Bringing Back the Nineteenth Century Won’t Save Men

Over the past month, the world watched in shock as President Trump introduced a tariff regime that promised to upend global trade and the global economy, to say nothing of the American economy. It shouldn’t be surprising, however. The President’s primary trade advisor, Peter Navarro, authored the trade chapter of Project 2025, which also outlines policy recommendations that could further global economic chaos—another chapter on the Federal Reserve calls for the dismantling of the Fed and a return to the gold standard. While this seems unimaginable, the administration is already taking steps to remove the Fed’s independence, and its wider economic strategy seems to be a coerced return to the nineteenth century. It would fit with the American Right’s pronatalist strategy; widespread abortion bans, attempts at restricting the use of abortion medication, and even an interest in getting rid of no-fault divorce all seriously undermine the advancement of women’s rights. Why bring us all back to the nineteenth century? Ironically enough, Fox News host Jesse Watters reveals the motivation in this clip where he describes the threat of a service-based economy to men. Watters’ argument, which is shared by many on the Right, seems to be that a manufacturing-based economy will solve America’s crisis of masculinity. He’s wrong. Bringing the US back to the nineteenth century won’t save men—it will hurt our whole country, bringing all of us down together.

Hegemonic Masculinity and the Marketplace of Power

The primary reason the nineteenth century is attractive to the American Right is its elevation of hegemonic masculinity, although they would likely deny that is their goal. Hegemonic masculinity is a socially constructed collective gender identity, defined by Elizabeth Spiers as the belief that men should be “dominant in hierarchies of power and status… over not just women but all less powerful groups.” While other masculinities have a solid foundational core, hegemonic masculinity is defined by its domination—it is only hegemonic as long as other identities are subordinated, lending it an inherent fragility. This does not mean that all men are dominant, rather, it implies that society views men who aren’t dominant as less valuable. To unpack this, imagine that social, economic, and political power functions as a marketplace. The currency of this marketplace is status, which is determined by a person’s identity. The status each person holds dictates their value, and therefore, their power in shaping institutions, or setting the rules of the game. In the US, white hegemonic masculinity maintains the highest status, preserving the highest value for heterosexual, cisgender, white men, whether or not those men are aware of their elevated position. While all other identities (including other masculinities) are still organized hierarchically to each other, they are all subordinate to white hegemonic masculinity, granting white men an outsized share of power over social, economic, and political institutions. 

There are two common explanations for white men’s historical and contemporary dominance. One is the biologically essentialist argument: white men deserve their hegemony because they are naturally stronger, or more intelligent, or less emotional than those with subordinated identities. This argument openly acknowledges the dominant position of white men in social, political, and economic institutions and accepts it as a normative ideal—in other words, the institutional dominance of white men is the goal. The other argument justifying men’s institutional dominance is that because those with subordinated identities have achieved relative parity in legal rights with white men, they also should no longer experience discrimination. This argument tends to either deny the dominance of white men, or chalk it up to individual merit—in other words, those individual white men hold those positions of power not because they are white men, but because of what they have achieved in life as individuals. The emphasis on individual merit completely disregards the structural elements that give white men a leg up in almost every setting, but it also obscures an important truth: a lot of the time, those individual white men who have achieved great things are astonishingly mediocre. While they may have worked hard to achieve their status, they have not had to overcome the additional obstacles experienced by those with subordinated identities. 

The profound mediocrity that hegemonic masculinity affords to white men is not a new phenomenon, nor is it a new concept. Instead, it’s a secret truth that has been specifically excluded from the mainstream. CEO of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, noted her realization of the mediocrity men get away with in a video that went viral a few years ago—“Me and my girls,” she said in an interview, “we can run circles around you,” referring to some of the world’s most powerful men. More than anything else, it’s this allowance of mediocrity that explains men’s larger share of the pie of social, economic, and political power. White hegemonic masculinity isn’t innately more valuable than subordinated identities in the marketplace of power, it just doesn’t have to compete. By forcing a zero-sum context into the marketplace so that subordinated identities compete with each other for status (you can’t have a hegemon in a positive-sum context), white hegemonic masculinity artificially inflates its own value. The true asset to white men isn’t the hegemony of white masculinity, but rather, its provision of mediocrity without threat to their status. 

Unfortunately, white hegemonic masculinity has become deeply problematic for men as well as for everybody else, as evidenced by the strong support from (especially young) white men for President Trump in the 2024 election. White men can no longer afford to be mediocre and expect to achieve the same result; as their status declines, their identity does not hold as much value. This is especially problematic given the narratives around hegemonic masculinity that dominate in the mainstream. The decreasing value of hegemonic masculinity implies, to individual men, that they are not worth as much as those who have come before them. Subordinated identities have always held a core tension between their internal self-worth and their value in the marketplace of power, prompting both resiliency and innovation in the face of shifting status. Hegemonic masculinity does not have this tension. Similar to how whiteness protects white people from having to be conscious of their race (a concept defined by Robin DiAngelo as white fragility), masculinity’s hegemony insulates men from an awareness of their privileged status. If the rules of the game are designed for you, you’re not as likely to notice that the rules don’t work as well for others, it just looks like they aren’t as capable. Consequently, white hegemonic masculinity has enjoyed an inflated sense of its internal value and has not had to innovate. It’s not just that white men are having to compete where previously they did not, but they are also less well-equipped to do so on a psychological level.  

The crisis facing men because of the declining value of masculinity has not gone unnoticed. The rise of the “manosphere,” the proliferation of men’s rights activists like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, and the shift towards President Trump in the 2024 election are all symptoms of this crisis. But it is not just men who spend a lot of time online that are impacted by hegemonic masculinity’s depreciation; they are symptoms of a larger issue in American society of how men perceive themselves. Across the board, men and boys are struggling. More men died during the Covid-19 pandemic than did women, and, it is worth noting that men are significantly more likely to die from suicide or overdose. Many of these statistics are even worse for nonwhite men. Regardless of how individual men are doing, because the socially constructed identity of white hegemonic masculinity is faltering, so too are the systems that support all men. As the consequences of President Trump’s reelection play out, the danger of neglecting these support systems becomes clearer, as was brilliantly depicted in the recent Netflix show Adolescence.

The Political Economy of Reproduction

If hegemonic masculinity’s inflated value in the marketplace of power doesn’t come from its internal value, where does it come from? This is where we get to the political economy of reproduction. In economics, the primary factors of production—the building blocks of an economy—are land (meaning resources), labor (the people), capital (money), and entrepreneurship (technological innovation). In very basic terms, an increase in a factor of production is how an economy grows—for labor, this happens either through immigration or reproduction. While the study of economics tends to disregard the centrality of reproduction to labor (people’s willingness to procreate is assumed), Marxist feminists have argued for decades that control over reproduction is, essentially, an economic asset. The group possessing control over reproduction has an edge over labor as a factor of production. This is why, for example, Justice Alito could trace a common law history of the criminalization of abortion only as far as eighteenth-century England when he wrote the Dobbs opinion—up until that point, population growth was not as essential to the growth of British economies as the other factors of production. It is no coincidence that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the codification of patriarchy in Western institutions exploded along with the Industrial Revolution—masculinity’s hegemony in the marketplace of power comes from its control over reproduction. 

However, human reproduction is complicated, lengthy, and costly, and requires intensive caregiving relative to other mammalian species. Consequently, maintaining control over reproduction is also complicated, lengthy, and costly, and requires the willing or coerced consent of women, who bear the larger biological burden of reproduction. All human societies have come up with ways to manage reproduction, usually through the mechanism of socially constructed gender roles. While across the span of human history gender roles have come in many forms, a labor-based capitalist economy is best supported by a gender role system known as heteronormativity. Under heteronormativity, the family, which consists of a man, a woman, and their children, is the primary unit of labor production. 

Theoretically, heteronormativity maximizes the efficiency of reproduction. Firstly, since a bigger population is the goal, reproduction is the only purpose of sex. Non-heteronormative sexual orientations reduce the efficiency of social systems of reproduction, and are therefore usually outlawed in heteronormative societies. Secondly, because women undergo the actual physical labor of reproduction, each family unit is more efficient at producing people if women specialize in caregiving, keeping them at home running the household. Finally, because men’s biological share of reproductive labor is relatively low-effort and brief, efficiency is maximized when men specialize in the necessary labor outside of the home. The more complete this specialized division of the labor of reproduction, the greater the ability each family has to produce more people. 

While the value of heteronormativity to labor production is well documented by feminists, they generally choose to focus their critiques on the relative balance of power between men and women in heteronormative contexts. This brings up an important point; nowhere in the theoretical heteronormative framework does it say that there has to be an imbalance of power between men and women. Patriarchal heteronormativity positions men as the head of the household—and therefore tacitly in control of the economic asset of reproduction—because this position justifies masculinity’s hegemony. In turn, hegemonic masculinity affords men the power to organize social, political, and economic institutions on patriarchally heteronormative terms, thus codifying hegemonic masculinity’s protection from competition in the marketplace of power. 

Ironically, patriarchal heteronormative systems are less efficient at maintaining birth rates. Patriarchal heteronormativity can’t use efficiency to justify men’s dominance of the family unit, so patriarchy turns to justifications that reduce the personhood of women—think biological essentialism or divine right. Denying women’s personhood also reduces their agency, limiting their ability to specialize in their heteronormative gender role, and thus reducing the overall efficiency of heteronormativity as a reproductive system. This is an incredible waste, in capitalist terms. Inequality of power based on biological essentialism rather is not just limiting to those with less power, but to the species as a whole. The same dynamic is true for race; for example, racism is part of why the US still doesn’t have universal healthcare, unlike most advanced industrialized economies. It turns out, inequality is incredibly inefficient. However, it is also worth noting that heteronormativity, regardless of if it is patriarchal, is definitionally discriminatory on the basis of sexual orientation. If only patriarchy were just about horses, as Ryan Gosling’s Ken believed in the 2023 film Barbie. Humanity might have progressed so much further.

The Limitations of Feminism

Luckily for humanity, heteronormativity is only the most efficient system of reproduction if technological innovation is not part of the equation. The technological advancements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—such as safe and effective abortion and contraception—greatly reduced the biological burden of reproduction on women, and therefore, the need for them to specialize in caregiving and household labor. Feminists frame access to abortion and contraception as a right to bodily autonomy in their arguments that the power imbalances between men and women should equalize. This approach has achieved varying levels of success. Rights-based advocacy is essential for establishing the existence of discrimination, but will always be limited in what it can achieve, for two reasons. By focusing on the marginalization of subordinated identities, it accepts the zero-sum premise of the marketplace of power and easily falls into the trap of debating whose rights should matter more, as was described by noted feminist Amia Srinivasan. Rights-based political action also offers cover for the ways in which institutions are already gendered and racialized. For example, Justice Alito cited fifty-one state laws criminalizing abortion as evidence of voters’ preference for abortion to be a state issue (see Appendices A and B in Dobbs). Only two of these laws were passed after the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote; no woman voted for the other forty-nine. It likely never occurred to Justice Alito that his argument mostly reflected the votes of men, and white men at that. 

What feminists have not done is focus on how the technological advancements of abortion and contraception put hegemonic masculinity in a tenuous position in the marketplace of power by exploiting its reliance on dominance. This neglect is to feminism’s detriment. As abortion and contraception give control over their reproductive labor back to women, they increase women’s agency and increase their bargaining power relative to men. Masculinity, to justify its hegemony, must be zero-sum. Any gains in relative bargaining power by women therefore come directly at the expense of men. However, while the balance of power within the marketplace may be shifting, hegemonic masculinity still affords men dominance in institutions. In other words, men’s identities are right now more threatened in the marketplace of power than they have ever been, while men are still poised to shape the world to their benefit. Presented with the reality of actually having to compete in the marketplace of power, and risk losing masculinity’s hegemony (and therefore, the privilege of their mediocrity and status), is it any surprise that the American Right is going after abortion and contraception? Or that young white men, realizing they are more vulnerable than their older peers, would find the version of America described by the Right seductive? Why would masculinity give up its hegemony when men can simply coerce a return to the nineteenth century?

For feminists to cement the gains in relative bargaining power for women by restructuring institutions around equality instead of hegemony, men will have to give up their dominance in institutions. It is not, however, in their interest to do so. Because masculinity has not innovated, and is therefore not competitive vis-à-vis subordinated identities, the only thing keeping men in the game right now is their institutional advantage. Consequently, it is easy, from the feminist perspective, to view the prospect of change as hopeless. But there is another threat facing men, one that women have hardly had anything to do with, especially given women’s history of exclusion from capitalist progress.

Masculine Decline as a Function of Capitalist Progress

As capitalism has progressed and countries have industrialized, humanity is on the verge of a seminal shift. It is technological innovation, more than any other factor of production, that precipitates growth these days. As technological advancement is rising, labor is falling. Between automation and the advancement of AI, humanity is rapidly approaching a future where labor will play a minimal role in growth. While this is not great for everybody who relies on wages for income, it is especially bad for men. Masculinity’s hegemony comes from men’s patriarchal control over the asset of reproduction, but this asset is only valuable so long as progress relies on labor; as labor becomes less important to growth, control over reproduction is a depreciating asset. Hegemonic masculinity’s value will continue to decline, not just because it’s facing real competition from subordinated identities, but because the source of its inflated value is at risk, too. That is, unless men can use the last vestiges of their control over institutions to bring globalization to a grinding halt by ending free trade, forcing corporations to return manufacturing to the US, bringing the country back to its industrialization era, when control over reproduction was an appreciating asset. But that’s probably not going to—oh, wait a second… 

The Trump administration’s tariff regime will not succeed in bringing the country back to the nineteenth century. Globalization is here to stay, just maybe without the US. While simple in concept, a US that is isolated from the world economy will have profound implications for all Americans. The administration might, however, be successful at bringing back nineteenth-century patriarchy, but this isn’t a problem that feminists can fight on their own; it will take men as well. Men aren’t just facing a crisis of masculinity, they’re facing an identity crisis that turns any attempt to break apart their monopolistic control of institutions into an existential threat. Identity crises can only be solved by finding self-worth and value from within. And while subordinated identity groups cannot do this work for men (to do so would only reinforce the hegemonic/subordinate dichotomy causing masculinity’s crisis), they also cannot be excluded from the process of remaking institutions. The US will not progress as long as the marketplace of power affords any identity group hegemonic control over institutions, and institutions will not promote fair competition between identity groups as long as their underlying gendered and racialized natures go unexamined. Addressing that problem will require both feminism and anti-racism. It is not coincidental that feminists and anti-racists began to sound the alarm about Project 2025 long before the 2024 election—those on the margins of the marketplace of power are often more sensitive to potential systemic threats than those in the center. Excluding and dismissing feminist and anti-racist knowledge from the mainstream is not just dangerous for subordinated identities, it poses an existential threat to all Americans, and for a little longer at least, to the world. 

Editors

Cameron Roberts, Managing Editor

Nicole Monette, Copy Editor

Julia White

Julia White (she/her, they/them) is a first-year master’s student in NYU’s International Relations program. Julia completed a combined BA/MA program in International Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University in 2021, and then worked for a few years in real estate before returning to academia — eventually, Julia plans to pursue a PhD in Political Theory. Julia’s academic interests include gender and feminist theory, political theory, political economy, and nuclear disarmament. When not studying, Julia can be found exploring Central Park while listening to podcasts, reading romance novels, and (attempting) to grow an herb garden.