8 VOICES>>> SPANNING The Great MASCULINITY Divide

We lean on them to inspire us, provoke us, or make us LOL. Here, a panel of influential men of all ages and political stripes debates the big topics facing men today.

- ZACH BARON, EILEEN CARTTER, JACK CROSBIE, HEVEN HAILE, KELEFA SANNEH & KATHERINE STOEFFEL

When GQ published its special New Masculinity issue in 2019, the reckoning of #MeToo and the increased visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement found men reaching for a more enlightened vision of manliness. A lot has happened in the past six years, some of it amounting to an ideological movement promising to “let men be men again”—whatever that might mean. In July we interviewed eight cultural figures representing a range of perspectives about how they make sense of this moment. We also conducted a survey that asked similar questions of 1,929 American men. The interviewees and survey respondents whose opinions are compiled here and in the poll disagreed, sometimes sharply, about the politics of the so-called crisis of masculinity. But many agreed that they do not wish to return to their grandfather’s version of society. In fact, the more we talked to men about their fears and aspirations, the more common ground we found.

PETE BUTTIGIEG, former secretary of transportation and Democratic presidential candidate, says men stopped seeing themselves in liberals' vision of the future.

There's clearly been a turn just in the last few years—it was brought out in the election, but it’s not just about the election. A lot of younger men no longer see where they would fit in a more progressive story.

Maybe it's gone on longer than that. But when I was teaching [at the University of Chicago in 2025], I made a point of speaking to more conservative students while I was there and definitely had a sense that their experience, not just with politics but also with COVID, made a really big mark that shifted their trajectory and made it less obvious than it is for most generations that you would be more progressive than the generation that came before.

Part of America’s anxiety and dissatisfaction, says Silicon Valley venture capitalist, podcaster, and Trump convert