Have We Reached Peak Testosterone?

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When some clever cultural historian writes the story of the Donald Trump years, this summer’s Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the White House lawn to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary will be a marker of … something: The 90-foot open-air “Claw,” near-naked gladiators, bloody faces, fireworks, and flyovers, with the most enduring remark coming from the heavyweight Josh Hokit, who told the podcaster Joe Rogan in his post-fight interview: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” The spectacle, the staff writer Helen Lewis says on Radio Atlantic, represented “a level of masculinity that was … so far across the dial that it tipped into camp.”

The second Trump administration rode in on a wave of masculinity-obsessed media. But the White House is unpopular, the podcast bros have withdrawn, and the midterms are only weeks away. Is it possible that the cultural-political force of extreme masculinity is losing its power?

Lewis and her fellow staff writer Sophie Gilbert joined me in a live Radio Atlantic taped at this year’s The Atlantic Festival to discuss the intriguing hypothesis that the culture has reached “peak testosterone” and may soon perhaps enter a more balanced phase.

We discuss evidence on both sides. Yes, the Tate brothers are facing extradition and prosecution abroad, but no, the U.S. does not feel all that much closer to electing a female president. Yes, James Talarico, mocked as “Low-T Talarico” by Texas Republicans, is ahead in the U.S. Senate race. But the requirement that all candidates prove their high-T quotient by filming themselves working out at the gym has been so widely accepted that Democrats are doing it too. The live debate went on, until it reached an absurd conclusion of encouraging women in the audience to buy more meat.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I had a thought. Maybe it was when I was watching race car after race car zoom loudly down Pennsylvania Avenue this summer—and a very buff man standing next to me, dressed in very tight red-white-and-blue overall-shorts getup, cheering.I had the thought that maybe we have reached peak testosterone. That is, this long era we’ve been living in, fueled by Donald Trump but also other cultural forces, such as the manosphere, has reached its organic comical extreme. And thus, the era might be on its way out.

It’s just a theory, but one I recently got to test.

[Music]

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

At The Atlantic Festival last month, I talked to two of my favorite writers on all things masculine and feminine, staff writers Sophie Gilbert and Helen Lewis, for a live taping of Radio Atlantic. Here is our conversation:

[Audience applause]

Rosin: We’ve all been living through an extended period of, let’s call it, masculinism. And by the way, I don’t even know if that’s a real word, but, you know, as in the opposite of feminism, like the general promotion of manly things. So there’s Pete Hegseth’s push-ups, J. D. Vance’s cat ladies, and a-lot-less-funny stuff, like the broad influence of the Tate brothers on teenage boys or the rollback of Roe v. Wade. And this has been building for maybe five, 10 years, depending on where you locate its origins. But there are signs that we may be shifting out of peak testosterone.

So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Is that true or not? I’m joined here today with Sophie Gilbert, who’s author of the book Girl on Girl and a Pulitzer finalist. Clap for Sophie.

[Audience applause]

Rosin: And Helen Lewis, whose first book is Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, and more recent book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, and more recently, the June Atlantic cover story, “The Men Who Fear Women.”

[Audience applause]

Rosin: Helen, I’m gonna start with you. What in your mind represents peak testosterone? What event or thing?

Helen Lewis: Well, if we’re gonna talk culturally and politically, then it has to be the [Ultimate Fighting Championship] cage fight on the White House lawn, which is one of the most American things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Rosin: Thank you.

Lewis: But it was also one of the most testosterone-fueled. It was like a movie you could’ve shown inside the film Top Gun.

Rosin: Right.

Lewis: That’s how I felt about it. But for those of you who don’t know: So Donald Trump has for a long time been friends with Dana White, who is the head of the UFC. That’s been a mutually very beneficial relationship to the two of them. And one of the things that he wanted to do was create this spectacle on the White House lawn, so he builds an octagon. And you have this, you know—the fighters walk in. One of the fighters starts in the Oval Office, right? Which to me, feeling slightly pious about it, is kind of, like—slight desecration to have some guy in leopard-print shorts strolling out, you know, to get seven bells punched out of him.

And it was just this very, like, hoo-rah masculine event. There was blood on the kind of tiles. And that’s when you get, immediately afterwards, one of the fighters says on the camera, you know, Michelle Obama’s a man. So you get this immense, like, disrespect for a kind of a beloved first lady with the other half of America. So, to me, it was this peak moment of, I guess, a level of masculinity that was, as it always happens, so far across the dial that it tipped into camp.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: Which is what always happens with these things. It became absolutely, incredibly camp.

Rosin: No. 1, I feel slightly embarrassed having two people from the U.K. talk about this. (Laughs.)

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: It’s like, I do feel somehow responsible and like I have to apologize for it. And No. 2, it’s interesting what you said, because maybe peak and decline, they’re like—once you reach camp, maybe that’s not the sign that things are on the up, but the other direction. Do you have anything to add to the cage fight, watching it from over there?

Sophie Gilbert: No. (Laughs.)

[Audience laughter]

Gilbert: I mean, yeah, exactly everything that Helen said was exactly true. I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s astonishing. It’s so primal and so bloodthirsty and so absurd. But, as Helen said, we’ve hopefully peaked at this point.

Lewis: But the Tate brothers, who you’ve written about, they also sit on that line, where they’re at the same time very scary alleged sex traffickers, but also inherent to that is the campness, the incredibly tight trousers—

Gilbert: The tight trousers.

Lewis: —and the sockless [indecipherable].

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: They coast that same line of peak masculinity, don’t they?

Gilbert: Well, in terms of thinking about peaks, yes. I think the moment when it became clear to me that things might be changing or going at least in a slightly different direction was the moment that the Tates were arrested, because they had seemed Teflon for so long. They obviously have political connections. They have connections inside the White House. They had felt protected. There have been so many cases against them in Romania, in the U.K., in the U.S., so many charges. I did not know that I would ever see Andrew Tate be arrested or have any kind of measure of justice for the things that he’s been alleged to have done. And so the fact that he has been arrested, he and his brother, and they are still in jail months later, I think is perhaps a sign that things are beginning to change.

Rosin: I wonder if they ordered their prison pants—

Gilbert: Tailored.

Rosin: —extra tight. Yeah. Is that a privilege that you can have in prison?

Okay, I wanna talk more about the trajectory of masculinism, but first I wanna spend just a little bit of time defining our terms, because as I’ve been preparing for it, one line that’s really stood out to me is that there’s two almost opposite brands of what masculinism is. There’s the very civilizing brand, like the religious sort of patriarch, J. D. Vance brand. And then this other sort of pagan, Man must be free to roam without the chokehold of the female HR executive, you know?

So in your cover story, you wrote a lot about the American religious-evangelical side of it. Can you talk about what that was like and what they believe?

Lewis: Yeah, I mean, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about since at least 2018, when I interviewed Jordan Peterson, who was very early to some of these ideas. And he kind of synthesized the two of them, this idea of man’s raw essential nature, which was essentially like yearning towards violence, and then you had to have the correct kind of mastery of it.

What masculine education meant was tempering your essential violent, uncontrollable nature. And it’s not surprising to me that he ended up moving more towards Christianity, because there is a kind of operating set of ideas that you will find in the work of, for example, people like C. S. Lewis, which is about the sort of civilization force of Christianity on men.

So in the piece that I wrote, I looked at both sides of them. One’s you’ve got kind of—there’s the strain that follows through Nietzsche, which is anti-Christian, which is about the idea of like the über-mensch. So Nietzsche thought that people were what he called learned cattle, what I guess we call now called sheeple or NPCs. But he thought that some people had the ability to attain, like, this will to power; they could kind of dominate everybody else. And so that is a very appealing message, I think, to young men who don’t feel a great sense of agency, who don’t feel like mini patriarchs. If you’re a 16-, 17-year-old boy, you don’t feel like the master of all you survey. So I think that is a very powerful message.

But then because it’s America, you also have this very straightforwardly Christian aspect. I talked to Douglas Wilson, who runs about—he’s the co-founder of a congregation of about 170 churches. And they are some of the—you know, he wants to roll back the Nineteenth Amendment eventually, which gave women the vote. And they draw on, for example, Saint Paul’s idea of headship. This is the idea that godly women should be quiet.

So they have a very old-fashioned Christian patriarchy, which then, as I write in the piece, blends very well with this other range of very traditional beliefs about, for example, race, about the kind of necessary, like, the Judeo-Christian heritage and the civil enforce and the European Enlightenments. So all of it kind of bleeds together. But one of the odd things is that you often find, kind of, the pagan and the Christian combined in the same person. So one of the people I interviewed—not Bronze Age Pervert, sadly—was Raw Egg Nationalist.

Rosin: Do you guys know who Raw Egg Nationalist or Bronze Age Pervert are? No. Okay.

Gilbert: They’re too online.

Rosin: We won’t go on. I really wanna talk about them, but everyone was like, No one cares, so leave it alone. But yeah. Just ’cause they are the voice of—they are like the id of the manosphere, in my mind. If you go back, they’re like the original sources of all the stuff you read in the manosphere. I went back and read them, and I was like, Aha, that’s why they all hate women. It finally made sense to me. And I’ll read you one quote from them, and then I promise I’ll move on. But go ahead. Yeah.

Lewis: Yeah. Oh, no, go on. Give us a little bit of Bronze Age Pervert.

Rosin: Can I do one or two? Yeah. Okay. I’ll do the stupid one and then the profound one. Here’s the stupid one: “There are women who are great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians.” Good one, Bronze Age Pervert. Okay.

Lewis: Why not actual lesbians?

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: I don’t know. Okay. I don’t know what a spiritual lesbian is. (Laughs.) I have no idea. I don’t know. Okay. Here’s the one that does sort of explain the manosphere hatred of women, though. “Anyone born with a will to conquest and expansion, any specimen born to courage and the expansion of boundaries, will feel thwarted now, will awaken at a young age to find themselves in a world pervaded by an evil and smothering shadow”—that’s us—“that seeks to blot out their spirit and break them.”

Gilbert: This is what I say to myself in the mirror when I wake up in the morning.

Rosin: Yes!

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: You say it to your husband, like, How can I blot you?

Gilbert: How can I smother today?

Rosin: Yes. Who can I smother?

Lewis: It’s a really useful closed loop of reasoning, though. So when I interviewed Jordan Peterson, he went on Joe Rogan’s podcast afterwards, and they were kind of grudgingly nice about me. They said I was a varsity-level player, right?

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Lewis: But then he said that I was animus possessed, which is a concept that comes from Jung. And it’s essentially the idea that your masculine side—if you’re a woman, your masculine side is too dominant. So you have this situation in which, even if you’re a woman and you do have a will to power or a will to blather on, as I very clearly do, that’s actually because, again, you’re either spiritually lesbian or spiritually male. So you can always loop it back to the fact that actually these gender roles are actually incredibly rigid. And yes, there are some exceptions, but that’s because they’re secretly not really women in some profound way.

Rosin: Okay. All right. You’ve got the two strains down: the Rousseauian civilizing and the Hobbesian (Makes sound.) raw id, whatever. So, Sophie, after Trump was elected the second time, you wrote the article, “Misogyny Comes Roaring Back.” And is it fair to say, you seem almost in a state of shock at that moment? And I’m wondering if it’s shifted in the last two years. If you wrote that story today, would the tone and feeling of it be different for you?

Gilbert: There was something about that moment, I think—there has been so much about the second Trump term that has been the first but, like, unhinged. Like, off the chain. There are no adults in the room. There’s no one holding him back. Everything is just sort of unfettered Trump, and I think the misogyny comes hand in hand with that. So the quote that I was thinking of was—who’s the internet personality? Sorry, I’m forgetting.

Lewis: Are you gonna say Nick Fuentes?

Gilbert: Exactly, Nick Fuentes. When he had that tweet that was, “Your body, my choice,” and I think that was the state of shock that you are referring to, where it just felt like, Okay, this is different. This is—

Rosin: Different. (Laughs.)

Gilbert: This is honest, real. Total degradation of women is the goal. And this is what will—like, it felt so endorsed, I think, by—and it felt so powerful. And then two years later, I do think, as you said, Helen, we possibly have reached a peak, and I think to a lot of people, the really grotesque masculinism, the performances of just unfettered cruelty and hatred of women, it seems to be turning more people off at this point, which I think is slightly cheering if we’re looking for signs of hope on the horizon.

And you can see sort of the new popularity of candidates like [the U.S. Senate candidate] James Talarico, who are not like that at all, who are men who are able to appear in public and present a more gracious persona and a less obvious hatred of women and all that we smother.

Rosin: So let’s talk about James Talarico, who’s a really great test case of where we are as a nation on these issues. I know that you wrote about this race. The Republicans have tried every way to call him gay.

Lewis: Gay.

Rosin: Yeah. Right. It’s like low T.

Lewis: They’re like, He doesn’t even like barbecue.

Gilbert: Yeah.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: Exactly. Yeah.

Lewis: Okay.

Rosin: Like vegan.

Lewis: Yeah, He’s vegan.

Rosin: He’s vegan. But last I checked, the polls show that he’s ahead. So—why are you making that face?

Lewis: No, ’cause I’m thinking the schadenfreude of it will be incredible. Because essentially, they had John Cornyn, who was a conservative Republican, and Donald Trump imposed instead Ken Paxton, who once stole a pen out of a security tray because he liked the look of it. This is the level of just, Oh, I’ll have that.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: And so because they haven’t got a single positive thing to say about Paxton, his record, lots of people in the state Republican Party hate him, it has all just been hard negative on Talarico. And it’s like they’re just turning a dial that just says homophobia and sexism up and up and up, and waiting for it to bite. And I think Sophie’s right. If you look at the poll, and Talarico has been consistently ahead in a state that the Democrats have targeted for a long time, that ought to be a Republican slam-dunk race. Even in a wave year, they should be able to hold that, and it’s genuinely in contention, because Talarico is normal—

[Audience laughter]

Lewis: —it’s, like, the low bar. He has apologized for some of the wilder things that he said in the 2020 time, when everybody got a bit overexcited. And because he hasn’t—I mean, he’s done some pretty punchy ads about Ken Paxton, for example. Like, he’s not soft in that sense. He’s willing to punch quite hard, but he hasn’t, to your point, Sophie, gone in for the kind of cruelty.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: And I think that’s the point. I think whenever it moves into just being mean to individual people, I think lots of Americans still recoil at that. There’s obviously a small chunk of people who love the idea that they can crush their enemies and like, Yeah, show it to the libs in the HR department. But most people, I think, still are genuinely decent, and they don’t—they might be interested in this thesis about the great feminization, but being rude to individual people is still a line that they feel quite queasy about.

Rosin: I can’t tell if what you’re saying is this turning up of the dial of sexism only works in individual cases and in individual races; if you’re making a broader point that maybe it’s just not working anymore; or a whole third point, which is that it’s been absorbed. Like, James Talarico did try and eat a big turkey leg, so that he has kind of—I know. It’s sad to think about.

Lewis: What’s sad about eating a big turkey leg? That’s awesome.

Gilbert: I know, lucky him.

Rosin: It’s just sad about, like, responding to these accusations that you’re gay by eating—

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: —a turkey leg. It’s just the sequence of events is a little depressing. (Laughs.)

Lewis: Yeah, okay.

Rosin: So is the idea that we’ve absorbed—like, that is the language that we speak now, so you just kind of have to submit? Can you imagine, Sophie—who are the feminist, the women leaders? It’s sort of weirdly hard to imagine now, even though things have gotten better.

Gilbert: I know. I mean, this is the thing in terms of thinking about the state of feminism. We don’t have the figureheads that feminism has always had. And I was thinking about this with the loss of Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, women who were really at the forefront of this movement that was actually very successful and got a lot done. And they were berated, and they were hated in their lifetime, and they certainly have been trashed by all different kinds of people. But they managed to win substantial gains for women over the course of their activist lives.

And I don’t know who the figureheads are now. I mean, there are sort of individual people who have enormous cultural sway, like Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain festival, obviously, was significant for its kind of cultural power, I think. Just to see a celebrity of that ilk stand up for reproductive rights felt very powerful to me and surprisingly unusual, I think. But in terms of people who are helping define feminism as a protest as a sort of intellectual movement, I don’t know who we have right now, and that feels strange.

Rosin: Yeah. When you were reading about Gloria Steinem, ’cause you recently wrote about her, it was kind of an interesting experience because some of the things she said felt sort of old-fashioned from the ’70s and ’80s, and some of the experience of reading about her was like, Wow, nothing has moved. I’m curious what stood out to you of what she said or what that period was like compared to now.

Gilbert: There was an article that Ms. magazine, which Gloria Steinem founded, ran in the ’70s, and it was titled, Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood, and it was about—I think it was kind of inspired by Steinem and how much she enraged other feminists. Specifically radical feminists, I think, felt that she was so mainstream in lots of ways.

To sort of see that tradition of tearing feminism apart by other feminists and to see sort of how little we’ve been able to move away from that and to work productively together. But also to remember that for all of the divisiveness, there were also moments in her career where she really was able to bring women together, and those were the moments when we had our most tangible gains, I would say. So as you said, a lot felt familiar, and it makes you think that nothing has really changed that much.

Lewis: I think it still feels very radical that she begins her memoir, the dedication is to the doctor who gave her an abortion when she was in her 20s.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: And you said, Promise me, you will never say what my name was, but also promise me you’ll live your life. And I think that even now, that still feels like a very edged thing. Lots of people would—that would still put their backs up, which, you know, 50 years later is, that still has that power—

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: —I think is quite extraordinary. I mean, my analysis of the problem of feminism in America is that regardless of traditional ideas of left and right, this is a culture which is both very individualist in a very libertarian way—it’s very much about individual freedom to do things—and it is intensely capitalist. And those things are both really difficult for feminism. So I’ve just written—

Rosin: Wait, explain that in two more sentences.

Lewis: Well, I’ll give you the example, which is for the latest issue, I’ve written about surrogacy. I mean, in Britain, where Sophie and I live, there is a pretty well-developed feminist critique of that and from a labor-rights perspective, which is that surrogacy is paid for by rich women and mostly pursued by women who are much poorer than them. Some of those might be in other countries, in the developing world. Some of those might be in America. But there is a fundamental mismatch when one side can afford really good lawyers and the other can’t.

And I think that’s not the way that Americans tend to see it. They tend to see it as a matter of individual choice and consent. If the surrogate says yes, that’s, like, Who are we to question a woman’s bodily autonomy and choices? So I think that has been traditionally a really big problem for the feminist movement. It’s why I think the abortion-rights campaign succeeded on that, “My body, my choice,” because that’s a very American way of putting it.

And then the capitalist part of it, again, is about, you know, freedom to buy things, freedom to own things, but it’s very difficult. Women’s lives, because of childbearing, necessarily follow a different path in aggregate to men’s, and that is something that is, Is it your individual choice to have a child, or are you doing something for civilization and society that then the state should have a role in supporting? Because it is still seen as like, But you chose to have a child, so why are you not responsible for that?

Lewis: Whereas the European social-democratic model is much more open to the idea that children are a social good, and it’s all of our responsibility to pay for them.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: why it feels like one of the worst things you can be in politics today is a woman.

[Break]

Rosin: The other thing that I wanna talk about—we’ve talked a lot about the Republicans. It’s easy to talk about Trump, the manosphere, and testosterone. The Democrats are a new phenomenon, a little kind of different and interesting what’s happening there. And I will bring us back to a gym in Dearborn, Michigan.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: Where Hasan Piker—

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: Who’s a sort of lefty streamer, and [Abdul] El-Sayed, who’s running for office in Michigan, were—what were they doing, Helen?

Lewis: Well, they were doing some—oh God, I’m gonna get the names of the exercises wrong.

Rosin: Deadlifts?

Lewis: Yeah, I definitely watched them do, I think some, like, Turkish pull-up, which is a thing you do with a kettlebell. They were also bench-pressing. Abdul El-Sayed, who is the Senate candidate in Michigan, he can bench-press 315 pounds.

Rosin: Which you know. We all know, and it’s actually kind of important that we all know this, ’cause they have Muslim-sounding names, which right now is, like, the Republican Party can sort of put your picture up and just say “Muslim.” And El-Sayed doesn’t say he’s part of the [Democratic Socialists of America], but he’s sort of DSA affiliated. And so it almost feels like the working out makes you extremely socially acceptable or something, and that’s a very weird logic. But I’m wondering how you interpret them very ostentatiously working out.

Lewis: But it’s about redressing this idea that to be a liberal is to be a kind of effete, pencil-necked, you know, like, not a real man’s man.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Lewis: There’s a bit—

Gilbert: Soy boy.

Lewis: Yeah, a soy boy, exactly. You know, like a cheesy Millennial. So, you know, they are both—

Gilbert: It all comes back to tofu.

Lewis: They are both out working out. And there’s a line just after they did the bench press, which is an upper-body exercise, where Hasan Piker says, Haley Stevens couldn’t do that—who was the woman, primary opponent of Abdul El-Sayed. And me, getting on my little feminist high horse, was like, Actually, women’s upper body strength is one of the most sexually dimorphic things that there is. So of course she can’t bench-press 350 pounds. She doesn’t have, like, circulating testosterone at your level. But it was a really interesting moment of, like, Ha, women. Ha, they’re weak.

Rosin: Right.

Lewis: And I think that’s the word that I think Democratic men are most frightened of at the moment. When I interviewed [California Governor] Gavin Newsom for the magazine, he said he’d got this line from Clinton, which was like, Voters would rather you were strong and wrong than weak and right.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Lewis: And I think that’s something that Donald Trump has internalized.

Gilbert: Mm.

Lewis: Part of the idea of being a man and a leader is just like, I’m the decider, and maybe I decide things wrong, but I get to do that ’cause I’m the decider. And being too consensual is seen as feminine. You know, you’re like, You wanna have a hippie drum circle, and everybody’s just gonna talk about their feelings until you all come to a mushy consensus. No, what men do is men tell you things, and then other people do them.

So I can see that they—you know, and I think El-Sayed is an incredibly talented political candidate, but he has definitely got and embraced a kind of masculine aggression. Like, he’s very much a debate bro, right? He will argue with you in the ways that I don’t see other candidates doing. But you’re seeing it with, you know, [former Transportation Secretary] Pete Buttigieg, who, I think if he runs for president, will lean very heavily on having served in the military, for example. These very traditional ideas of masculinity are still things that voters like and that Democrats feel that they need to embrace.

Gilbert: What you were just saying about being strong and wrong, it made me think it’s not actually just an American phenomenon, ’cause it was [former Prime Minister] Keir Starmer’s downfall in the U.K., the idea that he was seen as sort of mushy, couldn’t make decisions, couldn’t stand by his principles, would have, like, a 10-person meeting for every tiny thing he had to do.

Lewis: Yeah, there was a description of him that I think famously did, from one of the biographies of Keir Starmer where it described him being like a driverless train, like the DLR, which is the automated trains in London. Like, It’s going somewhere, but one’s doing the pedals.

And I think that is something that we associate with masculinity. And you’re right; it makes it hard for female candidates, because if you’re a female candidate, how do you access that level of, like, I just tell people what to do without becoming the Karen, the school mom, the nag? You know, all of these negative stereotypes we have about female authority.

Rosin: Okay, but just let’s surface what we just said here. It’s profound actually. So the Republicans or MAGA has reached this sort of peak cartoonish, practically camp masculinity, and then as it rolls down the hill on the train, obviously driven by a woman, it’s careening off. But what’s happened is: It, like, seeps back up and becomes so mainstream that the Democrats pick it up as a kind of necessity. Like, even take what Democrats define, like, their almost embarrassingly desperate search for a working-class candidate. What is it that they define as working class?

Lewis: Jobs that men do.

Gilbert: Yes.

Lewis: It’s being an oysterman; it’s being a logger. It’s not being a nail technician.

Rosin: Right.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Rosin: Exactly. Which is a working-class job. Which is a working-class job.

Lewis: Exactly, done by many immigrants in America, yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. So Pete Buttigieg is an interesting example. It feels like, Democrats or the left—one choice would just be to sort of speak this idiom and go to the gym and bench-press and have everybody know how much you can bench-press. Another option would be to slightly expand the definition of masculinity such that it could possibly include a gay dad who served in the military. Does that just seem ridiculous? Like, if I say that out loud, you’re like, That will never happen, or, That won’t happen now. That’s going too far.

Gilbert: No, I think that makes sense. I’m thinking about Jon Ossoff, who was a documentary filmmaker before he was the senator in Georgia. Expanding masculinity feels fruitful at this point.

Lewis: Yeah. I feel less optimistic than you. I think there’ll be such tension in the Democrats about, This is the most important election of our lifetimes. We have to find the kind of candidate that we feel, like, least tense about. I mean, I hope it’s not true. The Democrats took a chance on Barack Hussein Obama, with his middle name and all this kind of stuff, and it worked out for them. And I hope that they can find it in themselves to look at candidates who don’t look central-casting masculinity next time. But I worry they’ll think, Oh, no, other voters are sexist. Other voters are homophobic.

Gilbert: Do you think there’s any chance that there’s a female candidate? I don’t either.

Rosin: Let’s take an audience poll. Any chance there’s a female candidate? No. No. No. No.

Lewis: Unless AOC goes for it, but I think, it doesn’t—

Rosin: Too soon.

Lewis: Yeah, and I think the announcement about her freezing her eggs, that’s not the kind of thing you do when you’re about to embark on a presidential cycle. So it’s a shame. And Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, essentially ruled herself out. So I think we could be looking at another, like, total sausage-fest debate stage, basically. Yeah, like it’s ’92 again.

Rosin: You heard it here, guys. Sausage-fest debate. Okay, so we’ve talked a lot about politics and where we are. Sophie, I wanna ask you about realms other than politics. What about in culture? You and I have talked about this. In your book Girl on Girl, I mean, the message is that Millennials grew up with a sort of ’90s, early-aughts culture that put bad ideas about women in their heads. How have you seen that evolve? Like, if you wrote the book about, you know, 2020s pop culture and women. It does feel different. It does feel like women have a lot more agency. You mentioned Olivia Rodrigo, but what do you think?

Gilbert: I mean, this is the one thing that I keep coming back to, because it’s a sign of a positive. Like, there aren’t many; we cling to the ones we have. But in terms of mainstream culture, it’s so much better than it was in the 2000s. In the 2000s, there were no women in movies at all. If women were present in movies, they were bitchy girlfriends who were annoyed that their husbands are going to Vegas, or they were, you know, bombshells in bikinis, or they were sort of crones who were figures of sexual disgust. I mean, that was what women did in movies in the 2000s, and I should know, I’ve seen them all. No.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Gilbert: But basically, movies—I mean, there’s a great quote in a Tad Friend New Yorker piece, I think of a profile of the actor Anna Faris, and it comes straight from a studio executive, and he’s like, You know, men make movies, and if they don’t wanna put women in movies, they won’t. And it was that simple. So the culture that we had in the 2000s was incredibly misogynistic, degrading to women.

But now we are in this moment where we have, in film, in television, all these stories being told about women’s lives that are about things like the transition into motherhood, the tyranny of beauty culture, what it’s like to age as a woman. We have all these actors in their 50s, 60s, 70s, people who are doing the most interesting work of their lives, like Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman. I mean, there is a slight counterargument that to be present, to be visible in public life, those women have to do an enormous amount of cosmetic work to themselves, so that’s a side note. But at the same time, just the fact that more women are being given the opportunity to make film and television, to tell stories about women for women, or just even cultural products that are interested in women feels like huge progress.

At the same time, if you look at music, I think there is no argument right now against the fact that women are culturally dominant. Music is the one form of culture where women are all-powerful. I mean, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Olivia Rodrigo. These are the ones who the fans are obsessed with, who the tickets go crazy for. I mean, women have a power in music that men do not have right now. I have no idea why, so if you guys know, please tell me later. But it’s interesting to see. At the same time—sorry, I keep telling—

Rosin: No, no, no. This is the only, like, unquestionably positive part of this conversation so far, so continue.

Gilbert: Well, I was gonna go negative now, which is to say that, as I do, I’m gonna smother you all. No, to come back, unfortunately, for a lot of people now, especially young people, mainstream culture is not film and television and music. It’s what they see on their phones whilst scrolling.

Rosin: Ah, that’s the problem.

Gilbert: And that is the realm, I think, where I would argue misogyny is worse, more cartoonish, more depraved, more hateful than it’s been in a very long time.

Rosin: More hateful?

Gilbert: It feels like it.

Lewis: I mean, my worry about the female dominance in pop music is it reflects the lack of importance of pop music in our culture. And I think you have to look at—if you look at AI, how many women are there in those tech companies? How many women are in crypto? Things that are hot and cool, men fence off for themselves. And I worry slightly about those cultural products, that actually, the female dominance of them might reflect their lack of importance. Like, You can let—the women can have those, right? You can’t have crypto. That’s ours, ’cause we all think we’re gonna get very rich off it. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve brought it down again.

Rosin: That is a very depressing argument. But it’s very interesting, because it is what happens in the labor market. Men used to be secretaries, like in the Dickensian era, you think, like, All the men are secretaries.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: And then women became secretaries, so they got paid a lot less, and the same is true for teachers.

Rosin: But I don’t think that’s true in pop music.

Gilbert: I don’t.

Rosin: What do you think?

Gilbert: I don’t. I mean, Taylor Swift is a billionaire. I mean, obviously there can only be one Taylor Swift. But in terms of cultural power, but also earning power, I wouldn’t write it off as insignificant, I don’t think.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay, I wanna spend our last few minutes talking about relationships, which is harder to talk about. Because it’s sort of less concrete, and there does seem to be—you know, our colleague Faith Hill has written about this—a kind of freeze of suspicion between men and women. As you’re talking about the internet, I know you’ve written about porn. What are you seeing in the kind of male-female relationship realm—you have children—that worries you?

Gilbert: I mean, I have recently been reading an advance copy of a book by a Financial Times journalist called Patricia Nilsson. And her book is called Guilty Pleasure. It’s about how the entire architecture of the internet is basically built on porn, because porn was the first major force on the internet. And so many of the elements that we take for granted—like algorithmic engagement, endless scrolling, the sort of endless shift towards extreme content—so much of that comes from porn. Even things like payment processing, like, that was initially, like—it was made for porn sites first before it was used anywhere else on the internet.

But her point was—this was also something that I’ve felt and not quite seen anyone state so clearly, which is: Basically the majority of modern porn on tube sites now is degrading and humiliating to women.

Rosin: In different ways than it ever has been? Or what’s notable about that right now?

Gilbert: There’s just sort of a lot of violence towards women, slapping, choking, but also just name-calling. And her point, and I think it’s true, is that a lot of this impulse has sort of, it’s filtered out into different aspects of the internet as well and certainly into male culture. So you have a generation of younger men now who have grown up watching this kind of content and are entirely habituated to the idea that you will call women these vile names. And there’s something about the idea that if you’re a young man and you have been taught that women are not your equal, that they’re not fully human, that they’re figures of degradation and sexual humiliation, how are you ever gonna have a meaningful relationship with a woman in your life?

And so, my colleague Faith Hill has written a lot about the loneliness crisis and the fact that Gen Z men and women aren’t having relationships in the same way. But I mean, as women, what are the options? If the option is being alone or being with someone who absolutely hates you, I think it’s quite a simple choice.

Lewis: There’s a sociologist I really like called Alice Evans, and she has this theory about essentially that young men and young women, if they hang out together in offline spaces, they essentially de-radicalize each other.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lewis: And I think that’s really part of what we’re talking about here. When I look at the algorithmic internet, it feels very sex segregated. There are things you get shown on your Instagram algorithm, your YouTube algorithm, and one of the first things that those algorithms want to know is whether or not you’re male or female. So if you’re a guy, you get advertised—and it’s done for advertisers, basically, because there’s one set of products you’re gonna get advertised, like, meat.

[Audience laughter]

Lewis: No, seriously, like, okay, well, meat is not a product. A lot of these men, a lot of the manosphere things have, like, boxes of meat that you can buy. Yeah. Like, Order some meat from men.

Rosin: I’d like a box of meat, please.

Lewis: And then if you’re a woman, then they’ll, obviously, like—they’ll try and sell you stuff about the fact that, you know, you’re ugly and repulsive—

Gilbert: Beauty products, yeah.

Lewis: —and you need to pay money to offset that.

Rosin: It will be, like, extract of meat to put on your face every night. Yeah.

Lewis: Yeah. Face meat. But I think that’s really worrying. So part of that is I think you’re having young boys and girls, and young men and women, spending time in very sex-segregated spaces because it’s them and their phone. And actually, if they were spending more time just with, you know—one of the things that predicts better equality is when men and women report having cross-sex friendships. In cultures where that isn’t the case, they tend to be much more unequal.

That’s one of the ways I worry about America is that going backwards, and actually, getting young people off their phones and just hanging out at a bar or wherever it might be, like a pool hall, bowling, or whatever all these things are. That I think would be powerfully de-radicalizing. But that’s one of the things that worries me about where tech has taken all this.

Rosin: I can end in two ways. One way I can end is to create a manifesto for all the people in this room to pervert the algorithm. So basically, I’m saying all the women in this room, just order meat.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: So that it flips the algorithm. We can all agree to do that together, ladies. Another way—

Lewis: I would say manly meats, as well.

Rosin: Yes.

Lewis: Preferably, like, venison. No chicken. Chicken’s for ladies.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: Yeah, not chicken. The gamier, the better. That’s what the T-shirt will say, The gamier, the better. No. Here’s, in all seriousness, I was thinking about your first book, and the women that you wrote about, it’s 11 Fights.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: They were operating in very bad conditions, and I was wondering if in researching that book, there’s anything you learned about the modern era, or you see, even if it’s AOC, sort of somebody kind of operating in these unfavorable conditions but in a successful way.

Lewis: I mean, all I felt when I was writing this, and I don’t know if you felt this when you were writing Girl on Girl, was, like, these fights never go away.

Gilbert: Oh, yeah.

Lewis: Like, there’s just echoes constantly.

Gilbert: There’s just new iterations of them—

Lewis: Yeah, and it comes back.

Gilbert: —new technology. Yeah.

Lewis: But the other thing I felt was, you know, I saw some young journalist had got kind of bullied off Twitter because she’d written a piece about Sydney Sweeney, and everyone had called her fat, essentially. And I thought about posting, Do you know what really has previously worked against feminism, is just being rude about the physical appearance of feminism. That stopped women getting the vote. Well done. Yes, you did that one. That stopped women, like, you know, getting equal pay in the ’70s. No, it doesn’t.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: Actually, it’s what people do when they’re losing.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Rosin: Love it.

Gilbert: But it’s also what happens when you write about anything related to men, as a woman. If it enrages a man, he will sic all his followers on you, and they will all make fun of your appearance, and it’s because they can’t counter the ideas. They don’t have an intellectual standpoint with which to argue with what you’re saying, so they say, You look old, and I’m like, Thank you. I’m 43.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: All right, we’ll end on that. Thank you all for being such a great audience. Thank you.

[Audience applause]

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Genevieve Finn fact-checked. Miguel Carrascal engineered. Rob Smierciak provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.