I get my news from the Wall Street Journal morning podcast because it makes me feel like a professional adult. The ringing tones of the opening music are like the smell of coffee on Monday morning: a jolt of productivity and responsibility, the feeling of being among other professional adults as they close their briefcases, straighten their ties, check their watches, and board the morning train.
It is because of the Wall Street Journal morning podcast that I know the name of the chair of the Federal Reserve: Jerome Powell. On August 26th, Jerome Powell warned the American public that “some pain” might be caused by the Fed’s hard stance on interest rates. The Fed has been trying to bring runaway inflation down for some time, and its tool for this purpose is raising interest rates. So it has been hiking them, and Jerome Powell warned on August 26th that it did not intend to stop.
The Fed is attempting a “soft landing” in which inflation slows. If they aren’t careful, though, they could cause a recession—which in the Fed’s view is not as bad as runaway inflation.
The response to Powell’s announcement was that stock indexes declined immediately. This is a recurring theme of the Wall Street Journal morning podcast: people telling other people things has an effect on real life (if stocks are real life). It occurred to me at the time that Powell’s announcement was a powerfully indirect action: nothing had happened, but his warning of “some pain” was causing some pain, as well as perhaps fending off the inflation he feared. Whether or not he followed through on his warnings, they were somehow having an effect.
The Federal Reserve is a major part of the system known as “fiat currency.” Since there is no longer any country with a “gold standard,” currency backed by the government’s physical holdings of gold, all government currencies are now “fiat currencies.” From the Latin “fiat,” which basically means “let it be,” these currencies are valuable because the government says they are valuable. This is how announcements like Powell’s can have such a big effect—the value of money is volatile. This is the underlying experience one has when listening to the Wall Street Journal morning podcast over a period of weeks or months: that “vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” and what comes up one day will come down another. (Incidentally, this is especially true of cryptocurrency, which is not a “fiat” currency but which tends to fluctuate wildly nonetheless, especially during the crash this year, depicted in the charts below.)
On August 9, Psychology Today published an article that stirred up much discussion: “The Rise of Lonely, Single Men.” In the piece, Greg Matos, PsyD, observed: “Younger and middle-aged men are the loneliest they’ve been in generations, and it’s probably going to get worse.” Matos proposed a few possible reasons for this documented phenomenon, including the fact that more men than women use dating apps, relationship standards are rising, and there is often an emotional skills deficit in men in comparison with women.
It could be argued, though, that all these really boil down to the “relationship standards are rising” point: feminine disillusionment with dating apps has to do with what they see as an attractive dating pool, and Matos also admits that the emotional skills deficit is a problem because “There’s less patience for poor communication skills today.” The article took a charitable approach to these problems, suggesting that an option for men is to “level up your mental health game” in order to connect emotionally with a potential partner.
Whether you see this phenomenon positively or negatively, and whether you place the focus on men (as the article did) or on women, it seems clear from the piece that women set the stakes for romantic relationships in the modern age. Women are the “fiat” behind the “fiat currency” of these relationships, and “the rise of lonely, single men” is, perhaps, like the slump in the stock market or the crypto crash. Women’s standards are rising like the interest on millennials’ elusive mortgage loans. In response, some men are feeling helpless and acting out those feelings in offensive or even violent ways.
Psychologist Jordan Peterson is well-known for insisting that women are in the choosing seat in the dynamic between gender roles—or rather for distortions of his thoughts on this point. In a New York Times piece photographed with an even more sinister aesthetic than the one on Hillsdale, a skeptical and detached reporter interviews an earnest and almost desperate Peterson, who says that part of what is upsetting modern men is their failure in relationships with women: about half of them never reproduce, “And no one cares about the men who fail.”
Peterson’s solutions to the problem of “incels”—men who consider themselves “involuntarily celibate” because of repeated romantic failures, and who often become violent or misogynistic as a result—include recommendations like “stand up straight with your shoulders back” and “set your house in order before you criticize the world.” (These are from Peterson’s bestselling book Twelve Rules for Life, which though it isn’t incel-specific is part of Peterson’s body of work partly intended to encourage and rehabilitate such men.) Peterson is also known for encouraging young men to make their beds and take responsibility.
In other words, Peterson’s recommendation for men who are involuntarily single is like the advice of Psychology Today: perhaps they can make themselves more eligible. It is hardly the “enforced monogamy” that the Times caricatures Peterson as advocating, though he does argue for socially-encouraged monogamy.
Which is certainly better than shocking acts of violence. “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Peterson said of the self-described “incel” who killed 11 people in 2018. Incel discourse online can be deeply disturbing. Peterson offers an alternative, encouraging men to move from an existence marked by loneliness and self-destruction to some sort of agency: and it seems to work. The Times observes: “Those with V.I.P. tickets get to shake his hand and take a picture. Many tell him something as they stand, waiting for the flash: ‘You made me have a religious experience’; ‘we got back in our faith because of you’; ‘this is another wedding you can take credit for.’”
It’s been a commonplace in conservative media for some time that society is suffering from some sort of “masculinity crisis,” and this observation is increasingly common in mainstream and left-leaning outlets as well. The solutions for this, if solutions can be found, are certainly complex. Many are facing the question from the masculinity front: what can men do? Another question arises if femininity is like the Federal Reserve: what can women do?
While many articles are inclined to hand out blame to women in some form, they tend not to emphasize the power of women: the subtitle of the Times piece, “Why won’t women . . . just behave?” is a caricature, but one sometimes does find that when women are brought into the conversation about the “masculinity crisis” they are brought in almost as passive objects, as a pacifying force like the women sent after the men of the Gold Rush. Peterson leaves himself open to this critique by sticking so faithfully to the scientific literature that stable relationships civilize men.
This feeds into a temptation in feminine modernity to unduly read oneself into the life of a 1950s housewife or financially dependent Jane Austen character. Sometimes contemporary women, influenced by The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s disowned The Feminine Mystique, may begin to accidentally subscribe to a victim mindset in which men are constantly hampering their success, leeching emotional labor from them, being selfish and helpless. There have been many times in history when life for women was restricted in various forms, especially financially and educationally (Peterson’s sunny view of 1950s housewives, by the way, is not compelling, but it’s not his area of expertise—or mine, for that matter).
Challenges facing women are far from over, but by reading themselves into The Feminine Mystique or Pride and Prejudice women could miss a fact of gender relations that seems truer now than ever: the power of selection lies with them, alongside much more freedom than they had when they needed men around to protect them from bears or destitution.
The lack of bears in most of modern society is an almost unmitigated good, and the capacity for women to provide for themselves is certainly to be celebrated. But one must admit that the game has become a bit unfair. Women hold almost all the cards; they set the stakes for the game that men play, while men must quickly shift their attention from bears to therapy, from providing for a family to building their communication skills.
They can certainly do it, and perhaps romantic relationships in general will improve as a result—but in the meantime, women have some difficult decisions to make. They are urged in every direction: be more selective, be less selective, marry the next person who comes along, don’t marry anyone. The responsibility in women’s hands is like the responsibility in the hands of Jerome Powell. What to do is, as I imagine it is for the Federal Reserve, not always clear.
Perhaps we will come out on the other side of the “masculinity crisis” with a stronger “currency,” with relationships between men and women bolstered by the taking of responsibility and the going to therapy; or perhaps we are in a 2008 crash of the masculine-feminine dynamic, and we will simply have to ride out the storm.
Come back next Friday: to find out why a small Midwestern town is like a sitcom.
In honor of: Dubious Analogies’ one subscriber on Twitter, here’s the story of a kid who hacked the president’s Twitter account to promote a crypto scam. (We trust you, Chris.)
Don’t forget: that the government still hasn’t decided whether we’re doing Daylight Savings time anymore or not.