Politico masculinity issue is unintended parody

Politico Magazine published an issue on masculinity, taking aim at the emerging theme that men are in crisis in the United States and the Western world. It is a perfect microcosm of everything that is ridiculous about Left-wing sneering at people they don’t care for. And apparently, they really don’t care for men at all.

The masculinity crisis has become a theme in conservative politics, although the only reason it is a partisan issue at all is identity politics. The contemporary Left puts White men at the absolute bottom of the social ladder, and men in general are seen as a lower class of being.

But for Democrats, not Leftists, there is no reason to in principle deny that there is a serious problem and that we need to find a way to address it. Liberals and conservatives may have different frames of reference and different policy preferences for how to identify and solve problems, but the problem itself is easy enough to grasp: by just about any measure, boys and men are not doing well as a class, and things are getting worse.

Women live longer, do better at school, are incarcerated less, kill themselves far less often, are injured at work less often, are victims of crime less often, and graduate college at much higher rates. We hear constantly about the gender pay gap, which is a myth, yet there is among many an utter indifference to the fact that males are falling behind fast and the rate is accelerating.

Richard Reeves, a liberal scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote a book on the problem and has a Substack dedicated to the issue. He is not Andrew Tate preaching brutish masculinity (as is portrayed); he is a social scientist looking at the basic facts and pointing to a very real problem. As much as we hear that women are oppressed, the fact is that men are not just losing ground in some abstract relative sense, but literally dying younger and becoming immiserated.

Lots of people are writing about the crisis facing men in the West, and there are lots of different takes on why that has been happening. I don’t have anything to add to that debate right now.

Instead, I want to point out the absolute ridiculousness of the Left’s reaction to this discussion. Rather than take seriously that men may face problems in addition to the poor, oppressed women of the world–perhaps they think the fentanyl deaths and suicides are a good thing, and that the vast majority of immiserated homeless people being men is no big deal–they make fun of the discussion as the obsession of repressed elite White men who long for a world in which they can oppress women.

This is the Barbie Movie version of reality.

The quality of thought put into Politico Magazine’s work is encapsulated by one image:

All the essays are written by women. Every single one.

Now one would think, given the large number of men out there who have written about this issue they might have found one. Reeves, perhaps, who after all comes from an ideologically sympatico think tank.

Or, perhaps, find a conservative woman who has thought deeply about these issues, of whom there are many.

No, Politico chose a cadre of feminists to sneer at the idea that men literally dying younger and younger, falling behind in schools, no longer going to college, and dropping out of society and relationships is a bad thing.

Girl power!

It’s disgusting.

I haven’t any skin in this particular game because, frankly, I haven’t thought deeply enough about it to have any but basic opinions. I just haven’t spent enough time being steeped in the debates and statistics to have much of interest to say. But even the most cursory glance at statistics shows that there is a crisis here.

But in the world of identity politics, crises are defined by who you are, not what is happening in the world. Men are doing worse? Good! I don’t like men!

One has to wonder whether a single editor at Politico looked at their list of authors and thought: hmm, maybe when discussing masculinity we should ask a man’s opinion?

Naah. Why would we?