In late May 2026, the New York Times ran an opinion piece titled “America Has a Masculinity Crisis”—a transcription of a three-way conversation about the cultural trend to denigrate men. One discussant made an audacious claim: “Sabrina Carpenter said that the key to her songwriting is just to call men stupid as many ways as you can.
“I was suspicious that a Grammy-winning artist would say something that brazen, so I looked it up. Sure enough, when Carpenter accepted Variety’s Hitmaker of the Year award in December 2025, her songwriting advice was:
“Write what speaks to you, write something that only you can write. Write the music you want to listen to yourself. Add the weird chord progression and key change, and call men stupid in as many ways as you can.”
Mild criticism surfaced but failed to gain traction. Had a male musician said the same about women, the backlash would have been torrential before he made it from stage to seat.
Lingering Outrage from #MeToo
It is widely considered fair game to call men “trash”—no doubt a byproduct of the consciousness-raising #MeToo movement that laid bare just how perverse and depraved men can be. Those revelations unleashed pent-up rage among women and men alike. The operating principle is simple, the rules for men aren’t the same as the rules for women: it’s okay to punch up, not down. But the question worth asking is whether men are still up to the degree they once were. Does the practice of putting men down amount to hitting them when they are down?
Man Bashing Sells!
In 2023, Vice ran an article titled “The Commodification of Hating Men” in which author Amy Francombe featured the practices of a Florida-based clothing company, David and Goliath, which capitalized on anti-male sentiment back in 2003. The company launched a campaign featuring a cartoon of a boy running from airborne rocks with the caption: “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them!”
The brand caught on—T-shirts, lunchboxes, pencil cases. One shirt featured a stick-figure girl kicking a stick-figure boy in the balls, him wide-eyed, hair on end. Glenn Sacks, a radio host and men’s rights activist, made a stink, which only fueled sales to $90 million the following year. The company’s founder, Todd Goldman, subsequently released merch under such charming titles as “Boys tell lies, poke them in the eyes” and “The stupid factory, where boys are made.”
Letty Cole, editor of the Substack newsletter Burn After Reading, offered a pointed observation: “Female rage has earned a cultural capital that’s lucrative for brands [but] it’s so sad to see how women’s trauma has been warped and weaponized for commercial gain”—which, she notes, plays right into the hands of right-wing media that screams about the excesses of wokeism.
Men Have No Right to Complain
In the first post of this blog, I argued that there is precious little empathy for the present plight of men. The NY Times discussion reinforced the point. One female discussant described what she called the “shut up” narrative advanced by progressives that addresses aggrieved men: “[Your problems] aren’t real. They don’t matter. You have so much privilege. Time for everybody else to have a voice and for you to be quiet.” Such a narrative shuts men down, instructing them to not say a peep about the struggles they face having been born—boo hoo, poor you—with a penis.
How Male Bashing Affects Our Young Men
The Times piece raised concerns about what young men are up against culturally—a messaging environment that, in youth-oriented books and movies, pictures men as emotional idiots relative to girls, who are portrayed as having rich inner lives while boys are cast as dunderheads.
One female discussant spoke from personal experience: “I have three boys, and I hear this all the time. We live in a very progressive community, and ‘Men are trash,’ ‘Men suck’ is just in the water, and it’s really, really hard when you’re raising sons… it’s incredibly psychologically harmful for this generation of boys to go around hearing that over and over again.” Discussants noted how tentative boys have become about approaching girls. Whether such messaging pushes young men toward political conservatism is a question the statistics in my first post answer in the affirmative.
The discussants proposed solutions: better male role models, early intervention to build social and emotional skills, and making it acceptable for boys to cry, to be vulnerable, and to connect with their emotions—traits research suggests are partly hard-wired, which complicates the liberal-leaning view that it’s purely a matter of socialization.
Does Research Back the Claim of Widespread Male Bashing?
Before accepting the anecdotal accounts and sensational impressions offered by those who’ve published books on the subject, it’s worth asking what the research actually shows. What if Carpenter and David and Goliath are outliers rather than indicators of a broader trend?
The Pew Research Center—a nonpartisan think tank and one of the country’s most reputable research organizations—released its report How Americans See Men and Masculinity in October 2024, based on a survey of over 6,000 Americans across gender and party lines.
More Americans believe masculine men are viewed positively (43%) than negatively (25%)—which challenges claims that male bashing is widespread. But that 25% breaks down revealingly: 33% of men versus only 18% of women believe masculine men are viewed negatively. And Republican men are more than twice as likely as Democratic men to believe Americans as a whole hold negative views about manly men (45% vs. 20%).
Regarding the matter of toxic masculinity, majorities of both sexes disapproved of behaviors like throwing a punch when provoked, infidelity, and joining in when other men sexualize women—the kind of behavior epitomized by Billy Bush egging Trump on during the infamous “grab them by the pussy” exchange, dismissed at the time as mere locker room banter. While 69% of men objected to such behaviors, 80% of women strongly disapproved.
The study also found that equal numbers of men rate themselves as highly masculine and “leanly” masculine (40% each). Conservative men are three times more likely than liberal men to see themselves as highly masculine—many of the latter, I suspect, wouldn’t be caught dead claiming to feel like He-Men. Younger men are considerably less likely to rate themselves as highly masculine, and they feel most strongly that non-traditional male traits—being caring, affectionate, emotionally in touch—aren’t valued enough by society.
Crucially, 81% of those surveyed rejected the zero-sum framing that women’s gains come at men’s expense. The data doesn’t support the claim that anti-male sentiment is mainstream. But it does document a charged partisan divide: Republican men’s perception of widespread male-bashing is well out of step with the overall survey results—and that gap has real political consequences. It feeds the alt-right, manosphere narrative that men are being treated unfairly, fanning the flames of misogyny even when the data don’t back the grievance.
What About Heteropessimism?
A few days after “America Has a Masculinity Crisis” ran, the Times published a piece by Magdalene Taylor challenging the concept of “heteropessimism”, a concept introduced by writer and academic Asa Seresin. Heteropessimism describes a cultural phenomenon in which heterosexual women publicly express embarrassment that they still want to be involved with men, despite the apparent consensus that men are a disaster. Some feel ashamed to even refer to themselves as someone’s girlfriend.
Seresin’s point is that this expressed disillusionment is largely performative—a pose. Repeating the party line (“men are trash”) creates a sense of solidarity but does nothing to challenge the underlying problem. As the Vice article noted, businesses are happy to sell “men are trash” tote bags precisely because such gestures change nothing structurally.
What Does All This Mean?
The Pew data doesn’t support the claim that most Americans hold hostile views of men. But it shows that a vocal and politically energized minority does—and that perception carries consequences. Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always tell the whole story; the loudness of a minority view can make it seem more prevalent than it actually is.
There does appear to be a genuine trend of anti-male sentiment in pop culture—perhaps not unprecedented historically, but notable today. Men are struggling in measurable ways that get less sympathetic coverage than the subject deserves.
Richard Reeves (Of Boys and Men, 2022) argues the left has ceded concern for men to the right, which is politically dangerous. Critics associated with Bitch Media, the now-defunct feminist publication, long countered that “man-bashing” discourse is used to deflect legitimate feminist critique. These perspectives are also worth considering in that they provide add a socio-political dimension.