The other night, I was doing my weekly grocery shopping when I beheld an incredible scene. (I shop at a remote suburban store, as I told my therapist, because the vibes at the one in the city are “demonic.”) I walked through the sliding doors at roughly the same time as a family of four – mom, dad, and two girls, both in the 6-10 age range – and I got a rare chance to observe the full life cycle of an American nuclear family errand in the wild. What I saw astonished me. Mom was worked up, muttering (to herself, no one was listening) about what items they needed and darting around the produce section like a stressed aquarium fish to grab them. The two girls were wantonly misbehaving, screaming at each other, obstructing the aisles with the family shopping cart, bumping into strangers, knocking lemons and limes off their stacked pyramidal displays. And dad, ugly and inert as a barnacle, just stood there, motionless, scrolling on his phone. Occasionally he would glance up and, noting that the epicenter of the family earthquake had moved, take a few halfhearted steps in the general direction of the action. At one point, mom was several aisles away retrieving coffee (why hubby could not bag the broccoli while she got the coffee remains unresolved), and one of the girls rocked the shopping cart so riotously that she would have launched herself headfirst out of it and onto the hard floor had not big sis not reflexively rescued her at the last minute, setting the cart aright. As this went down, dad, still on his phone, looked up and inclined forward, in a way I recognized. It’s what I used to do during team sports in middle school whenever the ball came anywhere near me, an uneasy gesture at the intent to participate, but not actual movement. It ensures that somebody else will get there to deal with it first.
I beamed this man a continuous dirty look as I bagged my onions and selected my bananas. And the thing is, he actually already looked embarrassed, a flush of humiliation glowing from behind the expression he was trying just a little bit too hard to keep neutral. I recognize that look too, it’s the look of someone who feels awkward standing uselessly amid a lot of activity that they don’t understand how to correctly participate in. So while I felt contempt first and mostly for dad, I felt some also for mom. I’m allowed to say this because of my Lived Experience: straight women do get some kind of really weird jouissance from the overfunctioning they’re forced to do in straight relationships. (I’ll refer you to the infuriating recent article in The Cut about women “quiet quitting” their marriages, psychologically damaging their children by claiming to stay “for them” because they’re too weak, scared, comfortable, or crucially, subconsciously pleased to let go.) There were two interlocking and complementary gender scripts playing out in public (the eternal heterosexual kink, of playing out your psychodrama in public). Mom knows what to do and Dad doesn’t, and they both sort of hate and resent each other for it, but this is the unhappy equilibrium that they can evidently both live with.
Based on the behavior of men that I witness in real life, there is something deeply pathological going on with them at an emotional level. I think there is also a parallel disturbance in the collective psyches of straight women. This is why the male loneliness epidemic article in the New Yorker by Jessica Winter hit like a Camel menthol and Japanese jazz – gratifying to read on a molecular level. Winter deconstructs the “loneliness epidemic” “crisis of masculinity” hysteria by closely examining some of the writings and podcast remarks of centrist male loneliness pundits, full-timers like Scott Galloway and moonlighters like Rahm Emanuel and Gavin Newsom. First, she surfaces some of the assumptions implicit in these commentators’ takes on the “crisis,” namely, that women actually are just kind of inferior, but not in a misogynist way or anything like that. In response to a Rahm Emanuel op-ed in which he’s lamenting the unaffordability of housing for young men (but don’t worry, the party’s future “is not Mamdani’s New York”), she writes: “In other words, men and women pay the same bill, but we are obligated to understand that the social and spiritual price it extracts from men is higher.” And a little bit later: “What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be.”
Reading sentences like this feels like inhaling crack cocaine. (I think.) It feels absolutely electric for somebody to just fucking say it, to pithily give voice to what we already know, that the centrist Dem’s belated and lukewarm attempt to embrace male crisis discourse amounts to so much special pleading for boys. Winter is astute; they do this because they fear socialism (or even just the whiff of popular, progressive politics) much more than they care affirmatively about anything at all. It’s special pleading because they want to design a rhetorical strategy to confront the men’s grievances in the vernacular of gender roles rather than macroeconomic realities. In other words, like the dad inclining his head forward as his daughters nearly self-destruct, they want to be seen as making a plausible effort to address men’s grievances without addressing the real causes of those grievances in the slightest. Winter musters a lot of statistics that get heavy play in male crisis discourse and shows that they actually are affecting girls and women, too – it’s an “everything crisis” (not a masculinity crisis) that affects “young people,” not just young men.
By feinting to our young men in crisis, the centrist Dems Winter is skewering here are really just hoping to cash in on right-wing discourse in a way that they can fundraise off of, and maybe hoping that someone else gets there first to deal with it. They are the opposition party, so this is fucking stupid, and it amounts to divide and conquer, or as we might say, “identity politics.” The issue is not whether men “deserve” identity politics or the politics of grievance, emotion, and personal crisis. That’s what the entire discourse, in its centrist and leftist flavors, is intended to get us yapping about. The real issue, underneath all this, is an alarming erosion of popular power over the last few years. I think this accounts for my sense, reading Winter’s article, that we are all so close to getting it, although it’s not entirely clear what it is. The polycrisis, the concentrated effects on younger people, the whole goodie bag of familiar issues, made me think about something which I’ve been turning over and over in my head but have been reluctant to flesh out and post, because it might just amount to folk economics – I think that the “everything” crisis, affecting women as well as men is connected to a tectonic shift in the nexus of political economy. Specifically, that economy is moving away from consumption. Americans, who in our lifetimes and our parents’ have only ever experienced political subjectivity as consumers, are experiencing this shift as a real political disempowerment and fracturing. A real loss of ground, or status threat, or however a Richard Reeves might put it.
It’s simply not important for regular people like us to have spending money to stabilize and juice anymore. Of course, this has been a trend for decades that has accelerated a lot with the Trump administration, which is now just openly picking our pockets. I think a lot of leftist criticism has totally failed to account for how much liberal consensus consumerism was a source of popular power – there was a time, that I can even remember, where the need to not destabilize or piss off the American consumer too much, in the name of realizing profits, served as a kind of floor (a low floor, but a floor nevertheless) for domestic policy. That’s clearly over now. Everybody is disempowered now, and everybody is threatened. Another way of framing Winter’s argument, perhaps, is that women are culturally conditioned to accept and adjust to disempowerment (just another day), while men are culturally conditioned to resent and reject it, and act that resentment out in violence towards themselves and others. Political violence in America is not explicitly political. It looks lateral, personal, pathological, and random. This is not surprising, because to the extent that we think culturally about politics at all, we think about it as customers, which is to say, as consumers and as individuals with individual grievances. So I think the whole male loneliness epidemic is not inherent to gender (obviously), but it does tell us something about how a profound economic and political shift is being lived and expressed culturally through overlapping and competing scripts about gender.