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    Steeling My Daughters Against a New Kind of Misogyny

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    Since President Trump started announcing his cabinet picks, I have been trying to write a Very Serious Essay about the Current State of Feminism.When Pete Hegseth was confirmed, even after so many horrifying details of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, that seemed like an obvious blow to the basic ideals of gender equality. In a marginally just world for women, credible allegations of sexual or domestic violence would prevent a person from being considered for such a vaunted position in the first place.I started trying to write this essay by gathering data about women’s progress and trying to quantify how it has stalled. Though the vibes seem truly awful, I didn’t want to go by just potentially illusory internet trends or the vile choices of our commander in chief.Yet it would be disingenuous to ignore how far we have come since the 1970s, when most women didn’t even have access to credit. Women now outnumber men at American colleges and in the college-educated labor force. A higher percentage of Gen Z women say they’re feminists than women of any other generation.But: Roe is dead. Who knows what might happen with access to contraceptives or abortion medication in the next four years?We’re in a period of backlash against women’s progress, beyond what is happening in and around the Oval Office. “Surveys from 2024 show that support for traditional gender roles is increasing” among both Republican men and Republican women, according to the political scientists Michael Tesler, John Sides and Colette Marcellin in a guest essay for Times Opinion. They conclude that “any growing gender traditionalism may be a reaction to societal trends and not a cause of these trends.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hair Transplants and the New Male Vanity

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      Last year, I noticed that two comedians I like talked about getting hair transplants. One of them, Matteo Lane, named his special “Hair Plugs & Heartache,” which opens with an extended bit about the transplant experience. I appreciated Lane’s radical (and very funny) transparency regarding the cosmetic enhancement. He talked about the expense, described the 10-hour surgery and the long recovery, and joked about his hair growing in gradually “like a Chia pet.” He’s very happy with the outcome.Lane also talks about why he got his surgery in the United States instead of in Turkey. He said he didn’t want to go through customs with his head swollen like the alien from the movie “Mars Attacks”: “I want to be ugly at home.” Going to Turkey to get a cheaper hair transplant is such a cliché that there’s an entire genre of social media video dedicated to depicting men’s beef carpaccio heads on “Turkish hairlines” flying back to their homes from Istanbul.The British tabloid The Mirror just ran a story about one regular bloke who traveled to Turkey for hair transplant surgery and is quoted as saying that he feels he has “a new lease of life.”This is a marked change from just a few years ago, when men were less forthcoming about getting surgery on their domes. In 2021, my newsroom colleague Alex Williams wrote about the men who got hair transplants during the locked-down days of the pandemic. “There’s still that old stigma, where guys aren’t supposed to worry about how they look and spend a lot of money on their appearance,” one hair transplant recipient said at the time.That stigma is very old, indeed. There’s long been anxiety over hair loss among men, according to Martin Johnes, a professor of modern history at Swansea University in Wales who has researched masculinity, modernity and male baldness. But the stress really started ramping up in the 1930s, when men stopped wearing hats regularly and popular media started valorizing youthfulness more aggressively.In the 1930s, it was considered effeminate to pay too much attention to your appearance yet many of these men still wanted to take action if they were unlucky enough to go bald. They called baldness obscene, a major disaster and, poetically, a favored nightmare. One 30-year-old upholsterer said:I do not care to see bald heads. I can only tolerate them if the owner has a large head, or if his personality will not allow himself to look pitiable.While the bad feelings around baldness clearly aren’t new, talking about those feelings in public is. And hair replacement technology has improved so much in the last couple of decades that transplants look real now — it’s not just snake oil or cheesy infomercials for hair in a can anymore.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?

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      When I was a teenager, my older brother took me to see “Shane.”I wasn’t that into westerns, and the movie just seemed to be about a little boy running after Alan Ladd in the wilderness of the Tetons, screaming “Sha-a-a-a-ne, come back!”I came across the movie on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and this time I understood why the George Stevens film is considered one of best of all time. (The A.F.I. ranks “Shane, come back!” as one of the 50 top movie lines of all time.)The parable on good and bad involves a fight between cattle ranchers and homesteaders. Ladd’s Shane is on the side of the honest homesteaders — including an alluring married woman, played by Jean Arthur. Arriving in creamy fringed buckskin, he is an enigmatic golden gunslinger who goes to work as a farmhand. Jack Palance plays the malevolent hired gun imported by the brutal cattle ranchers to drive out the homesteaders. Palance is dressed in a black hat and black vest. In case you don’t get the idea, a dog skulks away as Palance enters a saloon.It’s so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, the right thing to do versus the wrong. Law and order wasn’t a cliché or a passé principle that could be kicked aside if it interfered with baser ambitions.The 1953 film is also a meditation on American masculinity in the wake of World War II. A real man doesn’t babble or whine or brag or take advantage. He stands up for the right thing and protects those who can’t protect themselves from bullies.I loved seeing all those sentimental, corny ideals that America was built on, even if those ideals have often been betrayed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Men in Caring Jobs Will Make Society More Equal

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      In her prescient 2012 book, “The End of Men,” my friend Hanna Rosin described a modern American dynamic between archetypes that she called “Plastic Woman” and “Cardboard Man.” These comic book characters represented American women who made miraculous social progress in the 20th century and American men who stalled out. That’s because women in the past 60 years or so have been able to be infinitely flexible and responsive to structural economic changes and men remained rigid planks. This hasn’t just caused a shift in the job market, it’s caused a shift in the marriage market, too. If men aren’t breadwinners, and they’re not caregivers, either — what are they for?Rosin explains that Plastic Woman went “from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If a space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it.” By contrast, Cardboard Man “hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way.”She added that a man’s sense of himself is often tied to having a traditionally masculine, physical job in construction, utility work or some kind of manufacturing. “They could move more quickly into new roles now open to them — college graduate, nurse, teacher, full-time father — but for some reason, they hesitate.”A lot of Rosin’s book still rings true 12 years later. Though on the campaign trail both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris promised to bring back those old-school, manly jobs, as Rebecca Patterson pointed out in an Opinion guest essay in October, manufacturing jobs are long gone and they’re not returning. “Even if every estimated open role is filled, the total employed in manufacturing would still be about three million short of its 1979 peak, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data,” Patterson noted.Which is why I was so pleased to see that Cardboard Man may be softening up, even as the political posturing around him may not have shifted. According to Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, “The number of male registered nurses in the U.S. has nearly tripled since the early 2000s,” going “from about 140,000 in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2023.” In health care, wage and market growth exceed the national average, and people still need emergency surgeries even in recessions, CNN’s Bryan Mena notes. Health care jobs are particularly vital in rural parts of the country, where hospitals may be among the largest employers in the area.Torry describes men who are moving into traditionally female jobs (or the “pink collar” sector) as rational economic actors who are dealing with the job market as it is, rather than as they wish it might be. “Many of the manufacturing jobs that are being moved overseas, replaced by automation or phased out of the American economy were mostly filled by men. As a result, other occupations traditionally dominated by women are now gaining a larger share of men, including elementary and middle schoolteachers and customer service representatives,” Torry writes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Barstool Conservatism, Revisited

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      Despite Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, his political coalition was already expanding in consequential ways. Not only did he make notable gains among Hispanic and African-American voters — gains that only increased this year — but he also attracted the support of a loose grouping of mostly young, male voters whom I described around that time as “Barstool conservatives.” This year, as I had predicted, they appeared to swing hard for Mr. Trump.“Barstool conservatism” was a reference to the media company Barstool Sports and its founder, Dave Portnoy, who became a folk hero of sorts in 2020 after raising millions of dollars on behalf of bars and restaurants whose existence had been threatened by Covid lockdowns. Apart from Mr. Portnoy, Barstool conservatism’s most representative figures today are the podcast host Joe Rogan, the retired N.F.L. punter turned ESPN personality Pat McAfee and various mixed martial arts fighters.Barstool conservatism is libertarian in the sense that it values autonomy and ambition but not doctrinaire about it in a way that would be recognizable to, say, the editors of Reason magazine. It is a world of fantasy football podcasts, betting apps, diet trends (keto, paleo, carnivore) and more nebulous “lifestyle” questions about the nuances of alcohol and cannabis use. The outlook is culturally rather than socially conservative, skeptical of racial and gender politics for reasons that have more to do with the stridency of their proponents than with any deep-seated convictions about the issues themselves.As a social conservative with an antipathy to libertarianism in all its forms, I viewed the rise of Barstool conservatism in 2020 with foreboding. And rightly so. This year Mr. Trump ran what was, in effect, a pro-choice campaign. He signaled support for legalized cannabis but not for a traditional conception of marriage. He may have selected JD Vance as his running mate, but otherwise he took social conservatives for granted. Barstool conservatives had the upper hand throughout the campaign, as underscored by the emphasis Mr. Trump’s team placed on Mr. Rogan’s endorsement.I have long been inclined to make certain hard and fast distinctions between Barstool conservatism and Trumpism of the sort that Mr. Vance represents, which I associate with opposition to abortion, pornography and cannabis, and support for traditional families, shoring up the power of organized labor and protecting religious freedom. In theory these two conservative tendencies are diametrically opposed. Until recently I would have suggested that only Mr. Trump could possibly unite them, by sheer force of personality.But since this year’s election I have been on an informal listening tour of young men in the part of rural Michigan where I live, which is a nice way of saying that I have spent a lot of time talking to people in bars. What I heard from mechanics, waiters, high school teachers and others often surprised me. The future of American conservatism now strikes me as more complex and less ideologically predictable — and less dependent on Mr. Trump — than I had thought.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Our Messed-Up Dating Culture Gave Us Donald Trump. Let Me Explain.

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      Joe Rogan. Elon Musk. Representatives of bro culture are on the ascent, bringing with them an army of disaffected young men. But where did they come from? Many argue that a generation of men are resentful because they have fallen behind women in work and school. I believe this shift would not have been so destabilizing were it not for the fact that our society still has one glass-slippered foot in the world of Cinderella.Hundreds of years after the Brothers Grimm published their version of that classic rags-to-riches story, our cultural narratives still reflect the idea that a woman’s status can be elevated by marrying a more successful man — and a man’s diminished by pairing with a more successful woman. Now that women are pulling ahead, the fairy tale has become increasingly unattainable. This development is causing both men and women to backslide to old gender stereotypes and creating a hostile division between them that provides fuel for the exploding manosphere. With so much turmoil in our collective love lives, it’s little wonder Americans are experiencing surging loneliness, declining birthrates and — as evidenced by Donald Trump’s popularity with young men — a cascade of resentment that threatens to reshape our democracy.When we think of Prince Charming, most of us probably picture a Disney figure with golden epaulets and great hair. In the Brothers Grimm version of “Cinderella,” he is called simply “the prince,” and neither his looks nor his personality receive even a passing mention. In fact, we learn nothing about him except for the only thing that matters: He has the resources to give Cinderella a far better life than the one she is currently living. Throughout much of Western literature, this alone qualified as a happy ending, given that a woman’s security and sometimes her survival were dependent on marrying a man who could materially support her.Recently, men’s and women’s fortunes have been trending in opposite directions. Women’s college enrollment first eclipsed men’s around 1980, but in the past two decades or so this gap has become a chasm. In 2022, men made up only 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds at four-year schools, and their graduation rates were lower than women’s as well. Since 2019, there have been more college-educated women in the work force than men.Cinderella may now have her own castle — single women are also exceeding single men in rates of homeownership — but she is unlikely to be scouring the village for a hot housekeeper with a certain shoe size. A 2016 study in The Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that even when economic pressure to marry up is lower, cultural pressure to do so goes nowhere. A recent paper from economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve found that since the 1960s, when women’s educational attainment and work force participation first began to surge, Americans’ preference for marrying someone of equal or greater education and income has grown significantly.Our modern fairy tales — romantic comedies — reflect this reality, promoting the fantasy that every woman should have a fulfilling, lucrative career … and also a husband who is doing just a little better than she is. In 2017, a Medium article analyzed 32 rom-coms from the 1990s and 2000s and discovered that while all starred smart, ambitious women, only four featured a woman with a higher-status job than her male love interest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      I’m 16. On Nov. 5 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft.

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      On the morning after the election, I walked up the staircase of my school. A preteen was crying into the shoulders of her braces-clad peer. Her friend was rubbing circles on her back.I continued up the stairs to the lounge, where upperclassmen linger before classes. There I saw two tables: One was filled with my girlfriends, many of them with hollows under their eyes. There was a blanket of despair over the young women in the room. I looked over to the other table of teenage boys and saw Minecraft on their computers. While we were gasping for a breath, it seemed they were breathing freely.We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.What made my skin burn most wasn’t that over 75 million people voted for Donald Trump. It was that this election didn’t seem to measurably change anything for the boys around me, whether their parents supported Mr. Trump or not. Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. ​​We don’t even share the same future.I am scared that the Trump administration will take away or restrict birth control and Plan B — the same way they did abortion. I am scared that the boys I know will see in a triumphant, boastful Mr. Trump the epitome of a manly man and model themselves after him. I was 8 years old the first time he was elected. Now I am 16. I am still unable to vote, but I am so much more aware of what I have to lose.I have seen the ways in which many of the boys in my generation can be different from their fathers. The #MeToo movement went mainstream when they were still wearing Superman pajamas. On Tuesdays in health class, they learn about the dangers of inebriated consent. They don’t pretend to gag when a girl mentions her period or a tampon falls out of her backpack. They don’t find sexist jokes all that funny and don’t often make them in public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump, Vance y sus aliados insultan a las mujeres al final de la contienda electoral

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      Trump ha utilizado un lenguaje misógino para referirse a Harris, fomentando un ambiente entre sus aliados y en sus mítines que se regodea en los insultos sexistas.De pie en su mitin final de la campaña de 2024, el expresidente Donald Trump, en los primeros minutos después de la medianoche del día de las elecciones, utilizó un rudo comentario sexista para atacar a la representante Nancy Pelosi, la expresidenta de la Cámara de Representantes quien es una de sus rivales políticas de larga data.“Es una mala persona”, dijo Trump en el Van Andel Arena de Grand Rapids, Míchigan. “Malvada. Es una malvada, enferma, loca”. Hizo una mueca exagerada, con la boca abierta para llamar la atención sobre la siguiente sílaba: “Pe…”.Luego levantó un dedo dramáticamente, fingiendo que se había dado cuenta. “Oh, no”, dijo. Mientras miles de personas se echaban a reír, Trump pronunció la palabra por el micrófono. “Empieza por P, pero no la diré”, añadió Trump. “Quiero decirla”.Mientras la multitud rugía aún más fuerte, algunos de los asistentes empezaron a suministrar la palabra que él apenas había omitido, gritando: “¡Perra!”.En los últimos días de la contienda, Trump ha hecho llamamientos directos a las mujeres mientras hace frente a una brecha de género en las encuestas que les ha preocupado a él y a su equipo. Ha evitado mencionar su papel en el nombramiento de los jueces de la Corte Suprema que anularon el derecho constitucional al aborto, una cuestión que, según las encuestas, es una de las principales preocupaciones de las votantes femeninas.Pero, al mismo tiempo, Trump ha utilizado un lenguaje misógino para referirse a la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris y ha fomentado un ambiente en sus mítines en el que oradores y asistentes se sienten cómodos profiriendo el tipo de insultos de género que, en otra época política, habría sido impensable decir en público.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Bad Do You Want It, Ladies?

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      Usually, I get political wisdom from Rahm Emanuel, not his brother Ari.But a quote from Ari, the Hollywood macher, to Puck’s Matthew Belloni about the gender chasm in 2024 caught my eye.“This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes,” Ari said. “You probably have 60 percent of the male vote for Trump, and the female vote is 60-40 for Kamala. It’s a jump ball. We’re gonna find out who wants this more — men or women.”Are we back to the days of Mars versus Venus? Or did we never leave?It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.Drilling into the primal yearnings of men and women — their priorities, identities, anger and frustration — makes this election even more fraught. When I wrote a book about gender in 2005, I assumed that, a couple of decades later, we’d all be living peacefully on the same planet. But no Cassandra, I. The sexual revolution intensified our muddle, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence in the 21st century. The more we imitated men, the more we realized how different we were.Progress zigzags. But it was dispiriting to see the fierce backlash to Geraldine Ferraro, Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton’s co-presidency and candidacy.In Kamala Harris’s case, the backlash is evident even before the election. Surveys reflect the same doubts about a woman in the White House that I saw covering Ferraro in 1984. Many men — and many women — still wonder if women are too emotional to deal with world leaders and lead the military.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More