Sex, Power, and Vengeance

How #MeToo Contributed to the Fall of Liberalism and the Reactionary Upsurge

The NY Times published a list of words and terms banned or censored by the Trump administration: “The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents…. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included. In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban.” Orwellian!

In this series of essays, I hope to open a difficult conversation on the impact of the #metoo movement on American society. Unfortunately, inadvertently, #metoo contributed to the Right Wing takeover of the American government and the rapid growth of Right Wing media. I am not arguing against the necessity, importance, or inevitability of #Metoo: I am interested in what we learn from it and what we do now in the wake of it, particularly as we see unleashed “toxic masculinity” reshaping political and social structures in the U.S.

Most of the powerful men who were targeted by #metoo were liberals and progressives. Ironically, many were major political contributors and supporters of Feminist causes. Harvey Weinstein, to take one example, donated $100,000 to Rutgers University to fund a faculty position named after feminist icon Gloria Steinem. At the same time, he was hiring former Mossad agents to track his sexual assault victims and intimidate them into silence.

While a few of the men brought down by #metoo were outright predators like Weinstein or Bill Cosby, most were not so extreme. Some were manipulative and some were just immature. Most were far from being violent criminals. We can argue whether or not the punishment they received (losing their status and families, forfeiting their careers in many cases) fit their crimes. Certainly their behavior, once out in the open, revealed a wide gap of hypocrisy between their stated ideals and their actual lives. The problem is that the loss of a substantial proportion of charismatic progressive men due to #metoo created a bigger opening for the Right Wing “manosphere,” with young men offered fewer alternative role models and less media power on the side of progressives.

We can now see the fall of many charismatic and successful progressive men as a part of a larger crisis of liberalism, which Trump’s second victory has laid bare. In their private lives, liberal men failed to align their values and ideals with their actual behavior. We find the same dynamic in liberal politics.

While establishment Democrats claim to support working people, they actually serve the financial elites and their corporate donors. Until now, the Democrats have benefited from stagnant institutions and soft corruption (Hunter Biden’s cushy positions, Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio, and so on). Chuck Schumer is a prime example. After capitulating on Trump’s ruinous budget, Schumer went on a tour to promote his new book. Among Democratic leadership, an out-of-touch gerontocracy seeks to maintain their personal privilege and perks, above all else. They need to be removed from power.

With Trump, we now see what an activist President with an agenda can accomplish with the support of his party in Congress. Over the last decades, Democrats often controlled the government, but they weren’t even able to raise the minimum wage from a pathetic $7.50 an hour in twenty years. They couldn’t get decent healthcare for the people or pass the ERA.

Many progressive men — leaders in society, in media, politics, and other fields — tried to present themselves as evolved, caring, and feminist. #Metoo revealed this was a lie. They hadn’t done the necessary inner work to evolve their patterns and unconscious beliefs around sex, power, and responsibility. At the same time, those patterns and beliefs were not theirs alone. They were inscribed into the cultural and social codes of Western civilization as it has developed over hundreds or even thousands of years.

People sense hypocrisy. In 2024, many millions chose the brutal “authenticity” of Trump and the Right over the soft corruption of the liberal establishment. The actual policies of the Right will wreak havoc on them and the country. But Trump, at least, was honest about being a monstrous misogynist and cheater who doesn’t pay his taxes or care about people. The Democrats tried to conceal their lies and failures of character, projecting a phony moral authority.

Now we find ourselves in a vicious cul de sac around gender roles, sex, politics, and power in the U.S. The crisis of masculinity and male anger at women’s increasing power underlies the Right’s calling forth of collective urges toward violence and retribution. The gender war is an integral part of the massive social regression underway in the U.S. I feel we need to understand the situation in its full, multidimensional complexity. We must understand what has happened and why, or we won’t be able to act effectively. Without fighting back, we will soon see Orwellian controls imposed on American society, which AI-based surveillance could make inescapable.

My goal is to help men and women unite against this force of destruction that threatens our collective future, not only in the US but globally, when we consider the ecological crisis, which the Right Wing disregards. This requires overcoming old patterns and animosities and finding forgiveness so we can move on. Men need to do the difficult inner work of initiation, define new archetypes for positive masculinity, and align around redefined goals and values. Women have already built networks of communication around different areas and affinities, such as yoga or career support, but these are often apolitical and lack a systemic critique. Considering the threat we face, those networks could be infused with a new political consciousness and repurposed for activism.

Since the 1960s, Western societies underwent a profound transformation in the role and visibility of women, propelled by the second-wave feminist movement, the sexual revolution, and increasing access to education and professional opportunities. Women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, overcoming institutionalized sexism. They demanded autonomy over their bodies and identities. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This captured the new belief that gender roles are not innate but socially constructed — and, therefore, mutable.

Since the 1970s, there was a quiet revolution in education and employment for women in the West. Women now far surpass men in high school GPA and college graduation rates — in the U.S., for example, women have earned more bachelor's degrees than men every year since 1982. In 2021, they accounted for nearly 60% of all college graduates. While the gender pay gap persists, it narrowed significantly — from 62 cents on the dollar in 1979 to around 82 cents by 2022.

In entrepreneurship, women are outperforming men. According to a 2023 report by Forbes, women-led startups deliver more than twice the return on investment as those founded by men, despite receiving less funding. The number of women-owned businesses in the U.S. has grown by over 100% in the past 20 years, despite only a 12% increase for businesses overall.

Over decades, achievements such as Roe v. Wade (1973), Title IX (1972 law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance), and the rise of feminist voices in literature, media, and politics seemed to suggest an inexorable trend toward equality. The cultural gains of the 1990s and 2000s — from the normalization of women in leadership roles to the emergence of intersectional feminism — seemed like irreversible trends toward women’s power and a remaking of gender dynamics.

The reelection of Donald Trump represents a drastic regression. We witness a psychic and political recoil against the perceived gains of feminism and multiculturalism. Trump's popularity is partly, if not largely, a result of his overt misogyny.

Fueled by resentment and cultural anxiety, this reactionary sentiment is rolling back social advances via populism, nationalism, focus on toxic masculine traits such as bullying, and the defense of faux Christian "traditional values." The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and the ideologues behind Project 2025 seek a nationwide ban on abortion. They also want to outlaw contraception and IVF treatments, seeking to make young women into baby-making machines once again and actualize The Handmaid’s Tale.

Since the 1970s, as women surged forward in education, employment, and public life, a quieter, less acknowledged unraveling took place among boys and men — some have called it the “boy crisis.” Warren Farrell, once a leading figure in the feminist movement and now a prominent critic of its blind spots, argues in The Boy Crisis (co-authored with John Gray) that boys have been left behind in an era of shifting gender roles.

“When boys are hurting,” Farrell writes, “they either withdraw into depression or lash out with violence.”

He points to alarming data: boys are more likely to drop out of school, less likely to attend or graduate from college, and far more likely to suffer from suicide, drug addiction, and incarceration. Farrell notes that one major root of the crisis is the “dad deficit” — the lack of strong, positive male role models due to rising divorce rates and the decline of father involvement. Boys, he argues, suffer disproportionately from the breakdown of traditional family structures, and schools often fail to engage their learning styles, while cultural narratives increasingly frame masculinity as toxic rather than essential.

Psychologists and social scientists echo these concerns from various angles. Richard Reeves, in Of Boys and Men (2022), analyzes data showing that in nearly every advanced economy, boys are falling behind in school, mental health, and economic mobility. “We need a positive vision of masculinity,” Reeves notes, “one that recognizes male struggles without reverting to outdated patriarchal norms.” The economy has shifted away from manual and industrial labor toward knowledge and service jobs — sectors where women tend to excel — while boys are less socially prepared or institutionally supported to adapt. “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges,” he writes.

Traditional male virtues like stoicism and competitiveness, once seen as strengths, are now often perceived as liabilities. Moreover, many boys grow up without clear rites of passage or cultural messages about what it means to be a man in the modern world. The result is a generation of lost and alienated young men — unsure of their place in a world that seems to celebrate women’s success but offers men little purpose or sense of intrinsic value. A lot of these men are turning toward the reactionary Right. Trump brought Andrew Tate back to the U.S., installing him in Florida with Russell Brand, to be “Catchers in the Rye” for the lost boys.

According to neuropsychologists, there are modest, average differences in male and female brain organization that contribute to behavioral tendencies. Women generally show greater connectivity between the brain’s hemispheres and more activation in emotional processing areas like the limbic system. This supports skills in empathy, communication, and social cognition. Men, on average, tend to have more intra-hemispheric connectivity, which lends itself to focused, spatial, or task-oriented behaviors.

Hormones also play a role: oxytocin, which promotes bonding and care, interacts with estrogen to shape affiliative tendencies. Testosterone exacerbates risk-taking and dominance behaviors. However, neuroscientists emphasize that these biological patterns are shaped by culture, upbringing, and social expectations. According to neuropsychologist Lise Eliot: “The truth is, there is no such thing as a ‘male brain’ or a ‘female brain’ — there are individual brains, with vast overlap in all their features.” That may be true, but there is no doubt that women, as a whole, have a much greater tendency toward emotional expression while men often suppress their feelings or lack language to explore them. Biology doesn’t determine destiny, but it tilts the scales.

In an increasingly pacified society where networks of communication play a larger role, we find that women, with their orientation toward care and connection, have innate advantages over men, who tend toward competition and violence. Individuals, classes, social groups, and genders do not relinquish power willingly. We can see the reactionary resurgence with Trump and the Christian Nationalists as a massive rearguard attempt to assert masculine dominance and undo a century’s worth of progress for women and minorities — a massive temper tantrum with potentially severe global consequences. It is not surprising that they are beating the drums of war and invasion again, as that seems to follow inevitably when societies deteriorate back into authoritarian repression.

This has gotten super long! I will return to the subject next time. Please let me know your thiouhgts and ideas in the comments.