With friends like these...
On J.D. Vance's familiar, hollow offering to young men
J.D Vance spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week. His remarks attracted a bit of notice, but far less than Elon Musk’s appearance at the same event. Such is the lot of Vance in the time of demagoguery. It doesn’t matter how much red meat he throws at the MAGA base. He can rail against the Pope and opine about how Europe is dying because it hasn’t forcibly expelled all of the Muslims and trans people. It won’t matter, because a few hours later a be-sunglassed Elon Musk will glide on stage with a chainsaw, wield it with all the grace of a just-tranquilized rhinoceros, and yell the one thing he presumes that normal people say when they’re holding chainsaws (“CHAINSAWWWW!”).
I suspect Vance isn’t that concerned about temporarily ceding the spotlight to Musk. He is a Yale Law-educated striver if ever there was one. In the three-headed Cerberus that is the second MAGA administration, Trump is the absentee figure-head, Musk is the chaos agent and Vance is the high school policy debater. It’s his job to give the “well actually” interviews and the scoldy lectures, to lay out a bullet-pointed but still deeply aggrieved vision for conservatism beyond Trump. Somehow it’s working, at least with the most plugged-in segment of the conservative base. When it came time for CPAC attendees to crown their early favorite in a 2028 Presidential straw poll, Vance lapped the field.
Like it or not, J.D. Vance is going to be a figure in American politics for a long while, which is why it’s worth paying attention to his sales pitch for America.
Vance began his CPAC speech by claiming that he is “having a hell of a lot of fun” since taking office, a statement immediately contradicted by thirty minutes of generalized grumpiness. Addressing an obsequious slate of questions from moderator Mercedes Schlapp (at one point Schlapp asked the Vice President, “can I be your best friend?”) Vance spent the majority of his half hour railing against a creaky set of enemies— Joe Biden (still!), CNN and “USAID art pieces about toilets in Afghanistan” among them.
None of it made any sense, of course, but that’s the needle you have to thread when you’re the spokesperson for a reactionary movement that has recently seized power. Since your entire pitch is about protecting the silent majority from powerful foes, you have to pretend as if you are still the opposition party even after you control all three branches of government. The trick is to openly engage in authoritarianism while still sounding like a libertarian Sophomore at Oberlin ranting about the intolerant leftists in their Poli Sci class.
Vance’s most animated moment came three quarters of the way through his remarks, when he started ranting about a “broken culture.” That’s a euphemism for feminism, by the way. Here, in his seeming moment of triumph, the topic J.D. Vance most wanted to discuss was young men under duress, and how he and Donald Trump were their only protectors.
This is not new territory, of course. In one sense, we have been talking about a “war against boys” for my entire adult lifetime. The term dates back at least to 2000, when Christina Hoff Summers published an influential philippic on the subject. More broadly, though, as Susan Faludi documented in Backlash, this is a tired old playbook. Advancements in women’s rights, even modest ones, have always been followed by a fierce counter-movement, one whose primary chorus is “but what about the boys?”
Just as America has been war against boys-ing ourselves towards Bethlehem for decades, this is a familiar beat for Vance. You might remember his election season tour of manosphere podcasts, basically one wide-legged jeremiad after another about how us fellas have it rough right now.
Friends, I regret to inform you that J.D. Vance is still sitting like that.
Forgive me for harping, once again, on J.D. Vance’s crotch-first approach towards arranging himself in a chair. It brings me no pleasure, but it’s actually a decent metaphor for the broader state of play here. I have little doubt that, if J.D. Vance heard that I was poking fun at the way he sits, he would assume that I’m a self-hating guy who has mainlined too much woke rhetoric and wants to lecture him on his toxic manspreading.
I assure you that my objections to the way that Vance sits go far beyond feminist virtue signaling. I just think that it is weird and off-putting! J.D., my guy, please cross your legs! You aren’t “owning” me by sitting like that. You’re just bumming us all out. Look how Mercedes Shlapp is sitting. Notice how she looks relatively normal and also how, were she wearing the same tight pants as you, her stance would not make those pants look like little French boy culottes. Sir, you are the Vice President of the United States. Why do you look like you just pleaded with your grand-mère for one more eclair?
That’s a joke, by the way. I hear that J.D. Vance loves jokes. I know this because, when it came time for the Vice President to address the issues facing boys and men, he didn’t raise the kind of concerns that you’d hear from serious scholars on the topic like
and . He didn’t discuss male suicide rates or the economic struggles of working class men. He didn’t consider the broader loneliness epidemic, and how that epidemic manifests for a wide variety of groups, including young men. He didn’t talk about what the ongoing crisis of gendered violence by cis men against women and other marginalized genders reveals about the profound rottenness of patriarchy. Instead, he kept talking about how guys aren’t allowed to tell jokes with their buddies any more.Young men, your Vice President has a message for you:
“Don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you are a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.”
In case the “make a joke” part escaped notice, Vance looped back to put a finer point on it:
“What is the essence of masculinity? When I think about me and my guy friends, we really like to tell jokes to one another. We like to laugh… This is why young men in particular are so inspired by President Trump. He doesn’t allow the media to tell him he can’t make a joke or he can’t have an original thought. President Trump just says what’s on his mind and that’s a damn good thing and a good example to set for young men in American culture.”
There’s some fascinating rhetorical sleight-of-hand here. If you blink, you could pretend that J.D. Vance is in fact quite concerned about American loneliness. Who can argue against cracking wise and knocking back a couple cold ones with the boys?
We’ll set aside, for a second, an alternate reality in which a less sycophantic moderator posed a few basic follow up questions (“who is preventing young men from telling jokes, Mr. Vice President?” “what about their masculinity is being threatened by their inability to tell those jokes?” “please give us an example of a joke that young men were discouraged from making that they is now permissible under a Trump administration?”). The subtext here is that it’s not just any jokes that separate real guys from the gendered rabble. It’s the ability to tell offensive jokes. Real men, according to Vance, are jerks. If you take away our chance to sound like the hackiest guy at the Chuckle Hut in 1987, what is left of us?
You’ve no doubt heard versions of this rhetoric recently. When young conservatives partied on Inauguration night, the conversation topic du jour was how relieved they were to be able to say the r-word again, as if every void in their life could be filled by one more slur. It’s depressing, but also revealing.
Young straight cis men, like all Americans, aren’t wrong for feeling isolated and disconnected. If there’s one thing we all share— across identity and ideology— it’s that the world as it is leaves us feeling deeply empty. The loneliness epidemic is both real and, I’d argue, an inevitable outgrowth of a country built on rugged individualism. I’ve said this before, but the specific tragedy of young men in this moment isn’t that they’re the only ones who are lonely, but that the salve they’re being offered for their loneliness will further hurt both them and all of us.
Instead of actual sources of belonging, young men are given the opportunity to get ripped off by crypto scams and sports betting. They’re warned that if they don’t make the cruelest joke, somebody will heave one their way. For God’s sake, they have to listen to J.D. Vance tell them over and over again that “a broken culture” hates them and that only people like him and Donald Trump can protect them from emasculation.
The irony of this moment is that everybody who claims to care about male loneliness and purposelessness— the J.D. Vances and Jordan Petersons and Matt Walshes of the world— are offering the exact opposite of what might be helpful. The cure for loneliness can’t be found in calling your friends the f-word or finding a trad wife who will stay in her place. It’s being in relationship with other people. And relationships, at their core, are about having people in your life who accept and love you, but it’s also about your accountability to those people. It’s about having your feelings valued, but with an equal expectation of emotional reciprocity. Behold and be held. That’s the deal.
Now, it’s phenomenally easy for me to look at Vance and his ilk and opine about the bankruptcy of their offerings. But it’s not just MAGA guys who have internalized the message that guys can float through life on our own hero’s journey. I wrote a whole book about being a white guy who spent half a lifetime cultivating an impeccable collection of loudly stated political opinions, not realizing that all that spouting off about my feminism and my anti-racism was much more in service of my ego than the common good. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the simple tautology that if I claimed to care about other people, then I had to spend significantly more time actually caring for other people.
Once I noticed this problem in myself, I increasingly saw it everywhere. I’m currently teaching a set of classes on how to build communities capable of responding to this political moment. They’re the most popular classes I’ve ever offered, which says less about my influence than it does about how much we’re all craving connection and efficacy. There has, however, been a clear trend in who has and hasn’t gravitated towards a class about community building. Of the nearly 600 current registrants at the time of this writing, only 45 identify as men (which, presumably, means that even fewer are cis men).
To be clear, I’m sure that I could be doing more to find the fellas and encourage them to join my trainings. No doubt, there are more than forty five men who are interested in strengthening webs of interdependence.
I suspect that there’s more going on here than my strengths or weaknesses as a man marketer, though. The problem isn’t just that I need to whip up a black logo with a gothic font and add a tagline like “Knowing your neighbors will give you a six pack.” I already know where the guys are in left-leaning political circles. They’re over-represented in those spaces where they get to offer their own pristine opinions and, ideally, be rewarded with leadership roles for doing so. Across the country, it’s not atypical for Democratic Socialist of America groups to struggle with the opposite issue as my community class. Over the past few years multiple D.S.A. chapters, upon noticing that they risk merely becoming a space for guys to debate about rather than build a political movement, have struggled openly with the question of “how do we de-dude socialism?”
It’s easy to pick on the D.S.A. for being full of white guys who love to pontificate, but the issue goes beyond a single organization. Last week we had a primary election here in Milwaukee. In the race for an open city council seat in a a progressive-leaning area of the city, six of the seven candidates were middle aged dudes. It was a diverse group, if you’re judging diversity based on a spectrum of facial hair. Forget therapy, guys would rather run a long shot aldermanic campaign than take a class on community. You see that, J.D. Vance? I can make jokes too.
These may be anecdotal examples, but the trend line is clear. Across political lines, men report being lonely, but are locked into a specific set of patterns that only make the issue worse. We want to be charismatic heroes or joke-making rebels, but not humble neighbors. We’re less likely to raise our hand when the task at hand is tending patiently to a space where others feel welcomed. We show up when we get to have our opinions validated, but stay home when asked to care about other people’s feelings. We want you to laugh at our jokes or marvel at our NBA draft analysis, but we’re often the last to make a casserole for a sick friend’s meal train.
Speaking personally again, I don’t pretend to have ascended to a higher level of community-centric consciousness. In some ways, I’m doing decently at caring for the emotional and practical needs of those around me, but I still drop the ball all the time. I still get caught up in ego and self-aggrandisement. I’m still learning all the ways that I make a mess of things, particularly across lines of identity.
What I will say, though, is that for the past few years I’ve charged myself with caring less about being right than about being in love, with spending less time clamoring for recognition and more time recognizing the web of humanity around me. In that time, I’ve been less lonely than at any other stage in my life. I’ve had friends show up for me because I’ve shown up for them. I’ve gotten to experience the gift of community because I’ve invested in shared spaces over the long term, even when I’ve been exhausted, annoyed, and unsure whether it would all pay off.
In the past few years, I’ve attended more memorial services and celebrated more births and weddings and divorces and gender transitions than I ever imagined possible. I’ve had more people cry to me and with me. Lest J.D. Vance be worried, I haven’t lost my ability to hang out with the guys. This weekend, I’m heading off to Louisville with a few of my best friends to watch basketball and, yes, crack jokes and drink beer. But when I get back I will talk about Wicked with eight-year-olds at my daughter’s school and share virtual space with activists across the world and then sit in a committee meeting with Quaker elders. I will deliver cupcakes to friends who are grieving and cater a pizza supper for a middle school lock-in. I will trade texts with long-distance friends who are caring for parents with dementia and trying to navigate life as a soon-to-be former Federal employee. My wife will go out with friends and I will return the care-giving favor she gave me on my trip away. Life will not be simple, but it will be full.
I’ve discovered, in practice, that the reason why I was lonely wasn’t due to some cultural inevitability. Contra J.D. Vance, it definitely wasn’t because feminism or anti-racism had poisoned the ground for me as a white guy. It was because you can’t reap what you don’t sow. This sounds obvious, but it bears repeating. The cure for loneliness isn’t to stomp your feet and yell about how you should be allowed to do and say whatever you want, consequences be damned. It’s to be interested in other people beyond what they can do for you.
In case it’s not clear, I’m not much of a guy whisperer. I’m admittedly pretty skeptical that there is a single way to talk to address men. The whole exercise feels fairly essentializing, one more way of pretending that culture is set in stone. But if J.D. Vance gets to make his pitch to the fellas, well, then I can at least give it a shot myself. Here’s my real talk message to young straight cis men. Imagine it in a black gothic font, if you will While I’ve clearly got plenty of feedback for men who share my politics, this particular final word is for those who don’t.
Guys. You all, like all people, deserve to be loved. The problem is, most of the messengers who claim to be your friends are lying. If you take their advice— if you believe that your path is merely to be the tough guy, the hero, to tell the dumb joke, to not give a crap about what anybody thinks about you— your life is going to be so much emptier. If you believe that trans people are somehow a threat to your manhood, that politics is about “protecting” this country from people who presumably don’t belong, that women are hysterical for sharing why they’re so frequently terrified and distrustful of us, you will dig yourself a deeper and sadder hole. No doubt you will find men who validate that sorry worldview. Those guys don’t love you, though. They love their power over you. And it doesn’t matter how cruel you are, nor how far you puff out your chest. The more that you pretend that your life isn’t entwined with all of ours, the more that myth becomes truth. You can rip off whatever playground insults you want and call it humor, but if that’s the sum total of your life’s aspiration, the real joke’s on you.
End notes:
That training on community I mentioned? Spots are filling fast for the last three sessions, but in the meantime you are all welcome to keep joining— yes, including the fellas. More info here and registration here.
As I’ve mentioned up above, relationships and community are about balancing generosity towards others while also being honest about how folks can help you. I try to model that here. In my case, I offer trainings, coaching, and the vast majority of my writing for free to all. I can only do so, though, because folks who are able support my work financially. If you value this work, thanks for considering a paid subscription and/or sharing this piece.
If you discovered this space because of one of my recent essays about this political moment, while I’ll be writing plenty of essays like those, I make occasional forays into related topics (because it’s all related— the personal and political and the cultural, the serious and the ridiculous) To that end, if you want to hear a very fun and thoroughly silly conversation between myself and the inimitable
(read Sarah Wheeler, friends!) check out the most recent episode of , the feminist parenting podcast she co-hosts with Miranda Rake. It’s a great episode in its own right, but it doubles as a preview of my annual Oscar’s issue, which is a little dumb/fun bonus I offer to paid subscribers (coming on Friday!). Want to hear which 2024 movie I argue is “basically Mamma Mia?” You’ll have to lisDid you see Friday’s essay? It was a short one, but there was a pretty fun offer at the end (free sticker if you’re willing to put it up).
Here’s the song of the week. “Don’t Tell The Boys,” by Petey. Seemed fitting.
“And now we're howling at the moon/Hell, yeah, we′re making lots of noise/You know I hate to say "I love you/But thеre ain't no other choice”
As I was reading this, gently scrolling along, I came across the first picture of J.D. Vance and said to myself, "That is like the widest man-spread I have ever seen." And then I scrolled further, saw Garrett's line, "Friends, I regret to inform you that J.D. Vance is still sitting like that" and guffawed.
Yeah, I just don't get it why hating other people is supposed to be a salve for loneliness.
Vance is the President of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club, and he's not allowing women into the treehouse!