Stop blaming male alienation on female liberation

Bad data and misogyny

This week, John Burn-Murdoch, a data reporter at the Financial Times, shared a graph seemingly showing a growing ideological gap between men and women. The image went viral on the site formerly known as Twitter, with a lot of people hand-wringing over the growing alienation of men.

It’s worth noting that other data scientists have pointed out that the ideological gap between women and men is exaggerated. And that it is about the same as it ever has been.

But the narrative is a sticky one, because it feels true. In the movie Sleepless in Seattle there is this exchange between the characters:

Keith: You know, it's easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to get married over the age of 40.

Annie: That's not true. That statistic is not true.

Becky: That's right, it's not true. But it feels true.

Statistics like this stick because they feel true. But they reveal more about our cultural biases than anything about what America is actually like.

This is the story we want to talk about — about men’s alienation; about how women are leaving them cold, alone, and lost on their ideological island. 

It doesn’t take much to get people to opine about the state of men in America. The Washington Post editorial board and David Brooks will all jump to the rescue when the “but what about the men” bat signal is flashed into the sky, eager to blame these perceived losses on men-hating feminists or the #MeToo movement. 

This “what about the poor lost men?” rhetoric happens in my comments and emails whenever I write about feminism, which is all the time. How can we help men? What about the men? I bet you’ve never thought about men here! These are often questions and comments I hear when I raise the issue of women’s liberation from fear, gender constructs, violence, and oppression.

Asking “what about the men?” is effective because it reframes stories of female liberation into tales of male alienation. And it positions the two interests as opposed. As if our liberation and our freedoms were not inextricably entwined.

I’ve written in the past about sexual assault and statute of limitations laws. Every time I’ve written about this topic, I’ve talked to male assault survivors, and every time these men, who are usually older, tell me it was the #MeToo movement that helped them understand what happened to them was abuse, and was not their fault. A movement that has been maligned for oppressing men has actually aided in liberation.

I’ve begun to do interviews for my forthcoming book This American Ex-Wife, and already I’ve been asked about how encouraging women to seek their happiness could affect men. Think of all the husbands left behind by these newly empowered women is the concern implicit in the question. But the reality is that if your sense of well-being was predicated on the misery of your partner, you didn’t have well-being in the first place. What you had was a lie. 

The zero-sum capitalist thinking presumes that if women are winning (we aren’t, btw) then men must be losing. But a  2022 report on boys in the U.K. suggested that when young boys learn about gender stereotypes, misogyny, allyship with women, and different types of masculinity it leads to better educational attainment and mental health.

Whenever there is a story of men as a whole being left behind or losing, it’s so often blamed on women. Rarely do we talk about how liberation and freedom benefit everyone. 

Further reading:

• Previously, I’ve written about how liberal women should not marry conservative men.

• And I’ve also written about the “marriageability gap.”

Also, Gisele Fetterman, do you need a copy of this book and would you like to come on a podcast?