The Neutering of the American Male

Tucker Carlson is my new favorite person. And I liked him plenty before! Here he is being his reasonable self in an interview with me in 2013 about an article I wrote that caused controversy, all because I said women who want children need husbands upon which they can depend if they want to find balance in their lives.

“I’m confused as to why this is controversial,” said Carlson, truly perplexed. “If I got up and said, and it would be true if I did, that I rely completely on my wife, I would never be happy or balanced or grounded or successful if I weren’t married to my wife, and people think that’s great. But if a woman gets up and says that about her husband somehow she’s weak? I don’t understand.”

This same genuine desire to understand, to get to the bottom of a topic without ideology getting in the way, is what makes Tucker Carlson the perfect person to address the single most significant crisis in America today: the neutering of the American male.

“American men are failing in body, mind and spirit,” Carlson pronounced to millions of Americans on Wednesday, in the first installment of a month-long series called Men in America about what’s happening to men—and thus to marriage, to children and families, to the economy, and to society as a whole.

“This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women far outpace men in higher education, virtually every college campus supports a women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. ‘Men are privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.’ That would be fine if it were true. But it’s not true. At best, it’s an outdated view of an America that no longer exists. At worst, it’s a pernicious lie.”

A pernicious lie, indeed. An “insidious” one, actually, as Jordan Peterson pointed out in the first installment of Carlson’s series. “It’s very insidious, the ideological movement that’s driving this…It’s hard to fight an ideological battle.”

The ideological movement to which Peterson refers is, of course, the feminist movement. And he’s right: what this radical group does is insidious. The feminist elite is comprised of professors, lawyers, journalists, writers, politicians, actors and actresses, bureaucrats, psychologists and activists. What these women have in common is clout, and their entire worldview is fueled by dogma that’s rooted in a singular belief—that American women live in a patriarchy designed to hold women down, and that the only way to end this injustice is to overthrow male power, or upend the male dominance hierarchy, and create a brave new world with women at the helm.

What they want, in other words, is to neuter the American male. And based on the new cover of the Hollywood Reporter, I’d say they’ve succeeded.