The Quiet Lie Behind Male Loneliness

A while back, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Gabbi Wolfe, a therapist who specializes in male psychology. After our conversation, she read the second edition of The Way Men Heal and recently sent me this video.

I was blown away.

What makes this video so powerful is that Gabbi doesn’t simply tell us how men grieve and heal. She tells us a story.

And it’s a remarkable story—one that draws you in, takes a turn you probably won’t see coming, and, before you quite realize what’s happening, gets under your skin.

Through the life of one man, Gabbi shows us grief expressed not primarily through words, but through action. She shows us healing through challenge and purpose, and the extraordinary power of something very simple: men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other men.

She also weaves some of my work into the story, including an excerpt from our interview and the metaphor from Swallowed by a Snake.

I think she did a remarkable job. But more importantly, she helps us see something about men that is very easy to miss when we look for grief only in tears and words.

This one stayed with me. I think it may stay with you, too.

I hope you’ll take the time to watch it.

My friend Fred Hayward wrote to me and asked if I had a list of misandrist books. He had seen one and wondered what I might know about it. I told him I didn’t have a list and couldn’t remember ever seeing one.

But I took Fred’s idea and went to ChatGPT and asked it to give me a list of misandrist books. It came back with numerous books and some ideas about the best way to present the material. It suggested using four categories, beginning with the most explicit and extreme anti-male material and moving toward books where the case for misandry was less clear.

It came up with 23 books and I asked it to write up its findings. This post is basically that write-up, followed by a conclusion I asked it to write. I didn’t tell it what conclusion to reach or how I wanted the books characterized. I did some editing along the way, and I gathered the book covers and made the main image.

I am familiar with many of the books it mentioned, but not all of them. I will be curious to hear from anyone who has read these books about how accurate the descriptions are. The books I am familiar with are portrayed accurately.

Here’s what GPT said:

Category 1 — Explicit Hatred, Elimination, Population Reduction, or Violence

 

These are the hardest examples to explain away as simply “criticism of patriarchy.” Here the hostility is not something we need to read between the lines to find. Men themselves—or the continued existence of men in anything approaching their present numbers—become the target.

 

SCUM Manifesto — Valerie Solanas (1967). This is probably the clearest example in the entire collection. Solanas doesn’t simply criticize male behavior or male-dominated institutions. She portrays the male himself as a biological mistake: an incomplete and defective female. From there, the manifesto launches into a sweeping indictment of men as emotionally crippled, egocentric, incapable of genuine empathy, and responsible for many of society’s evils.

And Solanas takes the argument much further than contempt. SCUM Manifesto envisions eliminating the male sex itself. That makes this qualitatively different from a book arguing that men possess unfair advantages or behave badly. Imagine a widely published manifesto describing women as biologically defective creatures and envisioning a future in which the female sex was eliminated. Would anyone hesitate to describe that as misogyny?

 

“The Future—If There Is One—Is Female” — Sally Miller Gearhart (1981/1982). Gearhart’s piece is an essay rather than a standalone book and was subsequently published in the anthology Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence. But it belongs in this collection because of the extraordinary nature of its proposal.

Gearhart argued that the proportion of males in the human population should be reduced to approximately 10 percent. This was not simply a prediction that technological change might eventually produce such a population. It was presented as part of a feminist vision for the future.

Think for a moment about what that means. Men currently constitute roughly half of humanity. If the female population remained roughly constant, reducing males to just 10 percent of humanity would mean a reduction of nearly 90 percent in the male population. If a male writer proposed that women should constitute only 10 percent of humanity, would we regard that merely as an eccentric political theory? Or would we recognize something profoundly disturbing in the willingness to imagine an entire sex reduced to a tiny reproductive minority?

 

I Hate Men — Pauline Harmange (2020). The title sounds as though it might simply be designed to provoke. But hatred of men is actually part of Harmange’s argument. She explicitly discusses misandry and attempts to rehabilitate it as a legitimate response to women’s experiences with men.

That distinction matters. This isn’t merely a book called I Hate Men whose contents turn out to be a nuanced argument against sexism. Harmange asks readers to consider whether women might actually benefit from disliking men and distancing themselves from them. Publishers Weekly summarized the book as arguing that misandry can be “healthy and joyful.”

Again, reverse the sexes. Imagine a contemporary book titled I Hate Women explaining why misogyny might be healthy, liberating, and joyful for men. Would a major publisher touch it? Would reviewers treat hatred of women as an interesting intellectual position?

 

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls — Mona Eltahawy (2019). Eltahawy is a more complicated case and should be represented carefully. Her book advocates seven qualities she believes women and girls need in resisting patriarchy, and one of those qualities is violence.

Most strikingly, Eltahawy imagines a scenario in which women begin systematically killing men until men are forced to negotiate with them. She presents this as a thought experiment rather than a literal program for exterminating men. That distinction matters, and we should make it.

But the thought experiment itself also matters. An author can use fantasy, satire, or hypothetical scenarios and still reveal something about which forms of rhetoric our culture is prepared to tolerate. Imagine a male author inviting readers to contemplate men systematically killing women until feminists agreed to negotiate. Calling it a “thought experiment” would hardly end the discussion.

For that reason, I would describe this as violent anti-male rhetoric rather than a literal proposal to kill men. That is both stronger and more accurate than exaggerating what Eltahawy actually claims.

 

Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist — Robin Morgan (1977). Morgan is particularly significant because she was not an obscure writer operating at the fringes of feminism. She was an important figure in the second-wave women’s movement and later became an editor of Ms. magazine.

The book chronicles Morgan’s development as a feminist activist and contains rhetoric about men and “man-hating” that deserves examination in its historical context. What makes material like this significant isn’t simply that an angry individual woman expressed hostility toward men. People of both sexes say ugly things. The more interesting question is how openly hostile ideas about men could exist within an influential political and intellectual movement without carrying the stigma that comparable statements about women would carry.

That question will recur throughout this collection.

Category 2 — Female Superiority / Male Inferiority

 

These works don’t necessarily advocate harming men, but they make arguments that would almost certainly be described as sexist if the sexes were reversed.

 

1The Natural Superiority of Women — Ashley Montagu (1953). Explicitly argues for women’s natural superiority. A publisher’s description of an earlier edition summarized its thesis as showing that “the superiority of women is a biological fact.”

 

The First Sex — Elizabeth Gould Davis (1971). Directly asks whether women are superior to men and argues toward precisely that conclusion. The publisher describes women being “the first sex” as the book’s “inescapable conclusion.”

 

Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism — Mary Daly (1978). Develops an extraordinarily sweeping critique of male-created culture, religion, medicine, and language. Daly’s vocabulary includes concepts such as “phallocracy” and male-centered systems as destructive forces against women.

 

Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy — Mary Daly (1984). Continues Daly’s framework, contrasting female liberation with what she calls “Cockocracy,” the “Phallic State,” and a male “sadosociety.” That terminology comes even from the bibliographic description of the book.

 

Beyond God the Father — Mary Daly (1973). Presents male-centered religion and the male conception of God as expressions of patriarchal domination. This one is considerably less explicitly anti-male than Pure Lust or Gyn/Ecology, so I would place it lower on the severity scale.

Mary Daly may deserve a section of her own in a serious treatment of this subject. Her work doesn’t merely criticize particular male institutions; she develops an entire vocabulary in which male civilization is repeatedly associated with domination, pathology, and violence.

Category 3 — Men Collectively Portrayed as an Oppressor or Threat Class

 

Here I would stop using the uncomplicated label “hate literature.” These books are important because of their collective attribution of guilt, danger, or domination to males, rather than because they literally tell readers to hate men.

 

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape — Susan Brownmiller (1975). Famously characterized rape as a process through which “all men keep all women” in fear. Whatever one’s view of the rest of this enormously influential book, that is an extraordinarily sweeping attribution to an entire sex.

 

Sexual Politics — Kate Millett (1970). One of second-wave feminism’s foundational texts. It interprets sex relations through a political structure in which men constitute the dominant class and women the subordinated class.

 

Pornography: Men Possessing Women — Andrea Dworkin (1981). Dworkin treats pornography as an expression of a much wider system of male domination, linking male sexual power with ownership, terror, and the subordination of women.

 

Intercourse — Andrea Dworkin (1987). Presents heterosexual intercourse within a structure of profound sexual inequality and domination. Importantly, though, the common assertion that Dworkin literally wrote “all sex is rape” is false; Dworkin herself explicitly denied saying that.

 

Woman Hating — Andrea Dworkin (1974). Describes male dominance as the fundamental political and cultural reality that must be abolished. Her introduction explicitly calls ending male dominance a revolutionary commitment.

 

The War Against Women — Marilyn French (1992). Perhaps one of the strongest examples in this category. The publisher describes French’s thesis as a male-dominated global society with an underlying aim of “destroying, subjugating, or mutilating women.”

 

The Dialectic of Sex — Shulamith Firestone (1970). Treats the biological sex distinction and reproductive family as the foundation of a sex-class system. Firestone proposes eliminating sex-class distinctions through radical changes including artificial reproduction. That is revolutionary gender theory, though not an argument for killing men, an important distinction.

 

The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism — Robin Morgan (1989). Links militarism, terrorism, patriarchy, and masculine systems of domination. I would include it as an example of the broader tendency to interpret large forms of human violence through masculinity.

Category 4 — Men as Privileged, Entitled, Dangerous, Defective, or Socially Problematic

 

These are substantially weaker candidates for the word misandrist, but they illustrate how negative generalizations about men became normalized in more mainstream literature.

 

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women — Kate Manne (2020). Makes “male entitlement” a broad explanatory framework for phenomena ranging from interpersonal behavior to mass shootings and politics. Manne describes it as a pervasive social problem rather than merely the behavior of a few men.

 

Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and Toxic Masculinity — Clementine Ford (2018). Begins with boys themselves and treats their socialization through the framework of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The publisher frames its central question as how to raise a son “to respect women.”

 

Men Explain Things to Me — Rebecca Solnit (2014). Helped inspire the concept of “mansplaining” and uses interactions with men to examine assumptions of male authority and women’s silencing. I would not call this a book advocating hatred of men, however; even Solnit has distanced herself from the term mansplaining.

 

Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide — Maureen Dowd (2005). The title plays deliberately with male dispensability, but the actual work is humorous social commentary about gender relations rather than a serious argument that men should disappear.

 

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women — Hanna Rosin (2012). Uses male decline and female advancement as its organizing conceit. But this really should not be represented as a hatred-of-men book; the book is socioeconomic reportage, and Rosin’s argument was about the decline of traditional male economic dominance.

Conclusion

What Would We Call These Books If the Sexes Were Reversed?

Looking at these books together leaves me with a very simple question: What would we call them if the sexes were reversed?

Imagine books titled I Hate Women, The Natural Superiority of Men, Are Women Necessary?, or The End of Women. Imagine a male writer proposing that women should make up only 10 percent of the population. Imagine another imagining women being killed until they agreed to negotiate. Imagine an entire body of literature describing women collectively as dangerous, defective, oppressive, entitled, or responsible for the world’s violence.

Would we have trouble finding a word for it?

I don’t think we would.

Now, these books are not all the same. That is important. SCUM Manifesto is vastly more extreme than Men Explain Things to Me. Some openly express hostility toward men. Others portray men collectively as an oppressor class. Still others simply use male privilege, entitlement, toxicity, or dominance as the lens through which they interpret relations between the sexes.

But when you stand back and look at them together, a pattern emerges.

Men can be described in ways that would immediately set off alarm bells if directed toward almost any other group. Male biology can be disparaged. Male sexuality can be treated as threatening. Men can be described collectively as oppressors. Hatred of men can even be defended as healthy or liberating. And proposals that would sound horrifying with the sexes reversed can sometimes be treated as provocative feminist thought.

Perhaps the most interesting question isn’t whether every book on this list deserves the label misandrist. Clearly they don’t.

The more interesting question is this: Why are we so reluctant to use that word at all?

We have become extremely sensitive to language that demeans women. I think that is a good thing. Hatred and dehumanization shouldn’t be encouraged.

But shouldn’t men receive the same consideration?

The book covers shown here are real. The words are real. The authors are real. And many of these works came not from obscure corners of the internet but from established writers, publishers, academics, and political movements.

Maybe the lesson isn’t that we should become less concerned about misogyny.

Maybe the lesson is that we should become equally concerned about misandry.

What If Schools Are Missing the Brightest Boys?

We are starting to hear more these days about boys who struggle in school, boys who can’t sit still, or fall behind in reading. This is bringing to light that all too often schools are not built for boys.

But recently I started thinking about the other end of the spectrum. What if schools aren’t just failing some of the boys who struggle? What if they’re also missing some of the brightest boys?

The Variability Hypothesis

Researchers have pointed out for years what they call the greater male variability hypothesis. What this means is that on average, men and women score about the same on measures of intelligence. But males tend to show greater variability and outnumber women at both the low and high ends. This means you will find more boys with significantly low IQ’s but also more boys with very high IQ’s. This tells us that based on this variability hypothesis, boys are likely to outnumber the girls in the upper regions of IQ.

A School Built for the Average Child

That realization led me to another thought. If boys are naturally more variable, then a school system designed for the average child will fail boys at both ends of the spectrum. Think about it. The struggling boy needs something different from the average classroom. So does the exceptionally gifted boy. Yet schools often become increasingly standardized and focused on bringing everyone toward the middle. The children who are furthest from average—whether below or above—are often the ones who receive less. The boys predominate at both ends.

Why Might Boys Gifts be Overlooked?

People who are gifted often do things that may encourage ordinary teachers to overlook them. Things like:

• become bored with repetitive work

• finish assignments quickly and then appear inattentive

• question teachers

• refuse busywork

• focus intensely on a narrow interest while neglecting other subjects

Some of these behaviors may not look like giftedness. They may look like inattentiveness, defiance, laziness, or simply a ​s​tudent who isn’t doing what he is supposed to do.

That got me wondering. If some gifted boys are being overlooked because they don’t necessarily look like the ideal gifted student, would we see any sign of that in who actually makes it into gifted programs?

But What about the numbers?

The next thing I did was check current enrollment in gifted programs. To my surprise, recent national data from the NCES show that girls now slightly outnumber boys in gifted and talented programs in the US. That was a bit of a surprise. Not because girls aren’t gifted. I am sure some are. But if there are more boys with high IQ’s, shouldn’t we expect more boys than girls among the exceptionally gifted? Equal numbers would already raise an interesting question. A female majority raises an even bigger one.

What are the actual differences?

One source I read said that an IQ of 130+ was the point that many gifted programs consider starting. But what is the sex ratio of boys and girls at the 130+ level? Since we find that more girls are in the gifted programs than boys we would expect more girls, right?

Here’s what I found:

One estimate is that boys outnumber girls at the 130+ IQ level at a ratio of 15:10. This means that for every 100 students who have a 130 IQ or higher you will likely have about 60 boys and 40 girls. As you go higher in IQ it leans farther towards boys. When you reach the 170+ range there are nearly 6 times as many males as females. Here’s a chart that shows these estimates: (the estimates are from AI and I chose a very conservative estimate from chatgpt to include here. I will include Grok and Google below)

 

You can see that boys predominate at the highest genius levels of IQ. Boys and girls are actually quite similar in the normal ranges of IQ, but the boys predominate at both the highest levels and the lowest while the girls cluster more in the middle. But how many boys and girls are likely to have scores above 130?

If we assume the mean to be 100 and a standard deviation of 15 we would expect that about 2.3% of people will have an IQ of 130 or above. Given that estimate at a typical high school that had 1100 students you would likely find about 25 students with 130+ IQ’s. Given our previous estimate of 15:10 we would expect that group to be 15 boys and 10 girls. Clearly more boys than girls.

It is certainly true that there are more factors in choosing students to participate in gifted programs other than iQ, but IQ is a very solid factor and that factor tells us more boys should be included. It does make us wonder about girls outnumbering boys in today’s gifted programs.

Why fewer boys?

Many gifted programs now consider: classroom grades, teacher recommendations, organization, homework completion, classroom participation, work habits, portfolios, and other indicators of academic success. Those are worthwhile qualities but it seems to me that they are indicators of how adjusted someone is to the school and the schoolwork. This is not necessarily the same thing as exceptional cognitive ability. A brilliant boy who is disorganized, restless, bored, inconsistent, or socially awkward may not look gifted inside a modern classroom. Imagine a teacher seeing these sorts of traits, would the teacher see him as gifted? He may simply look difficult. Or distracted. Or immature. His intelligence can easily become hidden behind his behavior. He will likely appear as a problem, not as a candidate for special treatment.

The Question Worth Asking

I do think there is an important question here. Are gifted and talented programs simply not recognizing gifted boys? Are there gifted boys who never get the opportunity offered by these programs? My experience says yes. I remember watching my own children and their friends when in high school. There were numerous special programs for girls including, camps, trips to the NIH, girl only events, and much more, but nothing even close to that for the boys. I watched and saw highly gifted boys who were overlooked for any such treatment. It seems in our attempts to give girls special treatment the boys have suffered.

Perhaps We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Direction

For years we’ve focused on boys who struggle. We should continue to do that. But perhaps we’ve overlooked another group of boys who also need our attention. The exceptionally gifted. The unconventional thinkers. The boys whose intelligence doesn’t always arrive wrapped in neat handwriting, completed homework, and model classroom behavior. If greater male variability is real—and decades of research say it is—then boys don’t simply present more problems. They also present more extraordinary potential. The challenge for education is not to make every child average. It is to recognize exceptional need wherever it appears. And that includes the children at the very top.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether boys are underrepresented in gifted programs. Perhaps the better question is this: Are today’s schools identifying giftedness—or simply identifying the students who fit school best?

Men are good.

1. Grok

Safe, conservative approximate male:female ratios (drawing primarily from greater male variance with equal or near-equal means, plus notes on the effect of a small mean difference) are in these ranges:

• Above 140: roughly 1.5–2.3 : 1 (central/safe figure often cited around 2 : 1)

• Above 150: roughly 1.7–3.1 : 1 (central around 2.5–3 : 1)

• Above 160: roughly 2.2–4.5 : 1 (central around 3–4 : 1)

• Above 170: roughly 3–7+ : 1 (central around 4–6 : 1, with high uncertainty)
  
  

  1. Google

     1. IQ 130: Approximately 1.5 : 1 to 2 : 1

     1. IQ 140: Approximately 3 : 1 to 4 : 1

     1. IQ 150: Approximately 5 : 1 to 8 : 1

     1. IQ 160: Approximately 10 : 1 to 15 : 1

     1. IQ 170: Approximately 20 : 1 to 30 : 1 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]