What did men do to deserve this?

The more spongy middle side has no such certainties. In both his podcasts and Notes on Being a Man, Galloway presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a way of life, equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about that.) In this amorphous framework, the biggest problem men face, likewise, is the feeling—an unattainable itch, a deep-seated belief—that men should still rank higher than women in the social hierarchy, but not to the same extent as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it cannot be overcome, and must be internalized, for the good of us all.

What these critics push us to do, politely, is to accept that women, for the most part, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid, overlooked and having their ambitions undermined, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by the costs of child care, ashamed by her inability to get a mortgage, or empty by working long hours as an ICU nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person’s duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but he does not take the capital “P.” This person’s opinions are important, but not decisively. the times Pundit Ezra Klein recently suggested that Democrats should consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, such as jobs, can be categorized by gender, and these rights are evaluated accordingly.

“You need a daddy,” Galloway, who has two sons, said in a recent podcast. The nuclear family he imagines seems to be one in which the mother is the default parent (“They look to her for care. When they’re really in trouble, I find they go to my mother”), while the necessary father is the authority figure to whom the mother can turn as the occasion demands. “There are certain moments when my partner needs to take stock,” Galloway explained. “I don’t know if it’s the depth of my voice or my physical size.” He continued that the children “begin to ignore their mother over time.” One might wonder how boys lose these frequencies in the first place. One would long for a deep voice to explain this.

In his book Of Boys and Men, Reeves, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, draws on the work of the late British sociologist Jeff Dench, who posited that “the fundamental weakness of feminist analysis” is its failure “to see that men may need to be placed in the role of primary breadwinner to give them sufficient reason to engage fully, and to continue to engage, in the business of long-term family life.” Reeves co-signs supply-side economist George Gilder’s hypothesis that once wives become “breadwinners and producers,” their husbands become “exiles” in their homelands. Reeves mostly rejects Gilder and Dench’s line of vindictive paternalism, but credits them with correctly diagnosing “the dangers of anomie and disconnection among men stripped of their traditional role.” In an era where two out of five families have two primary breadwinners, no one seems to know “what the point of fathers is,” Reeves said. One in six fathers does not live with any of their children. One study found that 32% of nonresident fathers had little contact with their children within one year of separation from their child’s mother, and that within eight years this number rose to fifty-five%.