Why Americans struggle over the future of masculinity

When Roberta Chevrette explores the idea of a “crisis in masculinity” with her students, she’ll often have them analyze some of the cartoons that proliferated in the early 20th century as the suffrage movement began to gain momentum.

Some of the cartoons mock women making political speeches, sexualizing their appearance with the caption “only a figure of speech.” Other images depict women smoking cigars and playing cards in a backroom while a visibly frustrated man in the next room washes clothes and holds a crying child. “Notice to fathers: wash your shirts with Sud’s soap.”

Another depicts a sketch of a girl brandishing a rolling pin, glaring at a startled and confused young boy: “You believe in women’s suffrage – don’t you?”

“There is a certain power in these rhetorical tools, which say, ‘Oh, hey, no, women’s rights? That means that men will be oppressed or somehow feminized,’” says Dr. Chevrette, professor of rhetoric, intercultural communication, and gender studies at Middle Tennessee State University.

Similar ideas of a crisis in masculinity emerged as a second wave of battles over women’s rights emerged along with the civil rights movement. “So in the 1970s and ’80s, for example, when U.S. women made major legal victories, the idea that ‘manly’ feminists were gaining too much power and demasculinizing men again gained popularity,” she says.  

A global phenomenon

In many ways, similar anxieties animate a revival of crisis rhetoric today, she and other scholars point out, not only in the United States but also around the world. While conservative thinkers and populist leaders today focus less on the expanding rights and social roles of women, many have decried what they call the left’s “gender ideology,” which they perceive as deconstructing the biological differences between men and women and defining masculinity itself as “toxic.”

Government officials in China last year banned media depictions of so-called sissy men in pop culture, which many blame in part on Western gender values. They’ve also cracked down on the number of hours children spend playing video games and have committed to a renewed focus on sports education in order to “prevent men from becoming too feminine.”

Populist leaders such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Hungary’s ​​Viktor Orbán have also proclaimed a crisis in masculinity caused by the “gender ideologies” of the left. Prime Minister Orbán has taken steps to ban gender studies programs in the country’s universities, saying “people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially-constructed genders, rather than biological sexes.”

Attacks on traditional ideas of masculinity threaten not only the civic vigor of a society, but also a nation’s ability to compete with others and defend itself from dangers, these leaders say.

“The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said in an address to the National Conservatism Conference last fall. “They want to define the traditional masculine virtues – things like courage and independence and assertiveness – as a danger to society.”

“The problem with the left’s assault on the masculine virtues is that those self-same qualities, the very ones the left now vilify as dangerous and toxic, have long been regarded as vital to self-government,” said Senator Hawley, who has become one of the most outspoken conservative leaders to proclaim that American men are in a crisis. “Observers from the ancient Romans to our forefathers identified the manly virtues as indispensable for political liberty.”

Goal of reviving manly virtues

The idea of “manly virtues” can easily be caricatured and made into a silly, cartoonish nostalgia for bygone eras, says Casey Chalk, a conservative Roman Catholic thinker and writer in Virginia. He’s also been concerned by what he sees as “the weird extremes” of a militaristic machismo and obsession with guns that men on the far-right express online.

“From a classical perspective, and certainly as someone who subscribes to the Catholic tradition, I believe men and women flourish when they’re participating in the same pursuit of cardinal virtues,” says Mr. Chalk, who did civilian work in Afghanistan as a Persian language specialist for the Department of Defense. “But males are naturally more aggressive, and they need outlets that will help direct that physical or sexual aggression in ways that are socially productive,” he says.

In that sense, he says, men need to rediscover the virtues of being a gentleman, a special moral discipline that can both channel and control the innate biological drives and special sociological roles of men. 

“I think there is a real sense in which men do, you know, eagerly want to be able to be viewed as brave and strong – not necessarily even physically, but even temperamentally and psychologically,” Mr. Chalk says. “They want to be protectors; they want to be able to defend their family and, more broadly, their way of life.”

But ideological pressures are only part of the current crisis, leaders like Senator Hawley say. Neoliberal policies of deindustrialization have cost working-class jobs, causing a crisis of idleness that then exacerbates problematic addictions to pornography and video games.

“American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers,” he said. “They’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse” – startling data that thinkers on both the right and left have observed with growing alarm.

But conservative thinkers such as David French and others have echoed concerns on the left about “the new right’s dangerous cult of toughness.” Some of the crisis rhetoric has led to an avalanche of threats directed toward public officials and even stoked the kind of rage behind the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“That’s not just Twitter trolling,” Mr. French told Sean Illing at Vox. “It’s not just posturing online anymore. It’s the logic of a movement centered around aggression divorced from virtue that indulges in apocalyptic rhetoric.”

The historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, however, also points out that this kind of crisis rhetoric along with ideas of masculine toughness and aggression has recurred throughout American history, especially within white evangelical Protestant subcultures, in which the idea of Christian manhood evolved to be seen in rugged, militant terms.

“Part of this definition of masculinity, this kind of rugged masculinity, is the kind masculinity that [Donald] Trump embodies for the right,” says Dr. Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” “It isn’t primarily physical strength, but it is a kind of ruthlessness. It is the willingness to do what needs to be done regardless of democratic norms, regardless of traditional civility.”

“This is kind of taken from the authoritarian playbook,” says Dr. Du Mez, professor of history at Calvin University in Michigan. “With such stark gender differences, women are to be very quote-unquote ‘feminine,’ women are vulnerable and need to be protected, and so it’s the strong, masculine men who have a God-given obligation to stand up and defend their women, defend their culture, and that violence may be necessary.”

But American rhetoric surrounding a “crisis in masculinity” also recurred in places such as the 1965 Moynihan Report, says Brandon Manning, professor of Black literature and culture at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. 

“His report talked about the legacy of slavery and its impact into the latter part of the 20th century, but it also said that Black communities were going to keep struggling because of a growing matriarchy in those spaces,” Dr. Manning says. “And so, essentially, he was doing a similar kind of call to action for men to take their rightful places – as well as an admonishment of Black women.”

“The family is meant to reflect and reverberate into political structures, educational structures, and such,” he says. “If masculine ideals are not exercised at home, then everything else is kind of, within this logic, out of whack, in a space of disarray.” 

Economy of “brains not brawn”

But such ideas about biological sex and gender have evolved within a much larger sweep of cultural and technological change, says Gloria Feldt, co-founder and president of Take the Lead, a women’s leadership center in Manhattan. 

“In today’s economy that is based on brains not brawn ... the kind of masculinity some men yearn for isn’t even functional anymore, if it ever was,” she says. “And it is toxic because it’s rooted in inequality.”

“In reality, gender is a social construct and power is like a hammer,” Ms. Feldt continues. “You can build with it or destroy with it. ... Those men who understand, as women typically do, that the resources that matter now – intelligence, innovation, empathy, for example – also understand that the world will be healthier, happier, and more prosperous with greater equality in leadership roles.”

On one level, there have been numerous efforts to encourage men to break out of limiting models of masculinity and encourage emotional vulnerability and expressiveness. 

Others such as Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential aspirant, have outlined a greater commitment to vocational education, national-service programs, and marriage counseling to address the growing economic struggles that many middle-class and working-class men are facing, along with increasing levels of opioid addiction and suicide.

“Here’s the simple truth I’ve heard from many men,” Mr. Yang wrote in a recent op-ed. “We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Second of two parts. Part 1: Why these men find the phrase ‘toxic masculinity,’ well, toxic