An open letter to the 31% of Gen Z men who believe that a woman’s role is to obey her husband

You've been sold a bill of goods, and been taught to blame the messenger

My guys,

It is both ironic and predictable that it’s International Women’s Day, and here I am talking both to and about us. But holy hell, we need to discuss this study. Apparently, nearly a third of you, across dozens of countries, believe that “a wife should always obey her husband.”¹ What’s more, over half of you feel that society has gone “too far” in promoting women’s equality. Of all the generations surveyed, your views were the most reactionary. It wasn’t even close. Compared to your elders, you are more likely to believe that men should be “physically tough,” that caregiving is emasculating, and that women shouldn’t be too independent or self-sufficient (though you do want them to have careers). It turns out that women can have it all, as long as you Gen Z fellas get to define exactly what “it all” entails.

But my apologies. I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t know me, and if I’m being honest, I’m not the kind of guy who usually commands your attention. I’m about as soft as they come: a cringey millennial dad who has never thrown a punch, doesn’t know how to track a macro, and patently refuses to “maxx” much of anything. Are we really talking like that, by the way? Like, with two xx’s? In earnest? I shouldn’t get distracted, because that’s the least of our problems here, but man, whatever.

I say all this just to acknowledge that I am– in the eyes of any alpha bro who has ever streamed or podcasted his way to fame and fortune– a grade A beta cuck loser. Call me whatever you want, by the way. I’ve heard it. I mean, you’ve probably been called all that yourself, likely from the same guys now trying to sell you lines, both about about how you’re supposed to treat women (like a lazy king, too busy protecting and providing to bother with paternity leave), and how they’re supposed to treat you in return (like obsequious handmaids, but who are also, like, super hot for you).

You may think those guys are cooler than me (and what a choice of guys: Are you a Rogan man? An Andrew Tate worshipping sex pest? A Galloway disciple? Or, more likely, do you take your advice from some 18 year old on Twitch with a name like AlphaPenis67 who somehow has a billion followers?). I’m sure those dudes talk more confidently than I do. I bet they could cook me in Call of Duty or bow hunting whatever it is real men are into these days. Bench pressing? I wouldn’t even know where to start.

But here’s what I have going for me, compared to every single one of those guys. I don’t actually hate you. And relatedly, I don’t want you to live sad, lonely lives. Those dudes? Oh man. They can’t stand you. Their only hope is that you wind up as small and petty as theirs, so as to somehow justify the craven path they’ve walked in exchange for likes and views. Is masculinity a pyramid scheme? All I’ll say is that I’ve never met a guy who has ever gotten to the top.

Make no mistake about it, to whatever extent there is truly a male loneliness crisis, its red hot epicenter is in those guys’ hearts and souls. They may be rich, but that doesn’t mean that they love and are loved. They may have J.D. Vance on speed dial, but doesn’t mean any of their buddies would show up at their house with a lasagna if they went in for surgery. They may brag about their romantic and sexual conquests, but that doesn’t mean that the women in their life actually feel safe around them.

Again, today is International Women’s Day. That holiday wasn’t invented as a grand feminist plot to leave you friendless and sexless. It was founded by socialists and labor activists who were into the idea of workers of all genders not dying preventable deaths. From its earliest days, it’s been a celebration of a whole slew of overlapping struggles to improve our lives. Justice for women. Justice for queer people. Justice for colonized people. Justice for workers getting screwed by bosses.

If you spent some time with feminist activists, by the way, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Contrary to decades of jokes about miserable, scold-y ladies who blame men for everything, here’s the secret about contemporary feminism: It wants a less rigged world for all of us. Yes, that means critiquing patriarchy and the ways it screws all of us over, but not in a vacuum. Last I checked, “intersectionality” remains a verboten concept in Trump’s America, but at its core it means being holistically honest about the world around us.

Do you believe that powerful elites have built a system that keeps us all down? Cool. Feminists are right by your side on that one. The primary thing we’d add (yes, I’m a feminist by the way, and no I don’t hate myself) is that the system is so thoroughly rigged that it has messed up our hearts and minds. It’s told us a lifetime of lies, many of them about how us guys should be allowed to be absolute jagoffs. Interpersonally. Systemically. Politically. We’ve been given a permission to make so many messes.

I don’t think you’re a jagoff, by the way. Not any more than the rest of us, at least. You’re a human being, like me, and you’ve probably made your share of mistakes, but there’s also a whole lot of things that make you beautiful. But if, as the manosphere influencers like to say, “iron sharpens iron,” then I have to be honest with you. Are you really walking around, in 2026, responding to a survey about gender roles with absolute neanderthal nonsense about how women were put not his earth to obey you?

Please, my guys, play this out for me. Explain how you will somehow be delivered from an epidemic of alienation if this is the full extent of your life’s purpose:

(1). get a job

(2). find a wife

(3) impregnate her.

(4). bark out orders at will

(5). expect her to tend over your household, your children, and her womb with gratitude and deference.

Actually, I bet I know the answer. “Because some guy online told me that both women and men were happier before feminism, and there’s this other sick looking dude on Tiktok whose wife wears gingham dresses and bakes sourdough bread and they seem like they’ve got it all figured out.”

I’ve probably seen that video too. I have my suspicions as to whether those couples are happy, but I do know that they have paid staff just out of frame. I also know that every true huckster knows that you don’t get rich hawking products. Nah, man, you gotta sell the fantasy.

Now, I bet you consider yourself a critical thinker who doesn’t like being taken for a sucker, so you should probably know that the whole “feminism makes women unhappy”claim is actually a lie that gets rolled out every time there’s even the smallest attempts to try to correct for gaping gender inequity. There’s never been any real evidence,² but it makes for easy backlash fodder (which is to say, it makes us, as guys into useful idiots for a system that feeds on our misapplied resentment). Have you ever read Susan Faludi? Add her to your list after you check out some bell hooks, Barbara Ehrenreich and the Combahee River Collective. Talk about a group that respected us, as men, enough to never lie to our faces.

It’s a hoax, of course, that all our wounds would be healed if there were two genders, men and women, and the women were quiet and agreeable and we, the men, got to have big boy jobs and carte blanche to ignore the world outside of our acquiescent familial fiefdoms. If it weren’t a hoax, we wouldn’t get so huffy every time anybody tried to puncture it.

That big, dumb, infantilizing lie is sold to you as some biological truism, but its real appeal is the permission structure it gives us guys to act like a bunch of petulant babies. Engage with new perspectives about the world? That seems hard. Listen to feelings and perspectives different from our own? No thank you. Show up for others, even if there is no immediate economic, reputational or sexual benefit in doing so? Sorry. we’d prefer to put down another $100 on a March Madness parlay.

You’d be forgiven, at this point, for crying foul on me. Didn’t I just say that I wasn’t going to blame you for everything? Didn’t I claim to be on your side? But that’s the core problem, actually, the fact that any of this feels like an attack rather than an invitation. If I were your football coach, and I informed you that you were literally sprinting the wrong way down the field, you wouldn’t accuse me of being unfair to running backs or causing a tight end loneliness crisis. You’d accept the feedback.

Again, I don’t know which podcaster or streamer you’ve surrendered your better judgement, but I can assure you that they don’t have an endgame here. They tell you that you’re lonely, that the world has turned its back on you and that feminism is the reason you can’t get dates. But when in human history has the cure for loneliness been found in caring less for fewer people? That’s not a ticket to connection and community. That’s paying for your own life with junk bonds. Some day, maybe sooner, maybe later, the bill is going to come due.

I have written about this in the past, and I am happy to talk to any of you about it whenever you’d like. The reason why I care so much about you all is that I’ve fallen into this same trap. Sure, I’ve never told a woman to shut up and get back in the kitchen, but I definitely wasted too much of my young adulthood pretending that I was on some great man hero’s journey.

Here’s what I learned from my years of sucking up the oxygen in rooms and offering far too little to others. Nothing makes you lonelier than pretending that everybody else in your life exists to help you tick off a bunch of personalized achievement boxes. When I spent too little time showing up for a wider swath of people, my world was smaller and sadder. What made it bigger and richer wasn’t some abstract quest to invent a new model of “positive masculinity.” It was just old fashioned giving a crap about other people Being caring. Being curious. Being neighborly.

You know how you come off, to over half of the world’s population, when you spout trash about how there are only men and women in the world, and how the former gets to be the boss and the latter has to take it? They don’t hear some bold provider and protector. They hear a scared little boy, a necessary evil whom they’ll have to navigate around, another guy they’ll complain about with their friends. I mean, to be truly honest, they hear one more bush league simulacra of the entitled ghouls in the Epstein files.

There are two reasons why I hope you stop listening to those grifters who hate you. The first is that I love and care for a whole lot of people whose lives are going to be worse if you revert to the least reflective, most ungenerous version of yourself. The second is that I also love and want so much more for you. Nobody deserves to be lonely. Nobody deserves to be alienated. Nobody deserves to be tossed to the curb, and nobody deserves to be the kind of person who tosses others to the curb.

Those other guys— the ones who peddle supplements and drive their cyber trucks to gated compounds– will never love you enough to admit that it’s an act. I’m just a nobody. I’m not trying to build an empire on your back. And so you may think I’m a loser, but at least I’m an honest loser who really wants the best possible life for you.

There’s a better world out there, fellas. One where other people actually love having us around, and more importantly where we truly love being around other people. But we’ll never get there if we keep plugging our ears and blaming the messengers. We’ve tried everything else: gambling, numbing the pain, blowing up (in a million different ways), literal fascism. Maybe it’s time to try gentleness. Maybe it’s time to volunteer to clean up after a community meeting. Maybe it’s time to ask fewer questions about what it means to be a man, and more about what it means to be a human being.

Love you, sincerely,

Garrett

End notes:

1. On the subject of facilitating connection, I’m currrently organizing a relay of parties, potlucks and other loving gatherings across the whole United States. Maybe you’d like to join us? Or just learn more? That’s all here. Pretty exciting stuff.

2. On the subject of admitting when you need help. Yes, it’s boring that the number one way you can lend me a hand is by becoming a paid subscriber, but everything I do here is independent, ad free and aimed to help us build a better world, and those kind of efforts are hard to keep running. Towards that end, I am running a subscription sale as we speak (until the end of this week, for my birthday, which is tomorrow) and seriously- it’s a really good deal and there are so many cool thank you gifts. I wouldn’t ask if each subscription didn’t help so much. Thank you.

3. Last week, I wrote about wars, and how it’s always a good idea to oppose them. On Friday (and continuing on through the weekend), the paid subscriber crew had a really beautiful discussion about things that have actually gotten better in our lifetime. Later this week… absolute nonsense (this week’s edition of my annual review of every Oscars movie, guaranteed not to be helpful, but always a good time).

1. Notably, while the trend line of Gen Z holding particularly reactionary views on gender is consistent across the world, there are massive differences from country to country. Not surprisingly, the lowest adherence to traditionalist views on gender occurs in those countries (such as the Nordics) that have long had the most ambitious public policy agenda around gender equity and validation of care work.

2. That link is worth reading, by the way, if you want to engage with a good faith analysis of why women generally report being less happy today than they did fifty years ago. What’s clear, from even a cursory analysis, is that there are a million reasonable conclusions to be made, including all the ways that all our lives have been made worse by the advance of late capitalism, generalized raised expectations for what a fulfilled/fulfilling life even could/should be, and understandable consternation at all the way that feminist victories of the late 20th century have been rolled back over the past twenty years.