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Useful Men

4 Apr 2026

It’s true that the ‘pathways’ to manhood are closing. I don’t think it’s a crisis of masculinity though. It’s a crisis of no more excuses for incompetent. We’re trying to find the meaning of manhood when what we actually need are new skills. Men just need to be useful.

I actually wanted to name this article ‘the last hiding place of incompetent men’, but my website doesn’t like long titles.

I’ve said it before, but gender essentialism is clearly getting trendy again.

When I wrote that article, just a year or so ago, it seemed like the most obvious incarnation of this was the kind of ‘edgy’, ‘heterodox’ stuff coming out of influencers like Jordan Peterson or Camille Paglia. Men and women leaning hard on evolutionary or historic narratives in the face of woke progressivism. The old, ill-fated, “getting back to nature” play. Nature versus nurture, and nurture, for them, is losing.

Increasingly, though, we’re seeing this evolve into something more mainstream. The masculine take is still the most obvious. Louis Theroux just dropped his latest documentary on the “manosphere”, and “looksmaxxing“ is widespread enough to garner it’s own episode of The NYT ‘Daily’ podcast. Men, trying very hard to be some kind of ‘ultimate man’.

But it’s rising on the feminine side too. Being a trad-wife is unequivocally a lifestyle brand now. Mormon Wives is into its fourth delightful season, and Instagram is crowded with this kind of content. I can find heaps of clips on Tik Tok of women trying to get into some kind of more domestic and feminine mode. Being a trad-wife is cool.

The downside, of course, is that old gender arguments are also becoming trendy again. The thing that initially prompted this article, old though it is now, was the Vogue article about how boyfriends are embarrassing,¹ and the ‘decentring men’ content that led to it. Or, on the other side, that Diary of a CEO fella keeps worrying about how women aren’t doing enough settling down and having babies.

What’s interesting here is that, once, these arguments seemed pretty contiguous with the culture war. Men would have been complaining that women weren’t being woman enough, and women would have been complaining about glass ceilings and the like. Two groups of people with goals that were completely at odds with each other.

That’s still true, of course. But these newer trends don’t really seem like they should be in opposition in the same way. Many women seem to want to spend more time being women, in some kind of traditional sense. And… men want that too? It seems like we should be sorted. So why is everyone still mad? If women are starting to get enthusiastic about trad-wifing, then why are boyfriends embarrassing and birth-rates declining?²

You might say that the underlying inequality is the cause. Something something patriarchy. And that obviously wouldn’t be wrong. But I also think there’s a more interesting answer here to be found if you look past the bigger cultural moments, and into the longer grass.

And I think it’s an important answer, because fighting gender essentialism clearly isn’t working very well. I don’t think there are many serious people denying the social fact that men and women are different anymore.³ The reasons maybe, but not the result. But our impulse is often to avoid the topic, assuming we’re not courting controversy for clout. Certainly mine is—the spectre of my single mother of two boys hovers ever over my shoulder encouraging me to be an ally.

But I think this answer actually relies on us leaning in to gender essentialism, not avoiding it. And when you start to do that, you start to see something coming through very clearly.

¶Let’s court controversy

Since I’m obviously now courting controversy for clout, I want to do this carefully, even though I think the idea here is actually very straightforward.

So first, I want to detour a bit into Rob Henderson’s idea of luxury beliefs. It’s, at least in part, derived from the idea that elites often fake progressive relationship values. For Rob, they have the luxury of promoting alternative sexual lifestyles like polygamy, despite the social and economic costs, and irrespective of whether they actually practice these kinds of things.

Now, Rob’s very concerned about traditional family values, for understandable reasons.⁴ So for him, the main issue is how this particular brand of progressive values harms low-socio-economic communities, which get huge benefits from more stable family environments than these alternative arrangements seem to imply.

What’s interesting, though, is that this trad-wife trend seems, prima facie, to cut against his narrative. Maybe some elites are getting really into orgies and polycules, but others seem to be signalling that the very family values Rob likes are cool again.

If we zoom out a bit, we actually see that both trends are flavours of the same thing. If we modify Rob’s concept of luxury beliefs to be less about harming the disenfranchised and more about the luxury,⁵ then we can see that in actual fact both trends represent something about being able to afford the costs these lifestyles demand.⁶

Managing costs of multiple partners and play parties and whatever else is hard. You’re breaking new social ground with all the social obstacles that brings, everything costs more money, and the emotional labour implied is something that dominates every Reddit thread about polyamoury. I think one of the reasons Rob’s idea took off so fast is because these kinds of costs are pretty intuitive.

Less intuitively perhaps, doing things traditionally is hard too! It’s not exactly straightforward to take up the role of domestic goddess while fighting the rising tide that is ‘decentring men’, in the wake of two or three generations of people advocating for the kinds of rights that would let women do everything other than exactly this. It’s also not precisely cheap to run a house on a single income in a world where people are complaining about the ’singles tax’⁷. And the Reddit threads for stay at home moms are just as full of complaints about emotional labour—of purposelessness, of loneliness, of caring for a house and a husband and children as a full time job.

There’s a cross-cutting thread here that’s straightforwardly about wealth. Just being rich is enough to make you an influencer now, and conspicuous consumption is a form of content all on its own.

But if we return to the manosphere, we get to the thread I actually want to talk about. Rob has addressed some of this himself. In a recent podcast with Louise Perry, he talks about his luxury beliefs again—how the manosphere is a parasitic symptom of traditional family breakdown. Fatherlessness harming lower-class boys disproportionately, and causing them to look for role-model figures. The manosphere monitises this with a form of dominance ideology.

But then, again, I think he doesn’t spend enough time on the broader point. The luxury of it. Because the kinds of men the manosphere promote are achieving ‘manhood’ by avoiding the work that makes it real. Rob actually says something close to this himself—where progressives assume men seek power, and conservatives assume they want responsibility, “most young men today want neither. Many are simply checked out.”

See, the manosphere sells manhood that most people can’t afford. But the cost isn’t exactly intuitive. As Rob himself puts it, “first you convince young men that they are nothing. Then you charge them to become something.” And by selling it thus, the manosphere actually makes manhood look cheap. It strips out the hard parts and sells what’s left—status, dominance, frame control, hotties. What you end up with is a form of manhood that doesn’t cost you anything personally, which means it isn’t really manhood at all.

¶On being a (useful) man

Now, I’m no sociologist, but I do like to have a go at it from time to time. And here we rather have to because there is a standard narrative about what’s wrong with men, and I don’t think it’s quite right.

The standard narrative goes something like this:

1. the world is becoming increasingly feminised;
2. masculine traits are thus increasingly devalued, becoming seen as ’toxic’ instead;
3. men are losing out;
4. crisis.

But if we look a little harder, we see a slightly different progression.

The first step seems to have been a kind of economic shift. We went from production economies to service economies—knowledge work over labour, what Arlie Hochschild called The Managed Heart. Now physical skills aren’t as important as social skills, and men can’t ‘provide’ through physical labour alone.

Relatedly, and speaking of ‘singles taxes’, it’s not really economically viable to manage a family on a single income anymore—what Warren and Tyagi call the two-income trap.

Both mean that men can’t be men by ‘providing’ anymore.

Then we have this asymmetric adaptation to the new world order. Women entered the workforce and started learning traditionally ‘masculine’ skills. Part of the same push for equality that makes trad-wifing socially subversive—a luxury belief. So women were already good at social skills and now they’re getting better at other skills too.

Men never had the same push to reciprocate though. Women experience lifelong training to be the social mayonnaise and feel the societal pressure to adapt to the world of men. But not only do men get very different social training, men never had the same impetus to adapt to the feminine.

So men can’t be men by ‘providing’ anymore, and the world isn’t structured in a way that lets them easily adopt a more ‘traditional’ form of masculinity anymore.⁸

Alongside this, we have a kind of collapse of initiation structures. Apprenticeships, military drafts, unions, fraternal orders, and so on—what Robert Putnam diagnosed in Bowling Alone and Michael Kimmel tracked through Guyland. Men aren’t being carted off and ‘made’ into men in the same way that they once were. As I say elsewhere:

like Sebastian Junger noticed in his book Tribe, it’s one of the reasons young men join the military—a lot of the kids in my platoon were trying to find manhood in one of its last traditional bastions.

So, men can’t ‘provide’, can’t fall on stereotypes, and find it hard to learn the trade of manhood. What you end up with is a pool of men with no easy pathways to become men. A fan in Theroux’s documentary puts it plainly: “life as a man, you’re born without value. We have to build it.” And this is a legitimate problem. People are talking about this. Boys lack the skills. Men are fleeing feminised institutions. The median man is falling behind.

But what is less talked about is how this same sequence of events also eliminated a series of excuses. Every pathway to manhood that closed also closed off a way of hiding incompetence. Men who relied on bringing cash into the home to obscure the fact they aren’t useful for other familial things, couldn’t rely on that any more. Men who relied on the usefulness of just being a man in a world where women weren’t allowed to do masculine things found that same usefulness evaporating as fast as women entered their spheres of influence.

And I think the narrative of ‘there aren’t any pathways’ or ‘there aren’t any initiations’ is so popular because, in part, of exactly this. Some men struggle to become men because they were never taught. The men that Rob is concerned about, perhaps. And this narrative seems like it explains to young men why they have this problem, without really helping them fix it. Worse still, it acts as an excuse for men who just aren’t doing anything about it. Either way, genuine or malicious, it’s the last hiding place of incompetent men.⁹

And all this only becomes a ‘crisis’ with the advent of social media, because social media makes this fact evident. TikTok is flooded with women documenting masculine incompetence in real time—Hochschild’s second shift, but on camera. The mental load women face in a household where men are struggling to keep up. The ways men bring false confidence into domestic domains in which women are still the defacto masters, and are yet troubled and confused when their haphazard attempts go down poorly. You just think of ‘the ick’, or check the #WeaponisedIncompetence hashtag on TikTok,¹⁰ or any TV show that has a man-child as the comic relief, or Love is Blind where the repeating trope is just how little the men on show have to offer. Social media, and now media itself, makes this incompetence eminantly visible.

Then there’s the vocabulary social media propagates. With the Millenial attraction to therapeutic culture—where phenomena like ‘demand/withdraw’ dynamics¹¹ and ‘gender performativity’ were once stuck in the counsellors office or academic papers—now, they get sharpened by the attention economy to their keenest edge. Men who haven’t worked out how to be useful in this new state of affairs are adding to women’s ‘emotional labour’ and men who are actively trying to disguise this fact are ’weaponising incompetence’. Everyone has lots of words now to describe their “embarrassing men“.¹²

Worse still for our incompetent men, the financial independence of women is on full display. The economic dependency that kept the arrangement stable is eroding in front of everyone’s eyes. Just watch the melting down of the husbands on Mormon Wives, as they struggle with their wives’ rising stars. There are no vague shadows left to hide in—men can’t be men by being men anymore—they actually have to be useful.

So, to the extent it’s truly a crisis at all, I reckon it’s more one of visibility, because my suspicion is that the men who are competent are just quietly getting after it like women have had to do.

Let me see if I can convince you with some more substantive examples.

¶Incompetent men and their hiding places

I want to start with a pre-social media example, because I want you to see what this looks like when there aren’t any cameras around. One of my most popular articles (and, now, lectures) is basically just me shitting on that famous 90’s relationship book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.

¶When hiding was easier

John Gray, the dubiously credentialled author, sets up a pretty intuitive premise—men and women speak different languages. Women nag and men withdraw.¹¹ That’s why they come into conflict so often.

Then he goes directly off the rails. My favourite example is when Gray tells us Toms story:

Tom was driving. After about twenty minutes and going around the same block a few times, it was clear to Mary that Tom was lost. She finally suggested that he call for help. Tom became very silent. They eventually arrived at the party, but the tension from that moment persisted the whole evening Mary had no idea of why he was so upset … From her side she was saying “I love and care about you, so I am offering you this help … From his side, he was offended. What he heard was “I don’t trust you to get us there. You are incompetent!”

As I point out:

Tom, mate, you are incompetent. Mary obviously likes you enough to tolerate your nonsense, but she doesn’t want to fuck about in the car with you all night while you pretend to know what you’re doing. Mary wants to go to the party, Tom.

Then there’s the list of “unsolicited criticism” that Gray thinks women should stop giving men. Truly unreasonable things like: clean the dishes properly, don’t lose things, spend time with your kids. Gray frames these as examples of women failing to respect masculine autonomy. They are, of course, just requests for basic interpersonal competence. Matthew Fray lost his marriage over exactly this—a glass left by the sink, night after night, until it wasn’t about the glass anymore. Gray would have told his wife to stop nagging.

And then, in chapter 8, Gray’s thesis in a paragraph:

“The secret of empowering a man is never try to change him or improve him.” Any attempt to change him is “unsupportive and counterproductive.” “Give up trying to improve him in any way.” “Practise doing things for yourself and not depending on him to make you happy.” “Surrender.”

Surrendering, remember, to Tom in his car, who’s never going to make it to the party, and can’t wash dishes properly. What Gray is selling, dressed up as communication advice, is a case for the worst men to improve a bit, with the implication that women should expect far less from the rest of them.

And any brief write up runs the risk of being uncharitable, but the book honestly deserves no charity. It’s just this message, over and over again. It becomes extremely clear, very quickly, that Gray’s men aren’t stoic providers struggling with articulating their feelings. They’re emotionally fragile, rejection-sensitive, and avoidant. Textbook cases of insecure attachment responding absurdly to the completely ordinary needs of their romantic partners. Hardly the essence of masculinity.

¶Hiding in the visibility crisis

What’s nice about Gray is it so clearly demonstrates how we try to hide. Dubious as I am about Gray’s intentions, even if we read him as genuine, it illustrates exactly how our masculine incompetence can be disguised or misdiagnosed to look like gender differences—hidden. And it shows just how quickly that collapses under the scrutiny of social media, in a world where men don’t get their value from, as Gray puts it “a long hard day at work”. There’s a reason his popularity peaked in the 90’s and declined in the internet era. He’s cannon fodder for #WeaponisedIncompetence.

But we’re still trying to make the same kind of moves. The shadows are laid bare, but we’re still stuck in this strange kind of rut where we desperately try to repackage the incompetence as something else. The example that springs to mind is Scott Galloway’s recent foray into the manosphere. A thoughtful economist, Galloway seems to have started championing the same cause as Rob Henderson—to make some noise about the declining outcomes of young men. Unlike the most headline-grabbing face of the manosphere, or the either grifty or terribly un-selfaware Gray, Galloway is much more careful to not alienate women.

But it’s the same bloody legerdemain. Galloway’s point is that men have lost their “role” as protectors, providers, and procreators, and what we need is a new sense of masculine purpose. Purpose. They need to learn how to be a man. Galloway thinks this is less a competence problem than an identity problem. The young men who can’t hold down a job, manage a household, or sustain a relationship aren’t failing at adult competencies that women have been quietly mastering for decades—they’re “searching for their role”.

What’s irritating about this is that I actually think Galloway does get it. He also make a big deal about men “creating surplus value”. He’s telling men to be useful. And so it _is a demand for competence. But then he wraps it in a framework that treats incompetence as a problem of meaning rather than skill. Meaning isn’t going to help fucking Tom wash the dishes![^13]

¶Outro

As I’ve been googling around for this article, a most interesting thing occurred. It seems like Louis Theroux’s doco was actually a bit late to the party. Even Nature is asking whether the boy crisis is real—which means it’s gone mainstream enough to be interrogated rather than championed. The manosphere’s own commentators are talking about it hitting some kind of midlife crisis. Louis’ targets are troublingly popular figures certainly, but the edges of hyper-masculinity are already bleeding into a mainstream death.¹³

Not only that, but tradwifing has also come acropper. Ballerina Farm and Patriarchy Hannah are two good examples—trad-wives that ended up being more Sara Lee than actual woman in the kitchen. Others, like Estee Williams and Nara Smith have started pivoting away explicitly from the label. And, as I mentioned, Mormon Wives fourth season was more about how much trouble the husbands are having now their wives are all millionaires, than the wives themselves.

I’d be willing to bet this is, in some non-trivial way, because of incompetent men. Tradwifing doesn’t work because the men on the other side can’t hold up their end—what end is there to hold up?¹⁴ The manosphere is useless because performing dominance produces precisely zero results when what you need are skills. It seems plausible to me that even the surge in polyamoury and the like is related to not having needs properly met and sustained by masculine partners.

So, I reckon this is why everyone is mad. It has nothing to do with women. Everyone just wants competent men. Women want them so they don’t feel like they’re doing everything. Rob’s and Scott’s young men and boys want them so they know what skills to develop, and how. And I want them, so I don’t have to read another article about how ‘no one is talking about men’ followed by a thousand words of talking about men.

I said at the start, that although I wanted to be careful, the idea was actually pretty straightforward. I can’t think of a single reason to go around wasting time trying to figure out how to ‘be a man’. Women adapted so hard they ended up back at ultra-femininity, and they’re just there… waiting for us to catch up.

You don’t need some kind of pathway. You just need to stop hiding. The golden age is over, buddy. Just be fucking useful.¹⁵

Elena Zevgolatakou gets a very special thanks for prompting this article, and walking through the weeds of it over beers many times.

Anthologies: Betterment, Connection, Collective Architecture, Somatic Architecture, Karstica, Everything Is Ideology, On Culture, On Politics and Power, On Love

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