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The Global Politics of Masculinity

In this episode, New Lines’ Gender Policy Director Kallie Mitchell, along with guests Ruth Whippman and Cait Dallaire, explore the hidden dynamics of identity and power that are reshaping global security, democratic movements, and the future of political engagement.

Kallie Mitchell:

Hi, welcome to Gendering Geopolitics, a special edition series of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy’s Contours podcast. Each episode features conversations with scholars and practitioners from around the world about issues of gender and international affairs. My name is Kallie Mitchell, Head of Gender Policy at the New Lines Institute and the host of Gendering Geopolitics. In an era marked by rising global tensions and democratic backsliding, we’re seeing a fascinating and troubling pattern emerge, the weaponization of masculinity and global politics and security. From election messaging to extremist recruitment, from international development to conflict zones, how societies understand and talk about masculinity has become inexorably linked to questions of power, democracy, and stability. On today’s episode, we’ll explore how masculinity intersects with global security, examine its role and current political challenges, and discuss potential solutions for building a more stable world. Today, I’ll be speaking with Ruth Whippman.

Ruth is an author, essayist, cultural critic, and mother of three boys from London living in the United States. She’s the author of many articles and viral essays, as well as a substack, I Blame Society. Her recently published book, “Boy Mom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity” examines how understandings of masculinity shape everything from personal relationships to political movements. Ruth’s analysis helps us understand how individual experiences connect to broader social and political patterns that we’re seeing globally.

Also joining us is Cait Dallaire. Cait is a senior non-resident fellow at New Lines, a fellow boy mom, and a former foreign affairs officer and peacekeeping advisor at the U.S. Department of State with expertise on the Youth, Peace and Security agenda and the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Let’s start the conversation by looking at the current global political landscape. We’re witnessing a rise in what many call strongman politics across multiple continents. These movements often share common themes in how they message about gender power and authority. Ruth, your book examines masculinity at a crucial moment in global politics. What key patterns did your research reveal about how masculine identity is being shaped and weaponized in current political movements?

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah, it’s a really interesting thing, especially with this last election cycle in the U.S., that identity politics is something that we often associate with the left, but really the right wing were absolutely leveraging these deep, deep questions of identity with men especially and masculinity and really tapping into these anxieties around masculinity, this feeling of threatened masculinity amongst men and especially amongst young men.

And I think that these anxieties are something that when I was researching my book, I realized that these are anxieties that we start off in young boys from very, very young ages. We sort of seed the roots of these kinds of anxieties. We feed them a notion of how and what they should be in the world. And then when the reality doesn’t pan out for various reasons, it’s very easy for bad actors and for different kinds of groups to kind of work with those anxieties and leverage them and use them as a way of blaming other groups that this feeling amongst boys and men, that there’s something that there’s an ideal that they’re not living up to. There’s a shame associated with that. And then leveraging that to blame everybody else, to blame women, to blame feminism and really tap into these very, very deep-seated feelings in men.

Cait Dallaire:

Yeah, I absolutely agree with you Ruth, and I think we’re really talking about two things here. I think first we’re identifying, and you pointed this out in your book, the fact that the norms of masculinity are restrictive and they’re problematic for people of all genders including men. And you explored that really thoroughly in your book and how that manifests throughout life. And you talked about the phenomenon of male loneliness.

We’ve seen the stats on male suicide rates, and this is just one example of how social norms around masculinity can harm men directly. And I think… thinking globally, then this creates a gap or a vulnerability later in life that can be exploited. So the second thing we’re really talking about then is the recognition and deliberate exploitation of that gap by what we can refer to. And I think you just said these are bad actors and that can be violent extremist actors and organizations online and in the physical world, and sometimes this even powers social and political movements. So I think in this way, what your book does so well is identify the social systems that create individual-level risk and then this creates global challenges, including the rise of autocracy, the backlash against the movement for gender equality, the recruitment of young men into violent extremist groups and reactive and anxiety-driven movements that position themselves sort of against progress, against the momentum that we’ve seen on the left and for social progress.

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah. And I think there’s a sort of irony in the whole thing, which is that in many ways the source of a lot of men’s problems, the loneliness, the isolation, the feelings that these groups are leveraging are actually caused by these masculine expectations in the first place, which it’s really interesting that these are really kind of the problems, but the right is selling them not as the problem but as the solution.

So what we need is more of it. We need more masculinity, more sort of hardline masculine expectations, more tough guy posturing. And I think the left in general, the progressive left, has done a really poor job of articulating why that’s not the answer. And in many ways, the left has somehow bought into the same zero-sum framing that the right is leveraging. So this idea that if women gain, then men lose. And so I think that message is really not connecting very well with boys and men. As Richard Reeves put it, “You don’t have any problems, you are the problem.” I think this is something that it is really hard for men and boys to connect with and empathize with in this moment. This is why the right is gaining traction in a way that the left is not.

Kallie Mitchell:

Absolutely. And I think that speaks to one of the most striking patterns that we’ve been seeing globally, looking at how anti-democratic movements often position themselves as defenders of traditional gender roles. And they weaponize anxieties around gender to consolidate power. Despite the significant progress in legal and political reforms towards gender equality around the world, the cultural resistance to these changes, what some might call a cultural lag as we’re renegotiating this environment creates a fertile ground for backlash. This gap between reform and societal acceptance allows these gendered hierarchies to persist and fuels the rise of populist and authoritarian movements. Ruth, you’ve described feminism as a half-finished revolution. How does this perspective inform our understanding of current global political movements, particularly the rise of anti-democratic forces, which often situate themselves in opposition to feminist progress?

Ruth Whippman:

Yes, I think there’s a long tradition within feminism of course, of recognizing that patriarchy harms men as well as women, that this system doesn’t benefit anybody. And a good feminist politics… bell hooks, we’re going back to all kinds of feminist thinkers and a good feminist politics should include and embrace men and men’s issues and the gendered ways that these pressures show up for men and boys as well as for women and girls. But I think in the kind of post Me Too era and in the sort of grip of the culture wars, it’s almost as though feminists have kind of forgotten that a little bit. And I think in the wake of Me Too, women and girls were so angry with men and understandably that anger was very justified in many cases. I think it’s been hard for them to bring men in and to embrace them as part of the feminist movement.

So they’re kind of buying into this same idea that women’s gain is men’s loss. And so I think when I talk about it as a half-finished revolution, I think we’ve done a lot of examining and unpacking and great critical thinking as feminists about the ways in which patriarchy harms women and girls and just the real granularity of that, the sexist messaging in daily life and all the rest of it. I think we’ve done a really weak job. We’re only just getting started on doing that same critical thinking and that same kind of deep exploration of the ways in which this system also harms men and boys and doing it in a generous, empathetic way that brings men and boys in rather than kind of pushes them out.

Cait Dallaire:

I think empathy is absolutely the key word there. And I would agree that there is some form of cultural lag or maybe to pull in a commonly used, we’re seeing a pendulum effect occur. And I think like you’re saying, this is symptomatic of a deeper issue, which is kind of the failure to keep advancing at the same pace, the discourse around masculinities and constructing new healthier norms that promote a more holistic understanding of gender so that we remember that gender issues are not just women’s issues or just queer issues, gender issues are everyone’s issues. And there’s validity to the idea that these issues of identity for boys and men have been recently unaddressed or addressed only in a diagnostic sort of way. I know you have three boys, Ruth, I’m also raising three boys. And so my boys are always front of mind. They’re entirely deserving of enjoying their full humanity.

And so it’s my responsibility to help them navigate what it means to be a boy and eventually a man and how to engage with their identity while understanding how it relates to others’ identities and others’ experiences. And I feel like sometimes that means giving them permission to be their full selves by saying, “Of course you can cry if you’re sad.” And sometimes that means teaching them to interrogate what they see in their own social lives like why did your friends divide up into boys versus girls? Why was that the assumption? But my point is, globally, I think anti-democratic movements are only effective if they can capitalize on discontentment, lack of satisfaction, some feeling that it is a zero-sum game or that you’re being left behind. And generally that lends itself very nicely to forming an identity or a movement in opposition to someone or something else. So I love when you said it’s a half-finished revolution because I think once we make progress on the conversation around all gender identities, more people will feel seen and people who feel seen are not so easily manipulated.

Ruth Whippman:

Yes, I absolutely agree with that. And when I was doing the research for Boy Mom, one of the experts in boys that I spoke to said that boys like every human need to feel safe and they need to feel heard. And when I interviewed boys in this moment, I talked to many, many boys, different types of backgrounds, boys and young men, and they felt profoundly unheard I think in this moment. And I think that’s at the heart of it, they felt kind of trapped between the old style masculine expectations, which is be a superhero, be aggressive, be dominant, take up lots of space. And then this new story that they felt was maybe coming more from the progressive left, which was, “Time to shut up now. Be quiet. Take a backseat, don’t take up too much space,” and I think they felt very caught. They felt like they were being shut down from all sides.

They didn’t know how to show up in the world, and they felt kind of these kinds of feelings of being shut down, unseen, and unheard. Absolutely were. And I talked to a couple of members of darker online groups like the incel movement, and I think it was that feeling of just being lonely, disconnected, and having nobody engaging with them or hearing their problems that was kind of leading them into these darker directions.

I think it was very important to me to really try and deeply engage with people. I think there is a push in certain circles to be like, “We shouldn’t engage with these people at all. They’re terrible, they’re associated with violence, they’re associated with misogyny,” all of these things. And so therefore, to humanize them and to engage with them is kind of giving them a platform in some way. And my own belief is that actually if we want to really understand what’s going on for people and how they got to where they are, we have to humanize them. They’re human. They are human beings, and they may be involved with some terrible things, but just saying, “Well, we’re not going to listen. We’re not going to try and explore and understand this phenomenon,” I think is not really helpful. So yeah, it was challenging to write, but it was, I think it’s an important thing to do for all of us.

Kallie Mitchell:

Absolutely. And I think after looking at these broader global patterns, we can maybe zoom in a bit to look at a specific context. The recent U.S. election provides an interesting case study in how gender shapes political coalitions and messaging. We know that for the most part, Kamala Harris won among women and Donald Trump won among men, and that there was a move to the right among men under 30. Ruth, what are your thoughts on how gender and age shaped the way that candidates were perceived and how political coalitions were built?

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah, it’s a really interesting point. I mean, I will say that I think once you really dig into the numbers here, I think that we’ve built this narrative around the bro vote, young men moving dramatically to the right, this huge gender gap. I think the numbers themselves are actually a little more complex. Young women were also moving to the right and young men, in fewer numbers. Obviously you saw it more with young men. And to put it in perspective, the move to the right amongst young men, they did slightly more young men voted for Trump than for Kamala Harris, but fewer young men voted for Trump than say white women did. So it’s not entirely a gender gap and it is slightly more complex. But what’s interesting is almost the narrative that we’ve built around it, that there’s this sort of block of angry, resentful young men that are moving to the right.

And I think these phenomena are real and there’s something that we need to address, but I think that it can also very easily slide into a narrative of blaming men and anger and shaming and blaming of young men in a way that I don’t know is always helpful if you look at the granularity of it. And I’m starting to see… in my newsfeed, I’m starting to see a lot of hot takes and op-eds, which are like almost, “I don’t want to listen to these guys anymore,” just dipping into this kind of sense of blame and shame. And I think we did a lot of that in the post Me Too era. I think this kind of anger at men and this blame game isn’t necessarily helpful in bringing them in and moving forward with this discussion.

Kallie Mitchell:

Absolutely. I think that’s a really great nuance to add. And I also wanted to highlight the value of understanding the influence of race in the formation of these political coalitions. I think that the interaction of race and gender reveals far more complex political landscapes than just gender analysis alone. And with the 2024 election, for example, as we said, white men under 30, there was a rightward shift, but black and Latino men demonstrated different political alignments. Black women often described as the most consistently progressive voting bloc, continued their pattern of strategic political engagement that has been critical in recent electoral outcomes. And I think that using an intersectional lens to understand how different social identities overlap and interact to shape individual experience can reveal how masculinity itself is not a uniform experience as you’re saying. For Black men, for instance, masculinity is shaped in part by distinct historical experiences of systemic racism.

The pressures of proving manhood look dramatically different across these racial groups and is influenced by everything from economic opportunities to historical context and to media representation. So the political messaging around masculinity therefore then has to vary significantly by racial context. Conservative political strategies have been particularly adept at exploiting racial anxieties alongside exploiting gender narratives, especially among white men feeling economically or socially displaced. And I think this complexity means that it’s important to look beyond the aggregate voting patterns to understand that the nuanced ways that identity and experience shape political engagement, and for broader international security and political analysis, I think this means that we need to develop far more sophisticated frameworks to understand global political movements by looking at the intricate and dynamic interactions of identities.

Ruth Whippman:

Yes, absolutely. I think everything you’ve said there is so important and there is nuance in this. And I think we also have to think about individual psychology. I mean, these things operate the pressures of masculinity, the expectations, the shame, the leveraging. It’s a very complex equation about how this shows up for any individual. And I think this is also what you’re saying both about the intersectional part, the racial part, the gender part. It’s very much tied into making people feel seen and heard. My work focuses on the home and at the individual level, and I think that really engaging deeply at an individual level with individual humans about how all these wider trends are showing up for them, I think is so important in changing these stories.

Kallie Mitchell:

Absolutely. And as we think about addressing these challenges, it’s becoming clear that our current approaches might need some reevaluation and evolution. Many institutions are working with frameworks developed decades ago that established a deeply rooted and pervasive structure of masculine values and norms that both shape and are shaped by the construction of gender. Looking towards solutions now, security institutions often try to address these gender issues through standard frameworks like positive masculinity or through women’s empowerment programs, which are all more narrowly focused on the individual and community levels. So Ruth, based on your experiences, what are we missing in these approaches and how might we evolve them to better address today’s security challenges?

Ruth Whippman:

Yeah, so I mean, I want to say that a lot of these programs are obviously doing good and helpful work, positive masculinity, women’s empowerment. Obviously many good things have come out of this. I personally push back a little bit on the positive masculinity framing in particular, partly because I think it can almost end up reinforcing these gender stereotypes rather than challenging them. We say to young boys, and there are all these programs, positive masculinity, and I think sometimes it’s like, well, masculinity itself is a non-negotiable. Obviously you have to be masculine, but maybe we can just tweak it a little bit or bring in a couple of other things. But I think by calling it positive masculinity, we’re already saying that men and boys have to be a certain way, that there is this sort of structure called masculinity that they must aspire to or ascribe to.

I personally would prefer a more full humanity model for these kinds of groups. When you’re talking about the gaps in boys like relational, social, emotional learning and intelligence, I don’t want to code these things as masculine or feminine. I’d rather sort of see them as fully human. Similarly with women’s empowerment programs, I think there can often be this sort of reinforcing of these old hierarchies where it’s like we want to encourage women to behave more like men traditionally did rather than giving genuine value in our culture to feminine coded activities like empathy, relationship building. So I think often when we ascribe gender to these characteristics, we’re doing everyone a disservice because everybody needs to have the full spectrum of traits and emotions to be psychologically healthy. So I feel like those kinds of programs were a good first draft, but if we’re really talking about the next generation of boys, the next generation of girls, and how they can live more expansive and healthier lives, I’d rather that we didn’t gender individual qualities.

Cait Dallaire:

Ruth, I could not agree more. And I actually had to read that section of your book a couple of times because before that I was one of the people that was talking about positive masculinity or an affirmative vision of masculinity thinking this was how we carry the conversation forward. And I really appreciate your point. It changed the way that I was thinking about that. And I agree that the goal should really be unpacking what are masculine and feminine coded qualities and kind of getting down to, okay, what are just the healthy, productive qualities for our full expression of our personhood that we should be working towards? And so I think that’s a really healthy way to look at it. At the same time, it can be challenging and taboo to talk about these issues this way sometimes in spaces that have been built around sort of a notion of what it means to be advancing gender equality.

So I think sometimes these conversations can be uncomfortable, but they’re the important ones that we need to have. And as you were speaking, I was thinking about the fact that 2025 is a year when we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda and the 10th anniversary of the Youth, Peace and Security agenda. So there’ll be a lot of thought and discussion probably about what both agendas mean going forward. And I hope especially in the WPS space, that there’s room for these kinds of conversations and broadening our thinking about how to move forward and insert the half-finished revolution. And on Youth, Peace and Security, this agenda is younger. As I said, it’s turning 10 next year, and I think this is a really valuable agenda when we’re talking about evolving our understanding of security challenges. This agenda was adopted by the UN Security Council in 2015, and that resolution plus two subsequent resolutions created the YPS, Youth, Peace and Security framework.

Youth, Peace and Security, YPS affirms the essential role of youth, which are defined as 18 to 25, sometimes 18 to 35, so kind of that demographic that we’re looking at in young men and women in our conversation, it affirms their essential role in peacebuilding work, and that can be really broadly defined. The agenda also outlines five pillars for youth participation, and it takes an intersectional and intergenerational approach to promoting youth inclusive peace processes. And this agenda is complementary to the WPS agenda and incorporates agenda lens into YPS work. So it’s all about viewing youth as not a problem to be solved or a risk to mitigate, but as agents of change who are already taking action in their communities and are looking for non-youth partners to help support their work and for structures to create space for them to meaningfully participate in decision-making processes. So YPS is all about empowering locally led action.

It promotes an affirmative vision for the leaders of tomorrow who are actually leading today, if we would notice and to create and innovate and build resilience in their communities. I noticed prior to this season of life, I was a peacekeeping adviser and travel out to some peacekeeping missions. And I noticed that in some of the most challenging conflict environments in the world, we see young people adapting to climate risk and building small businesses and seeking education and access to technology so that they can then access new opportunities. The security council has formally recognized their role, but governments around the world have a long way to go in operationalizing the agenda and capitalizing on the enormous potential of youth.

Ruth Whippman:

I feel that… As I said, I spoke to many, many boys and young men in the course of my research about their lives, and I was really surprised actually. I imagined that talking to young men would be this blood from a stone, just absolutely impossible task to get them to engage or talk about anything. They were so ready to engage. They were so ready to talk, to be heard. They were so thoughtful and articulate in a way that I really hadn’t imagined. And I feel like there is this absolute pool of young men who really want to be engaged in all of these issues and thinking about the future. And I feel that they feel left out of the conversation. And so I feel like this is a group that absolutely progressive spaces and people thinking about the future can really work with, really leverage. I think there’s so much talent, there’s so much thoughtfulness, there’s so many interesting ideas within this group, if only we can harness them. And I think the way to do that is through listening, engaging, bringing in rather than pushing out.

Cait Dallaire:

Absolutely. And that’s where I think it’s so important that we’re doing this work as engaged citizens, as mothers, to try to make our sons better for the world and also make the world’s better for them.

Kallie Mitchell:

Great. I think that is all we have time for today. I’d like to thank you so much, Ruth and Cait, for joining me today and for lending your expertise to this discussion on the gender dynamics of political movements and the implications for global peace and security.

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