In a 2022 op-ed in the Washington Post, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang laid out “one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country.”
I’ve been a high school English teacher for almost 30 years, so I’ve been hearing about this crisis for a long time. Some typical headlines: “Boys in crisis: Schools are failing young males," USA Today; “America's Boys Are in Serious Trouble," Education Week; “The Crisis of Men and Boys," New York Times. This is said to be happening all across the developed world. Educators and newspapers in Australia, Britain and across Europe bemoan a “masculinity crisis.”
Yang and most commentators are clear about the problem and suggest worthwhile solutions, such as making schools better suited to today’s boys, increasing vocational opportunities, subsidizing marriage counseling, increasing the child tax credit. All of these ideas would help boys, men and society as a whole. But where Yang and so many other commentators go wrong is in identifying the causes.
Yang mentions “economic transformation” and the loss of manufacturing jobs. But we see the same male crisis across all social classes. Like many other observers, Yang points to our education system, which is primarily staffed by women and which is perceived as favoring girls, who mature, on average, at an earlier age. But the same system has been in place for over a century, during most of which time boys were ruling the roost.
But there’s one possible cause that Yang and most others don’t mention, unless to dismiss it out of hand.
A level playing field, at last
In this context, we often hear about the “level playing field.” This analogy is used to the point of cliché, but rarely with any real consideration of its ramifications. Here’s a crude example.
Suppose you’re an alien anthropologist observing a soccer match played on a steep mountain slope:
- The team from the upper village always defended the goal nearest to them. They played downhill. They always won.
- The team from the lower village always defended the goal nearest to them. They had to play uphill. They always lost.
- The upper villagers assumed that they were superior. The lower villagers had their doubts.
- Then there was a mudslide and the hillside field was washed out. The two teams had to find a new field and the only location was a flat, level space a little ways off. So they started playing there. Suddenly, the lower village team started winning.
So, alien anthropologist, what would be your first guess for the reason for this change of fortunes?
In education, recent decades have seen a drastic leveling of the playing field. If not for the particular anxieties and the depth of the prejudice in this case, we humans might have jumped to the same conclusion when observing girls and boys in school: Girls are smarter.
I’m not saying that this is the definitive, proven answer. There are many more factors to consider. In fact, I personally do not believe that girls are smarter than boys. As far as I can tell from 30 years of teaching, the two sexes are more or less equal, and I have read nothing to convince me otherwise. But the fact that authorities do not first examine the obvious conclusion is suspicious. This explanation should be disproven before moving on to any others.
The way that authorities dismiss this answer without examination has the feeling of a politically correct speaker anxiously avoiding an unpalatable truth. Boys can see the evidence before their eyes, and can’t help wondering about it. The pat dismissal of what appears to be obvious is suspicious in itself, and part of the reason that millions of boys are internalizing the Occam’s razor solution: They’re simply inferior.
A conquered people?
Millions of boys and men have, in fact, come to the conclusion that girls and women are smarter. And not just smarter — now that women are outcompeting men in many professional fields, women appear to be harder working and more competent.
Boys and men tend toward competitiveness and winner/loser thinking, and they see a war that is going poorly, and may already have been lost. That perception is indeed a crisis.
Boys and men are behaving like a conquered people.
To be clear, I don’t believe that men are a conquered people. I do not feel conquered, nor do I think that men as a class are conquered. But what matters is not what is actually true, but what men and boys perceive to be true. And enough of them feel this way to have triggered this crisis.
To feel like a conquered people is a terrible thing. The psychic wounds are profound. Among some Indigenous Americans, we see much of the same evidence as in modern American men: underachievement, underemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, despair, suicide.
M. Scott Momaday, in his essay “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” describes his Kiowa grandmother, who “bore an image of deicide.” That’s an apt description of what it feels like to be a conquered people: Your gods have been killed. Everything you have been taught about the structure of the universe has turned out to be a lie. It’s a psychic wound similar to what some veterans of war describe in talking about their PTSD.
The war mythology that is a part of what theologians calls America’s civil religion had turned out to be a lie. Veterans lost more than their innocence. They lost the god of their childhood. Sometimes they came out of it with a new and more mature faith, climbing from patriotic mythology to genuine religion. And sometimes they bore the image of deicide, and went the way of despair. Their journey runs parallel to that which modern men in crisis must make: a journey to emerge from the male fantasies of their childhood and their culture, and grow into a mature version of masculinity — or else to live in despair, prey to false prophets who preach the familiar idols.
Most men and all boys are not old enough to remember a time when males were still dominant. But that notion lives on in the male subconscious; they have an inherited sense of a birthright that has been denied them. That sense of frustrated birthright has led to more than a few wars. In the past, disputes over monarchic succession between those with rival “claims to the throne” have launched countless wars. In modern times, it takes a mass movement. Hitler promised German men a birthright he claimed had been stolen by the Allied powers and the Jews. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping proclaim their countries’ birthrights to Ukraine and Taiwan.
A revolution — or a restoration?
It’s important to note that what seems like a revolution — women’s relative equality in positions of economic, political or spiritual power — might more accurately be termed a restoration. After all, that’s the way it used to be, a very long time ago. If birthrights actually existed, women might well feel that a lot of power is due to them. Especially when it comes to religion.
I believe it can be logically established that the first priests were women. Indeed, for two reasons, women must have been the first spiritual leaders for hunter-gatherer bands and early agricultural settlements. Consider the two most important criteria for being a holy person or sacred ritual leader:
- Some sort of supernatural power. (The holy man of the “Star Wars” universe, Obi-Wan Kenobi, can make others do whatever he wants by waving his fingers.)
- Some sort of supernatural connection. (Obi-Wan felt a “disturbance in the Force” when a far-off planet was destroyed.)
Women possess both these qualities, and men have neither. This may not seem obvious in the modern world, but in prehistoric times it would have been self-evident.
Women possess humanity’s only superpower. They give birth.They have the most godlike of abilities, that of creating a human life seemingly from nothing. We don’t think about it in those terms, of course, but that was the obvious point for early humans with little knowledge of gestation and a weak understanding of the role of intercourse in procreation.
Women also have humanity’s only obvious connection to the mechanics of the universe: They menstruate according to the moon. The average period is not 28 days, as laid out neatly in a pack of birth control pills. In a study of “real-world menstrual characteristics of more than 600,000 women,” University College in London found the average was 29.3 days — almost exactly one moon (29.5 days). Imagine the rhythm of life in a small band of hunter-gatherers. Scholars believe that in such communities, women aligned their menstrual cycles with each other, and with the moon. So when the moon disappeared, very likely the women did too, retreating to a sacred space to menstruate (and perhaps take a little vacation). So they tended to ovulate at the full moon, and since human gestation, on average, is not nine months but nine moons (that is, 38 weeks, or exactly nine times 29.5), most women also gave birth around the full moon.
So as early peoples made their first ventures down the path that eventually led to organized religion, it’s logical to assume that women were the first priests.
How and why that changed is not entirely clear, but the great overthrow happened all over the world, and happened in what we term “Western civilization” around 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. It was codified in the Old Testament (aka the Torah), when men asserted their new dominance by recasting these female superpowers as punishment and disgrace. Eve was cursed for her transgression when God made childbearing painful, and menstruation became a stigma. This excessive, virulent misogyny suggests that this was an act of revenge, not merely a new philosophy. Some historians believe that the event that launched patriarchy was the insight into paternity. When men understood that they were the sole father of specific children, their possessiveness became toxic.
But however and whenever things changed, the old regime is so deep in the past that this new change in our own time feels more like a revolution than a restoration. We are at a turning point in human history. An epoch of many millennia is ending. The social order is making a profound shift. It is impossible for humans to navigate such a transition without turmoil. It’s bound to be messy.
The Ghost Dance
The Lakota Sioux of the High Plains put up a heroic resistance to the European immigrants and their descendants who kept coming and coming, prospectors and settlers and soldiers. The battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 was a high point, but not a turning point. By the end of the 1880s, the Lakota were a conquered people and they knew it. The Ghost Dance religion was an imaginative, perhaps delusional response. Its practitioners believed the dance would summon ghosts who would banish the white invaders and restore Lakota power. That movement was crushed in the Wounded Knee Massacre in December of 1890.
The MAGA movement is a kind of latter-day Ghost Dance: a desperate attempt to recover the supposed lost birthright of men and restore a perceived rightful power. But just as for the Lakota, who wished to make their nation great again, it’s too late. Female ascendancy is a force of history too powerful, with too much momentum — built up after centuries of slow progress and a few decades of revolutionary tsunami.
Ghost dancers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his inability to concede might be explained by his psychic wounds and subconscious terrors. That’s his problem. But when millions of Americans latch onto his obvious lie, we have to look for deeper causes. His own pathology rings true to them because they feel deeper anxieties with which Trump connects. They cannot bear to admit defeat.
Terrorist violence is the grisliest Ghost Dance of all, a weapon of the weak, the conquered. Those secure in their own power don’t need terrorism: They have nations, police, armies. American far-right terrorism, both in deed and word, is first and foremost a misogynist phenomenon. We see it online in the sickening, violent, sexualized hate directed at women who have power or who merely speak up for themselves.
When racism is dropped into the cauldron, what emerges is the “great replacement theory,” which in various forms has been part of America’s fantasy life for at least a century. If you drink that witches’ brew, you begin to imagine Democrats and “globalists” recruiting migrants to swarm across the border and produce many children, all destined to become Democratic voters.
This fear-mongering myth is retailed by politicians for rational purposes, albeit cynical and corrupt ones. But when such a ludicrous theory is embraced by millions, we have to ask: What is the fear that is being mongered? As the Anti-Defamation League notes, "Virulent racism informs this conspiracy theory, but misogyny also plays an important role in motivating and justifying extremist violence in the name of the ‘Great Replacement.’”
There is a special fury among the extreme right directed at white women who are not at home having babies. The man who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement,” and began it by railing about “the birthrates” of white women. He was clearly inspired by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who murdered 77 people in 2011 and also wrote a manifesto alleging that “political correctness” had destroyed masculinity and that “feminism has greatly weakened Scandinavia, and perhaps Western civilization as whole.” Women, he wrote, “should be wives and homemakers, not cops or soldiers.”
What do women want?
All these efforts to prevent or reverse female ascendance are certain to fail, and also completely unnecessary. They are founded on irrational fear and faulty assumptions.
Too many men assume that women want to “replace” men or hold power over them. In other words, they assume that women think the same way that men do, at least according to gender conventions. When reactionary men (and women) portray feminists as angry man-haters, they’re expressing their deeper anxiety that women want to replace and subjugate men, the way that men replaced and subjugated women, way back when. But women, by and large, don’t think like this. As Germaine Greer said: “The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity.”
Men do not face a binary choice between power, birthright and dignity on one hand, and emasculation and impotence on the other. Of course there are some angry feminists, but they are not nearly as numerous as angry misogynists. Some feminist slogans, such as “The future is female,” seem guaranteed to evoke replacement anxiety. But in any case, very few women seek the absolute power that the male writers and scholars of the Abrahamic religious traditions arrogated for themselves. They want equality.
Welcome to the post-patriarchy
In her classic feminist book “The Mermaid and the Minotaur,” psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein offers a startling thesis: To save women and men, to save the planet and civilization, we need to fundamentally change our child care arrangements. Caring for infants should be equally shared between fathers and mothers. The argument involves a lot of early childhood psychology. Dinnerstein makes clear that this change shouldn’t come primarily from a sense of justice for women, or for men’s sake, but because it’s best for children, the adults they will become and the society they will inhabit.
It’s a magisterial work that taught me more about myself than any other book I’ve ever read. On a policy level, Americans have been especially slow to take up Dinnerstein’s ideas. Paternity leave is offered at many workplaces these days but there’s no government mandate. But we have clearly been moving in Dinnerstein’s direction. When her book was first published in the 1970s, it was highly unusual for a man to be present in the room when his female partner gave birth. Now, a father who isn’t there had better have a good excuse, or he may be judged harshly by his male friends. In Dinnerstein’s day, men rarely changed diapers, but now that’s not even worth commenting on; public bathrooms for all genders usually have changing tables. Every passing decade sees fathers spending more time with their children.
Men are not changing diapers because they have been coerced by their wives or goaded by feminist thinkers like Dinnerstein. They’re doing it because they want to. Many of them now realize just how much the old system stunted fathers, cut them off from their own hearts.
The best example I can think of to illustrate this trend is the Hulu documentary series “Welcome to Wrexham,” about the lower-division Welsh soccer team purchased by Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds in 2020. The show is a massive hit, and I think its profound resonance in the American consciousness is because it’s not just about a far-away soccer club but about community, and most strikingly about fatherhood.
Over and over in “Welcome to Wrexham” we see young male athletes who are devoted fathers. The team’s leading goal scorer, Paul Mullin, has a close bond to his autistic son. Mullin celebrates each goal by making an “A” with his fingers, for autism awareness. Another star, Ollie Palmer, tells of his loving relationship to his own father, who left his family when he realized he was gay. We not only see the close bond between these men, but we see Palmer as a loving and involved father to his own kids. One of Wrexham’s most rabid local fans, Shaun Winter, is a recovering alcoholic and divorced dad. We see his regrets and how he blames himself for his failed marriage, and that his clear priority now is being the best dad he can be. One or two such stories occur in almost every episode.
Fatherhood, especially of young children with all their needs, is in. Dinnerstein was not a critic but a prophet.
The joyful warrior of 2024
Much has been made lately about “joyful warrior” Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. While Walz is indeed skillful and cheerful in attack, there’s one battle hes not fighting, and it drives MAGA men nuts: he doesn’t fight the gender war, yet he does not appear the least bit defeated. His presence suggests that the battle between men and women doesn’t really exist at all.
Many commentators have noted Walz’s “dadness,” and there's no doubt that his classic middle-American dad vibe infuriates the church fathers of MAGA. That’s because Walz is a new-school dad, essentially the type that Dinnerstein prophesied.
The end of patriarchy is not a victory for women and a defeat for men, it turns out, but an opening for all of us. It provides an opportunity for deep fulfillment, for an emotional richness unimaginable to our grandfathers. Men who seize this opportunity are not conquered or conquerors. They are simply people who have faced the challenges of life head-on, and who have accepted the burdens and blessings of being a member of the human family.
And men are certainly not the only beneficiaries. The two great threats hanging over our entire species, the climate crisis and the possibility of nuclear apocalypse, are in no small part due to patriarchy and its attitudes: the separation of humans from nature and from each other, the exploitation of other humans and the natural world. The era of post-patriarchy might offer the best hope for the future of our species.
Patriarchy is not dying — it’s already dead, but some of us haven’t figured that out yet. Embracing what comes next is not admitting defeat, or asking men to accept something less. The choice for men is not between conquering or being conquered. The choice is whether to dance with women and children or to dance with ghosts.
