Let’s go back to a quainter time (sarcasm!): The 2022 midterms, when, thanks in part to hefty youth voter turnout, progressive candidates and policies did well at the ballot box. Some young progressives felt a spark of hope as their chosen candidates took office, but alongside that lefty cheer, something else was emerging — 2022 also brought us the online “manosphere” as we now know it.
The same month that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, vitriol directed at Amber Heard took over the internet as she battled Johnny Depp in a defamation trial, leading to what one media scholar called “a public orgy of misogyny.” Also that year, Megan Thee Stallion was put through a similar online ringer, this time worsened by misogynoir, or the tandem oppressions of racism and misogyny. These two cases show that we’re a far cry from “going too far" with the fight against rape culture, a popular talking point about the aftermath of the 2017 #MeToo movement. The year 2022 ended with manosphere star Andrew Tate being detained by Romanian police over allegations of human trafficking.
On the other side of what looks like a cut-and-dry ass-kicking for the Democrats, the manosphere that ruled the headlines in 2022 is celebrating what it sees as a definitive cultural and political win in the form of Trump’s election. In 2022, many asked over and over again: “How do we save boys from taking this route?” Rather than indicting and fighting the cultural standards and expectations that, predictably, empower boys to embrace toxic masculinity, many have called to further coddle them, assuming their misogyny is a flaw in how they are treated, rather than a feature of how they feel they should be treated.
According to this line of thinking, men lack positive role models (while mobs constantly harass attempts to diversify mainstream media) and have been knocked off kilter by the advent of women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color entering their spaces (even as there are travel warnings on states with bathroom bans and similar measures in place for those groups). We fear the loneliness epidemic, particularly for how we feel it creates incels. A headline from four days ago: “The Best Way to Help Women? End the Male Loneliness Epidemic.”
We speak of young men as toddlers who must be protected from their own ability to harm others. There are plenty of piece of sh*t boys; there are plenty of piece of sh*t people. But I know plenty of men who have had my back and grown alongside me. That didn’t happen because I expected less from them.
In the wake of 2022, I was frustrated. The 2016 election had spawned a similar line of discourse, suggesting that the only solution for protecting marginalized youth was to make young boys feel more catered to. (At the time, the great fears were the "alt-right” and Bernie bros, a bipartisan conception of the threat of toxic masculinity.) Now I’m angry.
As argued by The Guardian’s Malaika Jabali, Trump’s win is a byproduct of years of anti-feminist backlash. Teen Vogue spoke to young men before November 5 to try to understand how mainstream conceptions of masculinity had been shaping their votes. One report of how the manosphere went all-in for Trump this election cycle noted that over 40% of young men “trust one or more misogynistic voices online,” according to the Equimundo Center for Masculinities and Social Justice. This has been compounded by the overall distrust of mainstream media, which leads people across generations to seek information via social media or streamers, creating a “media vacuum.”
In response to the news that young men, especially young white men, voted for Trump, people have been making sweeping comments about how Gen Z did or didn’t vote. This is an oversimplification of the stakes in a number of ways, not the least because a majority of white women have now voted for Trump three times over. Because politicians are largely asking “What about the boys?” and then only talking about “protecting” cis girls in the context of keeping trans girls out of sports, we ignore how trans youth in particular are being targeted in schools, let alone how the gender binary itself harms those being socialized as young men. By focusing on reaching young men, who are we leaving behind?
According to one new study, in the 24 hours after the election, “researchers reportedly found a ‘4,600% increase in mentions of the terms ‘your body, my choice’ and ‘get back in the kitchen’ on X,’” NBC reported. Black people in at least 13 states — including middle and high schoolers and college students — received hateful text messages telling them to show up for shifts picking cotton, some alluding to Trump’s win. The New York Times reported the texts are being investigated by the FBI. (This follows the racist anti-Haitian harassment, inflamed by Trump and J.D. Vance, following the presidential debate in September.)
In the days leading up to the election, calls to the Trevor Project’s crisis services hotline jumped up by 200%; the day after the election, November 6, they saw a 700% increase “compared to the weeks prior,” according to the group. A third of those callers were BIPOC LGBTQ+ youth. The organization's national 2024 survey of LGBTQ+ youth mental health found that 14% of Black LGBTQ+ youth had attempted suicide in the past year (in comparison with 10% of white LGBTQ+ youth). And as young women and LGBTQ+ people grapple with their anxieties, material issues facing them are key among those fears: Searches for the morning after pill are skyrocketing.
Some Democrats are falling over themselves trying to pin their party’s resounding losses on trans people or the shorthand of “identity politics,” which even Bernie is blaming. But they’re blaming the population that… actually voted for Democrats. According to exit polling by NBC News, 86% of LGBTQ+ voters voted for Harris (going up to 91% when you exclude white queer and trans voters), second only to Black women voters.
Democratic US representatives Seth Moulton (MA) and Tom Suozzi (NY) threw trans girls’ participation in youth sports under the bus in post-election interviews. Meanwhile, trans teens are asking why the party providing an “alternative” to Trump won’t stand up for them. The GOP spent hundreds of millions on anti-trans ads, compared with just $9 million in response from the Democrats. “For those who think that the problem is that Democrats were too vocal in their defense of trans rights, I beg you to explain that gap,” asked MSNBC’s Hayes Brown.
Some Democratic candidates copied the transphobic rhetoric Republicans pushed, then went ahead and lost to those Republicans anyway. Said it before and I’ll keep saying it: Why would they want bigot lite when they can get the real thing?
In doing so, they left behind children like Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-WA) daughter. “We need to counter the idea that my daughter is a threat to anyone else’s children,” Jayapal recently told the New York Times. Echoing that stance, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) recently posted, “The Democratic Party needs to do some serious introspection to understand what went wrong and why our message isn’t resonating or reaching people. But one thing’s for sure — blaming trans kids isn’t the answer.”
Voters were also left behind here: As highlighted by MSNBC's Brown, recent polling from Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, suggests voters prefer a pro-trans candidate, and other polling shows that trans issues are generally not driving even transphobes to the polls.
Trump’s election is part of a global trend. In 2024, a year when more people worldwide voted than ever before recorded, David Dayen of the American Prospect observed, “Virtually every party that was the incumbent at the time that inflation started to heat up around the world has lost.” The continued anti-feminist backlash compounded by misogyny that has yet to be unpicked from societies is also international.
In France, earlier this year, 71-year-old Gisèle Pelicot set off a national reckoning on rape culture by choosing a public trial after being raped by at least 73 men at the hands of her now ex-husband, who drugged her and arranged the rapes; 50 of those men are on trial with her ex-husband. This week, the August rape and murder of a doctor in India — which triggered memories of a 2012 gang rape on a bus (from which the victim later died) that spawned a resistance movement — went to trial.
As NBC News reported, “Around the world, many of the repressive, authoritarian-like figures Trump and his movement idolize have all been bolstered by movements of petulant men who harass and threaten women,” such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
Years of trying to ask “But what about the boys?” has gotten us here. There is no way to change the dynamic without changing who gets prioritized and privileged in the decisions we make and the messaging we put out. There are real problems to fight in schools, problems that do actually cause sexual violence and abuse, from deepfakes to the more run-of-the-mill bullying and harassment that's been scaled up for the smartphone era. Republicans have spent years blaming drag queens, and some Democrats are taking the bait after the election loss, but young people are just as unsafe as they were before.
There is a way to acknowledge our differences and how they shape our material circumstances while prioritizing the working class. As it turns out, these are often the same struggle. On Capitol Hill on Monday, Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Jayapal, as well as newly elected Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), refused to take the bait others had, saying the election was not a referendum on “identity politics,” but instead proof that you can’t prioritize the economy while being “hostage to big-money interests.” A rising tide lifts all boats: An approach that defends the most marginalized and focuses on them will also protect young boys, in no small part by preparing them for a world in which we all matter.
It seems the bigger problem for Democrats wasn’t the feeble noises they made over trans rights, but that their party prioritized a never-ending “brat summer,” landing in debt, despite record-breaking fundraising, after spending millions on concerts and reportedly into the six figures on a Call Her Daddy appearance.
So maybe it was never about finding a “left Joe Rogan.” What if Democrats had tried embracing the people that actually vote for them and need protecting instead of trying to ham-fistedly create a counter to the manosphere? They’re not exactly who I’d trust with the job anyway. In the meantime, there are hundreds of students and young people who would love it if someone would talk to them without asking, “But what about the boys?”
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