It was in 2005 that I wrote about the “dehumanizing of men.” A half-decade earlier, the book The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers was published. Yet the anti-male spirit of the age marched on, and now the consequences are painfully apparent. In fact and in a sense, young men today are going a sort of sex-specific Galt.
Writing about this at Evie magazine Tuesday is one Brittany Hugoboom in an article titled “How They Broke The Boys.” Hugoboom points out that men are, in a sense, going MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way). For example, and as studies have shown, men are much less likely today to approach women romantically. In fact, the younger-generation dating scene is a “wasteland.” As Hugoboom relates, “‘All girls are hoes,’ a 21-year-old boy tells me, blankly.” She mentions, too, that there are gorgeous 20-something women who’ve never been asked to dinner.
(Note: The phenomenon is even worse in Japan, where nearly half of young men have never had a girlfriend.)
What Gives?
So how did this happen? Hugoboom presents her take:
I’m a millennial born in the ’90s. … Back then, the message was clear: “Girls rule, boys drool.” Girl power reigned supreme. From Powerpuff Girls to She’s the Man, we were spoon-fed the narrative that girls were better.
Stronger. Smarter. In every way. The fact that our national women’s soccer team once lost to a team of teenage boys [under-15s, do note]? It didn’t matter. The message was already embedded.
So think about what that means. Boys grew up being told that girls were superior in every way. That masculinity was toxic. That they were dangerous. That all boys were potential rapists just waiting for their moment to strike.
Yet even more perspective is in order. Early feminism (late 19th-early 20th centuries) mainly emphasized “equal rights” — though not equal responsibilities — such as suffrage. This gave way in the 1960s-’70s to the “A woman can do anything a man can do” notion. Thus did we hear the claim that the “sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences.” The idea: Upon believing this, people won’t think there’s any reason to exclude women from any sphere (e.g., policing).
Experiencing ascendancy around the mid to late ’80s, however, was the iteration Hugoboom experienced. Dubbed “femaleism” by some (the term didn’t stick), it involved open anti-male hostility and female chauvinism. The slogan “The future is female” reflected this. (In reality, a female future would be a dark age. I explained why here. Short version: As feminist Camille Paglia put it, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”)
The bottom line, though, is that all this agitation made the sexes’ relationship not complementary, but increasingly adversarial.
A World Apart
This is most significant. Ancient Greek philosopher Plato once stated that “[e]ach of us when separated … is always looking for his other half…. Neither the male alone nor the female alone is complete; they are but fragments.” The sexes are designed to complement each other. Modern feminism, however, has worked to make male-female relations not complementary but competitive — often viciously so. This can drive a wedge between what must be the central building block of the family: the husband-wife relationship. This creates an existential threat because the family is the central building block of civilization.
This male-female split is starkly apparent now in politics. Men have long leaned Republican and women Democratic, but this partisan divide is now historically large. Among Gen Z, in fact, it expanded to a whopping 30 points before the 2024 election.
So put simply, matching up young men and women today can be a bit like trying to fix up ex-Congressman Matt Gaetz with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And it’s not easy pairing up when the opening line may be an impassioned political argument.
Returning to Hugoboom, she also touches on anti-male double standards. For example, “At church, men are told ‘stop watching porn,’” she relates. This is good advice because porn is damaging (and sinful). “But where’s the sermon for women?” Hugoboom then asks. “Where’s the accountability for our sins? Why are men the only ones ever called to repent?” The real answer is interesting.
The Overt and the Covert
When men say “My wife is always right,” they don’t actually mean she’s always right. They mean she’ll never admit it when she’s wrong. Women do have a problem confessing error, and too many men today are afraid to call out female sin. The American man is, collectively, hen-pecked. The result is that female sins are ignored or, even, rebranded as strengths.
Not so with men’s characteristic sins. “If you look for the worst in someone, you’re sure to find it,” goes the saying. And, boy, does society ever look hard with the boys. Male sins are easy to find, too — but not for the reason most may suppose.
In reality, the sexes sin differently. Consider: When a little boy gets upset, he may have a volcanic temper tantrum and create quite a scene. Yet 10 minutes later he may be loving you again. A little girl is more likely to not boil over but simmer long-term, even perhaps holding a grudge. Thus, the amount of negative energy expended may be the same; only the intensity and duration vary. But which trespass is far more likely to bring punishment?
This is evident throughout life: Men’s sins are more overt, women’s more covert. Boys are more prone to get into fistfights. But girls may be more apt to bully peers to the point of suicide. In this case, the trespass more likely to bring punishment is the less severe.
And so it goes. Male violence is matched by female emotional manipulation and vindictiveness; male lust by female vanity; male gluttony, sloth, and anger by female pride, envy, and avarice. (Yes, there is overlap; at issue are characteristic faults.) Male sin is a swift, sudden impalement; female sin is death by a thousand cuts.
Accomplishment
Then there’s the more obvious but unacknowledged. That is, men are certainly responsible for most of the direct murder, virtually all forcible rape, and the majority of the violent crime generally. And, having governed civilization historically, they have prosecuted almost all history’s wars.
It’s also true, however, that men are virtually all those who save lives. Men are generally the ones rushing into crime scenes, forest fires, flood areas, and other danger zones. They also perform almost every perilous, dirty job. Thus do men constitute 92 percent of workplace deaths.
More significantly still, almost exclusively male endeavor has created science, medicine, and other modern wonders. These are triumphs, too, that have saved literally billions of lives. They have caused the average life expectancy to rise from 33 in Paleolithic times to 78.4 (in the U.S.) today. They have also enabled women to outlive men, whereas the reverse was true in much earlier ages.
These advances are precisely why we have an eight-billion-plus strong world population now. And these numbers can only be sustained with the resources (e.g., modern food-production and water-delivery methods) male endeavor has provided. In other words, that much-maligned masculinity has brought many benefits.
That malignment, though, will eventually end. For one thing, “The future belongs to those who show up for it,” commentator Mark Steyn once pointed out. And feminism’s suppression of procreation ensures that its victims won’t show up for it. That is, too, feminism’s best quality: It’s self-limiting.
