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- [00:05]
A
This episode is brought to you by Boar's Head. What if we told you the taste of deep fried turkey is now available at your local deli? Well, Boar's Head just did that. Bursting with flavor, perfectly seasoned with that indulgent taste that usually means planning your whole day around it. Presenting the Friar's Turkey breast only from Boar's Head. Backyard tradition now available behind the counter. Visit your local deli today. Discover the craftsmanship behind every bite. Boar's Head committed to craft since 1905, this episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Spring is here, so celebrate it with fresh, juicy seasonal produce and some very tasty limited time flavors. New Whole Foods Market Peach Apricot Rose Italian soda. Perfect for a picnic or brunch, as is their trending Mango Yuzu Chantilly Cake. But if you're on the go, new 365 Strawberry Pretzels make a great sweet snack. That sounds delicious. Get savings with yellow sale signs storewide and everyday low prices on 365 brand items. Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring Save at Whole Foods Market.
- [01:13]
B
Hey everybody, Plain English is going to have one episode next week, the week of Memorial Day. We're going to skip our Tuesday episode and talk to you on Friday. After that, we'll be back to our regular schedule. So just so you know, uh, won't see you Tuesday, but we'll talk to you Friday. In 1920, the US ratified the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. But for the first few decades, women did not vote like a new or individual group. Many of them did not bother to vote at all. When they voted, they typically voted like men. Most specifically, they voted like their husbands. In 1940, the pollster George Gallup said this of women's voting behavior. How will they vote on Election Day? Just exactly as they were told the night before. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, with the rise of modern feminism, this started to shift. In 1980, it changed for good. Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party moved right on a handful of issues that women cared deeply about. The GOP came out against the Equal Rights Amendment, embraced an anti abortion position, and merged with conservative Christianity to criticize working women as an attack on traditional family structure. Reagan won in a walk, but he lost women by 8 percentage points. Only then, the following year, did the Washington Post first coin the term gender gap. That gender gap hasn't gone away. By several measures, it's grown to a double digit dividend. In 2024. John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, told me that while the gender gap is real. It's not the biggest story that explains this divergence in American politics. He said, quote, the parties are more polarized by gender attitudes than by gender itself. If that sounds a little confusing, don't worry. Here's how I explained the distinction two years ago. And I think this is an observation that still holds. Imagine you are standing on the opposite side of a wall from 100American voters that you cannot see, and your job is to accurately guess how many of those folks on the other side of the wall are Republicans. You can only ask one of the following two One, are you a man? 2. Do you think that men face meaningful discrimination in America today? The first question is obviously about gender. The second question is about gender attitudes about how society treats men versus women. And according to John Sides, that second question will lead to a much more accurate estimate of party affiliation than the first. That's because the parties aren't actually fully divided by gender. Derouf. Millions of women vote for Donald Trump every time he comes up on the ballot. Instead, the parties are now sharply divided by their cultural attitudes toward gender roles and the experience of being a man or a woman in America. Republican men and Republican women both think that men are getting a raw deal in this country, just as Democratic men and Democratic women both tend to think that that's a crazy idea. It's not men are from Mars, women are from Venus. It's Republican men and Republican women are from Mars. Democratic men and Democratic women are from Venus. The glue tying together the conservative movement is not just a fondness for Trump or low corporate tax rates. It is a nostalgia for traditional social hierarchies that protect men and manliness from the perceived left wing forces of wokeness and toxic feminism. Writing for this month's cover story for the Atlantic, today's guest, Helen Lewis, calls this emerging ideology that unites the right masculinism. It is the right's answer to feminism. And if you cannot understand the origin of or the nature of masculinism, Helen says, you will not understand modern American politics. So as someone who thinks modern American politics is a mystifying shit show that I definitely do not understand, I really wanted to ask my old colleague Helen to walk me through her reporting, her analysis, and the way she sees the 21st century as being divided between one gender war or another, I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Helen Lewis, welcome to the show.
- [06:11]
C
Hello. Thank you for having me.
- [06:13]
B
Everybody knows the word feminism, but in your new cover story in the Atlantic, you introduce or talk about A phenomenon that you call masculinism. What is masculinism and what makes this a new idea as opposed to just a retread of traditional chauvinism?
- [06:31]
C
Right. To some extent it is just simply anti feminism. It is a belief that feminism has gone too far, that American life is now skewed too much in favor of women, that, you know, men are discriminated against. But it's also. I wanted to use it, it's not a new word. It's been around since at least the 1990s. But I wanted to get beyond the idea of the manosphere. So we've heard a lot about the manosphere, which people tend to regard as like influencers and slightly shock jocks, you know, your Andrew Tates or whoever it might be. But I wanted to say that behind that is a really serious intellectual movement that encompasses quite a lot religious elements being America, but also people working in think tanks, for example, or online commentators working pretty high brow magazines. These are some serious arguments. And what's new about it is it is the glue holding together maga, which I hadn't kind of really thought about before until I talked to Laura Field, who's wrote a brilliant book called Furious Minds, which is tying together all the different strands of American online. Right. The Claremont Institute people, the post liberals, the social conservatives, the people worried about birth rates, all of this kind of stuff. That MAGA coalition, as we're now seeing, has got some pretty big divides across it, right? Very divided on Israel, divided on free trade versus protectionism, divided on big tech and whether or not it's good. But the one thing they can basically all agree on is that traditional gender roles are better, feminism has gone too far and that public life has become feminized and they don't like it and they would like to turn the clock back on that.
- [07:57]
B
What is this phenomenon reacting to most recently? Because some of these phenomena that you're talking about, the rise of feminism, even something like working women, these are old phenomena. These are, you know, 50, 60, 70 year old phenomena. What is this newest instantiation of masculinism responding to?
- [08:16]
C
Yeah, when I was doing my research for this, I found a quote from the Henry James novel the Bostonians in which one of the characters complains about we now live in a hysterical, canting, chattering age where, you know, like, men are not being risk averse enough. And it was, it could have come from one of these masculinist manifestos online. Now, I think the immediate reaction is to the 2010s and to that very. I hated it at the time. My first book, Difficult Women, is kind of a reaction to this. It starts off with me getting very cross about a children's book about one of those little people, big dreams books. And this one's about Coco Chanel. And it was like, coco Chanel, a fashion designer, she set up her own business. Wasn't it amazing? You go girl, and you're like, well, she confiscated the business from her co owner, who was Jewish under the Nuremberg laws. And she very probably slept with a Nazi officer and was a collaborator during the second World War in order to keep hold of her business. Hooray. Feminism. It was this sort of like, you know, feminism empowered by everything a woman does. I think that was the Onion headline. But there was this really shallow corporate version of feminism, right? You actually, to take it up to date, Chanel under Karl Lagerfeld did have a little catwalk show where they all held the future is female signs while wearing $5,000 tweed jackets. It was seen as being this kind of feel good, uplifting the future is female, aren't men crap kind of, you know. You know, sort of. It wasn't because it didn't really feel like a grassroots social movement. It felt like a marketing technique, but it clearly it rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. And I think you can see masculinism as the reaction to that.
- [09:51]
B
Could you go a little deeper on why you think it rubbed today's masculinists the wrong way? Because the story that you just told about the way in which, say, 2010's feminism, in an attempt to uphold a kind of girl boss theory of everything, had to whitewash the story of Chanel in order to make her seem like a hero. But I can't imagine that there's a lot of modern Republicans that are, like, significantly averse to the whitewashing of Chanel. They're reacting to other strands of this phenomenon that you're putting your finger on. And so could you just go a little bit deeper into talking about what strands of 2010 feminism you think this is a response to?
- [10:37]
C
I mean, I think some of it is really about the vibes, you know, and we're also talking about the era of social media in which it became trivially easy to start a cancellation campaign. You know, the first one I can really remember was like, cancel Colbert, which was, I think, over, like, an anti Asian joke he'd supposedly made. And, you know, it now just became an easy way to kind of just rampage across the Internet saying that somebody had committed a sin against some particular progressive shibboleth that maybe had only really existed for like 10 minutes. But that's a technological change and a kind of economic change. Right. Because the companies involved didn't have to respond to those things, but they did. Right. You had this situation where companies would just panic because 5,000 people on the Internet had started a hashtag. And I think that's the kind of thing that if you look at some of the, like an anti DEI activist like Christopher Rufo, now they're reacting to that level of kind of power. They also want it for themselves, you know. And the same thing I would say is probably true of, you know, anti discrimination laws. There is a feeling that during this time, actually people started acting in unconstitutional ways. They wanted to massively increase the number of, say, you know, minorities in adult education or women in higher education. And the way that they did that was by janking the hiring procedures and explicitly favoring women, which in America is unconstitutional. It's sex discrimination. And some of these people appear to have been stupid enough to write that down. And so I think we're now seeing the kind of fallout of lawsuits from that. So there was this feeling that the system was rigged, which again speaks very deeply to lots of anti establishment voters. And the feeling was that it had been rigged in favor of particularly college educated women away from non college educated men. And that's not a completely ridiculous thing to think because you can give me the figures, I'm sure better than I can remember them, but college educated people of both sexes have done much better in the last 20 years than non college people. So you have a situation in which lots of these gains have happened for women. And actually non college educated men have not seen the same uptick in prestige status and wages during that time. So there is a kind of class dimension to this too.
- [12:46]
B
You said about 15 things that I want to react to, but I think I'm going to have to save a lot of those reactions for the second part of this interview because I really want to understand specifically what these men are saying. And I think the best way to do that is to talk about two men in particular. One of them is Douglas Wilson, the other, Nick Fuentes. Let's just start with Douglas Wilson, because he's probably the least or the lesser famous of the two, at least among liberals like me. Who is Douglas Wilson? What is he saying and why is he important?
- [13:17]
C
So Douglas Wilson is now in his 70s. He's been around for a really long time writing a blog since the 2000s. He went on a lecture tour with Christopher Hitchens where he was the kind of fire breathing Calvinist and Hitchens was the new atheist. And he's got an empire in Moscow, Idaho, which is like a publishing house, a streaming platform. He's the head of a congregation of churches, evangelical Protestant churches with 170 churches. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, is notoriously like one of his congregants. He was invited into the Pentagon to talk to people there. And part of the thing that he said is that they needed to be unembarrassed, unapologetic Christians at work. His vision of the US he's been very explicit about this. He wants a theocracy and he specifically wants a Protestant theocracy. So bad news for Catholics, you don't even make the cut in the Doug Wilson world. But he thinks we should have household voting in the US So if it's a married household with families, then they should have one vote that they all decide on in practice. That will probably disempower women. He thinks that really the evils of the Confederacy were overstated. He's written that fairly obviously. And he also believes in this biblical concept of headship. So this is to get a bit niche into the divisions in American evangelical Christianity. But there are different ideas about how men and women fit together. So there's complementarianism, the idea that men and women are different, but they have equal roles. And then there are people beyond that who are flat out patriarchs. They probably call themselves biblical patriarchs and they believe, following St. Paul in his letters, he has this injunction that women should, quote, unquote, be quiet. You know, women shouldn't preach in church. So for them, it's actually quite spicy that Trump, noted feminist Donald Trump has a female spiritual advisor in Paula White. Right. This is actually quite horrifying to some of the American evangelical patriarchs because they don't think that women should ever give spiritual teaching or ever teach. They believe very firmly that a woman's place is, is secondary to a man. And so Doug Wilson has been saying this stuff for a really long time, but the reason that he's getting so much attention now is because he is being invited in to talk into government branches. Now, I'm not American. I can't give you chapter and verse on the separation of church and state, but having somebody who preaches theocracy come and tell people in the Pentagon that they should be more Christian at work feels to me quite, quite borderline, really.
- [15:44]
B
And now Nick Fuentes, and in describing the politics of Nick Fuentes. I would love you in your answer to also be specific about the way that his ideology is not the ideology of Douglas Wilson. They have very different views on some issues and yet they share this sort of. They're connected by this underground river of masculinism as you define it. So tell me about Nick Fuentes and his connections to Wilson.
- [16:12]
C
Well, so Nick Fuentes is a Gen Z viral superstar. He's been banned from a whole bunch of social networks for being too offensive. But in the modern era, that's not really a problem. He gets a lot of money by people super chatting him. This thing where you're live streaming on Rumble or wherever it is and people directly send you money and people send him money to get shout outs, whatever it might be. So he's got a direct relationship with his audience. That means he doesn't have to at all moderate what he says. And, you know, he is a Holocaust denier. He's pretty openly anti Semitic. He is a Christian nationalist. He is, at 28, a sort of proud virgin. You know, he says, you know, he thinks women are kind of disgusting. I mean, the bit that I quote in my piece is that he says all women should be put in breeding gulags, right? They should be sent to the gulags and then the good ones should be let out because, and this is his rationale, Hitler locked up his enemies. And actually our enemies are women. And like, when you say that, it's almost so luridly misogynist that it's supposed to be like there's a level of pantomime villain about it, right? Everybody involved in this knows to some extent that this is a kind of WWE style performance. But that doesn't mean it's not serious too. It doesn't mean it doesn't have real world effects. Doesn't mean that people have a, you know, don't have a right to be offended by it. Now, he is broadly unpopular. Even the latest polling showed that even with young Republicans, like he's, you say he's a polarizing figure. He's actually a pretty unpopular figure. But he has acquired this kind of, I don't know, there's a sort of outlaw glamour about him that he has become the way for young college conservatives to kind of signal to each other that they are open to dangerous ideas. And I guess you and I probably both have a complicated relationship with this, right? Because I've spent the last decade of my career saying perhaps the left has become a bit stifling in ways we should be More open to discussing things that blah, blah, blah. But what you see on the maga right, with Nick Fuentes is a movement that has been entirely built on that. The Democrats are scolds who will always tell you, don't say this and don't say that. And a total inability, therefore, to deal with somebody who comes out and says things that are just flatly, outrageously racist. And so he went on Tucker Carlson's show a couple of months ago and said all the usual stuff. Tucker gave him a very softball interview and said, you're speaking a lot of sense, essentially. And this became a real, real problem because the Heritage foundation, which is like the most influential MAGA think tank, the president of that, Kevin Roberts, was like, well, you know, we don't agree with everything, but he has got a right to say it. And some quite influential Jewish conservatives went, I'm sorry, what? He has got a right to say that the Holocaust didn't happen and if it did, it was a good thing. I don't think that's actually true, is it? And so you watched, you know, lots of people then left Heritage. They went to Mike Pence's think tank instead. It was a real moment of kind of, this is a movement that's prided itself on not having any red lines. How on earth do people within that then try and say, well, actually, no, hang on, this one, this one is a red line. But notably, he never gets any pushback on his sexism. There's this real. I think there's a real. For the conservative women, there's a real pressure to be kind of cool with it, to prove you're not one of those naggy, scoldy woke women.
- [19:22]
B
You use the word unapologetic to describe both Douglas Wilson and Nick Fuentes. And I think that's a very interesting word because there's a psychological layer to the era of woke and the era of anti woke. In a way, I think you could make a responsible argument that the era of wokeness was about making the winners of society feel, let's call it appropriately guilty, right? That men should feel appropriately guilty, whites should feel appropriately guilty, the rich should feel a little bit guilty, even maybe shame. America should feel guilty about the story of our founding and our history. And I see the era of anti woke in many ways as being a kind of guilt jubilee, right? The same way that a debt jubilee means all the debts are forgiven. A guilt jubilee says all the guilts are forgiven. You can be unapologetic about being a man, about being white, about being rich, about being an American, about being anti woman, about being a little bit racist, about using the word, I hate to use it. But retard, in this context, quoting here, rather than jumping at the opportunity to use, is this philosophy of guilt jubilee, that it is good to be unapologetic in the context of fighting back against the hall monitors of the left. And I wouldn't myself think to make a connection between guilt and feminism, except there is a writer who makes that connection very explicitly and you spoke to her. It's Helen Andrews in this other viral essay called, I believe it was called the Great Feminization. This idea that America, the West, modernity, has been feminized, has been brought down to this state of hall monitor guilt finding shame filled weakness. And I would love you to speak to this thesis of the Great Feminization because even though on the one hand it's just an essay, I do feel like that essay went viral because it made concrete something that wasn't formally said before, which is that it is feminism that is responsible for this regime of guilt that the left tried to register over American society for the last 15 years.
- [21:44]
C
Well, it's more even than that, right? Because it doesn't matter if you're a woman, what your ideological underpinnings are under the Great Feminization thesis, just by being female psychologically, there is a problem with you and that if you are allowed to run amok in politics, the law and academia, you will inevitably ruin it with your psychological defects. That's the argument. The Great Feminization. One of the examples that Helen Andrews gives is the law. And she says essentially women have a surfeit of empathy. They don't seek truth. And that is a problem in the law, it's a problem in academia because they want to do research that makes everyone feel good about themselves rather than coming to uncomfortable conclusions. I think it spoke to people. You can't deny it did. Like there's something about the vibes of it that spoke to a lot of people. My problem with it has been that when you try and look into the individual claims, they kind of like you can't really touch them. Like they just sort of, they're smoke, like, you know, and if you're in a very smoky room, you can definitely tell that it's happening, but you can't. There's nothing you can actually touch or point to. So a very good example, she cites this other very influential essay about the Longhouse by a guy called Lomas who was writing under a pseudonym. And this is the theory that the feminized society is like a communal dining hall in some unspecified society ruled by a den mother in which everybody is kind of bitchy and backstabbing and passive aggressive, and instead of having proper arguments with each other where, you know, they're maybe settled by violence or whatever it might be, everybody just snipes and bitches in that stereotypical way we have like, of an all girls school. And there are a couple of issues with this thesis, right? One of them is that he declines to name any specific society that this might have been the historical example for. I was like, was this the Vikings? What are we actually talking about here? The other thing someone pointed out to me recently, ostracism, right? Which is this idea that they say is quintessentially feminism. Do we know what society that came up with that concept of ostracism as a punishment, Right? The word comes from ostrakhan, which these tablets that you write the name of somebody you want to ostracize on. That comes from classical Greek, which was a society in which women were extremely firmly second class citizens, right? They were not allowed to vote, not allowed to work, just not at all in charge of the ostracism. So you've come up with this idea that this is like all of these things are down to a female dominated society, but they happen in male dominated societies too. So then you move into this much more vibesy thing where actually even men can be feminized. So actually the problem is that Democrat men are also feminine. So hang a minute. What are we saying now at this point? So Gavin Newsom, because he was too tight, he kept locked down for too long. That was weak and feminized. The manly thing would have been to just let all the old people die or whatever it might be. And it's kind of. It's just basically it always. There's a saying that they had in feminism, which was a woman's place is in the wrong. And it just seemed to me that a lot of it was reverse engineered from here's something that I don't like. Therefore I'm gonna make the argument that it's. That it's feminism, that it's feminine. And yet I just. For that reason, and also that people have been making these exact complaints since there were far fewer female CEOs I reference because it's in both the Longhouse and Helen Andrews essay. The ousting of Larry Summers as president of Harvard. That happened at a time when 4/5 of the tenured faculty, so the people in positions of Power and security in that university were mentioned. So if this terrible feminization can happen when women are only 20% of tenured faculty, what level of women in public life isn't a threat to civilization? Those are the kind of slightly hard empirical questions that I'd like to ask. I think it's perfectly legitimate to say, do male and female judges hand out differing sentences? That would be an interesting piece of research. I'm not aware that it exists. Maybe the conclusions would be pretty horrifying for my side of the argument that believes that we have kind of universal values. Maybe female judges are just letting off criminals because they feel sorry for them and they think that they probably didn't have enough love. Great. In that case, that would be a useful piece of information. We could act on that. We could change sentencing guidelines. We could do all that. There are policies that we could enact to do that. But at the moment we're kind of all coasting on vibes, basically these deep intuitions we have about gender that actually are just things that people feel. And this is from the side of the argument that said facts don't care about your feelings. Well, let's just have some more facts then.
- [26:03]
B
Right. So we have spoken up to now mostly about vibes, about writings, about essays and arguments on streaming video. I want to move from thinking of masculinism as a shock jock movement to analyzing it as a policy frontier, as something that is really making contact with reality. You point out this movement is not only popular among young men. I believe you reference a study. Yes, from the Manhattan Institute that 83% of Republican men under 50 think society is too feminized. In addition, it has real policy goals and policy initiatives. Tell me a little bit about the policy agenda of this movement.
- [26:47]
C
Right, so some of it is about bringing back single sex educational institutes, for example. So Scott Yenner, who's now at the Heritage foundation, doesn't want military colleges to be co edited. He thinks that that inevitably leads to them becoming kind of weak, non enforcing discipline. And also that there would be a kind of male martial spirit that would help men develop as men that is being compromised by having women around the place. It's an interesting argument. I don't think it's an illegitimate one to make and explore. I mean, I went to a single sex school. You know, girls schools turn out to be pretty good for girls because they don't have boys hogging all the attention. But like, so these aren't, you know, these aren't completely ridiculous questions to ask. Beyond that though, There is a kind of whole vision of Society. And Project 2025, again from the Heritage foundation, this blueprint for a second Trump administration is pretty explicit about that. Right. It envisions the perfect society is the male breadwinner and the female homemaker. And in order to accomplish that, there are a whole range of policy asks. So you get rid of no fault divorce, right? You bring back the idea that the party who is responsible for the divorce is penalised in some way. You know, you may be bringing married tax breaks to make it easier for couples to transfer between them their tax allowances, making it easier for women to stay at home. So you move more to family incomes than individual incomes. Ditto the same things that Scott Yenner has suggested in other contexts. Right? He's suggested this idea of the family wage, which is essentially, you could pay married men more for the same job as single people or married women, to encourage, again, that breadwinner model bias in hiring and promotion for married men, to encourage a society where that is the model that was widely established among white families in the 1950s in America and kind of bring that back again. I mean, one of my many problems with this is a. I believe that I actually, like, I take the old fashioned liberal view that, yeah, you can have some arguments about not wanting to have bias, affirmative action, I totally understand those, but this is just affirmative action in the opposite direction. As far as I'm concerned, it's affirmative action for men. But also the fact is that people could live that lifestyle now if they wanted. Right? There isn't. You know, if people want to take a massive hit to their income, they can arrange their own families in a breadwinner, homemaker way. It's just that people would rather live in the nicer suburb, go on holiday, have a car, like all of that kind of stuff. Every society where this has become a real choice, women have opted for economic independence. Because you only have to go back and read literature from the 1800s to understand why that would be. You know, when I was working on my book on feminism, I read about all these women who had had, you know, nine babies and four of them had died and, you know, and they didn't know how to feed if another one, if another one came along. Or the women whose husbands, you know, were supposed to come home with a pay packet on a Friday night, but they stopped off on the pub or at the bookies and they gambled it and they drank it and, you know, their children and their wife were kind of very secondary to it. There is a reason why women are not content to put their fates in the hands of male partners. And that is not even so much like lots of people who are making that choice wouldn't even describe themselves as feminists. Right. They're just people who have this now modern conception of themselves as an individual economic actor. And I feel like those policies are deeply unpopular and if they were exposed to the scrutiny of the glare, most Americans don't want them. And so what you see is a kind of range of ways to kind of smuggle things that are, you know, on the road towards them. In the same way that you had this wave of anti abortion activism before Dobbs that was all about making abortions harder, like raising the gradient, so you had to have the heartbeat scan, so, you know, it was harder to get the license for the pill, so you couldn't do telemedicine, all that kind of stuff. So there's a similar thing going on with this vision of society that these masculinists have, where they're just kind of trying to raise the gradient basically on the type of life that people are choosing to have.
- [30:50]
B
You write in your piece that, quote, almost every facet of contemporary online rightism can be refracted through the prism of gender. End quote. I'm really interested in how you see this philosophy holding together the disparate parts of Trumpism, because I just had this conversation with Ross Douthat about how there's many ways in which the modern Republican Party as it's constituted, doesn't make any sense as a unified whole. You have people, for example, who are staunch isolationists, who are Republicans. You have people who are staunch neoconservatives who think we should bomb the hell out of Iran, who are also Republicans. Those ideas don't live alongside each other, but they can be glued together if they share a philosophy about the world. And it seems like the biggest argument that your essay is making is that this is the glue. An element of masculinism is the glue that holds together the dominant party in America. So I'd love you to just explain how and why you think that's the case.
- [31:48]
C
I think it's by rendering the kind of establishment that's keeping you down as being feminine or female. And that applies in different ways. Right. If you are a non college educated guy, then it's about the fact that college educated women are doing better than you. And is that really fair? Why are those women's wages going up? You do a hard job. So I can see how that's appealing to somebody who works in a manual industry, for example, if you're a think tank guy, then maybe in your very patriarchal conservative, then having a female boss might be kind of horrible and alienating to you, might feel emasculating. So it appeals to those people. If you don't like bureaucracy, then the idea is that women just do bureaucracy. Those aren't real jobs. So there's this real hatred within this kind of masculinist movement of what they call email jobs. And the idea is that women have just got email jobs. They don't do men are plumbers and linesmen, whatever it might be, and women just have email jobs jobs, which is a reflection of the change in the American workforce, right, towards way more white collar work. There are huge, I mean, huge numbers of people work in hr, which again, I'm not like an industry I particularly want to defend. I think the HR departments often end up defending the company and being pretty useless to the workers. But nonetheless, these are kind of feelings. These are illegitimate jobs that women have hoovered up at the expense of men. No real acknowledgement of the fact that a lot of women's jobs are in things like education. And presumably most people think teachers are a good thing or in healthcare. And actually being a nurse or a care assistant are both quite physical, demanding, dirty jobs that women are doing in huge numbers. So again, there's that kind of class dimension to it. So there's people who are feeling emasculated by female bosses. There's people who think women's jobs are silly and stupid. There's people who don't like being told what to do by the managerial class. I mean, I remember there was an article in Harvard Business Review, I think it was, by Joan Williams, just after Clinton got defeated in 2016, that said that she represented everything that lots of these people hated. You know, you hear it now in the discourse about the Lanyard class, right? The idea that there are just people telling you, constantly nagging you and telling you what to do, and nagging itself as a word is gendered female. Right. You saw it in the Karen discourse, which the left got really into in the 2000s. The idea that any woman enforcing rules is kind of like, oh, it's like your mum or whatever it is, that women enforcing rules is somehow just illegitimate manly rules, like authoritarian manly rules are fine, but ladies rules are kind of an imposition on you and you shouldn't obey them. So, you know, there's many ways of interpreting that. But all of it goes against the idea that I just, I Think a lot of it. Like Cartman. You know that Cartman line in south park where he goes, I do what I want. Like, I just think about that a lot. That that is the kind of thing.
- [34:33]
B
This is my guilt jubilee. That's exactly it. It's right that there. There's this idea that the 2010s were about guilt and the 2020s must be about, I can do what I want. Right, Right.
- [34:46]
C
That's how I feel. Like, that is like Trump.
- [34:47]
B
That is the distinction and has been covered with the patina of gender. Right. And that, to me, is really interesting. I wanna bring in one more piece here, which is that obviously, the Republican Party is currently united by a central figure of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is many things. He's a bulwark against leftism, liberalism. He's also a kind of cartoonish representation of traditional masculinity. Right. Like, there is something like almost mythical about the way that he presents himself as the ultimate guy's guy, despite his fondness for Andrew Lloyd Webber or even because of it. As you said in the piece, you know, Ben Shapiro and Donald Trump both love musical theater. And the people who love them say, oh, well, that's just, you know, hell Viking of them to love to listen to music. Could you just talk a little bit about the degree to which Trump fits in to all of this? Because we can't really talk about the invisible tethers that hold together the Republican Party without making very clear the fact that, look, it's Trump. So how is Trump sort of the ultimate masculinist, in your view?
- [35:58]
C
Right, you're right. It's a fascinating paradox, and I think about it quite a lot, and I often think about the fact that WWE is maybe the best guide to Trump's appeal. Right. You know, he was a guy who was.
- [36:07]
B
How are we gonna celebrate the 250th anniversary of America? We're gonna have wrestling, a perfect example,
- [36:12]
C
and kayfabe is what it's all about. Right. We all know this is fake, but actually, no one, you can't say it. And underneath it, there is something serious going on. And it's all about making money and you can be a heel, but all of those tropes are so embedded, and it's no surprise to me that his education secretary is Linda McMahon, wife of Vince, who ran WWE. But professional wrestlers are often very camp. They are also people who do a job that means that they could break their neck at any point. That is a genuinely physical job. So he has integrated this kind of show tunesy showmanship into masculinity. But the bit of masculinity that he represents is the patriarch, the unquestioned patriarch who nobody tells him what to do. And that, to me, that's the vision. I mean, I just wrote a book about genius, and I did a bit about the male genius, and I talked a bit about Picasso and what Picasso kind of offered. People around him hated being in his orbit to some extent. There were a lot of suicides around him. His daughter said he needed blood. His granddaughter said he needed blood to paint our family's blood. He was not a pleasant human to be around, but people were kind of drawn to him anyway, and they stayed in the orbit because something kind of magical and dangerous and exciting was happening. And I think of Trump very similarly also. The thing with Picasso was that the idea that he kind of got up when he wanted. He did what he wanted. He had sex with every he wanted. He had, you know, girlfriends who were 60 years younger than him. Like, no, he had no fetters on him. There's a Philip Larkin poem that's all about how he wishes he was the shit in the shuttered chateau who farts out 500 words a day and spends the rest of time on booze and birds, right? And Philip Larkin, isn't that right? Because he's a librarian in Hull, writing angry poems in his spare, beautiful poems in his spare time. But, like, the male power fantasy is so key to Trump, right? It's like, no, he does what he wants and no one tells him what to do, and you can't stop him. It just is this unbridled id, and that is a new version of masculinity. It's very different to what you would have heard from a Jordan Peterson, whose whole thing was, as a man, you have this great capacity for violence and to do great things, but you need to temper that and learn how to control it. The Trump fantasy is, you don't need to control it. Do what you want. If you feel like being violent, be violent. Kidnap the president of Venezuela. Don't let anyone tell you what to do. Invade Iran. Like, yeah, no one can tell me what to do.
- [38:39]
B
This episode is brought to you by Uber. Did you know that Uber has a range of safety features, including in app audio recording? You can just turn it on in your safety settings with the option to record all your rides or just some of them. But the safety doesn't stop there. Uber requires every driver to pass a thorough background check before they can start driving. This consists of a multi step screening process that checks for impaired driving or criminal offenses, followed by annual background checks each and every year. Moving forward in App audio recording and driver screenings are just a few of Uber's many safety features that put safety at every turn. Learn more@uber.com safety annual driving history reruns do not apply in New York City. Did you know about one in three people with plaque psoriasis may also develop psoriatic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness and swelling. Does this sound like you? Listen to what it sounds like to
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- [40:55]
B
I want to put a full rest into this part of the conversation because I'm also very interested in this much larger question of why it feels like American politics and culture seems to move between eras that are defined by a certain theory of gender, right? If right now we are in a theory of gender that is all about ultimate male fantasy. As you just said, we're coming out of an age of millennial feminism. And whether ironically or fittingly, your cover story came out just after you wrote an article called I Believe the Death of Millennial Feminism. Before we talk about my largest question, which is why it feels like we are stuck between this penduluming between extreme versions of gender politics and gender culture. Could you describe what you think millennial feminism was and why you think it is dead?
- [41:55]
C
I mean, I gave a much pithier and funnier version in the piece so people can go and look in that, but essentially it was this idea that you were completely in charge of your life story and no one could question it. And assertions you made about yourself were just to be treated as kind of true, which I think has now been, you know, that that murder has ended, really. But also things like, you know, this is the pre Ozempic era, so fat positivity, which I think was a good thing, right, because people had an incurable metabolic disease and they didn't, they shouldn't feel shamed about it all the time. Which then blended into another movement that was called Healthier Any Size, which essentially said, it's not, you know, it's not bad for you to be overweight. Pretty good research showing that actually being morbidly obese is bad for you, you know, Then there was to go back to your guilt jubilee, the idea of kind of privilege checking and privilege disclaiming. So you ended up with a lot of people who, you know, wearing their identities like badges essentially to prove that they weren't members of groups that were marginalized and therefore should be taken seriously. So it might be like, I know I'm white and I went to private school, but I'm non binary, or I'm actually, you know, I'm a member of, you know, the African diaspora. And then you find out like, your father is a literal prince, right? Or like whatever it would be. But people would pick the bits of their identity that they thought made them the most likely to be listened to, because that was the idea that you kind of racked up points basically on this index of kind of marginalization and therefore authority. So there's all of that kind of stuff. I think it's slightly blended into the kind of the idea of the Omnicorus, which was the idea that all social movements on the left kind of fitted together really well. So trans rights fitted seamlessly into Palestinian activism, fitted seamlessly into green activism. And all of those are pretty worthy causes as far as I'm concerned. They actually don't fit together into a really neat way as far as I'm concerned. But it was like this idea that you kind of took a package deal of everything, like these are all the things that we believe, and then you take them all as one. So there's all of that. A lot of the way that people discuss neurodivergence and the fact that they weren't seeking diagnoses from doctors, they were kind of self diagnosing and then immediately turning themselves into influencers based on those identities. That was a pretty millennial feminist thing to do, I think. And then as we Talked about at the beginning, this kind of Tumblr feminism that was very performatively anti male, that was about, ugh, you know, kill all men. Like I drink male tears, which you can understand as being like a kind of teenage slamming the door of the bedroom. Right? Not to be taken particularly seriously, but it upset a lot of guys who to this day are emailing me saying, I don't know how you can complain about male violence against women when there's a podcast called Kill All Men. And you say, well, that's got like 500 reviews on iTunes. Whereas the overwhelming rate of intimate partner violence that leads to fatalities is men killing female partners. Right. We just have the stats on that. But there was this feeling that really, that actually women had gone too far. They weren't oppressed anymore. And it was very kind of. I mean, that's what the reaction to it was really. But it was this very sort of shouty, performative social media. And I think this is what killed it in the end was that it didn't end up with the strong bonds that you needed for genuine activism. That's quite hard to do. There was an awful lot of consciousness raising, which isn't a bad thing in itself. But let's make people aware. We need to talk about this, right? And it'd be like, we need to talk about that. And you're like, okay, but what do you want to say about that? And then the second bit was like, what legal and policy changes do you want as a result? My classic example being the Me Too movement, which did a lot of good things in my opinion. I'm pretty happy that Harvey Weinstein is in jail and no longer forcing actresses to watch him masturbate. But where are the legal backstops for that? If you are now a cleaner who gets sexually harassed at work, how has your legal recourse improved in the decades since MeToo has happened? Right? That's the bit that never. The second bit that I think really suffered as a result of it being such a social media based era of feminism.
- [46:07]
B
There's a version of not necessarily masculinism, but male concern that is typified by writers like Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway that ask people to focus on issues that they argue disproportionately affect men so they'll talk about declining male college graduation rates or male suicide rates. I wonder how you see an emphasis on those points fitting into the picture here, because I don't even know if I want to.
- [46:46]
C
Well, look, say the end of the sentence, I'll tell you What I think about that, which is, like, you should talk about them.
- [46:51]
B
You go first before I go, yeah,
- [46:53]
C
but people should talk about them. But the one thing that gets on my nerves, something chronic, is the assumption that people are stopping you from talking about them. Like, who are these people? And also, do you think that ever happens to anyone ever? I get people all the time. Anytime you say anything feminist, it used to be the one you got all the time. You talk about something that was relative. You say, like, oh, isn't it annoying that women's clothes don't have pockets? Not a particularly huge oppression, but something I find personally irritating. And people go, why aren't you focused on FGM in Sudan right now? The thing is, where were you on grooming gangs? So anytime you ever try and make any type of place, I'm sure you had it with abundance. Why are you talking about abundance and not this? There will always be something that you apparently should be talking about. So these guys should acknowledge that when you say talk about men, and people kind of go, ooh, that happens to all of us. They are not uniquely oppressed. Right. And also, just there is a huge amount of writing about men, if you want to. The problem is there's no market for it unless it's framed as God, women are annoying, and we need to have a resistance to feminism. It's really interesting to me. One of the best books I've read in the last couple of years, how not to Be a Boy by Robert Webb, half of Peepshow. And it came just after an English journalist called Caitlin Moran's how to Be a Woman and Her Events. They were just attended by loads of women who were really keen to talk about all the problems with women. And then I did an event with Rob, and it was, again, the audience was women, right? Like, talking about the men in their lives. So I think that the market for some of this stuff is very hard to find unless it is framed in this hostile way. And that is a problem. But it doesn't mean this stuff is. You know, no one stopped Tucker Carlson making the End of Men, his documentary about testicle tanning. You know, it wasn't like, I don't know, Gloria Steinem intervened and kind of told him he wasn't allowed to. You can talk about the things you want to talk about. It's fine.
- [48:46]
B
As a cultural analyst, why do you think we seem to be passing through these eras where there's an era that seems to be defined by a particular form of feminism in which mentality some men feel like they're left out. They're made to feel guilty. No one is talking about them. Followed by an era that I think you aptly describe as being shot through with this, like, enlivened chauvinism that is unembarrassed and unapologetic about saying objectively offensive things that they previously thought that they might be socially punished for. It feels like we are passing through ages of extreme gender politics in a way that is somewhat unique for modern American history. In part because maybe it's just unique in American history because there just hasn't been a previous period that was defined by, or seemed to be led by women's cultural attitudes. Right. That like, women might not have had the political and cultural power in previous generations in order to even define something like millennial feminism that could be reacted to with something like Masculin. But I wonder what you think is going on here that we are, as I said earlier, just like, penduluming between these eras that feel like they have a not necessarily good, but coherent theory of gender. Who is good, who is bad, who should apologize, who should be empowered. It's just interesting to see the baton be passed this cleanly from one era to the next.
- [50:20]
C
That's a really good question. I mean, I come back a lot to the attention economy and the fact that it rewards deeply provocative content. It rewards. Preaching to your choir. It rewards.
- [50:31]
B
And I'm gonna let you finish this, but I just thought it also, I remember from my interview with Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at nyu, he's found a specific study finding that it rewards in group versus out group framings. And so when you think about that, it pulls the curtain back a little bit as to why one gender good, one gender less good might be more compelling.
- [50:52]
C
But sorry, please, no, I know that is the best way to, you know, if you'll know this from writing articles. The best way to get people to get read your articles is to go like, they don't want you to know this or no one is talking about the one thing no one's talking about or like, whatever it might be to, you know, to imagine that, you know, that this is kind of secret, forbidden knowledge in some way. And that kind of plays into it too. I also think there's a really boring reason, which is about the kind of ad funded Internet. It's really useful to advertisers to have very sex segregated media, right? You have your male podcasts, which advertise crypto and gambling apps and like raw meat in the case of some of them, like boxes where they send you meat and then you have, you know, women's podcasts which advertise you HRT and scarves and other stuff that women like. So you know that this kind of sex segregation of online spaces, I think is really new and important in a way. We've got this weird situation where we desegregated all of the public realm and then the Internet has resegregated the Internet.
- [51:54]
B
That's such a good point. It's funny. Just watching my wife's TikTok and comparing it to my Twitter stream is so fascinating from that perspective because we are so alike. We've been together for 10 years, we've lived together for six years. We obviously share an enormous amount of information and media and ideas. I don't recognize her TikTok at all. Like they are. They are seven layers down on some topic that I haven't just peeled the first layer of, but it speaks to this idea that on TikTok in particular, an algorithmic media is going to take a small difference in taste and exaggerate it by taking you down a rabbit hole that accentuates that maybe small difference in taste between husband and wife. This idea that algorithmic media and the attention economy is diverting a certain aspect of men's versus women's media, and therefore maybe men's versus women's politics is an interesting idea. I'm not sure I fully understand it yet, but that's a really, really cool thought.
- [53:03]
C
I mean, I don't either because I don't know how and I don't know where you would go and do Right. In the same way that people have done experiments where they've taken a kind of clean phone and then just put in like a blue state, or they've kind of given the algorithm a little tiny bit of knowledge about political leanings and then just look to what it then feeds you. I suspect you could do a similar thing with gender. I remember. Yeah, I have had exactly the same. It's very funny to compare my husband's Instagram feed with mine because just in terms of what he's being advertised versus what I'm being advertised. As soon as it knows that I'm a woman in my 40s, it is just absolutely desperate to tell me that if I need to talk about urinary incontinence, there's really someone here to help me. Please stop playing this. I don't need this yet. Give me time. But I had the same thing with when I did my interview with Jordan Peterson for GQ, which was mega viral. Back in 2018, I had a friend, Andy, who said to me, you've ruined my YouTube algorithm. All I used to do on YouTube is I used to watch videos for me to learn chords on the guitar. And I watched that one video of you with Jordan Peterson. And now it's just pumping out manosphere content and me going like, women, aren't they annoying? Aren't they annoying, though, women? And I think that's just probably happened hugely. Alice Evans is brilliant on this. She's now at Stanford. This kind of great gender divergence, and she's particularly interested by looking at it in countries that have still got quite traditional gender roles, but have now got smartphones. And the fact that you have these very unhappy women because they can see what is available to women, but they're not getting it in their own society. And I think you can't really unlace that the technological aspect of the gender wars from the fact that we're all spending six hours a day staring at a little glass box instead of just having normal conversations with friends of both genders.
- [54:51]
B
Can you imagine, optimistically, a world in which we go from sort of. In which we, in a Hegelian kind of way, we go thesis, antithesis, synthesis, that there's this age of the 2010s followed by this age of the 2020s, which is a reaction followed by something that is a little bit more down the middle and not seen by either side as particularly critical of or hateful toward a gender, but rather more welcoming, maybe united around something else. There's some other out group that is created that puts men and women on one side of the in group and then some other.
- [55:27]
C
Maybe we'll all get really into racism instead.
- [55:28]
B
Derek, I realize in the middle of that sentence that it's gonna sound like I'm proposing something that I'm definitely not proposing. But let's keep the question as broad as possible to keep me out of trouble. Does any part of you, having reported this piece, hold out some optimism that we might be able to walk into a better world that is not so gender segregated by one group seeing the other as the out group?
- [55:53]
C
Yes and no. I think if that happens, the changes won't be maybe so much political as technological and social and maybe economic. So the interaction of politics and culture on that I'm not quite sure of. But I also think you have to remember one of the things I say in the piece. Scott Yenner has these very stridently masculinist ideas in which he said modern women were medicated Meddlesome and quarrelsome and all this kind of stuff. And I remark in passing, right. He couldn't get confirmed to a university board in Florida, right. Florida, home of the war on DEI under Ron DeSantis. And the same thing with Donald Trump keeping a federal abortion ban off the RNC platform in 2024. There are actual limits that median Americans who are not massively political wouldn't describe themselves as feminist or masculinist. Very normal that they just have. Maybe they have some background biases and prejudices and ambient feelings about they like stand up comedy, doing routines about how bitches be crazy, whatever it is. But they also don't subscribe to either end of this spectrum. And that's what I mean about the answer possibly being technological. I would be very interested to know if you, you know, when we start getting smartphone bans for under 16s, which I think lots of places are considering, right. It's become Australia's already getting there. It will be really interesting to see what that does to young men and women's ideas about gender. Like we will at that point maybe be able to work out how much of it was about what they were being kind of fed and pumped out. And you know, but there might be. You equally would strongly say, and I'm sure some of the masculinists would say, that schools are preaching a very particular form of gender roles to kids. None of these arguments will ever be settled because no one knows what the perfect final form of gender relations is. And no one else really knows what anyone else's relationship is like. Right. One of the things that happens a lot is an over indexing from someone's own happy or unhappy relationship to being like. And that's why I think all heterosexual relationships are like this. You just see an enormous amount of that. Like, there needs to be quite a big acknowledgement of human variation that actually both sides, you know, both ideological sides often don't really encompass.
- [58:04]
B
Helen, this was great. I learned so much from this, both talking to you and from reading your piece. I don't often talk about gender politics on this show, mostly out of deep, deep, deep reservoirs of fear. If and. But really, who do you think is gonna.
- [58:19]
C
Who's gonna shout at you when someone
- [58:22]
B
screams at me about this episode? What do you think? What did we miss? What are they going to scream about? And what can we say in response to that most likely scream?
- [58:30]
C
There may be some screaming about the fact that we aren't taking men's issues seriously. I mean, you did mention their male mental health And I think those are completely legitimate. McKay Coppins from the Atlantic, he just wrote a really brilliant piece about gambling in which he noted. Imparting. Adam on the shipping. Yeah. That most problem gamblers are men. Right. And this is the thing, I think is, I think that you have to talk about that as being a male problem. Specifically, if you're gonna understand it, like, why is it this is not a young person's problem. Like, this is a young men's problem. And discussion has to encompass that. So I'm very up, like, obviously, I'm very happy to recuse myself from that conversation in the same way that you probably don't wanna be put in charge of the struggling feminist movement. But there's no problem with talking about things in. In terms of male specific gender things. And the way we have got used to talking about in female terms. What else will people be angry about? I don't know. It's always a constant surprise to me. I don't think I'm particularly controversial. I think I just say things that are common sense. And yet people seem so vexed. Who can say why?
- [59:31]
B
Well, I'll close with this. For folks who are interested in shows that are specifically about problems disproportionately affecting men, and in particular, young men in America, I would encourage you to listen to our shows with Richard Reeves. Listen to our show with McKay Coppins. This is a subject that.
- [59:45]
C
That.
- [59:46]
B
That box has been checked several times on plain English. So if people want to hear more about that, they can listen to those shows. Helen, this was really, really interesting. Thank you so much for writing about this and thanks for coming on the show.
- [59:57]
C
Thanks for.