|
Bald, white, and jacked, Scott Galloway is an action figure of the tech-and-finance overclass. He’s an angel investor, a best-selling author, and a personal-finance guru. He podcasts constantly: his hosting duties include “The Prof G Pod,” which offers business-news takes and career advice; “Pivot,” in which he riffs on news of the day with the tech journalist Kara Swisher; and the self-explanatory “Raging Moderates,” with the Fox News personality Jessica Tarlov. For someone of this Übermensch milieu, he is surprisingly progressive and self-aware—he often acknowledges that his wealth and achievements were made likelier by his race, sex, publicly funded education, and devoted mother, who raised him mostly on her own.
In recent years, Galloway has also become a leading evangelist for a notion that rapidly solidified into conventional wisdom: America’s young men are in crisis. “Seldom in recent memory has there been a cohort that’s fallen farther, faster,” he writes in his new book, “Notes on Being a Man.” To make his case, Galloway pulls from a heavily circulated set of statistics. At colleges and universities nationwide, female students outnumber males by about three to two. Among young adults, men are more likely than women to live with their parents; by their mid-thirties, more than fifteen per cent of men still live with their folks, compared to less than nine per cent of women. Men die by suicide at about three and a half times the rate that women do. Men’s real wages are lower for the tenth and fiftieth percentiles of earners than they were in 1979. Currently, the unemployment rate among young men with bachelor’s degrees between the ages of twenty-three and thirty is close to double that of their female peers.
These numbers have roused bipartisan concern. In March, Governor Gavin Newsom, of California, on the début episode of his new podcast, welcomed the conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, who lamented Gen Z as the “most alcohol-addicted, most drug-addicted, most suicidal, most depressed, most medicated generation in history.” And these under-thirties, Kirk said, were receiving a pernicious message: “You’re not going to have the same American Dream that your parents would have.” He and his fellow conservative organizers “saw this as an opportunity,” he added, “especially with young men.” Donald Trump won men under age thirty by fifty-six per cent in the 2024 election, up fifteen points from 2020. For these gains, Kirk credited the coalescing electoral power of the right-leaning constellation of podcasters and streamers known as the manosphere, which encompasses libertarian bros, evangelical Christians, and white nationalists.
Newsom, who is angling to become the next Democratic Presidential nominee, appeared to be listening closely. At the end of July, he issued an executive order intended “to confront California’s growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” A week later, another likely Democratic contender, the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, published an op-ed in the Washington Post that linked unaffordable housing and health care to an “increasingly despondent” mood among young men. “You don’t have to be an incel to believe that the ‘system’ is fundamentally broken and rigged against your success,” Emanuel wrote.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/what-did-men-do-to-deserve-this
|
What Did Men Do to Deserve This?