What Did Men Do to Deserve This?
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.
“You need Dad,” Galloway, who has two sons, said on a recent podcast. The nuclear family he imagines seems to be one in which the mom is the default parent (“They look to her for nurturing. When they really have a problem, I find they go to Mom”), while the necessary dad is the authority figure to whom Mom can appeal as the occasion demands. “There are certain moments when my partner needs me to weigh in,” Galloway explained. “I don’t know if it’s the depth of my voice, my physical size.” Boys, he went on, “begin tuning out their mom over time.” One might wonder how boys lose these frequencies in the first place. One might long for a deep voice to explain it.
In “Of Boys and Men,” Reeves, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, draws on the work of the late British sociologist Geoff Dench, who posited that the “fundamental weakness of feminist analysis” is its failure “to see that men may need the status of the main provider role to give them a sufficient reason to become fully involved, and stay involved, in the longer-term draggy business of family life.” And Reeves co-signs the supply-side economist George Gilder’s hypothesis that, once wives become “both provider and procreator,” their husbands become “exiles” in their own homes. Reeves mostly rejects Gilder and Dench’s line of revanchist patriarchy, but he credits them for correctly diagnosing “the dangers of anomie and detachment among men stripped of their traditional role.” In an age when two out of every five households have a female primary breadwinner, no one seems to know “what fathers are for,” Reeves has said. One in six fathers does not live with any of his children. One study found that thirty-two per cent of non-resident fathers had minimal contact with their children within one year of separating from their children’s mother, and that, within eight years, this number rose to fifty-five per cent.
