In her new book, What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything, feminist author Jessa Crispin explores the crisis facing modern men. 

Men these days are falling behind. It’s evident in education, the labor market, and in the data on drug overdoses and increasing deaths by suicide. As podcast host Seth Illing recently said, “We have an alarming number of lonely, alienated, and disaffected young men in this country. And whatever the reasons for that, this is something we have to deal with as a society.”

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In What is Wrong with Men, Crispin sees a solution in dismantling the “patriarchy” and “unlearn[ing] habits” that leave both men and women unhappy. People have to focus less on competition and winners and losers and more on providing for schools, the poor, and the working class. They have to get over greed.

So, where does the actor Michael Douglas fit in? According to Crispin, the movies Douglas made in the 1980s and 1990s reflected the confusion and panic men felt as society changed around them. “The goal was no longer to be a good, respectable family man,” Crispin writes, “carrying on the patriarchal traditions of generations past. Not only was it becoming unfashionable, but increasingly difficult: the economic and political shifts—a slashed social safety net, globalization—made it harder to find a breadwinning income, a stable home life, and a secure place in the public sphere.”

In movies such as Fatal Attraction, Wall Street, and Basic Instinct, Douglas “was our president, our Wall Street overlord, our mass shooter, our failed husband, our midlife crisis, our cop, and our canary in the patriarchal coal mine. His characters were a mirror of our cultural shift, serving as the foundation for everything from the 1994 Crime Bill to Trump’s ultimate rise.” 

This is an interesting argument, reflecting the current reality that the academic Left and the populist Right both support the American working class. 

However, Crispin is on less solid ground when she starts making the very arguments that drove the working class away from the Democrats. “Gender is a performance,” she writes. “While this was a radical idea when Simone de Beauvoir mainstreamed it in her 1949 philosophical feminist masterpiece The Second Sex, it’s become generally accepted thanks to the work of feminist thinkers who followed and the widespread introduction of gender studies classes in universities throughout the 1970s. Gender is a role that we play in order to get along in society and achieve our goals and desires.”

Pages later, Crispin notes that in one liberal podcast, “the hosts let out nervous giggles almost every time they use the words ‘manliness’ and ‘masculinity’ in a way they would never do before saying ‘femininity.’ The political left has spent decades theorizing and conceptualizing womanhood, Blackness, homosexuality, and transness. But the idea of understanding something like whiteness or masculinity from an insider position—rather than as part of a critique from an outsider—remains taboo.”

So, gender is a social construct, but liberals desperately need to appeal to the innate masculinity of regular men.

Understanding masculinity remains taboo because, for the modern Left, oftentimes reality itself is taboo. Gender is not a “social construct” or a “performance.” It is something hard-wired into us. Men are naturally protectors; the best seek honor in defending their families, countries, and tribes. The best of them hate bullies and protect the weak. It’s telling that in What’s Wrong With Men, Crispin never mentions transgender women taking over women’s sports and invading their bathrooms. This offends men so deeply because they feel that elite society is not allowing them to protect vulnerable women.

A better cinematic model for our age might not be Michael Douglas’s characters, but Rick Deckard (portrayed by Harrison Ford), the robot in the classic 1982 science fiction movie Blade Runner. Deckard is a replicant, a genetically engineered android “more human than human.” In a dystopian future, replicants were created for slave labor, military operations, and pleasure — i.e., the working class. In Blade Runner, the replicants are more fully alive than the humans, who seem anonymous in the dark future world of Los Angeles. The replicants express anger, sarcasm, and wit. Their faces convey more emotion than their creators, which is one reason why they must be retired.

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In short, they are more like the real, sweaty, hurting, romantic, yearning, and human modern-age men in the digital, feminist, post-patriarchal, and porn-saturated world. Replicants are the last bastions of masculine honor. This explains why, at the end of Blade Runner, a weak but fully human police officer says to Deckard, the android who had to dispatch a threat violently, “You’ve done a man’s job.”  

He had to. No one else could.