Something is wrong with the men. Lord, the men you put on this earth to build houses and hunt game, conquer the Mediterranean, invent democracy and dictatorship, build intercontinental railroads, then retreat to leather-bound libraries and oak-paneled clubs, hold court at cocktail parties and make book deals over three-martini lunches, their names embossed on spines that lined university syllabi, now, at this very moment, these inheritors of conquest and creation are complaining about the disappearance of the Literary Man. They’re saying it should worry everyone. Lord, the men you put on this earth to lay pipe and go to war are decrying the Male Loneliness Crisis and struggling to read third-person omniscient narrators. Donald Trump won the election because of something called the “Manosphere.” The very men who should be leading scout troops and serving as volunteer firefighters and going to the Century Association to discuss who among them got the biggest novel advance are instead using their free time to demand a “Joe Rogan for the left.” Please, Lord, send us a Joe Rogan for the left!
For years, variations of this same concern have been swirling the culture drain like a wad of hair or a piece of leftover food (that my husband never cleans out, am I right ladies?!). In the months between pitching this piece and actually sitting my womanly ass down to write it (am I right, ladies?!), I had to suffer through four additional discourse cycles on the topic—an essay on “brodernist” literature (“Annie Ernaux for the boys”); an essay by world historic soy boy David Brooks ISO of a time “When Novels Mattered”; an all-male reading on the Lower East Side; and a jumbled tantrum about the “Vanishing White Male Writer,” which dared to ask the brave question: Where is the white Tony Tulathimutte?
Yet masculinity is as present in literary fiction as ever, even if it’s not getting the “girlie” treatment of Barbie, bows, e-girl, sad girl, literary it girl, Brat girl, bad bitchery lately en vogue. I started noticing a type of book that was preoccupied with The Men—their crucibles, their tests, their cultural power or lack thereof. It’s hard to miss that the authors of these essays on the lack of Literary Men are selective readers, cherrypicking for the sake of their own self-pitying point. They know these books exist and read them strategically, often at the expense of the authors themselves, whose points get whittled down to their most brittle in trite semi-analysis. They all cite the same selection in their pieces: Rejection by the aforementioned Tulathimutte, Victim by Andrew Boryga, How to Win a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto, The Novelist by Jordan Castro (or else his newly released second novel, Muscle Man), anything by Andrew Lipstein—who the Vitamin D-deficient denizens of the Red Scare book club subreddit recently called “a secret handshake amongst the cool kids” in their search for “straight, white male literary authors under 40.” And so, as a neutral third party (read: non-man), I set out to read these books on a sweeping quest to solve the masculinity crisis. Lock in, chat. We’re going into the manosphere.
First, a few definitions are in order. As my friend Charlie pointed out a few months ago, there is a phantom limb attached to the “Literary Man” in all of these essays (no, not that phantom limb, am I right ladies?!)—or rather, a rotating series of phantom limbs creating a Substance-esque monstrosity that’s easy to talk around but harder to pin down. The imagined literary man in question is unquestionably cis; he’s most likely straight; he’s sometimes explicitly white, but usually just implicitly white. Occasionally “white” alone won’t do—he should be a “white American.” He’s often required to be under 40, or 35, in an attempt to make the point that millennial men have been edged out of publishing without aligning on what “millennial” means at all.
What goes unsaid in these essays is that the phantom limbs restrict membership in the lost colony of the literary man to a smaller and smaller group of people, winnowing down the books these writers are searching for to an authorship of one: themselves. The question underneath the question, “Where are all the white male novelists?” is a much sadder, more embarrassing one: “Why not me?”
For our purposes, let’s make the limbs explicit. The modern manosphere canon includes books by cis het authors of many colors collectively plagued by a series of tropes—anxieties that together make up a modern pastiche of masculinity in dispute. Men in these books are under siege by a series of emasculating forces, which I’ve loosely narrowed down to an unholy trinity: cancellation, the body, and the father.
1. Cancellation
The specter of cancellation hangs over the manosphere canon. Or rather, “soft-cancellation,” as the literary men often put it, to assure the reader that they’ve done nothing violent or truly malevolent, just stepped over a line in our purity culture and triggered a vicious mob ready to gleefully tear them down.
I don’t mean to say that male writers today write in constant fear of cancellation—though, sure, some of them might make that case. What I mean to say is that the discourse around “cancel culture” has so monopolized the literary world for the past two decades that it has seeped into fiction, haunting the protagonists themselves. Since The Human Stain (I think I’m stealing this point of origin from Tulathimutte)—and maybe even before—writers have been so preoccupied with the consequences of putting their feet in their mouths or their dicks in their students that “cancellation” has reached the status of trope. Like the Marriage Plot or Rags to Riches, the Cancellation Plot is now an archetypal narrative structure in American literature, uniquely resonant across the manosphere.
The Cancellation Plot meets its most literal iteration in Julius Taranto’s satirical novel How I Won a Nobel Prize. Though the book is often placed in the manosphere canon and is indeed written by a cis, straight man, its protagonist is actually (gasp!) a woman. Helen, a physicist trying to save the world from impending climate crisis, decides to follow her mentor to the Rubin Institute Plymouth (RIP), a flourishing libertarian university and isolation chamber for the brilliant and cancelled. The predators at RIP have committed a series of crass acts that are heinous even as they are so blatantly objects of satire, though of course, Helen doesn’t come out squeaky clean herself. In her singular obsession with high temperature super-conductivity and winning a Nobel Prize for her research, Helen is willing to sacrifice her morals, her marriage, even her self-respect—until her socialist husband wins the day by blowing up the phallic tower at the heart of RIP, an edifice jokingly known as “The Endowment.” The two come out uncancelled, unbroken, and relatively unscathed, though one of the reasons Taranto is able to pull it off is because he made the more “problematic” partner of the pair the woman.
Sometimes the cancellable offenses in these books are so contrived that you have to laugh. Something Rotten, an excellent book by the prolific Lipstein, follows disgraced NPR reporter Reuben, who is unhirable after he forgets he’s on a Zoom call while going down on his wife. This is a lubin’ Toobin designed to exonerate gloomin’ Reuben. After all—sure, it’s bad to expose your coworkers to an unsolicited sexual act. But, fellas: Can a man not pleasure his wife anymore? Isn’t it actually quite feminist, we might find ourselves thinking, that he goes down on her so frequently that this instance was caught in 4K?
As is often the case, there is a woman waiting in the wings, ready to capitalize on the literary man’s humiliation. In Something Rotten, it’s Molly, Reuben’s NPR coworker who is understandably disturbed by the sex act to which she’s accidentally privy. Reuben feels for her, and in one compelling moment, he forces himself to watch a recording of the meeting and confront the horror on her face. But then again, she gets his job once he’s ousted—so didn’t she get what she wanted in the end?
Elsewhere, the relationship is even more antagonistic and less nuanced. In Boryga’s Victim, chronic truth-stretcher Javi is shilling for clicks at the buzzy Brooklyn gentrifier mag, The Rag, when his identity politics-fueled fabrications are finally exposed—on live television. Javi’s been lying about sources and exaggerating details in his writing for years, playing into the stereotypes in his imagined reader’s head and the confessional personal essay industrial complex of the late 2010’s. His editor has long been suspicious of Javi’s “reporting” and is ready to pounce in his stead, rising up in the ranks to become managing editor as he storms off set, castigated. “It’s over. I’m dead,” Javi says as he literally walks into traffic.
Of course, Boryga is playing the melodrama for laughs. But despite the interesting set pieces, his treatment of the post-Trump, post-BLM, post-MeToo glass cliff remains shallow. Javi is supposedly a somewhat talented writer with big dreams of making great art, but he never mentions any authors he’s reading or inspired by. His relationship with his girlfriend is unconvincing and filled with the very ethnic credentialing (“In the center [of the table] was a roasted chicken, a pie, rice, potatoes, and an abundant salad. Not even the slightest whiff of adobo in the air.”) Boryga is supposedly out to satirize. And annoying as Javi can be, Boryga never goes far enough to make him a true villain, perhaps for fear of being mistaken for him—a metacommentary on the anxiety of “soft cancellation,” if I may.
The preoccupation with cancellation that looms in all of these contemporary books by men points to a masculinity in tension with itself, a masculinity that regards itself as neutered and surveilled—or pokes fun at characters overcome with feeling that way. And nowhere does this conversation play out more, well, physically, than in contemporary depictions of the male body.
2. The Body
In the manosphere there is a strong fixation on the body, a source of alternating shame and pride. The male protagonist of contemporary fiction is dysmorphic and insecure, embarrassed by his narrow shoulders and weak jawlines. He lives in the shadow of a culture obsessed with looksmaxxing, bodymods, and getting built. Sure, he might be emotionally repressed. But the body, as the saying goes, keeps the score. And so, he heads to the gym.
Jordan Castro’s claustrophobic debut follows a novelist over the course of a single morning, so closely restricted to the protagonist’s mind and body that the result can become physically nauseating. At one point, the shit-obsessed narrator takes a look at his chest and triceps in the mirror, angling the mirror to make himself look “thinner and stronger.” He considers his body. “Body man,” he thinks. The real Castro writes of getting a pump with almost religious zeal. “When blood flows into your muscles it changes your eyes—like wearing glasses,” he wrote in Harper’s in 2024. “It starts in your blood and stretches out over the world, where everything remains the same, but different. It’s as if each color contains a deeper, richer layer of itself … which only gets revealed when blood makes muscle thick and full.”
Castro’s new book takes this sacrament even further, following a gym bro professor named Harold for twenty-four hours, including for an almost Mezzanine-ian journey to the gym. Every moment that he’s not at the gym is openly excruciating for Harold. He hates his colleagues, including a woman whose performance of “Southernness” grates on Harold to an extent that verges on abject disgust (how convenient, for Castro to pick “Southernness,” but that’s a point for another essay). Harold longs for the gym, for the pain of a lift, in a way that replaces all other desires, chiefly even the sexual. In Castro’s telling, a lift itself is the perfect foil for his neutered professional life of letters: “The body ached and screamed but it also spoke and sang. The body had its own way of thinking. The body had its own words. Harold was beginning to learn the language of his body.”
Castro may be a racist and a misogynist, but he’s not stupid. He knows what he’s promoting. It’s an oddly pastoral view of masculinity: the urge to get thick and full in the body as evidence of life force. Call it recency bias (I spent the summer rereading Anna Karenina), but I couldn’t help but think of literary men of ages past, like Tolstoy’s Konstantin Levin, who is so moved by tilling the fields with his recently emancipated serfs that he considers giving up his noble life to join them.
This in opposition to the long history of constructing the female body in literature as the proverbial “docile body.” The contemporary literary man dreams of Levin’s bygone day of force and is ashamed of his contrasting, Sergei Ivanovian shlubiness. “The body,” Susan Bordo wrote in 1993, “is not only a text of culture. It is also, as anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher Michel Foucault (among others) have argued, a practical, direct locus of social control.” If today’s men could just dunk their faces in one more Saratoga water, if they could just eat one more serving of raw meat, maybe then they could—could what? The male body today is a battleground for control, not just over the male body itself, but over the female body, its imagined docile subject.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the literary depictions of inceldom—at least, the ones that exist so far. Crown prince of Reddit, world-historic internet ethnographer Tulathimutte explores the other side of that coin in his 2024 collection Rejection—the best book of last year. In the opening story, a lonely virgin Subway surfing along the male-feminist-to-incel pipeline is so trapped inside his own body that he can’t even masturbate in peace. “Was masturbation lowering his testosterone count,” he wonders, “contributing to his narrow shoulders? And does that give women the impression that he has a small penis, which he objectively does not?”
Later in the collection, echoes of these same concerns, this time from the perspective of a recently out, gay Thai-American protagonist newly getting into the gym. “He’s read that squats are the most comprehensive exercise, and at the squat rack he loads on the smallest plates that don’t look comically slight.”
In Jonathan Escoffery’s 2022 collection, If I Survive You, the question of what men should do with their bodies is enacted literally with a story called “Odd Jobs”—in which the cash-strapped protagonist, Trelawny, is hired via Craigslist to punch a young white woman in the face for a “photography project.” Should he take the gig? Trelawny sorely needs the money. But what kind of man is he, if he is willing to hit this woman? Is he a sissy himself? Or worse, even more manly for it? In some ways, the question leads him back to a preoccupation with his father, who has spent his life calling him a “soft boy,” “weak,” and in one devastating moment, “defective.”
At risk of beating a deadlift horse, this intense awareness of the body haunts almost every literary man of the past five years. Certain parts (the aforementioned shoulders, the primordially relevant dick-measuring contest, face symmetry, biceps) serve as benchmarks to hit: external markers of masculinity or its “soy” opposite. In Gabriel Smith’s Brat, the protagonist is losing sheets of skin alongside his artistic drive. “My penis felt loose,” he says at one point. “I tore away the entire skin around my crotch, penis, and upper thighs.” The body is loose, falling apart, soft, faulty. It cannot perform the tasks that a man “should” perform.
3. The Father
The modern literary man has daddy issues. Gone are the days of Roth’s forlorn mother-lovers, longing, aching, to return to the womb. Today’s literary men are haunted by, shamed by, in search of their fathers’ hard-ons.
The Father presents an aspirational version of traditional masculinity—a missing link, an impossible standard. More often than not, he’s absent. In Lipstein’s novel, Reuben grows up without even the name of his biological father. But when he finally works up the nerve to reach out, he learns that his dad was just a mediocre dentist all along. Likewise, Zain Khalid’s Brother Alive follows three adopted brothers raised by an imposing father figure, the strange and eccentric Imam Salim. The plot is a recursive pyramid scheme of fathers and grandfathers and the search for protagonist Youssef’s biological ones; the word “father” appears 188 times in the novel’s 352 pages. Daddy, daddy cool.
When the father is not a mystery, he is the object of mourning. Boryga’s Javi also grows up without his father, who he sees get shot after a drug deal gone wrong in Puerto Rico. That early loss becomes Javi’s origin story, a foundational trauma he later learns to exploit. When his father was alive, he hated him for the way he made him feel: weak, feminine, inadequate. Without him, though, what kind of man could he become?
The same goes for Jeremy Gordon’s See Friendship, one of the warmest and most affecting “manosphere” books of the last few years, in which an elder millennial’s grief and nostalgia lead him down a red herring-laden path of not-quite-true crime. Gordon’s protagonist, Jacob, loses his father to a “surprise heart attack” in the first year of college—and proceeds to drown his sorrows in binge drinking and indie rock. “Maybe this just sucks, and it’s just going to keep sucking,” Jacob writes to a friend whose father dies a few years later. “Maybe you can’t make anything good out of it.”
In Smith’s Brat, the protagonist spends the length of the book grieving his father, and though we don’t get to know him well enough to quite understand the depths of their relationship, it’s clear he is unmoored by the loss—not just as a son, but as an artist, and a man. In Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations, David Hammond is a single dad who, after losing his father at a young age, is left to seek out role models in art, in church, and even in Obama-esque political candidates. And though much has been made of the haunting portrait of the maybe-martyred mother in Kaveh Akbar’s 2024 Martyr!, it is the death of the protagonist’s father that sets him on a path of addiction and sorrow. In the end, Cyrus’s mother reveals herself to have escaped what would have been a fatal plane crash and reinvented a life as the renowned artist Orkideh; his dad, all along, remains in the ground. Grieving their fathers, these neo-Hamlets must learn to come of age on their own terms—or, more specifically, to become men on their own terms.
In all of these books, the father figure is a useful symbol for patriarchy at large. Each of these protagonists is tasked with figuring out how to be a man, or become one, without a patriarch to follow. Their power is warped, their path is unclear. They don’t want to repeat the mistakes of their fathers, or else, they don’t have one around to call. And so they set out (sometimes effectively, sometimes not) to reinvent themselves.
•
To be clear, I don’t think the patriarchy is as dead as these dads—far from it. But contemporary manosphere literature certainly paints a landscape of patriarchy in crisis, at war with itself about how it should wield its own power. For this reason alone, I think reading the manosphere is fruitful. There’s an answer for all of us, including subjects of the patriarchy, on the pages inside.
In fact, I suppose I’ve played my cards too close to my chest. “Neutral” third-party could be a stretch. The truth is, I have a vested interest in this topic myself. Despite my dwindling number of straight male friends, some of my greatest literary heroes and inspirations are the very twentieth-century Western authors for whom the grieving literary man essayists harbor a pat nostalgia. The Jewish-American triumvirate of Malamud, Bellow, and Roth; DeLillo, Foster Wallace. I love these writers! Well. I don’t love that Foster Wallace beat his wife, that Roth slandered and abused his, or that Bellow was a prickly, sexist curmudgeon, defending himself from proto-cancel culture as far back as 1994. But I can certainly admit that I love their books.
So I care. I want to read good books by and about men. But writers like Jacob Savage (yes, apparently that’s his real last name)—who wrote the Compact manifesto on the Vanishing White Male Writer—aren’t actually interested in that at all. Their ulterior motive is a reactionary political point hiding, just barely, in plain sight. Elsewhere, Savage has written about the “erasure” of American Jews (which he also calls a “vanishing”) at the expense of DEI policies, an argument as asinine as it is insidious. Brooks argued that the decline in the contemporary novel’s cultural power is due to left-wing purity politics and “conformity.” In his retort, Savage even says the quiet part out loud. “What hope is there,” he asks, “for a white guy with more questionable politics?” Translation: How can I get published and venerated by the people I publicly dismiss and despise?
Reading these guys feels like watching someone blindfold themselves and fumble around in the dark for the point, all while they say, “Well, actually, I mentioned Toni Morrison, so I do read women!” For one thing, if they really cared about nonconformity and breaking the chains of industry censorship, they’d write about the genocide Israel is committing with American weapons and tax dollars in Palestine.
For another, they’re always butt-hurt that only Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith sell, as if those two authors stand in for all women artists and satiate our collective need for influence, attention, and readership; in other words, our capacity to make a living. The fact that the only two contemporary literary novelists these men can name are women says more about their paltry reading habits than it does “the literary man” at large, and their inability to grasp the bigger picture—what it means to be a writer of any identity during the slow decline of literacy—is maddening. “Literary novels by men aren’t bestsellers like they were in the ’70s,” they complain. “It must be because of woke.” How sad, how naive. “It’s the money!!!!!” I want to scream. It’s always the money. As the good people of LARB pointed out in a September podcast episode, men are notoriously good at getting off a sinking ship fast—many have seen the writing on the wall and pivoted to screenwriting on the golden coast.
Literary institutions are stricken, flailing. This summer, the National Endowment for the Arts cancelled its renowned Creative Writing fellowship as well as hundreds of grants to literary magazines. Federal funding for arts, education, and literacy programs, bolstered by LBJ’s Great Society faced waves of devastating cuts under Reagan, both Bushes, and Clinton—just ask the reactionary Cato Institute, which labels the years 1980–2010 the era of “limiting government.” The dwindling cultural reach of literary fiction has more to do with the fact that fascists prefer their populace uneducated than it does the number of white men winning Booker Prizes. No novel interrogating masculinity—or any social force, for that matter—is worth its weight if it pretends to exist outside of that political reality.
For all their faults, the literary men of the twentieth century knew that. Their protagonists stand the test of time not just as characters but as agents in history—classed, ethnicized, vile, wrong, sympathetic, pitiful, alive. The extent to which today’s manosphere writers live up to their forefathers lies precisely in their ability to grasp our current political reality—and speak it, compellingly, to the dwindling readership of our day.
Complaining about lost status and influence won’t help anyone’s case; it just makes you sound like a whiney loser. I don’t want to be prescriptive, and far be it from me to give career advice, but I think there’s a cure to the crisis at hand: Find something interesting to say, even if it’s painful or embarrassing. Ask yourself why it’s actually harder to make a living as a writer today, and find solidarity, rather than derision, on the other side of that question. You might be less lonely that way.