The US presidential election seemed to mark a backlash to changing gender roles. But most Trump-voting men say they don’t want to return to the past.
President Donald Trump’s reelection seemed to mark a cultural turning point on gender – a backlash to #MeToo and other progress for women’s rights, and a return to a time when men could be men.
His campaign told men that they had lost their status in American society and that the Trump administration would restore it. Vice President JD Vance reiterated the point at a gathering of conservatives last month: “Don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.”
It’s a message many Trump-voting men want to hear: Republican men are more likely than others to agree that Americans have negative views of manly men. Nearly half say that’s true, compared with a quarter of people overall, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted during the campaign, findings that have been reflected in other polls.
But survey data, academic research and interviews with Trump-voting men suggest that most don’t want to return to a more traditional masculinity either, one that requires men to be aggressive, dominant or stoic. Instead, they want Americans to have a different take on masculinity – one that is positive instead of negative, and broad instead of narrow.
Overall, respondents were more likely than not to say American society places too much emphasis on traditionally masculine traits like physical strength and risk-taking. A majority thought there wasn’t enough emphasis on being caring or open about emotions.
And a majority – including a majority of Republicans – said certain behaviours by men were unacceptable, like talking about women in a sexual way, drinking too much or throwing a punch.
That is not always the message from the president – who has been found liable for sexual abuse, said he’d “protect” women “whether the women like it or not”, and was instrumental in ending abortion rights nationwide – or from members of his administration or right-wing influencers.
The president “is delivering results to improve the lives of women across the country”, said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, including by hiring female senior staff and through executive orders to expand in-vitro fertilisation access and ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports.
Trump-voting men don’t necessarily share macho or sexist beliefs, the survey and interviews show. Instead, many think progressives have gone too far.
The distinction is subtle, but is a common pattern in political ideology, said Robb Willer, a sociologist studying political attitudes at Stanford: people don’t necessarily embrace the extreme version of what politicians say, but they oppose the movement opposing it.
Logan Fischer, 21, who details cars in Blue Springs, Missouri, said there are too many “toxic men, who think they’re the most important thing in the world”. Those vibes in the Trump campaign, he said, were “over the top”.
Still, he thinks boys and men are viewed too negatively, starting in school, where he said teachers unfairly viewed boys as “less intelligent, because we’re a little more rambunctious”.
“The way that people view men now, especially the way people view straight white males, it’s the whole ‘we hate all men’ kind of thing,” he said.
Fischer wishes men were given more leeway to be fuller versions of themselves. Masculinity becomes toxic, he said, when people assume there’s only one way to be a man.
“We’re kind of losing a lot of our positive masculinity,” he said. “A lot of society thinks men should never show emotion, always be the big man in the room, always be strong. But we’re human. We have emotions too.”
Young men, who swung toward Trump in this election, have grown up when most mothers worked and girls outpaced them in school. Some have heard that the “future is female”.
Yet they’ve also seen male gender roles broaden. Younger men were most likely in the Pew survey to say that American society should place more value on men’s soft traits, and that it was acceptable for men to do traditionally feminine things like put effort into their style or take their spouse’s name. Overall, they support gender equality and policies like abortion rights, other data shows.
“This idea that young people in particular want to go back to some golden era of masculinity misses the mark pretty significantly,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “That’s not a world they know. The world they know is the expectation that men and women are equal and treated equally, and what they’re increasingly concerned about is an uneven playing field tilted against them.”
Men have fallen behind women in education, relationships and some jobs. The right has blamed the left for efforts to include women in more fields, and for movements like #MeToo and phrases like “toxic masculinity”.
This idea that young people in particular want to go back to some golden era of masculinity misses the mark.
The prevailing belief in corporate America, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Joe Rogan’s podcast, is: “Masculinity is toxic. We have to like get rid of it completely.”
A Trump executive order barred diversity policies that it said caused men to be passed over for jobs: “Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.”
Logan Roberts, 18, a security guard near Belfair, Washington, believes traditional gender roles are preferable – men working and women mothering.
“I feel like now women are given more opportunities than men,” he said. “The fact is that if you as an employer, or you as a professor, if you don’t give them those opportunities, you’d be cancelled.”
Though Republican men were most likely to believe these ideas, only a minority did, found the Pew survey of 6204 adults. Republican men were more likely than others to say that as women began doing better in their educations and careers, men did worse. Still, only about a third of Republican men said women’s progress had come at the expense of men’s.
Republican men were more likely to say changing gender roles had made life harder. But again, a minority held these beliefs.
Republican men were less likely than others to say that society should be more accepting of men who took on untraditional gender roles, yet a plurality said society had the right amount of acceptance.
Christopher Pontrella, 25, a construction worker in Brick, New Jersey, said that “in a lot of ways men are doing better”, because they are less confined to acting a certain way, especially when addressing mental health.
He voted Democratic in college, when he said he was influenced by ideas like intersectionality – how identities like gender and race overlap. But he felt the focus on those issues had gone too far and didn’t relate to the “adult real-world concerns” he has now, like about the economy.
“People obviously deserve rights,” he said. “But a lot of what they ran on, Trump’s team, is not being afraid to have differing opinions on stuff, all that stuff that’s drilled into you in a college classroom.”
One could argue that men have run this country and we haven’t done the best job at it.
Anthony McNinch, 38, outside Rochester, New York, welcomed changing gender roles. “My dad is old-school – he was the breadwinner, he never talked about his feelings,” he said. “My wife and I are very open about all that stuff together.” She, unlike him, finished college, and as a nurse earns more than he does in construction management.
He said he’d love to see more women in power: “One could argue that men have run this country and we haven’t done the best job at it.”
Though he works with a bunch of “alpha male dudes”, he said, he never hears anyone in his daily life say the sexist things he’s seen online. But they were drawn to Trump, he said, because he seemed like men they knew.
“I think just a lot of regular blue-collar guys resonate with Trump because even though he’s a billionaire” he’s kind of a trash talker, he said. “And if you go on any construction site, that’s what we do.”
Even if Vance was exaggerating when he said men can’t tell a joke or have a beer with friends, he and Trump, along with the podcasters who helped them relay their message to men, tapped into something, said Richard Reeves, founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. “The playfulness, the transgression, the freewheeling conversation” is happening on the right, he said – while people on the left are too scared to say the wrong thing.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Claire Cain Miller
Photographs by: Kenny Holston, Michelle Gustafson, AFP
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