The So-Called "War on Men"
Not even a good skirmish
While my last two newsletters have been about aspects of higher education, both have given passing attention to the non-college crowd. These were the groups Will Bunch called the Left Behind (if they are 50 or over) or the Left Out (if they are in their 20s to 40s). I want to give some thought to what contributed to the blight of these populations, who are disproportionately male. I’ll explore some possibilities for understanding their plight and what, if anything, we might do about it in coming newsletters.
But first, I want to put to rest the right-wing argument that the fault lies in cultural and social dynamics reflected in women’s rights that have resulted in a “War on Men”.
The argument goes back at least to the middle of the last decade. A 2015 opinion piece by Suzanne Venker titled The War on Men showed up on Fox News (she later wrote a book of the same name). It quickly became a talking point on the right. Here’s the heart of her argument:
To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically.
In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.
Now the men have nowhere to go.
To be fair (I hate to do that), she was reacting to an argument in Hanna Rosen’s The End of Men. But I don’t think Rosen’s argument ever achieved the kind of cultural status that the War on Men did, except as an obvious and repeated foil in the culture wars.
It’s not hard to find arguments like Venker’s repeated ad nauseam. The War on Men motif took on new ammunition when a Wall Street Journal1 article last year noted that college enrollment now was 60% to 40% female, spawning a new rage of “but what about the men” think pieces. Last November, Senator Josh Hawley spoke to the National Conservatism Conference about “the left’s attack on men” (a foreshadowing of his book coming out next year).
The Left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic. They want to define the traditional masculine virtues—things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness—as a danger to society.
This is an effort the Left has been at for years now. And they have had alarming success. American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers; they’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.Many men in this country are in crisis, and their ranks are swelling.
And that’s not just a crisis for men. It’s a crisis for the republic.
What we need as a republic is for men to show the valor, toughness, and fortitude that characterized the Roman empire! No focus on shared responsibility or sensitivity to other’s pronouns. No more talk of “toxic masculinity” because labelling the male character as deficient is emasculating.
Maybe the solution to this emasculation by the left is more testosterone, as Tucker Carlson pointed out.2 The cultural change of the last half-century, the critics argue, has focused on freeing women while not allowing men their rightful place. This is from a piece by Mona Charen, usually a more moderate conservative voice.
A significant percentage of American men are growing up without models of manliness in the form of fathers. They don’t see a man shouldering responsibilities for his wife and children, helping with expenses (or covering them), joking with Mom, taking out the trash, tossing a ball with his kids, helping with homework or preparing a meal. Without a balanced picture of masculinity based upon their life experience, they search for masculinity elsewhere and often find a tawdry version offered up by the Carlsons and Putins of this world.
Charen’s hypothetical here (besides leaving “significant percentage” undefined) is telling. It’s hard to read her description of the “man shouldering responsibilities” and not see all that as centered in a late twentieth-century, middle-class, suburban family of two parents.3
Oh, and I forgot White. Nobody writes on the War on Men when it comes to Black and Brown Men. That would require attention to our law enforcement strategies, drug laws, economic patterns, hiring behaviors, mortgage evaluations, and school practices.
Of course, a good part of the War on Men argument is in reaction to the improved status of women in society. In the workplace, in career sharing, in divided home/family responsibilities, in the media, in the #MeToo movement. As women’s status has improved, they have found the power and voice to push back on prior lousy treatment. Here’s a quote from Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad:
This is about women, some of whom have been angry for a long time, but didn't have an outlet for it, didn't realize how many of their neighbors, their coworkers, their friends and mothers and sisters, felt the same, until someone yelled, loud and fierce and ugly, and everyone heard her. It's about women who found themselves at the Women’s March holding signs, and experienced a kind of awakening there — one third of those women had never been to a political protest before — and wondered for the first time how on earth they'd been lulled to sleep in the first place.
This War on Men isn’t a real war any more than the War on Christmas is about cashiers saying “Merry Christmas” at Target. It is, to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King, “not even a good skirmish.”4
It is a cultural artifact intended to stymie the progress made in women's rights over recent decades and redefine men as the victims. We can see this in a number of ways by looking at the cultural pushback to this “war”.
The new Disney/Marvel series She-Hulk Attorney at Law (the title picture of this newsletter) has a wonderful scene where Jennifer Walters explains to her cousin Bruce Banner why she doesn’t have trouble controlling the angry part of Hulk.
“Here’s the thing Bruce, I’m great at controlling my anger. I do it all the time,” Jen says. “When I’m catcalled in the street, when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me, I do it pretty much every day because if I don’t I will get called emotional, or difficult, or might just get murdered. So I’m an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you.”
About the time the War on Men first emerged, Jason Klepper had a show on Comedy Central following the Daily Show titled The Opposition.5 Klepper had two wonderful episodes on the War on Men. In the first, he opens with this:
Did you know that a whopping 5% of US companies have a female CEO? Which means that with the exception of 95% of the economy, women control the economy.
In the second, he makes this recommendation for fighting the war:
It’s time to man up and stop letting women control the conversation – by occasionally contributing one or two ideas to said conversation.
The rest of his bits are equally good and I recommend watching both clips. And just in case you think I’m being overly critical of this argument, just today Twitter was abuzz over a Desiring God article arguing that men should grow beards to protest against the emasculation of Men.
But what about that often-repeated article in the Wall Street Journal arguing about the gender imbalance among today’s college students? Turns out that there’s a really great analysis of that data that doesn’t begin from the premise of male victimhood.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis crunched the numbers using data for people in their 30s in 2015 comparing different levels of education. Their findings are interesting.
In short, women’s salaries at the high school level trail men’s salaries by nearly a quarter. Among women with associates or bachelors degrees, the gap was 5% to the good for women.6 In other words, women attend at least some college because of financial necessity (which is also why they are more often victim to fly by night occupational programs).
Yes, it could be argued that the women’s movement created conditions where women wanted independent work rather than a little work on the side to supplement the family income. It can also be argued that we need more investment in community colleges so that men in trades or manufacturing can turn their degrees into earning power.
But cultural factors like the so-called War on Men are not the cause of alienation and despair among the Left Behind or the Left Out. We cannot find the sources of that hopelessness in social transitions like the women’s movement or shifts in family structure.
Largely, these sources lie in our under-investment in rural America, the breakdown of the social safety net, economic transformations that move capital from localities to urban and international settings, and the limitations of mobility. I’ll explore these in my next newsletter.
I don’t have a WSJ subscription so I can’t link to it.
Carlson’s solution is “testicle tanning”. I’ll let you look that up on your own.
Kristin Kobes DuMez’s excellent Jesus and John Wayne underscores the sacralization of these families in American culture, especially the evangelical church.
From his sermon at the National Cathedral March 31, 1968. “Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.”
If the original Colbert Report was loosely based on Bill O-Reilly, The Opposition was InfoWars.
The percentage gap in comparing female to male enrollment patterns is greater when you include associates degrees than it is for bachelors degrees alone.