We see this also, perhaps most frighteningly, in toxic-masculinity-laden rabbit holes online, where young men can find easy answers and welcoming brotherhood communities with those who have similar grievances.

“Through most of the 20th century, men were always the default character. The protagonists,” Morrison tells me. Now that is changing — and they’re mad. Really mad. It’s this “politics of grievance,” Morrison says,

This is the pot calling the kettle black. Equality alone isn’t the source of white male anger, it’s a broad sense of not knowing where they fit anymore and easy (and wrong) answers online.

This is an insightful read on the topic, starting from male college enrollment and working downwards:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-college-decline-gender-gap-higher-education/620066/

We should be embracing egalitarian views and discussing the issues affecting men and women, and we should be having more conversations about what’s hurting men without dumbing it down to “they’re white and angry”, because that’s only stoking anger and driving people away.

I think if you dig into it you’d find a lot of men are hurting in our economy, feel trapped by our reliance on degrees for training, and don’t feel included in communities anymore. Men have traditionally needed to be breadwinners and that view hasn’t changed much (see the divorce rate of unemployed men, or statistics that women don’t tend to date lower earners than themselves (I think OKCupid wrote about it)), and frankly the collapse of manufacturing amid globalization has killed an area that typically men excell at and gave the majority a path towards a comfortable life.

Then there is a large group capitalizing on this and pushing the easy narrative of anger, and another large group overlooking all these men who are hurting and blaming them. It’s not so simple, and we all need to work on solving it.