In 2018, the newspaper “The New York Times” published an opinion piece by Michael Ian Black entitled “Boys Are Not Okay” which anticipated, in the purest American style, the lines of a discourse widely taken up since then throughout the Western world: it was necessary to rethink masculinity and pay attention to boys who felt lost in the face of new feminine positions, a situation that could lead them to isolation or fury. The author stated that stripping a man of his masculinity was so simple that it could be achieved with the simple gesture of asking for it in a restaurant. This fragility of the young male ego concealed a potential for anger that was difficult to control, as if there were a natural inability of man to accept equality. It was later, years later, that it became necessary to analyze the causes of a significant percentage of these boys who were “not doing well” channeling their supposed frustrations and turning to the extreme right.
The analysis is necessary because the reality is what it is: the extreme right is gaining greater power through men, and through young men of military age, to use their specialized language of hate. The mistake, in my view, is to rescue the old term of gender war to designate the radicalization of what in the United States is called the vote of the brothers, the vote of male colleagues. Feminism has little to do with it, except that girls no longer follow the trend of the most popular quarterback in the fraternity. It is true that men no longer have as many female chorus of courtiers as in other eras, but boys direct their steps towards the ultra corner because society, their environment, the men who have power and the leading role in public conversation, lead to this abyss for their own benefit. The loss of male status is focused on quasi-criminal aspects, such as not being able to touch a woman’s breast without her consent in a stadium. But I would bet that Trump, the perfect synthesis of narcissism and victimization and the architect of the American right’s drift, has not spent a minute of his life thinking about feminism. The material and cultural causes that explain the rise of ultra-populism have less to do with angry teenagers than with parents and grandparents inclined to fascism.
