Only Men Can Save Men

I was stooped over my laptop, squinting ever so slightly, my eyes darting over a draft for perhaps the tenth time, when my phone pinged, and then pinged again—a succession of pings followed, filling me with much irritation. This irreverent, unrelenting cacophony had disrupted my flow state, the heightened focus I take on when I spend extended periods obsessing over a seemingly minuscule aspect of my work. I glanced at my phone and saw a salvo of messages from a friend, Kanyinsola, and a few voice notes, too. An anxious dread enveloped me, I felt, in my gut, something curdle into a ball and rise to my throat, ensconcing itself there. Why was she inundating me with messages? Had something happened? Bringing my phone closer to my face, my eyes assuming the assiduousness of a precision missile, I read her first text: “Chibubu,” it began, “why do men hate women? Why do they get triggered when they see opportunities that are specifically carved out for women?” 

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In the intervening messages, after speaking in vague language, she explained to me that her tirade had been triggered by an incident that had just transpired in her class group chat. Some guys, apparently indignant about a women-only survey that had been sent to the group chat moments before, stirred a fiery debate about gender dynamics in the workplace and society at large. “My main argument,” one of the guys wrote, “is that no one is really oppressing women in the field enough for all the gender specific movements they are doing.” “I’m just saying that it makes no sense to be fighting for gender equality in a male-dominated field (engineering) that’s incredibly merit-based,” another one wrote. As I read those messages, I marveled at the uncanny resemblance between their arguments and the standard rhetoric peddled by white nationalists who are infamously opposed to diversity, equality, and inclusion, which, they argue, is the ultimate antithesis of a merit-based system. 

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Despite overwhelming evidence, this group—white nationalists—often deny the existence of racism, casting it as an artifact of a long-concluded era. And as Donald Trump continues his indiscriminate assault against cultural institutions—everything from art institutions like the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Centre, to universities like Harvard and Columbia University—racist rhetoric has only exploded, especially on X, which has become a raucous zoo since Elon Musk assumed its leadership. Wading through the texts Kanyinsola sent me, I could see stark parallels to white nationalists talking points. Mirroring the arguments that racism no longer exists, their arguments found them dismissive of sexism. Beyond that, just as white nationalists often deride DEI initiatives, while carefully ignoring the virulent racism and exclusionary practices that created the problems which DEI now seeks to correct; these guys, Kanyinsola’s coursemates, held an almost gleeful ignorance to the fact that, across the world, not to long ago, women were denied access to education. 

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While their rhetoric evinces hints of misogyny, it echoes what seems to be the defining characteristic of male-led gender conversation on social media: the compulsion to malign women, or in another construction, to put them in their place. A vast number of men, for seemingly inscrutable reasons, are needlessly hostile toward women on social media, they are indignant, caustic, and ever ready to prosecute a gender “war.” Red-pilled influencers, a category which includes figures like Andrew Tate and Adin Ross, continue to warp social discourse to conform to their retrogressive sexist ideology, mostly by convincing disaffected young men that their problems can be traced to a single cause—feminism—and that only by staving off its rise can they return to a gilded age—for men, of course—in which women are relegated to ancillary status, while men trot around 

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The rise of red-pilled influencers and virulent misogyny on social media has also coincided with men falling behind in areas such as education and employment. Across the world anxious missives decrying the unmoored status of contemporary males have become frequent. “They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex,” Idrees Kahloon writes in a 2023 essay for The New Yorker. Similarly, in a 2024 article for The Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch writes: “Across the developed world, girls and young women have been pulling ahead of boys and young men in education for several decades, with much larger proportions going on to attend university than their male counterparts.” 

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Lagos, Nigeria—my city—falls outside this “developed world” Murdoch speaks of in his piece, and yet, even here I’ve noticed an uptick in misogynistic rhetoric. Whatever evidence I have for this is purely anecdotal—research on this is at best tenuous—but it only takes a few scrolls through social media to be inundated with chauvinism, an especially mindless variety. Take the increasing incidence—as Shalom Tewobola in an essay, AI Has Weaponized Our Misunderstanding of Consent, reports—of men, on social media, altering, using AI tools, women’s pictures, to depict nudity or lewdness. What’s perhaps most shocking about all of this, as Tewobola rightly states, is that perpetrators of this revolting act seem to see nothing wrong with it. They instead seem to see it as part of the provisions of their inherent rights as men.

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Having diagnosed a crisis in masculinity, the question then becomes “What is the solution?” It’s not enough to gripe about the rise of manosphere figures, or misogyny, or incel culture, or the decline, in many key areas of society, of male participation. These problems are but a symptom of a decline of upright men, men of integrity, who wear their masculinity proudly. There is, in this assertion perhaps, an oversimplified explanation of a problem that is equal parts various and complex. But you only need to carefully observe the global media landscape to see that it holds much truth. 

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While red-pilled, far-right, manosphere figures—Think Andrew Tate and his ilk—are very loud about their views and ideas, conscientious men, men with integrity and moral compunction, tend to instead be quiet, preferring to wail about the seemingly inexorable rise of toxic masculinity instead of combating it by matching the intensity of manosphere figures. As we reflect on men’s health awareness month, the primary imperative—as opposed to platitudes like “men should cry more”—should be to internalize the fact that only men can rescue the situation: only men can save men. Just as women have, for decades, done, men need to organize programs aimed at positively shaping the worldviews of young men, many of whom are still very impressionable and particularly vulnerable to red-pilled propaganda. More importantly, there needs to be among, upright men, an understanding that it is our collective responsibility to stave off the onslaught of toxic masculinity and posit an alternative vision of masculinity in these times.

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