Where The Boys Are

Not nearly as on board with feminism as we’d like them to be, despite nearly incontrovertible data showing that the more gender equality,the stronger a country’s economy.

- Rachael Combe

I watched Hillary Clinton’s concession speech with my two eldest children, Theodore, 10, and Louisa, 8, both her ardent admirers. Toward the end, Clinton said, “And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.”

Theodore sat straight up. He reached for the pause button on the remote. “Why did she say that only to the little girls? What about the boys?” I explained that boys had lots of examples of boys who grew up to be president, but girls didn’t. He nodded. Yeah, okay, he got it. But when we watched the rest of the speech, he leaned back on the couch, regarding Clinton from more of a distance, no longer caught up in the moment.

Aggrieved manhood has become a hot topic across the ideological spectrum. There are Bernie and his bros on the left, who spent the months after the election accusing Democrats of ignoring economic issues in favor of pandering to women and minorities. On the right, there are the blue-collar white men of the Rust Belt, who’ve voted for Democrats in the past but last year pushed the swing states over the edge for Donald Trump.

In a PRRI/Atlantic poll taken shortly before the election, Trump supporters were more likely to agree that “society seems to punish men just for acting like men” and that “society as a whole has become too soft and feminine.” A study published in Harvard Business Review last fall showed that, among Republican men, the segment who believe men face “a great deal” or “a lot” of discrimination has doubled since 2012, to near 20 percent. The more marginalized the men felt, the more negatively they rated Clinton.