Gender-Based Political Polarisation is Making Men Stupid and Uninteresting

The meaning and consequences of "enchudification"

Barack Obama went on his wife’s podcast recently to speak about what I guess we’re required to call the “crisis amongst boys and men”. For someone like Obama and the audience of that podcast, the “crisis” really means the male drift away from the progressive end of liberalism as a culture and a political force. Obama is an articulate and serious person, and one of the most reliable communicators of mainstream ideals, so his comments were picked up by a number of different people including Richard Reeves, here. He touched on the absence of male role models, men’s declining involvement in community, and withdrawal from shared spaces. Sample quote from the podcast:

I do think there are some particular issues with boys that as a society we’re not addressing… I do think as a society we have to create more structures for boys and men to have guidance… rirtuals… frameworks… encouragement… to be able to meet a wide range of role models so that whatever their inclinations they can see a path to success that isn’t just sports or money…. so that’s on all of us together. I think it would be good to find places in your community where there are a bunch of men who can be elders to boys… (what boys need is) not just exposure to one “Dad”…

It’s at about 57 mins here if you want to give it a listen.

The idea that men have lost spaces in which they are at ease, and that that’s bad, has become a truism; as has the idea that there’s a kind of cascade effect coming out of that impacting the healthy formation of male character. It’s also become a cliche for mainstream voices to say, as Obama does in his typically measured way, that we need to fix that. For the record I’m skeptical about a lot of this, including the need for role-models. But I don’t think the people who fret about it most have fully assimilated the implications of the problem, or what it would take to solve. Getting men back on-side will be harder than progressives think, and is going to cost them something.

“Where did the men go?” is a strange question in a world where they comprise 50% of the population, and in society dominated by a technology that allows everyone to see what everyone else is doing at all times. The question is in fact a restatement of the mainstream political problems, “why are men not in the same accessible cultural places they used to be”, “why aren’t they not responding to the old instructions” and specifically “why can’t we reach them in these new places they’ve gone to”.

For reasons of status as well as morality, one of the side-effects of the advance of social media over the past 20 or so years has been an accelerated pressure for shared spaces to explicitly politicise themselves in a progressive direction. “Spaces” here just means anywhere people gather together, anything from hobbies and fandoms, various types of clubs, different types of media, to sports and literal physical locations. Men are an oppressor class and a problematic out-group within the moral structure of progressivism; as polling reflects this structure is synonymous with political and moral ideals that are more aesthetically and emotionally appealing to women. (The truth of that claim should be obvious from the world around you but here’s a study supporting it if you need one.)

This means that the demand for demonstrations of loyalty to the moral structure of our time has fallen on male spaces in a way that hasn’t elsewhere. Over time, activities that were largely sustained by male interest, and that implicitly reflected the preferences of men, have been turned into low-level cultural conflict zones.

You can test the truth of this by looking at any activity that men are disproportionately interested in and seeing the political developments over that period. I’ve written about the way in which football has become an intense locus of activism of a type that appeals much more to women than to men, despite the audience (and in particular the most active and dedicated part) being more male than female. You can also look at nerdier hobbies, like tabletop gaming; read here about how “the portrayal of orcs’ physical attributes (in Dungeons and Dragons) often includes characteristics historically linked to offensive depictions of non-European ethnicities” - the advance of politics into these spaces is broken down in greater detail in this Guardian article.

These changes are happening for a variety of reasons and of course are supported by some men; but the point is that men are much more likely to experience this push as an invasive one, and one which there is no acknowledged legitimate or respectable way to resist or complain about. The push never happens in the opposite direction.

One of the effects of that moralisation and politicisation of unguarded spaces is that, by default and unthinkingly, men are drawn to places that are by their nature resistant to this trend. These newer spaces need a couple of different characteristics - they have to be ones that progressive people, and women especially, don’t currently occupy, and don’t want to occupy - are maybe even are repulsed by - often because they embody some value or set of values that women are uncomfortable with. It helps if these spaces are seen as downwardly mobile because of course it’s less likely someone will ask to be made to feel at home in those.

So from a defensive perspective men are drawn to spaces that not just that they skew male, but that they skew towards the male tendencies that women are least enthused by or straight up don’t like. Lots of this will be totally benign; for instance the advent of the four and a half hour long podcasts on scientific subjects for men who are detail and technicality obsessed.

But a lot of it is not benign at all. A logical outcome of this process is a cultural rush to places that accentuate objectively bad traits more common in men - pomposity, wilful stupidity, coarseness, meanness, inegalitarianism. I think that explains a lot about the media that has been ascendant for the last few years - the worst and dumbest parts of things like the bro-Podcasting complex, combat sports content, right-wing and conservative agitprop on social media. (I like watching UFC and listening to podcasts, I emphasise here that I’m talking about the most obnoxious and superficial versions of these things.)

Part of the reason people have rushed to this stuff is a reaction to the politicisation of neutral and unguarded spaces. It’s as though, psychologically speaking, men are moving into a cockroach sanctuary to escape the hygiene-obsessed people who are gentrifying their neighbourhood. These spaces in turn create people who aren’t fit to be anywhere else.

There are multiple social forces at the same time here. Women’s general upward mobility and increased social, cultural and political power means they will have an increased presence in the most respectable and valuable institutions, and an increased shaping of those institutions to better reflect female moral and aesthetic preferences. (There’s nothing wrong with that, and good for them.) Where a neutral space exists, or a space that skews a little bit female, or that is more easily turned for political purposes then men will gradually recede from enthusiastic participation in them - that includes for instance, the humanities, literature and art and drama, every kind of activism and charity. In the great political gender divorce women have taken a greater share of the organs of cultural production, and men by default get a greater share of those spaces that govern the production of crank science, fart jokes, and dropshipping. I exaggerate of course, but not much.

My interest here is as a writer, and the whole phenomenon helps explain why so much right-wing and male-oriented (same thing) content online is scared of stuff that is essential to good writing - abstraction and ambiguity - and often seems repulsed by those things. It also explains why there’s an increased chunk of men in this sphere who seem only able to interact with art where there is an obvious and direct practical lesson or instruction that can be taken from it, and struggle to appreciate it for its own sake. For instace my own impression is that men that are most enthusiastic about using AI - being a subset of the tech content that holds greater appeal to them; they are most impressed by it’s capabilities and least aware of how clumsy and artistically inert it has proven to be to date, some examples of this techno-philistine idiocy below.

One of the key outcomes of the process of “enchudification” (if you will) is that there is a growing subset of men who seem to have given up on any form of art or expression that involves any level of abstraction as being “woke nonsense”. As someone who likes art, literature and expression for their own sakes I find myself frustrated at the way men have surrendered that territory. My own experience with writing is that it’s incredibly difficult to get anyone to express interest in any artistic idea that is not purely literal or that is not a political hot take or culture war shot - but where you do that person is way more likely to be a woman than a man.

That’s not to say that there aren’t people who are fighting this good fight. There is a layer of men determined to re-fire interest in the classical world and they have been alarmingly successful (this has caused some distress). There are also fiction authors like Delicious Tacos or publishers like Passage Press who are attempting to create and popularise new art. But I think it’s noticeable with examples such as the latter, that their most popular books seem to be the ones that can be linked most closely back to the discourse. In other words their success at this point is a subset of a culture war fight rather than a victory for art itself per se (hardly their fault). In general, I really feel like the men of my own age and younger have given up on anything abstract or not purely technical in art as alien and enemy territory. I hate it.

To refer back to the original point about Obama above and the wider conversations about men as a political problem. There is a correct feeling that men have in spirit departed shared cultural spaces. There is a sense this creates a knot of other problems, including that there are now no role-models for younger men as to how to behave within those spaces, and that we increasingly don’t understand what’s going in male interior lives… per Obama, the solution that’s often presented, with unintentional glibness, is “let’s invite ourselves back into their lives, create the role-models and talk to them”. I think that sidesteps the depth of the rot, and structurally why the current disconnect exists.

I have never seen a person of the Obama type wrestle with the idea that maybe men have drifted away because this worldview is simply because it’s a bad value-fit for them - and that that is a reasonable assessment on men’s part. To say “men need role-models” and “men need male-friendly spaces” is to tacitly accept that there are basic essential differences in outlook between men and women. It’s not possible to accept and act on that, while also believing that men and women have fixed positions in the oppressor-oppressed model that is the essence of their belief system. No one is even ready to admit to that tension.

The answer is to make an accomodation between men and progressivism, but that’s easier said than done. That would mean a willingness to accommodate male-appealing values, interests and interpersonal styles. The benefit of that would be that you get back some male voters and male energy and you can keep a morally delinquent group where you can see them. I think the level of cultural deference progressive people are used to, their famed inability to mind-read opponents means they will not be able to do that.

There is no way of having spaces that men are more comortable in are not also often repulsive and contradictory to the spirit of our time, even when they are relatively dignified, sedate or harmless. If we insist that a male space or a male role-model or themselves is totally in line with progressive liberalism is going to result in something very wan or banal that men aren’t drawn to. That’s why I have often in the past defended people like older (circa 2017-ish) versions of Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson as being, from a progressive point of view, the best that you can hope for. Neither of us has to like it, but this was the cultural compromise you needed. You won’t like what comes next.

The most basic problem we have is that we live in the smartphone panopticon era, where everyone sees everything, groups that would naturally separate are psychologically thrown together, and the world becomes a stage where every act is an emotional performance of values and social status. In order to exist side by side in peace - which is a supposed goal of egalitarianism - a certain amount of strategic ignorance, about what the Other is up to, is bliss. Backing off a little on political oversight would mean, for men, that over time they could retreat a little from the chud inside, and discover older versions of themselves that have been forgotten. But a feature of progressive liberalism is that it cannot leave you in peace - in part that’s because it’s a moralising faith but also because the kind of person who is drawn to it is deeply anxious and therefore constantly expresses a need for reassurance by micromanaging the emotions of others.

None of this is to excuse men themselves for their own condition - if they are becoming dumber it’s their own fault. Maintaining a hold on valued intellectual territory was always hard in the past and men seemed happy to do it. That’s what’s most troubling about this era - not just that men left places where it was clear they weren’t welcome, but that they shrank from something worth fighting for. Perhaps the saddest fact is that we’ve reached the stage of degradation that many don’t even know what they’re missing.