Why do rich men want other men to think our masculinity is under threat?
I just visited my family in West Virginia, and I have questions...
I just spent a weekend in what publications like the New York Times call “Trump Country,” and all I saw were people bending so-called “traditional” gender norms.
Sure, my dad’s cousin drives a truck, wears West Virginia Mountaineers hats, and hunts and fishes. But he also spends a ton of time in the kitchen. He brought homemade ice cream to our family reunion dinner and sent us home with venison and bear meat he’d butchered.
Sure, my grandma spends a ton of time in the kitchen herself. But she also used to shoot guns, drive a tractor-trailer, and pilot a small plane down a mountain to her job at a manufacturing plant. (Yes, she really did that. It blows my mind.)
Around the fire one night, she told us stories about her mother doing nearly everything back in the day on their self-sufficient family farm. My great-grandpa had debilitating arthritis, so my great-grandma had to raise chickens and pigs and keep the garden producing food, while also raising six kids. “Once a year, on Christmas, we’d get an orange,” my grandma told us. “Other than that, we ate what came out of the garden.”
Sure, my dad’s other cousin is a woodworker and built his own house. But he also has built and nurtured a huge community of friends in his small West Virginia town. Everywhere we went, from the local coffee shop to a cidery on the side of a mountain, people knew and loved him.
Sure, my dad’s cousin’s wife is caretaking for multi-generations of family members. But she also has to manage the finances for her and her husband who’s struggling with medical issues.
The last few days, I’ve been trying to make sense of why my people don’t fit so neatly into stereotypical breadwinner-homemaker gender roles.
They grew up and live in a county that last November voted 70 percent for Trump. Some of them voted for Trump themselves. And according to a number of polls and studies, support for “traditional” masculinity predicts support for Trump more than anything else other than party affiliation. Why aren’t the men solely focused on “providing and protecting,” while the women stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?
This raises a bigger question I’ve been struggling to answer ever since starting this newsletter: Why are politicians and other rich and powerful men so invested in getting working class men to believe in a version of masculinity that’s actually only a few hundred years old?
If people in the country’s most conservative state are bending gender norms, why are those norms still such a powerful force in politics?
Why did Sen. Josh Hawley say that “the crisis of American men is a crisis for the American republic” and write a whole book about it?
Why did Tucker Carlson make a documentary proclaiming “the end of men” and hyping eating raw eggs and testicle tanning?
I’ve only found snippets of answers.
“American politicians have long fanned popular flames of masculine panic to advance their own agendas,” writes journalist Liza Featherstone. Conor Heffernan, historian of physical culture, writes that during the Cold War U.S. elites were anxious about the Soviet Union being physically fitter and encouraged men to take their fitness more seriously. “A soft body was indicative of a soft mind—and, worse yet, could even make one vulnerable to communist ideology,” Heffernan writes.
The law professor Joan C. Williams recently wrote, “Adept manipulation of masculine anxieties is an essential ingredient in the secret sauce of many far-right figures, from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro to Viktor Orbán to Alternative for Germany’s call to ‘rediscover our manliness.’” Journalist Virginia Heffernan put it bluntly: “Elite men are anxious that their wives, workers, and children will gain financial and intellectual independence, take their property, and flee.”
This makes me think it’s similar to how the rich and powerful use racism to divide and control working people. If they can get men to blame women and trans people for our struggles rather than them or the economic system on top of which they sit, they can keep hoarding their billions of dollars. If they can get us to think that there’s some natural, biological, “traditional” version of ourselves that’s under threat by allowing women to make money and trans people to play sports—and that they’re the only ones who can stop that threat—they can motivate us to vote for them and their messed up policies (like the just-passed “Big Beautiful Bill” that will transfer trillions of dollars from workers to Wall Street).
It turns out that my West Virginia family members aren’t all that abnormal.
In my search for an answer, I came across the work of sociologist Jennifer Sherman, who has studied rural working class communities and concluded, “Flexible forms of masculinity appear to be [a] common response to economic collapse and play an important role in helping families to weather the transition and adjust to the new labor market realities.”
In other words, people are going to do whatever they need to survive, “traditional” gender norms be damned. West Virginia used to be a prosperous state, when there was still plenty of coal in the ground. Now, it’s one of the poorest. My people are just doing what’s needed to ride the waves of capitalism’s near-constant crisis for working people.
And the rich and powerful are doing what they always have done: exploit people’s understandable anxiety about change and feeling out of control in a political and economic system that wasn’t built for them. My question—which is at the heart of this newsletter—is: What will it take for us to stop them?
I’d love to hear your thoughts—why do you think elites are so invested in getting men to buy in to so-called “traditional” masculinity? What do you think we can do to stop them?
— Jeremy
It’s a carrot on a stick:
- Don’t want to come in early and stay late? Lazy.
- Don’t want to do dangerous work? Pussy.
- Request a higher wage? Entitled baby.
When management exalts “masculine” values, it makes men jump at the drop of a hat when they insinuate that maybe, just maybe, you’re not a “real man” or a “hard enough worker.” That is an identity shattering accusation. It’s a very useful psychological tool in the exploitation of the working class.
Of course, you’ll never be man “enough.” That sentence doesn’t even make any sense. It’s simply a clever manipulation tactic to get workers to accept more work, shittier conditions and less pay— because they’d rather do that than have their “manhood” put into question.
Source: Working blue collar jobs for over a decade.
> The law professor Joan C. Williams recently wrote, “Adept manipulation of masculine anxieties is an essential ingredient in the secret sauce of many far-right figures, from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro to Viktor Orbán to Alternative for Germany’s call to ‘rediscover our manliness.’” Journalist Virginia Heffernan put it bluntly: “Elite men are anxious that their wives, workers, and children will gain financial and intellectual independence, take their property, and flee.”
I think this is really interesting, because it gets at the heart of the issue: "masculine anxities" stem from insecurity. "Elite" men are anxious that their wives, workers, and children will leave them, because they're afraid that they're bad husbands, bosses, and fathers—and the call to "rediscover our manliness" is a convenient way for them to avoid having to confront the insecurity within themselves and become better people. On an individual level, people don't like change, and don't like discomfort. The new paradigm in which men have to work just as hard as the women and split all the housework equally is annoying, and men would rather just not.
On a political level, as you point out, the rich and powerful have a vested interest in keeping people divided. It's easier to pass tax cuts and get away with corruption if you keep the people's eyes on culture war issues, as we've seen with the recent GOP Bill. Only one party is championing men's issues, and they're doing it in an incredibly disingenuous way. What a shocker.
But on a personal level, I am a little worried about the future of men, particularly young men. I've complained to my women friends before about the lack of male fashion or style choices—it seems that the status game has really flattened the range of male expression, as seen in the Great Male Renunciation in which men "abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful" and "henceforth aimed at being only useful" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Male_Renunciation). The suit's monopoly on dress codes and the drabness of male fashion is an interesting allegory for a greater problem: if male fashion is default, lifeless, and boring, what does that say about being a man in general?
I don't write about gender much, because I usually don't care to. My identity as a man is extremely non-central to my life—I care much more about my hobbies and my friends and what I'm going to be eating for dinner tonight. But I can't help but wonder what the future looks like for the men who DO care about being "manly", whatever that means.