The Masculinity Crisis Is Real

The male experience, a Gen-Z religious revival?, zero-sum politics and more in this week's digest.

The New York Times Magazine ran an interesting piece (gift link) about the 2006 book Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent. Vincent was a woman who disguised herself as a man and was surprised by the difference in how she was treated. I haven’t read the book myself, but material from this book has been a manosphere staple for a while.

Its author, the journalist Norah Vincent, has been anointed as something as a godmother to the manosphere. In her book “Self-Made Man” (2006), she recounted an 18-month social experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and infiltrated male-only spaces. As “Ned,” she dated, applied for jobs, did a stint in a monastery. She joined a bowling league and lurked at dank strip clubs. Vincent assumed her project would reveal that men moved through life with a kind of ease that women could scarcely imagine. She was brutally disabused. The men she met were lonely and unhappy. Their pain became her own. When she tried to date as a man, the cruelty of women left her shaken and humiliated.

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All this came later. The project began as a lark. One evening, a drag-king friend dared Vincent to go out dressed as a man. She put on a flannel shirt, baseball cap, mustache and goatee. As they strolled the neighborhood, no one paid her any attention. As a woman, Vincent wrote, she was used to being stared at and scrutinized on those same streets, but this time the men looked away.

“It was astounding,” she wrote. “The difference, the respect they showed me by not looking at me, by purposedly not staring.” The more she thought about this gesture, the more important it seemed. “There was something more than respect being communicated in their averted gaze, something subtler, less direct. It was more like a disinclination to show disrespect,” she wrote, “to leave each man to his tiny sphere of influence, the small buffer of pride and poise that surrounds and keeps him.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

One thing this illustrates is that women don’t understand men’s experience of the world, and of course vice versa. This is part of the men are from Mars, women are from Venus dynamic.

And The Point magazine had an interesting essay on the masculine mystique. It’s about “romantasy” films and kink, so be aware before reading it.

The Changing Nature of Work and Child-Rearing

Amil Niazi has has an interesting book excerpt in The Cut. She talks about the impact of the white collar work from home movement on children, who now spent a lot of time watching their parents work and focus on work.

The thing about working from home is that the kids see me work. They’ve become accustomed to Mom shushing them during a Zoom call or podcast recording or waving them off as I sit at my desk for hours at a time.

Like all parents do, I chastise myself sometimes for how it must hurt their feelings or make them feel less important, but then I remind myself how much of my time they have otherwise. Not that it’s ever enough. The appetite of a child for their mother is bottomless. They don’t often complain out loud, or not to me anyway, but that doesn’t change how I see myself.

It’s hard to balance the desire to keep existing creatively and existing for them, even when it’s beautiful and encompassing and full of love and reward.

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Neither of my parents ever brought their work home in the way that both Matt and I are forced to do. They didn’t have email or cell phones or Slack; once they left work and came home, that was it, there was no carryover — the thought alone makes me feel wildly jealous. Their jobs were a kind of mystery, something we only ever encountered if there was an awkward work picnic. On the one hand, their distractions weren’t career-oriented; if or when they ignored us, it had nothing to do with work. On the other, my only interaction with the concept of work or ambition came through the TV and what Murphy Brown was up to. Everything about being an adult was a fantasy.

Now, some people did bring home boxes of files to work on in the pre-Internet era, but I think it’s fair to say that for most kids, their parents jobs were not something they witnesses on a regular basis. For some people that’s still true. But for many others - such as my son - it isn’t.

I do think it’s worth reflecting on, and paying attention to how this will affect those kids view of work and their parents.

There Is No Gen-Z Religious Revival

Quantitative scholar of religion Ryan Burge has been pushing back against the idea that there’s been a big return to religion among young people. He wrote a piece for the Deseret News about this.

As the share of adults with no religious affiliation climbed from just 6% in 1991 to nearly 30% in 2020, it would certainly make headlines if that march toward secularism suddenly stopped — and even more so if the ones leading a return to church were teens and 20-somethings.

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, many of his followers described him as a martyr for conservative Christianity and claimed that his death would spark millions to embrace his evangelical beliefs and lifestyle. That possibility received significant coverage from outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

However, as someone who looks at data on American religion nearly every day, I can say without equivocation that there’s no clear or compelling evidence that younger Americans are more religious than their parents or grandparents. In reality, many casual observers are overinterpreting some short-term shifts in survey data.

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Could millennials and Gen Z find God in the years ahead? Possibly — but it would require a transformation unlike anything seen in modern times. Roughly 10 million millennials would have to reaffiliate with religion, followed by another 18 million Gen Zers. There’s no sign of that happening in any dataset.

To make this more concrete, consider a simple numerical exercise. About 25% of Americans report attending a house of worship on a typical weekend. If that rose by even three points — a small but noticeable increase — that would mean 10 to 12 million more people in church today than just six months ago.

That’s hard to imagine given that there are only about 350,000 houses of worship nationwide. Evenly distributed, those 12 million new attendees would add roughly 35 people to every congregation. And since the median church in America averages just 65 attendees, each one would have to grow by nearly 50% just to move the national number by three points.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Zero-Sum World, Zero-Sum Politics

John Burn-Murdoch has another great column in the Financial Times on the rise of zero-sum politics.

The deviation from a uniform story of populist rightwing insurgence may reassure some readers. However, upon closer inspection these apparently disparate shifts are all part of a coherent and perhaps even more troubling trend: the emergence and solidification of a politics that is anti-system, anti-growth and fundamentally premised on the idea that we live in a zero-sum world.

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When economic growth is weak, upward mobility becomes limited, meaning gains really are more likely to come at another’s expense. This describes the past two decades almost perfectly. Per capita economic growth across the west has averaged less than 1 per cent a year since the financial crisis, down from more than double that in the previous three decades and triple before that. The conveyor belt of generation-on-generation economic progress has slowed to a crawl and everyone is looking accusingly at the person a few steps ahead or the one joining the line half way along.

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And the importance of upward mobility to the formation of zero-sum beliefs solves another apparent puzzle: why socialist and New York mayor-elect Mamdani had particular success with high-earning young professionals. In the 1980s, almost three-quarters of thirtysomething New Yorkers earning the equivalent of $100,000 in today’s money owned their own home. Today that figure is less than half. New York’s six-figure socialists are not play-acting; by the most salient marker of socio-economic success we have (home ownership) they are empirically a downwardly mobile group, turning to radical anti-market measures out of desperation.

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The housing crisis is just one of many reasons that it should come as no surprise to see young people holding the strongest zero-sum attitudes. Recent years have seen steadily increasing economic transfers from young to old as pensions in many countries have become more generous while taxes and other deductions from the young have mounted alongside climbing housing costs. Rent often passes directly from young adults to their parents’ generation.

Click over to read the whole thing (if you can get past the paywall).

A key to understand this is that many things today do have zero-sum characteristics. When Ivy League schools fail to expand enrollment slots, admission to Harvard is a zero-sum game. With not that many new apartments being built in New York, living there is a zero-sum game. Part of the idea of the “overproduction of elites” is that there are too many people chasing too few slots.

Article Follow-Ups

I wanted to share a few reactions to recent pieces of mine. First, on my First Things evangelical elite essay, Albert Thompson posted an interesting insight.

Many evangelicals understand ownership, but they do not understand governance. Evangelical business success is concentrated in sectors like retail, restaurants, and distribution—niche fiefs, where the power of ownership is absolute. This is effective for building a company with a relatively predictable business model, but it is a poor preparation for the commanding heights of society. Institutional power in places like high finance, the Supreme Court, or elite universities requires a different social capital: the ability to marshal a consensus among the governed and to navigate complex, high-trust systems that you do not personally own. When evangelicals bring a fief mindset to politics or public institutions, they may win a few elections, but often fail to create durable institutions that flourish and survive in a messy and fallen world. Instead, they become lords of gated enclaves and public square paupers. [emphasis added]

This reminds me of a Law & Liberty essay I’ve referenced before that talks about the difference between “car dealers” and “New Dealers.” Evangelicals are car dealers (sometimes literally) whereas elites are New Dealers.

Now, I’ve spoken favorably of ownership before and the need for evangelicals to acquire more of it. So I’m not anti-ownership. But I’m also not a believer in one-size-fits-all model. The majority of evangelicals probably should continue focusing on things like ownership. But to reach elite levels, a small subset of people need to be comfortable operating in a different register as well.

The young evangelical man I’ve mentioned before who decided to go to Yale rather than Oklahoma wrote to share these thoughts:

From my perspective as someone who is considering trying to become one of those evangelical elites and in a very good place to do so here at Yale, I wanted to expand on a two issues that I think disincentivize people like me (young male evangelical from Oklahoma) from ending up where I am.

1. Lack of examples. Young people like me have absolutely zero framework to work off of for what it actually looks like to be an evangelical in an elite space. What would it mean to be on the Supreme Court as an evangelical? There’s no obvious path forward. As such, any evangelical that hopes to become an elite will be largely paving new paths, consciously entering into a space with little mentorship or precedent to follow behind.

Compare this with the type of people that were venerated in my church in Oklahoma. Men who did well for themselves, owned local contracting or HVAC businesses, and had time enough to disciple other men and care for their families. Just based on exposure, this is the type of men most young evangelicals will grow up to be. In this way, the evangelical deficit becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. This is doubly true for young women, who rarely have examples of women leading successful careers, much less elite ones.

The only person I knew who went to an Ivy transferred out after a semester due to mental health struggles. Not exactly an inspiring precedent for me to follow after. (Interestingly, the one person who did explicitly encourage me to try to attend an Ivy was my uncle, who is Catholic.)

2. Mistrust of institutions. Going to a good college like Yale is the surest way to make it into the elite. It’s also a really good deal for most people who aren’t extravagantly wealthy, contrary to popular belief.

These are facts many evangelicals would like to ignore. Most would rather write the Ivy League off as ‘too-woke’ and send their kid to State U rather than acknowledge that, even if there is bad, it often is outweighed by benefits unavailable at other institutions. (I also just don’t think that the wokeness is that big of a deal given my first semester experience here, but it’s likely too early to make a judgment.) Evangelicals are shooting themselves in the foot by not taking advantage of these opportunities. The vast majority of Supreme Court Justices went to an Ivy League undergrad, almost all went to an Ivy League law school. If we want evangelical Supreme Court Justices, parents are going to have to toughen up and send their kids to good schools.

(Another critique of Ivy Leagues is that they’re not good places to find a spouse, which…largely does seem to be the case, for better or for worse. But again, this is a self fulfilling cycle: I know a quite a few young Christians up here who wouldn’t complain if there were more eligible matches that enrolled.)

Charles Pick also left an interesting comment on my essay on the partisan coding of Christianity.

I strongly suspect that this phenomenon of Christianity becoming more about symbols than conformity to doctrine is comorbid with post-literacy. In the time before printing and the competitive pressures of Protestantism, Catholicism was a somewhat different religion on the ground than what it was in text. Printing as a coded, highly efficient medium, made it easier for the people to supervise what their leaders were doing and to compare that conduct to ideals ideals and doctrine. As the middle stops loses its capacity to decode print, it also loses its appetite for doctrine.

Pete Hegseth’s image, crafted first as an officer and then at Fox News, plays well to the semiliterate or illiterate Republican base in the same way that a similar version from another time would play well to recently converted Goths or Saxons. You could easily see him as a gregarious marcher lord on one of the many pagan frontiers, not too different from the people he’s charged with fighting. Politics also during that time was bound up with personal symbolism, personal visitation, and performance of ritual in public more than it was about the communication of complex ideas. The code is the symbol, the look, the tone, and what’s said. Only a rapidly shrinking minority can easily decode text.

Best of the Web

Scimitar Capital: Self-Reflections of a Striver - “A striver is a member of the educated professional class who organizes life around upward mobility in wealth and social status.”

WSJ: Love Is an Online Battlefield (gift link) - Red-pilled men and anti-Trump women have turned dating into a nightmare

NYT: With Rights and Resources Uncertain, They’re Seeking Sterilization (gift link) - More young, child-free women are pursuing the permanent form of contraception

WSJ: A Russian Billionaire Fights Global Infertility —With 100 of His Own Children (gift link) - Telegram founder Pavel Durov will cover IVF costs for women who want to use his donated sperm, and has promised his offspring a share of his fortune - Looks like we have a full blow billionaire fertility fetish these days.

Cremieux: Fertility Goes Up When Men Win - Successful fertility policy might need to raise male incomes specifically

William Galston/WSJ: America’s 25 Years of Decline (gift link) - Misgovernment has been the watchword for the first quarter of the 21st century

Emma Collins: Against Doom - A scathing review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. Kingsnorth has a lot of fans - even fanboys - but this review and the responses to it shows that there’s a contingent of Kingsnorth skeptics as well.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from Ross Douthat in the New York Times, First Things, National Review, Real Clear Politics, Tim Challies, and American Reformer. I was also mentioned in this Paul Vanderklay video.

New this week:

• Evangelicals Need a Thicker Skin (paid only) - Taking offense to quickly at perceived slights hands control to your critics

• Beyond the Culture of Nihilism (guest post by John Seel) - America’s culture wars mask a deeper crisis: a shared nihilism defined by destruction and the will to power.

• My exclusive podcast for Members this month was about the problem of right-wing movements keeping out the kooks. (Learn more about my Member community).

• My regular podcast is a return visit from Daniel Hess on why the left went child-free.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.