Young men, the manosphere, and Trumpism

Here’s an interesting essay (gift link), on the apparent rightward shift of young male voters, that was an important factor in Republicans winning the Trumpian trifecta this month.

Recently, men’s and women’s fortunes have been trending in opposite directions. Women’s college enrollment first eclipsed men’s around 1980, but in the past two decades or so this gap has become a chasm. In 2022, men made up only 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds at four-year schools, and their graduation rates were lower than women’s as well. Since 2019, there have been more college-educated women in the work force than men.

These trends run up against the cultural reality that it’s still considered a form of status degradation for a man to marry a woman who is more successful than he is in conventional social and economic terms:

Our modern fairy tales — romantic comedies — reflect this reality, promoting the fantasy that every woman should have a fulfilling, lucrative career … and also a husband who is doing just a little better than she is. In 2017, a Medium article analyzed 32 rom-coms from the 1990s and 2000s and discovered that while all starred smart, ambitious women, only four featured a woman with a higher-status job than her male love interest.

Straight men may not be taking their cues from old Sandra Bullock movies, but their preferred relationships also mirror the rom-com ideal. A 2019 study by the economist Joanna Syrda found that husbands were happiest when their wives contributed 40 percent of the family’s income. Any percentage above this threshold, however, increased their anxiety.

That anxiety has ended up fueling the cultural and economic success of the likes of Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, and of course Donald Trump:

Enter the manosphere: a space occupied by new media podcasters and their favored politicians who win eyeballs, votes and dollars by selling a retrograde version of masculinity as the fix for men’s woes. In the final month of his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump skipped traditional outlets for a manosphere media blitz, which many credit for his 14–point lead among young men. While so-called female gold diggers are an obsession of the manosphere, much of its content reinforces the male-breadwinner norm — tying money to manliness and women’s preference for providers to biology.

Romantic pessimism pervades the manosphere, which puts forth that dating is doomed, and modern women are not to be trusted. Modern women feel similarly despondent. The Cut ran an article this summer asking straight women: “Is Dating a Total Nightmare for You Right Now?” It received so many furious, affirmative responses, the site published a digest of the most representative and depressing comments soon after.

All this is contributing to a larger “epidemic of loneliness,” to use the words of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who believes this problem is wreaking havoc on both our emotional and physical health. Last year, 41 percent of single people had no interest in dating at all, as reported by The Survey Center on American Life, an alarming statistic for those worried about U.S. marriage rates and birthrates, which are already at or near historic lows.

There’s a larger story to be told here about how an almost universal experience — sexual and romantic frustration — has been ideologized into a key component in the rise of the reactionary hyper-nationalism with neo-fascist elements that is Trumpism.