'Why Are Men Moving Right?' — The Man Problem

Why men and women are unhappy

Death Grips

The Left is losing young men. You mean to tell me that telling half the population they’re the villain isn’t the best recruitment strategy?

Impossible...

I’m writing this from a flat in London, only learning today that in the UK young women are now out-earning men by £2,200, flipping the pay gap on its head.

Analysts are calling it a crisis for young men, a generation slipping behind as the workforce changes around them.

The same is happening in the U.S. —in 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that women aged 25 to 34 are entering the workforce with increasing momentum, while the share of men has stayed neutral for the last ten years.

All the while, men are moving politically to the Right and women to the Left.

What’s going on here?

Trump winning in 2024 made it plain that men are leaning Right, and it’s not just an American thing. Go to Paris, London, or the corner bar, and you’ll see the same tilt.

Today I want to give you 3 predictions that will come of men moving to the Right —and yes, Trump may have gotten the ball rolling but he’ll be irrelevant to this movement by 2030. Here’s what to make of the men v. women shift:

1. ‘Masculinity Will Not Save Men’

I read that headline in New York Magazine this week.

Guess what they believe will save men? Destroying the patriarchy.

LOL. Lmao even.

Source

I’m inserting this to reiterate that this war between men and women is salient.

Think about it. I could write an article about Karmelo Anthony or a polemic against Israel, and probably get less hate than writing about this. It's 1000% more socially disastrous to stick up for your basic dignity as a male nowadays.

It’s a cultural war with the following stakes:

• Men trying to figure out their place in this new world (i.e. falling behind and trying to find a new purpose)

• Women trying to figure out their place in this new world (i.e. being more masculine than many men and working more than them)

• And politicans, journalists trying to exploit both.

It’s why articles like that NY Mag piece make no sense. What is this Patriarchy?

Men and women were historically both treated as shit.

Men ran the household, or so they say, but most were barely running their own lives. Factory hands, sharecroppers, laborers grinding away generation after generation. If that was the patriarchy, then my grandpa got a raw deal.

It was a partnership:“The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.” —My Big Fat Greek Wedding

What happened is, in the past, men have always been treated as cannon fodder and there has always been a culture of utilitarianism above all else when it comes to them.

In modern times, men have kept the weird utilitarian norms of still being working class, while women for the most part haven’t.

Call it biology or behavior, but there are reasons girls pull ahead faster—girls study more and develop faster. They adhere to the system more, as Orwell pointed out. But the reasons are complex and not today’s subject. What matters is that there will be a fight to frame this issue, with politicians and media gearing up to spin it for all it’s worth.

2. The New Right Wing, Downfall of Republicans and Democrats

Every article or video that talks about the “men crisis” always mentions Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes. That NY Mag piece did it; they all do it. After all, Tate, was the most Googled person in the world only two years ago and is still popular.

Reasons being that Nick and Andrew are the two most extreme parts of the right-wing and they both get a lot of viewers. They’re also leading a right-wing civil war.

Fuentes, whose audience is almost entirely male, calls it “Groyper War II.”

But it’s not just him, the entire right-wing is splintering: Daily Wire is collapsing, Candace Owens is calling out Israel losing neo-con and right-wing Jewish support, and Andrew Tate is steering towards being apolitical.

Just as Democrats are saying that they need a civil war because they have no one— literally no one—to run or appeal to young Americans the Right will have the same quagmire. Trump and his family took power from the conservatives like Bitch McConnell and changed the Republican Party. We’ll see the Left do the same and ostensibly, put up a candidate who is not left-leaning performance art but is principled and not bashing men or promoting ideas from “Das Kapital.”

And it doesn’t matter that Trump won, the Right will see a civil war as well to disrupt the system. Every Republican presidency, including Trump’s, follows the same formula:

• Republican wins

• Pays lip service to middle class & immigration policy (no border wall)

• Then Bombs the Middle East

• Liberals become more unhinged, violent, and psychotic by his mere presence

• Next Democrat President is more left-wing and anti-American

• Following election, Republican wins (repeat cycle of Left getting crazier)

How much longer can this drag on? The country has real crises like homelessness and gutted cities, but on X, it’s all glib noise. Right-wing influencers act like misgendering someone is a W, mistaking petty jabs for policy, while problems like immigration, the crisis of boys and men, and endless wars continue

Trump was supposed to break the system and is becoming it.

3. The Solution: New Narratives For Men

Men are slowly turning into Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin: They are accounting for three out of four “deaths of despair” — from alcohol, suicide, or drug overdose; meanwhile, 40% of women outearn them (another interesting source); and about 15 percent of men say they have no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. As Henry David Thoreau once famously said, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.”

If you live in elite circles, you aren’t seeing these types of men, but I implore you, look down. Look down at the bottom, or even at the middle; there are real men with real problems who feel like they have no voice.

So, what are these solutions?

I’ll tell you what they aren’t: They aren’t what the Left is preaching by telling men to become self-flagellating “male feminists” or talking about the “patriarchy.”

But they also aren’t what the Right is saying because there is no going back to Tate’s vision of women chained to the stove, silenced until spoken to, and sucking dick on command; it’s absurd.

That pollanniash fantasy is like when neocons like Ben Shapiro wish that hip-hop music weren’t a thing. Maybe next we can pretend T-Rexes are still around?

Men need to create a new narrative, but we don’t need to erase the progress that the first wave of feminism made when that movement made sense.

“The Left are effectively turning their backs on boys and men, and the Right are trying to turn back the clock on women and girls… we need a model of mature masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.”

— Richard Reeves, Author of “Of Boys and Men”

Women had an old narrative: take care of the house and children, and be a good wife. They have a new narrative: you can do anything you want, be a badass bitch, and strive for the 1% of top men, because historically speaking, your ancestors were not given that chance.

Men had an old narrative: be a breadwinner and provider, go compete mostly with men (having both men and women in a workplace certainly changed social dynamics), and be a good husband. And now their new narrative is… well, we don’t really have one.

So, what we need to do is create new narratives for men.

I’ve been reading Richard V. Reeves’s new book “Of Boys and Men” for solutions to this crisis. I think he has some good answers:

• More Male Teachers: The meteoric rise in Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson shouldn’t be surprising. When men are absent in boys’ lives, they naturally seek out male mentors and role models. Reeves argues that we need more male teachers in schools, especially in the early grades. Fewer than 3 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers are men, and those numbers don’t improve much in later grades.

• Higher Importance of Family: Dostoevsky once said, “The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.” Reeves argues that we need to put more emphasis on family life in the early years to set boys up for success later in life. This means more parental involvement, especially from fathers, who, as of two years ago, fatherhood fell to its lowest point in 42 years.

• Ban Porn: Seriously this needs to be talked about more. Most people don’t even know that states like Texas, Montana, and Utah have porn restrictions. Porn is not free speach. In fact, in 2002, during the Israeli military's occupation of Ramallah in the West Bank, Israeli forces seized control of several Palestinian television stations. They began broadcasting porn as a destruction mechanism against the Palestinian families.

• Start Boys Later in School: Boys develop their pre-frontal cortex — the part of the brain that handles executive functioning like planning, organization, and self-regulation — later than girls. This is why boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD or push off homework for playing outside. So, Reeves argues, we should start boys in school later (at age six or seven instead of five or six) to better match their development.

None of these solutions are easy.

Some are even controversial.

But if we want to save our boys and men from a life of mediocrity and possibly complete despair, we need to start somewhere.

The next election will be a circus of liberals posing with shotguns and pickup trucks to court men, while Republicans tiptoe around abortion bans and wave rainbow flags to win women. The pandering will hit absurd heights, but if the public keeps noticing as they are now, the illusion might finally break. But maybe I’m being too optimistic?

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