Women Against the Centrist Manosphere
Scott Galloway on men, Peter Thiel on capitalism's challenges, liberal clergy and more in this week's digest.
Next week there will be no Digest because of the Thanksgiving holiday. I’ll put some holiday long reads in here to keep you occupied.
Scott Galloway is an NYU professor and bigtime podcaster I’ve mentioned before. His thoughts are heterodox and often stated boldly, but he’s also a Never Trump man of the center-left whose views are within the Overton Window.
He’s long talked about the problems facing you men today, and has a new book out on the topic called Notes on Being a Man. Jessica Winter at the New Yorker takes umbrage at this, critiquing not just Galloway but even the anodyne Richard Reeves.
In recent years, Galloway has also become a leading evangelist for a notion that rapidly solidified into conventional wisdom: America’s young men are in crisis. “Seldom in recent memory has there been a cohort that’s fallen farther, faster,” he writes in his new book, “Notes on Being a Man.” To make his case, Galloway pulls from a heavily circulated set of statistics. At colleges and universities nationwide, female students outnumber males by about three to two. Among young adults, men are more likely than women to live with their parents; by their mid-thirties, more than fifteen per cent of men still live with their folks, compared to less than nine per cent of women. Men die by suicide at about three and a half times the rate that women do. Men’s real wages are lower for the tenth and fiftieth percentiles of earners than they were in 1979. Currently, the unemployment rate among young men with bachelor’s degrees between the ages of twenty-three and thirty is close to double that of their female peers.
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What some Democrats would prefer, it seems, is a centrist manosphere of their own. (One imagines a podcast studio attached to a well-appointed gym where a bunch of white guys are discussing “Abundance” over beta-alanine smoothies and doing pistol squats to the theme song from “Pod Save America.”) In “Notes on Being a Man,” Galloway—who has expressed bullishness on the Presidential prospects of both Newsom and Emanuel—declares that discontented members of Gen Z and the boys and teens of Gen Alpha need an “aspirational vision of masculinity,” a vision opposed to the misogynist messaging that’s epitomized by influencers such as Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes. Part self-help memoir and part Dudes Rock polemic, the book presents a capital-letter credo: “Men Protect, Provide, and Procreate.” Masculinity can be expressed simply by “getting up at f**king six in the morning and going to work and doing sh**ty work such that you can protect your family economically,” Galloway once said. And the evolved man also insures that he does not slack off “domestically, emotionally, or logistically,” leaving his partner to ask, in Galloway’s signature demotic, “O.K., boss, what the f**k are you bringing to the table?”
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The ambassadors of the centrist manosphere praise women’s advancement and the feminist cause while insisting that men’s economic and vocational anxieties are more naturally potent. This ambivalence reveals the weakness of their side. The right-wing manosphere knows that masculinity is a series of dominance signals beamed from behind iridescent Oakleys and the wheel of the most enormous pickup truck you’ve ever seen; it is a smirking multimillionaire who “DESTROYS” a young woman at a college-hosted debate; it is—must it be said?—an AR-15, openly carried. Manliness in the Trump era, Susan Faludi has written, “is defined by display value,” which exhibits itself in a “pantomime of aggrieved aggression.” Upon this stage, men’s biggest problem is feminism, and the solutions are straightforward: restrict reproductive rights, propagandize about traditional gender roles, etc.
The squishier centrist side has no such certainties. Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all.
What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person’s duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital “P.” This person’s opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.
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The deeper one sinks into our nation’s alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Women like Winters find it intolerable that men might care about their own problems instead of hers (and those of other women).
One big difference between the manosphere and feminist left is that the feminists have access to elite media platforms in which to express their resentments towards the opposite sex.
The Problems of Capitalism
Peter Thiel is a libertarian leaning investor, but he’s been telling people for years not to discount the complaints of Millennial socialists. There are some famous emails to Mark Zuckerberg to this effect floating around out there.
Thiel was recently interviewed by the Free Press about this topic. It’s paywalled, but here are some excerpts.
If you graduated in 1970 with no student debt, compare that to the millennial experience: too many people go to college, they don’t learn anything, and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt. Student debt is a version of this generational conflict that I’ve talked about for a long time.
The rupture of the generational compact isn’t limited to student debt, either. I think you can reduce 80 percent of culture wars to questions of economics—like a libertarian or a Marxist would—and then you can reduce maybe 80 percent of economic questions to questions of real estate.
It’s extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners. If you have extremely strict zoning laws and restrictions on building more housing, it’s good for the boomers, whose properties keep going up in value, and terrible for the millennials. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.
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Younger generations are told that if they do the same things as the boomers did, things will work out well for them. But society has changed very drastically, and it doesn’t work in quite the same way. Housing is way more expensive. It’s much harder to get a house in a place like New York or Silicon Valley, or anywhere the economy is actually doing well and there are a lot of decent jobs. People assume everything still works, but objectively, it doesn’t.
Boomers are strangely uncurious about how the world is not really working for their kids. It’s always hard to know how much bad faith there is or how bad the actors are. I think it’s odd that people thought it was odd that I was complaining about student debt in 2010, when even then the growth in student debt was an exponential process. The national student debt was $300 billion in 2000, and it’s now more than $2 trillion. At some point, that breaks.
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Free Press: A lot of people are drawing comparisons between President Donald Trump and Mamdani. Both led vibes-based campaigns, were joined by unlikely allies, and promoted policies centered on grievance. They are both hyper charismatic. What do these similarities say about what most resonates with voters in our digital age?
I stress the negative. It’s how fake the other people are. It’s just, the average—I’m not sure who to pick on—Jeb Bush or whatever, where everything is just precisely choreographed in this extremely fake way, and you can’t say anything charismatic. There is some kind of authenticity to Trump and Mamdani. I’m not sure that they’re perfectly coherent, nor perfectly authentic. But this is what the establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats really don’t like about Trump and Mamdani, is that they can’t even call them inauthentic, because both are somehow more authentic than what the parties have. If you’re someone like Paul Ryan and you think Trump is fake, what does it say about you? What does it say about your lack of charisma, your lack of ability to speak to people?
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There are some dimensions in which the millennials are better off than the boomers. There’s some ways our society has changed for the better. But the gap between the expectations the boomer parents had for their kids and what those kids actually were able to do is just extraordinary. I don’t think there’s ever been a generation where the gap has been as extreme as for the millennials. [emphasis added]
Click over to read the whole thing.
The Clergy-Laity Divide in Mainline Churches
Ryan Burge, an academic and until recently the pastor of a mainline church (American Baptist) put together and interesting post about how much more liberal mainline clergy are than their parishioners.
Here’s an incredible chart of the share of clergy vs. laity identifying as Republican.
He also breaks it down by gender.
There’s a lot of good material in there so read the whole thing.
Best of the Web
Cremieux: Are All the Good Men Married? - Why do married men earn so much? Is it because the good men get married, or does marriage make men good?
Pew: 12th grade girls are less likely than boys to say they want to get married someday
The Atlantic: The End of Naked Locker Rooms (gift link)
NYT: Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts (gift link) - “In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen,” a priest said about the surge of young men drawn to the demanding practice of Christianity
WSJ: More Middle-Income Americans Are Trying to Make a New Life Overseas - Financial advisers say they have seen a surge in interest in residency abroad among clients looking to cut costs or change lifestyle
I’ve long said a key indicator to look for to show that there are real problems in America is if large numbers of native born citizens start expatriating. I’ve never seen anything to indicate this is happening. However, recently there have been articles like this talking about more Americans moving abroad. I would consider this a yellow light on the dashboard saying that we should monitor this measure closely in case it starts to become material.
New Content and Media Mentions
I was mentioned in this World magazine podcast and in a recent episode of Breaking Points.
New this week:
The Rich, the Poor, and the Ultra-Rich - The haves, the have nots, and the have yachts
Between Empathy and Agency - Conservatives need to validate young people’s struggles—and then challenge them to act anyway
My podcast this week is with Williams College professor Darel Paul on how society forgot about fertility.
Holiday Long Form Content
Chapin Lenthall-Cleary: Men are more tolerant of the other side than women are of their own
Claire Smith: A History of Complementarianism - This is a good read. It essentially validates what I’ve contended about complementrianism, such as:
It’s a product of a reaction against second wave feminism.
It adopted some of the second wave feminist critique and thus is in some ways infused with second wave feminism. For example, they asserted that there was an “upsurge” of domestic violence but failed to mention something that was unquestionably upsurging, namely female initiated divorce without Biblical cause.
NYT: She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges (gift link) - MaryBeth Lewis’s desire to be a new mom again, at 65 years old, led to a custody battle like no other.
Celine Nguyen: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
Crimieux: The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians - Why are Japanese elites so likely to be Christian when Japan is a 99% non-Christian country?
It’s probably surprising to hear that 20% of the post-World War II Prime Ministers of Japan before the newly-elected Sanae Takaichi have been Christian. Out of those 35 Prime Ministers since 1945, Shigeru Yoshida and Tarō Asō were Catholic, and Tetsu Katayama, Ichirō Hatoyama, Masayoshi Ōhira, Shigeru Ishiba, and Yukio Hatoyama were various flavors of Protestant. How this happens in a country that’s less than 1% Christian and in which there’s significant anti-Christian discrimination is perplexing, but I think it makes sense given how today’s Japanese Christians came to be.
Here are a couple of presentations from me at the Believe in Your City conference in Grand Rapids. This was some of the content that I turned into my essay on entrepreneurship and the spirit of adventure.
My presentation:
And here is my post-presentation discussion with John Tuttle, the president of Acrisure