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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Repeal the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, and then let the man of the house vote for the household. If you think that anyone who advocates for that is too fringe to be taken seriously, think again. It’s the view of Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson, the pastor who co-founded CREC, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. CREC has a network of about 170 churches, including the one Secretary of Defense – or Secretary of War – Pete Hegseth belongs to. Wilson was the guest pastor in February at the Pentagon’s recently created monthly Christian prayer service. Hegseth prayed beside him. CREC also has a network of Christian schools, and Hegseth’s children attended one of them. Wilson is influential in the growing movement that’s sometimes called masculinism, which believes feminism has been emasculating men, men should have more power than women and that a woman’s place is at home raising children and following her husband’s wishes.

My guest, Helen Lewis, writes about masculinism in her Atlantic article titled “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” It’s subtitled “A Virulent Form Of Misogyny Has Become The Single Most Important Force Holding Together The American Right.” Wilson is one of the people she interviewed for the article. Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic with a focus on the intersection of politics, society and digital culture. She is also the author of “Difficult Women: A History Of Feminism In 11 Fights,” and “The Genius Myth: A Curious History Of A Dangerous Idea.”

Helen Lewis, welcome to FRESH AIR. So before we get to Pete Hegseth and Douglas Wilson, what is masculinism, and how does it compare to regular old misogyny, patriarchy?

HELEN LEWIS: Well, masculinism is a word that has been around for quite a long time now. It’s the idea, essentially, that men should be in charge. That that’s the way that the world should be ordered, that you get now new versions of it that are about talking about biology, you know, men’s hormones mean that they’re more suited for government. But it’s not exactly patriarchy in the sense that it is a political ideology, and it’s one that its adherents will kind of argue for. And I didn’t want to just say sexism or misogyny because I think that is a kind of conversation ender. You know, we can all agree that’s bad. Well, I say we can all agree that’s bad, obviously quite a lot of people don’t agree that’s bad. But I wanted to give this its due as being a fleshed-out set of ideas that sit behind the manosphere influencers that people might have heard of – your Andrew Tates or your Myron Gaines of “Fresh And Fit” and has got a kind of intellectual underpinning, both to them and to the MAGA movement.

GROSS: When you say it’s a political ideology, what do you mean?

LEWIS: In the sense that there is a set of governing ideas and then a series of kind of policy proposals that flow from them. In the same way that you might see this is the kind of flip side of feminism. So the idea behind feminism was that men and women should be politically and financially equal, and you should enact policies in order to make that happen. You should give women the vote. You should make them entitled to equal pay for equal work. You should stop discrimination that keeps women out of being judges, say, or serving in the military, whatever it might be. This is the other side of that. It says men and women aren’t equal. They’re suited for different things. Men are much better suited to being politicians, to being CEOs, to serving in combat roles. And women’s role is to be nurturers, supporters, mothers.

GROSS: So what’s on the political agenda?

LEWIS: You mentioned there at the start repealing the 19th Amendment. That’s the one that gave women the right to vote. And that sounds, I’m sure to some of your listeners, like the craziest, completely settled argument. However, it is one that quite serious figures advance. And they do it for two reasons. One is because they genuinely believe it. This is how they feel that society should be structured, you know, more like, in some cases, a kind of Saudi Arabian system of guardianship, you know, the idea that men are the head of the family and they should vote as a household.

GROSS: You know what? I’m going to stop you right there. Why don’t we hear Douglas Wilson say it in his own words?

LEWIS: Sure.

GROSS: ‘Cause this is him talking about why we should repeal the 19th Amendment.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DOUGLAS WILSON: Back in the bad old days before the 19th Amendment, the men were considered to be the heads of their households and represented their families at the ballot box. So what happened when their wives were granted suffrage? Well, just take a typical presidential election to illustrate it, using the first one in 1920 after women’s suffrage was accomplished, the election between Warren Harding and James Cox. If both the husband and wife vote for Harding, say, then what you have done is simply multiply the number of total votes cast for him by two. And if the husband votes for Harding, say, and the wife votes for Cox, then what you have done is cancel out the voice of that particular household. Upon discovering how they were each going to vote, what would be the harm if the two of them just stayed home for a quiet dinner together in order to cancel out one another’s vote that way? Where was the great progress supposed to be located? The net effect of women’s suffrage was not an advance in women’s rights but rather part of a push to replace covenanted entities, like families, with raw individualism. An overweening state greatly prefers governing an atomistic populace, where each individual is like a bb thrown into an electoral sack. There’s no structural rigidity to it, especially after laxity in the law concerning porn, pot and poker has now greased all the bbs. Nothing coheres anymore. In the older system, the people were grouped in molecules, Burke’s little platoons, some of them quite complex, and molecular societies are much more capable of resisting the demands of statism. So the suffrage movement was actually not taking up the cause of women, but rather was part of a long, sustained war on the family. The nadir of this kind of thinking says that a decision to abort a child is a decision between a woman and her doctor. The father of the child is stripped of any legal ability to protect the life of his own legitimate child. We need to retrace all of our steps in order to discover how a travesty like that could ever happen. And when we do, we discover that a lot of it started at Seneca Falls.

GROSS: Can I just ask you, Is it just me, or can you actually follow his train of thought?

LEWIS: (Laughter) How do I put this, he is quite a prolix speaker. His sentences roll on. But you can see there the outlines of the argument, which is essentially that the family is the unit of society, not the individual. And that is a big challenge to liberalism, which has been focused on individual rights. And he thinks that women getting the vote has, for example, encouraged them to see their own bodies as sacrosanct, right? He thinks it’s led to the idea of abortion being about bodily autonomy rather than that being something that the fathers of those children have a stake in, too. So you can see how it’s a coherent ideology. The thing I would say to him is, you know, he says, well, it’s fine because actually, you know, the husbands voted on behalf of their wives. That’s what landowners used to say, that they used to vote on behalf of their serfs. And – you know what? – that didn’t work out particularly well for their serfs. It’s one of the things that, you know, the American Revolution was about, the idea, you know, not fulfilled, obviously, in the original Constitution, but the idea that all men are created equal. Doug Wilson doesn’t actually think that all men are created equal. He thinks that actually the family is the fundamental unit, and we should look at people in those blocks rather than as individual atoms.

GROSS: But there’s all these little questions, like, say you have two adult children living with their parents, one is male, one is female. Does the male not get to vote, even though he’s a man, because the father is the head of the household?

LEWIS: I mean, I did try and ask Joel Webbon, who’s a hard-right pastor, who is based in Austin, you know, how you would work through this. So in his view, unmarried women would also get voted for by a father, a brother, an uncle. And I said to him, having been to Riyadh reporting last year, what you’ve said there is you say this for Christian reasons, you’ve described the Saudi Arabian guardianship system. So there is – there are different versions of it. Some of them – I think Doug Wilson’s version is that unmarried women would be able to vote on their own. Other pastors would like, essentially, all women’s votes to be assigned to the nearest responsible male. And, you know, you can talk about – and they do – how this would kind of encourage people to kind of bond together. And isn’t it terrible that the votes of the husband and wife cancel each other out? Not really, not to me. That means that everybody’s had their say. And if the answer is a draw, then the answer is a draw.

GROSS: So getting back to how masculinism has become a political ideology, what else is on the agenda? And I should point out here that Douglas Wilson says that although he’d like to repeal the 19th Amendment, like, maybe in 200 years ’cause he has bigger fish to fry. So what are the bigger fish that he has to fry that are also on the larger masculinism political agenda?

LEWIS: Yeah, I know. When he said that to me, I said, the thing is, you know, if I said to you, I want all white men to be put in cages, but not now. It’s not my aspiration for now. Can I also interest you my thoughts about tax policy? No, you would be – you would want to stop and dwell on that one for a little bit. And I think that comes back to what I was saying earlier, which is the other point about the Repeal the 19th rhetoric. It is designed to be trollish and attention-catching. It is designed to be outside what political scientists call the Overton window, the kind of envelope of acceptable, debatable ideas, precisely in order to stop everybody having to kind of, you know, slow down and talk about it.

You might think about another version of this being the way perhaps the U.S. had arguments about creationism in which the great idea was you had to teach the controversy. And what that did was place creationism, which is a biblical but scientifically unsupported idea up against the best ideas of modern science and just said, well, let’s just really weigh them up about which one we should be teaching to children as fact. And this is a kind of version of that. And I think because it’s affecting half or slightly over half of the population, it’s considered more respectable to kind of dally with extreme anti-feminist ideas than it would be to say, I think Black people shouldn’t vote, or I would take the vote away from Jewish people. I think those would, even in some of the excesses that we’ve seen in the last couple of years on the right, still be considered not enjoyably spicy ideas, but kind of flat out off-the-table in a way that Repeal the 19th is not treated like that.

GROSS: Well, we need to take a break here. So let me reintroduce you. My guest is Helen Lewis. We’re talking about her article in The Atlantic called “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with Helen Lewis, a staff writer at The Atlantic. We’re talking about her article about the new masculinism titled “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” It’s subtitled “A Virulent Form Of Misogyny Has Become The Single Most Important Force Holding Together The American Right.”

So you describe masculinism as the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters and fanboys. Why do you think it’s the most important factor uniting the American right?

LEWIS: You know, when I was writing this, I was thinking about, what are the linking strands between MAGA and the kind of loose constellation of influences around that? And it was just in the middle of a very, very big split over Israel. You know, you have people like the podcaster Tucker Carlson taking a very different line from the White House, criticizing the White House very strongly on that. And you also had Tucker Carlson hosting the very, very right-wing podcaster Nick Fuentes on his show, which the Heritage Foundation refused to condemn. And then there was then a mass walkout from the Heritage Foundation. Lots of people upped sticks and went to Mike Pence’s new foundation.

You know, these things are causing really big schisms. You might think, as well, of the splits over regulating AI. For example, there are very different views on that – free trade generally versus protectionism, America First isolationism versus foreign policy adventuring. You know, these are really deep splits that I think whoever succeeds Donald Trump will have to manage very carefully.

I mean, you’ve seen – JD Vance has been given the poisoned chalice of being the face of the Iran negotiations. Any successor to Trump is going to have difficulty holding his coalition together because the only thing really they can agree on is that Trump is the alpha king. But maybe the one thing that they do all agree with is traditional gender roles are better. Men should be men, women should be women. Women have got a bit too uppity. It’s better that they should be seen and not heard, or, at least, they should succeed in kind of MAGA-approved ways. There’s a very strong aesthetic look about many of the women at the top of that movement that is very traditionally feminine, you know, iron femme, really. So I just found it was basically, apart from the persona of Donald Trump, one of the only things that I could see that really united them.

GROSS: So let’s get back to Douglas Wilson. As biblical as Douglas Wilson is, he’s called women small-breasted biddies, which doesn’t strike me as godly language. So the clip we’re about to hear is Douglas Wilson speaking in the U.K. on a Times radio show in May of this year.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

WILSON: I called certain women small-breasted biddies. I was talking about the small-breasted biddies. So it is not the case that I think that all women are like that, or – and it’s not the case that I think that all feminists are like that…

UNIDENTIFIED INTERVIEWER: OK.

WILSON: …Or that all progressive women are like that.

UNIDENTIFIED INTERVIEWER: Right.

WILSON: So let me finish the point. This is a really important point. There is a certain kind of woke scold that wants to reach into the shower and adjust the temperature of your shower for you. They want to run your life in every detail, and they want to scold you for not cooperating. And there is that kind of – I was drawing a caricature of that kind of person.

UNIDENTIFIED INTERVIEWER: Right.

WILSON: The woke scold.

GROSS: So that was from a Times radio show in the U.K. recorded in May of this year. What do you hear when you listen to that? And what do small breasts have to do with anything?

LEWIS: Well, a great question. But I think it’s about the fact you’re not conventionally feminine, right? That’s the idea. And – but this is entirely woven into the critique of feminists as unfeminine and unnatural, you know? And, you know, I wrote about the suffragettes. This was all the stuff that was being thrown at them. Like, no one wants to have sex with you. No man would ever want you. You’re ugly. You wear clumpy shoes. You’re probably lesbian. Like, all of these things are insults that are deployed to keep women in line by saying there is a correct way to be a woman.

The thing that struck me when I listened to that is, it’s really interesting to me that both the political left and political right have a problem with female authority. So his version is the woke scold who tells you to turn down the temperature of your shower. Now, some people may have put their shower on too high, and the shower may be burning them, in which case, your mum, whoever it is, is entirely right to adjust the water temperature. But that’s a vision, essentially, of women are telling me what to do, and I don’t like it.

The left had a version of that, you may remember from the 2020s, the Karen. And the Karen was somebody who also essentially wanted to tell you what to do. They were nitpickers who told you to wear a mask or told you not to wear a mask or, you know, said you can’t walk there or you can’t do this, or whatever it was. And both of them are expressing this incredibly persistent and deep belief that it is kind of emasculating and wrong for women to exercise authority. And I think the reason that some of this stuff is so successful is that it is extremely widely held a millimeter under the surface, both by people who – whose persona is overt sexism, maybe for clicks, but also for people who, you know, know that in their workplace, they can’t use this kind of language. But, it – you know, it’s there in the back of their brain, and they’d really like to when their female boss has something that annoys them.

GROSS: Do you think Wilson ever – well, you wouldn’t know. You can’t read his mind. But I wonder if Wilson ever realizes that calling certain women small-breasted biddies is so nonbiblical, and it’s so adolescent. It’s so unbecoming of somebody who considers himself a very important religious leader.

LEWIS: But I think American public life has just degraded on this front in the last decade, really – let’s be honest – driven by Donald Trump. And his final triumph might be making Democrats talk like this, too. You know, everything has just become a kind of pig wrestling in the mud, hasn’t it? We’ve lost the idea of kind of dignity in public office and public life, and it’s now really about who can own the other person harder.

I think the other thing, if you want to talk about something else that unites the MAGA movement – they’re owning the libs. There is a great desire for revenge on people, you know, who are sort of deemed to have lorded it over you and scold you. And so I don’t think that Doug Wilson’s salty language really causes him any problems because, as he’s outlining there, he’s very careful that he directs it against his political enemies.

GROSS: The fertility rate is a big thing with the masculinists. The fertility rate has been falling in the U.S. and in many countries. And there’s many explanations for that, but the explanation among many masculinists is, like, blame women. They don’t want to have children anymore, or they don’t want to have as many children. Or they’re going to work and they’re not staying home, and therefore they’re not having children. And I feel like, oh, women can’t win ’cause if women want children, then a lot of men complain, oh, women. All they want to do is have children. I don’t want to have children, or I don’t want to have that many children. I don’t want to be tied down like that.

So, like, the pendulum with this movement is swinging toward, like, fertility. Stay home. Have lots of children. What do you see that as being about? Is that connected at all to the fear that white people will no longer be the majority population in a few decades?

LEWIS: Oh, I mean, absolutely. I mean, somebody like, you know, Elon Musk has taken up, you know, a very true and upsetting story about grooming gangs in Britain. But the thesis behind it has been expanded into this all-purpose bogeyman of essentially, you know, Islam is coming to take over Europe. And those families from – that have very recently come from poorer countries have more children.

And you – you know, you will absolutely hear that said all over the manosphere, that the problem is essentially feminism has stopped white women from having enough kids. And that will lead to the kind of the end of the white race or European-descent civilization or Judeo-Christian religion or whatever you want to put it in that way.

The trouble with it is, you know, I think that this ideology is incredibly flexible because, as you say, when it was the 1950s, the idea was that, you know, women can’t vote because they don’t have enough responsibilities outside the home. They’ve silly little brains that, you know, they don’t – they just earn a bit of pin money and whatever it is. You know, they’re not full actors in civil society, so why would we want to hear from them? And now that the majority of American women go out and work, even after having children, it’s switched to, well, actually, the problem is that, you know, they’re ruining society by going and doing that. So whatever women are currently doing turns out to be wrong.

It’s not an unreasonable point in the sense that birth rates are falling in pretty much every country, and it does track with women getting increasing amounts of education. We also do know that lots of women are saying they are not having as many children as they would like to, which is something that you could potentially address through policies, although no one has really cracked that yet. Places like Hungary have tried explicitly natalist policies – you know, things like reduced income tax or whatever it might be.

But the other thing we know is that the birth rate is falling in some – in America or the U.K., we would consider still incredibly patriarchal societies like, for example, South Korea or Japan, where, you know, it is still expected that women will give up work after having children. One of the things that really just seems to be driving it is, well, in America, there’s a possibility that smartphones – I mean, the smartphone theory of everything, but the possibility that people aren’t meeting each other in the offline way that they would. They aren’t pairing up, and downstream of that, of – is fewer kids. But also, it might just be the fact that parental investment of time in children is so much greater.

GROSS: And money.

LEWIS: You know…

GROSS: It’s so expensive to have children now.

LEWIS: Right. But that’s the thing. The average American dad is now spending as much time with their child as the average American mum was in the 1960s. You know, this is the most involved generation of fathers ever. And that makes me think, well, that is quite coincidental, that people want fewer children. Men want fewer children when it’s more hard unpaid work for them. And that doesn’t seem to be – me to be maybe something we should exclude from this discussion either. Having kids is really hard work.

GROSS: Well, it’s time for another break, so let me reintroduce you. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Helen Lewis, and we’re talking about her article in The Atlantic titled “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” We’ll be right back after a short break. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Let’s get back to my interview with Helen Lewis, a staff writer at The Atlantic. We’re talking about her article about the new masculinism titled “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” It’s subtitled “A Virulent Form Of Misogyny Has Become The Single Most Important Force Holding Together The American Right.” Lewis is also the author of the books “Difficult Women: A History Of Feminism In 11 Fights” and “The Genius Myth: A Curious History Of A Dangerous Idea.”

You describe Nick Fuentes as Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir. Now, Fuentes is one of the more extreme podcast provocateurs. You describe Fuentes as a self-professed Christian, antisemite and virgin. Why do you mention virgin in there?

LEWIS: Because it’s really interesting to me that he is not Doug Wilson’s intellectual heir in the sense of a traditional Christian family. Like, he – what he’s not preaching to his followers is settle down, find a nice woman, have some children, be the patriarch and head of your household, right? Everything that he says reeks of the fact that he hates women. He doesn’t want to be around them. He never hangs out with them. He has nothing to do with them.

There’s a theorist called Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who wrote a book about homosociality – you know, men who only associate with other men, who see themselves in other – relationship to other men. And that’s Nick Fuentes. His is a world of actually no women at all. They don’t really matter to him, you know, which you might say is also true of somebody like Andrew Tate, who is, you know, a pimp by his own admission. The women are there just kind of as a way of keeping score to impress other men with how amazingly virile you are. And Nick Fuentes is a more extreme version of that, where he’s like, well, I – look, I – you know, I don’t even want to sleep with them.

GROSS: So let’s hear Nick Fuentes from one of his podcasts. And in this, he’s talking about the problem with women. And this is from his podcast “America First With Nick Fuentes,” and it was recorded on February 11 of this year.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

NICK FUENTES: Our No. 1 political enemy is women because women constrain everything – every conversation, every man, everything. They have to be imprisoned. They are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate. They’re the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people. You know, when you – when – I want you to understand something. When you’re sympathetic to poor people, you’re sympathetic to brown people because brown people are poor. OK? Not all poor people are brown, but most brown people are poor.

So women are making us sympathetic to poor people, aka brown people. Women are making us sympathetic to George Floyd. Women are the reason that the fertility rate is low because they’re getting educated, and they attack every man as a rapist and a pedophile. And they’re henpecking and controlling all the men. So just like Hitler imprisoned gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women.

GROSS: Well…

LEWIS: It’s not subtle, is it? It’s – he doesn’t – he’s not a man who’s ever heard the word dog whistle. It just – gone straight to the whistle. The thing I find interesting about that is it doesn’t surprise me that he’s an – also an antisemite because in both cases, the analysis of what’s wrong with the out-group is the same, right? So both Jews and women are simultaneously weak and useless, but also an evil cabal that is controlling the world. And I just find that really, really fascinating – that that is, you know, two historical groups that he’s managed to weave together into this seamless mythology.

And the other thing you see there is he’s also talking about empathy, which is the masculinists’ most hated emotion because, you know, Doug Wilson has a podcast episode called “The Sin Of Empathy.” Gad Saad, the Canadian marketing professor who’s a big favorite of Elon Musk, had a book called “Suicidal Empathy.” You also hear about toxic empathy. And this is woven completely into their critique of the problem of women having political power, is they think that women want equality and they want to help the underdog. And that means that they, for example, support immigration, or they’re not tough enough on violent crime.

GROSS: They’re not racist enough.

LEWIS: Well, in the case of Nick Fuentes, yes – that they just don’t hate brown people, as he puts it. But, you know, there are respectable versions of this argument about empathy, too. So the entrepreneur Peter Thiel wrote a very famous or infamous essay for a Cato Institute publication back in the 2000s, in which he said it’s – we haven’t had a real democracy since the 1920s, a real capitalist democracy, because women, you know, and welfare recipients won’t vote for libertarian parties.

And so to take you all the way back to Douglas Wilson, you know, the critique is the same. The problem with women voting is that they vote in a way that we wouldn’t like. And that is a problem only if you think that their political preferences aren’t equally as legitimate as yours, and actually, it’s your job to persuade them to your way of thinking. No. They’d rather go straight and say, wouldn’t it just be easier to get the political program through that we want if we only had half the electorate to convince?

GROSS: You know, I think with somebody like Nick Fuentes, I always wonder, like, how much of it is about money and power? You know, like, it’s a great way to get followers if you live on the extreme and can influence people to join you there or admire, like, your strong views. And how much does he, like, truly believe?

LEWIS: And that is almost a part of how I think about reporting on it, right? Because you’re thinking these people are attention-seeking, and I’m giving them some attention. And that’s not an uncomplicated thing to do as a reporter. At the same time, they are arguing for these things. Whether or not they’re sincere is – you know, that’s separate to the effect that they’re having on the discourse, which is real and genuine…

GROSS: Yeah.

LEWIS: …And does exist.

GROSS: Yeah.

LEWIS: So I also think, as a – you know, if you’re somebody who does believe in individual voting rights or liberalism, whatever it is, you kind of need to keep your…

GROSS: Or…

LEWIS: …You know…

GROSS: …Imprisoning women.

LEWIS: Right, but you are kind of somebody who does need to keep your debating weapons sharp. Those arguments are never really truly won in a way that I think, probably, you know, ’90s liberals were a bit complacent about. You do have to stand up and say incredibly controversial things like, I actually think that all adults should vote. I mean, you know, which is a very recent historical development. You know, even for a long time, very few people in England where I live, you know – the – only a few nobles were in charge of the government, even when we had a quote-unquotes democracy. And it took successive huge political movements to change that. So these – you know, these ideas of individual rights don’t – they – they’re not natural, or they’re not, you know, settled forever. And that, for me, is the point of writing about this stuff.

GROSS: So again, you called Fuentes Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir, but Wilson doesn’t like Fuentes’ rhetoric about women. He says, the Bible says that a godly woman is a husband’s crown. I’ve never seen a king talk about his crown the way Fuentes talks about women. Comparing women or wives to a crown, the bejeweled headpiece that announces who is king, isn’t exactly the most humanizing description of women.

LEWIS: Right, but that is the distinction between them. You know, they both share that appetite for provocation and certain views. But, you know, Doug Wilson is presenting it as benevolent sexism. We know what’s best for you. We’ve got your best interests at heart. Nick Fuentes is malevolent sexism, which is, you’re awful and you should be put, you know, in a gulag and restrained by violence. But they both have the same fundamental underlying point, which is that men and women are not equal and men make better decisions than women.

GROSS: Well, we need to take a break here, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is Helen Lewis. We’re talking about her article in The Atlantic called “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF AMANDA GARDIER’S “FJORD”)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with Helen Lewis, a staff writer at The Atlantic. We’re talking about her article about the new masculinism titled “The Men Who Want Women To Keep (ph) Quiet.”

So alongside this obsession with fertility, the masculinists also have an obsession with testosterone. Testosterone is the thing that sets apart men from women. Men have a lot of it. Women have a little of it. And it’s become, like, the defining quality for some men of, like, what real manhood is. So can you talk a little bit about testosterone?

LEWIS: I mean, this is a story with many strands, one of which it’s now never been easier to get hold of testosterone replacement therapy. So just a huge number of people, you know, particularly in that “Manosphere Podcast” zone, are on it. You know, they’re middle-aged men who are feeling a little bit more tired. You know, things are a little bit more hard than they used to be. And they get a prescription for testosterone in the same way that women have been getting HRT prescriptions. And guess what? They feel, you know, peppy and alive again. And, you know, that is not an unreasonable medical presentation, but there does seem to also be just a kind of lifestyle feeling that this is what men are. They are aggressive, and they’re go-getting, and they’re driven. And testosterone is kind of the hormonal version of that.

So one of the books that I talk about in the piece is “The Last Man (ph)” by Charles Cornish-Dale, who goes by the online alias Raw Egg Nationalist. And the reason that he believes that you should take raw eggs is that they boost your testosterone. And, you know, his whole theory is that the MAGA movement is a testosterone movement. Donald Trump is the high-T president because he, for example, doesn’t care about equality. You know, he’s about ambition and ruthlessness because the winners need to win and be dominant. And so, you know, they want to bring back, as they say, testosterone to politics. It’s all got a bit hippie drum circle, people trying to care about the weak and the poor and trying to make sure that everybody’s happy. No, that’s not the way things should be. Politics is about power and drive, and those things are symbolized by testosterone.

GROSS: And testosterone was actually figuring into the Senate race in Texas, because James Talarico, who is the Democrat running for Senate against Republican Ken Paxton, is being called by some of his opponents Low-T Talarico. And low T stands for low testosterone. There’s a lot of, like, low T commercials on cable news now, advertising testosterone replacement. So…

LEWIS: Right. Stephen Miller, the White House immigration czar, went on Fox News and said, He’s Low-T Talarico. You know, he’s the first transgender candidate for Senate. You know, if you cut him, he doesn’t bleed, he just drips soy. And that’s a very deep cut, but there is essentially the feeling that plant phytoestrogens in soy are also feminizing men. It’s one of the many things in modern life that is feminizing men. So this is a…

GROSS: That’s why they’re against soy?

LEWIS: Yes. There’s a whole background, too, like, real men eat meat and are not vegans. So one of the things that was held against him was the fact that he said he wanted to have a kind of animal product-free campaign. His girlfriend appears to be a vegan. So he’s obviously going to have to spend the summer being photographed eating kind of huge bits of brisket and turkey legs and, you know, slaw running down his chin as he goes to barbecues because, you know, this is the knock on him. Because he is quite softly spoken and looks very boyish despite being in his 30s and because he has supported gender transition, you know, the knock on him is that he’s not really a man. He doesn’t understand what it means to be a man.

This has got two things. One thing, it attacks him in an electorate, where there are lots of people, particularly Hispanic men, who do have a pretty traditional view of gender. But the second thing is it is a way of excusing Ken Paxton, who is – you know, has faced his own fair share of allegations of corruption, who’s currently in the middle of divorced on, quote-unquote, “biblical grounds,” understood to be adultery.

GROSS: She’s divorcing him.

LEWIS: She’s divorcing him, but that is understood to be – that’s man stuff. That’s the kind of thing that men do when they’re powerful. You know, these are alpha. You know, he – guess he’s got some foibls but his foibls are alpha foibles. And that has become a really, you know, big part of the discourse in Texas is, you know, driving up the male vote by calling James Talarico unmanly. And the key thing is that that is also seen as being weak. And this has just infected all of politics, even places you wouldn’t realize.

So at the beginning of the year, I published a profile of Gavin Newsom, the California governor who is widely expected to run for president. And he told me at the start that he had taken this line from Bill Clinton, which is the American voter prefers strong and wrong over weak and right. Essentially, this idea that you have to just bulldoze through, you have to be confident and aggressive about things. Now, if you see, you know, his team’s strategy on social media, which has just been very, very rude about a lot of people, you know, that’s what he’s gone from. It’s not dignified or maybe morally defensible, but it looks like power and aggression. And there are voters, clearly, who want that, and they don’t associate the Democrats with that.

GROSS: So, you know, with Ken Paxton, in terms of being an alpha male and that these are, like, alpha male accusations, CNN did a timeline of 20 years of scandals for Ken Paxton. And those scandals include securities fraud charges, an FBI investigation of bribery and abuse of office. He was sued for firing whistleblowers. The state of Texas sued him for professional misconduct. The state House voted to impeach him in 2023. He was acquitted in the Senate. His wife filing for divorce on biblical grounds after years of publicly reported infidelity by her husband. So are those the things that are considered, like, the alpha male conduct?

LEWIS: Yeah. I think that’s the thing. It’s like, that is boys will be boys. I don’t think we’ve ever stretched it to boys will embezzle before, but, you know, that’s where we’ve got to. The fact that James Talarico is kind of squeaky clean, you know, that’s – they haven’t been able to land a real kind of, like, blow on him in terms of probity, is now recast as being a bit weak, a bit vanilla, a bit soy, essentially. And, you know, you might trace that all the way back to Donald Trump and the “Access Hollywood” tape and the defense of that as locker-room talk. You know, this is just how guys talk, and you’ve got to – you know, you’ve just got to accept that, basically.

GROSS: So where do you see President Trump fitting into masculinism and how masculinists see Trump?

LEWIS: Well, they see him as, like, the ultimate bully and the ultimate patriarch, you know? Here is somebody who controls everything around them. And, you know, I’m – I see masculinism as quite an anxious ideology in a way because it’s about control. You know, it’s about needing to kind of keep a grip on your emotions. You never cry. You know, you don’t eat soup ’cause that’s gay. You don’t cross your legs because, you know, that’s – Gavin Newsom did that, and everyone mocked him on Twitter for it. You know, all these things that you kind of can’t do because they would somehow impugn your masculinity does add up to quite a kind of anxious way to live, in my view.

But the way that it’s reframed around Trump is – you know, I always think of kind of Trump as the Eric Cartman from “South Park” of American public life. You know, he just does what he wants, and everybody else has to deal with it. And that’s the kind of ultimate patriarchal fantasy. You can do whatever you want, and everyone else has to put up with it. And actually, everyone else kind of worships you and look up to you. And, you know, you’ve got a – the woman on your arm. And you’ve got the guys who love being in the status hierarchy where they all know who the – you know, the top one is.

You know, he is – he encapsules that dream, which I think is hard for people outside the movement – like me – to understand because I look at him. And I think, you know, there’s a guy who loves show tunes who’s slathered in 14 pounds of makeup and has been, you know, dying his hair a series of bizarre colors for 25 years or more. It doesn’t, to me, radiate kind of what I think of as sort of that American cowboy, Clint-Eastwood-in-a-poncho kind of masculinity. But there’s clearly something about it that codes to those people as very, very alpha indeed. Maybe more alpha, right? Maybe the ultimate alpha thing is you can wear bronzer, and no one’s allowed to mention it. They just have to get on with it.

GROSS: You point out something that I hadn’t quite put together before, which is that, you know, Trump had a surprising number of women in important positions in his second term. And then he fired several of them – Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem – and they were all replaced by men.

LEWIS: Yeah. I mean, in some cases, they were replaced briefly by Marco Rubio, who is the kind of universal solvent for the Trump administration’s hardest problems. But yeah. It seems to me that it’s quite hard to be a woman in MAGA. There are extremely high demands on you. The one who has survived and thrived, I think, is Susie Wiles. You know, Trump is, you know, unexpectedly, the person who brought the first female chief of staff into the White House, and she’s made it all the way so far. There hasn’t been that revolving door that there was in his first term.

So – but I think she occupies an interesting position. The way that people talk about her is essentially as a kind of grandma figure. You know, she doesn’t challenge Trump. She doesn’t see it as her job, like some of the previous chiefs of staff with a military background, to kind of challenge him or stand up to him or give him the alternate view. She sees her role as being to carry out and enable, which I – you know, it would be probably demeaning to say that that’s the role of a really good secretary or executive PA. But it is not a – an authority role in the way that some other chiefs of staff have kind of presented themselves or carried themselves, I think, whereas the women who’ve tried to claim personal authority within MAGA have had a really difficult time.

GROSS: And Linda McMahon has survived, too – secretary of education. And of course, she was, like, a co-founder with her husband of WWE – you know, the big wrestling franchise.

LEWIS: I mean, she’s in a fortunate position, really, because her belief is that the Department of Education shouldn’t really exist. So when that’s your kind of guiding principle, it’s quite hard to fail, right? It’s not that you can sort of say, this department hasn’t been doing well, when you don’t think it should exist at all.

But she – yeah. She’s a very interesting case because she, like Trump, understands the idea of kind of storylining your life. You know, he approaches his presidency like a WWE season, where you have heels and faces and reversals and slightly shocking things and that, you know, she participated in. And there were whole storylines about how Vince was, you know, cheating on her and how humiliating it was, and she was tied to a chair in the arena. So she’s someone who’s willing to endure public humiliation by, you know, overbearing men, which I imagine was a pretty good preparation for serving in the Trump administration.

GROSS: Let me reintroduce you. We need to take another short break. My guest is Helen Lewis, and we’re talking about her article in The Atlantic titled “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with Helen Lewis, a staff writer at The Atlantic. We’re talking about her article about the new masculinism titled “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” It’s subtitled “A Virulent Form Of Misogyny That’s Become The Single Most Important Force Holding Together The American Right.”

Who are some of the people in Congress or in state or city-elected officials or influential writers or thinkers who are part of this masculinist movement?

LEWIS: Someone I would say who was very early to this is Senator Josh Hawley, who wrote a book about manhood a couple of years ago. You know, he spotted quite early on that there were lots of men in policy circles and elite circles who felt very annoyed that we’d heard a lot of, you know, the future is female and about the various oppressions suffered by women in American life, and that maybe, you know, there would be a constituency that would like to hear a bit more about the ways in which men are oppressed or men have been disadvantaged. So that’s – you know, I think that’s really important.

The Trump administration has been using the Equality Office essentially to say, are you a white man? You know, do you feel you’ve been discriminated at work? Do you want to come and, you know, talk about that? So it’s kind of flipping that idea of the kind of DEI bureaucracy to address a different minority group in white men.

GROSS: So I want to mention Scott Yenor, whose name I didn’t know, but you write about him. He worked with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in rolling back DEI programs, and he recently became the chair of the Heritage Foundation’s American Citizenship Initiative. And they published a report in January that called for a culture-wide Manhattan Project to promote family building. Can you say a little bit more about that?

LEWIS: Yeah, I think Scott Yenor is a really influential and interesting figure. He believes in the family wage, which I guess is the kind of workplace corollary to family voting. Essentially, you should be able to preferentially hire and promote married men to encourage them to be the breadwinners and women to stay at home and be the homemakers. He also has used Douglas Wilson-style language. He talked about women being – modern women are medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome. You know, the analysis is very similar. And you do see echoes of this language, I think, you know, JD Vance is very steeped in all this stuff. So bits of this language dribble through to him. The interesting thing about Scott Yenor is we published a piece by Henry Olsen in The Atlantic when he was appointed to The Heritage Foundation, saying, you do realize that this guy’s views are really on gender are really quite extreme. It caused the most awful stink in kind of, you know, post liberal and MAGA Twitter. Essentially, the main criticism seemed to be don’t air our dirty laundry in public, you know, don’t tell people about this guy, which I thought – that was really fascinating to me. It was an acknowledgment of the fact that, you know, in certain spaces, his views would be received as kind of titillating. But actually, for wider consumption, they were probably pretty repellent to the median voter.

GROSS: Now, I want to make it clear. You think that there are really concerning problems facing men and boys right now. And I’d like to end with you talking about some of those.

LEWIS: I think that’s really – should be an important part of the conversation. You know, I’ve written about feminism and the – you know, the things that affect women throughout my career, but it is very important, too, to talk about the fact. So, I think it’s really tough to be a young man right now. My colleague, Derek Thompson, once described the situation of young men as being like monks in the casino. You know, we know that they drink less, they party less, they have more – you know, they are less likely to be coupled up than previous generations of men.

At the same time, via their smartphones, they can access any amount of porn and crypto and gambling. This is a bit where I think I do have some overlap with Doug Wilson, and I think that lots of bits of modern life are really tough for young people. They are being urged into funnels to make money for big social media corporations that are not necessarily the way that, you know, you would choose for anybody to live. And I think that, you know, the decline of traditional manufacturing has meant that the workplace has become easier for women to get a job in, in some respects, harder for men at the entry level. Then there has been, I think, in some places, overt discrimination against men and white men because lots of companies in the last 10 years have looked at their diversity statistics and kind of vomited at how bad they were and gone on what will probably turn out to be unconstitutional hiring binges to try and make those statistics look better. That’s an advance for equal rights. It’s tough on the individual men that that has affected. So I think, you know, when you are taking on some of these more outrageous ideas, you have to acknowledge that some people feel hard done by in the last decade, and that is not a completely preposterous situation to take.

GROSS: I don’t know how much social media you do, but what kind of reaction are you getting from the manosphere on this piece that you wrote?

LEWIS: I think a mixture. I mean, I had some quite hostile responses, as you would expect. You know, there were people saying that, you know, I make the kind of classic face that all liberal women do when they are, you know, confronted with facts that they can’t debunk, all that kind of, like, blah, blah, blah, whatever. There were loads of really thoughtful responses, too. I think some of the people just like being mentioned in the mainstream media, the kind that they could show to their own mother. You know, when you’ve got a show on Rumble, you know, your mum doesn’t really believe that you have a job. So I think there’s some – you know, there was some oddly positive responses from some people. But I also got loads and loads of really thoughtful emails. Not least, a really interesting strain from older guys who said, you know, I’m 70, and this stuff is also completely alien to me. This doesn’t speak for me, and I think I’m really worried we’ve gone backwards. And it was really interesting to hear from them because that’s not a perspective, you know, that you get to hear a lot, I think. And I don’t hear enough of that.

GROSS: Well, Helen Lewis, thank you so much for talking with us, and thank you for your article.

LEWIS: It was really lovely. Thank you so much for asking me.

GROSS: Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where her article, “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet” is published.

Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be Anna Deavere Smith. She’s known for writing and starring in shows about real people. She interviews them and portrays them with their actual words. Her new show is about her great-great-grandfather, a free Black man who reburied the Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground for Lincoln’s most famous speech. I hope you’ll join us.

To keep up with what’s on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram – @nprfreshair.

FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I’m Terry Gross.

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