)

• Helen asserts that, with the exception of Trump himself, “masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right” (Emma Ilech, quoting Helen Lewis, 05:08).
• Every faction—pastors, podcasters, influencers—agrees on the necessity of traditional gender roles, even when divided on other issues.
• “The one thing you probably can't be is a radical feminist.” (Helen Lewis, 06:53)
• “You don't need to” talk openly about gender since dog whistles and cultural coding do the work (Helen Lewis, 07:33).

3. The Subtlety and Aesthetic of Right-Wing Masculinism (08:41–10:48; 22:35–23:05)

• Attacks on male Democratic candidates (e.g., James Talarico) often manifest as coded gender insults—“real men eat barbecue and girls and gays ... are vegans.” (Helen Lewis, 08:49)
• Masculinism is both ideology and aesthetic: muscular imagery, Roman avatars, the “Spartan” vision of the military (Helen Lewis, 22:40).

4. Historical Roots and Evolution (09:34–12:37)

• Traces roots to Phyllis Schlafly and the backlash to 1970s feminism and Roe v. Wade.
• Trump’s 2016 election intensified and mainstreamed masculinist rhetoric, especially after beating Hillary Clinton.
• The “future is female” culture and the MeToo movement spurred male backlash and feelings of lost status. (Jon Favreau, 12:18–12:37)

5. Masculinist Grievances: Empathy, Zero-Sum Thinking, and Male Victimhood (31:11–35:18, 36:51–37:33)

• Key belief: empathy is a feminine (and therefore, allegedly, a societal weakness).
• “Elon Musk ... does little rants about ... the hard men of Gondor ... and that’s like Tommy Robinson and other kind of provocateurs.” (Helen Lewis, 31:30)
• Stephen Miller and others argue for a worldview defined by “force and strength and power,” dismissing cooperation and diplomacy as feminine.
• The Duke lacrosse false accusation is a touchstone, fueling the idea that “men are more at risk from false accusations of rape than women are from rape.” (Helen Lewis, 37:12)

6. Contradictions and Performative Masculinity (25:11–29:15)

• Online masculinist influencers’ personas differ from real-life encounters—politicized posturing frequently becomes insincere or theatrical.
• “There's a kind of WWE aspect to all American politics now. People are playing the heel in quite a lot of situations.” (Helen Lewis, 27:35)
• Even among hardliners, lines are drawn—Doug Wilson criticizes Nick Fuentes for being “vulgar,” while his own barbed language is seen as “literary.”

7. Religion, Empathy, and ‘Rambo Jesus’ (38:00–40:12)

• Helen, from a Catholic background, contrasts the “hippie Jesus ... blessed are the meek” with the American evangelical preference for “Rambo Jesus” and Christian Nationalism that merges patriarchal politics with faith.
• Andrew Tate’s embrace of Islam for its perceived patriarchal qualities is noted as an ironic twist.

8. Impact of Masculinist Ideology in Policy and Power Structures (17:40–22:57, 55:40–58:14)

• Doug Wilson (homeschooling, “household voting,” Christian Nationalism) is highlighted as an influential intellectual architect with growing political ties.
• Pete Hegseth, as Secretary of War, blocks promotions for women and pushes masculinist military culture.
• MAGA women like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Caroline Levitt navigate the movement with less real influence—often relegated to hype-woman or maternal roles. (56:13)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On coding masculinity:
  “Men should be manly in this very narrowly defined way, and women should be feminine and not too ambitious, all of that kind of stuff.” (Helen Lewis, 06:30)

• On empathy as weakness:
  “Doug Wilson has a podcast called Man Rampant ... the first episode is called the Sin of Empathy ... Elon Musk quite often does little rants about the hard men of Gondor...” (Helen Lewis, 31:24)

• On the zero-sum worldview:
  “Every negotiation there is a winner and a loser, and you bully people until you make sure that you are the winner and that everything is zero sum.” (Helen Lewis, 35:36)

• On masculinity and the left:
  “I think Obama is a good example ... somebody who has been married for a long time, clearly massively respects his wife, thinks that having a smart wife is something that you boast about, right? It’s not something that makes you feel less of a man.” (Helen Lewis, 48:14)

• On performative vs. sincere extremism:
  “It’s one of the things ... you have to acknowledge the posting of it all. And so much of politics is now posting.” (Helen Lewis, 27:10)

• On the overreach and political danger:
  “You do end up with people like Fuentes saying things like women should be put in gulags and that will be something people get asked about for years ... and a lot of women ... at that point, there’s already a big voting gap.” (Helen Lewis, 60:35)

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Important Timestamps by Topic

| Time | Topic / Section | |-----------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:40–05:55 | Defining masculinism and its difference from sexism/misogyny | | 05:08–08:21 | Masculinism as unifying force in the right/MAGA | | 09:34–12:37 | Historical antecedents: Schlafly and the 1970s, post-2016 backlash | | 17:40–22:57 | Profiles of movement leaders: Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth and policy implications | | 22:35–23:05 | Masculinism as aesthetic and culture | | 25:11–29:15 | Online personas vs. real-life interviews; performativity vs. sincerity | | 31:11–35:18 | Empathy as a ‘sin’; zero-sum logic; masculinity’s limits | | 38:00–40:12 | Christian vs. masculinist visions of Jesus; Andrew Tate & faith | | 43:42–47:20 | Acknowledging real male grievances & how the left could respond | | 48:14–49:47 | Obama as alternative masculine role model | | 55:40–58:14 | The place and limits of women in MAGA/masculinist movement | | 58:34–60:53 | Overreach phase: when overt bigotry becomes politically costly | | 60:53–62:20 | Public reactions to sexist rhetoric; why overt bigotry can backfire |

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Conclusion: Risks, Overreach, and the Opposition’s Opportunity

• Helen concludes that masculinism is now in an “imperial overreach” phase, where open misogyny risks political backlash ("the mask has slipped"). (58:14)
• She argues that being openly rude or dismissive towards women—even if it’s framed ironically—is ultimately dangerous for the right, as “Americans don’t like overt bigotry. I don’t like overt evil.” (59:29)
• For the left, there is a productive space in modeling a relaxed, secure masculinity that isn’t obsessed with dominance or constant gender anxiety.

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Closing Thoughts

This nuanced conversation provides a detailed look at how masculinism functions as a potent force undergirding MAGA ideology, the evolution and dangers of performative masculinity, and the challenges—and opportunities—it presents for opposition politics and society at large.

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[Summary by Podcast Summarizer — Full transcript reviewed, content-only sections highlighted for accuracy and natural flow.]

Transcript

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[Helen Lewis]

And that's the thing I think is that I think Democrats could embrace is that I don't have anything to prove. Like, that's the state you get to

[Emma Ilech]

with your masculinity, that actually, you know

[Helen Lewis]

what I do, I like sports, but I also enjoy watching films or like, I'm a dad and actually having kids

[Emma Ilech]

means a lot to me and all

[Helen Lewis]

that kind of stuff. That's all there. And that I think does begin to look powerful in contrast to what you see sometimes on the maga side, which is guys in, like, heavy makeup and,

[Emma Ilech]

you know, like, hairspray saying that it's

[Helen Lewis]

gay to eat soup, right? Like, I just think that shout out

[Emma Ilech]

to Jesse Waters, right?

[Helen Lewis]

But like, that just begins to look really weird, doesn't it? Like, you just think just maybe just eat the soup and like, have sex with whoever you want to have sex with.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, Helen Lewis, staff writer at the Atlantic.

[Emma Ilech]

Helen just published a provocative piece that really breaks new ground on the post 2024manosphere debate. It's titled the Men who Want Women to Be Quiet. And it's all about the voices on the right giving rise to masculinism, a

[Jon Favreau]

movement that's trying to reverse the advances

[Emma Ilech]

of feminism and reassert the, quote, primacy of men.

[Jon Favreau]

You're likely already familiar with some of the figures in the movement, your Andrew

[Emma Ilech]

Tate's, your Nick Fuentes's, and many of the names we've talked about on this podcast express similar beliefs.

[Jon Favreau]

But in this piece, Helen goes deeper

[Emma Ilech]

and speaks with many of the so called intellectuals and leaders of the movement,

[Jon Favreau]

many of whom have direct ties to senior MAGA officials, even as they speak

[Emma Ilech]

openly about repealing women's right to vote,

[Jon Favreau]

to run for office, or even to make the most basic decisions about work and life. Helen and I had a great conversation

[Emma Ilech]

about the misogyny at the core of

[Jon Favreau]

the MAGA movement, how the influencers profiting off this movement prey on young men, and the ways these right wing grievances are now bleeding into electoral contests across the country. We'll get to that conversation in a minute. But before we do, if you want to support independent pro democracy media pushing

[Emma Ilech]

back against the tide of the Andrew Tate's and Nick Fuentes's of the world,

[Jon Favreau]

consider subscribing to Friends of the pod. As a friend of the pod, you get access to subscriber only shows like Pod Save America, Only Friends, all of our great substack newsletters, and you get ad free episodes of all your favorite crooked media podcasts, including this one. Head on over to crooked.com friends to subscribe.

[Emma Ilech]

All right, here's Helen Lewis. Helen, welcome to Offline.

[Helen Lewis]

Thank you very much for having me.

[Jon Favreau]

You recently wrote a big piece for

[Emma Ilech]

the Atlantic about masculinism.

[Jon Favreau]

Is that how we're saying it? Masculinism?

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, you can say masculism if you want.

[Emma Ilech]

Which masculism?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman coinage. But I went for masculinism because I

[Helen Lewis]

think it gives the idea that the

[Emma Ilech]

people who are behind this would say this is a kind of reaction to or a counter movement against feminism. It's about reasserting the primacy of men and also saying that feminism went too far.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I was going to say, I

[Emma Ilech]

was going to start by asking how you define it and how it's different from sexism or misogyny.

[Helen Lewis]

Well, those are quite narrow things.

[Emma Ilech]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

In the sense of sexism, I would

[Emma Ilech]

say, is the belief that women are inferior to men in whatever way you want to say. Misogyny is kind of the weaponized version of that. Like that's hatred of women.

[Helen Lewis]

This you could have no hate in

[Emma Ilech]

your heart for women. You would just believe that society should be organized in a different way.

[Helen Lewis]

And one of the things that, you

[Emma Ilech]

know, I try and do in my work, it's hard, but I think it's good intellectual discipline is try and argue with the best version of your opponent's case. Right. Say this is what these people think that they're doing.

[Helen Lewis]

They think society would be better organized than this. They think it would be better for women. Right.

[Emma Ilech]

They think women would be happier living in a patriarchal society.

[Helen Lewis]

So they think that they're doing this

[Emma Ilech]

on behalf of women. It's not motivated by hatred or fear.

[Helen Lewis]

So I wanted to use that more

[Emma Ilech]

neutral term essentially from the start, just to say this is.

[Helen Lewis]

And also to say this is.

[Emma Ilech]

This is an ideology, right? This is an intellectual movement.

So you make a big claim in the piece. Here's a quote. 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. So masculinism, in your telling, more important force than immigration or fighting wokeness or fighting the left or Donald Trump himself on the right. Why do you think it is the most important force uniting all these factions?

[Helen Lewis]

Maybe not more important than Donald Trump?

[Emma Ilech]

Because I think the way a lot

[Helen Lewis]

of MAGA functions is that essentially by

[Emma Ilech]

deferring to the strongman leader, you avoid having a lot of arguments. There are a lot of situations in which, what do we think about this? We think whatever Donald Trump thinks about it today, and if he thinks something different tomorrow, we'll think something different tomorrow.

[Helen Lewis]

So let's put him aside. But it was very obvious to me that as I was writing it, the

[Emma Ilech]

MAGA movement is split along a number of fundamental different ways. The question of Israel, obviously a really important one. Foreign policy, but also the tariffs have upset a lot of people who are essentially protectionist.

[Helen Lewis]

And the regulation of tech. We've just seen the executive order on

[Emma Ilech]

regulating AI go through after an intense back and forth. David Sacks, the AI czar, seems to have been involved in that. There are countervailing forces within that Trump White House.

[Helen Lewis]

But the thing that absolutely everybody, the

[Emma Ilech]

kind of table stakes, the price of emission, I think absolutely everybody agrees, is that traditional gender roles are best. Men should be manly in this very narrowly defined way, and women should be feminine and not too ambitious, all of that kind of stuff.

[Helen Lewis]

So to me, it just seemed to

[Emma Ilech]

be that you can hold all kinds of views and still be kind. Call yourself a member of maga.

[Helen Lewis]

The one thing you probably can't be

[Emma Ilech]

is a radical feminist. I would say that would be tough to accommodate that in however big the tent currently is.

It is interesting, though, that of all the other issues, this is probably like. I agree that it is. It's the glue that sort of holds it all together, but they don't speak about it as publicly or openly as Some of the other issues, they talk about immigration all the time. They talk about there's fights over the war in Iran. There's everything you hear from the White House. They don't talk a lot about women and women's roles, like specifically. Certainly the people that you talk to in this piece do. But what do you make of the fact that that didn't come from the politicians themselves?

[Helen Lewis]

That's interesting. I think they almost don't have to because we all have such a keen sense of gender politics and things can be so coded that you almost don't need to. I mean, you mentioned immigration.

[Emma Ilech]

And just to go back to that,

[Helen Lewis]

one of the things that's very interesting

[Emma Ilech]

is that a lot of the kind of maga manosphere crossover influences aren't white.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, Myron Gaines are fresh and fit.

[Emma Ilech]

I mentioned the pieces. Sudanese American. Andrew Tate is mixed race. He has a, I think black British father and a white mother sneako who's featured in the Louis Theroux documentary.

[Helen Lewis]

And, you know, Trump made big gains

[Emma Ilech]

with young black men and young Hispanic men.

[Helen Lewis]

So there's something that's slightly more complicated

[Emma Ilech]

going on with immigration. And I do agree with you that it's a very big binding force in that coalition.

[Helen Lewis]

But the reason I think that gender

[Emma Ilech]

doesn't get talked about up front is because you don't need to.

[Helen Lewis]

So to give you an example, I've

[Emma Ilech]

been just watching a lot of the

[Helen Lewis]

clips about James Talarico.

[Emma Ilech]

I was gonna ask about that.

Yeah, right.

[Helen Lewis]

But it's a very obvious example. So James Talarico, the Democratic contender for

[Emma Ilech]

the Senate nomination in Texas, running against Ken Paxton, who has a scandal list as long as your arm, there is essentially no positive case to make for Ken Paxton. And so they've gone out very early, very negative against James Talarico.

[Helen Lewis]

And you know, saying that he's vegan,

[Emma Ilech]

ought not to be gendered. Right. But it is. It's like real men eat barbecue and girls and gays, you know, are vegans.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, to the extent that Arnold

[Emma Ilech]

Schwarzenegger made a whole documentary for Netflix,

[Helen Lewis]

which is very good about eating vegetarian

[Emma Ilech]

food and how healthy that is for you.

[Helen Lewis]

And he did two things, and I

[Emma Ilech]

noticed at the time, one, he called it a plant based diet because you can't say vegetarian cause that's for girls and gays.

[Helen Lewis]

And two, he said how amazing it

[Emma Ilech]

was for like bodybuilding and how strong your erections would be.

[Helen Lewis]

So it was basically like, don't worry,

[Emma Ilech]

men, you can eat vegetables and nothing bad will happen to your Masculinity.

[Helen Lewis]

And so that's what I mean is I don't know if it needs to be surfaced because there are just so

[Emma Ilech]

many dog whistles that then do invoke ideas about gender.

How and when do you think masculinism sort of became this dominant force organizing the political right? Was it Trump's election in 2016? Was it before that? Was it after that? Like, trace the evolution for us?

[Helen Lewis]

That's a really interesting question. I mean, I probably go back even

[Emma Ilech]

further than that and back to Phyllis schlafly and the 1970s. You know, the second wave of feminism was this incredible flowering of both consciousness raising and crucially, also legislation.

[Helen Lewis]

Right? That's when you start to get things

[Emma Ilech]

like the ruling on equal rights, you know, things like the demands for equal pay.

[Helen Lewis]

And then that bleeds into the third

[Emma Ilech]

wave and worries about sexual harassment.

[Helen Lewis]

But there was essentially this huge feminist swell, and so there was a need

[Emma Ilech]

for a right wing woman figurehead to lead the charge against it. Right?

[Helen Lewis]

There wasn't. There was a feeling that what you

[Emma Ilech]

couldn't do is have a bunch of dry old dudes telling women to get back in their box. That would be kind of unpleasant.

[Helen Lewis]

So you found this new kind of

[Emma Ilech]

organizing that Phyllis Schlafly did, and, you know, the. The Backlash to Roe vs. Wade is a really big part of that, Like a really energizing issue that attempts to speak to right wing women, particularly as mothers, and forge this new idea of what it means to be a right wing woman.

[Helen Lewis]

So I would go back almost to

[Emma Ilech]

that, really, and the fact that

[Helen Lewis]

it is quite hard to succeed, obviously, even

[Emma Ilech]

now within the Trump White House, the number of women who've been pushed out of that White House is, I think, really striking, actually.

[Helen Lewis]

I'm not sure that they are necessarily

[Emma Ilech]

the least competent people objectively, but they have been far more expendable than some of the other people in there.

[Helen Lewis]

So I think I would probably trace

[Emma Ilech]

this particular version of the kind of right wing masculinist movement back to the 70s, even as far back as that.

[Helen Lewis]

But obviously given enormous impetus by the

[Emma Ilech]

election of Trump the first time around in 2016, when we had the whole grab by the pussy. Is that locker room talk? Is that just how men talk? And Democrats are actually missing something by saying that's a standard we should hold politicians to.

[Helen Lewis]

And you see that all the time now. And actually you see it from Democrats, too.

[Emma Ilech]

It's kind of essentially Graham Platner's argument in Maine is like, this is just how guys talk. And Democrats who don't get that, who have these politeness standards that's kind of feminine and weak?

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it is.

[Emma Ilech]

I mean, so many of these movements, be it a backlash to racial progress or this are a backlash to some perceived loss of status or, or, you know, someone else's rights being advanced. And I feel like with around 2016, you get it's not just Trump, but it's Trump beating Hillary Clinton in that race. And I think, you know, you talk about this in the piece a little bit too. In the 2010s you have the future is female. And like, do you see sort of where the culture went in the 2010s as part of what accelerated the masculinism movement sort of post Trump's election?

[Helen Lewis]

I think so, because I think there was a feeling that women had grabbed

[Emma Ilech]

the microphone during that time and they

[Helen Lewis]

were getting, you know, from the perspective of being a, you know, a feminist writing through it. The MeToo movement was, you know, it was a, it felt like lots of people had had stories that they had been sitting on for, often for decades

[Emma Ilech]

in some cases that they were now felt empowered to speak.

[Helen Lewis]

But then I think sometimes that was

[Emma Ilech]

read as being very privileged, women getting to speak. You know, why are we hearing from all these Hollywood actresses? You know, you're getting paid millions per film. Do you really have anything to complain about?

[Helen Lewis]

And then there was a feeling from

[Emma Ilech]

some men that actually they had things that were wrong in their life. And like, why doesn't anyone want to

[Helen Lewis]

hear about the things that have happened to me? And at the same time, I think you're right. There was a genuine progress. I mean, the majority now, for example,

[Emma Ilech]

of medical students in the US Are female.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, you have colleges that are

[Emma Ilech]

actually putting their thumb on the scales essentially for affirmative action for men in some humanities courses, because they, they, you know, there is, that is, that is the group that doesn't really want to go and do higher education in those subjects.

[Helen Lewis]

So definitely there was a situation where it was felt that like men were

[Emma Ilech]

falling behind, and that was something that you kind of weren't allowed to talk about.

[Helen Lewis]

And always say, as ever, with politics, seeing everything as a zero sum game,

[Emma Ilech]

well, if we're talking about women, then we must not be talking about, about men.

[Helen Lewis]

But I, you know, the wit, the bit I would concede, and I did talk about this in the piece, I do also think that I talked to

[Emma Ilech]

a lot of parents, liberal parents, who said, I feel like my son, my young son, my 12 year old, 14

[Helen Lewis]

year old is being made to feel

[Emma Ilech]

like he's carrying this kind of original sin around with him. Like, you know that masculinity is inherently toxic.

[Helen Lewis]

And actually that's not really a message

[Emma Ilech]

that I want to give to my kids.

[Helen Lewis]

We have all of these children's books

[Emma Ilech]

that are about like brave, sassy heroines.

[Helen Lewis]

Well, hang on a minute. Do we have brave, sassy boys?

[Emma Ilech]

Is that a thing that you're allowed to have now?

[Helen Lewis]

And so I do. That's the bit I think I do

[Emma Ilech]

have a lot of sympathy for.

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Emma Ilech]

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[Jon Favreau]

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[Emma Ilech]

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[Emma Ilech]

You talk to a wide range of prominent feminism haters for the piece. Who are some of the most influential figures that a lot of people don't know about but probably should.

Well, I start off with Douglas Wilson, who I think is really influential because he was massive in the American homeschooling movement in the 1990s.

[Helen Lewis]

And I think that's one of those things that if you were outside it,

[Emma Ilech]

you wouldn't have really any interaction with it.

[Helen Lewis]

But he has built himself this mini

[Emma Ilech]

empire in Moscow, Idaho, which is a publishing company and a streaming platform and

[Helen Lewis]

he's written a zillion books and you know, he has, his son in law

[Emma Ilech]

is involved in the liberal arts college there, he's involved with the school there. Right.

[Helen Lewis]

Like he has thought about every single

[Emma Ilech]

way that you would get your message out.

[Helen Lewis]

And in the old days it was

[Emma Ilech]

through, you know, Leaflets and books about homeschooling kids. Now it's through streaming platforms, you know,

[Helen Lewis]

so I think he is really incredibly influential, and he's only really become someone

[Emma Ilech]

that people have talked about in the last couple of months because he's Pete Hegseth's past. Well, he's the founder of the denomination to which Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, belongs to.

[Helen Lewis]

And, you know, his views are.

[Emma Ilech]

How do I describe them?

[Helen Lewis]

I think in the piece, I describe

[Emma Ilech]

them as uncompromising, which is a lowball.

Wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, right?

[Grainger Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

He wants to bring about household voting, for example. He's described his political views as paleo Confederate.

[Emma Ilech]

He's described himself as a Christian nationalist, a theocrat, a patriarch.

[Helen Lewis]

He believes that St. Paul and other

[Emma Ilech]

people in the Bible laid down the view which is the man is the head of the household and a woman's role is to support him. And he would like to move back to an America where that is the

[Helen Lewis]

case, you know, and he has been in. In February, he went into the Pentagon

[Emma Ilech]

to preach to them at the invitation of Hegseth.

[Helen Lewis]

And one of the things that he said was, you know, I want you

[Emma Ilech]

to be uncompromising Christians, unashamed Christians at work.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. So, you know, this, again, is somebody who doesn't believe in the separation of church and state.

[Emma Ilech]

He wants a Christian America.

[Helen Lewis]

And he's, you know, he's legitimately entitled to. He's pulling every lever he can to

[Emma Ilech]

achieve his political vision, but it is a very distinct one and a minority

[Helen Lewis]

one, and what people, a lot of

[Emma Ilech]

people could see as an extreme one.

[Helen Lewis]

So, to me, that was really interesting

[Emma Ilech]

to write about somebody who has both got a very specific ideology and has thought quite deeply about all the ways to advance that ideology.

[Helen Lewis]

I think if you're someone who opposes

[Emma Ilech]

that ideology, you really need to know about that.

I was thinking about Doug Wilson because there's just so many stories about the Trump administration and so many outrages for the last 10 years, but especially in the second administration. So I remember hearing about Doug Wilson and Pete Hegseth, but, you know, reading your piece again, like you said, he led a prayer service at the Pentagon. And then you've got Hegseth, who has moved to block the promotion of female officers and opposes women in combat. And he's faced allegation of sexual misconduct, abuse, harassment, violence towards women. He's now running the military, asking our troops to pray for victory in Jesus's name in the war in Iran. Why do you think the Wilson connection and hegseth's views, which could be described as a form of masculinism, just not as maybe loud or specific as Doug Wilson's.

[Jon Favreau]

Why do you think that hasn't been

[Emma Ilech]

a bigger topic of public debate?

[Helen Lewis]

That's a really good question. I mean, I think again, it's a bit like some of this stuff is the kind of sea that we swim in. I think that, I don't know, it's odd maybe to reference stand up comedians, but the staple of every hack stand

[Emma Ilech]

up comedians act is a kind of like little light battle of the sexies humor. Like, you know, why are women like this kind of stuff?

[Helen Lewis]

So I just think there's a kind of soup where it is still more

[Emma Ilech]

acceptable to say things that are sexist,

[Helen Lewis]

you know, sexist in a kind of

[Emma Ilech]

slightly ironic way than maybe some other things.

[Helen Lewis]

So in the case of. But. And I also think that, you know, the military is an interesting wedge issue because I think.

[Emma Ilech]

I don't know what the polling is. I'd be interested to see it, but

[Helen Lewis]

I would imagine that a relatively significant

[Emma Ilech]

minority of the American population are a bit uneasy about women in combat roles.

[Helen Lewis]

Actually not, as far as I can

[Emma Ilech]

tell, a particularly controversial thing within the military itself. But it's something that lots of people outside, including lots of women, you know,

[Helen Lewis]

feel maybe they actually do have a

[Emma Ilech]

few questions about it.

[Helen Lewis]

So I can see why that is a kind of. That's a really potent issue. But it's also, you're right, like, he.

[Emma Ilech]

Pete Hegseth has a very particular vision for what he thinks an army should

[Helen Lewis]

be that is actually weirdly kind of pre Christian.

[Emma Ilech]

Right. It's almost, it's sort of Spartan, it's kind of pagan. Right.

[Helen Lewis]

He just, he thinks they should all

[Emma Ilech]

be kind of strapping, I think, oiled, beardless warriors and they should look a certain way.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Emma Ilech]

And there's a kind of an aesthetic to it.

[Helen Lewis]

And that's the other thing.

[Emma Ilech]

I'm not sure I brought this out

[Helen Lewis]

enough in the piece, but I think it's part of it is that masculinism is a.

[Emma Ilech]

Is an aesthetic too.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. You can, you can, you know, it's. It is.

[Emma Ilech]

It's the bodybuilding pictures and the Spartans and the Roman statue avatars on Twitter. And like there are all these kind of, you know, cultural signifiers that it, that it has kind of. It's got an aesthetic of its own.

[Helen Lewis]

In the same way that the MAGA

[Emma Ilech]

aesthetic is now kind of gold leaf and AI slop, there is also a very distinct Maga masculinist aesthetic.

Yeah, it's just, I was, I'm like, I'm trying to imagine a similar case where a pastor, someone who's Defense secretary or any cabinet secretary, and they belong to this pastor's church, and the pastor comes in and leads a service and the pastor has a view that we should segregate black and white Americans again or, or even like that Israel shouldn't have a right to exist.

[Jon Favreau]

Like, these would be controversies that we

[Emma Ilech]

would be talking about quite a bit, particularly in the segregation case. And you're right, I guess that maybe because it's partly aesthetic, maybe because we, like you said, we just swim in these waters and we're used to it, it just doesn't quite get the same level of attention. It's just wild to me.

[Helen Lewis]

I also have a kind of slightly

[Emma Ilech]

spicy theory that I'm sure will get

[Helen Lewis]

me in trouble, which is, I think

[Emma Ilech]

a lot of middle class men don't believe that middle class women actually face sexist oppression. Right. I don't think that they think that

[Helen Lewis]

sex is a, you know, women like,

[Emma Ilech]

of their class, they think that they are kind of pampered and they do. All right, they're willing to believe that maybe if you're a migrant woman, it's hard or what, whatever it might be, or women in Iran have it hard, but they don't think that essentially their girls, you know, their girlfriends and wives have ever suffered any real, real disability due to being, being a woman. So I think there is also that kind of feeling that the sexism on its own is just not real in some bone deep kind of way.

[Helen Lewis]

And actually maybe I think it sometimes bleeds out into.

[Emma Ilech]

Actually, isn't it easier to be a woman? Because, you know, you get men that are chivalrous and they buy you dinner and they open doors for you and, and they look after you. So I think that may also be part of it.

[Helen Lewis]

But it's also understood in this ironic way, isn't it? So Doug Wilson says, you know, I

[Emma Ilech]

want to take the vote away from women, but only maybe in 200 years. And that's understood to be kind of cute. Whereas I think if someone said, I want to bring back Jim Crow, but only in 200 years, not now, people

[Helen Lewis]

would be at that point people would

[Emma Ilech]

be out essentially in a way that they're not out. This is understood to be kind of, you know, kind of funny and ironic and cutesy in a way that I don't think we apply necessarily to other injustices in American history.

Well, the other dynamic Here that I think is fascinating in your piece is the difference between who some of these men are online and how they express themselves online and how they are in person. Like, when you spoke to them, could you talk a little bit about, like, the sort of the difference between their Persona when you actually interviewed them versus what you see online?

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, I mean, this may be partly me.

[Emma Ilech]

I'm.

[Helen Lewis]

I'm. I'm.

[Emma Ilech]

I'm quite okay with interpersonal conflict. It doesn't bother me.

[Helen Lewis]

In fact, I managed to when I interviewed Jordan Peterson in 2018.

[Emma Ilech]

Now, he went on Joe Rogan afterwards and said I was animus possessed, which is a Jungian term meaning that I've got, like, too much masculine anger in me and I'm not properly feminine.

[Helen Lewis]

And that's probably.

[Emma Ilech]

Probably true. It's probably fair enough, actually.

[Helen Lewis]

But, you know, real compliment I would take.

[Emma Ilech]

Right. But apart from that, it was a

[Helen Lewis]

great night out at the theater.

[Emma Ilech]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

But, you know, I think it's. It's one of the things when you're a journalist that you should be able to do. Right. You should be able. If you want to challenge someone, you

[Emma Ilech]

should be okay saying it to their face. You don't need to hide behind the keyboard or the screen, you know?

Yeah.

Say it to their face.

[Helen Lewis]

But I. But that is quite rare. And I, you know, so I didn't go into these conversations looking to pick fights with people, but I was kind of willing to challenge them and say

[Emma Ilech]

that, you know, I disagreed with them or I disagree.

[Helen Lewis]

And actually, most people don't want to

[Emma Ilech]

fight with you on Zoom in that way.

[Helen Lewis]

But I think that's really fascinating. I mean, I mentioned in the piece,

[Emma Ilech]

Joel Webbin, who is a very hard. Right. Pastor, thinks, you know, there's LGBTQ mafia and posts about Jewish sodomites and all this kind of stuff.

[Helen Lewis]

And, you know, he was polite. I've interviewed men who've interrupted me far more like, he listened to me very thoughtfully.

[Emma Ilech]

He called me ma', am, you know, all of this kind of stuff.

[Helen Lewis]

And then you go away and you look at his Twitter feed, and it's, you know, it's Jewish sodomites and the LGBTQ mafia. And it's just so. I think you have to. When you're writing these stories about modern

[Emma Ilech]

politics, you have to acknowledge the posting of it all.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, right.

[Emma Ilech]

And so much of politics is now posting.

[Helen Lewis]

I mean, the Democrats have started to

[Emma Ilech]

do it, too, with the performatively, like, telling Stephen Miller that he's ugly. And, like, you know, everybody now just does the kind of insult comic routine.

[Helen Lewis]

But. But that's not how most people live

[Emma Ilech]

their actual lives, for sure.

[Helen Lewis]

So, you know, and I think it's.

[Emma Ilech]

People struggle with it.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. Because the performativity doesn't mean that there

[Emma Ilech]

isn't also sincerity underneath. But you have to acknowledge that some of this is a. There's a kind of WWE aspect to all American politics now. People are playing the heel in quite a lot of situations.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Emma Ilech]

I was gonna ask because obviously it's hard to get into these people's minds, but, like, how much of the nastiness is. Do you think is sincere belief? How much is performance? And maybe most importantly, how much does that even matter?

Yeah. Does it even really matter?

[Helen Lewis]

I don't. I'm of the feeling that it.

[Emma Ilech]

That it doesn't. You should take responsibility for all of your words, whether or not you meant

[Helen Lewis]

them, because some people will think that you meant them. Right.

[Emma Ilech]

And they might make decisions acting on them.

[Helen Lewis]

But. But it was really interesting to talk to Doug Wilson, who has called women.

[Emma Ilech]

Let me get you the list. Small breasted biddies, Jezebels, lumberjack dykes.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, he's just.

[Emma Ilech]

He blogs like a kind of 2000s insult blogger.

[Helen Lewis]

To hear him say, oh, I think

[Emma Ilech]

that the way Nick Fuentes talks about women is repulsive. You know, he doesn't talk about women the way that, you know, Jesus said, you know, talk about women like they all crown and St. Paul.

[Helen Lewis]

And he doesn't do that. And I said to him, well, how.

[Emma Ilech]

Hang on a minute.

[Helen Lewis]

This is what you're doing too. But, but in his mind, he is

[Emma Ilech]

doing, you know, he's doing a bit, essentially.

Yeah.

And he's being elegant in his insults and they're to, you know, to some extent to be understood in this kind of literary referential way, whereas he thinks, you know, Nick Fuentes is actually kind of vulgar and gauche. And that was. That was just a really interesting moment to me, that you would have somebody who uses that kind of language, who makes a point of saying things that are deliberately offensive, but then they would still say that. No, no, he's really offensive. Nick Fuentes is really offensive.

Yeah. I guess you always need someone who's more extreme than you to appear a little bit more reasonable to others, I guess.

[Helen Lewis]

Well, it is a huge problem for that section of the.

[Emma Ilech]

Right. The appearance of Nick Fuentes.

Yes.

[Helen Lewis]

And, you know, he caused a massive split at the Heritage foundation, which may

[Emma Ilech]

be the most influential MAGA think tank because of his comments about the Holocaust and Jewish people.

[Helen Lewis]

And you watched A section of the right which has made a fetish of

[Emma Ilech]

never condemning offensive comments, being cool with everything, suddenly try and find the way to articulate, oh, no, this is actually our red line.

[Helen Lewis]

And they really, really struggled to the

[Emma Ilech]

extent that lots of people left the Heritage foundation for Mike Pence's think tank, because Kevin Roberts would not condemn those remarks.

[Helen Lewis]

And that to me was really interesting. Again, first of all, that they didn't condemn Nick Fuente as saying that all

[Emma Ilech]

women should be put in breeding gulags, which seems like a fairly extreme opinion to me.

[Helen Lewis]

But also that they struggled so hard

[Emma Ilech]

to find a way to say, you can't say that, because so much of that bit of the right is built on saying, that's feminine. You know, that's nagging.

[Helen Lewis]

That's Karen stuff.

[Emma Ilech]

That's the HR department. Won't you not say that? You know, if you come with us, you can say whatever you like, and

[Helen Lewis]

then you get somebody who really doesn't, who goes past the self appointed rules,

[Emma Ilech]

and then they're kind of completely stuffed.

One detail in your piece that really stuck out at me was the title of Doug Wilson's first podcast episode, the Sin of Empathy. And you also talk about a marketing professor who rails against suicidal empathy. This is something that's been on my mind for a while because I've seen Elon Musk talk about this a lot, that empathy is suicidal. And the west is. The Western civilization is dying because of empathy. Why does masculinism need to treat empathy as a weakness? Like what is inherently feminine about caring

[Jon Favreau]

for another person or trying to understand

[Emma Ilech]

where someone else is coming from?

Yeah, so that's. Doug Wilson has a podcast called Man Rampant, which is just a great name podcast. I'm sad that you didn't pick it for this podcast, really, next season. Yeah, the first episode is called the Sin of Empathy.

[Helen Lewis]

And yeah, there's toxic empathy and suicidal empathy. Elon Musk quite often does little rants

[Emma Ilech]

about the hard men of Gondor and how who are they?

[Helen Lewis]

Well, the problem is here I live

[Emma Ilech]

in England, as you can tell from my accent. The problem is we're like the hobbits in the shire.

[Helen Lewis]

And we don't understand that.

[Emma Ilech]

We're, you know, we're facing the orcs, comma, brackets, Muslims, and we need the hard men of Gondor to defend us. And that's like Tommy Robinson and other kind of provocateurs like that.

[Helen Lewis]

So for him, essentially, the feminine problem is that women feel sorry for other

[Emma Ilech]

people, people who present themselves as victims and that is illegal immigrants, refugees, violent criminals who've had a really rough childhood. And they feel sorry for those people instead of recognizing their inherent danger as strong men do. And therefore they let them get away with stuff.

[Helen Lewis]

So that's kind of a bit of Helen Andrews great feminization thesis in her

[Emma Ilech]

essay that women corrupt the law because they rely too much on their feelings and not enough on facts. So they will be sort of soft on crime.

[Helen Lewis]

And again, you can see how it, you know, it narrates perfectly into lots

[Emma Ilech]

of messages that the right already had about the Democrats about not being tough enough on crime.

[Helen Lewis]

And now it takes on this extra

[Emma Ilech]

gendered dimension in which rehabilitating criminals and now becomes feminine for reasons best known to itself and therefore bad or allowing migration is because you feel sorry for people who live in Mexico or Venezuela or wherever it might be. And so you let them in, but you don't realize that actually, you know, they're rapists and they're coming to infiltrate your country.

[Helen Lewis]

So that when you understand that, I did find that a kind of little

[Emma Ilech]

skeleton key for understanding what it is that they're also worried about.

[Helen Lewis]

But it, you know, I think social

[Emma Ilech]

media again plays a part in this.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, they're just a feeling that

[Emma Ilech]

you can sort of numb yourself by just consuming huge amounts of content about the threat that you're under.

[Helen Lewis]

I mean, it's one of the things that I find really fascinating is this is a discourse that is very much about strength. But they appear. There's a, there's a, you know, someone

[Emma Ilech]

did one of those fake Ken dolls that was conservative man, afraid of cities.

[Helen Lewis]

Which, which really made me laugh. Right. I live in London and quite often, you know, you will get American right wingers who are absolutely convinced that this

[Emma Ilech]

is basically Mogadishu on a bad day.

[Helen Lewis]

And you're like, actually, have you looked

[Emma Ilech]

at our murder rate versus a mid sized American city?

[Helen Lewis]

You know, we don't have guns, so it's quite hard for people to kill each other. But they're absolutely convinced that like living

[Emma Ilech]

in a city is the worst thing that could happen to you and are

[Helen Lewis]

afraid of cities, but that for some reason isn't feminine.

[Emma Ilech]

That's not being hysterical and overwrought. That is a sensible level of fear based on a real and true threat.

[Helen Lewis]

And so that was the other thing I was trying to bring out, was

[Emma Ilech]

the immense flexibility of this discourse. Right.

[Helen Lewis]

You find the feeling that you already

[Emma Ilech]

have and then you work back to why it's either masculine or feminine based on Whether you approve of it or

not, basically, I do think it's the skeleton key. And to me, you're where we started about this masculinism being sort of the uniting force among all of these right wing factions makes a lot more sense. It reminded me of Stephen Miller going on TV a couple months ago, and I think he was talking about Iran. He might have been talking about Venezuela, some kind of conquest that they wanted to do. It might have also been about immigration, could be about any of these things. But he said the laws of nature are force and strength and power, and that is how decisions get made. And that is just the world the way it is. That is reality, something to that effect. And it really, to me, that was the dividing line between how they see the world and how they think everyone else sees the world. And this idea that we make laws and international treaties and diplomacy and cooperation

[Jon Favreau]

and we understand other people and we

[Emma Ilech]

try to cooperate, like that whole ideology for them is, is, you know, against nature. It's not reality. And they would say it's feminine.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, it's weak. I think that's exactly right. You have to essentially follow the lead

[Emma Ilech]

of Trump in which every negotiation there is a winner and a loser, and you bully people until you make sure that you are the winner and that everything is zero sum. And like, that's it. Like, you can't possibly have a mutually beneficial cooperative arrangement. No, in that case, you probably, you're the pussy. You've been the one, you've been tricked, essentially.

[Helen Lewis]

The other thing, my colleague Tom Nichols

[Emma Ilech]

once wrote a piece about Trump and

[Helen Lewis]

masculinity, which I thought was really interesting.

[Emma Ilech]

He compared him to the kind of

[Helen Lewis]

World War II veterans that he'd grown up around who had often got Purple Hearts.

[Emma Ilech]

They had often done incredible, brave things under fire.

[Helen Lewis]

And sometimes you didn't even find out

[Emma Ilech]

that they'd done them until they died and they found the medals in the drawer.

[Helen Lewis]

This was an archetype of masculinity that

[Emma Ilech]

was about being a protector, that was being stoic and strong.

[Helen Lewis]

And that's very different. I don't see a lot of protecting in this.

[Emma Ilech]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

And again, but that kind of comes back to the J.D. vance thing about Ordo Amoris.

[Emma Ilech]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

The idea that you only really the only people you look like, you may,

[Emma Ilech]

you care about your family, and that's just about it.

[Helen Lewis]

You admit you care about your nation.

[Emma Ilech]

You certainly do not care about anybody in another country. Like, screw those guys. What do they got to do with you?

[Helen Lewis]

And so, yeah, I think empathy and

[Emma Ilech]

the limits of empathy is. Is absolutely core to understanding that worldview.

[Helen Lewis]

And by the way, Stephen Miller is

[Emma Ilech]

a very good example.

[Helen Lewis]

I don't know if I didn't go into this in the piece, but his

[Emma Ilech]

kind of origin story, his kind of spider man bitten by a spider thing is the Duke lacrosse story, which was a false accusation of rape.

[Helen Lewis]

And that is a kind of key to this mythology too, is that actually that men are more at risk from

[Emma Ilech]

false accusations of rape than women are from rape.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. And actually that's not really true if

[Emma Ilech]

you look at the numbers, but it's

[Helen Lewis]

a very powerful motivating message when you

[Emma Ilech]

find an actual case where their false accusation has been made.

[Helen Lewis]

Because you can say, actually we're having

[Emma Ilech]

the wrong conversation about rape. We should be talking about men and how unfair this is on them.

Yeah, it's interesting because you talk to so many religious folks like Wilson, how they justify defining empathy as a sin when empathy is very clearly at the

[Jon Favreau]

core of nearly everything Jesus says and

[Emma Ilech]

does in the New Testament. Like, what is the theological justification for this? And I know that goes into the JD Vance and the odoramus thing as well, but.

[Helen Lewis]

But yeah, I mean, I grew up Catholic, right?

[Emma Ilech]

My dad is a deacon in the Catholic Church and my mum was an RE teacher.

[Helen Lewis]

And so I went, you know, I

[Emma Ilech]

read a lot of Bible, went to Mass a lot.

[Helen Lewis]

And I was, you know, I was just kind of fascinated by how different our conceptions of Jesus were. You know, the Jesus that I grew

[Emma Ilech]

up with and more in like the European and British tradition is blessed are the meek. You know, like, leave your mother and father and follow me.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, turn the other cheek, you

[Emma Ilech]

know, a new commandment I give unto you, Love one another. All of this kind of stuff.

[Helen Lewis]

Kind of like hippie Jesus, I guess. But like, to them that's not appealing.

[Emma Ilech]

They like Rambo Jesus, who would have been machine gunning the way the stone from the grave with an AK47.

[Helen Lewis]

Right.

[Emma Ilech]

I find it fascinatingly disconnected from the Bible.

[Helen Lewis]

And American evangelical Christianity has got entirely

[Emma Ilech]

its own set of beliefs about Jesus that are for me hard to reconcile with the Jesus of the Bible, but extremely internally coherent

[Helen Lewis]

and actually got to

[Emma Ilech]

the extent where they now identify Trump with Jesus because Trump was wronged, he was betrayed.

[Helen Lewis]

Much as St. Peter betrayed Jesus, so

[Emma Ilech]

did the rest of the Republican Party by agreeing to going along with him not being the candidate or whatever.

[Helen Lewis]

I find it absolutely fascinating. So I did want to bring in

[Emma Ilech]

the Christianity because I think it's a

[Helen Lewis]

really important part of the story it's also one that has a kind of ironic codicil which is that Andrew Tate converted to Islam because he said, and

[Emma Ilech]

I quote, Christianity is a cucked religion,

[Helen Lewis]

right, that it's not patriarchal enough, that

[Emma Ilech]

Jesus is kind of namby pamby and actually Islam is properly patriarchal. And that was much more appealing to him.

[Helen Lewis]

And you know, and I, and I said that to Joel Webbin, the pastor, I was like, you want essentially a

[Emma Ilech]

guardianship system of women.

[Helen Lewis]

That's, that's Saudi Arabia. Not even Saudi Arabia now because now

[Emma Ilech]

Saudi Arabia is liberalizing in, you know, a lesser, greater or lesser extent.

[Helen Lewis]

But actually a lot of these guys, you know, want something much more hardcore

[Emma Ilech]

than traditional mainstream Christianity. And therefore the kind of Jesus of the Bible is sort of slightly, slightly embarrassing to them almost.

He's a problem for them. And it's why a lot of their quotes where they justify some of their views in the Bible, they go to the Old Testament, do you notice?

[Helen Lewis]

Or St. Paul. Right, or St. Paul rather than actually Jesus.

[Emma Ilech]

Because that's, you know, that's where the title of the piece ends up coming from, that women should be quiet. That's St. Paul's advice to godly women.

[Helen Lewis]

But yeah, you know, that is really

[Emma Ilech]

interesting to me at a time when America is becoming less religious that actually the more fire breathing bits of American religion seem to be more resistant to secularization. So you might end up in an

[Helen Lewis]

odd situation in which the kind of

[Emma Ilech]

middle bit of American mainstream Christianity is kind of slowly ebbing away. And what is left are the people who are very strongly theocratic. I could see that trajectory happening.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Emma Ilech]

I want to touch on something you said earlier about you noted some legitimate entry points into masculinism and talking to parents about their boys. And you know, men are genuinely lonelier. That's an issue falling behind, becoming more alienated, I think, from society in a way that's harmful to all of us. So how do you think the left society, everyone deals with this idea that there are legitimate issues that men are facing and that if we roll our eyes at them or ignore them, then perhaps they go down a rabbit hole and find the Doug Wilsons of the world. Like what is the proper way to handle some of these issues and also prevent young boys from sort of following following this path?

[Helen Lewis]

I mean, I'm not a parent so,

[Emma Ilech]

you know, take my parenting advice with an extreme pinch of salt.

[Helen Lewis]

But I do think that often the

[Emma Ilech]

way that we structured schools can be quite hard on boys. So I wrote about this in my first book, Difficult Women. I had a chapter on education.

[Helen Lewis]

And what lots of teachers told me

[Emma Ilech]

was that schools are now structured around essentially the perfect model pupil is the good girl, right, who just sits there, is quiet, does the work, whatever.

[Helen Lewis]

And for lots of boys, it's one of the reasons, I think that maybe ADHD diagnoses are on the rise. They just find school really tough. Like the level of concentration and quiet

[Emma Ilech]

and not burning off their excess energy, really tough.

[Helen Lewis]

And that gets interpreted as behavioral issues. So I think there is a piece there about just being more open to

[Emma Ilech]

the idea that you might need to give boys some latitude.

[Helen Lewis]

Richard Reeves had this idea about letting

[Emma Ilech]

boys start school a year later, right?

[Helen Lewis]

There are. And every so often someone will pop

[Emma Ilech]

up and say, maybe we should let teenagers start school later in the morning.

[Helen Lewis]

We do run schooling in the way

[Emma Ilech]

that is convenient for parents and teachers and maybe isn't actually the best thing for the individual children involved.

[Helen Lewis]

So I think that's definitely part of it. But the other thing is, you know, for all I had to my disputes

[Emma Ilech]

with Jordan Peterson, some of the stuff in his early work I think was really good and useful.

[Helen Lewis]

Like one of the things he used

[Emma Ilech]

to talk about was just self respect and discipline. And this is the kind of where the much mocked, like, clean your room

[Helen Lewis]

stuff, but essentially you would find quite sweet Reddit threads of boys or young

[Emma Ilech]

men saying, like, I've done everything on the thing. You know, there's this girl in my class, I really like her and like, I've tidied up. I've, you know, I've shaved. I've had a shower.

[Helen Lewis]

I've had a shower every day this week. And you think, who needs to be told this? But no one is born knowing how often to shower.

[Emma Ilech]

So it's clearly someone hadn't told them.

[Helen Lewis]

And that stuff I thought was really

[Emma Ilech]

positive, like, make yourself somebody that you respect and then other people will kind of want you.

[Helen Lewis]

And it's one of the really big things, I think, that's causing problems in some other societies where there are mismatched expectations.

[Emma Ilech]

Much more is that women want much more egalitarian relationships.

[Helen Lewis]

And because of feminism, they have the

[Emma Ilech]

means to turn down men who don't offer that. And so men have got to decide essentially whether do you want to hold out for somebody who will be submissive to you in this patriarchal way, or would you like to have a different kind of relationship that makes it Easier to have a relationship.

[Helen Lewis]

I mean, Matt Iglesia suggested, only slightly trolling, that more young men just need

[Emma Ilech]

to be like, pretend to be really, really left wing, given that women are more left wing than like, if it

[Helen Lewis]

really means that much to you to have a girlfriend, consider compromising. Consider like, taking an interest in, you

[Emma Ilech]

know, the clean energy or whatever it is that you're. The girl that you're interested in is also interested in.

Well, I was thinking about the politics of all this, and obviously there's been this sort of long and somewhat interminable debate after the 2024 election about what the left can do to reach young men. And do you think there's a version of, you know, here's what being a good man looks like that makes sense for the. For the left to offer? Or is. Is the whole frame wrong?

[Helen Lewis]

I think there absolutely is. And I think it's one that doesn't have to be a kind of anxious straitjacket, because I find that some of the way that some of the people on the right talk about masculinity is just.

[Emma Ilech]

It's like a constant monitoring. Like, you've just got to keep a grip on it and not do anything that, like women like, you know, in.

[Helen Lewis]

In a way that just sounds to me like deeply unrelaxing and actually oddly young and insecure. You know, I think that's kind of fascinating. I think Obama is a good example of this, right? Somebody who has been married for a

[Emma Ilech]

long time clearly massively respects his wife,

[Helen Lewis]

thinks that having a smart wife is

[Emma Ilech]

something that you boast about, right? It's not something that makes you feel

[Helen Lewis]

less of a man. It's like, look who I managed to land. I remember I went to the DNC in 2024, and it was the night

[Emma Ilech]

that both the Obamas spoke.

[Helen Lewis]

And he said, I'm the only guy

[Emma Ilech]

who has to follow Michelle Obama.

[Helen Lewis]

And it was a really beautiful moment because it was Chicago home crowd they had loved.

[Emma Ilech]

Michelle Obama could not have been happier and really probably more than him.

[Helen Lewis]

But it was cool in that way

[Emma Ilech]

of like, I don't have anything to prove.

[Helen Lewis]

And that's the thing I think is that I think Democrats could embrace is that I don't have anything to prove. That's the state you get to with your masculinity.

[Emma Ilech]

That actually, you know, what I do,

[Helen Lewis]

I like sports, but I also enjoy

[Emma Ilech]

watching films or like, I'm a dad

[Helen Lewis]

and actually having kids means a lot to me and all that kind of stuff. That's all there. And that I think does begin to look powerful in contrast to what you see sometimes on the MAGA side, which is guys in, like, heavy makeup and,

[Emma Ilech]

you know, like, hairspray saying that it's

[Helen Lewis]

gay to eat soup. Right. Like, I just think that.

[Emma Ilech]

Just shout out to Jesse Waters.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. But, like, that just begins to look really weird, doesn't it? Like, you just think just, just maybe just eat the soup and, like, have sex with whoever you want to have sex with. So I think that, like, that level of relaxation is there. I interviewed Gavin Newsom, and he was talking about the fact that.

[Emma Ilech]

How sad he thinks it is that, like, lots of young men haven't asked a girl out.

[Helen Lewis]

I could just. I could do with. I could have a few more stories,

[Emma Ilech]

like heartwarming stories about male politicians on the left talking about how they got together with their partners.

[Helen Lewis]

Like that would be fine.

[Emma Ilech]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

Where it becomes really tense.

[Emma Ilech]

Right. Is when there's a sense of, you know, like, how much about male sexuality is inherently frightening or about dominance.

[Helen Lewis]

And I think that's the bit that's really.

[Emma Ilech]

That's really tough for the Democrats.

You mentioned both of these candidates, so I was going to ask about them, which is, like, it's interesting. We're talking now, and right at this moment, we're having this debate that sort of circles around masculinism with James Talarico, who the right has decided to go all in on saying is not masculine enough. Low. Tyler Rico, six Gender. Jimmy. Stephen Miller called him the Democrats first transgender Senate candidate. And then. Which again. And then on the other side, you've got Graham Platner. And the knock on him is certainly not that he's not masculine enough, but that he represents a more toxic brand of masculinity usually associated with MAGA candidates that the right is pushing, that he represents this. What do you make of both of these dynamics? And one thing that always gets me to think is, okay, if you are a guy running for office, it's like, I gotta be masculine. I can't be too masculine. I can't be toxic masculine. But I can't be called low T. And the right's going to do this. It's a tricky balance.

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

I think you're best served by just

[Emma Ilech]

being your actual personality, whatever that happens to be.

I mean, if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, it doesn't. Yeah, Right.

[Helen Lewis]

And not everybody's. I'm. I'm certainly not cut out for elected office. You know, I. It's not going to happen for me. I'm not you know, I find I would find people quite annoying if I

[Emma Ilech]

had to be nice to them all day. That would be too much for me.

[Helen Lewis]

Like, I'm not going to be a politician. But the Talarico thing I think is interesting because there's two separate things I've been thinking about. I spent the early 2000s saying I.

[Emma Ilech]

All this emphasis on language is turning people off.

[Helen Lewis]

It's really weird.

[Emma Ilech]

It's really exclusionary.

[Helen Lewis]

It just makes people think that you're having these semantic arguments about how many

[Emma Ilech]

genders there are and why are we doing this when there's all this other stuff going on in the world.

[Helen Lewis]

The thing I would say about him is the reason that he came to fame is that he went on Joe Rogan and a big source of argument

[Emma Ilech]

about Democrats about doing that.

[Helen Lewis]

So what he isn't. He's not from that bit of the progressive wing of the Democrats that has a very minority set of views on

[Emma Ilech]

language and things like that, and also

[Helen Lewis]

thinks that anybody who doesn't share them

[Emma Ilech]

basically is a bigot who should be shot.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. He's willing to go out there and make. If he thinks there's six genders, God bless him, it's America.

[Emma Ilech]

You're entitled to your views. Go out and argue that.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. The problem that I think that lots of people had during that period and

[Emma Ilech]

people like me had was this feeling that, by the way, the commissar has declared that there are six genders. And anybody who dissents from this, you

know, is do better.

[Helen Lewis]

Right, Exactly. Do better with the claps. But like, so I appreciate. I would like to have an argument with James Talariko about how many genders there are. I still feel like they're probably infinite genders, actually. And probably I think he's right that God is non binary. Like he's God, he's not a person. Why would he. This is. Reminds me of the arguments I used to have with my very Catholic parents in my teens. So I think there's. That stuff is. Is kind of interesting. But so, I mean, winning Texas for

[Emma Ilech]

the Democrats is a massive stretch anyway. So let's be honest, what will probably happen is that he will lose and everybody will say it's because he said all of these things. In 2020, it's probably more likely to be just because he's had a blue rosette on.

[Helen Lewis]

But there should be room enough in

[Emma Ilech]

the tent for people with a wide range of views.

[Helen Lewis]

And if you can. I feel like if you can go

[Emma Ilech]

out as far as Platner on one side and that's.

[Helen Lewis]

And then you should be able to go out as far as Talarico on the other side.

[Emma Ilech]

Platinum's an interesting one because it's someone who clearly throughout most of his life, like sort of did embrace, even though he had pretty left wing views, did sort of embrace the language of a more toxic masculinity set. All kind, I mean, all of his Reddit posts. Right. And now has sort of, you know, at least in his politics over the last couple of years has been much more, at least in the way he talks, much less of the toxic masculine sort of guy. And then you get the sexting scandal and you're like, well, that's more traditional guy who's just behaving.

That's quite bipartisan. Yeah.

Guy behaving shittily. Right. So it is a, it's, it's, that's a curious one to me because I think some people perceive him as the typical toxic masculine guy, but I don't quite know if that's his problem, even though he clearly does have some problems right now.

[Helen Lewis]

I think Josh Barrow identified a very

[Emma Ilech]

big problem and he blumped Fetterman in this group as well, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, which is just the kind of screw up.

[Helen Lewis]

I think he referred to them as

[Emma Ilech]

both being low conscientiousness. And that's the thing.

[Helen Lewis]

And I think that is the real knock on them. James Tallarico, I think I might think

[Emma Ilech]

that he said some very silly things and he might have some disagreements with me.

[Helen Lewis]

What I have not heard anybody say

[Emma Ilech]

so far, I've not heard anyone impugning his character.

[Helen Lewis]

Right.

[Emma Ilech]

By all accounts, he seems to be a decent guy.

[Helen Lewis]

I'm not sure I would be willing to say that about Graham Platner.

[Emma Ilech]

I think he has probably treated people in his life quite badly.

[Helen Lewis]

And the other thing, again, that is gendered, I am not sure that a female candidate with that kind of background

[Emma Ilech]

would get all those passes. No, there is a kind of boys would be boys.

[Helen Lewis]

I was just thinking about the fact that the two most chaotic female Republicans

[Emma Ilech]

I would have said were Marjorie Taylor Greene, now out of Congress, and Nancy Mace, now sort of friendless and influenceless.

[Helen Lewis]

So there is a kind of degree

[Emma Ilech]

of forgiveness of Platner that is very much tied to both him being a man and him having committed very male coded sins in the past. Right. I think that has to be part of that conversation.

What do you think about the MAGA women in this way? Cause you talked about Phyllis Schlafly, but like, are The Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Nancy Maces, like, are they sort of the, you know, 10 iterations away from Phyllis Schlafly on this?

[Jon Favreau]

You've got.

[Emma Ilech]

And you've got, like, Caroline Levitt sort of making the case at the briefing every day. And what does it take to be a MAGA woman in good standing in this world of masculinism?

[Helen Lewis]

I think you've got a couple of

[Emma Ilech]

archetypes that you can play into.

[Helen Lewis]

One of them is the kind of hyper secretary, right?

[Emma Ilech]

The kind of very much the efficient executor of Trump's power.

[Helen Lewis]

And I would put Caroline leave it

[Emma Ilech]

in that group, right? She doesn't set policy on her own. What she does is she goes out and she's the saleswoman for it.

[Helen Lewis]

So there's that kind of archetype, then

[Emma Ilech]

there's the kind of ball buster, and you get kind of honorary man status until you don't.

[Helen Lewis]

And then there's the kind of mother, which I think Susie Wiles has got, has essentially been like, she's the designated grown up.

[Emma Ilech]

And everybody else, therefore gets to act even more like a teenager. Because actually, you know, there's mom who's gonna kind of keep this. You know, she's the one who's gonna make me get to the briefing on time. Oh, what a buzzkill.

[Helen Lewis]

And that's. So that is one, maybe one version

[Emma Ilech]

of kind of authority within that MAGA setup.

[Helen Lewis]

But, you know, I think that we were just talking earlier about the number of MAGA women who've been burned essentially by this, by feeling that they were not respected in the end, that actually

[Emma Ilech]

their voices weren't heard or they weren't really in the power games.

[Helen Lewis]

And I think Trump himself is. There's a phrase that they use in very postmodern graduate seminar, but homosocial, which

[Emma Ilech]

is that actually his primary social bonds are with men. He's interested in what men think.

[Helen Lewis]

He sees himself in competition with men. Women are not massively interesting to him, except maybe as a means of keeping score, like he seems to be. And then maybe this is something he's

[Emma Ilech]

just come to in his later years.

[Helen Lewis]

He seems to be much more interested in how attractive men are than how attractive women are these days, which is, you know, a choice and a reversal from maybe where he was. But it also does speak to what he does, which is he thinks that he is.

[Emma Ilech]

He lives in a man's world, and women are kind of just an adjunct to that.

[Helen Lewis]

I don't feel like he really sees

[Emma Ilech]

himself in competition with women ever. They're people that he would need to beat because by definition, they're not playing the same game he is.

Yeah, no, I get that too. You describe this masculinism as hitting its imperial overreach phase, like the Roman Empire they all idolize. What does that look like in practice? And do you think it starts costing them? Do you think it sort of undermines this, this whole movement?

[Helen Lewis]

I think when it moves beyond the

[Emma Ilech]

kind of disrespect to designated enemy women, that's quite dangerous, you know, and I

[Helen Lewis]

think that that's, that has Trump can be as rude about Rosie o' Donnell

[Emma Ilech]

as he wants, and that's never going to cause him any problems.

[Helen Lewis]

But the feeling that when people start

[Emma Ilech]

saying overtly sexist, dismissive things about women we like, I do still think that will be a problem for them.

[Helen Lewis]

And I also think that when Twitter

[Emma Ilech]

was Twitter, people on the left got very carried away and said a lot of things that probably in the cold light of day, maybe they don't feel great about.

[Helen Lewis]

And this exactly the same thing I

[Emma Ilech]

would say is happening with the right now on Elon Musk's. Lots of people are saying things out loud that I think in a couple of years time might be when the wind changes again, real millstones around their neck.

[Helen Lewis]

And just ultimately, I don't think that Americans like overt bigotry. I don't like overt evil. And so the coded language of this stuff about, you know, feminism has made

[Emma Ilech]

women unhappy is kind of, you know, framed as kind of concern trolling.

[Helen Lewis]

People regard very differently from she's a bitch.

[Emma Ilech]

And at that point, people are just a bit like, well, it's a bit uncalled for, isn't it?

[Helen Lewis]

You know, I don't know how this went down in America, but certainly in Europe, the way that Trump and Vance treated Zelensky, just that straightforward discourtesy, played really badly here. And I'm not sure how in America

[Emma Ilech]

it played with swing voters.

[Helen Lewis]

I'd be really interested to know. But people do have a very finely tuned sense of like, they don't like rudeness, maybe they like caricatured, campy WWE heel turns. But just like that level of disrespect,

[Emma Ilech]

I think sometimes when it feels uncalled for, I think is still a turn off.

[Helen Lewis]

And I think because of the fact that everybody has got so into their bubble and that, you know, that maga

[Emma Ilech]

masculine sphere is so on the march,

[Helen Lewis]

you do end up with people like

[Emma Ilech]

Fuentes saying things like women should be

[Helen Lewis]

putting gulags and that will be something

[Emma Ilech]

that people get asked about for years and years to come and they will

[Helen Lewis]

either have to say no, I don't

[Emma Ilech]

think women should be putting gulags.

[Helen Lewis]

And then some people will hate that or they'll have to go along with,

[Emma Ilech]

you know, Nick Fuentes is Nick Fuentes

[Helen Lewis]

and a lot of women. I think at that point there's already

[Emma Ilech]

a big voting gap.

Yep.

[Helen Lewis]

Anyway, you know, there was a great piece in I think Buzzfeed in 2016

[Emma Ilech]

about the Ivanka Trump voter. You know, the people who like to vanker Trump because she was the reassurance that this wasn't just a kind of bully boys club and they're in danger of becoming that losing that gloss of irony and awareness against sour faced feminists and lesbians and it becoming oh actually no, the mask has slipped. They actually just don't like women. I think that is still dangerous in American politics.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Emma Ilech]

I remember being surprised even in 2024 that people who do focus groups would say that people would bring up spontaneously without even being asked. J.D. vance's childless cat lady's comment that that was just something that broke through and it's very hard for things to break through and really bothered people. I think Trump's. I think you mentioned this in the piece the quiet piggy.

[Helen Lewis]

That quiet piggy, it's just rude. It's just unnecessary. And the childless cat lady, I think, you know, he obviously thinks it's because it's, you know, it's about Baron Apparatchik,

[Emma Ilech]

that Scott Yenna of the Heritage Foundations phrase.

[Helen Lewis]

But enough people will know somebody in

[Emma Ilech]

their circle who is infertile, not by choice.

[Helen Lewis]

And for them that might be the

[Emma Ilech]

worst thing in their lives.

[Helen Lewis]

Desperately wanting to be parents and haven't

[Emma Ilech]

been able to make that happen.

[Helen Lewis]

And then you just think, well, who's this guy? Like, you know, it just the picking on the minority does not land in

[Emma Ilech]

the way they want to. There's a kind of splash damage around it.

[Helen Lewis]

And then that does become something I think the same thing you see with. Do you see the congressman who deleted his tweet about how he wants to he wants to get rid of Pride

[Emma Ilech]

Month and have nuclear Family Month and

[Helen Lewis]

will eliminate homosexuality for America. And I was really interested to see that. Oh no, a staffer posted that because again, open overt homophobia is still something

[Emma Ilech]

that makes people recoil in America.

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Saying the quiet part out loud does

[Emma Ilech]

seem like it could be what, what, what saves us.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. But Trump always get Trump. Traditionally Trump has got away with it because he says outrageous things in a

[Emma Ilech]

kind of campy Liberace w WWE way

[Helen Lewis]

and JD Vance does not have access to that register. There is nothing about J.D. vance that says I'm fun.

[Emma Ilech]

This is show business.

[Helen Lewis]

It just comes up.

[Emma Ilech]

No subtlety. No subtlety.

[Helen Lewis]

And nasty.

[Emma Ilech]

Yeah. And unnecessary, as my mother would say. That was unnecessary. J.D. vance.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Emma Ilech]

This is why Rubio is catching up to him in the invisible primary right now. Helen Lewis, thank you so much for joining. This was a fantastic conversation about this and really appreciate it.

[Helen Lewis]

Thank you very much.

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is a crooked media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilech Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer and Anisha Banerjee is our associate producer. Audio support from Charlotte Landis. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Matt de Groat is our VP of production. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva, Eric Schutt and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos. Every Friday week, our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America.

[Emma Ilech]

East.

[Grainger Advertiser]

Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.