The weaker centrist side has no such confidence. Galloway, in both his podcasts and Notes on Being a Man, presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary, but as a state of mind and way of life that is available to men and women alike and therefore cannot be defined. (It's a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about it.) In this amorphous structure, men's biggest problem is also the feeling—an unattainable itch or deep conviction—that men should still be superior to women in the social hierarchy, just not as strongly as before. This belief may be mistaken or unconscious, but it is nonetheless irresistible and must be accepted for the good of us all.
What these pundits are pushing us to do, even very politely, is to admit that women, in general, are used to being a little degradedthey are slightly underpaid, ignored and suppressed in their ambitions, which is not and never will be the case with men. A woman-coded person, to use Krugman's terminology, may feel overwhelmed by childcare costs, ashamed that she can't get a mortgage, or exhausted by long hours working as an ICU nurse, but such feelings do not disrupt the order of the universe. This person's responsibilities to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they are not written with a capital “P.” This person's opinion is important, but not decisive. Time Expert Ezra Klein recently suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded and those rights are valued accordingly.
“You need a dad,” Galloway, who has two sons, said in a recent podcast. The nuclear family he imagines seems to be one in which Mom is the default parent (“They turn to her for care. When they really have problems, I believe they go to Mom”), while the necessary dad is the authority figure that Mom can turn to if circumstances require it. “There are certain times when my partner needs me to weigh in,” Galloway explained. “I don’t know if it’s the depth of my voice or my physical size.” Boys, he continued, “over time begin to disconnect from their mother.” One might wonder how boys lose these frequencies in the first place. One might wish to hear a deep voice that would explain this.
In Of Boys and Men, Reeves, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, draws on the work of the late British sociologist Jeff Dench, who argued that “the fundamental weakness of feminist analysis” is its failure “to see that men may need the status of the primary breadwinner role to give them sufficient reason to fully participate and remain involved in the long-term and tedious affairs of family life.” And Reeves supports supply-side economist George Gilder's hypothesis that once wives become “both breadwinners and childbearers,” their husbands become “exiles” in their own homes. Reeves largely rejects Gilder and Dench's line of revanchist patriarchy, but credits them for correctly diagnosing “the dangers of anomie and detachment among people deprived of their traditional roles.” In an era when two out of every five households have a woman as the primary breadwinner, no one seems to know “what fathers are for,” Reeves said. One in six fathers do not live with any of their children. One study found that thirty-two percent of non-resident fathers had minimal contact with their children within one year of separation from their children's mother, and within eight years this number had risen to fifty-five percent.
