Is Masculinism Dangerous?
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5868665
In this interview from NPR’s Fresh Air on June 24, Terry Gross discusses a recent article from The Atlantic with the author, Helen Lewis. To boil down a long interview into a few words, there is a movement mostly gripping the right that avows to be a needed counterbalance to feminism and wokeness. It has lots of names, but “masculinism” is the one Lewis uses and it seems about right. (See below for interview on NPR from July 7, 2026 on this issue).
Its tenets are easy to understand. Only men should vote. Women should stay home and have lots of children. Women do not belong in the workplace. Women are robbing men of their virility by telling them what to do and how to feel. And, the ultimate alpha male is, of course, Donald Trump.
This mindset pervades Christian nationalism, many white churches, and professes to be the answer for the evils that have befallen the United States. In other words, at its core, masculinism seeks to overturn the Declaration of Independence’s statement about equality (unless you take it at its face value of “all MEN are created equal”) and seeks to repeal the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote.
What is important is to understand how widespread these beliefs are, especially among the MAGA of America. This is not a fringe group or cult. There are millions of Americans who ascribe to these ideas and the believers have as much access to the internet as anyone else.
This belief system views the essential unit of American citizenry as the family, not the individual. If these people had their way, each family would get one vote and that vote would be cast by the man of the household. Obviously, they oppose abortion, but not just abortion. They oppose the view that a woman’s body is hers and hers alone. They believe that the man should be making any decisions regarding life and death, thus surely, abortion. These folks view women as “the problem.” Women invented wokeness. Women evinced empathy. Real men do not emote or show empathy. Real men do not eat soy. They eat meat. Real men control their environment and everything around them. Women have interfered with this. You can count on this as being a key point of contention in the up-coming Texas Senate race where the philandering, impeached, and all-around crooked Attorney General Ken Paxton is running against squeaky clean James Talarico. Paxton may be a crook, but he’s a “real man.” Talarico eats soy.
Now why should I care about any of this? I agree with none of it and actually believe such thinking is dangerous given the message it sends girls and boys.
I am concerned because I believe that this thinking is real and growing. I think many Americans believe this stuff. As someone who was born at a time when the glass ceiling for women was easily touched because it was so low and watched how my own wife was discriminated against by the hierarchy at the Duke Department of Medicine, this really scares me.
Recently, the female dean of the Duke Medical School informed us that 73% of the incoming freshmen class were women. Women tested better on exams that predicted success as clinicians. But perhaps most importantly, we cannot exclude over half of the population from accomplishing their dreams simply because they are women. Such thinking is thoroughly backwards and must be opposed at every opportunity.
Finally, I want to make a pitch for greater inclusion of women at the highest reaches of academic medicine. Mary Klotman, the current Duke Medical School dean, is an exemplary person of great accomplishment in every way. She is a singular role model. My former boss Margaret Kripke, only the second woman vice president at Anderson and the first woman chair of a basic science department, showed her immense administrative and leadership skills on many occasions. She also was a master at handling the males who surrounded her and to whom she reported. Meanwhile, as MD Anderson suffers through yet another inept president, no woman has ever really been considered for this job. I hope that a woman takes the helm at Anderson sometime while I am still alive. I made it happen in my novel “Conflict of Interest: Money Drives Medicine and People Die,” I’d love to see it happen for real.
By any measure, “masculinism” is toxic masculinity. It is no good for academic medicine and it is no good for the country. The arguments being made about the superiority of men and inferiority of women mirror the arguments made against Blacks, Jews, and foreigners from everywhere.
If Pete Hegseth is the prototypical high T (testosterone) male and Donald Trump is the god to whom these men worship, I’d say this philosophy is bankrupt. Everyone must resist this at all costs.
For a long form interview with Doug Wilson, a major proponent of Christian nationalism and male dominance, see here:
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5822558/pastor-doug-wilson-interview-pete-hegseth
