The earliest uses of the #MeToo turn 20 this year, and the public discourse around sex, relationships and gender has been evolving quickly since those first posts.
Opinion columnist Christine Emba dove into that conversation with her 2022 book “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation,” exploring the goals—and failures—of the MeToo movement and modern sexual ethics.
But in research for that book, Emba started noticing another pattern: men struggling in education, work and relationships, prompting her to write the viral Washington Post piece “Men Are Lost: A Path out of the Wilderness” in 2023.
Emba now researches sexuality, gender and social norms at the American Enterprise Institute, and she’s visited Whitworth University this week for her lecture “Modern Love, or Lack Thereof: Bridging the Gender Divide.”
SPR’s Eliza Billingham chatted with Emba before her stop in Spokane.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. It's also framed around Emba's original title for her lecture, “Men Are Lost: A Path out of the Wilderness," the same as her 2023 Washington Post piece.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: My first question, just generally, is about the first half of the title of your lecture and the title of a piece that you published a couple years ago. But you start off with this premise that men are lost. Can you talk to me about how did we get there?
CHRISTINE EMBA: Yeah, so I'm currently an opinion writer for The New York Times, but previously, for almost a decade, I was an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.
And I wrote a piece in 2023, in the summer of 2023, entitled “Men are Lost. Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness.” And it went pretty viral.
It had, you know, over a million readers, you know, people reached out from all over the place to talk about it with me to ask questions. It came out on the heels of Richard Reeves’s well-known book “Of Boys and Men.”
And I think at a period, also kind of post-election, where people were suddenly waking up to the fact that men and boys didn't really seem to be doing that well, in ways both sort of notable by data and also just in their experiences with men. And I kind of seen this myself, and that is why I felt compelled to write this essay.
So, you know, you could see it in sort of the broader political scene, you know. In 2016, Trump campaign was fueled by memes from 4chan and like a backlash against #MeToo.
You know, you saw the 2024 election, then upcoming, targeting young men through sort of podcasts and other sort of spheres of influence. And they ended up having a big impact on the outcome of the election. They formed an unexpected voting bloc for Donald Trump.
Then there was sort of like the kind of broader data problem, where, you know, you note that men account for almost three of every four deaths of despair. Men are accounting for more than 70% of the decline in college enrollment overall.
In a total flip from, you know, just a few decades ago, women are out earning men in many large cities, are out earning men in terms of getting college degrees and getting graduate degrees. Nearly half of women have reported in surveys that they out earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners, which is a huge jump from I think the number was fewer than like 4% of women did so in 1960.
And then, you know, I write a lot about Gen Z. I'm a millennial, and I'm always interested in sort of what the younger generations are doing. And I heard from my peers and younger peers and experienced this myself, that the men around me were getting a little weird in some sense.
They were suddenly listening to these sort of like bro-y, manosphere podcasts and sort of getting obsessed with this certain kind of often misogynist content. They seem to be like seeking out advice on how to be a man and how to live their lives, whether that advice came from, you know, Jordan Peterson or worse from Andrew Tate.
They seemed a little bit unclear as to what their role was supposed to be in the modern age, like, should they ask women out? Are they even allowed to talk to women? Are they providers anymore? Are they protectors? Like, what does it mean to be a man when women are now capable of doing all the things that men can do, and in some cases seem to be outdoing them?
So there seems to be this like latent anxiety that was clearly having an impact on the culture.
EB: Do you think it's important to differentiate masculinity and femininity versus just focusing on people being good people? Why do you think it's important to parse out what should masculinity be?
CE: I mean, I think the ideal goal is for people to be good people, to be kind of like the highest, most virtuous version of themselves. You know, we talk about gender and sex as maybe being made up of different traits, but, of course, there's also often substantial overlap.
If we say that courage is a male trait, well, women can be courageous, too. You know, if we say women are nurturing, like, men hopefully should learn to be nurturing, too.
But I think the problem with just saying that, ‘Well, we all need to be good people,’ is that it's pretty vague. And I think in this moment, and especially for young men who are, you know, sort of the focus of my interest, who are just now kind of defining who they are in the world, just be a good person doesn't give them very much to go on.
It's not specific. It's not really a clear path. It doesn't really speak to many of the traits that they might feel like differentiate them from their female friends and partners. I think ideally, you know, people would understand what just be a good person means in any context. But I think especially for younger men who don't have clear role models of what that looks like for a person who maybe looks like them, who has some of the same capacities as them.
You know, we talk about the idea that representation matters, but it matters for men, too. I think noting that there is a particular thing called masculinity and like X, Y and Z, maybe A, B and C, maybe some mixture of those are the paths that you take to get there provides, you know, a lot of clarity and comfort for people who feel like they're otherwise kind of lost in a swiftly changing landscape.
EB: It seems to me like scholars and young people alike are concerned with the question of whether men and women are having sex together. [both laugh] Sorry to be crass.
CE: No, you're right.
EB: I'm interested in your perspective as a scholar. What do you think the point of sex is?
CE: I laugh when you say that because it kind of feels like an odd turnabout, right, from just a decade or two decades ago.
You know, in the past, if scholars and policymakers were like, ‘Oh, no, there's too much teen pregnancy, like the teens are getting out of hand.’ Suddenly they're like, ‘Wait, why aren't the teens getting pregnant anymore? We need them to have more sex and drink more.’ And it feels like a real about face that I find frankly kind of amusing. But I think it does speak to something real.
You asked what sex is for, which is sort of a huge question. But, you know, and I'll note that I'm Catholic. And so I'm speaking about this from both my perspective, but my perspective as informed by my faith, too. I think that sex is meant to be unifying, you know, like a real and deep expression of connection with another person.
And also it's often procreative. So I think one problem with or one worry for policymakers about the kids not having enough sex is that--where is the next generation going to come from? Like, is our sort of economy and culture going to stagnate because there's limited reproduction?
But I think of that as not the main concern, or at least that's not my main concern. I'm more focused on the idea of teens not having sex, not dating, not interacting with each other as a statement about how teens are not connecting with each other. They’re not forming romantic relationships. In some cases, they're not forming platonic relationships either. It speaks to an increasing level of solitude and loneliness.
When you talk about how someone would go about having sex as a teen, there are social skills that you would learn, right? How to talk to the opposite sex or the same sex, how to present yourself in the world, how to move about with others. And if teens are finding themselves unable to have sex, or form relationships that lead to sex, it suggests that they are not doing well on those other fronts either. And that I find really worrying.
We already know there's a loneliness crisis. This just seems to be like one indicator.
EB: And I wanted to bring up this line from a recent New York Times opinion piece on why Gen Z isn't dating. And you write that, “if trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute.”
Full disclosure from me, I'm a single woman in my 20s, and I grew up in an evangelical Christian culture, and I'm kind of trying to unlearn the narrative that marriage is the cure for loneliness. I guess I see a lot of people who are lonely in marriage, but would you say that marriage is probably the most prominent or the best cure for loneliness?
CE: That's a good question.
I mean, I also grew up, you know, with a pretty firm religious background, too, and have had someone learning to do around purity culture and this fascination with marriage myself. Though, obviously, I'm clearly still interested in this question.
Again, I don't see marriage or sex necessarily as cures to loneliness, right? Like, exactly as you say, there are many people who are in marriages who are lonely. There are people who have sex who are still lonely during and afterwards.
Again, I think that, you know, my worry about people not getting married, people not having sex, speaks to this difficulty that I see people having in forming connections.
I think, though, that for better or for worse—and in some ways, I think it's for worse—I think that the United States and the Western world kind of overprioritizes its small nuclear family. But that's maybe a later question?
Marriages and the nuclear family still tend to be our main societal units, right? You get tax breaks for being married. Being single is more expensive. And I think as people grow older, they find that—or many people, but not all people—do find that having a partner helps ease their loneliness, makes it easier to make friends and find companionship.
And so I think with a decline in marriage, you may—you probably will see an uptick in people who feel solitary. I don't think that marriage can cure loneliness. Not at all. But I think marriage often has a salutary effect of keeping people in community.
EB: I also wonder, in your work, you are trying to tease out the differences between expectations that men and women have for each other previously and today.
But I wonder, are you also trying to posit that things are worse for men and/or women than they used to be?
CE: I am trying to tease out what has changed and how people feel about it, like what impact it has, societally and culturally. There are researchers who kind of do the database thing. Like, how many people are married? How many people have kids? Like, what are the stats?
And I've always been interested in the second-order questions. Like, okay, here are the stats. Why? Like, what are the theories and ideas that we have behind what's happening? And how do they affect the way that we sort of live our lives? And how might they affect whether we live good and flourishing lives?
I think it's definitely true that dating expectations have changed for both sexes and that I think the lived sort of landscape of being male and female has changed. I think it's hard to say flatly that these changes are good or bad on the whole.
If you think about women, for example, like women can go to school. They’re doing well in the job market. They have more employment opportunities. They're making their own money and are able to run their own lives. I think that is a win for feminism and a win for women. I think that is a good thing.
This is what my 2022 book, “Rethinking Sex,” was about. I'm also hearing a lot of women complain that the dating landscape sucks for them. That they feel sometimes pressure to enter into relationships or sexual situations that they don't really want to be in because it seems like they're supposed to somehow, to be a modern woman.
Especially in this moment, I'm hearing a lot of younger women bemoaning the fact that there don't seem to be that many good partners that they can find in the dating pool, or at least partners who “meet their expectations” is how it's usually phrased in survey data.
And so as a result, they may not get married, and there are women who want to have families and want to have children with a partner who don't get to do that. And who live what they describe as lonelier lives. And so that seems sad to me, right?
So it's mixed. And then for men, though, I think it is – it feels worse to them. And again, I think I have to be clear that, you know, feelings aren't facts, right? So men can say that they feel worse, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their lives are worse or that it's up to women to fix them.
But, you know, post-NAFTA and, you know, in our upcoming age of AI, frankly, many of the sort of standard working class jobs that, you know, gave a lot of young men a place in the economy and sort of a structure of value to their lives are gone. Those opportunities aren't there anymore.
Places that used to feel like they still had space for men or were reserved for men, whether it's universities or certain leadership positions or cultural influence, women are there too, and they have to compete with women.
There's a Psychology Today study that came out in 2023 when I wrote the “Men Are Lost” piece that posited that men's romantic dating – I'm quoting here from the study – “dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise.”
And, you know, I think it's probably a good thing that relationship standards are higher than, ‘Okay, this person has a job, I guess I'll marry them.’ But if men feel like their ability to find a romantic partner has suddenly fallen, that feels bad, one can imagine.
If you feel like, you know, there used to be a place for you in the world and now there doesn't seem to be one, that causes a lot of psychological discomfort. And often that discomfort is acted out in the world in really negative ways, more so by men than by women, I'll say.
And so, again, like, are these changes that have led there bad necessarily? No. But the men affected feel bad, and their feelings, unfortunately, do have an effect on the way the rest of us live.
EB: One of the things that I love about your work is that you don't end in the diagnostic stage, but you try to figure out what to do now. So the second half of your lecture title and the article title was A Map Out of the Wilderness. Now, I want people to go hear you in person, but can you give us a sneak peek of what that map is?
CE: Guys, if you come to Whitworth College on April 8th, you will hear me deliver the solution to the gender crisis. Actually, seriously, that is not really going to happen because a solution is not obvious or clear.
But I do have some thoughts for a few things that could help, and I'll save some of them for the talk. But I think the most obvious one, and the one that, frankly, you've also heard from other people, I hope, is to, “touch grass.”
I continue to think that one of the things that's contributing to this sort of misunderstanding and distrust between the sexes, especially now, is that we spend a lot of our time on the internet, online, on social media, where our feeds and the information that we reach is increasingly shaped by algorithms. And algorithmic content succeeds based on the sort of force of feeling that it engenders in the people who watch.
So, you know, the content wants to make you angry. It wants to make you scared. And so if you're listening to dating content or gender advice content from, you know, a dating coach who wants to make you angry or scared, they're telling you that ‘Men are the worst. Men are terrible. Here's what you have to do to, you know, find a few good men who are still out there. But maybe there aren't any good men at all.’ That is not going to make you feel good about the other sex or about dating or relationships. In fact, it probably will make you want to stay home and not even try.
Similarly, for men, there's so much dating content or just content right now that is just lathered in misogyny and trades in just falsehoods about the dating landscape and about women that have gained so much traction. You know, this idea that women only want to date guys who are above six foot tall or, you know, women are…whatever, whatever, something about body count--that tutors you in a kind of misogyny and fear of the opposite sex.
They're not telling you anything true or useful. And that will make it harder for you to form relationships with other people. And the best way to bridge the divide is to stop mainlining that content and talk to real members of the opposite sex or your own sex in person in third spaces to actually try and make real world connections, which takes bravery in this moment and takes practice.
I think post-COVID, so many people are out of practice or maybe never got the chance to practice the kinds of awkward interactions that you just have to do over and over again if you're going to make a friend or find a partner. But that’s what you have to do to make a friend or find a partner. So, you best get started.
