The Misogynist Idiocy of 2024
By 
Although I am very political person and a cranky man who will say what is on my mind, I’ve never gotten in trouble for political statements in the classroom, even though I talk about Trumpism all the time. I think there are a few reasons for this–being a man and being kind of scary in the classroom can help, but also I couch it in terms of analyzing America, not in terms of electoral politics. But there is one thing about contemporary America that I have utter and complete contempt for and routinely savage in the classroom, which is the manosphere, the biggest bunch of fucking morons to have ever existed on the planet. Oh boo hoo, you are 18 and no one wants to fuck you because you are an asshole or you just don’t know how to talk to people and it must be the fault of those bitches. Dude, fuck off. You think you are the first generation of men who isn’t having all the success dating you want? Christ……..some men need a good boxing of their ears.
Well, I was catching up on my London Review of Books issues (I am sure all of you read this religiously) and I read Emily Witt’s review of a couple of books on Andrew Tate and her summary of the sheer idiocy of the 2024 election and its rhetoric about men not only hit home but also made me think how future historians will talk about this awful, pathetic period of American men embracing fascism because women don’t want to be choked during sex and whatnot.
Last autumn, during a particularly enervating phase of the United States presidential election, it became clear that one of the themes of the campaign was going to be men. Never mind the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the demonisation of immigrants and the plans to put thousands of them in for-profit jails, the genocide in Gaza, climate change. The Democrats, according to the polls, had lost their appeal to men. We read about the voter gender gap. We read that the disparity was greatest between divorced women (who lean heavily Democratic) and divorced men (who tend to vote Republican). We read that Black men were no longer loyal to the Democratic Party, that they were going to vote for Trump or not at all. Men, men, men: their diminished career prospects, their loneliness crisis, their suicide rates. In the final stretch of the campaign, the Democrats made a desperate attempt to appeal to them. The film director Tyler Perry gave a speech about being a self-made billionaire; Michelle Obama gave a speech about the person bleeding out in the delivery room being your wife. Kamala Harris promised to ‘protect crypto’. It didn’t work.
Donald Trump was better at pandering to the mythology of the patriarchy. Men didn’t need to listen to a lady lawyer lecturing them about how to live their lives, nor did they need a social safety net. A real man didn’t care about the minimum hourly wage or Medicaid. He was an independent agent. His windfall was always just around the corner, with the right crypto investment, the right sports bet, the right meme stock. It was the sweepstake election, with Elon Musk handing a giant cardboard cheque for a million dollars to a real estate agent called Jason who homeschools his six children in Michigan. No, it was the podcast election. We read that the left needed more podcasts, more men offering hour after hour of meandering banter that made listeners feel as if they were hanging out with the bros. ‘Whatever happened to the strong silent type?’ a friend of mine grumbled. A few months later, we learned that Democratic Party operatives had proposed a project called ‘Speaking with American Men’ to study male ‘syntax, language and content’.
Among my friends, the sort of women J.D. Vance likes to mock as miserable losers, the male loneliness crisis became a bitter joke. We discussed possible cures: becoming a Deadhead, getting into cycling, poker nights. We made approving comments when we saw straight guys doing things together, like the time a group of dads showed up at someone’s Pilates class. There were movies and TV shows about the problems of contemporary manhood, some concerned (Adolescence), some satirical (Friendship). Mark Zuckerberg, whose male-to-male transition included bulking up, putting on an XL T-shirt and a gold chain, and becoming a fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is ‘culturally neutered’ and needs more ‘masculine energy’. He has proposed AI friends as one solution.
On the dark edge of all this has been the manosphere, the network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels. The manosphere is confusing, because it’s a place where one can find both benign advice about protein consumption and ideas that have led to mass shootings. Its theories of evolutionary biology, mostly concerning what women were ‘built’ to do, are reposted on social media by people such as Musk. It’s annoying to have to take it seriously, just as it’s annoying to have to take the Taliban’s gender theories seriously. But in recent years the manosphere has forced us to pay attention through acts of extreme violence, and many of its advocates and theories have been taken up by democratically elected governments.
Now, while I’m the type of guy who naturally will hate everything as I get older, largely because I always have hated most things, I was really genuinely determined to not be the old guy who hates everything the kids do because they are young. And I had good reason to think I could do that–since I have nothing but contempt for Boomers and basically think my own Gen X is somehow an even worse generation, you want to have hope in the kids. But then everything about the present turned into such an unredeemable shit show–social media, AI, endless superhero movies, the end of reading, the turning of the universities into capitalist service organizations, being told that everything I love has no value because it doesn’t lead to profit, etc. I mean, you wouldn’t think the future would be even worse than the present. But it is sure leaning that way and the manosphere makes me want to drink myself to death.