The Progressive Quest to Win Back Men Is Going Very Badly

"Exasperating, agitating, maddening, infuriating" lads?

Corisca and the Satyr by Artemisia Gentileschi

In the beloved movie musical My Fair Lady, we watch as Professor Higgins attempts to turn cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle into a Duchess. The process doesn’t run smoothly, mostly because Eliza insists on having a mind of her own. In one of the most famous songs, the Professor blasts Eliza’s kind as “nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags!” Getting to the point, he asks: “oh, why can’t a woman be more like a man?” It’s a question that has come to trouble the Professor Higgins analogues of our own age - self-appointed instructors and patrician guardians of all that is good - but this time the sex of the subjects has been swapped. What the fuck is the problem with these men?

In the run-up to the American election it became clear that Donald Trump had a young-male-centric strategy, that the Democratic side had no counter-strategy and that it spelled trouble. The final tally reflected this: across all racial categories men broke decisively in Trump’s direction and were a key factor in his victory. If it was a simple matter of numbers that would be bad enough for his opponents; but the creeping horror that they have lost not just the voters but an entire male-oriented slice of popular culture has triggered what Ezra Klein described as a sort of spiritual crisis amongst Democrats. Listening to activists struggle through questions on Podcasts has been one of Schadenfreude-laced joys of the post-election period. The question is relevant even for those of us who aren’t American as the drift of men away from the left becomes a global trend.