Male self-esteem is indexed to wealth, an unstable prospect in a highly economically unequal society. In search of an alternative source of validation, many young men are turning to misogynistic ideas. The Left needs to provide alternatives of our own.

The Netflix series Adolescence, which follows the aftermath of a teen boy’s murder of a female classmate, has amassed nearly 100 million views, making it one of the streamer’s biggest hits to date. Viewers have praised the show’s nuanced portrayal of a youth social world pervaded with the views of the misogynist online “manosphere.” But not everyone is a fan. A spokesman for top manosphere influencer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, who is named directly in the show, told Newsweek:

The reference to Andrew Tate in Adolescence is an attempt to pin broader societal issues on one individual, which is neither fair nor accurate. Whilst online influence is a valid topic, it’s unjust for the public to make him the scapegoat for complex problems like radicalization and violence, which stem from far wider cultural and systemic factors.

Tate’s spokesman has a point: his noxious brand of seething chauvinism is symptomatic of sweeping cultural and economic trends. Anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee, who previously spoke to Jacobin’s Meagan Day about the political economy of tradwives, returns for this discussion about the social pressures and contradictions that elevate figures like Tate and deliver young men into their orbit.

Kristen Ghodsee is the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Everyday Utopia, and many other books and chairs the Russian and East European studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. In this conversation, she proposes that the manosphere is filling a self-esteem void created by the indexing of male value to wealth accumulation in a climate of profound economic inequality. She also proposes that we take seriously the idea that modern society is producing “extra men,” introducing an element of social instability that is everyone’s problem. The question is how to address the issue of lost, angry, and hurting young men without undermining women’s hard-won autonomy.

Meagan Day

What is so attractive to young men about the manosphere right now?

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Boys and young men are very lost. The future looks bleak to them, and they’re struggling to find sources of validation. Most men are economically disenfranchised, yet male social status is still primarily indexed to wealth. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey showed that 71 percent of Americans believe that “it is very important for a man to be able to support a family financially to be a good husband or partner.” Young men get the message that to be desirable and respected, they must make money, yet our economy makes that incredibly difficult.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, they believe that without cash, women won’t want them and other men won’t respect them. They see figures like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos upheld as ideal men, but they know they’ll never get close. So they’re looking for alternatives, something near at hand.

That’s where this jacked-up masculinity comes in. It’s cheaper. Men already have the “equipment” — they were born with it, and half of the population doesn’t have it, which puts them at an automatic advantage. That’s why Tucker Carlson talks about red light therapy for your testicles. It’s all about treasuring your natural resources. Of course, this stuff is all too often predicated on putting women down. Look at Andrew Tate and his open misogyny. Look at how Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters feminize their opponents as much as possible.

In reality, puffing men up for being men is just throwing them a bone for depriving them of the fruits of their labor. This is a classic move when you have a massively disenfranchised population that poses a threat to social stability. You need to placate them. In Everyday Utopia, I write about how historically, one way to placate angry young men who may destabilize an economic system beset by vast inequality is to give every man a wife so he can be a dictator in his own home. When men feel disempowered in the public sphere, they can channel that frustration at home: “At least in my own house, I’m a king.” This is an ancient technique for social stabilization.

Young men aren’t thinking about it critically, and many of them mean well. Most guys, especially young men I teach, just want esteem. They want to be respected, loved, and appreciated. It’s not nefarious at all, but it ends up in this terrible place.

Meagan Day

Inequality among men is a major fixation for the manosphere. The “alpha” and “beta” discourse is about intramale inequality. The whole “80–20” incel discourse is about male winners and losers, which is also the central and highly dramatized conceit of the UFC. It’s Trump’s leitmotif too. It’s as though the collective psyche is ruminating on the issue of male social rank.

This isn’t intrinsic to masculinity or inevitable in society, right? Tell me about the compression of inequality between men in Eastern European state socialism, and what effect that had on men’s way of relating to each other and to women.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

There was still patriarchy in Eastern Europe — getting rid of capitalism doesn’t automatically eliminate patriarchy. But they detached patriarchy from its role in upholding wealth inequality, and that blunted it.

There were also still inequalities, but these were inequalities of privilege, not wealth. Even at the highest level of Communist society, there were limits on how big your apartment could be. You couldn’t have a mansion. It was very difficult to get a car, and if you did, it was the same car everyone else got. People showed off by bragging about how many books they’d read and what month they got assigned to visit their communal seaside resorts. (July was the most high-status month to go, by the way.)

In order to attract partners and get social esteem, men were not invested in making more money, which wouldn’t work in a socialist society anyway (because there wasn’t anything to buy). In this context, women chose partners based on attraction, mutual compatibility, shared interests, and affection — not on whether the man could pay the rent, which was irrelevant, because you had housing from the state. These states also provided child allowances, childcare, and paid job-protected parental leave. Under socialism, men had to be attentive and good partners in order to attract women.

The result, as I documented in my book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, was that men ended up investing in being interesting guys that women wanted to be with. Of course, this improved gender relations!

After socialism, once wealth became important for attracting women, men found that it was much easier to just get money than to be interesting. This shift was obviously bad for women, but it was also bad for men. I’ve talked to men who grew up under socialism who say that after 1989 or ’91, they were never really sure if women were with them because they loved them or because they needed their money. They have an idealized view of relationships before capitalism because if a woman was with you, it was because she genuinely liked you. That made men feel secure.

Meagan Day

You said something a moment ago about elites placating young men because they’re afraid of their destabilizing potential. What did you mean?

Kristen R. Ghodsee

There is a ton of anthropological research about the way that disenfranchised and unpartnered young men pose a serious threat to the social order. There’s one fascinating article in particular by Joseph Henrich and colleagues about how polygamy is inherently unstable, because polygamous societies produce a class of unmarried low-status men. These men then engage in all kinds of antisocial behaviors because they have nothing to lose.

Capitalism and monogamy usually go hand in hand, and that’s not a coincidence. People often note that monogamy is important for capitalism because it facilitates the intergenerational transfer of wealth from fathers to legitimate sons. But one thing we overlook is how, in a society with incredible inequality among men — a few very wealthy men at the top and many not-wealthy men at the bottom — those disadvantaged men are a problem for those in power. Monogamy ensures that the men who get all the wealth don’t also get all the wives. Thus, building on the work of Henrich and of historians like Laura Betzig, I’ve argued that socially imposed universal monogamy is a tool by which elite men maintain stability in an unequal society. If you can redistribute wives more broadly through society, you can stave off social chaos and unrest.

A 2016 paper tested the relationship between monogamy and male violence and found that having a partner did indeed reduce violent male behavior. One 2019 paper on “excess men” in the Journal of Conflict Resolution also found good evidence that “young men who belong to polygynous groups,” or polygamous societies involving multiple wives per husband and thus many single men, “feel that they are treated more unequally and are readier to use violence in comparison to those belonging to monogamous groups.” Monogamy is the solution to the wife shortage created in societies that still practice polygyny.

But what happens if there’s a shortage of wives because women are getting married later, or aren’t getting married at all, or are exercising their hard-won right to divorce — not because rich men are hoarding them? In other words, because of the advances of feminism and women’s independence? That creates the same problem as polygamy: it produces a class of restless, directionless, potentially volatile, unpartnered men.

And these men are quite vulnerable. For socially constructed reasons, men get their primary emotional support from women, while women get it from each other. In 2022, when I lived in Germany, two of my colleagues were Ukrainian psychologists doing trauma counseling by phone with people on the front lines in Ukraine. They told me almost all their callers were women, even though most soldiers were men and were also dealing with massive trauma. Men were embarrassed to seek psychological help. Young men without emotional support are easily radicalized because they’re suffering real pain.

Meagan Day

You’re proposing we recognize the real destabilizing potential of unpartnered men. Capitalism doesn’t want the chaos they would bring — but neither do we.

It’s a real problem, but of course the solution can’t be rolling back feminist advances or, even worse, “state-mandated girlfriends,” as the incel half-joke goes. Women’s autonomy is contributing to the issue, but we can’t violate women’s autonomy to solve it. So what do we do?

Kristen R. Ghodsee

We need to promote alternative models of masculine achievement besides being a UFC fighter or a billionaire.

As we become more economically unequal, disenfranchised men will be increasingly desperate for methods of distinguishing themselves. We’ll get more manosphere misogyny and with it more bigotry of all kinds. It’s content to distract the bachelors, the “excess men,” and it’s not going away as long as wealth inequality remains unaddressed. The obvious answer is reducing wealth inequality through redistribution. That’s the big project.

Additionally we might imagine other sources of esteem that aren’t rooted in wealth accumulation and raw physical aggression. To accomplish that, we need institutions that reward young unpartnered men for other values. Interestingly there’s one institution full of unpartnered young men that manages to control the chaos energy somewhat, and that’s the military. Why? Because in the military, esteem is achievable. Soldiers get promotions, insignia, and rank that determine how they’re treated, how people salute them. The nonmonetary form of esteem is built into military structures.

Meagan Day

We need institutions that give unpartnered men a reliable source of positive self-regard. Ideally those institutions could be put in the service of ending inequality, rather than just distracting from it or acting out its anxieties — or, in the case of the military, ultimately upholding it.

A highly active labor movement, for example, would reward values like political leadership, community service, political education, and so on. High unionization rates create whole social worlds with their own incentive and affirmation structures. This could be a powerful social stabilizing force.

In the 1930s, unpartnered men at the bottom rungs of society individuated through class struggle. They became people they were proud to be by participating in it. They had adventures worthy of novels by John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair. That feels like a clue.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

This is what I meant by saying we should look to the Eastern European socialist countries. They were really good at building institutions like the Young Pioneers and Komsomol, similar to Boy Scouts or Eagle Scouts. These civic organizations provided systems people could ascend through and feel accomplished. They provided alternative sources of esteem besides wealth accumulation and physical domination. Germany today still has a density of civic organizations. In the United States, as Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, we’ve lost these.

Meagan Day

So the answer to masses of ideologically unstable unpartnered men is not to undo feminism but to resurrect Kiwanis and Lions Clubs?

Kristen R. Ghodsee

[Laughs] Maybe not exactly that, but perhaps weekend soccer leagues or traditional martial arts, where you have belts and ascend through ranks. In a society where everything is about wealth, we need other metrics of achievement — you earn esteem not just because you’re rich or ripped, but because of your accomplishments. These kinds of institutions promote self-esteem and prosocial behavior.

But beyond class struggle and civic organizations, the main thing we need is good jobs. Workplaces can serve the same purpose, but in capitalism they absolutely don’t.

Meagan Day

Right. For the working class, jobs don’t provide a sense of accomplishment or esteem. For many, there’s no rising through the ranks, no sincere congratulations on a job well done, no fulfilling community, no reassuring reflection of yourself. Better jobs wouldn’t just pay better. They’d be reliable sources of self-respect.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

Everybody needs money. But beyond that, everybody wants the same thing: to be appreciated, validated, and recognized for who they are and what they give to the world. That’s why Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life was such a huge bestseller. It was a book talking to young men and telling them, “Here are some ways you can get esteem.” They’re hungry for it.

As socialists, feminists, and humanists, we absolutely must understand this. Our politics must be grounded in it, and we should propose viable alternatives that can make people feel better about themselves.

Meagan Day

I would certainly rather address the problem of restless disenfranchised bachelors by redistributing wealth and rebuilding civic organizations than by forcing women back into a position of financial and legal dependency on men.

Kristen R. Ghodsee

The Right is very actively trying to pursue the latter option. They’ve already overturned Roe v. Wade. They’re shaming women, like J. D. Vance’s dig at “childless cat ladies,” and they’re promoting tradwife content to convince women to leave the workforce. Some conservatives are even already talking about making divorce harder, since women are the primary initiators of divorce. They want to prevent women from leaving marriages to deal with this problem.

Guys like Andrew Tate are trying to convince young men that there is no other route to admiration and status than through wealth and domination over each other and over women — and if they try to pursue other avenues, they’re not real men.

If men had an alternative form of validation, they would be happier. But our society is based on this competitive notion that we’re all better off if everybody is fighting for scraps from the billionaire’s table. It’s a form of social control. Young men who buy into all of this manosphere stuff need to hear that they’re being distracted and used.

Great Job Kristen R. Ghodsee & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.

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