< Make America Male Again? Fifteen years of aggrieved men

BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:

Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR - a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

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LUSE: All right. So in the aftermath of this election cycle, I've been hearing a lot about men - the role they played in reelecting Donald Trump, how Joe Rogan and podcast bros are a growing political force and how all of this is connected to the economy. And every time I hear one of these conversations, I think about Hanna Rosin. Hanna Rosin, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.

HANNA ROSIN: Thank you - excited to be here.

LUSE: Because Hanna began reporting about all of this 15 years ago, eventually publishing a book in 2012 called "The End Of Men."

And Hanna, I don't want to be the one to have to tell you, but there are still men. There are still men.

ROSIN: (Laughter) Some of them live in my house, Brittany.

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LUSE: Mine, too. It's wild how that happens. Well, what did you mean when you titled your book, "The End Of Men"?

ROSIN: You know, at the time, I felt like I had discovered something a little bit unsayable - that women were surpassing men. But if you look at almost any category - race, demographic, income - men or boys in that category are doing worse than women or girls in that category. I mean, men are increasingly falling behind in all the measures that help you lead a successful life.

LUSE: That may sound counterintuitive. After all, the gender pay gap still exists, and who knows when we might see a woman president. But if you look at the statistics, what Hanna saw 15 years ago is even clearer today. In their pursuit to close the gender gap, women have found ways to slowly outpace men.

ROSIN: Like, it feels crazy. Like, it feels, like, what? No. Like, boys rule the world. That's a no. It's just hard to - it's hard to get our heads around.

LUSE: Boys and men are less likely to graduate from school. Traditional job prospects in manufacturing are disappearing, and their wages have stagnated. Meanwhile, women have thrived.

ROSIN: It starts way down in, like, when you're a kid or a teenager. So of those getting the best GPAs, two-thirds are girls. And of those getting the worst GPAs, two-thirds are boys. If you look at either poor white boys or poor black boys...

LUSE: Right.

ROSIN: ...They seem to suffer and be way more sensitive to poverty, injustice, and family disruptions than girls are.

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LUSE: For decades, our societal message has been about girl power, about busting through the glass ceiling and telling women they can have it all. But in the process, did we lose the boys?

ROSIN: It breaks our usual story. So should should you pay specific attention to boys? You probably should or at least note that they are suffering and dealing with these circumstances differently than girls are.

LUSE: Hmm.

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LUSE: Today, Hanna and I are going to trace how cultural norms prepared women for a changing world, while men were left in economic and societal stagnation, and how all of this laid the foundation for the return of Donald Trump.

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DONALD TRUMP: Look what happened. Is this crazy?

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ROSIN: The story of men and women, just to give us the gender binary for a minute, of the last 40 or 50 years, is a story about the world moving very quickly and women doing a better job of, like, sort of keeping up with it - with a lot of struggle. Like, think of it as an actual treadmill - like, just the world moving more and more - like, the treadmill's going faster and faster. And women are struggling but kind of keeping up. Like, they're just kind of adjusting or figuring out how to go to college or, like, if marriages, and they figure out, like, how to take care of the kids and how to stay in the workforce...

LUSE: Yeah.

ROSIN: ...And men just not able to, like, shift or keep up. It's not about total numbers - like, men sinking, women rising. It's about women rising and men, like, not quite able to rise or keep up. And so I think there's something real about that for men and the anxieties. There's something real about - like, I don't know who to be without the structures. I don't know who to be in the world without marriage. Or I don't know, like, who to be in the world without the provider role or the husband role.

It's, like, without these traditional man roles, I feel really discombobulated and lost, whereas, I think, women have been rolling through the collapse of roles for, like, a century. Like, the roles collapse, and they just kind of, like, keep on moving. And there's lots of theories about why that is. Like, some of it is about your brains develop earlier. Some of it is about skills, like organization skills. So it is 'cause, like, the kids are there, and women have to take care of the kids. So there's all sorts of reasons why women are able to kind of find stability as women, whereas men have a harder time finding stability as men.

LUSE: Hmm. Hmm. In talking about some of the challenges that men may be facing or dealing with in our current society, let me describe a man to you.

ROSIN: I'm into this. Yeah, I'm into it.

LUSE: We'll call him Luke (ph). Let's call him Luke.

ROSIN: Luke.

LUSE: Luke lives in a large town that's a little more rural than suburban Pennsylvania. He's middle aged, about 45-years-old. He's divorced. He doesn't see his children often. Luke is white, and he makes around $40,000 a year, and he recently faced bankruptcy.

ROSIN: Ugh.

LUSE: If I told you this man stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, would that surprise you?

ROSIN: No.

LUSE: Why not?

ROSIN: Because this is the big change that happened between the time I wrote the book, and now this is the biggest change that happened. People did not identify as aggrieved men. They just kind of lived that way and were embarrassed by it.

So the Lukes - the Lukes who appeared in my book - I'll tell you about one Luke who appeared in my book. He lived in one of these towns, a little more rural, just like you described. And the factory shut down. This is totally typical white American story. It was a Black American story sort of 34 years before, in the cities. Then it became a white American story in the rural areas. And so Luke's wife was still working. She was still working in the schools, and she would put her paycheck down on the table. And then Luke would go cash that paycheck, and there was a sense of shame around it.

Now, 15 years later, Luke is wearing a T-shirt saying, the end of men. Like, he's not embarrassed. He's, like, part of some big political movement/community of, like, we're aggrieved, too. So that's what I watched happen in the 15 years, where, like, the Lukes who were, like, quietly suffering started, like, really loudly suffering. And that upended our politics and our culture in so many ways.

LUSE: Hmm. That's very interesting.

ROSIN: 'Cause I bet underneath your question maybe is, like, should I feel sorry for Luke? Is that what you're trying to...

LUSE: No. That's actually - that is (laughter) not one of the questions that I have.

ROSIN: Yeah.

LUSE: I mean, I got to come clean. Luke is not a real person, but his characteristics were all ones pulled together from people's lives that actually did storm the Capitol...

ROSIN: Yeah.

LUSE: ...On January 6.

ROSIN: Yeah.

LUSE: And I brought up this kind of composite character, Luke, because I think that that character is a good way to think about how gender anxieties can actually be an expression of other anxieties in our lives. What do you think about that?

ROSIN: Hundred percent - I think it's the most powerful, most concrete and most persistent expression of generalized anxiety. I mean, I was at a Trump rally, and the number of times the people used expressions like, we don't want beta males. We want alpha males. We - I'm telling you - we want a world where men are men and women are women. And I'm thinking, the world is changing really fast - like, the world around gender and all over the place - because it's happening in urban places and rural places. Like, the way a younger generation thinks about what gender is and what their own gender is - it's really shifting radically and how that is just genuinely terrifying to people. Or it just becomes, like, a split. Like, the country splits in two, and one part of the country has really, like, rigid, traditional ideas of gender, and the other goes in, like, totally the other direction.

LUSE: I mean, it's interesting 'cause, like, when it comes to sort of, like, the Make-America-Great-Again era - you know, like, the past nearly 10 years - there's these, like, two competing gender ideals butting heads against one another. What do these two mentalities say about what we as Americans value? Or, in other words, like, what hopes and fears do we unconsciously put inside of our views on gender?

ROSIN: I feel like I'm in some kind of Buddha mood or something. I mean, the immediate answer that comes to me is...

LUSE: Go for it.

ROSIN: ...The world is an unstable and scary place, and people have lost a lot of their grounding - whether because fewer people are getting married, because jobs are less stable, because of the climate disasters - sort of for all sorts of reasons. And I think some people are grasping for stability kind of backwards, outside themselves - like, make America great again. Go back to the other time when things were like this, and I recognized them, and everything didn't seem out of control. And some people are looking for stability kind of inside themselves - like, self-determination, who I am, my own identity. I get to decide, like, what I want to be. And I think that's very grounding and empowering. So I think everybody's experiencing similar instability and just looking for answers...

LUSE: In different places.

ROSIN: ...Yeah - finding their comfort in different ways.

LUSE: I hadn't thought about self-determination as a way of finding comfort. That's a very interesting reframe.

ROSIN: Did I make that up? I kind of made that up.

LUSE: No.

ROSIN: But it just...

LUSE: I mean, I hadn't heard it before.

ROSIN: (Laughter) I just...

LUSE: I hadn't heard it before.

ROSIN: Yeah. No, it just struck me as, like, why - everybody feels the instability, you know? Everybody feels shaken. All of it is a feeling of out-of-controlness (ph) that you need a solution for. So it's like, where do you find your solution?

LUSE: Hmm. Hmm.

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LUSE: All right. I'm going to take a quick break, but we have so much more to dig into. So stick around. I'll be right back.

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LUSE: There is so much of this that, to me, strikes me as, like, societal attitudes. And some of our societal attitudes are so old and so baked into the way that we operate as a society, as a country, as Americans, as Westerners, I can't help but think about how those sometimes are a hindrance to the change that you're talking about needs to happen.

ROSIN: I mean, it's funny because the traditional male/female stereotype is, like, the longer I am on this earth, the less it makes any sense to me, even though it's, like, so powerfully ingrained. I mean, the hierarchy between men and women is the most consistent hierarchy across history, across cultures, across continents. It gets replicated over and over and over again all the time - kind of men above women, men above women. Why? Like, why are the traditions this way?

Like, I would ask the guys who I was reporting about in the book, like, why can't you just get a job teaching? Nope. Why can't you get a job in the hospital? Nope. That's woman's work. Why? Why? Like, what would you lose? Because if you think - one of the things about women is that they have, for the last century - think about how many stereotypes of femininity they have busted through for one reason or another, like, how you dress, if you work, if you're allowed to work when you're married. Are you allowed to work when you have a small child?

LUSE: Right.

ROSIN: Are you allowed to be a boss to a man? Are you allowed to run a thing? Like, they've kind of trampled all of these old stereotypes. But men are - I can't say they're not shifting. They're definitely shifting. I mean, you know men down the generations shift.

LUSE: Yeah.

ROSIN: Let's take a father who's 30 in a certain social class. There are different expectations of fathers now, I think, than there were two generations...

LUSE: Oh. Fathers who are in their 30s presently? Certainly.

ROSIN: Yes. Yes.

LUSE: Yeah - way different.

ROSIN: I do think maybe we can take some hope in that - that, in the current moment, some of the stigmas around how you have to be as a man are fading away. Like, in the things we talk about, like a Trump rally or January 6 - maybe there are some very loud, theatrical ways in which they're not fading, but maybe there are some subterranean ways in which they...

LUSE: They are.

ROSIN: ...Are fading. Like, they're just, you know, what you are expected to do at home, how you can express yourself, how - I mean, I have to say, I've been surprised at the different corners where I come to see men starting to recognize how important it is to understand your emotions, talk about them, how it holds you back if you can't. Like, that's the thing that's sort of trickling wider than I expected it to.

LUSE: Hmm. I want to put a metaphor to you. Do you know about, like, the strangling tree? Do you know about that?

ROSIN: Mmm-mmm.

LUSE: So there is this tree that grows up and around an existing tree, molding itself, like, around the contours and structures of the original tree. And then slowly, over time, the strangling tree overtakes and suffocates the other tree. Do you see that as maybe perhaps a good metaphor for what's happening with men and women right now - like, women have had to adapt and grow around men...

ROSIN: Ooh.

LUSE: ...While men have been able to maintain their status quo? But in the process, now, you know, we've gotten to this point where women have advanced, and, I mean, metaphorically, of course, men - you know, metaphorically, of course - have, you know, slowly but surely, suffocated to a kind of...

ROSIN: Oh, Brittany, that is really...

LUSE: I mean, I can't...

ROSIN: That is good imagery because I have long been thinking, like, there is this sense where women are, like, hustlers, and they're immigrants. They'll take any job. They go to the community college. I'm just talking statistically, not like...

LUSE: No. And that came through statistically, but that also came through in so many of the narratives of your book.

ROSIN: Yeah. Like, they're just - it's like, oh, I got to take care of the kid. Oh, I got to be a pharmacist. I got to go to school. I got to do this. I got to do this. And then all of a sudden, they've strangled this tree in the middle that's kind of, like, stood still, you know? I think that's a really, really, really good imagery for this current moment. The only problem with that imagery is that the top leaves of the tree (laughter) - like, if you take the tree, still, it's, like, being strangled, strangled down at the bottom, strangled towards the middle. But then when you get to the very top, that center tree totally dominates the canopy.

LUSE: (Laughter).

ROSIN: So that's how I'm going to complete your metaphor there. I just don't want to - you know, I don't want to be stupid about it. Like, that is also part of the picture - that, at the very, very tippy top are men and that, at some point, you do encounter the mother penalty, and that is very real. Like, the caretaking mother penalty still exists and is still around.

LUSE: Men also have had - and still have - immense power and privilege. How much are they actually in trouble, and how much is just them losing some of the power they once took as a given?

ROSIN: That's the central question because, you know, they're losing their position as head of the household. They're losing their economic privilege. That's all true. Like, that is happening. I guess the question is, what if you just said, so what? Like, what if that was OK? What if all those things were happening, and you redefine them as necessary recalibration as opposed to an absolute disaster? Like, if you just shifted your brain 20 degrees, you could solve a lot of the problems.

LUSE: Hmm. Well, Hanna, this has been a fantastic conversation. This has been great. You've just been great. Thank you so much for talking with me about this.

ROSIN: Thank you, Brittany.

LUSE: That was Hanna Rosin. She's the host of Radio Atlantic, and her book, an all-time classic, is called "The End Of Men."

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LUSE: This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...

BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.

ALEXIS WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Alexis Williams.

LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.

COREY ANTONIO ROSE, BYLINE: Corey Antonio Rose.

LUSE: This episode was edited by...

JESSICA PLACZEK, BYLINE: Jessica Placzek.

LUSE: Our executive producer is...

JASMINE ROMERO, BYLINE: Jasmine Romero.

LUSE: Our VP of programming is...

YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.

LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.

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