Market Failure and the Manosphere

The market failure beneath the manosphere, America's gerontocracy crisis, foreign influence in universities and more in this week's digest.

A final reminder for those of you in Chicago that you can come hear me talk at a First Things conversation at the Chicago Athenaeum on Monday evening.

If you liked my repost of Anthony Bradley’s post about evangelical “cubicle men,” be sure to go read part two in his series and sign up for his Substack.

Market Failure and the Mansophere

Last week’s Financial Times weekend essay was one of the best things I’ve seen in mainstream media about the rise of the manosphere. It’s about the market failure beneath the manosphere.

The clip had promised a raging misogynist. What I encountered was a boy whose insecurity and ambition were fighting over control of his face. Davey’s dad died young. What he wants now, more than anything, is to give his own children what that death has taken from him: a strong father figure at the centre of things, providing and steadying, the man of the house.

This innocent ambition had curdled into something else entirely: a search for a “tradwife” and contempt for a woman he barely knew.

What took him from one to the other is the manosphere, the sprawling online ecosystem of influencers who have built profit-making careers telling boys the world is rigged against them. The manosphere has two unifying elements: escaping the so-called matrix, a worldview that tells you your role as a man is already fixed and the system has you under its thumb; and the corruption of modern society by feminism.

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American young men are significantly less likely to identify as conservative than their elders, with 68 per cent in one recent poll disagreeing with the idea that society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles. Young people of both sexes are more liberal than ever. 

Whatever the indicator you look at in the World Values Survey — women in political leadership, abortion, homosexuality — the long-run trend across western democracies is the same: young men aged 18 to 29 are becoming less conservative. This is quite the narrative violation in the manosphere debate, where the dominant framing treats the whole phenomenon as the visible tip of a deeper ideological shift.

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I propose a different explanation. Strip away the misogyny, the supplements, the snarling podcasts, and what remains is a disarmingly simple promise: you can make something of yourself. Yes, the manosphere is ideological but its core appeal is about agency, about giving young men a navigable path through a world that grades them hard on success but offers them little guidance on how to achieve it.

In polite society, talking too openly about success is not quite the done thing. This is understandable, but it also creates a vacuum. And a crude, extractive definition will always find buyers among young men who cannot get their answer elsewhere.

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There is a moment, somewhere between puberty and adulthood, when something ignites in many young men: an almost physical conviction that you have to make something of yourself. Earn money, get fit and, perhaps most pressingly, become “high-value” on the dating market.

I recognised it in friends, in classmates, in boys I shared a single cigarette with outside clubs. I felt it myself. It arrived alongside the first cold suspicion that nobody is going to do this for you, and that the clock, for the first time, is actually running.

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At school, we learnt about Pythagoras’s theorem and the Treaty of Versailles, neither of which proved especially useful outside a debating society. Nobody told us how to approach a girl, how to build a network or what success actually meant.

There is a reason for that silence. Success, examined closely, is an uncomfortable subject for anyone who takes seriously how much of it is unearned. Before your first breath, your genes have already set margins for your height, your hair, your metabolism and your predisposition to anxiety.

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Religious communities, sports coaches, teachers (politicians, at present, perhaps less so): all present and dispense wisdom about the good life. What they share, however, is a certain reluctance to name what success looks like for a young man, and to say plainly how it is achieved. The manosphere has no such reluctance.

Many young men are intensely competitive, and there is nothing wrong with that. The question is simply what that drive gets aimed at.

The manosphere is not uniquely well-positioned to reach people such as Davey. It wins simply because it shows up, because a crude map beats no map. It’s ultimately about demand and supply. That is the market failure beneath the manosphere.

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If this captures the appeal of the manosphere, then the way to beat it is to offer boys an alternative story about male success, about what it means to win and how to get there. Let me offer one.

The lives I find most impressive share a single feature: the person has found a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction. What they share is the understanding that individual ambition and collective benefit are not at war.

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Rather than being primarily about ideology, the manosphere is a contest over who gets to define success for a generation of boys actively searching for an answer. Young men in a capitalist society understand perfectly well that they will pay the price if they have no answer to what success means and how to get there.

The manosphere gets at least one thing right: this demand is real and will not go away. The “red pill” it sells (don’t just accept the hand you’re dealt) contains a kernel that is not wrong. The problem is that it then uses it to sell shortcuts that don’t work and views that harm women.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can try to click over to read the whole thing. I excerpted as much as I could justify.

There’s clearly something to this. Society at large seems indifferent if not outright hostile to male success. Instead, men are delivered hectoring Man up! lectures about how they need to be less toxic or sacrifice more for other people.

As I’ve said before, in most evangelical teachings, a man has no legitimate claims of his own he can assert and no legitimate desires or aspirations he can hold.

Even this piece hits similar themes. He author says men should find “a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction.” This is good so far as it goes. But I wonder how many people in our society would be willing to qualify women’s ambitions similarly, to say that they are only legitimate if they lead to someone else’s flourishing? I rarely hear female ambitions talked about this this way.

Related in the Dispatch: The Dispatch: The Rise of the “Gentlemanosphere”, the Anti-Manosphere - While some of these people like Richard Reeves and Arthur Brooks clearly deserve the title of gentleman, the main person featured in this piece, Prof F-Bomb Galloway, certainly does not.

The Old Guard

The new issue of Harper’s has a great essay on the crisis of America’s gerontocracy called “The Old Guard.” It’s very much worth reading. Some excerpts:

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink. The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless. Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-­the-­job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us.

Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-­one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-­living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down. Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-­five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year. Last year, a seventy-­five-­year-­old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.

The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours. Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.

The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.

In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system. They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy.

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America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—­waiting for the old to make way for the new—­defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.

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That question ignores the relationship between the aging of politicians and the disaffection of the young, who prefer to vote for candidates closer to themselves in age, all other things being equal. We know that the age skew of voters is among the best explanations for the elderliness of our politicians, and it has created a self-­fulfilling prophecy: the young stay home, and then have an even better reason to do so in the next election, because the old vote old politicians into office.

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Elder power in the public realm has a private foundation: above all, old Americans are disproportionately rich. Gerontocracy overlaps with plutocracy—­or more precisely, it is one of its most consequential forms. Of course, poor old people exist, just as rich young people do. You can imagine, just barely, a society in which elder rule is not so intertwined with wealth. But that place is not America today, and the correlation of age with wealth is anything but random.

According to a 2011 study, the median senior citizen had forty-­seven times more wealth than the median American between the ages of eighteen and thirty-­four. This disparity had gotten remarkably worse over time. In 2009, households headed by adults older than sixty-­five had improved their median net worth by 42 percent over the prior quarter century. By comparison, the median net worth of households headed by adults eighteen to thirty-­four fell by 68 percent during the same period.

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It’s no mystery why the old want to retain their privileges. That they can keep them so easily is in large part because the age of gerontocracy has been an age of tax revolts on behalf of the propertied. A house isn’t just a place to live; older people also have fanatical attitudes toward the disturbance of their property. “They are not generous,” Aristotle noted, for “they know from experience how hard it is to get and how easy to lose.” Beyond blocking development that would benefit those who do not yet own homes, the old evince a hostility to taxing property for the sake of social goals. Americans in their final decades go even further than the libertarian American default. Not only do they feather their nests; they also secure them against predators, even though they hurt their own young in doing so.

The primary agenda for old people has long been avoiding property taxes, even when the immunities they win are regressive in the extreme, as in the case of California’s Proposition 13….The purported rationale for property-­tax relief is that old people no longer have the salaries coming in that they would need in order to pay their share to the state. But this is mostly a smoke screen, because of just how much property wealth many older Americans control.

Property-­tax limits have further abetted the elderly’s monopolization of housing. Places with higher property taxes predictably have lower house prices, leading to younger ownership. After all, it’s easier to pay even a high tax bill than to make a giant down payment. So it follows that when property taxes are held down, and home prices rise, young people are kept away.

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The effects on all levels of American government are tremendous. It has been estimated that various property-­tax breaks for seniors cost states the equivalent of 7 percent of their income-­tax revenue.

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If we want to counter their power, it won’t work to suggest that elderly people have the same stake in building a better world for the future, because they don’t. Their eagerness to avoid taxes that benefit younger generations demonstrates as much. It won’t work, either, to paper over the enormous differences between the precarity of some seniors and the situation of the mass of younger people living without the specific privileges correlated with, and often reserved for, older people. Those differences imply that seniors will sometimes be allies of progress, but not always, and opponents more often. Age-­related class advantages are in many cases far more profound than the intersection of class with gender or race. There is no way to ignore them if we want a fairer future.

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Legally, it became possible for workers to stay longer and longer, and many do, clustering in elite professions, in contrast to manual or menial work that people leave if they can or because they must. America’s corporate leaders exemplify the situation. The average hiring age for CEOs at the top American companies—­those included in the Fortune 500 or the S&P 500—­has risen dramatically, from forty-­six to fifty-­five in the past two decades. That is the same period during which executive compensation has soared, with direct implications for the fusion of age and class inequality in America today. It is not hard to think of leaders who stay on and become hard to eject even for sound business reasons, as they control their own companies or stand symbolically for them.

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There is no known reason to believe that corporate performance has improved as a result. Indeed, there are many reasons to think that there is a price to pay, and it is not borne only by younger workers who are unable to break into the upper ranks. The market speaks clearly about the profitability of younger leadership. According to a recent study, stock prices decline when younger CEOs die unexpectedly, while the sudden deaths of the doddering and wizened drive price spikes.

According to their official purpose, corporations should be engines of change and novelty; part of what drives profits is the creation of new and better products that consumers will buy. But corporate America is hampered in this mission by its laboring gerontocracy, and by the conversion of society into a static domain for hoarding seniors. While Monsieur Grandet eventually dies in Balzac’s novel, his successors are alive and well in America today.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s interesting that almost all of the discussions about the implication of gerontocracy, such as incredible generational inequality in favor of largely Boomer seniors, is happening in secular society but not in the church.

There’s frankly enormous injustice in wealthy, selfish seniors who continue to push for policies that benefit themselves at the expensive of younger generations and the future of the nation. This form of selfishness is basically never called out by pastors as near as I can tell, however.

Foreign Influence in American Universities

Kite and Key is a great media non-profit that produces informative explainer type videos designed for social media. The recently turned five years old, and just released this really great video about the way foreign governments like China have acquired undue influence over our universities.

Best of the Web

The Federalist: Project Hail Mary Is The Masculine Christian Film You’ve Been Waiting For - See also Joseph Holmes’ review if you missed it.

The Guardian: Despite their bad reputation, parenting group chats are – for some – the village that never sleeps

NYT: Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed (gift link) - Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.

WSJ: More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class (gift link) - Research shows that ranks of higher earners have grown markedly over last 50 years, while lower rungs of middle class have shrunk

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in Mere Orthodoxy.

New this week:

• When Bad Social Practices Drive Out Good - Why it’s getting harder to do the right thing — whether hiring legally, waiting for sex, or running for office — as bad social practices take over

• Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.” - Why a culture obsessed with safety, reputation, and moral control is quietly eliminating the kind of risk-taking required to build institutions - A guest repost by Dr. Anthony Bradley.

Be sure again to check out Bradley’s second installment in this series.

Cover image: Andrew Tate by James English/Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0