> We’ve all seen the self-righteousness, catastrophizing, my-way-or-the-highway attitudes, and emotional outbursts that shut down discussion and suck the oxygen out of the room. That’s toxic femininity.
This line reminded me of Kamala’s appearance on “Call Her Daddy” and how it was strikingly less informative than Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan. So much of the communication was subtextual and about managing the emotions of the participants. The baseline assumption of CHD is that listeners are scared and traumatized and need to be affirmed rather than challenged.
We ran the test of setting national policy according to these assumptions and the results don’t seem to affirm the idea that constantly talking about “mental health” makes it better.
Yeah. Harris's campaign was a combination of platitudes and emotional solidarity, a mirror image of Trump's. One way to view this election is as a contest between Toxic Femininity and Toxic Masculinity.
Well said. I hope we can. I've been voting Democrat since 2008, this is the first time I felt adamant about not doing so. I couldn't in good conscience vote for either candidate. What pushed me away is experiencing something like what you've described, and it compounds with many of the other issues, especially speech policing. I don't think being boorish or crude, or hyperbolic, makes speech norms any better.
It's like a Tower of Babel moment. We're losing the norms for a common language. The political coalitions are polarizing one side to hyper-feminized discourse and the other to hyper-masculinized discourse. This makes it hard to even talk about the issues. Both styles of discourse are good and useful for different reasons. But when it comes to running a company or running a country, a masculine discourse is *probably* more effective. It's more useful for competitive strategizing.
And come on, it's feeling a little war-timey. Can a Commander-in-Chief afford to have generals worrying about their pronouns? No, but the opposite: orders need to be crystal clear.
The social class swing was probably partly fueled by wanting more money in their pockets, or hoping the economy will get better and prices will go down. But I don't even buy it completely. This trickles all the way down. I bet many people are sensing and feeling this emotional manipulation in some way or another and voting for clarity. For Latino/a over Latinx, for example--and it isn't trivial, it's in the language how they're feeling manipulating by what they're seeing and hearing...
"Epistemic breakdown," which you touch on in the second paragraph, is a real issue and something I've touched on in past writing (and should probably write more on). Jonathan Haidt has a Substack called "After Babel" by the way.
Your comments on clarity vs manipulation are interesting — hadn't thought about it that way, but it makes sense. Thanks.
Cool, yeah, I'm aware and enjoy After Babel. Good stuff. Epistemic breakdown sure is well underway! The democratized internet is kind of like a kaleidoscope, or house of mirrors. I recently saw some Joe Rogan thing where Terrance Howard (the actor) was trying to say that 1x1=2 and read a Substack newsletter today that needed to defend that 2+2=4. So, there's that . . .
What an interesting perspective and a thought-provoking read. On emotions and men feeling silenced, I'd say emotions are synonymous with feelings and that men are just as emotional as women nor do they lack the spaces to express those emotions. They do, however, express those emotions often from a place of anonymity, which tends to result in more baser instincts coming to the fore. The web and social media is full of men venting their emotions in vulgar and violent terms aimed at women. The mainstream media, on the other hand is seen by many men as the space were all men are made into monsters.
Thanks and that's a great point. I was trying to point out that it's not like men aren't expressing themselves. It's that the channels for them to do so are outside the mainstream and sometimes in less healthy spaces.
You put into two sentences, what I meandered about. The mainstream is the norm, the status quo, and many men feel ostracised from that. When people feel they don't have agency, then things are going to get ugly. There's that saying that facts don't care about your feelings, but people act (vote) based on their feelings, so feelings have impact and consequences.
These are familiar words to any man who has lived with women. And there’s a place for them. Now skip to the post mortem of the election, with its tunnel-visioning on “messaging”. The problem has to be how the platform was presented; it couldn’t be the platform or its fruits. To say otherwise would be a failure of the voters to validate the feelings of the consultants, and that’s insensitive.
I really liked reading your piece. It has a flow to it I wish I could replicate. If I may offer a policy that will help substantiate my perspective while bolstering your argument, I’d point you to the $110 million White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. This was touted by Jill Biden as a step towards “equity.” Except women already live longer than men and the life expectancy gap has been widening. Sure, you can blame this on lifestyle or genetic differences but those are never the arguments made when evaluating equity in any other context. I’m sure you can see why this is insulting to any male taxpayer, or anyone interested in cogency.
Great article that summarizes what I have been noticing for almost 10 years (the Halloween costumes controversy at Yale in 2015 was when I first realized something was wrong). The progressive left has weaponized compassion and inclusion while the right has weaponized order and tradition. The use of emotional blackmail in the explosion of trans identified teens, especially females, is probably the most stark example of what you are talking about. The UK and Europe are quickly backtracking on this issue while the Republicans are painted as the mean adults.
Exactly. These trends have been brewing for several decades, but I believe they bubbled up in this election in a way that they haven't before, not even in 2024. I like your last sentence - so true lol.
Largely agree, from the perspective of an anti-identitarian, antipopulist, heterodox center lefty** who mostly gave up on the Republican Party after birtherism mainstreamed.
** (somewhere between Jesse Singal, Scott Alexander, Matt Yglesias, ...). Two points:
1) "Republicans and Trump voters make up over half of the electorate" - by "electorate" I assume you mean those who did vote in 2024, rather than the set of eligible voters. I suspect "over half" will turn out to be accurate, depending on how many Republicans voted but not for Trump; I'd place a small bet against him getting an absolute majority of the popular vote when all the counting and challenging is finally over (though I assume he will claim that he did).
2) Worth noting that increasing gender polarization seems to be a fairly global phenomenon, at least in countries that we might consider "historically small d democratic". And most of them don't have a Trumpy figure (yeah, sort of Bolsonaro and/or Orban, further back in time Berlusconi).
2A) You might, if you have not already, want to look at the BSW in Germany - a bunch of refugees/leavers from The Left [party, Die Linke] who are trying to make a (serious but maybe not literal) run at left nationalist populism (they are opposed to lifestyle liberalism, immigration restrictionist, Euroskeptic, friendly toward Russia and China, ...). It will be interesting to see how effectively the BSW competes with the AfD going forward (for a brand new party, they did pretty well, 3rd with AfD in 2nd, in the three recent elections in some of the former east german Landtage).
I'm familiar with the global gender gap in industrialized countries but could've touched on that more in the essay. I'm not familiar with BSW but will read up on it now thanks to your note. Thank you.
Yeah, that whole Singal/Alexander/Yglesias axis is mostly composed of nerdy guys, who some might argue are toxically masculine in a different *way*. (I am in fact a frequent and enthusiastic commenter on Alexander's blog, to make my own prejudices clear.)
Bingo! This is exactly the tiptoeing I've been doing for years and therefore I should have voted for Trump. But knowing him for years here in PB, I could never do that. So obviously l didn't vote FOR Kamala but AGAINST Trump. Honestly, there's little free space even with friends for open discussion about opposing views. Sad.
"It’s partly their fault for not claiming space or expressing emotions constructively."
I'm incredulous. The slam campaign against men's spaces or ability to express emotion has few rivals from any other social campaign in human history. That campaign has been waged legally, morally and the physical. There are actual people who lose their livelihoods or die trying to leak information past the incumbent institutional firewalls. The only possible way I could see this is men's fault is, "Well, why didn't the men just physically enslave anyone who disagreed with them? Heh gotcha now it's your fault checkmate."
Meh. If you want to make this purely a victim narrative, that's fine. Obviously, I'm sympathetic or I wouldn't have written this. But if men self-censor and stew in the face of liberal tears, that's partly their fault.
I think you wrote a generally very good article here. Full credit to you here. But... on this specific point, let's get real. You can't reasonably expect an average everyday person (male or female) to literally *risk their livelihood* in an attempt to share the other side of a contentious issue. And yes, that is the risk here. I've followed "culture war" material for about a decade now - sometimes people get fired for this.
i love getting fired/banned for noticing the truth a bunch of adults are too ashamed to admit. more people should realize how fun it is to be proven right.
Jeff, why don't you go get a job in a medium-to-large company in a mixed gender department, and then tell a woman who starts crying (it will eventually happen) that she is being unprofessional and if she doesn't stop she'll be fired. See what happens.
Obviously, everyone knows what will happen. She'll cry more and it'll be you who gets fired, not her, because the liberals will engage ever-escalating freakouts until you are gone. Every time. This is exactly the problem you're talking about in your essay, so what do you think should happen here?
The only obvious way to avoid this outcome would be to systematically detect and fire/refuse to hire anyone on the left, then have written policies in place that ban toxic femininity, and then somehow survive the onslaught of lawsuits from the government, boycotts etc that the left would focus on your as the sole point of resistance.
Men are not to blame here. Men are systematically oppressed by the left, because the left is misandrist to its very core, and it's clearly not about to change.
While I agree with all of this, you could write the same article about toxic masculinity and the Republicans 4 years ago. Seems to me something like 47% of the electorate (not the public) on each edge is polarized and the 6% that swings back and forth determines the election. Let Trump screw up enough and we will be reading articles about toxic masculinity and the evil of men in 4 years.
From what I can tell from exit polls, the big issues seem to have been inflation, immigration, abortion, and 'democracy' (likely Jan 6), and just enough more people cared about the first two to put Trump in office. (Particularly inflation, which has bedeviled left-leaning or leftist governments since at least Weimar.)
Also, the gender gap was 55-45 each side--not exactly a yawning chasm. (It *is* larger among the young.)
I think one primary reason that escalated Trump, and then escalated liberal responses as a result, was the liberal misunderstanding of the root of so many conservative beliefs. So many conservative beliefs trace back to “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
I like to think many conservatives don’t mean to use this as an argumentative “get out of jail free card”, or that they actually want the world to suck. This weaponization of emotion runs into cold facts that make everyone squeamish to address.
Why can’t we have free healthcare? Healthcare is a complicated topic, but the short answer is it’s ridiculously expensive and even if we could tax billionaires more, it probably won’t cover it all. AND even if it did, you will have to make peace with the fact that universal college and pre-k will likely never be funded.
This is one example where emotions can run high and men aren’t really sure how to tell visibly emotional people, especially women, the truth.
And then, when conservative/men’s beliefs get completely misinterpreted for years, they get frustrated. What was once a compassionate stoicism to a broken world has morphed into a sadistic glee. We’re not cutting programs because government is too big and we will default on the debt, we’re cutting government programs to see liberal tears.
> We’ve all seen the self-righteousness, catastrophizing, my-way-or-the-highway attitudes, and emotional outbursts that shut down discussion and suck the oxygen out of the room. That’s toxic femininity.
This line reminded me of Kamala’s appearance on “Call Her Daddy” and how it was strikingly less informative than Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan. So much of the communication was subtextual and about managing the emotions of the participants. The baseline assumption of CHD is that listeners are scared and traumatized and need to be affirmed rather than challenged.
We ran the test of setting national policy according to these assumptions and the results don’t seem to affirm the idea that constantly talking about “mental health” makes it better.
Yeah. Harris's campaign was a combination of platitudes and emotional solidarity, a mirror image of Trump's. One way to view this election is as a contest between Toxic Femininity and Toxic Masculinity.
LOL
Men act stupid and fuck everything up.
Guess who's to blame?
DA WIMMINZ!
This is why men shouldn't be allowed to vote. You should be in a coal mine.
I love it when commentators jump into the comment section and performatively prove correct every claim in the OP.
Well said. I hope we can. I've been voting Democrat since 2008, this is the first time I felt adamant about not doing so. I couldn't in good conscience vote for either candidate. What pushed me away is experiencing something like what you've described, and it compounds with many of the other issues, especially speech policing. I don't think being boorish or crude, or hyperbolic, makes speech norms any better.
It's like a Tower of Babel moment. We're losing the norms for a common language. The political coalitions are polarizing one side to hyper-feminized discourse and the other to hyper-masculinized discourse. This makes it hard to even talk about the issues. Both styles of discourse are good and useful for different reasons. But when it comes to running a company or running a country, a masculine discourse is *probably* more effective. It's more useful for competitive strategizing.
And come on, it's feeling a little war-timey. Can a Commander-in-Chief afford to have generals worrying about their pronouns? No, but the opposite: orders need to be crystal clear.
The social class swing was probably partly fueled by wanting more money in their pockets, or hoping the economy will get better and prices will go down. But I don't even buy it completely. This trickles all the way down. I bet many people are sensing and feeling this emotional manipulation in some way or another and voting for clarity. For Latino/a over Latinx, for example--and it isn't trivial, it's in the language how they're feeling manipulating by what they're seeing and hearing...
"Epistemic breakdown," which you touch on in the second paragraph, is a real issue and something I've touched on in past writing (and should probably write more on). Jonathan Haidt has a Substack called "After Babel" by the way.
Your comments on clarity vs manipulation are interesting — hadn't thought about it that way, but it makes sense. Thanks.
Cool, yeah, I'm aware and enjoy After Babel. Good stuff. Epistemic breakdown sure is well underway! The democratized internet is kind of like a kaleidoscope, or house of mirrors. I recently saw some Joe Rogan thing where Terrance Howard (the actor) was trying to say that 1x1=2 and read a Substack newsletter today that needed to defend that 2+2=4. So, there's that . . .
What an interesting perspective and a thought-provoking read. On emotions and men feeling silenced, I'd say emotions are synonymous with feelings and that men are just as emotional as women nor do they lack the spaces to express those emotions. They do, however, express those emotions often from a place of anonymity, which tends to result in more baser instincts coming to the fore. The web and social media is full of men venting their emotions in vulgar and violent terms aimed at women. The mainstream media, on the other hand is seen by many men as the space were all men are made into monsters.
Thanks and that's a great point. I was trying to point out that it's not like men aren't expressing themselves. It's that the channels for them to do so are outside the mainstream and sometimes in less healthy spaces.
You put into two sentences, what I meandered about. The mainstream is the norm, the status quo, and many men feel ostracised from that. When people feel they don't have agency, then things are going to get ugly. There's that saying that facts don't care about your feelings, but people act (vote) based on their feelings, so feelings have impact and consequences.
“It’s not what you said but how you said it.”
These are familiar words to any man who has lived with women. And there’s a place for them. Now skip to the post mortem of the election, with its tunnel-visioning on “messaging”. The problem has to be how the platform was presented; it couldn’t be the platform or its fruits. To say otherwise would be a failure of the voters to validate the feelings of the consultants, and that’s insensitive.
I really liked reading your piece. It has a flow to it I wish I could replicate. If I may offer a policy that will help substantiate my perspective while bolstering your argument, I’d point you to the $110 million White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. This was touted by Jill Biden as a step towards “equity.” Except women already live longer than men and the life expectancy gap has been widening. Sure, you can blame this on lifestyle or genetic differences but those are never the arguments made when evaluating equity in any other context. I’m sure you can see why this is insulting to any male taxpayer, or anyone interested in cogency.
Sources:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/10/23/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-110-million-in-awards-from-arpa-hs-sprint-for-womens-health-to-accelerate-new-discoveries-and-innovation/
https://time.com/6334873/u-s-life-expectancy-gender-gap/
Great article that summarizes what I have been noticing for almost 10 years (the Halloween costumes controversy at Yale in 2015 was when I first realized something was wrong). The progressive left has weaponized compassion and inclusion while the right has weaponized order and tradition. The use of emotional blackmail in the explosion of trans identified teens, especially females, is probably the most stark example of what you are talking about. The UK and Europe are quickly backtracking on this issue while the Republicans are painted as the mean adults.
Exactly. These trends have been brewing for several decades, but I believe they bubbled up in this election in a way that they haven't before, not even in 2024. I like your last sentence - so true lol.
Henpecked is the word I've used for how so many people have quietly told me why they're voting for Trump.
Perfect word. Wish I had used it!
Great article.
Largely agree, from the perspective of an anti-identitarian, antipopulist, heterodox center lefty** who mostly gave up on the Republican Party after birtherism mainstreamed.
** (somewhere between Jesse Singal, Scott Alexander, Matt Yglesias, ...). Two points:
1) "Republicans and Trump voters make up over half of the electorate" - by "electorate" I assume you mean those who did vote in 2024, rather than the set of eligible voters. I suspect "over half" will turn out to be accurate, depending on how many Republicans voted but not for Trump; I'd place a small bet against him getting an absolute majority of the popular vote when all the counting and challenging is finally over (though I assume he will claim that he did).
2) Worth noting that increasing gender polarization seems to be a fairly global phenomenon, at least in countries that we might consider "historically small d democratic". And most of them don't have a Trumpy figure (yeah, sort of Bolsonaro and/or Orban, further back in time Berlusconi).
2A) You might, if you have not already, want to look at the BSW in Germany - a bunch of refugees/leavers from The Left [party, Die Linke] who are trying to make a (serious but maybe not literal) run at left nationalist populism (they are opposed to lifestyle liberalism, immigration restrictionist, Euroskeptic, friendly toward Russia and China, ...). It will be interesting to see how effectively the BSW competes with the AfD going forward (for a brand new party, they did pretty well, 3rd with AfD in 2nd, in the three recent elections in some of the former east german Landtage).
I'm familiar with the global gender gap in industrialized countries but could've touched on that more in the essay. I'm not familiar with BSW but will read up on it now thanks to your note. Thank you.
Yeah, that whole Singal/Alexander/Yglesias axis is mostly composed of nerdy guys, who some might argue are toxically masculine in a different *way*. (I am in fact a frequent and enthusiastic commenter on Alexander's blog, to make my own prejudices clear.)
“We must tone all of this shit down.” Lol. Yes.
Lol, I know right? Still.
i am always glad to read an article/essay that has been burning in my heart but that i do not have the time to write. this was a really good read.
High compliment — thank you.
Bingo! This is exactly the tiptoeing I've been doing for years and therefore I should have voted for Trump. But knowing him for years here in PB, I could never do that. So obviously l didn't vote FOR Kamala but AGAINST Trump. Honestly, there's little free space even with friends for open discussion about opposing views. Sad.
"It’s partly their fault for not claiming space or expressing emotions constructively."
I'm incredulous. The slam campaign against men's spaces or ability to express emotion has few rivals from any other social campaign in human history. That campaign has been waged legally, morally and the physical. There are actual people who lose their livelihoods or die trying to leak information past the incumbent institutional firewalls. The only possible way I could see this is men's fault is, "Well, why didn't the men just physically enslave anyone who disagreed with them? Heh gotcha now it's your fault checkmate."
https://youtu.be/-06ki92PyVY?si=axnV_S1zN-_0F59k
^Portrayed in Futurama
"Republicans have their own flaws, like conspiracy theories "
To add to the article's claims about gloating, the conspiracy theorists are eating pretty well in regards to getting it right lately.
Meh. If you want to make this purely a victim narrative, that's fine. Obviously, I'm sympathetic or I wouldn't have written this. But if men self-censor and stew in the face of liberal tears, that's partly their fault.
I think you wrote a generally very good article here. Full credit to you here. But... on this specific point, let's get real. You can't reasonably expect an average everyday person (male or female) to literally *risk their livelihood* in an attempt to share the other side of a contentious issue. And yes, that is the risk here. I've followed "culture war" material for about a decade now - sometimes people get fired for this.
i love getting fired/banned for noticing the truth a bunch of adults are too ashamed to admit. more people should realize how fun it is to be proven right.
Jeff, why don't you go get a job in a medium-to-large company in a mixed gender department, and then tell a woman who starts crying (it will eventually happen) that she is being unprofessional and if she doesn't stop she'll be fired. See what happens.
Obviously, everyone knows what will happen. She'll cry more and it'll be you who gets fired, not her, because the liberals will engage ever-escalating freakouts until you are gone. Every time. This is exactly the problem you're talking about in your essay, so what do you think should happen here?
The only obvious way to avoid this outcome would be to systematically detect and fire/refuse to hire anyone on the left, then have written policies in place that ban toxic femininity, and then somehow survive the onslaught of lawsuits from the government, boycotts etc that the left would focus on your as the sole point of resistance.
Men are not to blame here. Men are systematically oppressed by the left, because the left is misandrist to its very core, and it's clearly not about to change.
While I agree with all of this, you could write the same article about toxic masculinity and the Republicans 4 years ago. Seems to me something like 47% of the electorate (not the public) on each edge is polarized and the 6% that swings back and forth determines the election. Let Trump screw up enough and we will be reading articles about toxic masculinity and the evil of men in 4 years.
From what I can tell from exit polls, the big issues seem to have been inflation, immigration, abortion, and 'democracy' (likely Jan 6), and just enough more people cared about the first two to put Trump in office. (Particularly inflation, which has bedeviled left-leaning or leftist governments since at least Weimar.)
Also, the gender gap was 55-45 each side--not exactly a yawning chasm. (It *is* larger among the young.)
“Men are the spoils of women’s battles”.
It’s not the men (any more).
Social media is the poison.
First it was the catalogues, now it is Instagram.
The beating will continue until morale improves.
These young women are killing themselves.
But, if it’s a man who’s running the company, making “all the money”, then it’s definitely his fault. If it’s a woman, “you go girl!”
I guess I get the point but toxic masculinity is violent and murderous. Toxic femininity is annoying use of free speech.
I think one primary reason that escalated Trump, and then escalated liberal responses as a result, was the liberal misunderstanding of the root of so many conservative beliefs. So many conservative beliefs trace back to “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
I like to think many conservatives don’t mean to use this as an argumentative “get out of jail free card”, or that they actually want the world to suck. This weaponization of emotion runs into cold facts that make everyone squeamish to address.
Why can’t we have free healthcare? Healthcare is a complicated topic, but the short answer is it’s ridiculously expensive and even if we could tax billionaires more, it probably won’t cover it all. AND even if it did, you will have to make peace with the fact that universal college and pre-k will likely never be funded.
This is one example where emotions can run high and men aren’t really sure how to tell visibly emotional people, especially women, the truth.
And then, when conservative/men’s beliefs get completely misinterpreted for years, they get frustrated. What was once a compassionate stoicism to a broken world has morphed into a sadistic glee. We’re not cutting programs because government is too big and we will default on the debt, we’re cutting government programs to see liberal tears.