After Donald Trump’s surprise election victory in 2016, Americans of a liberal bent were aghast. One of them was Mark Lilla. A professor at Columbia University, Lilla was gripped by anxiety at the prospect of a postmodern Republican Party taking the White House. But unlike his fellow Democrats, he directed his focus inward, toward the wreckage that had been wrought by the progressive movement’s rigid “antipolitical dispensation.”
In The Once and Future Liberal, Lilla identified a particularly egregious example of this phenomenon. The home page of the Republican Party, he noted, was thick with public policies aimed at addressing America’s manifold ills and securing its future prosperity. Meanwhile, the home page of the Democratic site had no such manifesto, or anything that gestured toward concrete government action or specific projects for social change. What it displayed instead was a seemingly interminable list of “people” to whom it appealed, a bevy of assorted groups and identities. Lilla counted 17 separate messages tailored to each of these distinct factions and imagined that he had somehow landed on the website of the Lebanese government rather than that of the oldest political organization in the New World.
In a highly readable new book, Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway makes a similar observation. Only this time, it’s not public policies that are mourned owing to their absence from the Democratic platform. It’s men. Nearly a decade after Lilla’s broadside against identity politics, the Democratic National Committee retains fealty to a cornucopia of constituencies and favored demographic groups along lines of race and gender and sexual orientation. This identitarian craze leaves Galloway scratching his head, not least because it omits some rather important blocs. The DNC’s feast of identity showcases “Who We Serve”—African Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, women, et cetera—but boys and men are nowhere to be found.
This marked indifference toward the male half of the populace has a long pedigree. In 2012, the Obama campaign produced “Julia’s world,” a fictional universe borne out in cartoon illustrations whose protagonist outwardly lacked any qualities of an autonomous citizen. In a series of cartoons tracking the stages of her life, Julia is subsidized and comforted by an omnipotent government—she’s the recipient of college and business loans, birth control, and maternity care. It soon became painfully apparent that, enmeshed in the Leviathan’s embrace, Julia’s world was totally atomized. As Charles Krauthammer observed at the time, it contained “no friends, no community, and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state.”
Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur, plainly resents this smug attitude and hopes to prompt a course correction. He begins in appropriately manly fashion, arguing against one of the reigning progressive nostrums of our era. “There’s no such thing as ‘toxic masculinity,’” he avows. This “emperor of all oxymorons,” Galloway remarks, conflates machismo with masculinity, when in truth “cruelty, criminality, bullying, predation, and abuse of power” are the antithesis of the masculine virtues. In pointed contrast, the role of men, as he defines it, is threefold: protection, provision, and procreation.
What makes this cri de coeur remarkable is not so much the argument itself as where it’s coming from. For decades, the cultural elite—of which Galloway is a member in good standing—has recoiled from notions of masculine virtue and actively suppressed natural male exuberance. The prevailing view in the upper reaches of society is that traditional male proclivities and occupations—from the Boy Scouts to the military—augment emotional repression among young men while diminishing and subduing female pursuits. A therapeutic approach to education venerates feelings while denigrating competition and risk. Galloway doesn’t exaggerate when he contends that it has become fashionable to view men as a “shadowy cabal” upholding a social order that is invidious and oppressive.
The popular conception of an entrenched patriarchy has given rise to open hostility for traditionally male sensibilities, which has in turn generated a crude backlash from a significant number of men (and some women). A procession of “men’s rights advocates” on social media speaks to challenges faced by young men and castigates the wretchedness of an effete culture that has no place for them. Rather than articulating a program of moral and material improvement for young men, however, these uncouth and often squalid figures promote a will to power that is indistinguishable from egotism. Instead of tempering and channeling boys’ unruly and aggressive tendencies toward constructive purposes, the tribunes of machismo preach male superiority and sully the covenant that used to exist between the sexes. It seems safe to surmise that when healthy expressions of masculinity are not tolerated, malicious forms take root.
In this fraught landscape, Galloway is a welcome and largely reliable guide. For starters, he is no kind of reactionary. Unlike the male chauvinists who mistake any hint of civility and gentlemanly conduct for weakness, Galloway is secure enough to defend both physicality and kindness, strength and restraint, in the same breath. In contrast to much of the “manosphere,” he cheers the progress of modernity that systematically dismantled the economic structures and social taboos that suppressed women’s liberty and kept them dependent on men.
Nonetheless, Galloway is sensible enough to recognize that, amid historic social upheaval and feminine uplift, our character-forming institutions have generally lost sight of a crucial question: What happens to boys and men when their proper function has become ambiguous? What happens when there is no moral direction or sense of high purpose imbued into them? At a time when boys are languishing academically and socially, Galloway does not mask the ominous trajectory of this widespread neglect: “There is nothing more dangerous,” he writes, “than a lonely, broke young man.”
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With due modesty, Galloway sketches a rough outline, not an instruction manual, about how to be “a responsible human flooded with testosterone.” This includes a grateful, and refreshingly bold, acknowledgment of male sex characteristics, which he lists as dominance, ambition, competition, confidence, skill, risk-taking—“anything that can help a man beat back competitors and attract a mate’s attention.” Instead of disparaging testosterone, let alone proposing to stifle it, he lauds the engine of masculinity for “winning wars and World Series.” When properly harnessed, it is a tremendous asset for civilization, and Galloway doesn’t shy away from saying so.
Notes on Being a Man is mostly a memoir of its author’s travails growing up in Southern California in the late 1960s and 1970s, the only son of a cash-strapped immigrant single mother. But it is meant to serve as a kind of self-help guide for young men who are alone and adrift, imploring them to spend as much time playing sports as watching them, to cultivate a strong work ethic, and to take up yoga in search of a mate. Galloway has become famous in certain quarters for dispensing countercultural advice—“don’t follow your passion” being a crowd favorite—and he recycles his greatest hits in his new book. Think Jordan Peterson for strivers and would-be entrepreneurs.
Galloway writes with a combination of effortlessness and grit, which makes for flashes of real humor and some penetrating cultural insights. However, the book is carried along by an endless series of vignettes, and this gives it a disjointed style that can at times make for hard sledding. There is also a fair amount of repetition—this reviewer lost count of how many times the author referred to himself, tediously, as a “straight white man.”
In the main, though, the book marshals compelling evidence on behalf of a worthwhile thesis: Boys and men are in crisis and in need of urgent help. Leaning heavily on research by the Brookings Institute scholar Richard Reeves, Galloway draws attention to a disturbing reality: Men are falling behind women across a range of measures, from college enrollment to employment rates to general life satisfaction. The decline in educational attainment and remunerative employment, along with a prohibitive real estate market, has cast legions of young men into a downward spiral of “social isolation, boredom, and ignorance.”
The statistics paint a grim picture. Sixty percent of men between the ages of 18 and 24 live with their parents, and, at age 30, 1 in 5 still live with their parents. What Galloway does not fully illuminate is how young men’s struggles in school and the marketplace have produced growing alienation between the sexes, especially when ancient gender ideals still hold sway. About 60 percent of Americans under the age of 35 live without a spouse or partner. Readers may be shocked to discover that, for the first time in more than a century, people under 35 are more likely to live with a parent than with a partner. The prospects don’t brighten appreciably with age. Almost one-third of middle-aged Americans, those who are 35 to 54, live without a partner.
This social bifurcation is rife with political implications, as American men and women vote more and more differently. (Even when they vote the same, it can be for diametrically opposed reasons.) The Republican Party has historically addressed the cultural grievances of American men, and this trend has grown much more pronounced in the age of Trump. In 2019, men were 13 points more likely to approve of President Trump than women—the largest presidential gender gap ever recorded. By 2024, between young men and women, the gap was 16 points—the biggest pivot from Democrats to Republicans of any age cohort. An election that was “supposed” to be a referendum on women’s rights, Galloway laments, was driven by “failing young men.” This can only propel a vicious cycle whereby tenacious male alienation aggravates the political polarization of the sexes, and the resulting frustration and incomprehension drive them still further apart.
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One component of a solution to the current plight of boys and young men is to lower the room temperature by evolving a view of the world beyond the Manichean struggle between Mars and Venus. Just as it was wrong to treat girls and women as “the other sex” for generations, reversing this formula at the expense of boys and men involves an equal injustice. We’d be better off heeding what Saul Bellow called “the universal eligibility to be noble” and granting each sex the space to flourish in accordance with its nature. This will require substituting the overriding concern in civil society to guard self-esteem with a more tough-minded emphasis on self-respect.
It’s clear that, in pursuit of a radical egalitarian ideal, America’s distinctly non-virile educational system punishes boys for the circumstance of being boys. In our schools, boys are regularly treated as if they were interchangeable with girls. Galloway impishly remarks that in some ways, boys are more akin to energetic dogs: If they aren’t worn out, they will cause trouble. Great efforts have been made to curb natural male tendencies and sensibilities. (To pluck a suggestive example, the old game of “tug-of-war,” where not banned outright, is now commonly rechristened “tug-of-peace” on playgrounds across America.) The problem doesn’t end after school lets out, given that an influential gender-equity movement regarding masculinity as inherently predatory animates much of the public square.
So long as American society does not bring itself to acknowledge that boys and girls are different—equal, but not the same—large numbers of each will continue to struggle in vain. It has long been suggested that recognizing important sex differences is liable to foster sexism and stereotypes. But it behooves us to consider the high price of continuing to indulge a Rousseauian romanticism that shames and thwarts the characteristic sensibilities of boys and men. If what the ancient Greeks called thumos—spiritedness—is stigmatized in male behavior, the other lifestyles beckoning young men may be much less agreeable, not least for women.
Since public esteem is no longer widely conferred on acts of gallantry and manly assertiveness, there is little incentive for men to make themselves worthy of such esteem. The more that men feel that no good deed goes unpunished, the more they will logically conclude that genuine courage and compassion are not worth the risk. Thus, they will abdicate their erstwhile role and responsibilities. By contrast, men who abjure risk and keep a low profile are disposed to reap lavish rewards.
Where have the good men gone? By and large, they have been rudely cast out of polite society. Those remaining are left with an unenviable choice between, on the one hand, a shrinking mediocrity that may at least offer the prospect of decent compensation and, on the other, a prolonged adolescence filled with trivial pursuits—from video games to drug use—to distract them from the cruelties of fate.
Unfortunately, Galloway does not really spell out this perverse incentive system, which is bizarre given how obvious and destructive it has become and since it furnishes irrefutable evidence for his case. Though his personal goodwill and sharp eye are equally manifest throughout this book, his limits as a social and political analyst are, in the end, no less apparent.
Despite these blemishes, Galloway deserves immense credit for fleshing out the broad contours of “an aspirational vision of masculinity.” To overlook that achievement would be—if you’ll forgive the expression—unmanly.
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