It is so easy to exaggerate the current antipathy between (some) men and (some) women in the U.S. today. Here is a political overview:

For a growing percentage of young men, Cox [1] wrote:

Feminism has less to do with promoting gender equality and more to do with simply attacking men. A 2022 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good and even more Republican men agreed.

More young men, he added, “are adopting a zero-sum view of gender equality — if women gain, men will inevitably lose.”

This attitude varies quite a bit from one generation to another, from one region of the country to another, and from one social class to another. That’s why it is important to put “some” in at the right places. Still, it is commonly understood that economies vary from a “positive sum” view at one end of the scale to “zero-sum” at the other end. It strikes me as a little odd that what I am referring to casually as “the gender wars,” should make use of a scale that was invented to describe macroeconomic distributions of values.

Surely they ought to be more different than that.

In order to uphold the zero-sum model, the men who feel this way—nearly half of Democratic men—need to understand the relative success of women in education and in the professions as taking away something that they could otherwise have. That takes something of a stretch.

Picture a diesel mechanic saying, “I could have had that professorship myself if they had not decided to give it to a woman.” Just sit with that for a minute. You can’t get there by the route I have described above: women are succeeding more than men, therefore I myself, am being cheated. There is a way to get to it, however. Richard Reeves [2] puts it more dramatically than I would, but his meaning is clear.

The left see a war on girls and women; the right see a war on boys and men. The left pathologizes masculinity; the right pathologizes feminism. [3]

Back to the diesel mechanic. If he starts by pathologizing “feminism”—meaning by that the greater success of women in sought after schools and firms—then he can take nearly anything as “evidence” that the life he wants is under attack and that women are the reason.

Let me put that another way. If you start with the cause—women are displacing people like me—you can use almost anything as “evidence” for it. A competitive job search chooses the most qualified candidate. “I don’t care.” Is the candidate a woman? “Ha! It’s just as I said!”

This could be a very long haul and I don’t have the patience for it this morning. Let me point in the direction of the two things that would help. the first is a belief in merit. The second is compensation for the losers—the “less meritorious.”

The justification for “the meritocracy” [4] is that it is fair. Whoever has most of what the position requires is chosen for the position. Giving priority to anyone from any group on other grounds—sex, race, age, body size—erodes a belief in the fairness of the system. It undercuts meritocracy. It enables the diesel mechanic to say what he says.

The second component is compensation for the losers. There have always been higher statuses and lower statuses. The lord of the manor has a higher status than the merchants in town and than the serfs on the land. But it has taken capitalism to turn the occupants of lower statuses into “losers.” If the system is fair and if everyone aspires to the higher statuses, then those who do not attain them are losers. That’s not much of a stretch.

So if life for the losers—in this formal sense of the term—is really bad, then the protest against the unfair system that fastened these conditions on them will be vigorous. Eventually, it will be violent. There is no way to make these people not “losers” given the presuppositions of capitalism, but social policy could make their lives considerably more satisfying than they are.

I’m going to stay with that simple declaration. Social policy could do that. Having taken that leap, I am free to return to the diesel mechanic and note that he is now free, if he wants to do it, to acknowledge that women are getting the best gigs because they are the best prepared and in many cases the most motivated. With a better life himself, he could let go of the zero-sum explanations of gender equity and move toward “fair is fair.”

I think that would be helpful and it is easier to change economic conditions than it is to change gender attitudes. Surely we know that by now.

[1] Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute,
[2] Reeves is the author of Of Boys and Men.
[3] Again we see that English is stuck with unbalanced terms. We could force the issue and oppose “masculinity” to “femininity” but those terms don’t work any more. Also, there is no commonly used word “masculinism” to oppose to “feminism.” It leaves us with the clumsy, inadequate opposition Reeves uses.
[4] Words ending in -cracy all ought to mean “rule by __” The root of the word tells the reader just who is being identified as the ruler. Democracy is understood—these days—to mean rule by the people; kleptocracy would mean rule by thieves. Meritocracy would mean “rule by the most meritorious,” but it leaves unexamined just who is to decide what traits and abilities have merit. Oh well.