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Matt and Sam explore the crisis of masculinity in America through books on the subject by Senator Josh Hawley and Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Many men in this country are in crisis, and their ranks are swelling, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley said at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021. And thats not just a crisis for men. Its a crisis for the republic.

Some version of this sentimentthat men are in trouble, adrift, or falling behindis shared by writers and thinkers across the political spectrum. Its nearly impossible to open a magazine without finding an article about the state of manhood in America. Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reevess 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It is a bestseller. Figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate attract huge audiences, serving as reactionary self-help gurus for young people eager to be told what a man is and how he should behave. One doesnt have to accept the rights framing of the problemnor any kind of gender essentialismto acknowledge the statistics: boys and men are falling behind in education, in workforce participation, and succumbing to drugs, alcoholism, and suicide.

Hawleyapparently having stewed on the topic for two yearshas just released a book on manhood, which advises a revival of biblical virtues to guide the aimless young men of twenty-first-century America. To pair with Hawley, we read Harvey Mansfields 2006 book on manliness. Putting Hawleys evangelical Christian preaching in conversation with Mansfields Straussian philosophical playfulness proved very constructive. Along the way, we talk about our own relationship to manhood and try to decide which (if any) of the virtues associated with maleness are worth preserving, defending, or even advising young men to embrace.

Sources and further reading:

Harvey C. Mansfield,Manliness(2006)

Josh Hawley,Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs (2023)

Josh Hawley, Americas Epicurean Liberalism,National Affairs (2010)

Becca Rothfeld, How to be a man? Josh Hawley has the (incoherent) answers,The Washington Post (2023)

Phil Christman, What Is It Like to Be a Man?Hedgehog Review (2018)

Martin Amis, Return of the Male,London Review of Books (1991)

Martha Nussbaum, Man Overboard,New Republic (2006)

Idrees Kahloon, Whats the Matter With Men?New Yorker (2023)

Zo Heller, How Toxic Is Masculinity?New Yorker (2022)

Lisa Miller, Tate-Pilled: What a generation of boys have found in Andrew Tates extreme male gospel, New York Magazine (2023)

Originally posted here:
Know Your Enemy: Whats Wrong With Men? - Dissent