Opinion | Our Messed-Up Dating Culture Gave Us Donald Trump. Let Me Explain. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/30/opinion/dating-bro-culture-manosphere-trump-cinderella.html
By Sarah Bernstein
Ms. Bernstein’s latest play, “Strange Men,” takes place in a dating workshop for straight men and is currently in development with Stroller Scene.
Joe Rogan. Elon Musk. Representatives of bro culture are on the ascent, bringing with them an army of disaffected young men. But where did they come from? Many argue that a generation of men are resentful because they have fallen behind women in work and school. I believe this shift would not have been so destabilizing were it not for the fact that our society still has one glass-slippered foot in the world of Cinderella.
Hundreds of years after the Brothers Grimm published their version of that classic rags-to-riches story, our cultural narratives still reflect the idea that a woman’s status can be elevated by marrying a more successful man — and a man’s diminished by pairing with a more successful woman. Now that women are pulling ahead, the fairy tale has become increasingly unattainable. This development is causing both men and women to backslide to old gender stereotypes and creating a hostile division between them that provides fuel for the exploding manosphere. With so much turmoil in our collective love lives, it’s little wonder Americans are experiencing surging loneliness, declining birthrates and — as evidenced by Donald Trump’s popularity with young men — a cascade of resentment that threatens to reshape our democracy.
Our modern fairy tales — romantic comedies — reflect this reality, promoting the fantasy that every woman should have a fulfilling, lucrative career … and also a husband who is doing just a little better than she is. In 2017, a Medium article analyzed 32 rom-coms from the 1990s and 2000s and discovered that while all starred smart, ambitious women, only four featured a woman with a higher-status job than her male love interest.
Enter the manosphere: a space occupied by new media podcasters and their favored politicians who win eyeballs, votes and dollars by selling a retrograde version of masculinity as the fix for men’s woes. In the final month of his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump skipped traditional outlets for a manosphere media blitz, which many credit for his 14-point lead among young men. While so-called female gold diggers are an obsession of the manosphere, much of its content reinforces the male-breadwinner norm — tying money to manliness and women’s preference for providers to biology.
Romantic pessimism pervades the manosphere, which puts forth that dating is doomed, and modern women are not to be trusted. Modern women feel similarly despondent. The Cut ran an article this summer asking straight women: “Is Dating a Total Nightmare for You Right Now?” It received so many furious, affirmative responses, the site published a digest of the most representative and depressing comments soon after.
All this is contributing to a larger “epidemic of loneliness,” to use the words of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who believes this problem is wreaking havoc on both our emotional and physical health. Last year, 41 percent of single people had no interest in dating at all, as reported by The Survey Center on American Life, an alarming statistic for those worried about U.S. marriage rates and birthrates, which are already at or near historic lows.
The manosphere would have us believe that this situation was inevitable, that women have emasculated men with their success and now complain that there aren’t enough real men to go around. In truth, our culture is broken because while we have acknowledged the limiting nature of the peasant-to-princess story line, we have not done the same for the prince. Over the past 60 years, as girls and women have fought their way into classrooms and boardrooms, society has expanded its idea of womanhood accordingly, yet our definition of manhood has failed to evolve alongside it.
