Masculinity
Story Stream
Are Men OK? March 12, 2025
On November 21, 2024, Richard V. Reeves stood in a greenroom at The Washington Post’s third annual Global Women’s Summit. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), was the only man in a lineup that included former Democ...
The Sex War March 05, 2025
Among conservative men, one often hears the claim that feminism has contributed to the destruction of Western civilization. Ideas such as “toxic masculinity” were openly ridiculed. It is certainly the case that divisive feminist rhetoric made the fat...
What Does It Mean to Be a Man? February 17, 2025
In a world of eunuchs, buffoons, and beasts, we need new heroes....
The Toxic Male Is Ready for His Close-up February 12, 2025
Between the first presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the arrival of the #MeToo movement in 2017, progressive activists and social critics increasingly warned us about something called toxic masculinity. The term, vaguely academic in nature, re...
“Monk Mode” Is Destroying Young Men January 21, 2025
Explorations of the American loneliness epidemic are everywhere these days—and with good reason. The rise of the “anti-social century,” as Derek Thompson labeled it last week, has had disastrous effects across our culture and politics. Young men migh...
Who Should We Emulate? January 13, 2025
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” This aphorism appears in Meditations, a collection of philosophical musings written by Marcus Aurelius, a 2nd century Roman emperor.Aurelius is considered one of the less tyrannical, ev...
The Only Thing Men Are Allowed to Be November 27, 2024
Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.I’ve been firing off essay after essay on here with more to come, and it has been paying off. I am learning, for better or worse, that conversations about the animosity between genders right now are resonating wit...
Reclaiming Ted Hughes November 19, 2024
Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I r...
The Fap/NoFap Election November 18, 2024
Masturbation appears to have lost the election.In the days preceding last week’s presidential contest, a Democratic SuperPAC called Progress Action Fund (PAF) made a final pitch to men. Two advertisements in a multimillion-dollar campaign warned youn...
Nick Cave’s Revised Rules for Men November 18, 2024
Nick Cave, one of the most physically expressive figures in rock and roll, was looking at me with suspicion. His eyebrows climbed the considerable expanse of his forehead; his slender frame tensed defensively in his pin-striped suit. I think he thoug...
Manliness Needs to Make a Comeback November 18, 2024
Regarding the education of American boys, the news of late seems rather bleak: our boys are struggling in school. As Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men points out, 45,000 fewer boys than girls are graduating each year from high...
How Media Is Failing Young Men November 18, 2024
Are young men … OK? That’s a question that seems to be on many a mind these days as conversations about gender, sexuality, and what it means to be a “man” reach a fever pitch in the media and beyond. A large part of that discourse revolves around an ...
We Need to Talk About ‘Toxic Femininity’ November 15, 2024
We’ve spent several years now talking about “toxic masculinity,” though I’m not sure what exactly it means. It’s a great example of what Andrew Hofer calls “Trojan terminology” — think “white supremacy,” “settler colonialism,” “anti-racism” etc. Thes...
Trump’s Masculine Appeal November 15, 2024
“Fight! Fight!” Donald Trump shouted to his followers. He stood up straight, blood on his cheek, pumping his fist in the air, rising after having been bundled to the ground by Secret Service agents when shots rang out at his rally in Butler, Pennsylv...
How the Democrats Bud Lighted Their Brand November 15, 2024
Last spring, a marketing grunt at Bud Light sent TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman, custom cans of beer featuring her picture. As intended, Mulvaney posted about the beer on social media, igniting a firestorm and a boycott of the brand. Men r...
Why #MeToo Generation Young Men Swung to Trump November 12, 2024
This commentary was published in partnership with Unherd.The days when most young voters, whether male or female, would reliably vote Democrat are over. Among the axiomatic election patterns smashed by Donald Trump, young men have swung to the Republ...
Is the Gen Z Bro Media Diet to Blame? November 08, 2024
Among the many questions that will be sure to plague Democrats in the months following Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 presidential election: What is happening with Gen Z men?Could it be that growing up in a fundamentally different media environme...
Revenge of the Silent Male Voter November 07, 2024
On election day, I caught the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Sitting across from me, an elderly woman wore a T-shirt with the image of Trump pumping his fist in the air with the words “fight, fight.” A small “I Voted” sticker was pressed onto her...
The Boys in the Bandwidth November 05, 2024
Red and blue Americans are locked in a hostile custody battle right now. But if they agree on anything, it’s that “the gender gap has never been wider,” as one piece in the New York Times just summarized. For both the Harris and Trump campaigns, that...
What’s the Matter With Men? October 30, 2024
New York City waitress Madison Tayt experienced something that has become all-too common on public transportation in major urban areas. In a post on X, she complained that a “man on the subway was repeatedly harassing a woman, being disgusting, invad...
The Tech Divide Driving Male and Female Voters Apart October 28, 2024
From the moment JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” became a media firestorm, the divide between the sexes has dominated much of this US presidential race.On the Republican side, the messaging has been aggressively masculine. At the part...
21st Century Insecure Man October 24, 2024
What is the modern young man insecure about? Undoubtedly, many of the same things that Gishimmar the third son of a Sumerian grain thresher would’ve jotted down in his cuneiform scribblings (had universal literacy existed in the Bronze Age). But Gish...
The Loneliness of the Bullfighter October 18, 2024
The most frequently used word in the new film by director Albert Serra is “balls,” but almost as frequently used is “truth.” Following the killing of a bull in which the subject of the film, the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, took near-i...
The Gender Divide Is a Class Divide October 17, 2024
This week, Kamala Harris released her “opportunity agenda for black men,” promising targeted loans, protection of crypto assets, and weed legalization, among other policies. It’s just the latest sign that her campaign knows it is doing historically p...
'Fight Club' at 25 October 14, 2024
David Fincher’s subversive comedy-drama Fight Club turns 25 this year. Its blackly comic exploration of toxic masculinity, released when Andrew Tate was still an impressionable 12-year-old, continues to divide opinion. It was gloriously misunderstood...
