The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Winna Liu. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games. And I love horror movies. I love my dog. And I love trying to trick you. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. The fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com slash games to start playing today.
If you travel deep into the new right, what you find at the moment is a constant yearning for something very old, not just a time when America was great, but a time when men were great, when men were men. You hear it in Kostin Vlad Alamaryu, who's better known as the Bronze Age pervert. You hear it in his longing for the Bronze Age.
I am here just to spread the political views of the ancient Hittite empire or the ancient Mitanni empire.
You hear it when the pastor Doug Wilson yearns for the time before the 19th Amendment. The net effect of women's suffrage was not an advance in women's rights, but rather part of a push to replace covenanted entities like families with raw individualism. You hear it in the increasingly constant idealization of 1950s America. Why wouldn't you design a system consistent with nature? What would that look like to you? It would look like what we had before Betty Ferdinand wrote The Feminine Mystique, before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the West. There's a time when all this could be dismissed as a fringe movement on the fever swamps of the internet. But Bronze Age pervert is a favorite of young Trump staffers.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited Doug Wilson to preach at the Pentagon. Tucker Carlson is, well, he's Tucker Carlson. These are not all fringe figures, and it's not just them. It's a much broader thing on the new right, which increasingly wants a return, is theorizing for how to create a return to very old ideas of how men should be. to very old policies that centralize the power they wield and the way society is ordered. Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights and The Genius Myth. She's just written a great cover story for The Atlantic mapping this world. She calls it masculinism, talking to many of its key figures, trying to understand its core ideas.
So I want to have her on the show to talk about it. As always, my email, Ezra Clancho at NYTimes.com.
Helen Lewis, welcome to the show. Thank you. So I want to start with a clip from Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State University that I think is a good place to start.
Our independent women seek their purpose in life in mid-level bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, environmental protection, and marketing. They are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such medicated, quarrelsome, and meddlesome women gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project. They are agents of the new world, but not new life. Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the Western world.
I thought that was as concise a description of this masculinism that you've been reporting on, as I've heard from many of its subjects. So tell me about him and the view of society you understand him to be spinning out here.
Well, you know, as you heard, it's one that's not afraid to be offensive. But the essential thesis is that it's women's role in life to have children. Modern women have been deluded instead into pursuing careers which aren't real jobs. They're not doing anything of any merit anyway. And therefore, their lives will essentially be empty and pointless. But I find it, I like my job. And I also feel that my job is equal social worth to Scott Yenna being in a think tank, right?
What is the new masculinist movement on the right?
Like he's hardly a cancer surgeon, calm down, son. I find it kind of intriguingly repellent. And I think a lot of people do as well.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:41
2
What is the new masculinist movement on the right?
4:41–8:05
3
How do historical references shape the new right's vision of masculinity?
8:05–15:47
4
What is Helen Lewis's perspective on the masculinist backlash?
15:47–44:41
5
How does the new right view modernity and masculinity?
44:41–48:10
6
How does the new right's vision of masculinity impact women?
48:10–1:44:31