The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet

Has a virulent form of misogyny become the single most important force holding together the American right?

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I couldn’t really have come up with a better title for a hitpiece if I’d tried.

Back in 2022, Mother Jones wrote a takedown about my previous book The Eggs Benedict Option and called it “Blood, Soil and Grassfed Beef,” which I thought was pretty cool. Cool enough, indeed, that I ended up reclaiming the slogan and turning it into a t-shirt for sale on my website. I think it might still be up there, and if it isn’t, I’ll make sure to bring it back. Maybe we’ll do a new design.

The author of that piece—Eamonn Whalen?— said the book read as if “Tucker Carlson wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which I also liked.

I sometimes think it would be better if my detractors just ignored me and didn’t say a word, in rather the same way Donald Trump’s critics just make him look better, whatever they write about him—in whatever language they write about him.

“IST DONALD TRUMP EIN SEXMONSTER?” asked a German magazine, maybe Der Spiegel.

(I think I made that slogan into a t-shirt too…)

Now this latest piece about me, the cover story for the June 2026 issue of The Atlantic, is called, “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet.” I mean… yes. Not all the time; but certainly a bit quieter than the current norm. How about a 25% reduction in volume?

The author is Helen Lewis, whom you may remember from that really excruciating GQ interview with Jordan Peterson in 2018. Looking back, I think that was probably when the wheels started coming off the JBP bandwagon. He probably just had a bad day—perhaps he’d had a spoonful of cider vinegar?—but he came across as sullen, moody, entitled, like a spoiled teenager and not a leader of men. Lewis was undeniably combative, and she seemed to enjoy getting a rise out of the professor, or multiple rises out of him, but I’m not sure what he was expecting. He’d been into the lion’s den plenty of times before.

So I was quite surprised when I received a message from Helen on Substack asking if I’d speak to her for a piece she was putting together. I imagined it would be hostile to some degree—I mean, pretty much all mainstream coverage is—but she turned out to be extremely personable.

Actually, we got on really well. I liked her and she liked me. When we spoke by Zoom—I was in Washington promoting my new book—it was very clear she had read The Last Men and thought about it quite carefully. She had also done plenty of research into me, and had some incisive things to say about me, my work and the broader scene of which I’m a part. We spoke for well over an hour, me lying in bed in a rather nice new dressing gown I’d picked up in Austin a week earlier.

Basically, the premise of the piece is that there’s a rising movement called “masculinism” within MAGA that provides a kind of glue for a movement that still, a decade later, lacks a consistent unifying ideology.

Here’s what Lewis says:

“But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.

“The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. ‘People ask me what the New Right is furious about,’ the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. ‘And i think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.’”

And it is an “unlikely constellation” Lewis brings together in her essay. Doug Wilson, Nick Fuentes, Joel Webbon, Sneako, Andrew Tate, and even Helen Andrews, who has been a pretty powerful critic of the feminisation of the workplace and education—as well as me. Of those four, I’d probably say I have more in common with Helen Andrews than anyone else.

I’m not sure “masculinism” really is a unifying ideology for MAGA. As much as I’d like to deny it, I do share some concerns in common with Nick Fuentes and Joel Webbon. And men’s problems, especially men’s health problems but also the broader issue of feminisation, are now prominent and being taken seriously in a way they weren’t under President Biden. Or during the first Trump presidency, for that matter. But whether this is what holds together MAGA, now or in the future—don’t bet on it.

Anyway, I think I come off pretty well—better certainly than Wilson, Fuentes or Webbon—and I can overlook the one or two jibes, which include being called “essentially an influencer—albeit one who knows a lot of $10 words.”

More seriously, I think Lewis mischaracterises the argument of my book, to make it fit in with her general thesis about the “anti-elite” temper of MAGA masculinism. When we spoke, I thought her grasp of the argument was much better.

“He lays the blame at the feet of the elites,” Lewis writes.

“They are keeping you fat; they are unhappy with risk-taking and hierarchy; they are calling masculinity toxic.”

My argument is about liberalism as a political system. I don’t think anybody is in control of liberalism, in the same way I don’t think anybody has deliberately poisoned the food supply and the environment with estrogenic chemicals (and I actually say that in my chapter on the “gay frogs conspiracy theory”). I’m interested in the constraints of the system and the incentives it offers—and how people respond to them. If Kamala Harris or CNN’s Dana Bash or George Takei doesn’t take testosterone decline and traditional masculinity seriously, that’s not because it’s part of some elaborate plan for controlling the masses, even if testosterone decline, as I argue, helps uphold the liberal status quo.

I’ll be interested to see where this “masculinism” argument goes. I think it will stick around. In fact, I think it will be used to try to drive a wedge between Trump and his female voters, by presenting MAGA as a clear and present danger to their autonomy—and, increasingly, a movement led by weird misogynist dudes who probably have a terrifying internet history they’d rather keep under wraps. This isn’t new. It’s as old as Megyn Kelly asking then-candidate Donald Trump why he made so many disparaging remarks about women—to which he famously replied, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” Trump has deftly handled charges of misogyny and smartly avoided doing things like supporting a federal ban on abortion, making it hard to support the Handmaiden’s Tale fantasies many liberal women have about his presidency. The difference now, I think, is that MAGA is passing out of Donald Trump’s hands, and it’s not yet clear whose hands will receive it. Given the wrong successor, women could easily be driven away in large numbers.