In this episode of Into the Truth, Pierpaolo Finaldi is joined by Nina Power, philosopher and author of What Do Men Want? Nina explores why many men feel alienated by modern culture, why the rise of the manosphere cannot simply be dismissed without asking deeper questions, and what we might be missing about the frustrations driving young men towards these online spaces.
Nina Power is a writer, critic and philosopher, a former senior editor and columnist for Compact, and currently works with the New Culture Forum. She’s also the author of What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents, which is the main theme of this interview.
This interview originally took place on our Into the Truth Podcast but has been adapted here for Substack.
I was brought up as a very liberal subject with atheist parents who are very loving. I love my parents very much, but I would describe them as quite pagan. I grew up in the countryside, so my parents had a great love of God’s creation, although they wouldn’t describe it in that way. I was very much a liberal subject until probably about five or six years ago. I am an Anglo-Catholic, so the Catholic tradition within Anglicanism or high Church Anglicanism, so I’m not a proper Catholic.
I think it was a series of things. Partly a disappointment, or a total collapse of what liberal values meant - though I don’t really think liberal values exist exactly. Also, various personal providential things, like meeting my now husband. We started going to Giles Fraser’s church, and Giles was very brave during the lockdown because he kept his church open against both the rules of the church and the rules of the land. That was quite significant in the turning point because this led me to decide to be baptised. There was also a series of personal problems. I was cancelled, so I lost lots of jobs and lots of friends. It’s a classic story now for taking what I believe are truthful positions, for example on the reality of sexual difference. I think a lot of people got cancelled for that.
But I think even before that, there was an increasing feeling of God, particularly in nature, and my pagan background was part of that revelation of creation. Perhaps there is a slightly psychedelic aspect of this which is not very straight-laced. I had a feeling that being is good, that what God has created is good and that God is around us, which is something I see in nature all the time, as well as in other people. Particularly during lockdown, I had this idea that the way the state was perceiving itself wasn’t reality, that it was a kind of prison, in fact. I felt that this wasn’t what was true; it wasn’t God but was actually taking us away from God.
When people convert later on, their way into the church is often quite strange, and I do wish that sometimes the people who were lucky enough to be brought up Catholic or Christian would be a bit less afraid of the stranger people who might come to faith through esoteric ways.
I suppose it was partly just my increasing horror at the way in which that discussion around men was going. As somebody who loves their father, loves their brother, loves their husband, loves their male friends, I was appalled and disgusted with the discourse that seemed to be happening around men in the liberal media. This discourse expanded in a bad way; it increasingly became this claim that men were somehow fundamentally wrong and that there was some fundamental division between men and women. It was very weird to me as someone who is quite well read in second-wave feminism that there was always this negative stereotype about feminists that they hate men. Then this negative stereotype was turned into a positive thing - that it was good to hate men - and this was encouraged all the time, for example, the belief that men are fundamentally violent and suspicious. What made it even more bizarre was that it was happening at the same time as the idea that the sexual difference wasn’t real and didn’t matter, and yet somehow men were still to blame. This wasn’t my experience of the men in my life who are wonderful, but just human like we all are. I didn’t recognise what was being said about men at all. So Penguin had asked me to write a book about men a few years before I turned in the manuscript, and I think they actually really wanted me to write a polemic against men. They were not very happy with the manuscript that I did in fact turn in, which was a defence of men and really a defence of the relationship between men and women, of our social life and the mixed world in which we actually live.
It’s difficult not to go down a more conspiratorial route on this, but I do think there seems to have been perhaps a concerted effort to present men in an extremely negative light. Either as incompetent, like you say, or stupid, irrelevant or even something worse - that men were fundamentally abusive or untrustworthy - and that was definitely something that’s happened in my lifetime. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, there wasn’t this discussion of men. I think we still had a reality principle that men and women existed.
One of the things I wanted to defend in the book was the playfulness of that relationship, which is, of course, predicated on the reality of male and female from a religious perspective. The response to the book was funny; I think Tim Stanley said it was very positive, but it was not religious enough, and then other reviewers said it was too religious. I tried to do it subtly, and I was still in the process of becoming Christian as I wrote the book, so it’s not a Christian book. It was definitely increasingly informed by Christianity, for example in the creation of man and woman. I was influenced in particular by my reading of Ivan Illich, who wrote a book called Gender. He was a strange renegade anarchist who was a Catholic priest [until he left the priesthood in 1969 after controversy surrounding him within the Church]. He was very critical of institutions, including the Church, but I regard him as a fantastic Christian thinker. He described what he calls the sad loss of gender, meaning that since the Industrial Revolution, the relationship between men and women with the separate spheres and the playfulness between them got converted into this idea of “the worker”. So I think there’s almost an economic explanation for the presentation of men as redundant. There was this increasing narrative, even before the turning of the tide against men, that men were redundant somehow. The economy had changed; we had moved from industry, and we were now just doing knowledge and service work, so therefore men were not so important. That idea that men were less important was, of course, absolutely nonsense, but that was what was being pushed.
In the book, I did actually draw on biblical ideas because I wanted to say that whatever the contemporary use of patriarchy or patriarch was, it was a misunderstanding. It was as if the patriarchy was some sort of zero-sum game in which there was a structure where men have all the power and women have no power, while men are parasitically taking things from women. But really, I think the point about patriarchy is about duty and actually taking care and responsibility; it’s not about being able to take or have what you want. It’s actually really onerous. There was actually an attempt to get rid of duty for everyone, partly as a consequence of the sexual revolution, which really only benefited cads. I think the cad has always been with us, but the cad should not be the role model for men. Louise Perry, who I’m very close to, did a very good job taking apart the promises of the sexual revolution and actually pointing out how bad it was - and still is - in reality for men, women and children. So the patriarchy is a man who takes responsibility.
It’s a complicated question, how the social, the economic and the religious all play into one another. But I think once you strip both men and women of certain roles and create this idea of the worker and this new economic subject in which sex becomes relatively indifferent in certain kinds of jobs, then you lay the ground for the idea that sex is less important or less significant. You can then create new subjects, like the consumer and then identity and all of those things that we got later.
I would say that in many ways my parents are very Christian, in their outlook, in their civility, in the way that they treat their neighbours and their environment. They’re extremely generous and thoughtful people, and I’m very fortunate to have parents like that. But I think it was also residual cultural Christianity. My parents are baby boomers, and they lived in the countryside, so maybe that makes it easier to hold on to older values. There are endless questions about whether we have an inverted Christian culture or whether certain bits have been extended in weird ways, or whether it’s completely heretical. It’s an endless discussion about what remains of Christianity in non-explicitly Christian secular culture, but I do think we still owe a lot of our conceptions to Christianity.
In terms of role models, my father actually never met his father, so he was a man who grew up with a single mother, which was quite rare then and quite scorned. He had to develop his own version of being a good man. The book is ultimately about what it means to be a good man and a good woman, pointing out that this is not being represented; we don’t have role models with Christian virtues and values. But I had a great male role model: my father took great care of us - he was very patient and very generous, as he is to everyone. It’s difficult when people start asking what the specific virtues are, because then people get upset when you ask whether there are virtues specific to men and virtues specific to women. I think there are, but most of them overlap; most of the time we need to practice the same virtues. There may well indeed be specific virtues for each sex.
So in many ways, yes, my upbringing was not traditional. My father made the food, for example, very badly, but very charmingly, because my mother was working. I think he regarded himself as a feminist in lots of ways because he was brought up that way by his mother. He would often encourage me to not let myself be held back because I was a girl, which was the line then, as opposed to today when you’re automatically a “girl boss”. So I think it was both residual Christianity and just the luck of having good parents with good character.
There are various directions in which a dissident masculinity took root. One of these was Men Going Their Own Way, which was a male separatist movement, which is quite interesting. I tried to look at that in parallel to the feminist separatists. MGTOW was a pretty small movement, but it was men who described themselves as red-pilled, which is to say, they understood the truth of reality and decided that pursuing women was just a money drain and that there was no point in engaging in heterosexuality. They were not homosexual either; they were just not interested in women. I think in many cases they might have had a bad experience with women and then generalised to all women. There were a lot of generalisations in this movement, as there is with the toxic masculinity idea, for example that all men are bad, or all women are bad. It’s very black and white.
I think MGTOW are probably the more dominant manosphere trend, which then caused a lot of worry and concern, as we see with, for example, Prevent and Adolescence. People got very upset about images of masculinity that were more hierarchical and less Christian in the sense of being about power, men being strong and working out and so on. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with men working out - it’s a good thing to try to be healthy and to look after our bodies - but that sort of thing became very right-coded. This is again very weird to me because when I was growing up, it was really the liberal people who were worried about food and health because they were suspicious of big pharma and cheap food - it was much more “hippyish” to be like that in the 80s and 70s. Then for some reason, those things all became right-wing coded, for example with silly Guardian pieces about how exercising makes you a fascist or something, which is just ludicrous.
The difference between the Christian right and the non-Christian right is, first of all, a discussion about souls, because we believe that everyone has a soul, which the non-Christian right doesn’t necessarily believe. Another difference is their commitment to hierarchy as manifested in the world: that this is a material instantiation of hierarchical difference, which would include the superiority of men over women in some ways.
Unfortunately, the backlash to it seemed to make it more attractive. When you have entire governments, bodies, NGOs and schools panicking about Andrew Tate - and I have no respect for Andrew Tate; I think he’s a terrible human being - but you create allure and transgression. The reaction to this movement wasn’t handled at all well, and that drew a lot of young men into watching those kinds of videos, because these videos also contained a kernel of truth. That’s why they were so effective: some truths that were not even allowed to be spoken in the liberal environment were now being spoken, but unfortunately they were being taken in unpleasant directions by the male separatist movements.
I suppose it’s an idea that men are kind of inherently dominant and domineering and that women are kind of chattel or people to be manipulated. Apparently, Andrew Tate converted to Islam, though I’m not sure that he was particularly devout, and he may not be Muslim anymore. But there was almost this celebration of polygamy within the manosphere as well; it was this idea that alpha males deserve everything they can get.
Actually, it’s worse than that. It’s a kind of pimp model that men like that deserve to control women and make money off them and manipulate them and so on. This is how you express your masculinity: through force and domination.
I suppose that the kernel of truth within it all would be to say that men and women are different. This is one of the problems with the sort of liberal madness because the reality of sexual difference stopped being important for the left. These were people who were supposed to be historical materialists, looking at the way in which class and sex interacted over time, and they just gave up on all of that. They were no longer materialist, apparently; they were coming to be completely idealist, believing that everything was just ideas.
If you want to be attractively oppositional to this, all you have to do is restate basic truths, which already puts you in an intriguing position, especially for young people who were being told they couldn’t discuss these things because it was offensive. If you’re a young man and you’re constantly being told that your masculinity and your way of behaving is somehow wrong, then of course you’re going to look to someone who says, no, you’re being oppressed by this ridiculous system that is trying to crush your energy. We saw a lot of that: the idea that young boys’ behaviour was somehow aberrant and they needed to change who they were, even as children.
Broadly speaking, I think it’s the absence of a role, and then people telling you off for who you are. Obviously that’s going to make you unhappy and then probably quite angry. I’ve written quite a lot about male suicide, which is very high. For some reason, my generation, Gen X, had high suicide rates when we were younger. I don’t know why that is, but for the men that I’ve known who’ve killed themselves, I think it’s the absence of a role, the absence of a place to act in the world, a feeling of uselessness in front of the cosmos. I think for men, it’s crucial to see your work reflected back in the world. That doesn’t mean that every man has to have a family or that every man has to achieve something, but I think when those things are completely cut off, or they appear not to be there, and you’re completely demeaned by virtue of your very existence, it’s like being told off for being who you are. It’s absurd, this idea that men are somehow fundamentally wrong for existing, because obviously they do exist; that’s just reality.
The opening line of my book is “Men and women exist, full stop.” I had to fight Penguin to keep this line in my book. I’m not joking. For a long time, people were trying to cancel the book, people both inside Penguin and outside. My editor asked me to get rid of that opening line, but I said no. Then she asked if I could include “men, women and people of other genders”? I said absolutely not. It’s ridiculous that we’re at this point that we have to say something so blatantly, obviously true, that the entirety of human history understood until apparently five minutes ago.
I’m very pro it, obviously, but I would just say anecdotally: my brother, who was a very irresponsible young man, when he did finally become a father, changed completely. It made him a man, and he’s an incredibly responsible, loving father now in a way that I find stunning, having known him as a teenager and in his 20s, because he was terribly selfish and badly behaved. So I think fatherhood is very good for a lot of men and I think motherhood is very good for a lot of women. One of the tragedies is when you listen to young people say that they can’t start a family, which I think is one of the saddest things; it’s absolutely brutally tragic. We need a society which absolutely encourages people to do that, whilst also having room for the odd, strange people like myself who can’t or won’t have children and not treating them weirdly either.
Of course, religion has a solution for this, but I think the real issue I have is with the state, because the state has taken away all of those kinds of family, community, church responsibilities where people would look after each other, and there would be a network and community. Instead, it has replaced it with this inhuman behemoth where the financial incentives for being a single mother are greater than staying with the father of the child, which is absolutely abhorrent as a social incentive. This encourages the idea that the state is daddy and mummy, but in fact, the state is not. The state is an inhuman bureaucracy. That has really contributed to the erosion of social ties and those bonds.
I think there is in the second wave of feminism, which is now completely verboten; you’re now not supposed to read it. My favourite second wave feminists tend to be the kind of wacky nature feminists who are very committed to sexual difference, in a kind of goddess way. There is an interesting dialogue with Christianity. Many of those feminists are very critical of what they saw as the Church’s suppression of women and women’s myths. I do think they were serious scholars, though, because they were looking at reality and history. There are outliers like Camille Paglia, who absolutely defends the difference between men and women. Also, I am friends with people like Erika Bachioch and other Catholic feminists, and there are lots of very brilliant female scholars working within a Catholic feminist tradition, though that’s a very fine line to tread in some ways, particularly in more traditional Catholic communities.
We hear a lot that feminism is to blame, but I don’t think that contemporary feminism is actually feminism. I actually argued this years ago in 2009, before I was a Christian, because I could see it was just Propaganda and consumerist; it had nothing to do with reality, but was more about selling things to people. Since then, I think it’s become much more sinister. There is a faux feminism which is sold as emancipation and smashing the patriarchy, but really is part of a bigger attempt to erode the ties between men and women. If you look at countries like South Korea, which has the lowest birth rate of any country in the world, the men and women are more or less segregated; they don’t encounter each other anymore. It’s so bizarre that there’s no playfulness, no interaction, no dialogue. What is going on there and who benefits from this strange, segregated world? It’s a terribly sad world.
Yes, but I think it’s deeper. It’s the acknowledgement of sexual reality and being at ease with it. And I don’t just mean in terms of flirtation or sex; I mean wearing one’s sex, both seriously and light-heartedly, so that there is a kind of back and forth that is part of a recognition of the opposite sex. I think all of those things have been crushed. People used to meet their spouse at work, but now you have to go to HR if you say something nice to someone. I suppose what I mean is that ease of casualness of what I call hetero sociality, which is the fact that we live in a mixed world and actually it’s much nicer if we get along together. That can be quite light-hearted. Unfortunately, I think the sexual revolution has created a terror, in the French revolutionary sense. We’re in the sexual terror phase where not only are transgressions perceived everywhere, but they’re hallucinated. Then everyone becomes terrified so that you can’t have that sort of light-hearted, just getting along thing so easily. So I think we need to bring back playfulness somehow.
We used to have all of these rituals for acknowledging these things, whether it was dancing or where the acknowledgement of the role was culturally made manifest into these beautiful performances and rituals. But I think those are all smashed. We don’t have a homogenous culture; we have a very libidinous culture where people do whatever they want, whenever they want. We’ve lost the stages of life or community that would bring people together to do similar things at similar times, which would be this playful acknowledgement of the cosmic humour.
I also think there’s been altogether too much proximity, which is a problem because we shouldn’t know this much about each other. It’s much more mysterious and interesting when we regard the opposite sex as somehow different and intriguing. I think the social worlds and the lack of segregation in certain respects have destroyed some of the mystique.
I think an awful lot because the Christian anthropology is fundamentally true and it’s been worked out over hundreds and thousands of years. Fundamental to my understanding of Christianity is the recognition of the inevitability of social harm and social awkwardness, which we all commit and we all receive. I think forgiveness is fundamental, but I don’t see very much forgiveness in our contemporary world at all. We have a world that, on the one hand, is very liberal and people can do what they like, but if people transgress, even unwittingly, they’re punished forever. There seems to be very little flexibility and forgiveness in the world.
So in terms of what we can learn from the Christian understanding, I think it’s much more realistic, much truer. Christianity is the only major religion, possibly the only religion, that takes women and children in their difference and values them in that difference, without making it a question of hierarchy, dominance, ownership or possession. Christianity absolutely loves and respects and understands women and children and men in their specificity. It does so in all of these very beautiful and complicated ways, whether it’s through the saints, whether it’s through Mary, whether it’s through the Trinity. The contemporary world has forgotten all of the most important lessons about sexual difference that Christianity has always understood, so it can learn everything from it.
I think one of the most important lessons is that women are also fundamental to Christianity. They see Christ’s resurrection and are there throughout that. They are equal and loving partners with Christ and in the Church from its very foundation, so that women have a different but equal role.
Yes, I think so. It’s a narrow and mean understanding of reality. Certainly, when I look at my Christian friends, whether they’re Anglo-Catholic or Catholic, they often have larger families, and they often are married quite soon after they meet. These are very functioning, healthy and wonderful relationships, so clearly something is working here. Clearly, relationships are flourishing where people are respected as individuals, and where that relationship is part of a family that is faithful and goes to church together. It seems to be the best way of living and the best image of faith. Liberalism doesn’t have a positive image of men or women. It has something else, which is the libidinal subject or the desirous subject or the individual who is not particularly male or female. But we are fundamentally male or female.
The subject that desires, and that desire is fundamentally good, and that society should be there to give you what you want. Basically the idea would be that what makes you who you are is your desire, which I think is fundamentally untrue. A lot of desires are very bad for people and bad for the social whole. We’ve gone down this quantitative world of measurement. There’s this idea that the economy is more important than people, but markets should be subsumed to people’s needs, and not the other way around.
It goes back to this idea of responsibility because I think one of the other problems with liberalism or modernity is the idea that the state gives you rights and that that’s the mechanism of duty. Whereas actually, we have a duty to each other all the time. I think duty has become a dirty word; people think if they don’t want to do something, then they shouldn’t have to. Being a father obviously involves all kinds of duty and care and protection, so it’s in that sense that I think patriarchy needs to be protected or resurrected. One of the points of the book is to say that, actually, enormous numbers of men are doing this all the time already; they might be being ignored and neglected and actually misrepresented, but this is the reality of men who love and take responsibility for their families. It’s already happening; it happens all the time.
Ignore 95% of the world. If they are fortunate enough to be a member of a church and to have friends who are Christian, I think it’s important to practice the sort of religious life that might see you at odds with the world and with the propaganda, to develop character and interests. Even in the 90s, it was still important to ask, “How do you become a person?” And the answer was that you have interests and character; you weren’t an identity. This kind of development of one’s religious and curious life - the fact that we have certain aptitudes and interests and so on - just keep doing that.
On Substack. I also do book reviews for The Telegraph and The Critic here and there.
Nina’s book What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents is published by Penguin and is available to order from Amazon.
What the Female English Martyrs Tell Us About the Feminine Genius
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The martyrs of England and Wales have been a source of inspiration, encouragement and intercession for British Catholics for centuries. But in our own time, they can also help us to navigate the debates and disagreements around sexual difference, gender roles, and collaboration between men and women, which have become particularly strident in recent yea…
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