The patriarchy died in its sleep sometime during Obama’s first term. Or so goes the argument of The End of Men, a 2012 polemic that’s being revisited in the wake of the election. As Donald Trump aggressively courted young men on his way to victory, the mainstream media desperately searched for the right kind of talking heads to help explain the widening gender divide haunting our politics. Enter the book’s author, journalist Hanna Rosin, whom NPR interviewed on a post-election bro-safari to ask whether Trump voters were “Making America Male Again.”
In the book, Rosin observed that American men had declined economically and socially while women had quietly gained the upper hand for the first time in human history. “The most distinctive change of the last decade,” Rosin declared, “is probably the emergence of an American matriarchy, where the younger men especially are unmoored, and closer than at any other time in history to being obsolete—at least by most traditional measures of social utility.” Put another way, the “end of men” amounts to the extinction of the traits and behaviors once called manhood and the social collapse that has inevitably followed.
“What’s framed as the battle of the sexes is often just class friction.”
Few were willing to heed her warnings at the time. Though Rosin was a liberal feminist in good standing, The End of Men was demonized by critics as propaganda for the still-thriving “broligarchs.” In the NPR interview, the author herself all but apologized for it. To be sure, the haters weren’t completely wrong about The End of Men. Obviously, not all men are on the wane. College-educated men still earn more than their female counterparts, and it is difficult to shed a tear for the high-earning alphas who still have a white-knuckled grip on Big Tech and the C-suite just because beer commercials and video games have gone woke.
But this leads us to a point missed in the debate around Rosin’s book. In their rush to proclaim that the patriarchy is fine, actually, the liberals missed the book’s real flaw: a lack of a class analysis. The gender-essentialist framing accepted by Rosin and her critics alike helps obscure the fact that male inequality skyrocketed even as working-class women were also left behind in the “Lean-In” girlboss era. So, what’s framed as the battle of the sexes is often just class friction that expresses itself as gender friction.
The title of Rosin’s book really should have been The End of Working Men and the Rise of College-Educated Women. It’s less catchy, no doubt, but it captures the twin forces that have upended American society over the last half-century. While the white-collar world has been busy diversifying and de-masculinizing, the blue-collar world has been disintegrating. The liberal political and media class has celebrated the former and all but ignored the latter, while conservatives have mourned the inversion of the old order while pursuing a policy agenda whose benefits redound mainly to men at the top.
According to a recent “State of Working Class Men” report from the American Institute for Boys and Men, 64 percent of men lack college degrees—one common way of demarcating working-class status—compared to 57 percent of women. Post-industrial economies are unfriendly to working-class men. After all, as The End of Men observes, the fairer sex is better suited to an information and service economy that values soft skills—communication and collaboration—over the brawn and physical endurance of the industrial age. This epochal shift was already noticeable to Rosin, who wrote that “the US economy is becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood.” (To be clear, however, the post-industrial economy isn’t great news for most women either: Of those making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less, 69 percent are women.)
The declining prospects of the working class, male and female alike, have only gotten more pronounced since Rosin’s book appeared due to stagnating wages, shaky job security, the gig-ification of employment, and a loss of status and purpose in the culture. The Obama-era maxim that unemployed workers should “learn to code” now feels like a cruel joke. They didn’t. For men, the numbers are stark: In 1950, 1 in 20 men in their prime didn’t work; today, the number is closer to 1 in 5. Men have not only been slowly dropping out of the economy but out of higher education, marriage, child-raising, and civic life—and considering climbing suicide rates and “deaths of despair,” life itself. Working-class men between the ages of 35 and 44 are about seven times more likely to die between those ages than college-educated women in the same cohort.
“The educational attainment rates between the sexes have essentially flipped.”
The flipside of the implosion of the working class in the neoliberal era is the rise of college-educated women, who started to climb to parity or even surpass male achievement on a societal scale. Over the past century, the educational attainment rates between the sexes have essentially flipped. Men once were more likely to wear a cap and gown, but by 1979, about 200,000 more women were enrolled in college than men. By 2021, that difference had grown to about 3.1 million more women than men enrolled in college. In 13 states, 60 percent or more of college students are female. College-educated women are likelier to have a good career, close friends, and social bonds, and less likely to do drugs. They even live longer.
This disparity even has its own geography. The working-class increasingly live in atomized inner-ring suburbs and the sprawl of exurban and rural areas. College-educated men are disproportionately clustered in the West, especially in tech-centric regions like Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas. Their highly educated female counterparts are found in greater numbers in the superstar cities of the East—New York City, Atlanta, and Washington, DC‚ where women under 30 now out-earn men.
The nation’s capital, which voted 92.5 percent in favor of Kamala Harris, has become something of a city-state for the Democratic Party’s current core base. It is also ground zero for the growing gender and class divide. The District of Columbia has the lowest percentage of working-class men (29 percent) in the country compared to the 50 states and one of the highest female-to-male ratios in the country (53 percent women), and as a city, has the third highest educational attainment (65 percent have bachelor degrees). Not coincidentally, DC also claims one of the five highest per capita GDPs at nearly $260,000, upwards of $100,000 higher than Luxembourg—the wealthiest country in the world. No wonder everyone complains that dating in DC is “notoriously bleak.”
Just a few hours’ drive to the west, we find the bizarro-world inverse of DC: the struggling state of West Virginia. The Mountain State has a third of the college graduates of Washington, a per capita income of $32,000, and a male life expectancy that’s dipped below 70. Not coincidentally, it’s the heart of MAGA-land, going for Trump by a more than two-thirds margin.
A funny thing happened in 2012 after the liberal media and the educated professional classes dismissed The End of Men as regressive tripe in service of the ossified male power structure. Over the next decade, they successfully fomented a decade-long moral panic against men that took hold everywhere in corporate culture and pop culture. The patriarchy is dead, long live the patriarchy!
“The patriarchy, we were told, was suddenly everywhere and nowhere.”
Those driving this trend didn’t stop with targeting the excesses of the boorish men of #MeToo. Masculinity itself became a primal, oppressive force to be overthrown. The patriarchy, we were told, was suddenly everywhere and nowhere: Like an invisible toxic chemical, it infected frat houses, manspreaded next to you in the subway, hid in the corner office of every corporate headquarters, in the motivations of mass shooters. The term of endearment “bro” was refashioned into a winking half-slur, and a whole new vocabulary lept from elite female-centric humanities classrooms and Tumblr pages into a pop phenomenon: rape culture, the male gaze, and mansplaining, oh my! The Democratic Party’s insistence that “The Future is Female” wasn’t just a mere slogan during the elite panic around Trump’s rise to power. It was a mandate that accelerated the exorcism of masculinity and men from media, academia, tech, and NGOs—the economic and intellectual power brokers of the Democratic Party.
But because all politics is now a perverse projection, the Republican men on the other side of the aisle have been busy devouring their own tail. There has been a resurgence of a particularly resentful form of male chauvinism among lonely and atomized men that has curdled into something darker in male-dominated online spaces like multiplayer video games, 4Chan, and a wide swath of YouTube. Many right-leaning men mistakenly see women’s empowerment as the primary driver of their decline rather than an elite failure (of both sexes), and many of the aggrieved bro celebs in the MAGA orbit are happy to brandish the very “toxicity” they’ve been accused of like a badge of honor.
In the long leadup to the faceoff between Trump and Harris, there was a fleeting sense that the former’s victory heralded a brave new world for men. Just after the election, Jake Paul stood triumphant in the boxing ring after beating the aged phantom of Mike Tyson. He grabbed the mic and proclaimed on Netflix that the return of the once-and-future president represented a new day in America. The subtext was clear: Bros are back, baby. But the reckless comic-book maleness embodied by Paul and company is what feminist critic Susan Faludi once defined as “ornamental masculinity”—all Cybertrucks, steroid-aided muscles, and swilling Black Rifle coffee rather than the older manliness of moral strength, self-sacrifice, and duty.
Meanwhile, the liberals have reacted to the widening schism in gender relations and the rightward drift of men by treating them as if they’re another demographic or special interest group to be pandered to or a puzzle to be workshopped—Hey, maybe they just need a left-wing Joe Rogan or the right TED Talk? In 2024, in other words, “What’s the Matter with Men?” became the new “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Those in the mainstream media not busy blaming Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate for being the Pied Piper of Bad Men are tapping Richard Reeves, the president of the left-leaning American Institute for Boys and Men, on the shoulder as a kind of bro-whisperer. Similarly, the Harris campaign made an awkward attempt to placate Trump-leaning working-class men by playing dress-up with camo hats and playing up the golly-gee antics of former football coach Tim Walz.
I fear that nothing much will change in the fractured political and media landscape in 2025. The rise of Elon Musk, the nation’s richest man, as shadow vice-president in the Trump administration is a sign that the working men in the MAGA base will get little in the way of policy help. For all the big talk, the GOP hasn’t proved it can think beyond corporate shareholder value. But we’re sure to have plenty of content to consume from two insular bubbles divided by sex: the blue women-and-queerverse of the mainstream and the blood-red countercultural manosphere, and never the twain shall meet.
And if it turns out we’re at the End of the End of Men moment of history, it’s not necessarily a moment of triumph. As Tom Cruise quips in the classic guys-being-guys movie Cocktail: Everything ends badly, or else it wouldn’t end.