<em>The Atlantic</em>’s June Cover: Helen Lewis on “The Men Who Don't Want Women to Vote”
· The Atlantic
For The Atlantic’s June issue cover story, “The Men Who Don't Want Women to Vote,” staff writer Helen Lewis reports on the rise of “masculinism,” a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men. Lewis argues that multiple strains of anti-feminism—from the Christian right, from the manosphere, and from Donald Trump—have coalesced and become a new and potent force in American political life: “Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.”
Lewis writes that, like most popular movements, masculinism has many entry points, and both defensible and alarming forms: “At one end of the spectrum are legitimate concerns about male loneliness, the declining share of men in higher education, stagnant wages for non-college-educated men, and the deadening effects of day-trading, gaming, and porn.” At the other end of masculinism, Lewis writes, is a political agenda close to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, whereby women are denied the right to work, vote, and control their own body. The policy goals of masculinism’s proponents are very real: the rollback of no-fault divorce; tax breaks to reward male breadwinners and female homemakers; an end to anything with a whiff of DEI, even leadership programs for women in the military, including one cut by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; a return to the workplace culture of the 1970s, where sexual harassment was normalized; an open preference for male employees in hiring, promotion, and pay awards. “In other words, affirmative action for men,” Lewis writes.
For the cover story, Lewis spoke with prominent figures in masculinist circles, including Douglas Wilson, a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, who has built a small empire dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States (one of the denomination’s 170 affiliated churches counts Pete Hegseth as a member). Lewis also interviewed the manosphere provocateur Charles Cornish-Dale, a religious historian who has studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, and who is known online as Raw Egg Nationalist; Joel Webbon, a hard-right pastor based in Austin who has built a large social-media following by opposing feminism and the “LGBT Mafia”; and Helen Andrews, who wrote a viral 2025 essay that questioned whether greater female participation in the workforce is a “threat to civilization.” Additionally, she writes about such prominent masculinists as Scott Yenor, who has declared that modern women are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome,” and since 2000 has taught political philosophy at Boise State University.
Lewis concludes that masculinism “functions as a perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo—whatever that currently is. Masculinism is both serious and silly, sometimes camp and sometimes chilling, an attention-grabbing performance and a genuine proposition. No wonder it has become the cornerstone of Trumpism.”
Helen Lewis’s “The Men Who Don't Want Women to Vote” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.
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