“Smashing the patriarchy” would help men as much as women. Why is no one telling boys?
Ditch the "male tears" coffee mug. It's time for feminists to show boys some empathy.
Back in the late nineties, when I still believed I had to preface even the mildest bleat for female equality with the man-pleasing disclaimer, “I’m not a feminist but…” it would have been hard to believe that “dismantling the patriarchy” would one day be the narrative premise for the Barbie movie.
Since #Metoo, the acceptable range of discourse on gender politics has become unrecognizable. Women have collectively crowbarred the Overton window out of the men’s locker room and reinstalled it in the gender studies department.
But young men are not sold. While as a group, their female peers have become vastly more politically liberal over time, boys have collectively sprinted to the right. For perhaps the first time ever, young males are more likely to identify as conservative than their fathers and even their grandfathers, and are more likely to believe that “feminism is harmful.” Many are turning to the cartoonish and furious masculinity of the online “manosphere.”
On the face of it, this looks like a simple calculus of self-interest for boys. Power is a zero-sum property, goes the logic, so if girls gain, then boys must lose. Therefore young men should bitterly fight any attempts to destroy the patriarchy with rants about alpha males and wolf pack analogies and meat-only diets and the occasional side order of horrifying misogyny.
But in reality, far from being their enemy, feminism could actually be boys’ best hope. And the inability to communicate this effectively to them has been a massive PR failure on the part of the feminist movement.
Because almost as much as it harms girls and women, patriarchy hurts boys and men. The same cultural system that gives men power also crushes them emotionally, and leaves them depressed and lonely and avoidant. Rigid masculinity norms police boys behavior, tell them to “man up” and squash their emotions and that vulnerability and intimacy are for girls. The whole thing is like some kind of soul-compromising bargain from a Greek myth - the world bestows systemic power on boys at birth by virtue of their maleness, but at the cost of their emotionality, their freedom to access the full range of feeling and connection and humanity.
Gen-Z boys blame their struggles on feminism when really they should be doing the opposite. Boys are in crisis, but their problem isn’t feminists, it’s actually the very system that feminists are fighting against. The same system that tells girls that they need to be hot and thin and submissive and to center men’s needs, also tells boys they need to be emotionally rigid and that to display vulnerability or intimacy towards another man makes them a pussy. But instead of selling “smashing the patriarchy” to boys as a gain- in freedom and self-expression, in connection and mental health, feminists have ironically bought into the same basic framing as the masculinity influencers- that it would almost be a form of revenge against men- a punitive loss for them. And rather than solidarity or empathy with boys, feminism’s primary tone has generally been one of either demonization or ridicule.
Much seminal feminist thinking acknowledges that patriarchy hurts men as well as women. In her book, The Will to Change, Men, Masculinity and Love, for example, author and social theorist, bell hooks outlined in great detail the many harms that patriarchal norms bring to boys and men, cutting them off from their emotions, and forcing them into a kind of rigid gender prison. Masculinity Studies is a small but robust subfield of gender studies. But it would be easy for most boys to miss this subtlety. Generally, the louder voices in the popular discourse have focused less on how patriarchy harms men and more on how it benefits men at women’s expense. And although more nuanced gender theory places both men and women as victims of patriarchy, for many high-profile, super online feminists, a refusal to engage with men’s feelings has become almost a point of principle.
The phrase “male tears” popped up on Tumblr around 2012 and has become the go-to sneer amongst millennial and Gen Z feminists in response to men expressing any kind of ‘we are the real victims’ politicking. It served a purpose, helping to clarify the basic structures of oppression in peoples’ minds, but the sentiment has become more widely adopted, as a way of ridiculing or shutting down any expression of men’s pain.
Men have systemic power, without doubt, but that framework is perhaps of limited use when trying to understand, say, the issues of an adolescent boy with no financial or social capital trying to find his way in the world.
The upshot of this is that for many boys, it can end up feeling as though male emotions get dismissed from both sides. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there is a voice from the left telling him that to voice his problems is to take emotional airtime away from a woman, whose suffering is more valid. These are not morally equivalent of course, but in practice, for many boys, the impact can be similar. It’s not hard to see why manosphere spaces can start to feel like the only place that a troubled young man might find a sympathetic ear, or a sense of belonging or empathy.
Paradoxically, the same people who advocate for men to become more emotionally expressive, are often also the same ones taking a principled stand against hearing how they actually feel. Many progressive writers and commentators understandably have a political objection to humanizing boys and men who are drawn into the manosphere.
“Countering these narratives requires journalists to surmount the instinct to sympathize with these men,” argued researchers from the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism in an article about incels, some of the most extreme examples of this trend. “Aggrieved male sexual entitlement is not a mental health issue but rather an ideological one.”
In an era of identity politics, male pain, and in particular, white male pain, has been politicized. As a society, we are deeply divided on whether we should even be engaging with it at all. Within this paradigm, humanizing the boys who have been drawn into these manosphere spaces at all feels like a political statement, empathizing with them a betrayal of feminist ideals.
But I believe this stance is a mistake, and can actually prevent desperate boys and men both from embracing wider ideas of feminism and gender equality, and also from seeking help themselves.
When I was researching my book BOYMOM, I spoke to several boys who were drawn towards the manosphere, and frequenting incel spaces. One particularly desperate young man, barely out of adolescence, confided in me that he was desperate to leave the incel movement and seek help. He wanted to find a therapist, and look for understanding and validation outside of the manosphere, but he was nervous that a therapist would not be willing to listen to him.
“This idea that women are these eternal victims and men are these demons who oppress has been spread so far and wide.” he told me, “And it is true. For the longest time in human history, women never had rights, or anything at all. But this idea has been pushed beyond a certain line to the point where if a man voices any concern, they get deflected with all of their so-called privileges. Women just wouldn’t care, and if they listened, they wouldn't sympathize or understand. They’d be like "whatever. You deserve it. Women have suffered more than you, so you have no right to complain.”
Clearly a good therapist would never respond like this, but it's not hard to see why he is concerned. The general lack of empathy and blanket condemnation, particularly online, can make it very hard for young men to seek help or therapy, precisely when they need it the most. This in turn makes it more likely that they will turn to destructive impulses.
As criminologist and incel researcher Sarah Daly put it to me in an interview, “By treating them like that, we are making it really hard for them to get help, or to identify and work on these feelings in a positive way and even try to change.”
It’s not just that modern feminism doesn’t seem to care much about boys and men. They have actually managed to frame caring about them as a mark of bad faith in itself, a dog whistle for a kind of rightwing, misogynistic politicking. It makes sense of course- we are all furious and exhausted by the long history of systemic misogyny and male violence against women and men’s refusal to engage with it. But this binary shuts down an important conversation.
Because while feminists sip from their “male tears” coffee mugs and silence or mock boys, the right sidles up to them with a more seductive story. Follow us and we will restore you to a manly place of power and dignity. You too can achieve that coveted ‘alpha male’ status. This shiny promise obscures the reality, which is that this kind of oppressive masculinity- far from being the solution- was the very source of boys’ problems in the first place.
The feminist movement needs to sell dismantling patriarchy to boys as liberation. Instead they have sold it as a punishment. No wonder boys want little to do with it.
PREORDER MY BOOK, BOYMOM, REIMAGINING BOYHOOD IN THE AGE OF IMPOSSIBLE MASCULINITY, HERE! OUT JUNE 4th!
I totally feel this as the mom of an 8yo boy, and I read your piece with a hopeful heart…but I’m struggling. How do we provide empathy and understanding without continuing to maintain the position of emotional doormat for men?
I have done so much work and spent so much time learning and growing to be strong enough to break cycles and relieve the chokehold of my own internalized misogyny. I have kids and I have a strong impulse to do right by them, to be better for them. Being empathetic in this case feels like I have to do the work for the men too.
They have access to all the same resources and information I had on my journey. Yet, they would come to me looking for answers because I seem to already have them. I paid for months and years of therapy, but I am giving it away for free to the men in my life who refuse to seek it out on their own.
I learned through my DEIB work that I can’t wait for “a black friend” to educate me, I have to be willing to see the issues in my own right and commit to doing better. As a white woman, I can’t come to the DEIB meeting and cry and say I’m sorry and expect to get an “it’s ok” from any black people in the room. Why should men deserve that treatment from me? This feels like more unpaid emotional labor…
Feminism has been telling boys for at least a generation that, “Patriarchy hurts men too.” I don’t think the problem is lack of outreach.