26. No One Told Men the Floor Was Made of Women
On decentering men, loneliness, men's desire for recognition, and why persistently misdiagnosing men's crises is making everything worse for everyone
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Last week, German police association chief Dirk Peglow provoked a heated public debate when he announced, only partially joking, that, to be safe, women should “not get into a relationship with a man. If you do, the risk is much higher of becoming a victim of psychological or physical violence.”
He is essentially saying how much sense it makes for women to avoid men as much as possible. This, if you think about it, is a way of suggesting that women…decenter men.
Peglow, who was threatened for his efforts, later explained. “It was not meant as advice to be taken literally. The overwhelming majority of men are not violent and are not criminals.” Man meet bear. Bear meet man.
Until relatively recently, most women could do very little to mitigate the risks posed by men, known or unknown. Today, however, women are increasingly able to distance themselves from men with more deliberation and intent, which is the officer’s suggestion.
Formally or informally, women are decentering men, even if they never use that word. This is not because women actively hate men but because women have access to the education, money, birth control, some reproductive rights, and legal standing that make male centrality and approval optional rather than necessary.
It turns out that for a variety of reasons, it’s easier for women to live without men than the other way round. No one, no society, prepared men for this reality or changes in women’s status and their effects on gender relations. This is true despite gender norms for women evolving continuously over a century. In fact, most parents have protected boys from this shift, opting to teach most how to be men in much the same way their fathers and grandfathers were taught. Every generation of girls, on the other hand, had to adapt to a new reality.
But the real problem, the deepest cut, is that no one told men that the floor was made of women. Not the floor of the family household, managed and maintained by unpaid domestic and child care. Not the floor of the economy, held up by unpaid and low-wage care work that kept social reproduction artificially cheap and racial hierarchies in check. Not the floor of men’s emotional lives, built on women’s emotional and hermeneutic labor. Not of men’s protecting and sense of courage, made possible by women’s fear and silent, vigilant risk-bearing. Not of men’s purpose, which required women’s public and economic purposelessness to be evident by contrast. Not the floor of masculine identities, which begin with women’s reliably provided recognition. Lastly, and critically, not the floor of men’s public authority and power, which depends on violently or coercively suppressing women’s public voices, participation, and desire for authority.
This operates at every level, but, as a reader pointed out, in the United States the floor for the country overall is Black women, the people whose bodies have most absorbed its violence, and whose political organizing has repeatedly changed the nation but has never been rewarded (TY Barry LaFleur). Their reproductive, domestic, economic, political, and labor are provide the infrastructure for every other group's ascent, including, white women’s provision of care and support to white men.
Additionally, to make things even worse, equality was supposed to mean women being treated like men, not men being treated like women. Today, more men are expected to do things that women have always had to (emotional work and child care); to work the way women have always had to (precariously, with flexibility, with less security and lower wages); to modify their bodies to meet market needs (“looks maxxing,” disordered eating, plastic surgery); to move through public space with heightened awareness of how they are perceived, what they can say, and whether they are safe; to manage their desirability as a condition of their worth; and to absorb institutional indifference to their suffering without complaint, subject to the whims of far more powerful elites.
The difference is that men are expected to do all of this while supporting a system that is simultaneously telling them that being a man means never having to do any of it at all. Men, much of the culture still insists, are supposed to make money (see “wallet dads”), be strong, pursue status, do whatever it takes to provide, protect, and procreate. Women’s role was to do whatever needed doing to make this possible and that is no longer true.
I can imagine, if I were a man, being put out by what I’m saying, by the policeman’s suggestion, by the discomfort my generalizations may provoke. But, in fact, free associating, I resent my own imagining because, frankly, so relatively few men have ever seemed genuinely willing or capable to do the same in return — imagine being a woman, on behalf of women.
My first real conscious experience of this happened at dinner with a man when I was in my early 20s. I’d resisted going out with him because we were coworkers, but after a late in the office, we went to a nearby restaurant to grab some food. Towards the end of dinner, he told me about his summer. He’d gone to an island in Greece with his now ex-girlfriend. “Have you,” he asked, “ever had a religious epiphany?” I had not. While on the beach a few nights before they were due to leave, he did, he excitedly explained. As a result, he dragged his former girlfriend into the ocean and tried to drown her, in other words, kill her. She got away, and he was subsequently jailed for 3 days before being extradited.
Could he, he asked as we paid the bill, walk me home?
When women say no.
Even though women have more flexibility and freedom, it is still true that a girl or a woman who refuses a boy’s or a man’s demand for recognition engages a massive risk.
In early April, after a 20-year-old Brazilian woman repeatedly politely turned down a man from her gym, he broke into her house and stabbed her 50 times with a pocket knife. Last week, a teenage boy in New York smashed a girl’s head into the ground repeatedly after she wouldn’t give him her phone number.
But the case I want to talk about is this one: On September 29, last year, two 17-year-old girls, Maria Niotis and Isabella Salas, were riding a bike home when they were struck and killed in Cranford, New Jersey. Their families immediately made it clear that what happened was not an accidental hit-and-run.
Vincent Battiloro, also 17, had been harassing, threatening, and stalking Niotis for months. She tried to get a restraining order. He was driving an estimated 70 mph when he deliberately drove into the two girls. After he killed them, he went home and live-streamed a description of the event, without mentioning his role.
Battiloro was described as “an online game streamer apparently influenced by right-wing and misogynistic content.” He accused Niotis of bullying him and was angry that she would not pay him the attention he thought was his due. He was mad that she mocked Charlie Kirk. He expressed admiration for Andrew Tate. He told her boyfriend, “I’m not leaving her alone until she apologizes to me.” When the boyfriend pushed back, Battiloro sent him a nude photo of another girl, adding, “I did it to one girl. I’ll do it to another.” His live-streaming was suffused with a sense of grievance — he’d been wronged, misunderstood, falsely accused, not appreciated, and failed by a girl. He had apparently planned the killing for months and believed that his violence was virtuous and in his own defense.
Battiloro’s language mirrored precisely what men like Tate, Kirk, and Pete Hegseth built careers on: the besieged man who is owed respect but is demonized by a feminized society—a man whose assertion of control, even through violence, is a justifiable moral correction.
Some people might say he was lonely and mentally ill and, because he claimed she’d bullied him, that he felt misunderstood and mischaracterized. He is hardly alone in feeling these ways, particularly as an adolescent. But he is also hardly alone in his use of violence. These aren’t separate issues.
I know this example is extreme, but think about the mechanics of what I am talking about. Here is what they look like, stripped of the extreme outcome:
A girl declined to center a boy’s feelings, and he experienced her refusal as an injustice rather than her right.
He expected her attention as something owed, not something she could freely choose to give or withhold.
He interpreted her indifference and unwillingness to apologize as an active act of ongoing aggression: being ignored = being attacked.
He demanded she see herself through his eyes — to acknowledge she was a person who he felt had wronged him — rather than through her own.
He communicated his grievance through sexual threat because controlling and negotiating with other men over women’s bodies and reputations is a readily available tool for restoring male dominance and status.
He was a “nice kid,” and even though the people around him knew he was violent, they didn’t consider his behavior vis-a-vis a girl — the entitlement, the demand for apology and respect, the refusal to accept a boundary, the self-defensive pose — aberrant enough to do something meaningful.
Mainstream ideology meant his community confirmed his interpretation of events, making his response seem more justified.
He immediately got online to share what happened and what he had done. He wanted to be seen doing what he did by others.
Every item on this list happens daily, in families, on streets, in classrooms, at workplaces, and online, without a murder at the end. The murder is extreme but, if you’re a woman, the mechanics are an average Tuesday.
Boys and men choosing to use coercion, bullying, and force in response to women asserting autonomy is something the vast majority of men seem comfortable be doing, by their own admission, regularly, even if not as brutally as cases such as this one reveal. Researchers of a recent study concluded that, “Consistent physical pressure and verbal coercion were common; overt force, including physical restraint and use of pain, was less common but not uncommon.”
In nearly all communities, there is still a powerful expectation that women center men’s needs, manage men’s emotions, and subordinate their own feelings, thoughts, and ambitions. People addressing male loneliness tend to do this without simultaneously investigating loneliness in relation to 1) male-perpetrated violence and 2) the fact that boys and men are being socialized from birth to understand themselves as central to women and society.
We socialized boys to live in the past and socialized girls to live in a future they have to build themselves.
Our societies have, even as women fought for and gained rights, stubbornly rooted men’s identities around women’s dependence (providing), vulnerability (protecting), and submission (presiding). These identities depend on and are supposed to garner, for men, priority and centrality by default. Being a man has historically meant being recognized for fulfilling these roles, even among men oppressed because of race or other factors.
As a result, when women withdraw recognition, when free women determine the course of their own lives, men and the larger society perceive their independence as an attack and as hatred of men. If women center themselves and opt out of - either through choice or necessity — men providing, protecting, and presiding for them, it’s a confusing dilemma at best and an existential problem that cultivates violence backlash at worst.
Which is where we are. Men were told to expect one thing - dominance, but have to live with another: equality. It’s no surprise that men feel bereft, unseen, unvalued, or that they are vulnerable to misogynistic movements.
Today, Gen Z men, in trying to adhere to what they learned was important, are growing more gender conservative than their fathers and grandfathers.
The chart above is from US data. An international survey released this year found 31% of Gen Z men say a wife should always obey her husband, while about one-third believe husbands should have the final say in major household decisions.
Is it any wonder dating is fraught? Should women, like many of their mothers and grandmothers, enter relationships with men who fundamentally don’t think they are equals, who don’t see them as partners or full people?
What happens when women say no to this? When women come together, walk away from men and their protection? From their habits and institutions? What happens if they try to make change in a way that is safe for themselves?
Intergenerational gender differences are the starkest
Most people focus on intragenerational differences, but the one I am fixated on is intergenerational. The 79-point gap between the political beliefs of Gen Z college-educated white women and non-college-educated men of their grandfathers’ ages isn’t a chasm but a rupture; it reveals the threat posed by women’s full-scale break from the traditional intrafamilial transfer of political identity. This is what the Right understands and what the left has to understand better: the political agency of daughters who refuse to inherit their fathers’ worlds. This shift marks a quiet revolution unfolding inside families.
As I wrote in All We Want is Everything, statistics are all well and good, but what does this feel like, day in and day out?
In the fall of 2024, Slate ran a story that followed up on earlier reporting about women who were considering leaving their husbands if they voted for Trump. One of the women had, during the 2020 Covid lockdown, been diagnosed with and successfully treated for a life-threatening cancer, leaving her immunocompromised. Her husband refused to be vaccinated and argued vociferously against her and her children being vaccinated. “He became radicalized during the pandemic,” she explained in the article. “When I mentioned to a few people that he didn’t get it, people were really offended. Like, you’re getting treatment for cancer, and he won’t get vaccinated?” When their daughter turned 18, she insisted on everyone in the family getting vaccinated, an unresolved issue. “I couldn’t have been prouder,” said the woman, “the way she handled my husband. She really did a big fuck you. She wasn’t taking any shit from him.”
The daughter’s disruptive influence didn’t stop there, however. After she texted her mother that “she would rather be dead than deal with another Trump presidency,” the woman felt that she had to divorce her husband, “if for no other reason than to stand up for my daughter, showing her that at some point, it comes down to your principles.”
To make matters worse, the woman was embroiled in a workplace discrimination investigation. Over the course of her career, she had experienced a steady stream of sexism and felt that her husband’s behavior at home had only made the situation worse. “He tells me that pretty much every week, what an idiot I am,” she said. “This might sound stupid, but I feel like I have to stand up for my daughter. I have to show her that you don’t have to stay in a marriage or any other kind of relationship where someone is emotionally abusive.” At the time the follow-up article was published, she was still with her husband, her biggest concern being the inevitable impoverishment of divorce in her fifties.
Girls, am I right?
Prosecuting women’s solidarity for safety or success.
Right-wing women police sex segregation on patriarchal terms, but women gathering for virtually any reasons other than those having to do with domestic life, to engage in activities that contribute to their own pleasure, autonomy, safety, and independence are immediately suspect, and undesirable. Let’s start with non-violent responses to women choosing to come together without men.
In February, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Coca-Cola for sex discrimination after the company held a two-day women’s networking and team-building retreat. The women who attended were paid their regular wages and exempted from their daily responsibilities during the conference. The EEOC argues that the retreat violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act because men at the company were not given comparable opportunities. Women hold approximately 39% of senior leadership roles globally at The Coca-Cola Company — a figure the company hopes to close by 2030. The industry shows a similar pattern: women are present in professional ranks but are far less represented at executive levels.
Going to the retreat might seem like a fun boondoggle, but events like these are ultimately a tax on women. As is the case with so many DEI initiatives currently being dismantled by the Administration, events like this are extra work that historically discriminated against people have to do to deal with systemic resistance to their workplace equality. Every woman I’ve ever known who has participated in events like this one, even if she had fun, would gladly not have to. Nonetheless, we engage in these events, and when we do, we feel…safer, freer, less vigilant. Less in need of ‘protection’ we never asked for, and that we wish we didn’t need to think about.
The problem that this case illustrates isn’t how men are harmed by practices like a woman’s networking event, but what happens when women choose to aggregate without men. This, in turn, begs another, more widely relevant issue today: what happens when women stop making themselves available to men on male supremacist terms?
Connecticut’s Supreme Court ruled women-only gym areas violated anti-discrimination law, framing the issue as “access to equipment” while ignoring that 56% of women report being harassed in gyms.
Male Uber drivers in California filed class-action suits against the platform’s “Women Preferences” feature — arguing lost earnings — while Uber’s own data shows women constitute roughly 90% of reported rape victims in rideshares.
The Fearless Fund, a venture capital fund providing grants to Black women entrepreneurs, closed after it was sued, using a Reconstruction-era law written to give formerly enslaved people the right to enter contracts, because excluding non-Black applicants constituted racial discrimination. (It has since relaunched as the Fearless Global Initiative.)
A Tasmanian tribunal ruled against MONA museum’s women-only “Ladies Lounge” — an artistic inversion of the segregated pub spaces that excluded women until 1965. (Their Supreme Court overturned the ruling.)
A white woman in California sued the Department of Public Health because a program designed to improve Black maternal health excluded her.
A judge in California preliminarily approved a $7 million settlement in a case claiming that a bar’s “ladies’ night” discriminated against men, with no acknowledgment that women were more the product being sold than patrons.
The Wing, a women-focused co-working space, had to change its admissions policies after a man filed a $12m gender discrimination lawsuit.
A man sued Ladies Get Paid, a professional development organization for women and non-binary people, for the same reason.
The pattern, whether pursued legally or not, doesn’t reveal a devotion to anti-discrimination practices or equality, but instead to a stubborn belief that women are for men, not for themselves. Men who believe that their right to be centered, present, or acknowledged is more important than women’s desire to be even temporarily safe only prove the point.
The through line in these cases is that each prosecutor treats unequal social relations as if they were the same, a symmetry fallacy, well-established in legal debates about substantive versus formal equality. This fallacy defines backlash, which cynically and systematically repurposes civil rights instruments to protect groups and people that those instruments were designed to check. This is playing out today in education, voting rights, workplace equality, public space, everywhere. (See footnote 1 below for more.)
To flog what should be a very dead horse, women self-segregating is not the same as men self-segregating. Men’s self-segregated fraternities have historically functioned — as they do today — to consolidate power and exclude others. Women’s self-segregation, on the other hand, generally works to provide women with temporary relief from the consequences of that power. Pretending these are mirror-image phenomena is, frankly, stupid, no matter how many legal or intellectual rationales might be used.
Many men are enraged by women who support one another, advocate for each other, dance together, exercise in peace, or organize events that exclude them, even when the explicit reason is women wanting relief from the unending vigilance that comes with men’s presence. Many believe that when we come together for pleasure, we are man-haters. When we gather for safety, we are rights-deniers. When we come together for professional advancement, we are elitists engaged in illegal practices. We should not center ourselves, should not call attention to our needs, and we should definitely not exclude men from our spaces and consideration.
The demand is not for fairness but for access: to women’s space, attention, and men’s presence as a default condition of private, professional, social, and public life. The problem is, fewer women have to provide these — and the centrality and recognition that come with them— to survive.
Decentering: What are women doing that’s so upsetting?
“Decentering” is a practice of refusal that allows women to create alternative paths to living as freely as possible from patriarchal constraints. “To decenter men,” wrote Sherese (Charlie) Taylor in her 2020 manifesto, means “to actively interrogate and undo the ways patriarchy has taught us to center them in our thoughts, decisions, and self-worth.”
Pew Research finds that 38% of single women report being on the “dating market,” compared to 61% of single men — a gap that has widened significantly. Women’s age at first birth continues to rise globally. Voluntarily being childfree is now a durable demographic pattern, not a statistical anomaly. More men than women want to have children because obviously, it doesn’t cost them as much to have children, and never did. Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ at nearly three times the rate of Gen Z men — roughly 31% versus 12%. Among Black and Hispanic women, that number is even higher. Across wealthy nations, the percentage of women aged 25-29 who are unmarried has doubled in the past twenty years, exceeding 40% in many countries. Rates of gray divorce, of people over 50, roughly doubled between 1990 and 2015. Between 68 and 70% of heterosexual divorces are initiated by women who, unlike the men they divorce, express little interest in remarriage. These are not individual choices made in isolation from the wider culture. They are structural, institutional reorientations that affect every institution in our society. And men are pissed.
Pick your crisis — dating, marriage, men’s greater desire for children, loneliness, economic anxiety — and you will find women trying to find peace, and boys and men feeling confused, angry, depressed, or violently responding to not being centered and prioritized by women.
To be clear, what’s happening isn’t new, and it isn’t a “lifestyle choice.” And, sigh, this isn’t “misandry.”
Decentering isn’t, as many claim, “misandry” (which, in any case, is, as Professor Neil explains so clearly, typically a function of patriarchy.)This claim is another fallacy of symmetry; no system of misandry exists that reflects the scope and range of patriarchal misogyny. Even if individual women hate men, there is no institutionalization of that hatred governing men’s lives. What governs men’s lives, to their detriment, is, even if women are vectors, male supremacist beliefs and patriarchal stressors. So, the same reasons women are opting out.
From the 4B movement — named for four Korean principles beginning with “bi,” meaning “no”: no dating, sex, marriage, or children with men — to the spike in women preferring singlehood (going boy sober), choosing non-heterosexual relationships, forming queer families, opting for divorce, women are increasingly exiting the patriarchal chat.
The exhaustion, disappointment, and refusal that characterize women’s exits are typically not expressions of contempt for men as individual human beings but demands that systems meet even the most basic criteria for life and human dignity. Many men are making the same demands, yet you don’t hear nearly as much about them as threats to men, because women aren’t supposed to define culture and definitely aren’t supposed to center themselves if they try.
Feminist demographers consistently show that these trends correlate positively with education, income, bodily autonomy, and social equality — and that they reflect women’s progress rather than, as the government and conservative media would rather suggest, some dangerous social pathology.
How do men do the same? How do they decenter themselves and other men?
Decentering is often framed as a conscious feminist choice, a luxury available to women who have managed to achieve enough wealth or independence to make it. But for most women throughout history — Indigenous women, colonized women, Black women, lesbians, women fighting poverty, women abandoned or endangered by the men in their lives — decentering never was and isn’t still a choice. It is a condition of life. Mutual aid networks, chosen kinship structures, queer communities, grandmother economies, solidarity traditions: these are all ways women live, survive, and sometimes thrive by organizing life around women’s networks and relationships rather than male authority and patriarchal institutions.
What we are calling “decentering” today has often been built from sheer necessity across generations. When we frame decentering as a lifestyle trend, we ignore and erase the women who have been doing it forever.
Acknowledging this might, in fact, help men who are also, at this juncture in history, faced with fewer choices and are, as I said above, finding themselves structurally feminized. What if the key to survival is to do what women have always had to do? That question really is not about women, again. It is about men.
Can men decenter other men, even if only to save themselves? Can they share what used to be the default male centrality in intimate life, at work, and in political subjectivity? In the Anglo world, these questions are most pointed for white men, who have been, for centuries, at the top of the hierarchy and who, today, are the most vitriolic in backlash. The ones who are sure the solution is to restore men’s traditional purpose in society.
Recognition and loneliness are not the same thing.
In 2025, Equimundo (full disclosure: I am on the organization’s board) released a survey revealing that 53% of American boys and men feel “no one really knows me well.” In the same survey, 52% women say the same.
I want to be precise about what this statistic measures — and what it doesn’t. There is no doubt that young men are lonely in high numbers, but so too are young women, older adults, and post-natal mothers. Loneliness is a global bane that deserves societal attention. “No one really knows me,” however, doesn’t necessarily mean loneliness, and it isn’t necessarily interpreted the same way by men and women, who have very different cultural experiences of both relationship maintenance and recognition in our society.
Loneliness and recognition anxiety are not the same thing. Their symptoms sometimes overlap—withdrawal, irritability, vulnerability—but their origins and impacts differ. As posed, however, the question makes it impossible to distinguish between loneliness (a deficit of intimacy and connection) and what I would call a plea for recognition: the belief that one’s reality, perspective, authority, and inner life should be legible and prioritized by others and society, particularly by women, as a matter of social order.
Battiloro, for instance, didn’t lack Niotis’s company or friendship so much as he was angered by her refusal to prioritize him in her considerations. Nor did he escalate because she hated him; he did so because she ignored him. Her indifference was the insult that he couldn’t tolerate.
Loneliness is an emotional state, but recognition panic is a defensive reaction to a perceived threat to status and the entitlements that come with it. Collapsing them is unhelpful and has consequences. (See footnote 2 below for more.)
Among men, the “male loneliness crisis” as a political and media phenomenon is doing very specific work. Mainstream political and media coverage of male loneliness implicitly centers white, college-educated, and economically middle-class men. It centers, in other words, the emotional distress of the group least accustomed to being ignored, while rendering invisible men who are structurally abandoned and women more broadly. This strongly suggests that the real grievance is the loss of centrality and recognition, not social isolation per se.
Even when advocates go out of their way to provide intersectional analyses, the media strips out gender, class, and race specificity. Among Black men, for instance, suicide rates have risen significantly over the past ten years. Yet this shift receives only a fraction of the attention devoted to the more extensive male loneliness narrative. Poor and working-class men are also lonelier and more at risk than higher-wage-earning men, and yet there is no particular focus on either.
Here’s what definitely doesn’t and won’t work: Teaching boys that they will feel better if they are always centered does not prepare them for a world in which they will not be the way they once were. This only produces stressed-out and status-anxious men, as we are seeing so vividly today, who experience equality of any kind as erasure and threat. Yet, many well-meaning attempts to address men’s distress deepen complex problems by doubling down on men’s centrality rather than widening the field of both problems and solutions.
Precarious manhood is at the heart of masculinity crises.
At the core of this issue and the violence it breeds is that our society continues to essentially tell boys and men they have no intrinsic self-worth. Masculinity, in other words, as sociologist have explained for decades, a precarious state. Masculine identity, in theory a biological state that is fixed, is really an achievement that has to be earned, publicly performed, and reconfirmed continuously. It has to be proved over and over.
This means, for instance, that a single perceived failure — maybe a woman who outperforms a man or withholds deference or a person who doesn’t conform to hegemonic cis hetero norms — registers as a threat, propelling aggressive and disproportionate reactions.
This is also why trans people are so threatening. Conservatives keep the focus of their scapegoating on “men in women’s sports and bathrooms” as a danger. However, the real threat is to precarious manhood on multiple levels. Trans existence makes the performance of gender explicit. If manhood can be given up, transitioned into, or claimed by anyone, then it can’t be the fixed, essential category that the entire edifice of male supremacy is built on. I’m not suggesting this is a logical argument being consciously made, but this is why right-wing reaction to trans life is so disproportionate to the actual social or political footprint of trans people.
Today, queer and trans people’s lives are threatening male supremacy for the same reason women’s independence is threatening: all refuse the terms on which patriarchal masculinity depends. You cannot perpetuate precarious manhood without the gender binary. But to have the binary you have to police and enforce it at all times. The violence we live with follows from this logic to a tee.
From this perspective, the Manosphere as a Precarious Manhood Pyramid Scheme comes sharply into focus. What is a man, in this frame, if he cannot effortlessly demonstrate dominance over women, or gain access to them, or prove their dependence on him? If he has to compete against a woman and loses? If he has to earn women’s regard rather than assume it? He doesn’t just lose a relationship or work; he loses legibility within the system of male supremacist hierarchy on which his sense of self has been built. In fast-changing, uncertain times, boys and men are particularly vulnerable to pressure to “self-optimize” to keep up and compete for women, jobs, status, cars, and money. Online or off, the rage and contempt directed at women, especially those who distance themselves from men for any reason at all, is real, but its primary audience isn’t women but other men.
Recognition in crisis is the engine of the backlash politics, the vicious assemblies, and the firehose of assaults on women that we see every day. Men and male supremacist institutions are defensively responding to the withdrawal of a default centrality with the full range of tools and weapons available to them: from legislation to lawsuits to public harassment to interpersonal and political violence.
In the legal sphere, we see the EEOC suing Coca-Cola, the gutting of the Fearless Fund, and male Uber drivers suing over women’s safety preferences. In the cultural sphere, the rise of tradwife content aestheticizes the performance of women’s submission as “liberation” while recentering “natural” male authority. In the military, the “Department of War” rebrand has come with a purge of “weakness” (in the form of Black and women leaders), a restoration of the splendidly oxymoronic “neutral male standards,” the defunding of gender-affirming care (while continuing erectile dysfunction coverage), and making procedural changes that make sexual misconduct reporting more difficult. Not to be left out, for the everyday man, online harassment — doxxing, surveillance, deepfakes, coordinated mobbing — provides a full range of cheap, easy, and quick tools to recover public space as a man’s sphere.
Performing for other men is why Andrew Tate is a multimillionaire. It’s why Daniel Pelicot and his raping goons could do what they did. It’s why looks-maxxers are bone smashing their faces in. It’s what brings together tens of millions of men to celebrate a rape academy. If you truly think loneliness is the only problem at this point, you are part of the problem.
“Purpose” falls prey to the same confusion.
Men having to prove themselves to others is often filtered through the lens of “purpose,” another misdirection that requires deeper inquiry. A lot of public discourse about the crisis of masculinity centers on the belief that men have lost their “true” purpose.
Women are; men do. In this schema, women’s purpose is assumed to be reproduction, care, and service. Other than being sexually attractive, generally economically accessible, and appeasing to men, women aren’t expected to really demonstrate any socially or politically functional role. Even working-class women whose wages are critical to their families are expected to manage the nitty-gritty of living, as a “biological” mandate, whereas men are not subject to it.
Men’s purpose, by contrast, is tied to constant competition, performance, economic productivity, and public roles — provider, protector, builder, innovator, warrior. Eighty-six percent of American men, some of whom see themselves as “wallet dads,” say that being a man is providing for their family (women agree, by the way). This is why economic anxiety can seem much more debilitating for men.
Under patriarchy, femininity is represented as an ontological state, but masculinity has to be regularly produced. Commentaries and surveys examine this issue of boys’ and men’s purpose, for instance, but no one asks girls and women, for instance, how they feel about their purpose in life. The question itself encodes multiple gender assumptions and asymmetries.
When the fulfillment and validation of men’s prescribed roles are threatened, men’s sense of being feels at risk and displays of manhood become more vital. This is why Black and Hispanic boys and men, denigrated racially in ways that intensify gendered stress, tend to hold firmer “man box” beliefs, a compensatory strategy. (See footnote 3 for not on religion and Gen Z men.)
Those angry, angry women aren’t “the same” as those angry, angry men.
So many of the crises of the day — the male loneliness crisis, the Gen Z dating crisis, the marriage crisis, the population crisis — can be better understood and resolved if we see them for what they are: dimensions of men’s meta-crisis of equality. But, instead, all signs point to society, and men, moving exactly away from this understanding and towards false equivalences and antiquated ideals, like greater segregation.
Conservatives, for instance, are claiming that Angry Young Women — the ones most engaged with reorienting the world — are “driving men into the arms of cougars,” embracing “radical new feminism,” and in need of “some perspective.” They should shut up and be grateful for what they have been “given. “I’ll take a good laugh where I can these days, but this is not only ridiculous but dangerous and manipulative propaganda.
Angry young women and angry young men are not being “radicalized” in remotely comparable ways. “Radicalized” women are fighting for bodily autonomy, to insist on accountability for rapists and rape cultures, for increasingly inclusive democracies and democratic systems, for the right to participate in public life with the constant threat and abuse, for a sane climate and environmental frameworks, for fair and living wages, and for healthcare that recognizes their needs.
“Radicalized” men are fighting to reassert their unearned male status, to support leaders and institutions invested in women’s submission, to leverage historic privileges that intersect with race and ethnicity, to turn back the clock to a social order that is no longer even economically possible.
All of us can feel the effects of backlash, one of which is that boys’ and men’s gender ideals are becoming more, not less, restrictive. Who does this serve?
Cultivated antifeminism, embraced by most Gen Z men according to surveys, is providing the ideological backbone of efforts to recenter men. Fifty-three percent (53%) of Gen Z women identify as feminists compared with 32% of Gen Z men, the largest gender split of any generation surveyed. Almost 60% (57%) of Gen Z men say society has gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men, significantly higher than their grandfathers, only 44% of whom agree. Over two years, from 2023 to 2025, the percentage of 16-29-year-old men who said feminism had done more good than harm to society, 46%, increased by 10 points (and was just 4 points below the share of young women who said the same). They also hold more male supremacist views than older men.
Most men, and increasing numbers of women, are blaming feminism for unemployment (ignoring automation, AI, and globalization), for men’s loneliness and mental health problems (ignoring the patriarchal stigmas that prevent boys from learning to regulate emotions and men from seeking help for mental distress), and for rising violence (ignoring poverty, opportunity deserts, and male supremacist norms that equate violence with authority and legitimacy). Over two years, from 2023 to 2025, the percentage of 16-29-year-old men who said feminism had done more good than harm to society, 46%, increased by 10 points (and was just 4 points below the share of young women who said the same). They also hold more male supremacist views than older men. And yet, women who don’t date men because those men don’t respect them as equals are now the “radicals” hurting society.
And yet, more men than ever seem to want what feminists have been fighting for for decades.
More and more women are withdrawing from engaging with patriarchal systems, relationships, and exposure to a resurgent and, yes, toxic, hegemonic masculinity. (I know that the words “toxic masculinity” are desirable to many, but we are talking about toxic masculinity. It’s not demonizing men to say this. Besides, men, better than anyone, know what this is because they are subject to it from birth, when they become objects of violence. Toxic masculinity perpetuates what Michael Kauffman long ago called “the triad of violence”: violence by men against women is one corner, violence against other men is the second, and violence against oneself, the third.
Men are also fully capable of withdrawing from this system. If you are a man, you face a genuine choice: double down on entitlement to reassert unearned centrality through control, fascist politics, and violence; or rebuild relationships and recognition on mutually caring, reciprocal terms that engender all kinds of peace.
The goal is not to replace male centrality with female centrality, a patriarchal frame, but to dissolve the systems that require anyone’s subordination as the cost of someone else’s identity, safety, and well-being.
As it is, teaching boys to feel better about themselves by always being the center of attention, consideration, relationships, culture, and politics is clearly not preparing them for the world as it is. All it does is produce men who ceaselessly and anxiously compete with other men, who experience equality as loss, threat, and erasure, and who think it is their responsibility to police other people.
None of this is inevitable. Parents, boys, and men, again, have legit choices.
The question is not whether men and women can get along. Or if women will continue decentering men. They will. In fact, educational, economic, demographic, and relational evidence suggest the pace of this change is accelerating. The question is whether men, and the institutions that have historically served them, can accept equality as the precondition for a healthier relational life that is worth living for everyone, or whether they will continue to demand priority and centrality to the point that they destroy existence itself.
We are living through the largest exodus from patriarchy and patriarchal systems ever, a revolution in slow motion. I know things feel bleak, but it’s important to register what this means and to understand today’s conservative agenda as a response to a project that is working even as it is under profound and coordinated attack.
Teaching boys to feel better about themselves by always being the center of attention, relationships, culture, and politics, does not prepare them for a world in which they are not, or should not be, always centered. It does not teach them to appreciate the value of sharing culture and of personal and social reciprocity. All it does is produce men who ceaselessly and anxiously compete with other men, who demean and objectify women, who hold gender fluid people in contemporary society, and who experience equality as erasure, loss, and deadly threat.
The same system that builds boys to require women’s deference also builds them to be capable of embracing something entirely different — including feminism as the movement for equality. Feminism has always been a movement for freedom and equality, never a movement for revenge. The only thing “revenge” does is…recenter men. That’s not what women and feminists are doing.
Whatever men’s rights advocates, mainstream media, and conservative platforms would have you believe, feminism has always been the political movement most invested in expanding what men are allowed to be. Feminisms have always been projects of redistribution: of recognition, of resources, of care, of representation, of risk, including for men. Every institutional benefit invoked today to argue that men are being abandoned — parental leave, emotional support, violence reduction programs, the challenge to the sole-provider trap — came from feminist organizing. Societies that institutionalize feminist goals are better off. This is why the happiest people in the world, including men, as Liz Plank explains, live in the most gender-equal countries.
Men face a genuine choice (not the fake choice between victimhood and dominance that the manosphere imposes, but a real one): double down on entitlement to reassert unearned centrality through control, fascist politics, and violence; or rebuild relationships in partnership. Those who understand this, who are willing to locate their self-worth in mutual respect, care, and reciprocity, rather than in being in charge, the reference point for everything, already exist in large and growing numbers. They are in relationships where both partners report higher satisfaction, raising children with better outcomes, and building friendships that don’t depend on proving manhood within a hierarchy. The question is not whether men are capable of this. They demonstrably are. The question is whether enough of them will choose it before the men who won’t cause more damage than the rest of us can absorb.
Instead of seeing decentering as unreasoned carelessness or unhinged rage, it is possible to register that what is happening is a necessary, albeit difficult and unpredictable, process of balancing resources, cultural capital, rights, and capacities. Men are fully capable of withdrawing from systems that are anti-democratic and do not serve them, others, or the future. The goal is not to replace male centrality with female centrality but to dissolve supremacist systems, all of them, that require anyone’s subordination as the cost of someone else’s identity, safety, and well-being. This, however, requires men to share recognition and resources, and for our communities and institutions to stop treating this shift as an existential crisis and threat to boys at every turn.
All of this is why — yes, I’m finally done, if you made it this far, thank you — decentering men is part of the most important political movement of our time. One that men can join whenever they want to.
I write about these issues in Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, The Resilience Myth, and my most recent book, All We Want is Everything. If you find the content of this newsletter useful and of further interest, please give them a read, pass them along, and, if you have time and like it, please review them wherever you purchase your books.
Footnotes
The Coca-Cola case illustrates how this works perfectly. It treats the workplace as a neutral space where networking opportunities are the same for everyone. The EEOC is suing Coke over two days dedicated to women’s “issues” while ignoring the 363 other days of the year where default male-dominated networking — old boy connections, fraternities, golf courses, cigar bars, private dinners, strip clubs, and informal mentorship programs — happen as part of habit, tradition, culture, and daily life. These happen without dedicated spaces or program names. Their usefulness and power are found in their informality and invisibility.
By suing over the named event, the EEOC protects the unnamed ones. But the EEOC has gone even further. In February, the new Chair of the department posted a video on social media in which she directly encouraged white men to bring claims, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the EEOC as soon as possible.”
In the 1990s, Axel Honneth, a philosopher of recognition, argued that people achieve self-confidence and self-respect through social validation — by being loved, legally recognized, respected, and socially esteemed. This centrality and validation, he asserted, are the foundation of selfhood: withdrawing them destabilizes identity. In the early aughts, in an essay titled “Rethinking Recognition,” political philosopher Nancy Fraser responded with the argument that recognition can’t be separated from resources and redistribution. She expanded the idea to include the condition in which everyone can participate in social life as a full peer, which requires not just psychological recognition but transforming cultural norms, redistributing resources, and restructuring political representation and power.
In 2022, building on this argument, Fraser added another dimension to her recognition-redistribution-representation model: ecological sustainability while reasserting that women’s unpaid work is the infrastructure of the entire system. This is important because when women withdraw this labor, as we are by the millions today, we are not just making personal choices but exposing all the dependencies that the system has never named, recognized, or compensated.
There is a vital difference, one that conservatives will die before admitting, between losing default priority, which is what men are experiencing today, and being systematically denied recognition as a person, which is what women have historically experienced and are fighting against. However, to extend that recognition conversation to today’s various crises, women’s independence and equality don’t only threaten men’s recognition as individuals; they threaten the entire structure through which male supremacist patriarchal masculinity produces and maintains identity, roles, meaning, status, and relationships of power, including white supremacy.
A solution for many men today has been to turn to patriarchal religions for answers. For instance, Gen Z is the first American generation in which more men identify as religious than women. Many pundits assert that men are turning to conservative, hierarchical, patriarchal religions because they find a sense of purpose rooted in a “clear and consistent vision of manhood.“ Sure, but what exactly does this mean? What kind of purpose are we talking about?What conservative evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, and traditionalist religious institutions offer men, in addition to community, is purpose through divinely sanctioned male dominance. They confer epistemic and public power on men who are centered in community, ritual, authority, representations of the Divine, and even the afterlife for no reason other than that they are men. Women’s subordination isn’t incidental to this purpose; it constructs it whole cloth. Men’s unchallenged power is the purpose.
Even if every woman in the United States became a tradwife tomorrow, for instance, their families would be pitched into economic precarity and the economy would collapse: the healthcare system would fail, the education system would fail, household poverty would spike, and GDP would contract sharply. Yet, still, the very first condition of recognition depends, constitutively, on women’s subordination. It depends on the rejection of feminized people whose bodies and lives challenge the sex segregation and hierarchy of these faiths, LGBTQ people. This is why so many women are fleeing institutional religions. Two-thirds of Gen Z women name the fact that their faith organizations discriminate against them. Sixty percent of young people who leave their family faiths say that “negative treatment of gay and lesbian people” is an important reason.
Nobody told women that the floor is made of Black women.
This is truly brilliant. All parents, teachers, and medical professionals should read it. There are a lot of key takeaways -- this one is so important: We socialized boys to live in the past and socialized girls to live in a future they have to build themselves."