“The Men Who Fear Women.” That’s the title of Helen Lewis’s latest cover story for The Atlantic. It’s currently making a big splash as she travels the podcast and interview circuit—PBS, The New York Times, NPR—explaining what she calls “masculinism,” a movement that apparently wants to put women back in the kitchen where they belong, having stripped them of all their political rights.
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Sounds scary, huh? As the title suggests, though, it isn’t the women who are scared (although perhaps they should be)—it’s the men.
You may remember Helen Lewis from her car-crash interview with Jordan Peterson for GQ, way back in 2018. She was the one who really got up the good professor’s nose, needling and poking and making him look like a sulky teenager sitting atop a huge pile of mess in a fusty, darkened bedroom—the precise demographic Peterson arrived on the scene to rescue from its own retarded development and the scorn of polite society. In hindsight, although Peterson’s star would continue to grow, that interview was probably the beginning of the end for him, revealing the limitations of his philosophy and the personality behind it. Most of all, Lewis goaded Peterson into showing the true extent of his fragility: the brittleness that, in time, would make it impossible for him to continue in his valuable role as surrogate father to an entire generation of angry, confused, demoralized young men.
So, what is “masculinism”? Wilson describes it as a “movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.” There are religious “masculinists”—not just Christian, but also Muslim—and there are secular “masculinists.” For Lewis, the religious masculinists are exemplified by a guy called Doug Wilson, an evangelical pastor whose self-created denomination has 170 churches across the U.S. and counts Secretary of War Pete Hegseth among its members. Wilson even led a prayer service at the Pentagon in February.
“Wilson believes that women should ‘not ordinarily’ hold political office,” Lewis writes, “and should never serve in combat roles in the military.”
“Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits, and choice of television programs.”
The Nineteenth Amendment would be repealed, and voting would take place “the same way we do it in our church structure . . . by household,” Wilson told her.
Wilson has choice words for every shade of woman he doesn’t like. They’re “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes, “Jezebels.” Gloria Steinem and another prominent feminist are “a couple of c-nts.” Indeed, Wilson’s “twinkly, avuncular” persona one-on-one, in the flesh, is rather different from his public and especially his online persona, Lewis notes. In public life, Wilson’s “performative trollishness”—she uses the pro-wrestling term “kayfabe” to describe it—has one aim: “He wants feminists like me to get angry with his most outlandish proposals, making ourselves look like scolds or Chicken Littles in the process,” thereby proving his point about the unsuitability of women for front-facing roles in society. Clever game.
But Lewis notes that, despite the kayfabe, Wilson is deadly serious.
Wilson, as I say, is the archetype of the Christian brand of “masculinism.” But there are also the influencers Andrew Tate and Sneako, Nicholas J. Fuentes, another pastor called Joel Webbon—and there’s me. She calls me an influencer “albeit one who knows a lot of $10 words.” There’s even a woman, Helen Andrews, whom I’ll get back to in a moment.
When I spoke to Lewis at the beginning of the year, I was in Washington promoting my new book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. I must say, I thought she’d mellowed considerably since I’d last seen her, baiting Jordan Peterson like a scene from a 17th-century woodcut. It was clear she’d read my book closely, or so it seemed, and her comments and questions were smart and incisive—and not entirely unsympathetic either. She even complimented my striped dressing gown (it was early and I was still in bed), although she described it as a set of pajamas in the final piece. If you’ve been following my work, you’ll know I’m not a fan of pajamas or any item of clothing that risks overheating the testes, compromising hormone production and fertility.
Still, I knew that I would not get an easy ride. And, of course, I didn’t. Apart from the “$10-dollar words” quip, there’s much Lewis gets wrong in point of fact about my new book. She says the argument, about testosterone decline and the draining of masculinity, is directed against “elites.”
“He lays the blame at the feet of the elites,” she says.
They are keeping you fat; they are unhappy with risk-taking and hierarchy; they are calling masculinity toxic.
Either Lewis didn’t read the book as closely as I thought she did, or she’s trying to fit me and my work into a theoretical straitjacket that’s a few sizes too small. The argument of my book is not about elites vs. the people. It’s about liberal democracy as a political system, and what is and isn’t possible within the confines of that system. Nobody designed that system, and nobody is in control of it. I certainly don’t believe there’s a shadowy cabal of people with a checklist of things to do to “destroy masculinity,” like making men fat and useless and discouraging the forms of risk-taking necessary for boys to develop into fully fledged men. In my chapter on the “gay frogs conspiracy theory”—“they’re putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay”—I explicitly reject the notion that social engineers are polluting the food and water supply with gender-bending chemicals, even though there is evidence that companies like DuPont and 3M hid toxicity data about “safe” chemicals from regulators for decades, causing enormous harm.
But that doesn’t mean powerful individuals, like Stephen Colbert or Joy Behar, don’t use tropes like “toxic masculinity” or calling all forms of male association “gay” to pursue their own ends; and the baleful state of the average man does indeed tend toward the maintenance of the status quo, which is one of the main reasons nothing much is done to help men.
It is also wrong to say, as she does, that my focus is on feminism. My focus is on liberal democracy, which predates and encompasses feminism.
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What Lewis wants, most of all, is for masculinism to be an actual thing, a coherent movement—because otherwise, what would be the point of writing a 3,000-word piece for The Atlantic? If masculinism is just an odds-and-sods collection of dudes with retrograde views about women that you, as a modern liberated woman, don’t like, so what? Those five full spreads could be better filled with a piece about President Zelensky or trans kids.
The key to “masculinism,” Lewis claims, is that it provides a kind of unifying ideology for MAGA, which would otherwise lack one.
“In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump,” she says.
Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.
But beyond the motley crew of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys she assembles, there isn’t actually a great deal of evidence for this “single most important force uniting the American right.” She cites a couple of studies that suggest Gen-Z men are more likely than boomers to believe feminism has gone too far and that men are now disadvantaged. Eighty-three percent of Republicans under 50 believe society is too feminized, according to a survey by the Manhattan Institute. But Gen-Z men believe plenty of other things besides, many of which could be seen as just as important.
I’ll give Lewis her due: Yes, it’s obviously true there is a broad sense on the Right, that feminism has gone too far. But then again, what’s new about that? Would William F. Buckley, or any conservative or right-wing figure from the last 70 years, disagree? Ronald Reagan? Richard Nixon? I don’t think so. This isn’t so much about the emergence of a new ideology or even a recrudescence of an old one, so much as its newfound visibility on social media. She’s focusing on the message when it’s the medium that’s more interesting. Lewis briefly mentions Richard Hanania’s notion of the “based ritual”—a kind of signaling game people play online to show they’re “based” and “part of the club”—but this doesn’t really get us any closer to how social media drives consumers and creators to consume and produce ever more shocking and “outrageous” content. If Andrew Tate could make more money with baking videos on TikTok, you know he would.
If masculinism is a movement—and not just a “manosphere,” to use a more popular term—you would expect its most prominent members to display some kind of self-consciousness regarding their membership in that movement and a sense of shared goals. But the truth is, there’s outright hostility among the main “masculinists” and indeed toward MAGA itself. Look no further than Nick Fuentes. Fuentes is currently telling people to vote for the Democrats in the midterms and has been engaged in similar triangulations for years now. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he was telling people, “Kamala is brat” and attempting to disguise his own obvious disinterest in the opposite sex by saying, “Kamala’s got rizz,” and she’s “pretty hot.” He has few good things to say about President Trump; he hates JD Vance—almost certainly the heir to MAGA—and he also hates me. I would be the first to say I share very little in common with Fuentes, and that includes the origins of my “masculinism,” which don’t lie in a virginity as carefully preserved as that of a medieval saint.
MAGA doesn’t need a new single uniting force. It has always had one: the very simple credo, “America First.” We can debate, down to fine-grained detail, what that actually means, but we can’t deny its importance or its function as a North Star for the movement. It has remained such since Trump first came down the escalator over a decade ago. It’s why debates about the real causes and meaning of the Iran War have struck at the heart of MAGA and led some to claim Trump has betrayed it. Can you justify the war as being in America’s best interest? Is the Iran War America First?
Another challenge to her theory is the presence of a woman, Helen Andrews, among her “men who fear women.” Andrews has written very powerfully and persuasively about the feminization of education, the workplace, and society more broadly, and all the negative things that entails—the stifling of creativity, freedom, and innovation.
Why would a woman be a “masculinist” too? Lewis leaves this very interesting question unanswered in the piece itself, but in podcast appearances she has suggested that alignment with misogyny can have benefits for some women, or at least some women think that’s the case, anyway. In a sense, women like Helen Andrews become “house negros,” “Uncle Toms” who serve the dominant power structure in the hope of being rewarded and avoiding the worst excesses of its discipline.
Even a cursory glance at TikTok, at the wealth of videos made by young women documenting the serious negative health effects they have experienced from taking hormonal birth control, would tell you that’s a pretty thin, self-serving attempt at an explanation. The world feminists created does not serve all women equally well. It’s not “false consciousness” to believe that.
In the end, Lewis seems to be torn between declaring “masculinism” to be a clear and present danger to all women—my pen lingered over and then circled the words “Renee Good” as I was reading the piece—and saying the “movement” is a load of hot air that’s rapidly cooling. In the final section, she writes, “Masculinism is now approaching its imperial-overreach phase, like the Roman Empire that many of its leaders so admire.” The movement has real policy goals, and it has achieved things—like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, supported by notable “masculinist” Amy Coney Barrett—but in truth it’s just a “perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo—whatever that is.”
At one point, Lewis claims “masculinists” believe that men aren’t being talked about enough. I, for one, have never and would never say that. As I state in the introduction to my book, bathtubs of ink are now spilled on the so-called “crisis of masculinity” by people like Richard Reeves, Senator Josh Hawley, and Jordan Peterson. It’s not that people aren’t writing or talking about men. It’s that they’re saying the wrong things, in the wrong way. One thing they’re doing wrong is ignoring biology, pretending testosterone doesn’t matter. Another thing: Dressing up fears and grievances against men as dispassionate analysis and well-meaning advice. Take it from me, as a man: that won’t make me like you more.
