JD Vance Is the Wrong Answer

"Men are in a crisis, for sure. But JD Vance is not the example of masculinity that those who are lost should follow. 

Op-ed after op-ed has acknowledged the crisis men are facing, whether it’s their declining rates of college enrollment, increasing suicide rates, lower life expectancy, dwindling levels of employment, or troubling levels of Joe Rogan podcast subscriptions. Solutions for the crisis abound, too: Josh Hawley says we need to ban pornography. Brad Wilcox says people need to get and stay married. Richard Reeves, who’s done an incredibly thoughtful analysis of the problem, recommends starting boys in school a year later because of research that suggests boys mature more slowly than girls do. Vance’s solution, so far, seems to be to rage against modernity—to stay mad until society regresses.

Walz’s masculinity [by contrast] is positive. I mean that in the fullest sense of the term. Positive masculinity is more than just the absence of toxic masculinity: It’s about embracing what’s distinctly good about men. I can admit that in an effort to promote genders that have historically been marginalized, (some) liberals have failed to value men for their unique traits. There’s no contradiction between accepting that gender is a spectrum, and recognizing that somewhere along that spectrum lies cisgender men, who deserve to be respected for what they bring to the table. Positive masculinity is a man walking a female friend home at night if she feels unsafe. It’s moving furniture. It’s doing home repairs. It’s the joke circling the Internet that Walz is the kind of guy who would help you change your tire. It’s how Walz was the faculty adviser for the gay-straight alliance at a rural Minnesota high school 25 years ago because they needed a masculine figure like the football coach to lend legitimacy and safety to their organization. It’s using masculinity for good."

Ginny Hogan in The Nation