Democrats Need To Realize It’s Not Always Easy To Be a Man
Progressive rhetoric about men isn't just alienating but dehumanizing.
I have a random memory that pops into my head from time to time. I was in elementary school, probably second or third grade, and I recall our teacher telling us that we needed to move desks from one classroom to another.
So she asked every boy in the classroom to accompany her to the other room so that we could move the desks.
I went along with the other boys and carried a desk just like anyone else, but it was clear that I was struggling. For those of you who know me in real life, you know that I’m thin. But back then I was puny. I could barely carry that thing. Eventually, the teacher had to ask someone else to help me get it back to the classroom.
But half the girls in the classroom were stronger than I was! They could’ve carried the desks better than me. But because I was a guy, I was humiliated in front of everyone else because I was faced with a gendered expectation I couldn’t meet.
It’s not the worst thing in the world, and I don’t have a big chip on my shoulder about it. It’s actually kind of a funny story to tell people. But it’s a very banal or common example of how men, too, deal with gender expectations that they sometimes can’t meet.
I’m thinking about that as it relates to the Democrats’ male problem. Early estimates suggest that Republican Donald Trump netted a 13 point advantage with men, while Harris had an 8 point advantage with women.
Even before the votes were cast, polling made clear that the party was suffering from gender polarization, and there were many writers sounding the alarm on a trend that has been ongoing for decades now. A lot of people are wondering: how can Democrats get more men to vote for them?
As my anecdote above suggests, maybe they can start by not assuming that men always have things so easy. Sometimes, we have it just as hard as women do — and maybe even harder.
Democrats fail to treat men as human
Democratic Party and wider progressive messaging to men ranges from nonexistent to patronizing.
Often, Democrats will have elaborate organizing dedicated to reaching out to and encouraging women to vote for them. Party caucuses, for instance, exist so that women can find a place to organize for their agenda and produce messaging and outreach designed to win the support of women.
It’s almost unheard of, on the other hand, to find similar organizations aimed at men within the Democratic Party. (The closest thing I can find is that in 2023, a Congressional Dad’s Caucus was formed.)
Progressives usually treat being a man as a category of blanket privilege. Being a man is always better than being a woman, and your duty is to make sure you are using your privileges to support women.
Unlike progressive rhetoric towards women, which insists that we have to do more to guarantee rights and equal treatment towards the fairer sex (a reasonable demand), progressive rhetoric towards men grants them responsibilities but not rights.
This rhetoric dehumanizes men — meaning it removes from them the status of people who have their own independent thoughts, concerns, and needs.
Michelle Obama, one of the Democratic Party’s most popular surrogates, used her time on the trail to implore men to vote for the benefit of women:
Let me tell you all to think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equity.
So fellas, before you cast your vote, ask yourselves: What side of history do you want to be on?
In a sit-down interview with the Call Her Daddy podcast, the host asked Kamala Harris if there was any law that “gives the government the power to make a decision about a man’s body.”
Harris laughed heartily and said no. The question was a reference to her posing the same inquiry to then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Harris was so proud of her answer that her campaign clipped the video and blasted it out on social media.
I wonder if Harris, who spent little time espousing her views on war and peace during her four years as vice president, had ever taken the opportunity to glance at how many men died in the Vietnam War.
Tens of thousands of young American men lost their lives in the wars in Indochina. 67 women did. Men, after all, can be drafted under America’s laws and women cannot. I’d say compelling us to kill and die is making a decision about our bodies.
But fear of the draft didn’t seem to much bother another Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.
She once spoke about the offense she took when a man told her that if she took his spot in law school he could be drafted to Vietnam and subsequently killed. His fear was just an opportunity to show how resilient she was in the face of sexism.
(There is some fact-checking that has been done about this story and it’s not clear whether it’s 100% true as told by Clinton).
If Clinton felt any sympathy for men drafted to Vietnam, it may have paled in comparison to how she felt about the women they left behind.
“Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat,” she once said during a trip to El Salvador.
The harshness of life as a man
If a space alien came from Mars and wanted to learn about American men, they would come away badly confused if they relied on Democratic progressive messaging about what our lives are like.
You’d think all day we’re manspreading in public spaces, mistreating women, counting our many dollars we earn thanks to the gender pay gap, and bro-ing out to racist podcasts.
The reality is that life as a man is often harsh. Here are some facts:
Men are dramatically more likely to be shot in a police encounter.
Men make up roughly 80% of murder victims.
Men are 3.85 times more likely to die from suicide as women are.
Men are about ten times as likely to die on the job.
Men fare worse in criminal sentencing than women do due to gender bias that is even greater than the racial bias found our justice systems.
Men are lagging far beyond women in academics — with boys getting worse grades and graduating at lower rates.
Men are falling significantly behind women in college degree attainment.
Men are a majority of the homeless and an even larger majority of the unsheltered homeless.
Men have considerably lower life expectancies than women.
I could go on for days with these statistics, but I think I’ve made the point: being a man can be harsh.
Kamala Harris may not have been able to speak about how men can have it worse than women, but her dad, academic Donald Harris, once did.
In 2018, he wrote an essay that included a passage about losing touch with his children following his divorce to Harris’s mother. He blamed the court’s failure to award him more time with his children not just on racism but also misandry:
This early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972 when, after a hard fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California, the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting (especially in the case of this father, “a neegroe from da eyelans” was the Yankee stereotype, who might just end up eating his children for breakfast!).
The cynicism behind progressive scolding
When vice president-elect JD Vance was picked to be Donald Trump’s running mate on the Republican presidential ticket, he was quickly defined in progressive spaces as an in-your-face misogynist.
His quip from years ago about “childless cat ladies” drawn from a 2021 interview with then-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson went viral, drawing the ire of Democratic-leaning women who felt he was attacking their lifestyle.
And it’s true — that wasn’t an artful way for Vance to promote his views on family formation and stability. It was insulting to some women who either don’t have kids yet or don’t want them.
But even as he ran away from that comment, progressives had already casted him in the mold of a sexist man who harbors ill will towards women.
New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a darling of the online progressive left, even took aim at Vance for manspreading on a couch during an interview: “Why are you sitting like that?” she asked him in a Twitter post.
Ocasio-Cortez’s knowledge of male anatomy aside, she has made her view that America is full of misogyny and sexism a core part of her political argument.
“My experience here has given me a front-row seat to how deeply and unconsciously, as well as consciously, so many people in this country hate women,” she told a reporter in 2022. “And they hate women of color.”
To her credit, she made clear that this wasn’t a partisan thing.
“It’s not just the right wing,” she concluded. “Misogyny transcends political ideology: left, right, center.”
But during this year’s campaign, she had a hard time finding it anywhere except on the right.
After all, she campaigned alongside Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff — who has acknowledged cheating on his first wife and impregnating another woman. What’s more, the same publication who uncovered that affair later ran a story with four sources — including the alleged victim — claiming that he assaulted his ex-girlfriend (Emhoff denies this).
At the very least, Emhoff’s status as a male role model is questionable. But none of this has stopped liberal columnists from gushing about him. One columnist at the Guardian wrote that he serves as an “antidote to lousy men everywhere”; an editor at TIME told us that “he had given a little master class in how to be a guy's guy as well as a wife guy.” The feminist writer Jill Filopovic boasted about how Democrats put him forward as a “successful, ambitious man who is a great father—and who centers and backs his wife without hesitation.”
Amazingly, all of these words were written after Emhoff’s affair was revealed to the world — but before the story alleging he assaulted his ex-girlfriend was published.
Ocasio-Cortez, on the other hand, decided to praise Emhoff after both stories had been reported.
“He's not afraid to embody and pass on these values of security and this idea that you can, you can let your girl shine,” she said at a campaign stop where she joined him. “And he embodies that really well. We should all be really, really proud of him.”
I’m sorry, what?
Emhoff is at the very least a man who was unfaithful to his wife. At the worst, he committed domestic violence. Should we really be proud of him because he lets Kamala Harris shine? What else was he going to do? She’s much more famous and powerful than he is, and if he played his cards right, he would end up in the White House alongside her. That wasn’t exactly an act of charity on his part.
Part of the reason men roll their eyes when progressives warn about “toxic masculinity” is because the party of Bill Clinton and Doug Emhoff isn’t actually giving them any kind of alternative to retrograde attitudes and behaviors.
Ending zero-sum thinking about men vs. women
When I was in high school I read a fascinating essay published in 1985 by the author Paul Theroux in my AP English Language Class.
The piece, called “Being a Man” can be read in full here. Theroux uses the essay to lament the state of men and manliness in America, but I want to call attention to your the final paragraphs, where he speaks about why men are often unsympathetic to feminist messaging (I’ve bolded the most important part):
There would be no point in saying any of this if it were not generally accepted that to be a man is somehow—even now in feminist-influenced America—a privilege. It is on the contrary an unmerciful and punishing burden. Being a man is bad enough; being manly is appalling (in this sense, women's lib has done much more for men than for women). It is the sinister silliness of men's fashions, and a clubby attitude in the arts. It is the subversion of good students.
It is the so-called "Dress Code" of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, and it is the institutionalized cheating in college sports. It is the most primitive insecurity. And this is also why men often object to feminism but are afraid to explain why: of course women have a justified grievance, but most men believe—and with reason—that their lives are just as bad.
Democratic and progressive messaging to men will never go anywhere as long as it starts from the assumption that being a man is always a privilege and being a woman always makes you disadvantaged.
There are times when that is true, but there are times when that isn’t.
Men disproportionately suffer from all kinds of problems at much higher rates than women do. But progressives, who run the Democratic Party’s approach to social-culture issues, rarely acknowledge that. To them, men are simply there to be lectured about how they should do more for women.
Sure, a lot of men mistreat women (like Emhoff). Many men take our their frustrations in unhealthy and self-defeating ways. And the Democratic Party has played a real role in advancing opportunities for women and making sure that their rights are protected.
But you can do all that and not strip men of their humanity by constantly making demands of them but never listening to their needs.
On the morning of the election, Trump posted an ad that I suspect would resonate with many male voters.
“There was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job,” the narrator said as audiences are greeted with video of men from various ethnic backgrounds working at their jobs.
What Trump was doing was saying: look, men, I see your pain.
What the Democrats have done for so many years is the opposite, telling men: it’s your job to see other people’s pain.
And it’s working out terribly for them.
Perfect, Zaid. Perfect. I've been trying to tell this story myself for years. But ears don't wanna hear.
And it's genuinely infuriating with people saying that men are voting for Trump because of misogyny and they all want to rape woman. Like just no, that's not why men are voting for Trump. Trump makes them feel heard and voices their general grievances at society.