Did #MeToo Kinda F*ck Over Masculinity?
“An ugly boy asked her to a dance. It was so traumatic for her. So toxic.”
I went to a wine club on Friday of mostly retired engineers. It was pretty fun. Some good conversations. When I got home, I watched this:
I’ve consumed a lot, and I mean a lot, of “the downfall of masculinity” content since 2020. I’ve written about it a lot too. This video above is a good summation of some big themes around modern masculinity and what’s happening.
As with most “disappearance/decline of men” takes, the video purports that #MeToo messed up men. I’ve heard this from about 120 different sources. If you’re unfamiliar with all of this, the general thinking is that #MeToo made men afraid to approach women and afraid of constantly being labeled “toxic,” so you took away some baseline masculine traits (or repressed said traits), and that’s caused a backlash of sorts and messed up the dating market.
Some of that is definitely true, and I think #MeToo was a necessary movement, but ultimately ended up as an overcorrection that applied to both the big fish predators the movement was intended to out and catch but also to regular guys just trying to start up a conversation at a bar. That was one of the flaws. Too much got ensnared in that net.
Actually, probably in mid-2021 at a bar, I heard a mother tell another mother, re: her 10 year-old daughter, “An ugly boy asked her to a dance. It was so traumatic for her. So toxic.” I think that mother used two words incorrectly in that sentence. It really isn’t “traumatic” for an ugly boy to ask you out; most women will be asked out by plenty of ugly boys, and if that’s your bar for trauma, there’s a long way down from there. I also don’t think it’s “toxic” for someone not perceived as attractive to ask someone else out, but we have scope-creep on many of these terms of late.
What’s really happening with men is a much bigger picture than just #MeToo, and involves:
Fathers are not actively parenting sons.
Video games.
Pornography.
Young men are finding content idols on the right, whereas young women are leaning more left.
The labor market doesn’t value men as much as it once did.
The creeping toxicity of boy moms.
Bad parenting in general.
I’ve written about some of this stuff before. I will not belabor you with every link, but here are two:
Of these, I’d say the biggest ones are (a) lack of active fathers — which is tied to “bad parenting in general” — and the left/right split. The lack of active fathers one is usually dog whistled as a black community thing, and while it’s definitely true there statistically, a lot of two-parent households of affluence have less-than-active fathers. Women have been bemoaning this for years, especially on the domestic front, but since 2018 it feels like there’s a cottage industry of content that talks about how useless husbands are. I could see it. I know I have been useless in pockets, and I’ve never been a dad myself.
I can let dads off the hook a little bit here and point to inflation and economic stressors, and maybe the dad has to be beholden to work and boss more, and that cuts into active parenting time. That’s part of it, but a bigger part of it (to me, at least) is that men often lie about what they value, and claim to be a “family man” when really they just want to be seen as someone “successful” with a lot of material trappings. I think most men take fatherhood seriously, but there are caveats to how seriously they take it and where it falls on the priority list. I don’t think it’s usually №1, and it probably should be 1 or 1A. I think “motherhood” usually is 1 or 1A for women, although there does seem to be a rise in performative motherhood of late, so maybe it’s 1, 1A, or priority №2.
The left-right split is complicated, and definitely impacting dating down the chain. I would assume that women are mostly getting leftist views from their moms, their friends, Instagram, and TikTok. There are a lot of bleeding heart creators on those latter two platforms. Meanwhile, I don’t entirely know why young men would gravitate towards Rogan, but I think maybe it’s lack of strong males in the schools, the athletics programs, and at home. Mr. Beast is a tiny bit toxic, but he just makes dumb fun videos, and I could understand why an adolescent boy would want to see a train smash into a giant hole. I mean, I was a boy once. I get it.
But if young girls go further left and young boys go further right, and both have their faces buried in their phones most of the day, it’s much harder to see how “dating” and “coupling up” and “experimenting with sex” would work. It might just work because people get curious, but then we get into other narratives like “the rise of non-discussed choking,” which is deeply tied to porn.
Ultimately, on the “demise/disappearance of men” stuff, I usually come down here: what do we want men to be? If we want them to be virile economic providers, well, OK, that narrative is established. I do think some women want that model to continue. So we need that model, but with less toxicity? Got it. So for that to work, we need to define specifically what “toxic” means and no, it’s not a fugly 10 year-old boy giving your daughter a Valentine in school. We need a more tightened definition of what makes a boy “toxic.”
Now, if we want men to be vulnerable and domestic and more open with their friends, we have a long way to go on all that. If you’re vulnerable with most guys, they will fucking murder that friendship within years, if not sooner. I’ve lost three good friendships that way. Guys come to see you as “needy” or “too much,” and once they have kids and more responsibilities on that front, they just abandon you because you represent something they can no longer handle. So I don’t think we can just up and say “Men need to be vulnerable now.” It’s not incentivized in men at all. Also, I really don’t think a 29 year-old woman surrounded by bump photos on Instagram really wants her man crying about his dad and friends to her. She wants a baby.
So maybe we need to define men’s future evolution in terms of life stage, i.e. “development of brain,” “procreation,” “career-and-family-building,” “community involvement,” “retirement,” etc. Men don’t need to be the exact same way at 24 and 75. If they were, that would be pretty confusing, honestly.
The “future of masculinity” discussion lacks any specific guardrails or concepts that we can unify behind, and that’s why it feels so circular. If we decided what we wanted from men, maybe we could move them in that direction — and also move off the #MeToo narrative in the process.
Your take?
Blaming the MeToo movement on the downgrade of masculinity is an invalid take considering the fact that men have woven toxic masculinity so deeply their definitions of masculinity that when women call them out on said toxic masculinity inspired behaviours, they see it as a threat to their masculinity. Men ought to individually sit down and define what masculinity means to them.
Really great read. Agree with you 100% on all fronts