The collapse of men and women

we're not liking each other very much; can we please get a grip?

I recently sat down for dinner with a friend who I’d not seen for 12 months and she declared apropos nothing other than my asking how she was, “I hate men”. This friend works in politics (in Australia; centre-right orientation), has a good husband, and a son. But, as she told me, she’s “over it”.

It’s not the first time a woman has told me they’re over “men”. Here, I put “men” in inverted comments to signify that I, and other women like my friend, are referring to the phenomenon of men, of men as a force in our culture, not #hashtag all the individual men out there. This sentiment has become pervasive, with women increasingly unapologetic about voicing it, sometimes in frustrated carelessness (I can certainly be accused of this).

I’m, equally, picking up from a lot of men (in particular single men) that they are (and I think this is the right word) resenting “women” (in inverted commas for the same reason as above, obvs).

I’ve been on the planet 51 years. I studied feminism at university. I edited a women’s magazine. I have worked in several all-male environments and I have four brothers who I am supremely close to. My friends are split 50:50, men and women. For a female writer, I have always had a large male audience (well over the standard 10-20 per cent) who interact with me actively. Which is to say, I have been substantially alive to where both sexes and genders are at for most of my life. And I have never seen the gender landscape this brittle. All kinds of recent polls monitoring polarisation between the sexes are reflecting the same.

It’s horrible. And existentially worrying.

I’ve hesitated in writing this post for a long time. I’ve not known how to address the issue in a way that won’t stoke existing tensions. Plus, I’ve not had a neat fix to proffer. But I increasingly feel there is a need for the issue to be aired. We dearly do not want to be hating on each other (the women I know “hating on” men often add the caveat that they also love men). But, crucially, we also can’t afford to be hating on each other. As we struggle with all the other collapsing systems around us, we are going to need each other. The sacred, or healthy, masculine will need to hold the sacred, healthy feminine, and vice versa.

So today I’ll just ignite a conversation here that might produce some discerning, compassionate and helpful perspectives among us. I invite constructive input grounded in genuine curiosity and care, from everyone here. I’d particularly like to hear from the blokes.

🫶🏻 Side bar: Increasingly I’m struggling to be able to proffer fixes and meaty conclusions in my writing. I have thought to stop emitting anything here for a while, and was close to choosing this route last week. But I remembered my own sermon, from my own book: Staying in the ambiguity, the unfathomable complexity and the always-emerging truth is the entire point now! Collapse demands bearing, not fixes.

🫶🏻 Another side bar: Subscriber

Geoff

and I, and a bunch of others, have been having a conversation in the chat thread this week about the value or otherwise - of drawing on “generalised” statements, say, for example, with gender. I’m sure this post will attract a similar debate. I invite you to go check out my thoughts on the matter in the comments thread, here. TL;DR: Generalisations have always been required as a shorthand for humans to understand the patterns and behaviours around them. They’re also often simply describing actual stereotypes that have been imposed on certain groups by culture. If generalisations are used in good faith (ie in the service of understanding a cultural force; voicing the needs of the injured) then they should be taken in good faith (ie not defensively seen as an attack on any individual within a group or phenomenon).

🫶🏻 Caveat: I’m aware of the gender and sex spectrums and respect them. But, again, the points being aired here are not intended to be narrowed to individuals. And are also not limited to the sexual and romantic relations between heterosexual men and women.

Which is all to say….to air this issue, I will have to express a few things in broad brushstrokes without getting too bogged down in caveats. This is one such: Women today (broadly speaking¹) grew up pushed. They were pushed (encouraged to rise, to resist etc) in order to overcome stereotypes, to “have it all” (which, sadly, amounted to “doing it all”), to therapise and take responsibility for the trauma that came with so much growth, and so on. We landed in the present moment somewhat assuming men had been doing similar work. They (largely)² have not. Somewhere along the way, they got left behind. And so women are baffled and frustrated.

There is so much more to say on just these points, but the one I’m trying to get to is this…

Women are essentially feeling unmet and disappointed

Last month New York Times Magazine ran a cover feature that picked up on this, referencing the new terms “heteropessimism” and “heterofatalism”, coined by the sexuality scholar Asa Seresin. Both terms describe the outlook of straight women fed up with the behavior of men within heterosexual dynamics.

The writer speculates that heterofatalism has emerged from the burnout of doing the emotional labour of trying to partner with a man.

Maybe this is the utility of “heterofatalism” — naming the bitter pill before we force ourselves to swallow it and put on a carefree smile. Nice to meet you, “good guy”; I am “woman who expects nothing.”

The phenomenon comes with its own suite of memes by women who lament that they were born attracted to male pheromones. I’m seeing them everywhere - in MSM, online and being referenced in conversation. You too?

There’s also a whole sub-genre of memes about how an incredible man (he can cook! wash his own clothes! commit to a rendezvous and turn up on time!) is basically just “an average woman”.

There are also a bunch male influencers chiming in (cashing in) on the theme. This French guy nails it:

erosbroissant

A post shared by @erosbroissant

In the parallel universe that is Gen Z online culture, I’ve noticed a slightly different trend. Rather than getting vexed and tied up in frustration, young women are taking what appears to be a self-protecting, dismissive approach. They will simply caption a video of a man doing something…disappointing… with, “Are men ok?”. The fact they don’t bother to deconstruct or opine on what is going on in the video or image says a lot. So does the fact they relegate “men” to a mere object in their enquiry (the question is not, “Men, are you ok?”). Young women are meeting men’s avoidant meh behaviour with yet more avoidant meh. And so the chasm widens…

Women are also feeling exhausted

A week after the heterofatalism article was published, the same newspaper ran a feature on “mankeeping”, a term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara at Stanford University to describe the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives.

“The concept has taken on a bit of a life of its own, with some articles going so far as to claim that mankeeping has “ruined” dating and driven women to celibacy.”

I think it’s also driving women to queer relationships (per the meme above). It certainly has with a number of women in my intimate circle.

Meanwhile, men feel they’ve been left behind

I think it would be fair to say that “men” are feeling that boy’s and men’s needs have been misunderstood and neglected in recent years, and masculine qualities have been denigrated.

It’s clearly true that boys and men are suffering. Two-thirds of young men feel that “no one really knows” them. Their real wages have been falling since the 1970s. They’re dropping out of education and the workforce in growing numbers and AI is likely to see a disproporiate number of white collar male workers lose their jobs in coming years LINK. They die deaths of despair at almost three times the rate of women. Even their sperm count and physical strength is collapsing.

But the argument is also often made by a lot of men that this has been a result of the women’s movement - the focus on girls and women for the past, say, four decades has necessarily deprioritised men. Which is where the resentment comes in, and, shortly thereafter, Andrew Tate and all the grifters.

Men are also feeling “man-bashed”. They’re interpreting the palpable disappointment of women as an attack, rather than a desperate plea.

This guy talks to this pretty well:

alessandro_frosali

A post shared by @alessandro_frosali

OK, now for some more discerning (and uncomfortable) thoughts

The above is essentially where the debate tends to get to. Whereupon it quickly spirals and turns frustrated and resentful.

I’d like to now flesh out a few more nuanced points that extend the conversation but are possibly quite prickly for some (which is why this hoary issue rarely progresses further - it gets prickly fast). It is absolutely not serving any of us to stay in this spiral…

• Right off the bat, I will say that we need to drop this idea that feminism and women are the cause of what men and boys are experiencing. A substantial 2024 study found feminist women’s opinion of men are no harsher than those of non-feminist women or, indeed, men. In fact, it found feminists actually have more positive regard for “men” than non-feminists. In my experience feminist theory has always aimed to lift women and men from the grip of patriarchy. Feminists tend to be aware the problematic male behaviour often emerges from the system.

• Instead, we need to acknowledge that the cause of men’s pain is patriarchy. And capitalism. If feminism and women do contribute to the male crisis it is to the extent that both have been, over the years, co-opted by capitalism and patriarchy such that they, too, have become maladjusted cogs in the economic system.

• We need to be clear and honest about what the actual crises are. And what is responsible for them. Pew Research, for instance, showed 16% of both men and women report feeling lonely or isolated all or most of the time. The reason why we’re hearing so much about male loneliness is because of the way men are taught - by the system - to handle the affliction. Instead of seeking out connection, or being prompted to foster friendships, as women tend to, men tend to deny the lonely feelings and do nothing to alleviate it.

• Which is something that subscriber

  Rodrick West
  outlines in his comment here. He also points out that:

  “From the evidence, it is women…that we need to have compassion for and give attention to. For the first time men's suicide rates are on the decrease and women's are on the rise. Over the last 100 years female suicide rates have risen 50% and mens have fallen 30%. Women are using 250% more antidepressants than men. Longitudinal studies, like those of Yale University and others, comparing women's versus men's happiness, revealed that around 15 years ago for the first time since studies began, men's happiness is outstripping women's with male happiness increasing and female happiness decreasing. It's most pronounced in younger men being much happier than younger women (country variations of course). Anxiety rates and social phobias are over 50% higher for young women than young men….”

  I’ve covered this reality before. And have argued that there is a distinct correlation going on between the uptick in young women’s despair (vis a vis the gender divide) and the number of them deciding to abandon being a girl and undergo transition therapy.

  The gender-y culture war is hard to wade into. Let's do it.

• There’s also this…

  T Shea
  wrote in the comments last week, reflecting something I hear from a lot of women around me, “TBH, I'm really just feeling over the ‘plight of men’ conversation dominating right now, and I am raising a young man.” I think there are a few reasons for this reaction…

• It’s hard to be cool and compassionate about something you’re being inaccurately - and sometimes violently - blamed for.

• Ditto it’s hard to be cool and compassionate when you’re expected to “mankeep” the situation. It galling. In an interview with

  Liz Plank
  , Scott Galloway, fresh and enthused to the "plight of man” conversation (and writing a book about the male loneliness crisis) says “we often tell men to ‘fix their problems,’ something we’d never say to a Black person or a woman.” I’m not sure that’s true. I think there is certainly, however, an expectation that men get engaged in and take responsibility for their problems. Regardless, the inverse is more probably true - Black people and women have historically been prevented (and often violently so) from fixing their problems by men or by the system that has largely benefited men. As
  Liz Plank
  writes:

  “The tacit request that women now solve this problem for [men], as we’ve been asked to solve so many others, is not just unproductive. It’s offensive. It’s a continuation of the very system that treats women as emotional infrastructure, expected to carry men’s pain while still healing from the damage it caused.”

• Liz makes another discerning point - a lot of women have been talking this stuff for a very long time, but been met with (again, often violent) resistance. And so it’s also galling to be expected to have oodles of energy and compassion now that men are feeling the pinch of patriarchy and want attention on the issue.

  “When men say, “We’re hurting,” the response isn’t, “Too bad.” It’s, “Welcome. Now grab a shovel.” Because while the pain may feel new to you, the fire has been burning for generations. And many of us have been here for years, digging through the wreckage with blistered hands, trying to build something safer from the ash.”

  She also points out that men need to learn that the man crisis is a mirror that is enabling them to see what has been going on all along.

It would be easy to label the above points as man-bashing. But that would be to strawman the discussion, I think. I believe they are refined points that have to be acknowledged squarely if we are to move forward. There are many more (such points) and I’m aware I’m probably honing in on the ones that are part of my lived experience. Please do add any I’ve missed in the comments.

So where does it all land us?

I’ll put down my thoughts/opinions…they are my thoughts/opinions only. It’s all up for curious, discerning discussion…

• Men need a mass, healthy “masculinist” movement (their version of the feminist movement) that works to expose and deconstruct the system’s hold on them, and that will fight as a powerful collective for better conditions for all men and boys. Indeed, for all humans. Heck, for all of life!

• They need to do this themselves; it can’t be driven by women. Because rarely in the history of women telling men what to do have men done what women tell them to do. OK, this is some indulgent essentialising, but I do think that men need to learn from each other, boys need role-modelling, and change only happens when you are the true agent of it.

• To this end, we all need to be very aware that change also only ever happens when the pain of staying outweighs the pain of shifting. It might, therefore, be some time before the bulk of men are prompted or shoved into any kind of movement against the patriarchy. The pain is going to have to get a lot worse before we see any progression. A lot of men still think they benefit from staying in patriarchy. Which necessarily means we will need to brace for this and we will have to commit to bearing it with a shit-ton of radical compassion in what could be a protracted, violent, avoidant “meantime”.

• Women will also need to be patient. As my friend Michael said to me, the feminist movement took more than 100 years to gather momentum.

• Men will need to pick up their pace and try to catch up, before too many young men get hit with the pain too acutely. (And before they lose women to the chasm.) And they will need to learn to stop gaslighting, blaming, strawmanning and brain scrambling when the mirror gets uncomfortable. And show young men how to do the same.

• Men would be well advised, as they do this new masculinist work, to read the huge body of work created by the feminist movement (and reference appropriately). There are dozens of decades of resources and theories ready to assist. The bulk of feminist theory and activism, as I say, was engineered to lift men as well as women from the grip of patriarchy (despite what the manosphere says).

• Men would be also well advised to read more work by women, period.

• Men can feel reassured, I reckon, that a healthy masculinist revolution initiated by men, will be encouraged, supported, cheer-leadered by most women. We will roll out red carpets and throw confetti. We won’t be killing or jailing you for your efforts.

The above might read to some of you as too onerous. It entails a lot of compassion, tolerance and patience. A lot of bearing. However, this bearing can be done more artfully than we might imagine. I’m inclined to think Gen Z women might have something to offer other women here. We could choose to bear from more of a self-preserving distance that protects us against the crazy-making frustration and disappointment (although it might be best to leave out the dismissive disdain).

I’d also add that an invite exists here to make this onerous bearing both loving and empowering. Instead of being the injured, exhausted, burdened party in the equation, women could choose to take a true leadership role. We can be firm on the facts (“It’s the patriarchy, not women, causing this”), we can create boundaries, and we can be the calm, loving presence that doesn’t take over responsibility, but says, as

Liz Plank

phrases it, Welcome. “Yes, welcome, you are not alone and you are entirely human to feel this way. Let’s do this mad thing together.”

Men can choose to (humbly) relax into this inclusion. And can also derive satisfaction from the growth that they’ll experience.

And we can all laugh about it a bit more often.

As I said at the outset, I was very hesitant to delve into this subject and to tease out the stuff that most of us tend to abandon with a pained “I hate men” outburst, or a “women are just out to get us” offloading.

But set against a systems collapse framing, it’s clear we need to resolve this chasm urgently, before the fascist forces at play weaponise it. I mean, they already are with the clamp downs on women’s reproductive rights and so on. Recently The Guardian did a horrifying experiment to expose how the Tech Bros are doing exactly this. Then they set up Facebook and Instagram accounts for a bunch of “fake” twenty-four year old men. The profiles had no friends, no viewing history, and they turned off all ad tracking, so there was nothing to draw the men’s interests from. The journalists then let the accounts just sit dormant. It took only three days for these accounts to be deluged with misogynist material.

Working to unify against the patriarchy together could be an ultimate act of defiance. And love. Choosing to bear together could be what moves us through everything else. Doug Rushkoff just interviewed a sex expert on his Team Human podcast and they discuss the fact that, historically, in times of crisis, men and women have sex. Which is not such a bad antidote…

OK, keen to hear your ideas now…

Sarah xx

1. Obviously not all women…but we’re not going to keep adding these caveats.

2. OK, this is the last time I’m bogging down the flow with a caveat. Cool?