Alone in the Manosphere
by Maria Bustillos
The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter this week dissected Scott Galloway’s new book on masculinity, Notes on Being a Man, with an expert scalpel. According to Winter, Galloway tacitly agrees with right-wing influencers, like the late Charlie Kirk, that “young American men are in terrible and unprecedented straits, and those currents are yanking them rightward,” but he means to avoid the far right’s overt racism and misogyny, and create a “centrist manosphere.”
Galloway… declares that discontented members of Gen Z and the boys and teens of Gen Alpha need an “aspirational vision of masculinity,” a vision opposed to the misogynist messaging that’s epitomized by influencers such as Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes. Part self-help memoir and part Dudes Rock polemic, the book presents a capital-letter credo: “Men Protect, Provide, and Procreate.”
Galloway purports to be offering a morally superior alternative, in other words, to the right wing’s troglodytic views on the Crisis of Masculinity (a low bar, certainly, considering that Andrew Tate is a convicted tax cheat, facing charges of rape and human trafficking in multiple countries, who thinks that women should not be allowed to vote). Still, Galloway’s Three P’s irresistibly recall the three K’s of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), the slogan of the German Empire—and later, the Third Reich—for the appropriate role of women in society.
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