What the post-woke era means for marriage, manhood, and meaning
In February 2022, Allison P. Davis, a features writer for The Cut, earned her Nostradamus bona fides: “A Vibe Shift is Coming,” her piece was titled. The subhead: “Will any of us survive it?”
Davis’ piece popularized that now-omnipresent phrase, coined by consultant Sean Monahan, though few could have predicted in which direction the amorphous vibes would shift. Since then, the push to advance progressive gender ideology has stalled out, and even reversed. Its intellectual cousin, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts that exploded at corporate and college campuses post-Floyd, is likewise in retreat. A fever feels like its broken.
President Trump’s executive orders around DEI and gender were gasoline on a burning flame. The New York Times is now willing to publish guest essays disavowing Bud Light’s progressive ad campaigns, including its partnership with a transgender influencer that was the first unmistakable sign the left had overreached (the beer’s sales still haven’t recovered.) HBO’s White Lotus risked the fury of transgender activists in giving viewers a graphic introduction to the idea of autogynephilia, a concept intertwined with the phenomenon of adult men seeking surgery to make them resemble a female. West Virginia lawmakers are seeking to re-emphasize the reality of biology in government documents, following the lead of the UK’s National Health Service. “Chestfeeding,” “womxn,” and “birthing parent” are out; welcome back “breastfeeding,” “women,” and “mom.”
The reign of the censorious left is at low ebb. That means all sorts of taboos are able to be newly broken, for better and for worse. The Financial Times reports that Wall Street bankers are delighted in their newfound freedom to yet again say “pussy” and “retard” without fear of reprisal. The New Yorker, Bloomberg, and other prestige outlets have identified the political impact of the podcast bro: unwoke, uncancellable, and uninterested in the religious or traditional conservatism that has long leavened the limited-government coalition in the United States.
Long-time Democratic strategist James Carville has openly worried about the impact this evolution will have on his party. “A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females,” he says. The White House itself has seen the political energy in tapping into the “Barstool” faction. They reportedly influenced the Romanian government to free notorious influencer and sex trafficker Andrew Tate, with Alina Habba, who at the time was counselor to the President, calling herself a “big fan“ of the self-described misogynist (before reversing herself a few days later.)
The good news is that, so far, Tate and his peers are outliers. Our cultural difficulty is a more prosaic one: that our post-woke moment may point out the flaws of radical views towards gender fluidity without tackling the harder questions about what men can and should be for. The version of manhood on offer from the Joe Rogans, Pat McAffees, or Theo Vons is not Tate’s militant pro-misogyny; it’s largely a “just-be-cool” libertarianism. Indeed, the Trump 2024 campaign racked up big numbers among young men precisely because of the sense that the right would leave them alone. Trumpism is copacetic towards the vices condemned by the conservativism of yesteryear, without the left’s urge to police political correctness.
Yet the political winds never blow the same direction for long. Overreach and backlash is to be expected, and the vibes, inevitably, will shift again. When they do, with what will this current post-woke era leave us? A rediscovered license to use dehumanizing language, or the renewed freedom to use accurate words to describe the realities of human existence? Will we be newly able to build a society that recognizes the biological reality of sex, or will we simply lapse into essentialist memes about men just needing to be men?
Are We All Anti-Feminists Now?
Reactionary, atavistic masculinity isn’t going to lead to the kind of civilizational renewal we need. Yes, a healthy culture of marriage needs men who are comfortable, not apologetic, about being men. But that doesn’t come from listening to influencers interested in selling protein powder. The parody of masculinity on offer doesn’t tell men how to woo young women; it tells young men how to impress other impressionable young men. Many realize this—not just left-leaning voices who abhor the anti-feminism offered by Tate, but influential conservatives as well. “Empty masculinity that will enrich the pusher but leave the customer—in this case, young men—shriveled and broken,” writes the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo. At the Los Angeles Times, Josh Hammer was even more blunt: “How any political movement claiming the mantle of ‘family values’ can support such an individual is inexplicable.”
Thankfully, while Tate inarguably gets clicks, it’s less clear he is leading a counter-revolution. Writing about “vibes” is, almost by definition, amorphous. Still, we can ground our speculation in a recent report about Americans’ views on gender from the Pew Research Center, recently synthesized with interviews by The New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller. In the Pew survey, 36 percent of men aged 18-49 say they are “extremely” or “very often” frustrated when they think about how things are going for men in the U.S. Only a quarter of Republicans (versus 13 percent of Democrats) say having more women working outside the home has made it harder for men to lead satisfying lives, with roughly the same saying feminism has made it harder for women to lead satisfying lives. Some grumbling? Sure. But Tateism is not yet run amok.
In her Times piece, Miller talked to a 38-year-old construction manager in Rochester, N.Y., who compared his marriage to that of his parents: “My dad is old school — he was the breadwinner, he never talked about his feelings… My wife and I are very open about all that stuff together.” A similar generation gap is seen in the research data: one-quarter of Pew’s male respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 rated themselves as “highly masculine.” Yet more than half of those over 50 years old did the same. These numbers don’t exactly point to a massive testosterone-fueled mass revolt against women in the workplace.
I don’t agree with all of the interpretation offered by Heejung Chung, director of the King’s College Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, but she’s correct to note that the available survey data simply does not back up the idea that there is a surge of backlash to feminism among young men. There are certainly frustrations, as evidenced by the sighs of relief at the end of the DEI regime. But overall, young men consistently display higher levels of gender egalitarianism than the previous generations. Indeed, the political polarization along gender lines that should rightly worry us is driven less by young men becoming more conservative than by young women rushing to adopt progressive political positions.
Is it troubling to see the rise of openly misogynist influencers, or podcast hosts who openly speculate about whether women should be allowed to vote? Of course. But the testicle tanning, raw egg “slonking,” and obsession over hypergamy and performative masculinity are largely limited, thankfully, to the too-online red pill brigade.
Taking Aim at Apathy
The decline in marriage in America is both cause and effect of this extended male adolescence. We know that strong marriages are linked to better outcomes for kids, more stable relationships for adults, and a whole host of healthy social indicators. To be considered the type of person worth marrying, men need to show they can bring something to the table. If we misdiagnose the fracturing dating and mating market as due to male rage rather than male apathy and self-indulgence, we’ll get the prescription wrong.
The audience for Barstool-type content, far from being recruited into an anti-feminist revolution, are easy marks for various social opiates. Joe Rogan and his imitators aren’t looking to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment. They don’t encourage men to sacrifice for anything beyond themselves. They just want men to be free to indulge their short-term impulses, whether through the dopamine hit of smartphone-fueled sports betting, the rush of an endless scroll of naked women, or the high of newly legalized marijuana.
It doesn’t take a doctorate to determine why this message might be popular (and a profitable business model.) But policymakers should be skeptical of the messaging that these vices are victimless. Many, maybe even most, men, can bet on a game, look at porn, or smoke a joint without getting hooked for life. But we know a worrisome share cannot. And the post-woke moment seems to be locking in an attitudinal shift. We used to call these behaviors “vices” because we knew they weren’t good for one’s soul (even if there was always some hypocrisy involved.) Now, we embrace them. There’s money to be made, and urges to be fulfilled.
Condoning, even encouraging, these behaviors sends the signal that wasting one’s young adult years in a haze of self-interest is just as socially valuable as becoming the type of person that could become a reliable husband and father. If we want to see American marriage rates revive, we have to be intentional about the project of producing marriageable men—not on strictly economic grounds, as breadwinners, but in the sense of becoming the type of person a young woman would want to marry. That’s harder in a world with unencumbered access to internet porn, legal weed, and DraftKings.
The anti-woke backlash was necessary to restore sanity, if nothing else. But we should take care to disentangle the cultural momentum behind post-woke moment from a lasting victory on the issues that matter most. As liberals like Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Of Boys and Men author Richard Reeves demonstrate, we can have open conversations about the unique roles men can play, and the challenges they face, without collapsing into identity politics. We can talk about marriage and meaning as more than an individual consumer choice, but as questions that get to the heart of society and the human person.
For the post-woke moment to lead to an authentic renaissance, we must push back not just against the most cartoonish examples of reactionary masculinity, but also the easier-going lifestyle libertarianism that accepts instant gratification over long-term fulfillment. The podcast hosts won’t be on board; self-sacrifice is never going to be as appealing as self-indulgence. But if the momentum swing of the past three years has opened up anything, it’s the opportunity to revisit social trends we were told to accept as given. And that is really quite a vibe.
