"Masculinsim" goes mainstream: a movement to fight feminism

Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best.

“Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know what I've never seen this happen.”

This is true. This is true. Mysteries have every size each week, this American life, wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross, repeal the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote. And then let the man of the house vote for the household. If you think that anyone who advocates for that is too fringe to be taken seriously, think again.

It's the view of Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson, the pastor who co-founded Crack, the communion of reformed evangelical churches. Crack has a network of about 170 churches, including the one secretary of defense or secretary of war, Pete Hexeth, belongs to. Wilson was the guest pastor in February at the Pentagon's recently created monthly Christian prayer service. Hexeth prayed beside him. Crack also has a network of Christian schools

and Hexeth's children attended one of them. Wilson is influential in the growing movement that sometimes called masculineism, which believes feminism has been a masculine man, mentioned have more power than women, and that a woman's place is at home raising children, and following her husband's wishes. My guest Helen Lewis writes about masculineism in her Atlantic article titled The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet. It's subtitled a virulent form

of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right.

Wilson is one of the people she interviewed for the article. Lewis is a staff writer at the Atlantic with a focus on the intersection of politics, society, and digital culture. She's also the author of difficult women, a history of feminism in 11 fights, and the genius myth, a curious history of a dangerous idea. Helen Lewis, welcome to fresh air. So before we get to Pete Hexeth

“and Douglas Wilson, what is masculineism? And how does it compare to regular old misogyny patriarchy?”

Well, masculineism is a word that has been around for quite a long time now. It's the idea essentially that men should be in charge. That's the way that the world should be ordered, that you get now new versions of it, that are about talking about biology. Men's hormones mean that they're more suited for government, but it's not exactly patriarchy in the sense that it is a political ideology, and it's one that its adherence will kind of argue for. And I

didn't want to just say sexism or misogyny, because I think that is a kind of conversation ender, you know, we can all agree that's bad. Well, I say we can all agree that's bad. Obviously, quite a lot of people don't agree that's bad, but I wanted to give this it's due as being a fleshed out set of ideas. That's sit behind the manners for your influences that people might have heard of your, and duetate, so your, my own gains of fresh and fit, and has got a kind of intellectual

underpinning both to them, and to the mega movement. We need to say it's a political ideology, what do you mean? In the sense that there is a set of governing ideas, and then a series of kind of policy proposals that flow from them. In the same way that you might see this is the kind of flip side of feminism. So the idea behind feminism was that men and women should be politically and

“financially equal, and you should enact policies in order to make that happen. You should give”

women the vote, you should make them entitled to equal pay for equal work. You should stop discrimination that keeps women out of being judges, say, or serving in the military, whatever it might be. This is the other side of that. It says men and women aren't equal. They're suited for different things. Men are much better suited to being politicians, to being CEOs, to serving in combat roles, and women's role is to be nurturers, supporters, mothers. So what's our political agenda?

You mentioned that at the start, repealing the 19th Amendment. That's the one that gave women the right to vote. And that sounds, I'm sure to some of your listeners, like the craziest, completely settled argument. However, it is one that quite serious figures advance, and they do it for two reasons. One is because they genuinely believe it. This is how they feel that society should be structured. You know, more like, in some cases, a kind of Saudi Arabian system of guardianship,

you know, the idea that men are the head of the family, and they should vote as a household. You know what? I'm going to stop you right there. Why don't we hear Douglas Wilson say it in his own words? Sure, because this is him talking about why we should repeal the 19th Amendment. Back in the battle days before the 19th Amendment, the men were considered to be the heads of their households and represented their families at the ballot box. So what happened when their wives

were granted suffrage? Let's take a typical presidential election to illustrate it. Using the first

one in 1920, after women's suffrage was accomplished. The election between Warren Harding and James

multiply the number of total votes cast for him by two. And if the husband votes for Harding,

say, and the wife votes for Cox, then what you've done is cancel out the voice of that particular households. Upon discovering how they were each going to vote, what would be the harm if the

“two of them just stayed home for a quiet dinner together in order to cancel out one another's vote?”

That way, where was the great progress supposed to be located? The net effect of women's suffrage was not in advance in women's rights, but rather part of a push to replace covenanted entities, like families, with raw individualism. An over-weaning state greatly prefers governing an atomistic populace, where each individual's like a BB thrown into a electoral sack. There's no structural rigidity to it, especially after laxity in the law, concerning porn, pot, and poker,

has now greased all the BBs. Nothing cohere's anymore. In the older system, the people were grouped

in molecules, birch little platoons. Some of them quite complex, and molecular societies are

much more capable of resisting the demands of status. So the suffrage movement was actually not taking up the cause of women, but rather was part of a long sustained war on the family. The nater of this kind of thinking says that a decision to abort a child is a decision between a woman and her doctor. The father of the child stripped of any legal ability to protect the life of his own legitimate child. We need to retrace all of our steps in order to discover how

travesty like that could ever happen. And when we do, we discover that a lot of it started at

“Seneca Falls. Can I just ask you, is it just a me or can you actually follow his train of thought?”

I don't know about this. He's quite a pro-lix speaker. He's sentencing his role on, but you can see there the outlines of the argument, which is essentially that the family is the unit of society, not the individual. And that is a big challenge to liberalism, which has been focused on individual rights. And he thinks that women getting the vote has, for example, encouraged them to see their own bodies as sacrosanct, right? He thinks it's led to the idea of abortion being about bodily autonomy,

rather than that being something that the fathers of those children have a stake in too. So you can see how it's a coherent ideology. The thing I would say to him is, you know, he says it's fine because actually the husbands voted on behalf of their wives. That's sort of what landowners used to say that they used to vote on behalf of their serfs. And you know what, they didn't work out particularly for their serfs. It's one of the

things that the American Revolution was about the idea that not fulfilled, obviously, in the original constitution, but the idea that all men are created equal. Doug Wilson doesn't actually think that all men are created equal. He thinks that actually the family is a fundamental unit, and we should look at people in those blocks rather than as individual atoms. But there's all these little questions like, say you have two adult children living with their parents,

one is male, one is female. Does the male not get to vote even though he's a man, because the father is the head of the household? I mean, I did try and ask Joel Webbin, who's a hard right pastor, isn't based in Austin, how you'd work through this. So in his view, unmarried women would also get voted for by a father, a brother, an uncle. And I said to him, having been to re-ad reporting last year, what you've said there is, you say this for Christian reasons,

you've described the Saudi Arabian guardianship system. So there is there are different versions

“of it. Some of them, I think Doug Wilson's version is that unmarried women would be able to vote”

on their own. Other pastors would like essentially all women's votes to be assigned to the nearest responsible male. And you know, you can talk about, and they do, how this would kind of encourage people to kind of bond together, and isn't it terrible that the votes of the husband and wife can't sleep each other out? Not really, not to me. That means that everybody's had their say,

and if the answer is a draw, then the answer is a draw. So getting back to how masculineism

has become a political ideology. What else is on the agenda? And I should point out here that Doug Wilson says that although he'd like to repeal the 19th Amendment, like maybe in 200 years, because he has bigger fish to fry. So what are the bigger fish that he has to fry that are also on the larger masculineism political agenda? Yeah, I know when he said that to me, I said the thing is, you know, if I said to you, I want all white men to be putting cages, but not now.

It's not my aspiration for now. Can I also interest you my thoughts about tax policy? No, you would be, you would want to stop and dwell on that one for a little bit. And I think that comes back to what I was saying earlier, which is the other point about the repeal the 19th rhetoric. It is designed to be troll-ish and attention-catching. It is designed to be outside what political scientists call the otherton window, the kind of envelope of acceptable debatable

ideas, precisely in order to stop everybody having to kind of slow down and talk about it. You might think about another version this being the way the US had arguments about creationism, in which the great idea was, you had to teach the controversy. And what that did was place creationism, which is a biblical but scientifically unsupported idea, up against the best ideas of modern science, and just said, well let us just really weigh them up about which one we

should be teaching to children as fact. And this is a kind of version of that. And I think because

kind of dally with extreme anti-feminist ideas. Then it would be to say, I think black people shouldn't

“vote, or I would take the vote away from Jewish people. I think those would even in”

some of the excesses that we've seen in the last couple of years on the right still be considered not enjoyably spicy ideas, but kind of flat out off the table in a way that repel the

19th is not treated like that. So you described masculineism as the single most important force

uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys. Why do you think it's the most important factor you're unitingly American right? You know, when I was writing this, I was thinking about what other linking strands between Magar and the kind of loose constellation of influences around that, and it was just in the middle of a very, very big split over Israel. You know, you have people

like the podcast of Tucker Carlson taking a very different line from the White House criticising the White House very strongly on that. And you also had Tucker Carlson hosting the very, very right-wing podcast and Nick Fuentes on his show, which the Heritage Foundation refused to condemn, and then there was then a mass walkout from the Heritage Foundation. Lots of people upstix and went to Mike Pence's new foundation. You know, these things are causing

really big schisms. You might think as well of the splits over regulating AI, for example, there are very different views on that free trade generally versus protectionism.

America first isolationism versus foreign policy adventuring. You know, these are really

“deep splits that I think whoever succeeds Donald Trump will have to manage very carefully. I mean,”

you've seen JD Vance has been given the poison chalice of being the face of the Iran negotiations. Any successor to Trump is going to have difficulty holding his coalition together because the only thing really they can agree on is that Trump is the alpha king. But maybe the one thing that they do all agree with is traditional gender roles are better. Men should be men. Women should be women. Women have got a bit too uppity. It's better that they should be seen and not heard. Or at least they

should succeed in kind of mega-approved ways. And there's a very strong aesthetic look about many of the women at the top of that movement. And that is very traditionally feminine. You know,

Iron Fem really. So I just found it was it was basically apart from the persona of Donald

Trump. One of the only things that I could see that really united them. So let's get back to Douglas Wilson as biblical as Douglas Wilson is he's called women small-breasted biddies which doesn't strike me as godly language. So the clip we're about to hear is Douglas Wilson speaking in the UK on a times radio show in May of this year. I called certain women small-breasted biddies. I was talking

“about the small-breasted biddies. So it is not the case that I think that all women are like that”

or it and it's not the case that I think that all feminists are like that or that all progressive women are like that. So let me finish the point. This is really important point. There's a certain kind of woke school that wants to reach into the shower and adjust the temperature of your shower for you. They want to run your life in every detail and then want to scold you for not cooperating. And there is that kind of I was drawing a caricature of that kind of person, the woke school.

So that was from a Times Radio Show in the UK recorded in May of this year. What do you hear when you listen to that? And what do small-breasted have to do with anything? Well, it a great question. But I think it's about the fact you're not, you're not conventionally feminine. That's the idea. But this is entirely woven into the critique of feminists as unfeminine and unnatural. And I wrote about the suffragettes. This was all the stuff that was being thrown

them. No one wants to have sex with you. No man would ever want you. Your ugly, your clumpy shoes, your probably lesbian. All of these things are insults that are deployed to keep women in line. By saying there is a correct way to be a woman. The thing that struck me when I listened to that is it's really interesting to me that though both the political left and political right have a problem with female authority. So his version is the woke school who tells you to turn down

the temperature of your shower. Now some people may have put their shower on too high in the shower, maybe burning them. In which case your mum, whoever it is, is entirely right to adjust the water temperature. But that's a vision essentially of women are telling me what to do and I don't like it. And the left had a version of that. You might remember from the 2020s, the Karen. And the Karen was somebody who also essentially wanted to tell you what to do. They were Nick Pickers

who told you to wear a mask or told you not to wear a mask or you know said you can't walk there or you can't do this or whatever it was. And both of them are expressing this incredibly

And I think the reason that some of this stuff is so successful is that it is extremely widely

held a millimeter under the surface, both by people who whose persona is overt sexism may be for clicks but also for people who know that in their workplace they can't use this kind of language, but you know it's there and the back of their brain and they'd really like to when they're female bosses, something that annoys them. Do you think Wilson ever thought well you wouldn't know you can't read his mind but I wonder if Wilson ever realizes that calling certain women small

breasted bitties is so non-biblical and it's so adolescent. It's so unbecoming of somebody who

“consider themselves a very important religious leader. But I think American public life is just”

degraded on this front in the last decade really let's be honest driven by Donald Trump.

And his final triumph might be making Democrats talk like this too. You know everything has just

become a kind of pig wrestling in the mud hasn't it? We've lost the idea of kind of dignity in public office and public life and it's now really about who can own the other person harder. I think the other thing if you want to talk about something else that you nights the make a movement, they're owning the lips. There is a great desire for revenge on people, you know, who are sort of deemed to have lauded it over you and scold you. And so I don't think that Doug Wilson's

salty language really causes him any problem because as he's outlining there he's very careful that he directs it against his political enemies. Fertility rate is a big thing with the masculineists. The fertility rate has been falling in the

“US and in in many countries and there's many explanations for that but the explanation among many”

masculineists is like blame women they don't want to have children anymore or they don't they're no one to have as many children or they're going to work and they're not staying home and therefore they're not having children. And I feel like a women can't win because if women want children then a lot of men complain uh women all they want to do is have children. I don't want to have children. I don't want to have that many children. I don't want to be tied down like that. So like

the pendulum with this movement is swinging toward like fertility stay home have lots of children. What do you see that as being about? Is that connected at all to the fear that white people no longer be the majority population in a few decades? Oh I mean absolutely I mean somebody like you know Elon Musk has taken up you know a very true upsetting story about grooming gangs in Britain but the thesis behind it has been expanded into this all purpose bogey man

of essentially you know Islam is coming to take over Europe and those families from very recently come from poorer countries have more children and you know you will you will absolutely hear that

said all over the manosphere that the problem is essentially feminism has stopped white women

from having enough kids and that will lead to the kind of the end of the the white race or European descent civilization or due to a Christian religion or whatever you want to put it in that

“way. The trouble where there is is you know I think that this ideologies incredibly flexible”

because as you say when it was the 1950s the idea was you know women can't vote because they don't have enough responsibilities outside the home they're little brains that you know they don't they just do and a bit of pin money and whatever it is you know they're not full actors in civil society so why would we want to hear from from them and now that the majority of American women go out and work even after having children it's switched to well actually the

problem is that you know they're ruining society by going and doing that so whatever women are currently doing turns out to be to be wrong. It's not an unreasonable point in the sense that birth rates are falling in pretty much every country and it does track with women getting increasing amounts of of education. We also do know that lots of women say they're not having as many children as they would like to which is something that you could potentially address

through policies although no one has really cracked that yet places like Hungary have tried explicitly natalist policies you know things like reduced income tax or whatever it might be but the other thing we know is that the birth rate is falling in some in America or the UK we would consider still incredibly patriarchal societies like for example South Korea or Japan where you know it's still expected that women will give up work after having children

and one of the things that really just seems to be driving it is well in America there's a possibility that smartphones I mean the smartphone theory of everything but the possibility in people aren't meeting each other in the offline way that they would they aren't pairing up and downstream of that is fewer kids but also it might just be the fact that parental investment of time in children is so much greater in my opinion it's so expensive to have children now

right but that's the thing the average American dad is now spending as much time with their child as the average American mum was in the 1960s you know this is the most involved generation of

fewer children men want fewer children when it's more hard unpaid work for them

“that doesn't seem to be me to me maybe something we should exclude from this discussion either”

having kids is really hard work was time for another break so let me reintroduce you if you just joining us my guest is Helen Lewis and we're talking about her article on the Atlantic titled the men who want women to be quiet we'll be right back after a short break I'm Terry Gross and this is fresh air every episode of it's been a minute MPRs what's happening in culture podcast starts by asking three questions who how why now if the culture's asking it we're talking

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“stories you need to notice start your day on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts”

your favorite toys are back in Toy Story 5 and they're facing some new competition the dreaded tablet how will buzz and woody handle kids glued to screens and how does this new movie compared to others in the franchise we get into it on NPR's top-culture happy hour listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts you describe Nick Fuentes as Douglas Wilson's intellectual air now Fuentes is one of the more extreme podcast provocateurs you describe Fuentes as

a self-professed Christian anti-semite and virgin why do you mention virgin in there because it's really interesting to me that he is not Douglas's intellectual air in the sense of a traditional Christian family like he what he's not preaching to his followers is settle down find a nice woman have some children be the patriarch and head of your household right everything he says wreaks of the

“fact but he hates women he doesn't want to be around them he never hangs out with them he has”

nothing to do with them there's a theorist called Eve because obviously Sedrick who wrote the book about homosexuality you know men who only associate with other men who see themselves in other relationship to other men and that's that's Nick Fuentes he's is a world of actually no women at all they don't really matter to him you know which he might say is also true if somebody like Andrew Tate who is you know a pimp by his own admission the women are they're just kind of as a

way of keeping school to impress other men with how amazingly virally well and Nick Fuentes is a more extreme version of that where he's like well look at me you know I don't even want to sleep with them so let's hear Nick Fuentes from one of his podcasts and in this he's talking about

the problem with women and this is from his podcast America first with Nick Fuentes and it was

recorded on February 11th of this year our number one political enemy is women because women can strain everything every conversation every man everything they have to be imprisoned they are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate they're the ones making a sympathetic to poor people which are also brown people you know when he's when I want you understand something when you're sympathetic to poor people you're sympathetic to brown people because brown people are poor

okay not all poor people are brown but most brown people are poor so women are making a sympathetic to poor people aka brown people women are making a sympathetic to George Floyd women are the reason that the fertility rate is low because they're getting educated and they attack every man is a rapist and a pedophile and they're hand pecking and controlling all the men so just like Hitler imprisoned gypsies, Jews, communists you know all of his political rivals we have to do the same thing

with women well it's not subtle is it it's not he doesn't he's not a man he's ever heard the word dog whistle it just go on straight to the whistle the thing I find interesting about that is it doesn't surprise me that he's in also an anti-semit because in both cases the analysis of what's wrong with the out group is the same right so both Jews and women are simultaneously weak and useless but also an evil cabal that is controlling the world and I just find that really really fascinating

that that is you know two historical groups that he has managed to weave together into this seamless mythology and the other thing you see there is he's also talking about empathy which is the masculinists most hated emotion because you know Doug Wilson has a as a podcast episode called The Sin of Empathy, Gadsad the Canadian marketing professor is a big favorite of Elon Musk had a book called Suicide Lempathy you also hear about toxic empathy and this is woven completely

equality and they want to help the underdog and that means that they for example support immigration

or they're not tough enough on violent crime they're not resisting of well in the case of McFontes yes that they just don't hate brown people as he puts it but you know there are respectable versions of this argument about empathy too so the entrepreneur Peter Tiel wrote a very famous or infamous essay for a K2 Institute publication back in the 2000s in which he said it's we haven't had a real democracy since the 1920s a real capitalist democracy because women you know and welfare recipients

won't vote for libertarian parties and so to take you all the way back to Douglas Wilson you know the critique is the same the problem with women voting is that they vote in a way that we wouldn't

like and that is a problem only if you think that their political preferences aren't equally as

legitimate as yours and that's your job to persuade them to your way of thinking no they'd rather go straight and say wouldn't it just be easier to get the political program through that we want

“if we only had half the electorate to convince you know I think was somebody like Nick Fuentes I always”

wonder like how much of it is about money and power you know like it's a great way to get followers if you live on the extreme and can influence people to join you there or admire like your strong views and how much does he like truly believe and that is almost part of how I think about reporting on it right because you're thinking these people are attention seeking and I'm giving them some attention and that's not an uncomplicated thing to do as a reporter at the same time they

are arguing for these things whether or not they're sincere is you know that that's separate to the effect that they're having on the discourse which is real and genuine and does exist yeah so I also think as you know if you're somebody who does believe in individual voting rights or liberalism whatever it is you kind of need to keep you or a person in women right but you are you are kind of somebody who doesn't need to keep your your debating weapons sharp

“those arguments are never really truly one in a way that I think probably you know 90s liberals”

were a bit complacent about you do have to stand up and say incredibly controversial things like I actually think that all adults should vote I mean you know which is a very recent historical development you know even for a long time very few people in England where I live you know that only a few nobles were in charge of the government even when we had a quote on Quetz Democracy and it took successive huge political movements to change that so these you know these ideas of

individual rights don't they're not natural they're not you know settled forever and that for me is the point of writing about this stuff so again you you called Fuentes Douglas Wilson's intellectual heir but Wilson doesn't like Fuentes rhetoric about women he says the Bible says

that a godly woman is a husband's crown I've never seen a king talk about his crown the way Fuentes

talks about women comparing women or wives to a crown the bejeweled headpiece that announces who is king isn't exactly the most humanizing description of women right but that is the distinction between them you know they both share that appetite for provocation uncertain views but you know Doug Wilson is presenting it as benevolent sexism we know what's best for you we've got your best interests at heart Nick Fuentes is malevolent sexism which is your

“awful and you should be put in you know in a goolach unrestrained by violence but they both”

have the same fundamental underlying point which is that men and women are not equal and men make better decisions than women well we need to take a break here so the Marie introduced you my guest is Helen Lewis we're talking about her article in the Atlantic called the men who want women to be quiet will be right back this is fresh air in 2020 a group of protesters say a 16 year old was shot and killed in self-defense when you come in shooting I don't think it's not much of a

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and now anytime on the NPR app or wherever you listen to podcasts so alongside this obsession with fertility the masculineists also have an obsession with testosterone testosterone is the thing that sets apart men from women men have a lot of a women have a little of it and it's become like

testosterone I mean this is a story with many strands one of which it's it's now never been

easier to get hold of testosterone replacement therapy so just a huge number of people you know particularly in that man as fair podcasts zone are on it you know their middle age men who are feeling a little bit more tired you know things a little bit more hard than they used to be and they get a prescription for testosterone in the same way that women have been getting HRT prescriptions and guess what they feel you know peppy and alive again and you know that is not an unreasonable medical

presentation but they're does seem to also be just a kind of lifestyle feeling that this is what men are they are aggressive and they're go getting and they're driven and testosterone is kind of the hormonal version of that so one of the books that I talk about in the pieces that the last man by Charles Cornish Dale who goes by the online alias Raw Egg Nationalist and the

“reason that he believes that you should take Raw eggs is that they boost your testosterone and you”

know his whole theory is that the magam movement is a testosterone movement Donald Trump is the high tea president because he for example doesn't care about equality you know he's about ambition and ruthlessness because the winners need to win and be dominant and so you know they want to bring back as they say it testosterone to politics it's all got a bit hippy drum circle people trying to care about the weak and the poor and try to make sure that everybody's happy no that's

not the way things should be politics is about power and drive and those things are symbolised by testosterone and testosterone is actually figuring into the center race in Texas because James Tallarico who is the Democrat running for Senate against Republican Ken Paxton is being called by some of his opponents low tea Tallarico and low tea stands for low testosterone there's a lot of like low tea commercials on cable news now advertising testosterone replacement so right Steven Miller

“the White House immigration's are went on Fox News and said he's low tea Tallarico you know it's”

he's the first transgender candidate for Senate you know what if you cut him he doesn't bleed

he just he drips soy and that's a very deep cup but there is essentially the feeling that that plant fighter institutions in soy are also feminising men it's one of the many things in modern life that is feminising men so this is against soy yes there's a whole background to like real men eat meat and are not vegans so one of the things that was held against him was the fact that he said he wanted to have a kind of animal product free campaign his girlfriend appears to be

a vegan so he's obviously going to have to spend the summer being photographed eating kind of huge bits of brisket and turkey legs and you know slower running down his chin as he goes to barbecues because you know this is the knock on him because he is quite softly spoken and looks very boyish despite being in his 30s and because he has supported gender transition you know the knock on him is that he's not really a man he doesn't understand what it means to be a man

this has got two things one thing it attacks him an electorate where there are lots of people particularly Hispanic men who do have a pretty traditional view of gender but the second thing is it is aware of excusing Ken Paxton who is you know has faced his own fair share of allegations of corruption who's currently in the middle of divorced one quote unquote biblical grounds understood to be adultery which is convincing him she's divorcing him but that is understood to be that's

man stuff that's the kind of thing that men do when they're powerful you know these are alpha you know he's he's got some foibles but his foibles are alpha foibles and that has become a really you know big part of the discourse in Texas is you know driving up the male vote by

calling James tellerico unmanly and the key thing is that that is also seems being weak and this

has just infected all of politics even places you wouldn't realize so at the beginning of the year I published a profile of Gavin Newsom the California governor who is widely expected to run for president and he told me at the start that he had taken this line from Bill Clinton which is the American voter prefers strong and wrong over weak and right essentially this idea that you

“have to just bulldoze through you have to be confident and aggressive about things now if you see”

his you know his team strategy on social media which has just been very very rude about a lot of people you know that's what he's gone from it's not dignified or maybe morally defensible but it looks like power and aggression and there are voters clearly who want that and they don't associate the Democrats with that so you know with Ken Paxton in terms of being an alpha male and that's these are like alpha male accusations CNN did a timeline of 20 years of scandals

for Ken Paxton and those scandals include securities fraud charges and FMI investigation of rivalry and abuse of office he was sued for firing whistleblowers the state of Texas sued him for professional misconduct the state house voted to impeach him in 2023 he was

reported infidelity by her husband so of those are the things that are considered like the alpha male

“I think that's the thing it's like that is boys will be boys I don't think we have ever”

stretched it to boys will in bezel before but you know that's where we've got to the fact that James Talerica was kind of squeaky clean you know that's that's they haven't been able to land a real kind of like blow on him in terms of uh probity isn't right now recast is being a bit weak a bit vanilla a bit soy essentially and you know you might trace that all the way back to Donald Trump and the Axis Holywood tape and the defense of that as locker room talk you know this is just how

guys talk and you've got it you know you've just got to accept that basically so where do you see President Trump fitting into masculineism and how masculineists see Trump what they see him is that the ultimate bully and the ultimate patriarchy you know here is somebody who controls everything around them and you know I see masculineism is quite an anxious ideology in a way because it's

about control you know it's about needing to kind of keep a grip on your emotions you never cry you

know you don't need soup because that's gay you don't crush your legs because you know that's Gavin Newsom did that and everyone mocked him on Twitter for it you know all these things that you kind of can't do because they would somehow impune your masculinity does add up to quite a kind of anxious way to live it in my view but the way that it's reframed around Trump is you know I always think of kind of Trump as the Eric Cartman from South Park of American public life you

know he just he just does what he wants and everybody else has to deal with it and that's the kind of ultimate patriarchy fantasy you can do whatever you want and everyone else has to put up with it and actually everyone else kind of worships you and look up to you and you know you've got to the woman on your arm and you've got the guys who love being in this state is hierarchy where they all

“know who the you know the top one is you know he's he encapsulates that dream which I think is”

hard for people outside the movement like me to understand because I look at it and I think you know there's a guy who loves showtunes who's slathered in 14 pounds of makeup and has been you know dying his hair a series of bizarre colors for 25 years or more it doesn't to me radiate kind of what I think of as sort of that American cowboy Clint East would in a poncho kind of masculinity but there's clearly something about it that codes to those people is very very alpha indeed maybe more

alpha right maybe the ultimate alpha thing is you can wear bronzer and no one's allowed to mention it they just have to get on with it you point out something that I hadn't quite put together before which is that you know Trump had a surprising number of women in important positions in his

second term and then he fired several of them tells a gathered palmbandi christney gnome and they were

all replaced by men yeah I mean in some cases they replaced briefly by macarious kind of universal solvent for the Trump administration's hardest problems but yeah it seems to me that it's quite hard to be a woman in macar. There are extremely high demands on you the one who has survived

“and thrived I think is Susie Wiles you know Trump is you know what unexpectedly the person you brought”

the first female chief of staff into the White House and she's made it all the way so far there hasn't been that revolving door that there wasn't his first term so but I think she occupies an interesting decision the way that people talk about her is essentially as a kind of grandma figure you know she she doesn't challenge Trump she doesn't see it as her job like some of the previous chiefs of staff for the military background to kind of challenge him or stand up to him or given

the alternate view she sees her role as being to carry out an enable which I you know it would be probably demeaning to say but that's the role of a really good secretary or executive PA but it is not an authority role in the way that some of the chiefs of staff have kind of presented themselves or carried themselves I think whereas the women who tried to claim personal authority within macar have had a really difficult time and Linda McMahon has survived two secretary of education and of

course she was like co-founder with her husband of WWE you know the big wrestling franchise I mean she's an unfortunate position really because her belief is that the department of education shouldn't really exist so when that's your kind of guiding principle it's quite hard to fail right it's not that you can say this department hasn't been doing well when you don't think it should exist at all but she yeah she's a very interesting case because she like Trump understands the idea

of kind of story lining your life you know he approaches his presidency like a WWE season where you have heels and faces and reversals and slightly shocking things and they you know she participated didn't and there were whole story lines about how Vince was you know cheating on her and how humiliating it wasn't she was tied to a chair in the arena so she somebody's willing to enjoy public humiliation by you know overbearing men which I imagine was a pretty good preparation

for serving in the Trump administration let me introduce you we need to take another short break my guest is Helen Lewis and we're talking about her article on the Atlantic titled the men who want women to be quiet will be right back this is fresh air this week on WWE don't tell me we

I could draw really well so I could draw Fred Flintstone and Snoopy and then probably a couple

years later I started drawing them having sex listen to the wait wait don't tell me podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts the Trump administration makes news at a breakneck pace NPR's podcast Trump's terms is your guide to the headlines that matter from the transformation of the Department of Justice and the Pentagon, the foreign policy and trade we help you understand a president Trump is rewriting the rules of the presidency short episodes that cover one story

at a time. Trump's terms listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Who are some of the people in Congress or in state or city elected officials or influential writers or thinkers who are part of this masculineist movement someone I would say who's very early

to this is Senator Josh Holy who wrote a book about manhood a couple years ago you know he

spotted quite early on that there were lots of men in policy circles and elite circles who felt very annoyed that we'd heard a lot of you know the future is female and about the various oppression suffered by women in American life and that maybe you know there would be a constituency that would like to hear a bit more about the ways in which which men are oppressed

“or men have been disadvantaged so that's you know I think that's really important the”

the Trump administration has been using the equality office essentially to say are you a white man you know do you feel you've been discriminated at work do you want to come and you know talk about that so sort of flipping that idea of the kind of DEI bureaucracy to address a different minority

group in white men. So I want to mention Scott Yanner who's an MIT didn't know but you

write about him he worked with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in rolling back DEI programs and you recently became the chair of the Heritage Foundation's American Citizenship Initiative and they published a report in January that called for a culture-wide Manhattan project to promote family building can you say a little bit more about that. Yeah I think Scott Yanner is a really influential interesting figure he believes in the family wage which I guess is the kind of

workplace corollary to family voting essentially you should be able to preferentially hire and promote married men to encourage them to be the breadwinners and women to stay at home be the homemakers. He also is used Douglas Wilson star language he talked about women being modern women are medicated, middle, some and quarrel some you know that the analysis is very similar and you

“you do see echoes of this language I think in you know JD Vance is very steeped in all this”

stuff so bits of this language dribbles through into him. The interesting thing about Scott Yanner is we published a piece by Henry Olson in the Atlantic when he was appointed to the Heritage Foundation saying you do realize that this guy's views are really on gender at really quite extreme and it caused the most awful stink in kind of you know post-liberal and maga twitter essentially the the main criticism seemed to be don't err our dirty laundry in public you know don't tell people

about this guy which I thought was that that was really fascinating to me there was an acknowledgement of the fact that you know in certain spaces his views will be received as kind of titillating but actually for wider consumption they were probably pretty repellent to the median voter. Now I want to make clear you think that there are really concerning problems facing men and boys right now and I'd like to end with you talking about some of those. I think that's really

it should be an important part of the conversation you know I've written about feminism and the you know the things that affect women throughout my career but it is very important to

“to talk about the fact so I think it's really tough to be a young man right now my colleague Derek”

Thompson wants to describe the situation of young men as being like monks in the casino you know we know that they drink less they party less they have more you know they are less likely to be coupled up than previous generations of men at the same time via their smartphones they can access any amount of porn and crypto and gambling. This is a bit where I think I do have some overlap with Doug Wilson and I think that lots of bits of modern life are really tough for young people they

are being urged into funnels to make money for big social media corporations that are not necessarily the way that you know you would choose for anybody to live and I think that you know the decline of traditional manufacturing has meant that the workplace has become easier for women to get a job and in some respects harder for men at the entry level then there has been I think in some places overt discrimination against men and white men because lots of companies in the last 10 year have

looked at their diversity statistics and kind of vomited at how bad they were and gone on what will probably turn out to be on constitutional hiring bingers to try and make those statistics look better. Now that's an advanced recoil rights it's tough on the individual men that that has affected. So I think you know when you are taking on some of these more outrageous ideas you have to acknowledge that some people feel hard done by in the last decade and that is not a completely

preposterous situation to take. I don't know how much social media you do but what kind of reaction

had some quite hostile responses as you expect you know there were people saying that you know

I make the kind of classic face that all liberal women do when they are in a confronted with facts that they can't debunk it all that kind of like blah blah blah whatever there were loads of

“really thoughtful responses to I think some of the people just like being mentioned in the mainstream”

media the kind that they could show to their own mother you know when you've got to show and rumble

you know your mum doesn't really believe that you have a job so I think there's some you know

there was there was some oddly positive responses from some people but I also got loads and loads of really thoughtful emails not least a really interesting strain from older guys who said you know I'm 70 and this stuff is also completely alien to me this doesn't speak for me and I think I'm really worried we've gone backwards and it was really interesting to hear from them

“because that's not a perspective you know that you get to hear a lot I think and I don't hear enough”

of that well hello us thank you so much for talking with us and thank you for your article

it was really lovely thank you so much for asking me Helen Lewis is a staff writer at the Atlantic where her article the men who want women to be quiet is published tomorrow on fresh air our guest will be Anna Devere Smith she's known for writing and starring and shows about real people she interviews them and portrays them with their actual words her new show is about her great great

“grandfather a free black man who re buried the union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground”

for Lincoln's most famous speech a hope you'll join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews follow us on instagram at npr fresh air fresh air executive producer Sam Brewer our technical director in engineer is Audrey Bentham our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by phyllis miars and rebaldonado Lauren Crenzel Theresa Madden Monique Nazareth they are challenger Susan Ycundee Anna Balman and Nico Gonzalo's Whistler our

digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper Roberta sure up directs the show our co-host is Tanya Mosling I'm Terry Gross. This week on Wayway Jontale we talked to best selling author Caro Clare Burke about how it feels to write the hip book of the summer I've been very dissociative so I bet's a problem for my future therapist yeah I say let's talk about the fact you're not in therapy that's fast don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games listen to the lightweight

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