Despite Donald Trump’s protestations that suggest otherwise, Roy Wood Jr. isn’t so sure that men in the United States are “under attack.” That’s not something he agrees with, Wood elaborated — “I’m feeling good.”
“I think that Trump does a good job of creating something for people to be afraid of, so that, if that’s not enough to scare you to vote, ‘What about this? What about this? Oh, y’all under attack,’” Wood said. “Men are being under attack … there always seems to be a new fear log to throw on the fire of ‘why you should vote for me.’ As a man, I want to know what’s under attack. I’m feeling good.”
“Men have been oppressed for a long time,” Abby Phillip cut in. “I mean look, maybe he’s right though, that this is really what his campaign is about.”
Shermichael Singleton pointed to voter trends as a possible explanation for Trump’s message. “Since the end of President Obama’s second term, you’ve seen men slowly leaving the Democratic Party. I think there is an argument to make that some Democratic intellectuals have talked a lot about men being more vulnerable when I think men naturally are more stoic, more competitive.”
Trump’s messaging is a callback to ideas surrounding “traditional masculinity,” Singleton added. “I think a lot of men will look at — I think a lot of conservative men will look at the Democrats… I think the critique would be from Republicans that Democrats are arguing for a new manliness, and Republicans will say, ‘No, we are protecting traditional masculinity.’ And I think there’s an argument to be made there.”
“PoliticsGirl” creator Leigh McGowan entered the conversation as someone who “is married to a man, is raising a man, and is not a man” as she made her case. “First of all, I think it’s hilarious. We’re talking about manhood when women are the ones being attacked across the country, I find that hilarious. We’re the ones whose rights are under attack,” McGowan began.
“But secondly, I think it goes back to how you define a man… I think that we have bred out of men a lot of their instincts that they have when they’re young,” she continued. “When you’re young, you have these close friendships, you have all of these relationships with other people, and then as you get older, you’re supposed to keep it all in and keep it all together. And that’s probably why men end up shooting people, shooting themselves, why there’s an epidemic of loneliness.”
“There is a different way for men to react in our world that is not so alone, that is not so stoic, that is not so buttoned up. And we could open up the world to that, and then we would maybe not be having to talk about the death of manhood,” McGowan continued.
Trump’s thoughts on manhood and maleness represent the “hypermasculine cult of personality,” MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones wrote in early October. In such a system, “men are encouraged to remain stoic, inflict harm on others and ignore experts in favor of the advice of tough-talking podcasters.” The risks of this type of masculinity are many, including higher rates of suicide and deaths by guns.
“And the MAGA movement has done a great deal to discourage men from receiving the mental health care and attention they need to thrive,” Jones added. “We see this in the right-wing attack on suicide prevention programs and ‘social and emotional learning’ programs in school, which experts have used to help boys better process their emotions. Evidence shows that fear and stigmatization make men less likely to receive the mental health care they need.”
You can watch the roundtable from CNN in the video above.
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