The Cornell rape case has put male violence and predatory behavior in the spotlight yet again. The details of the case are beyond horrific, as anyone who has read even a little about it knows; I will not rehash those details here. But when put in company with the rise of the manosphere and the visible burgeoning of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism throughout society and in the highest levels of our government, we seem to be in a particularly awful moment. Men, we might be tempted to say, are out of control. But in many ways, none of this is new, and neither are the proposed solutions from manosphere influencers and the MAGA right: we must, they claim, return to a time when men were men, women stayed home, LGBTQ+ people were in the closet, and white men had a monopoly on positions of power and authority. Susan Faludi’s 1999 Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man analyzes similar concerns with masculinity, an analysis that remains relevant in the current moment. She argues that the problem that gave rise to a “crisis of masculinity” is indeed tied to a loss of purpose for men in US society, but that the culprit is not women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks but shifts in economic conditions in the US and globally. If we don’t confront those deep problems, she suggests, we will remain stuck with “culture wars.”
While Faludi’s focus is on the mid 1990s, the problem she analyzes would seem to remain: a so-called “crisis in masculinity.” Concerns were raised about boys and men losing ground educationally, economically, physical- and mental-health-wise; about men shirking their family responsibilities (in the guise of deadbeat dads), boys’ vulnerability to bad influences (in the form of gang membership); and about male violence, with OJ Simpson’s murder of his wife Nicole standing in for what was perceived as a widespread social problem. Faludi admits that she began her research with a huge questionable assumption: that the problem with men was masculinity out of control, and the solution was for men to get themselves under control. What she discovered was considerably more complicated: while cultural notions of masculinity demanded that men be “masters of their fate,” there was (and still is) very little over which they (well, most of them) have control. To explore the implications of her research, she examines two main models of masculinity that have existed in the US since at least the 1700s, one based on community and social usefulness, the other based on individualism and violence. In a nutshell, she argues that the model based on individuality and violence has won out over that based on community and social usefulness as the social supports for the latter have eroded.
We first begin to understand these 2 different conceptions of masculinity through the figures of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Though Disney has reduced them to the same, they were very different men, she claims. Boone was a settler in Kentucky and in that role went off on solitary missions to clear land and “tame” nature (and fight off Native Americans). The goal was to turn wilderness into homeland, to be able to cultivate the land for food and harvest. Any destruction of nature and/or Natives (we’ll come back to the positioning of Native Americans below) was not for its own sake, but for the sake of the community that could be built on the cleared and claimed land. Boone was thus the kind of man who fulfilled duties to others, both family and community. Manliness on this view was about contributing to something bigger than oneself, sacrificing for the good of others.
While Crockett was also a settler, his goal was more killing for its own sake. He was known for slaughtering animals like deer, bear, pigeons, turkeys, and buffalo far beyond what could be used for food, destroying land and forests along the way. Killing and destruction here have no greater purpose; they contribute to no community building or social usefulness. Dominating nature, Native Americans, and Mexicans (he died in the Battle of the Alamo) became symbols of masculinity as domination and control over others (human and otherwise).
Faludi sees the public usefulness notion of masculinity embodied in Roosevelt’s New Deal, World War II, and the national commitment to “winning” the Cold War. The New Deal sought to stabilize the US economically post-Depression through government programs and various regulations, including banking regulations. The Works Progress Administration, for instance, funded the building of schools, waterworks and sewage plants, roads, electrical grids, flood control and reforestation, as well as cultural and artistic endeavors. Each of these facets was seen as contributing to the broader goals of rebuilding a flourishing national community, and each individual contribution got its meaning from that larger goal.
After the War, this masculine ideal was carried forward into the Cold War and the space race. The vision of a post-war American was grounded in building a new nation out of the cooperative work of a different kind of “army”—an army of workers all aimed at improving the nation, with the common man as the foundation of US greatness. On this view, the network of workers—engineers, factory workers, scientists, technicians, managers, astronauts—are akin to the foot soldiers of the war, working together to achieve a common goal cooperatively; and communism becomes the national threat that must be defeated through this work. The same notion of anonymous, useful, community-oriented masculinity underlies this entire endeavor.
This entire enterprise fails, however, and the community-focused, publicly useful view of masculinity dies with it. Though a number of factors contribute to its demise, perhaps the most important is one that remains with us to this day, and that has even become exacerbated: the economic security and meaningful work that were supposed to adhere to post-war jobs disappeared when the corporations to which men were supposed to devote their lives did not offer loyalty in return. Not only was there no clear community-oriented good to strive for and participate in, but the means of taking care of even one’s own small community—the family—disappeared with globalization and shifting economic winds.
With this shift, Faludi suggests, men became lost. They understood that they had become diminished, but rather than examining the conditions that brought it about, they fell back on the only other cultural script for men on offer: the Davy Crockett version, rooted in violence and individualism. Faced with a loss of social purpose and standing, they blamed not the corporations and global forces that eradicated both but women and feminism, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, undocumented immigrants, and imaginary government conspiracies. (Sound familiar?) We can understand various examples of political violence (physical attacks on and assassinations of public figures, the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, threats of violence and death leveled at both public figures and private citizens), as well as other forms of violence such as school shootings, in light of Faludi’s analysis. US culture has shifted back to a notion of masculinity as domination and control over others. The behavior of Trump himself, and many men in his administration, embody this troubling shift: government agents engage in widespread violence against unarmed citizens and immigrants alike, and the president started a war in the Middle East seemingly to prove that he’s a tough guy.
This shift is complicated by the rise of celebrity culture, in which image and display are more important than accomplishment or hard work. Indeed, masculinity itself is up for sale: Viagra (and other erectile dysfunction “treatments”) is seen by many as manhood in a pill; gym memberships can help a man sculpt himself to look like a buffed-up GI Joe, even if he’s never been in a fight; guns have become a marker of male dominance; and let’s not forget Pete Hegseth’s obsession with testosterone for members of the armed services. (Hetero)sexual prowess, physical strength, and violence become the only culturally acknowledged ways to demonstrate “being a man.” Implicit in this notion are sexism and homophobia, with the subordination of women and LGBTQ+ folks as “proof” that hetero, buff men belong at the top of the social hierarchy.
As Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary makes clear, the manosphere embraces these cultural markers and practices with gusto. Explicit sexism and homophobia, intense physical workouts, and even physical attacks are livestreamed on many influencers’ social media platforms and characterize podcasts. They strive to be outrageous to attract viewers from whom they then do their best to extract money. They appeal to exactly the men Faludi argues have indeed lost their way: men who struggle to succeed in a system that seems clearly rigged for the few, but who blame feminists, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people for that system, believing that legal protections for these folks actually advantage them over straight men. Any man who thus seeks success in this rigged system is a duped fool, according to the manosphere influencers, who then position themselves as an alternate route to success, offering life coaching, courses, private memberships, etc., with the promise of longed-for monetary and social success. Not surprisingly, perhaps, success does not materialize, except for some of the influencers themselves.
While it’s obvious that violent, dominating notions of masculinity are bad for those toward whom men exert this violence and domination, Faludi also believes that they’re bad for men as well: they are ultimately left with only the emptiness of masculinity as public performance, which turns out to be not very satisfying. The solution to this problem is not, she thinks, to revert to the view of masculinity as public usefulness, which is based on the assumption that women are dependent and need protection from perceived threats; historically, Native Americans, Black men, and undocumented immigrants were positioned as the threats to be contained. Women largely prefer to provide for and protect themselves these days, and we have moved away from gross racial stereotypes of violent men of color, at least to some extent.
Instead, Faludi argues, masculinity itself needs to be redefined, much as the feminist movement redefined femininity (again, to an extent!). We could start by considering non-dominant forms of masculinity that exist either in local communities or on the margins of society. She sees the networks of care that emerged in gay communities during the AIDS crisis as a case in point. I think of the gentle, thoughtful, respectful, and kind men in my own family. We might also look to pop culture—the community of men depicted in Ted Lasso in the first few seasons seems like a nice example to me: they hold each other accountable for nasty behavior, including bullying; they respect women; they seek to understand each other and those who have harmed them in some way; and they support each other rather than tear each other down. These examples can lead us to ask: what should masculinity look like? Are there any features of culturally defined masculinity that are worth keeping? Or of femininity? Do we even need different sets of values, behaviors, roles, and norms for men and women? Asking these questions can also lead us to ask a bigger one: what kind of world would enable all of us—men, women, and everyone in between—to live fulfilling and meaningful lives? Doing so would allow us to address the economic, social, and political conditions that Faludi identifies as having brought us to this moment. Refusing to do so by clinging to unsustainable and unjust notions of who and how we should be will undoubtedly perpetuate the hierarchies that have been the target of social movements for the past almost 200 years, along with the violence that sustains them.
Sources:
Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (Harper Collins, 1999).
Jessica Grose, “The Manosphere Continues to Devolve,” NYT, 3/18/26 (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/opinion/manosphere-trump-maga-documentary.html?searchResultPosition=2)
Helen Lewis, “The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet,” The Atlantic, June 2026 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/)
“Regulating Femininity in the Manosphere: An Exploration of Femmephobic Discourse in Andre Tate and Nick Fuentes Podcasts,” Journal of Femininities, Feb. 27, 2026. Karmvir Kaur Padda, Shana MacDonald, and Nick Ruest. (https://brill.com/view/journals/fem/aop/article-10.1163-29501229-bja10032/article-10.1163-29501229-bja10032.xml?srsltid=AfmBOooNZ07gTvr2-OuUj8Xz0wNPGQrThI9wM9OSn9ftwoFC4NqpD6w-)
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, Netflix (2026).
