'If You Can Keep It': What ‘Masculinism’ Means For America

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0:38Last week marked the anniversary of Congress passing the 19th Amendment. In 1919, that constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote, although for decades that right only applied in practice to white women. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and Jim Crow-era state laws prevented black women from voting. Fast forward 107 years, and now a growing conservative movement wants to repeal that and other hard-fought rights for women and people of color. It's called masculinism, and its goal is to combat what its believers see as a feminized U.S. society. For the next part of our ongoing politics and democracy series, if you can keep it, how a right-wing fringe movement has shifted toward the center of power in America, thanks to its connections to the Trump administration and its influence on Republican policy.

1:26What do followers of this movement want? What does it mean for our democracy if a growing movement in conservative politics, one that could gain power in the future, wants to reinstitute patriarchy in U.S. politics and as a result, eliminate the right for women, black people, and other people of color to have a role in public life? I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwilling. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. We'll be back with more after this short break. Stay with us.

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2:33Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. We're talking about how a right-wing fringe movement has shifted toward the center of power and its influence on the Republican Party. Joining us from London is Helen Lewis. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic. She wrote the magazine's June cover story titled, The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet. Helen, welcome to 1A. Hello. And joining us from Washington, D.C. is Laura Kayfield. She's a writer and political theorist and author of Furious Minds, the making of the MAGA New Right from Princeton University Press.

3:08Laura, welcome to you as well. Thank you for having me. Helen, let's just start with a broad definition. How would you define the masculinism movement? Well, I wanted to distinguish it from the manosphere, which people might have heard of, and they might associate that with people like perhaps Andrew Tate, or they might have watched Louis Theroux's Netflix documentary. But I wanted to make the point that behind the kind of viral influencers who are often very much into shock tactics, there is a coherent ideology. And essentially it says feminism has gone too far. Patriarchy should be rehabilitated.

3:38Men should be the head of the household. They're better suited to serve in armies, to be political leaders, and to hold all kinds of public roles. And essentially, women are much more suited to being homemakers. So a very traditional approach to gender roles. So Helen, who are the champions here? If they're not quite the manosphere characters that we've talked about on this show, who are the people with the real ideology and what are the ideological origins of the movement? Well, I think one of the most obvious people to talk about in this context is Pete Hegser, Secretary of Defense or War, as he would have it, because he believes, you know, that women shouldn't serve in combat roles in the military.

4:14And in fact, you know, there have been reported stories about the fact of female and black officers being denied promotions, you know, that he has a very particular view of what he thinks an army should look like and it doesn't include women and minorities. So he's a very obvious example. I spoke to the founder of Christchurch, of the denomination that he's part of, which is, I would describe it as a kind of fire-breathing Calvinist denomination. And Doug Wilson is the head of that. Now he is, you know, he is a kind of, he's 72, but he has the blog approach of a much younger man, shall we say, and that he talks about women as small-breasted biddies and jezebels and lots of other words that I'm not going to inflict on your listeners at this time of the day.

4:53But, you know, what you have is somebody who has a very biblical interpretation, you know, describes himself as a biblical patriarch, and he was invited into the Pentagon by Pete Hegseth to talk to all the people who work there. So you have someone there who has a view of America that is incredibly old-fashioned, who has also a direct route into government. And that would be a very obvious example, I think. Well, let's hear a bit of what some prominent masculinist influencers have said online and to the media. Men are good at smashing and breaking things. They're good at fighting. And when you have this egalitarian dogma that women and men have to be the same, What happens is it's like saying everybody has to be able to dunk the basketball.

5:36If you've got an egalitarian dogma that says everyone has to be able to dunk, the only thing you're going to wind up doing is lowering the net. Within the parameters of a liberal democratic society, how much can men be men? Is this kind of like an inextricable problem from the nature of the system itself? Males should not be providers, we are told, or leaders of family, or even engage the family overmuch, except to support womanly nurturing. Males should be ashamed of the wildness in their hearts and the need they have for competitive greatness or iron sharpening iron. We should repeal the 19th Amendment.

6:16We should take it away. They vote for the wrong candidate every single time. Every single time the women vote Democrat, they vote for the wrong person. The voices we heard there was a Christian nationalist pastor, Doug Wilson, influencer Charles Cornish Dale, academic Scott Jenner, and the far-right white supremacist influencer, Nick Fuentes. Laura, what underlying trends in U.S. society do you see as fuel for this masculinist movement, what they're pointing to in their critiques? Thank you. Yeah, my work sort of situates this masculinist movement in the broader foment of the intellectual right.

6:51And so this is all taking place against the background of an intellectual movement that's tied to Trumpism, that is sort of against liberal democracy as such, against liberal pluralism, and does stand for these older hierarchies. And I think generally, this is a movement that's fueled by anger. I mean, my book is called Furious Minds. And they're angry about a lot of things. I think that there are a lot of things for Americans to be angry about, but one of the things that they're upset about is the kind of social transformations that have happened over the last 50 years, and especially in professional spaces.

7:31And so they're lashing out a lot at professional women and their loss of status that they see as the result of other people, other groups rising in professional worlds and universities and in sort of the elite spaces that they do care about. But it also includes minorities, right? That's a big part of the broader picture as well. And something really struck me in those quotes, that montage that we just played, and I believe it was a Charles Cornish Dale, the critic with the English accent. The critique wasn't just about feminism or demasculinity or minorities or liberalism that was damaging men.

8:12It was democracy, that democracies themselves cannot allow men to flourish. That was striking. Yeah, I noticed that too, because I hadn't quite seen that quote until I saw it in Helen's piece. But the idea that men can't be fully themselves and sort of fully manly in the context of an egalitarian, pluralistic, liberal democracy. And I think, depending on your definition of manliness, you know, if you're talking about just manly domination of others and a very sort of pinched and old-fashioned kind of violent understanding of masculinity or manliness, then I guess that's true, right? Liberal democracy does posit that people are equal and should not be dominated by any other group.

8:55And so there is a tension there, but I think, I mean, my own view is that that's an extremely pinched and bizarre way to understand sort of manly virtue. Well, Helen, we can talk about opinion, but it's really important that we talk about policy. So what kinds of policies do these influencers advocate for as solutions to what they see as issues in U.S. society? Well, you mentioned at the very top there the rollback of DEI. You know, there is an effort to say actually white men are the ones who've been really shut out of lots of prestigious jobs in journalism, publishing, academia. Scott Yenna, who's one of the people you quoted now at the Heritage Foundation, has posited this idea of the family wage, which is essentially the idea that you should be able to preferentially hire and promote married men and you should be able to pay them more so that their wives can stay at home and that is it's kind of fascinating because to me that is DEI that is affirmative action for men so it's kind of flipping around some of the stuff that we've been talking around in helping women and minorities in the last decade to say well let's you know let's apply this to men instead I mean heritage is a big think tank it's very powerful in the MAGA world And Project 2025, which some of your listeners might have heard of, the kind of blueprint for a second Trump term, had a very traditional vision of gender.

10:12It was about men as breadwinners and women as homemakers. And Heritage has carried that on. They released another report in January this year, which was, you know, had a kind of whole constellation of things that it was against, from daycare to dating apps to no-fault divorce, you know, to single-parent benefits. And it is all about this kind of, like, let's change the tax system. Let's change small laws and regulations. just all of it to nudge society in the direction that we'd like it to go in. So there are people thinking about this very seriously in policy terms. Laura, I just want to better understand this idea that white men have lost influence in the circles of power.

10:51If you look at Congress, I think it would be hard to argue that there's an underrepresentation of white men. The number of U.S. presidents who were white men all save one. So how are they coming to this conclusion that white men have been pushed out of even the C-suite? Majority? White men. So what are they drawing on as evidence to support this claim? Well, I think that they're grounding this in their very narrow experiences in some professional spaces and what they call the liberal elite spaces of the university. I think you're right. It doesn't really pan out. There are some things we can point to, like, you know, the fact that most many university students now, I think there's a majority who are women and there have been these transformations.

11:46But the idea that white men have been excluded, I think, is based on a false understanding of, you know, affirmative action and some of the DII policies. I think what they're actually, you know, they can't point to the evidence concretely, but what they're actually experiencing is the shift in our culture, right? A shift where, you know, in Hollywood, women are represented differently. We have, you know, gay marriage celebrated in these elite spaces. And so they have various terms for this. They talk about sort of liberal domination in the universities, in the media, in government. And I think you're right.

12:28It's not sort of accurate. But there's this feeling that they express that the cultural norms have shifted. And I think that much is true, right? And they have different words to describe this gynocracy, the longhouse, the cathedral, you know, liberalocracy. They have all these terms to describe what they see as a kind of tyranny of majority opinion that has been feminized. We're speaking to Laura Field. She's a political theorist and author of Furious Minds, the making of the MAGA New Right. Also with us, Helen Lewis, staff writer for The Atlantic. And we're hearing from you. Adam emails, I live in Indiana where the governor changed June from Pride Month to Nuclear Family Month.

13:07What a shame. And Randolph in Virginia emails, I am a U.S. Army veteran who deployed to Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst. and have worked as a contractor in the intelligence community for over 20 years. In my opinion, Pete Hegseth, his pastor in this current White House administration project, project an illusion of masculinity. But in reality, they project the complete opposite. He is in the position of Secretary of Defense, primarily due to being President Trump's sycophant, and not by merit, as he pretends to enforce. We want to hear from you as well. If you have thoughts about the masculinism movement, or you notice a shift in politics where you live or the media you consume, email us at 1a at wamu.org.

13:48Helen, one of the things that you bring to light in your piece in The Atlantic is that the masculinism movement, even if it's not based on, you know, as Laura says, they aren't hanging anything on real data. It is based on some things that are real or does have elements of real problems for men. male loneliness, graduation rates plummeting for young men, so that there is a foundation of disaffection or deterioration among men that this movement seems to be at least gaining a foothold from. Yeah, and I think when you look at the audience for these kind of messages, you have to bear that in mind, that particularly for non-college educated men, wages have been really stagnant, job opportunities have been really, you know, not very mediocre now for 10, 20 years, really since the financial crash in America.

14:40So there is a whole load of dissatisfaction. You know, they also speak to men at vulnerable times in their lives, you know, post-divorce, for example. And a lot of the messages are about the way that the court system will favour mothers. And I think those are very powerful to men who are having a really, really tough time in their lives. But at the other end, you know, I do think there is, I think Laura's right to pick up on this idea that the cultural shift has been very hard. So quite a lot of these influences has come out of the academy, you know, they are professors somewhere. And they have experienced what it's like when a hiring committee says, well, it's quite embarrassing that we've got an all-male department.

15:14Shouldn't we try and recruit more women and more minority candidates? So I think for the, you know, they feel that there is a tier of men who would otherwise have got quite good jobs and lives, and they have been essentially replaced by professional women. And one of the things that's most interesting is the class aspect of this, because if you hear this discourse online there are lots of chats about how women all have you know work in hr or they have pointless email jobs or whatever it might be and actually the the biggest professions in the u.s for women are education and nursing you know hard to grapple you know working class and low middle class jobs that are not you know easy and you sit around all day on a laptop but so much of this i think is about and as laura correctly identifies in her book men from an elite class who now understand that they have to compete with a whole load of extra people for the jobs and status that they want.

16:02Well, we mentioned that this movement finds a voice on podcasts, YouTube, and in academia, and public policy. Helen, what are the main ways you see this ideology spreading and getting attention, especially with new audiences? Well, I think Doug Wilson is a really interesting example of somebody who has thought very well about building a kind of media empire. So he's based in Moscow, Idaho, where members of his family are involved in the local liberal arts college, the local school. He has a streaming platform that distributes content that he makes. He has a publishing imprint that members of his family are involved with.

16:34And, you know, he writes his blog, he makes his videos, and he's planted churches around the US. So this is somebody who has absolutely thought about all the different communication channels that you would, you know, in 2026 want to have to get your message out. And that's, you know, that's the same for lots these guys. There's a whole circuit of, well, Laura can talk to this, there's a whole circuit of kind of conferences where you can go and sit with a lot of other like-minded people and hear about, you know, the horrors of the gynocracy. Laura, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Yeah, a lot of them, they have podcasts.

17:04I mean, many of the people, I sort of limited myself to writing about people with PhDs. I mean, not exclusively, but, you know, these are people writing books, writing journal articles. And then some of the younger people like Charles Cornish Dale, or there's another figure who goes by the pen name Bronze Age Pervert, but his real name is Costanella Mariu, and he has a PhD from Yale. But they have pretty massive followings online, and they have podcasts where they talk about bodybuilding, and they talk about classical music or Homer. They're talking about all these different kinds of things. I guess one thing I would add that I think is a reason for the sort of flourishing of masculinism is a lot of these influencers, and including the sort of highbrow people, are also sort of filling a gap of meaning.

17:50You know, they're helping these young men navigate their lives and, you know, find guidance in, I think, a world that we can all agree can be very confusing. Well, we have to take a quick break, but before we do, we got this message from one of you. Chance emails, I'm a 25-year-old white male, and the social media algorithm keeps pushing Repeal 19 content on me. I don't know why. I would never support this. And David in Florida emails, hearing how white males want to roll back equality reminds me of the quote, the loss of privilege feels like oppression. So to come, what this movement might do beyond the current administration.

18:24We'll be right back.

18:29You know that feeling when you hear a great tip and it's like, that makes so much sense. Why haven't I been doing that all this time? If that's you, you might like Life Kit. Whether you're looking to make changes around your health, your money, your relationships, your parenting, you're guaranteed the, this is so helpful feeling. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get back into our discussion of masculinism and what the rise of this conservative movement means for U.S. politics. Here's a voicemail we got from one of you. I am so surrounded by men who are comfortable being men and love having strong women in their lives and also are willing to be caring and loving and kind and supportive.

19:14I don't even know that this is going on in the world about trying to strip so many rights from women until I listen to YouTube. And the YouTube podcasters that I listen to are highlighting these extremist podcasters that claim religious ground and have no religious ground. And I think and hope, I pray people wake up and vote against this. Let's talk a little bit more about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. His name came up earlier. He personally intervened in Navy officer promotions at the one-star admiral rank. He struck women, black officers, some white men from the list. It resulted in no female officers on the new one-star list and only two non-white officers.

20:00Earlier this year, Hegseth also removed two women and two black colonels from the Army's one-star general promotion list. These are rare interventions by a secretary of defense who typically would sign off on these lists or reject them entirely. These lists are recommendations created by boards of active generals and admirals. That's why it's so rare for the secretary of defense to get directly involved. Of course, we can't forget about the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a black man who was sidelined by Pete Hegseth. Now, we brought up Hegseth because he attends the Pilgrim Hill Reform Fellowship.

20:36That church is part of the communion of reformed evangelical churches, the broader network of fundamentalist churches co-founded by Doug Wilson, who we've been talking about as one of the drivers of the masculinism movement. So, Helen, what other concrete actions have we seen in the Trump administration that align with masculinist philosophy? It's clear that the Pentagon is ground zero. Where else? Well, I think one of the things that's just been really obvious over the last couple of months is there seem to be very different standards applied for women and men working in the White House. I mean, you've just seen this departure of high-profile woman after high-profile woman, Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Labor.

21:15you know, there seems to be a kind of indulgence, perhaps, of men in the way that there isn't of women. And I think that is the kind of thing that will be quite obvious to female voters. We know that the Republicans underperform among women. There was a really big gender gap. And for all that, I think lots of people in the Trump administration and the masculinist movement think that they are appealing to men. There is always a danger of turning off those women in swing states with some of this stuff. So, you know, it will be interesting to look into the midterms about whether or not this is a driving force.

21:48I suspect we won't see it in any particularly obvious way that you can immediately point to causally, but I think it will add to a sense of a White House that is perhaps slightly out of touch in a way that voters are already worried about. And, you know, it's not something that Trump seems at all bothered about, you know, because that would be to show weakness, you know, that in this paradigm, it would be an unmanly thing to do. And just to be clear, Pete Hexf attends Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship. He's not a member of Christ Church, but he is a part of the broader group that that church is a part of.

22:22We got this message from one of you. As an administrator within a high-profile Florida University, it isn't outright anti-DEI rhetoric. It's a little more quiet, but it's definitely anti-DEI. We've had to completely remove our DEI sites and pages altogether to be in line with what Governor DeSantis wants. We've had to remove all instances of diversity across all of our website pages. My friends who are professors are seeing more complaints from young right-wing students simply for teaching and discussing literature and contemporary writing that discusses racism, microaggressions, et cetera, from well-known authors.

22:56Laura, you said that much of this thinking is happening within the academic sphere. Where are you seeing masculinism creep in in academia? So the, I mean, I've been focused on these, these mega adjacent intellectuals. And I think that from my experience, I sort of, I came up in conservative academia studying with sort of relatively conservative scholars, but sort of the best of the conservative world. And in my experience in, in academia, I mean, feminism never really took hold in some of these spaces. And so there was a kind of, you know, it wasn't the misogyny that we see on the new right, but there was kind of an anti-feminist undercurrent.

23:41And I think that in some, but in these mega, with these mega intellectuals, I mean, there are a few examples who are still within academia. Patrick Deneen at the University of Notre Dame has spoken quite, you know, has written against feminism as a kind of bond. The release from domestic life is akin to a kind, and the entry into corporate life is a kind of almost akin to bondage. And there are others who are still in academia, but a lot of these people have left academia either to work somewhere like at the Heritage Foundation, like Scott Jenner, or to become influencers. Well, Helen, you interviewed Doug Wilson and other influencers for your story on this movement.

24:23What did they say about their priorities? What are they hoping to accomplish either through this administration or future administrations? Well, I mean, they take the long view. Doug Wilson said to me, you know, repealing the 19th Amendment is not a priority. You know, it's a sort of 200-year stretch goal. But one of the things it does is it unites this movement around a kind of destination. Their idea is very much a return to patriarchy. And then anything along the way that they can rack up on the school board is a win for them. You know, it's a very clearly articulated vision. He's also said that, you know, he's a Christian nationalist.

24:57He's described his politics as paleo-confederate. You know, he has got a, you know, he wants to wind the clock back to an earlier version of America that he finds more congenial to him, really. Well, we got this message from Mel in Pittsburgh who asks, how does the masculinism movement feel about the LGBTQ community? If they don't like women's rights, I assume their stance on queer people can't be positive either. Laura, is it positive? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. I think that a lot of this is bound up to a kind of extremism that's brought into the movement that, you know, is against feminism.

25:34But that's almost just the – that's not quite as taboo as the racism that you also find in the movement. And then the homophobia and the anti-trans dimension is very strong. And so I think part of the policy agenda here that we should recognize, it's not just all of the things that have already been passed against trans people, but it's the repeal of marriage equality is, I think, certainly on their agenda, in addition to all of the things that Helen's discussed. We got this from Brian, who emails, I'm a 25-year-old gay Marine Corps veteran. What concerns me about this movement is that my male peers are gravitating towards such toxicity and overly puritanical values, which are often associated with conservative circles, including the military.