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Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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.
One of the things I heard in that clip is an echo of the J.D. Vance miserable cat ladies clip that went around in the 2024 campaign campaign.
We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
Which I mention because I think it can be easy to look at Yenor and some of the people we'll talk about and think, oh, this is a fever swamp right-wing movement. This is when you've clicked on too many posts on X and the algorithm has found something out about you that you wish it didn't know.
But one of the arguments you make in this piece is that masculinism has become a kind of unifying theory on a MAGA right that in other ways is coming apart. So defend that for me a bit.
Right. So you can see the splits in MAGA very obviously at the moment over the war in Iran, American support for Israel as a military ally, protectionism versus free trade. You know, there are all these interesting currents that are going on. However, if you asked, do you think feminism has gone too far?
How many people in the MAGA coalition are going to push back on that and say, actually, I think we should give more jobs and opportunities to women? So it is this one thing that basically everybody can agree with. Traditional gender roles are better. Equality has been a failed pursuit. It's maybe even an illegitimate pursuit.
Empathy, which is feminine by nature, has been misused and is ruining our politics because women and their parties that represent them, the Democrats, feel sorry for all these underdogs who aren't really underdogs. They're kind of cancers on our society, like violent criminals or illegal immigrants. So, you know, this is a very coherent ideology.
And the reason I wanted to write the piece is I think people are now quite familiar with the idea of the manosphere and the kind of Andrew Tate, you know, these provocateurs who are creatures of the algorithm. And I wanted to say, well, hang on a minute, actually, there is a really serious ideological and political project here behind this. It has got people in think tanks.
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Chapter 3: How do historical references shape the new right's vision of masculinity?
So it's worth, I think, for you to expand on that, which is to say, I think the core critique here and the core politics here is that modernity has thwarted masculinity. The arguments here—and we're going to tour through a number of them— They shift between this, as you say, 1950s nostalgia for when you had the single breadwinner family. And this, in some cases, it's very Christian.
In some cases, it's very pagan nostalgia. But this spiritual level of politics, and it seems to me to have this dimension of modernity is hollow. People are working, as you mentioned, particularly women, these bullshit jobs in human resource management and in marketing and environmental protection, and men are caged in these little offices and doing retail work that is beneath them.
And, you know, Jenner in their quote says, agents of the new world, but not new life. There's all this emphasis on what life is, the good, the beautiful, vitality, vitalism. Can you talk about that dimension of it, this the spiritual cell being made?
Yeah, I think that is part of it because another thing that often comes up is the idea that women are on a huge amount of anxiety medication and antidepressants. So you have this situation in which women having anything that they feel is wrong in their lives is taken as proof that they've picked the wrong course in life.
And if only they would pick this alternative vision of femininity, they would be happy. and this is part of the exchange that I had with Doug Wilson, the evangelical pastor, that this is not a new phenomenon. It was something that Betty Friedan was writing about in The Feminine Mystique when she was talking about specifically the unhappiness of stay-at-home housewives.
She said, you know, they're taking medication like cough drops. And the bit that I struggle with as somebody who loves reading historical novels, historical fiction, historical biographies, is that absolutely sure that women in 1700 were living these incredibly blissful lives. That's not what you get from the literature of the period.
In my first book, which is A History of Feminism, I wrote about some of the women who wrote to Marie Stopes, who was our kind of version of Margaret Sanger, a contraceptive pioneer. And they were describing lives of despair, where they had far more children than they can afford. They didn't know how to stop having any more.
You know, they were exhausted by their late 30s from this relentless tide of childbearing. But this is the kind of, you know, that era has now passed into memory long enough that it is susceptible to being, you know, revitalized into this kind of trad wife vision that is sold to people on Instagram because no one can really remember what it was like to live in those conditions anymore.
OK, let me try to think about how to do this, because I will say that typically when I get into a literature, I think I'm usually a generous reader and I leave with more sympathy for it than I came in. And I read your piece and then I read The Last Man by Charles Cornish Dale, the raw egg nationalist. I read Bronze Age Mindset.
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Chapter 4: What is Helen Lewis's perspective on the masculinist backlash?
And then the sense that what's really happening here is the destruction of what it means to be a man and literally the vital fluids that make men manly. That's the book.
Right. But there is an obvious overlaid political valence on this, which is that this idea that if you're high tea, you're risk-taking, you're possibly violent, and you don't mind about inequality. You know, it's about the strong dominating the weak.
And therefore, liberal democracy is inherently feminine because it's more concerned with making sure that the weak don't suffer too much, that there are equal rights for all. So it's very easy to see how that vision of masculinity maps onto kind of MAGA rightism, definitely. Yeah. The bit I find, I just, again, when I start drilling down into the examples, I find it tricky.
So young men, for example, have much higher testosterone than old men. So actually, really, are we talking about, if women shouldn't be in leadership positions, maybe old men shouldn't be in leadership positions. So because they don't have the requisite thymus either. Oh, no, you're not saying that.
So actually, you're just making very large sweeping claims about men are one thing and women are another thing. That kind of stuff, you know, sort of falls apart in your hands. But I also think that, don't you think it does speak to some people? And I think it speaks to people who have like a female boss and they resent it and they find it slightly emasculating.
The kind of people who, if a woman upset them, the word bitch would be pretty close to their lips, right? Like, how dare you speak to me like that? You know, you're just a woman. And I think that's closer to the surface in men, even men who are otherwise impeccably liberal than perhaps we sometimes like to acknowledge. So I can see why this stuff does have a relatively wide appeal.
And the person of Donald Trump in the 2024 election became a vehicle for this feeling. This guy who stood up and pumped his fist covered in blood after an assassination attempt rather than cowering behind his Secret Service guards or a lectern or, you know, staying on the floor.
This guy who would say anything he wanted to say, no matter who it offended, who did not play by the rules of feminized society. This man who kept driving forward through adversity, you know, lawsuits and electoral losses and made his own reality around him.
That Trump, for all his sedentary lifestyle and obesity and the fact that he's, you know, in advanced age and, you know, I haven't measured his testosterone, but it's probably not that high anymore. But that Trump represents... What masculinity in a way is supposed to be, which is an effort to dominate other people in a bid to achieve greatness for yourself, your kin, your country.
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Chapter 5: How does the new right view modernity and masculinity?
And I think we just probably need to find a slightly new way of talking. I try and discourage, you know, feminists from sort of framing everything in kind of men are doing this to us kind of way.
And I think that the real downfall of a lot of this discussion is it's almost impossible to have a conversation about men on its own terms in lots of these parts of the right without it having to be in some point women's fault. And if we could just break that chain, those conversations would be a lot healthier. And I think liberals would be a lot happier in participating in them, right?
If it can be, actually, maybe we got some bits of the COVID response wrong, schools should have opened earlier in California. That's a conversation people are going to be much happier to have if it's not done, some childless cow did this to you, right? Because at that point, I'm like, I'm out. I'm not interested in what else you have to say at that point.
Sorry, if you can't keep a civil tug in your head, then we won't have this argument. There's a
interesting dimension in a bunch of these books where it does feel to me you're watching both in these books actually and in culture broadly men import what has more traditionally been a huge problem for women and girls really quite rapidly which is this obsession with unrealizable body aesthetics
Bronze Age pervert, true to the name, is known for constantly posting pictures of, you know, tanned and muscled male bodies. Raw egg nationalist Charles Cornish Dale, weightlifter, talks a lot about that in his book. There's this whole idea of the pursuit of beauty.
Yeah.
as a way of aligning yourself to higher good. This is from the Bronze Age Perfect Mindset in its sort of weird internet grammar. In same way, see from all this that aesthetic physique has the most cosmic significance. And it is because of what I've said so far that aesthetic bodies are a window to the other side because they're the pinnacle of nature."
The book is full of just like hatred for the obese, he keeps calling it like yeasty, you know, physiques.
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Chapter 6: How does the new right's vision of masculinity impact women?
There is the idea that there are life's winners who are physically perfect and mentally acute. And then there are life's losers who are, you can even read in their features that they are subhuman. That's got such a long, dark history. Even in America, on the left as well as the right, in California there were thousands of people sterilized for mental and physical disabilities in the 20th century.
So these are ideas that were in circulation, and they could be again. We like to think that all these things just got ruled out completely after the Second World War. Why? So many other things that you would never have thought would come back have come back.
This idea that there are sort of subhumans, you know, you find them all that so often in the kind of right-wing and non-discourse on things like X.
You see it all over these books, too. I mean, there's an explicit passage in Bronze Age Mindset where he talks about the problem of the Jews and their pallid, nerdy, you know, they've made everybody want to be these intellectual, conceptual, you know, not sort of connected to the real vital forces of being alive. And I mean, this is very old-fashioned anti-Semitism.
And he tries to soften it by saying, well, when I say the Jews, I'm not saying just the Jews or all the Jews, but it's straightforward. I mean, he uses the term directly, which is maybe to say all this is very old. This is all very old. And it expresses itself as old, right? It's Bronze Age. It's, you know, going back into Christian nationalism.
It is all making this argument that modernity has taken a wrong turn. It has taken a wrong turn in all of this equality among men and women, among people of different races and ethnic backgrounds, among the idea that people in different countries have equal worth. A lot of it is framed as like a debate about
gender roles or sexual facts, but a huge amount of it is just about the past versus the present and whether or not our modern values are a betrayal of our baser and more fundamental instincts.
I mean, that's why it's appealing, because it's saying if you are alive today and unhappy, it's because of modernity. And it may be any other number of other things, but it gives, you know, it specifically addresses itself to people who are alienated by society in whatever way it might be and latches onto that.
You know, who does someone like Andrew Tate appeal to, to go back to the kind of broader manosphere? It's actually young teenage boys, right? It's actually at that period of age where you're getting all these messages about how men are patriarchs and toxic masculinity and blah, blah, blah.
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