Let's get one thing out of the way first. There is one reason that women like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift dominated pop culture in 2023: They are excellent at what they do. There was no feminist conspiracy to put women at the top of the charts. Nor was some mysterious matriarchy forcing movie-goers to pack theaters for showings of "Barbie." Women just happened to make the best pop culture of the year so they were rewarded for it with money, as per the traditions of our capitalist system. It turns out that if you take away sexist constraints on their creativity, a lot of women are very good at producing art that the masses enjoy. There's nothing sinister going on, beyond artists creating and audiences loving them for it.
Last year, women made music and movies, and even more women opened their wallets to show appreciation. To some, 2023 was a sure sign that we must be facing the male apocalypse. And the "What about men" whining isn't just coming from the usual right-wing grifters, like Ben Shapiro or Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., who peddle "war on men" lies for profit and political power. Christine Emba of the Washington Post ended out 2023 with an op-ed framing the success of female-centric pop culture in 2023 as a "danger" to the men of America.
"[T]here are consequences to ignoring the other sex," Emba warns, lamenting how many women "rejoiced in caring much less about male desires." If women are going to be so independent, she asks, "where, then, do those men end up?"
"What should they be doing in the meantime?" she pleads on behalf of those allegedly abandoned men.
The answer should be obvious: Men should take care of themselves. Men should not need women to be submissive in order to feel good. Adult men should survive without requiring women to forsake our own goals and desires in order to serve them. This may come as a shock to hear, but men can and often do learn how to clean up after themselves.
Emba, however, remains concerned about the fate of all those lost boys, who can find neither identity nor a future without women's necks to step on. "But even as we celebrate women being on top, it would be a shame — and a danger — to forget that someone else might end up on bottom," she concludes as if being an independent adult is a zero-sum game where men cannot thrive if women are doing well.
Emba drew a great deal of backlash to her concern trolling, and it's hard to feel too sorry about it. The faux-feminist framing of her column is infuriating, as is her "just asking questions" posture. Plus, the whole thing is sloppily argued, to the point where you wonder if the Washington Post editors are too busy laying off good columnists in order to do basic editing work on the ones they're keeping around.
She offers no evidence that men are harmed by women enjoying music or movies. Instead, Emba radically mischaracterizes the work of the various female artists she references to make her "men left behind" argument work. She argues that 2023 pop culture was "girl-coded," which she uses to disparage a message celebrating independence.
And adopting the aesthetics of “girl culture” helped to define that independent role: Girls don’t get married, don’t have children and aren’t yet tasked with perpetuating society. They don’t pair up with men, and aren’t responsible for supporting them; they leave men out altogether.
Okay, except almost none of the work she discusses in the column is "girl-coded." It's mostly about the lives of fully adult women. Beyoncé literally has a song called "Grown Woman." The "Eras" tour was structured as a retrospective of over a decade of Swift's career and evolution as an artist, which is to say it was about her maturity and experience. Emba mentions Britney Spears had a bestselling memoir — a genre that is inherently adult — which is literally titled "The Woman In Me." We are seeing adult women who aggressively reject society's efforts to infantilize them. Only "Barbie" was about girlhood, because Barbie is literally a toy. And even then, the movie is about Barbie's journey in putting away childish things, literally ending (spoiler!) with her trip to the gynecologist.
(Even male creators are getting in on this action, by the way. The new Emma Stone movie, "Poor Things" was written and directed by men, but it is a satirical takedown of men who want women who are dependent and childlike, instead of fully realized adults.)
Nor is it fair to say that any of these creators "leave men out altogether," especially with the two musical juggernauts that are Swift and Beyoncé. If anything, what infuriates sexists about Swift is she rebuts the idea that a woman must choose between career ambitions and romantic entanglements. Her songs are notoriously boy-crazy, and her personal life is an enviable list of sexual conquests that would make her a Lothario if she were a man. She doesn't let it get in the way of being a successful musician, and that's what infuriates her sexist critics.
As for Beyoncé, well, she is famously a married mother and, her husband and children are definitely not excised from her public persona. She collaborates with her husband, rapper Jay-Z, all the time. Her daughter, Blue Ivy, performed on-stage for the "Renaissance" tour as a dancer. To quote a Beyoncé song, "Run the World," she presents an image of women who are "Strong enough to bear the children/Then get back to business." She offers a holistic view of "woman" as an identity that contains multitudes. You know, the same way men have always been allowed to be both a father and a creator, both a husband and a worker.
There is no doubt that Beyoncé and Swift currently shine more brightly than the men in their lives. But that is not the same as men being "left behind." Jay-Z is doing just fine as the richest rapper in the world, having branched out into the business world. Swift's current beau, Travis Kelce, won the frigging Super Bowl last year and is a beloved tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.
Both men seem content to have female partners who have accomplished so much. In this, they reflect how plenty of non-famous men live in an era of rising equality: By respecting their partners as full human beings, instead of appedages of themselves. It would be churlish to begrudge a friend their success. It's even worse to do it to the person you are supposed to be in love with.
If men need women to be small in order to feel big, that's men's problem to solve, not women's. Therapy could help, but really, it's just a matter of basic empathy. Just imagine the shoe on the other foot. If a woman's happiness depended on her husband or boyfriend tamping down his talents, we'd all think she was an evil harpy. It's no better if men do it to women. This really gets to the crux of the difference between a healthy masculinity and a toxic masculinity. Healthy men draw their self-esteem from inside, by cultivating their own talents and good qualities. Men who can't feel good unless they're putting women down are toxic bullies. Bullies suck, and don't deserve to feel good about themselves.
