The Only Good Men Left In America Are Women
a nadir in masculinity
“The measure of a good man - not just a man - are the sacrifices he’ll make to keep his loved ones happy”
Jerry Esposito
The courthouse in downtown New Haven reminds one precisely why they would become a lawyer. It is layered in Vermont marble and visitors are greeted with an ionic portico housing a neoclassical statue of jurisprudence.
If it weren’t for the glitzy cars, its parking lot would belie the courthouse’s beauty. On a given day, it is filled with Mercedes and Acuras that would lead one to think these were corporate cronies, not those on a public salary.
Yet every day, my father would drive a Ford station wagon to work and before his trip across the parking lot he would be sure to have on a Red Sox jacket with rips in it dating back to the early nineties.
It was during a bringyoursontoworkday when I first noticed this disparity. But the contrast, however, extended beyond such material things. My father owned his office, commanding it with the compassion of someone who had been both blessed and cursed to have seen as many lives undone as have reached the American Dream.
There wasn’t a person in the courthouse who did not forget work was work, even if only temporarily, when in the presence of my old man. This includes those being prosecuted by the State. Attorney Richard Meehan reported on my Dad’s grandiose personality: “Gerry was my friend and this was his playful manner. He had the ability to disarm pretentious lawyers with this style. He could bring the biggest egos down to the size of us mortals with his wry wit.”
Still, it was a different obituary that managed to perfectly capture the essence of such a great man. America’s oldest newspaper, The Hartford Courant, spilled little ink to the subject matter of his legal career; a vocation that possessed no shortage of personal accolades. Instead, before listing the family members surviving him and his undying passion for baseball, the Courant detailed the most meaningful job he would ever have.
“Ever since he was a teenager, an up until just recently, Mr. Esposito worked for Lucibello’s Pastry Shop of New Haven delivering wedding cakes and pastries.”
And still, a mystery remained. I’ve long solved the reason for my Dad’s magnanimity, professional and personal. I’ve unearthed why he became a lawyer, sourcing it to a deeply entrenched thirst to find an altruistic outlet for his intellect. What lingered, however, was why my father continued to drive a station wagon.
“When the devil grows old he turns hermit.”
Ludovico Ariosto, Renaissance poet
The son of Innovation is the Frontier, and it has had many siblings throughout our nation’s lifetime. When there were no Western lands left for young men to adventure to there were still wars in faraway worlds. When the wars stopped, or stopped being enticing, there were societal fronts. Fight the man, protest discrimination, smoke weed with hippies, and depart from the norm. Accepting those wins allowed men to seek other realms to conquer: outer space and technology.
Today, men only see one frontier left to explore, and it lies within. The fight is an internal one. How can I evolve into an Alpha? Do I need women to be my best self? Is my body and mind in mystical alignment? Why do I like being alone and how do I maximize that time? Ironically, it was men who put themselves in the hellhole they now teeter between settling into or escaping from.
They are opting out of humanity. Men have done more than offload the social obligations that come with being a member of our species. They’ve done away with society altogether. We’ve transitioned from plugging into the scene, to asking the bartender if there is a charging outlet behind the White Claws. Norms and Cliffs are crying everywhere.
There were subtle hints. Over the last twenty years the amount of men age 25-34 who live at home with their parents has risen from 13 to 19 percent. Since 2008 the average age at marriage for men has risen 2.5 years. Between 2017 and 2022, youth boys sports participation has dipped from 61 percent to 58.
In the 1990s, 40 percent of men said they had 10 or more close friends. Today that number stands at 15 percent. What’s more, the percentage of men who reported having no close friends jumped from 3 to 15 percent. Six out of ten men under 30 are single and over half of Gen Z dudes were never in a romantic relationship as a teen.
Every Monday I ask my students about what they did that weekend and every Monday I hear two responses, each always something the same. From the girls: “I FaceTimed my friends.” From the boys: “Nothing.” While the loneliness epidemic impacts all genders, at least women possess the emotional intellect to recognize they’re hurting and the requisite willpower to seek help. According to Pew, 54 percent of women turn towards a friend for support, while only 38 percent of men do so. Same goes for enlisting mothers or professional therapists for help.
Young men are at home. Alone. Sexless and Ornery; one hand washing the other in that regard. But why? Professor Richard Reeves attributes this to something he coined neededness. It is the very sacrifices demanded of Mankind which constituted their fasttrack atop our social hierarchy. “To whom much is given much is expected,” Scripture says. Upholding the patriarchal esteem of men were pillars of self-centered desires forgone. When men are no longer needed to surrender such ambitions, they retreat from society.
Philosopher Andrew Taggart has his own theory of the case. Men have become “Secular Monks,” choosing to focus on ascetic improvement. There has been a torrent of wildly popular self help videos inundating the manosphere, ranging from ice bath tutorials to morning meditation, from jawline workouts to anti-porn mantras.
Regardless, young men are besieged by influencers doing everything but encouraging them to be in our social spaces. The basketball court is now for betting, not hooping with friends. No more shooting jumpers, just schools. Dating apps are being traded in for crypto markets. Three bedroom apartments for basement futons. College dorms for solitary drop-shipping. Sexual encounters for OnlyFans subscriptions and eventually, shame inspired incel podcasts.
“The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.”
Simone de Beauvoir
Both Reeves and Taggart may be correct, but it doesn’t matter. They each asked the wrong question. What matters is not unearthing what societal mechanisms pushed men into wimpy solitude. Rather, we must ask why men have allowed themselves to be pushed into such a regrettable place.
The last five decades of feminist progress has tested men, and they have failed miserably. What decrees a man to be one, and a good one at that, is the internal fortitude to forsake what is necessary for the wellbeing of their loved ones. They are failing their hardest test yet: allowing women to be equals and usurp their position of strength in that power dynamic. In this regard, men attempted to retain exclusive rights over sacrifice due to the way in which it catapults them into cultural supremacy.
The share of women who are the breadwinner for their family has tripled over the last fifty years. Moreover, the amount of men and women who earn roughly the same amount for their family has risen from 11 percent to 29. The 118th Congress saw a record number of women in office. In the last decade, two women ran for president and one of them won the popular vote. In 1995, zero women were the head of a Fortune 500 company. Today that number has ballooned to 53. 1992 was even declared “the Year of the Woman.”
There are more overt, traditionally masculine spaces that have witnessed the feminine uprising as well. The military has seen female enlistment soar from one percent in 1970 to 17.5 percent currently. The WNBA has hit an all-time high in viewership. The same trend can be seen in the police force, mechanics and engineers.
It can be argued that men once braved frontiers that resulted in protecting their American women, such as slaughtering natives during Manifest Destiny and defeating enemies overseas. Now, the battlefield is occurring between men and women, except women don’t wish the defeat of man, only “that they take their feet off our necks.” If men merely read the words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they might learn that they are the only ones perceiving this as a fight for supremacy.
What’s worse is that men only have themselves to blame. Nothing better exemplifies this claim than their zombification via video games. From 2004 to 2015, “approximately 60 percent of the 2.3 hours of increased leisure time per week for young men was spent playing video games, while younger women and older men and women spent negligible extra leisure time in this way.” As a consequence men gave up 30 to 60 hours a year working and voila, women raced past them.
This tracks with the college enrollment data that demonstrates women as the most eager to gain upwards mobility. Women now out-enroll men in college by over three million people, far outpacing the 200,000 person gap of the late seventies. Men didn’t simply take their collective foot off of the female neck, they took it off of the gas pedal. As it turns out, they’ve been outpaced and are now handling the ramifications of their inaction like spoiled brats.
My father was the greatest man I’ve ever known, and even he did not surrender his mantle of career driven self-worth. He could not sacrifice sacrifice, showing how monumental of a task that will be. But still, even he continued to face the world, something today’s young men are too scared to do.
“The sacrifice of men guarantees we women still have these splendid domains to wander around, but we wander around them alone.”
Storm Constantine
At last, I’ve solved the mystery of the station wagon. It was common knowledge that my father always coveted a fire engine red Mustang. It was to be his retirement reward. But the moment never came. Until the day he died, my father drove that grey station wagon and proudly parked it between Beamers and Range Rovers.
Like my father, I also help out at my cousin’s bakery, especially during the busy Holiday seasons. The owner, Peter, once nonchalantly solved this mystery for me. “I can’t believe your father kept that car. I used to tease him all the time about that. But he told me he needed it to deliver wedding cakes. The backseat unfolded into a flat surface to keep them from smashing around during the drive over.”
If you’re looking for a lawyer with a side job, he’s buried at All Saint Cemetery in North Haven. All other searches end in vain. With his salary, he could have afforded the Mustang he long desired. But along with acclaimed public status and the superficial trappings typically sought by jurisprudents, his dream car was forsaken and exchanged for something much more meaningful.
That is what a good man does. Who a good man is. They deploy measured acts of sacrifice to guarantee happiness for the ones they care about most. I don’t know where that station wagon is now, but I am sure it remains encrusted with hardened icing residue from a Lucibello’s piping bag. More importantly, my cousin Peter harbors a steadfast memory of my father; one dripped in the remnants of a good life lived, derived from the service provided by a loved one.
Nothing was more important to my old man than family. The Mustang would have to wait, because delivering wedding cakes on Saturday mornings helped alleviate pressure from our cousin, who desperately needed it.
My Dad’s sacrifice imprinted my heart with an impact far greater than any bible verse or adage could deliver. It has taught me the difference between a career and a vocation, a lifestyle and a calling. It opened my soul to the doings of those worthy of one. And while I remain far from perfect, what brings me comfort is knowing my father was just as far away. My mother, however, has picked up where my father fell short.
Material things aren’t always easy to sacrifice, but they aren’t as difficult to give up when compared to callings of the spirit. Where my father sacrificed luxury goods he surely deserved, my mother surrendered something much more difficult to give up.
During the early 2000s, with three children to raise, my parents faced a dilemma. It was determined that my mother would shift to part-time work as a lawyer while my father stayed on full-time. When public layoffs came, the part-timers went first. My mother lost a career she tirelessly battled sexism to achieve, while my father got promoted to a judgeship.
Although he would be addressed as Your Honor, the honor fully belonged to my Mom. As one of four women in her graduating Law class, she fought to the top. Coffees were carried into the office, legal briefs stapled and filed, all for her to get her shot one day. When her moment came she proved exceptionally impressive.
And just like that, it was gone. While her husband ascended into ambition, she labored at home with three little assholes, cleaning sheets and preparing dinner. Part of her identity, her raison d'etre, was unceremoniously stolen from her.
Simultaneously, my Dad was springing into a new life where his passions would manifest in a name still spoken in New Haven by those reflecting on local heroes. She never said one ill word on the situation, instead offering nothing but support and love.
Her sacrifice is emblematic of precisely what was once expected from our young men. With an intellect as sharp as my father’s, she calmly assessed the situation and recognized the hierarchy of what was most important to her. Being home for her family superseded career ambitions. Moreover, forgoing her dream would unlock her husband’s. Placed above any love for herself was the love she had for those she cared most for.
A smart woman would be correct in asking why such an ideal belongs only to men. It doesn’t. For much of America’s History, men monopolized the virtue of sacrifice, weaponizing it to gain a societal position allowing them to have the final and most powerful say. Doing so enabled men to claim their authority through virtuous means; a tactic as formidable as it is effective.
Justifying this usurpation were the burdens they carried. It were men who died in the wars. Men who journeyed halfway across the country to work one of FDR’s programs before sending money back home. Men who gave us electricity and cars, in the words of James Brown however, they have forgotten that this man’s world would be nothing without a woman or a girl.
During multiple waves throughout the 20th Century, however, women realized it were not only men who could find fulfillment in the ideal of sacrifice, and rightfully so. Simone de Beauvoir introduced the world to a concept known as “the other.” Betty Friedan mystified us into reviving a second iteration of feminism and class while bell hooks wove race into the movement as well.
Illuminated in these movements was more than the notion that men subjugated women to eliminate half of the competition for jobs and therefore, wealth. Feminism permeated the nation because it touched upon something deeper. By being the breadwinner, men could justify their place atop the hierarchy through righteous means. After all, it was the men who labored all day in terrible conditions for a family paycheck. If anyone deserved the final say, the largest piece of chicken, the worn-in recliner, wasn’t it the one who hauled mattresses from 9am to 5pm?
Dutifully, women began clawing their way into this power dynamic, not to own it, but to purchase their own share of equity. The battle to possess the ideal of sacrifice began, and a battle it was. Whether you like her or not, it were women like Hillary Clinton who smashed glass ceilings and blazed paths for women to demonstrate their worth. Hate her if you will, but her path to power only mimicked the very men who did it before her. If men abhor her, they must also abhor each other.
And today, we all reap the benefits. The nation is as their best when the brains and brawn of women are freed from their kitchen. Subsequently, men are at their best when women equalize the power existing between them.
To be clear, men did not willingly hand over sole possession of sacrifice as a virtue. Women ripped it away from them. In fact, for years it seemed as though men were slowly acquiescing. There were economic shifts in family income, but the cultural blowback of today remained at bay. This is when presidents were persecuted for sexual manipulation, not lionized for it. It birthed George W. Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism and feminist phenomenons like Sex and the City or Oprah’s societal command. Michelle Obama had an approval rating of 72 percent in 2009.
Today, men, specifically conservative men, sincerely believe Obama is a transgender man. Perhaps they only way the could reconcile a meteoric rise like the former First Lady’s is to, oddly, proclaim she is actually has a penis. But this would not be the last time men entered the arena of anatomy to voice their childlike bitterness.
It now makes sense why men are leading the charge for control over a woman’s body, albeit their movement springs from keyboards and not public demonstrations. They have watched women, in good faith, prove through hard work that they can do everything a man can do. And they did not like it, because they are not real men at all. Naturally, asserting dominion over the physical body of women presented itself as an achievable goal and moreso, a path back towards societal superiority. Although men see the giving of life as a godlike cause propelling them back towards supremacy, nothing in truth could be more devilish.
I’ve never seen anything more clearly. The stench of bitchassness among my gendermates is more rotten then ever. Men have never confronted the rise of women with the compassion and courage it deserves. Everyone benefits - economically, socially, culturally - when are given the chance to be at their best.
Yet we’ve turned inwards. Instead of sharing evenly the virtue of sacrifice among men and women, the former has doubled down on a new form of sacrifice. Where they should be looking outwards, and towards women, men are turning inwards. Their new focus is on surrendering comparatively meaningless yearnings, like fast food, one-night stands and alcohol. Color me unimpressed.
Nevertheless, they are trying to reclaim sacrifice by controlling themselves. Unfortunately, society demands they surrender the only thing they cannot control, women.