The boys are not alright. They are falling behind in education and employment, and many have responded by leaning into the politics of the aggrieved. For decades, these major cultural developments have laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's re-election. Today Brittany talks with Hanna Rosin. Fifteen years ago she started researching what was going on with men. Her groundbreaking book The End of Men was one of the first to note this societal shift for men. Over a decade later, her assessment is more accurate than ever.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are the societal changes affecting men today?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. All right.
So in the aftermath of this election cycle, I've been hearing a lot about men, the role they played in reelecting Donald Trump, how Joe Rogan and podcast bros are a growing political force, and how all of this is connected to the economy. And every time I hear one of these conversations, I think about Hannah Rosen. Hannah Rosen, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Thank you. Excited to be here.
Because Hannah began reporting about all of this 15 years ago, eventually publishing a book in 2012 called The End of Men. And Hannah... I don't want to be the one to have to tell you, but there are still men. There are still men.
Some of them live in my house, Brittany.
Mine too. It's wild how that happens. What did you mean when you titled your book The End of Men?
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Chapter 2: Why did Hanna Rosin write 'The End of Men'?
You know, at the time, I felt like I had discovered something a little bit unsayable, that women were surpassing men. If you look at almost any category, race, demographic, income, men or boys in that category are doing worse than women or girls in that category. I mean, men are increasingly falling behind in all the measures that help you lead a successful life.
That may sound counterintuitive. After all, the gender pay gap still exists, and who knows when we might see a woman president. But if you look at the statistics, what Hannah saw 15 years ago is even clearer today. In their pursuit to close the gender gap, women have found ways to slowly outpace men.
Like, it feels crazy. Like, it feels like, what? No. Like, boys rule the world. That's a no. It's just hard to, it's hard to get our heads around.
Boys and men are less likely to graduate from school. Traditional job prospects and manufacturing are disappearing, and their wages have stagnated. Meanwhile, women have thrived.
It starts way down in like when you're a kid or a teenager. So of those getting the best GPAs, two-thirds are girls. And of those getting the worst GPAs, two-thirds are boys. If you look at either poor white boys or poor black boys, they seem to suffer and be way more sensitive to poverty, injustice, and family disruptions than girls are.
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Chapter 3: How are boys performing in education compared to girls?
For decades, our societal message has been about girl power, about busting through the glass ceiling and telling women they can have it all. But in the process, did we lose the boys?
It breaks our usual story. So should you pay specific attention to boys? You probably should, or at least note that they are suffering and dealing with these circumstances differently than girls are. Hmm.
Today, Hannah and I are going to trace how cultural norms prepared women for a changing world, while men were left in economic and societal stagnation, and how all of this laid the foundation for the return of Donald Trump.
Look what happened. Is this crazy? The story of men and women, just to give us the gender binary for a minute, of the last 40 or 50 years is a story about the world moving very quickly and women doing a better job of – Like sort of keeping up with it with a lot of struggle.
Like think of it as an actual treadmill, like just the world moving more and more like the treadmills going faster and faster. And women are struggling, but kind of keeping up like they're just kind of adjusting or figuring out how to go to college or like if marriages and they figure out like how to take care of the kids and how to stay in the workforce.
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Chapter 4: Why are men feeling discombobulated in modern society?
And men just not able to like shift or keep up. It's not about total numbers like men sinking, women rising. It's about women rising and men not quite able to rise or keep up. And so I think there's something real about that for men and the anxieties. There's something real about like I don't know who to be without the structures. I don't know – who to be in the world without marriage.
Or I don't know who to be in the world without the provider role or the husband role. It's like without these traditional man roles, I feel really discombobulated and lost. Whereas I think women have been rolling through the collapse of roles for like a century. Like the roles collapse and they just kind of like keep on moving. And there's lots of theories about why that is.
Hmm.
And talking about some of the challenges that men may be facing or dealing with in our current society. Let me describe a man to you.
I'm into this.
Yeah, I'm into it. We'll call him Luke. Let's call him Luke. Luke. Luke lives in a large town that's a little more rural than suburban Pennsylvania. He's middle-aged, about 45 years old. He's divorced. He doesn't see his children often. Luke is white and he makes around $40,000 a year. And he recently faced bankruptcy.
If I told you this man stormed the Capitol building on January 6th, 2021, would that surprise you?
No.
Why not?
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Chapter 5: What does the story of 'Luke' reveal about gender anxieties?
He lived in one of these towns, a little more rural, just like you described. And the factory shut down. This is totally typical white American story. It was a black American story sort of 34 years before in the cities. Then it became a white American story in the rural areas. And so Luke's wife was still working. She was still working in the schools.
And she would put her paycheck down on the table, and then Luke would go cash that paycheck. And there was a sense of shame around it. Now, 15 years later, Luke is wearing a T-shirt saying, the end of men. Like, he's not embarrassed. He's like part of some big political movement slash community of like, we're aggrieved too. So that's what I watched happen in the 15 years where like,
The Lukes who were like quietly suffering started like really loudly suffering. And that upended our politics and our culture in so many ways.
Hmm.
That's interesting. Because I bet underneath your question maybe is like, should I feel sorry for Luke? Is that what you're trying to... No, that's actually, that is not one of the questions that I have.
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Chapter 6: How have men's roles transformed over the past 15 years?
I mean, I got to come clean. Luke is not... a real person, but his characteristics were all ones pulled together from people's lives that actually did storm the Capitol on January 6th. And I brought up this kind of composite character, Luke, because I think that that character is a good way to think about how gender anxieties can actually be an expression of other anxieties in our lives.
100%.
I think it's the most... powerful, most concrete, and most persistent expression of generalized anxiety. I mean, I was at a Trump rally, and the number of times that people use expressions like, we don't want beta males, we want alpha males. I'm telling you, we want a world where men are men and women are women. And I'm thinking,
The world is changing really fast, like the world around gender and all over the place, because it's happening in urban places and rural places, like the way a younger generation thinks about what gender is and what their own gender is. It's really shifting radically and how that is just genuinely terrifying to people.
Or it just becomes like a split, like the country splits in two and one part of the country has really like rigid traditional ideas of gender and the other goes in like totally the other direction.
I mean, it's interesting because like when it comes to sort of like the Make America Great Again era, you know, like the past nearly 10 years, there's these like two competing gender ideals butting heads against one another. What do these two mentalities say about what we as Americans value? Or in other words, like, what hopes and fears do we unconsciously put inside of our views on gender?
I feel like I'm in some kind of Buddha mood or something. I mean, the immediate answer that comes to me is... Go for it. The world is... an unstable and scary place. And people have lost a lot of their grounding, whether because fewer people are getting married, because jobs are less stable, because the climate disaster, sort of for all sorts of reasons.
And I think some people are grasping for stability kind of backwards outside themselves, like, make America great again, go back to the other time when things were like this and I recognized them and everything didn't seem out of control. And some people are looking for stability kind of inside themselves, like self-determination, who I am, my own identity.
I get to decide, like, what I want to be, and I think that's very grounding and empowering. So I think everybody's experiencing similar instability and just looking for answers In different places. Yeah, finding their comfort in different ways.
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