Kate Riga: Let's start with this idea that masculinity is under crisis. It feels like it's at an inflection point right now, but also that it's not a particularly new crisis to have befallen us. So, Karen, can you give us a rough idea of the trajectory of this notion and when it started springing up in our politics?
Karen Lee Ashcraft: Absolutely. So aggrieved manhood, aggrieved masculinity, manly grievance, all of those are synonyms, right, that I'm using to capture what is essentially a feeling, a conviction, like a felt certainty that real men – particularly straight, white, Western men – their manhoods are under attack.
All this conversation, for example, about toxic masculinity sort of proves their point, right? That if you're a real man today, or if you value manhood, you're under siege. You're the bad guys. Something's wrong with you. You're toxic. So you're absolutely right that this is in no way new.
If you look back historically, there have been crises of masculinity proclaimed for so long. It's ridiculous. And all of those crises are culturally specific. So they happen in different national and regional contexts.
About 20 years ago, I started studying crises of masculinity with a colleague, and we began with a crisis that was in the U.S. around 100 years ago. We were comparing some of the themes of that crisis with the one that was emerging at the time we were writing. So briefly, the history of the current moment is really coming out of a lot of the social movements in the sixties and seventies around feminism, gay liberation, civil rights, all kinds of racial justice movements. And there was an emerging sense coming out of those that the bad guy, the fall guy or the person it wasn't cool to be anymore was the one who was allegedly so privileged, the straight white guy, right? So we started seeing a rash of literature, films, all kinds of popular culture, examples of white men can't catch a break basically being the theme. And then this kind of intensified, taking so many different forms, and that's one of the challenges I'm sure we'll talk about, that it's hard to recognize the through line through some of those different forms. It can be as volatile or virulent as Andrew Tate and as seemingly intellectual as Jordan Peterson. And so it's hard to see what combines all those threads, but it really has been on an intensification or an escalation ever since the sixties and seventies and the men's movements that began to respond to those movements in an oppositional way.
Nicole LaFond: Piggybacking off what you just explained, it's kind of hard to wrap your head around the idea of how are we even having this conversation when we live in a culture that socially, economically, politically, religiously favors men by almost every measure?
Karen Lee Ashcraft: Yeah. Well, this is where I like to borrow a phrase from Michael Kimmel, who wrote the book Angry White Men. Around the time just before Trump's election, he was following the Tea Party and kind of making these connections. And he described this feeling. And, I can't emphasize enough the felt part of it, that it's not necessarily an ideology, but a feeling that it's real but not true, which I think Nicole gets at what you're saying.
If you look at every kind of data evidence indicator, it would be hard to maintain the truth, so to speak, of this feeling. And yet in the ways that it circulates, it's passed around, it is absolutely experienced every day by tons of people and not just men as very real, undeniable. That's why I introduced it as a felt truth. So I think that's a complication for sure.
Kate Riga: And it's funny because if it's just a feeling, it's impossible to disprove or debunk it.
Karen Lee Ashcraft: Yes. And I think that is such an important point because you'll notice that we tend to respond to this feeling in all the ways it presents itself at the level of argument or we talk about misinformation, disinformation. It's ideological radicalization.
And what we're missing is that it is an animating felt truth that then attaches so easily to any kind of ideology. Right? It can go so many different ways.
So when you're addressing it at the level of content and not at the level of feeling, it's really not going to be a great conversation, because nothing is going to rattle the feeling at the content level, if that makes sense. It's already experienced as real.
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