As news coverage of masculinity grows, feminist experts are left out

A quick search of the New York Times for mentions of “manosphere” returns over 900 results since the start of 2024, more than three times the number in the eight years prior. The Times built an internal “Manosphere Report” tool using large language models to track the ecosystem of narrow, patriarchal views online. They’re not alone in their curiosity: Alongside news organizations, major podcasts, documentaries, and best-selling books are examining the behavior and beliefs of men. 

But the tenor of these discussions has changed perceptibly in recent years alongside that increase in interest, Evette Dionne, the former editor-in-chief of Bitch Magazine, said. 

“The absence and destruction of feminist media and independent media has definitely impacted who is in the space talking about gender, and more specifically, the kinds of conversations that are happening,” Dionne said.

Bitch Magazine, which shuttered in 2022, is just one of the many independent publishers of feminist cultural critique and reporting, including Jezebel, Wear Your Voice, The Establishment, Broadly, and The Lily, that have either closed or been acquired by larger corporations in the past decade. With disappearing digital publications have gone important works. 

A practical outcome of this loss has been a lack of space for, or ignoring of, radical Black feminist and queer writers, as writer Hari Ziyad recently highlighted regarding their Afropunk essay, “My Gender is Black.” Women in general are only a quarter of news subjects and sources globally, and their leadership in U.S. newsrooms has specifically declined since 2024. Black women, as well as trans and gender-nonconforming journalists, are further marginalized across the media.

“The loss of those publications and a critical public forum like Twitter,” Dionne adds, “leads us to a place where there’s an absence [and] something else will fill it.” 

Feminist writers see this destruction of feminist and independent media, coupled with a lack of interrogation about history and science, as moving the Overton window — or what is considered publicly acceptable discourse — on masculinity, gender, and sex, rightward as anti-trans ballot measures gain traction. And the opinions of moderate and conservative men, which may have previously received more pushback and less visibility, are increasingly accepted as the norm: A 2025 study by Equimundo found U.S. men’s “views about masculinity” have become “more restrictive” since 2017. 

Though bell hooks wrote Feminism is for Everybody more than two decades ago, and defunct publications like Feministing published hundreds of articles on masculinity in the 2010s, several men writing on masculinity are arguing that the movement for gender liberation forgot about men.

Father and multimillionaire Scott Galloway, who confesses he has “no training on the subject of boys and men” near the start of his 2025 self-help memoir Notes on Being a Man, claimed in a Times op-ed in August that “America abandoned its ‘unremarkable’ young men.” 

Richard Reeves, whom Galloway calls his “Yoda” on masculinity, penned “The Boys Feminism Left Behind” for Bari Weiss’ The Free Press in 2022 — a year before he founded the American Institute for Boys and Men. He also wrote Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, which appeared on Barack Obama’s recommended reading list in 2024.

While his work is now cited by white men in Congress and in even more new books about masculinity, Reeves rarely cites hooks or many of the other Black, Indigenous, or otherwise anticolonial feminists who have been writing about masculinities since at least the 1970s. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality appears in a single chapter of Of Boys and Men in relation to “plural identities” and situational disadvantages of Black men, rather than to draw attention to interlocking social systems of oppression. 

When Reeves appeared on The Daily Show last year, he noted the surging interest in his work since the 2024 election of Donald Trump. Yet Akiba Solomon, a senior editor at The Marshall Project since 2019 and co-author of How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance, sees the atomization of issues and writers contributing to a backlash to racial justice going back further than 2024.

From 2011 to 2019, Solomon worked in various editorial roles at Colorlines, a publication focused on race, culture, and politics from the perspective of communities of color, including writing a column titled “Gender Matters.” 

While Colorlines allowed her to cover “multiple movements” in a way that, for example, connected “Native midwives … to Black midwives and the erosion of women’s choice,” she said the broader mainstream media then, as it does now, resisted the approach. 

Solomon now connects that longstanding fear of intersectionality to subsequent cuts to DEI programs and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs for Black women since 2024, which she said is among other state-backed “moves toward maintaining white supremacy.” 

In the 1965 Moynihan Report, Daniel Patrick Moynihan blamed Black family structures for poverty and joblessness in Black communities and inspired the phrase “blaming the victim”, which was coined in a 1971 response. 

Of Boys and Men author Reeves’ sole citation of Crenshaw comes in the same chapter as his cosign of the report. Writer Ericka Hart sees a throughline between the Moynihan Report’s racist and sexist analysis, which she called supported by “long-debunked misogynoiristic semi-pseudo-science,” and writers like Reeves and Galloway’s proposed solutions to the so-called “crisis of masculinity.”

Reeves says gender inequalities now go “in both directions”, emphasizing a binary framing that largely ignores gender-nonconforming people and demanding more social pathways for men to embrace what Galloway calls the three pillars of manhood: their need to “provide, protect, and procreate.” They both denounce concepts like “toxic masculinity” as responsible for shaming young men into anti-social behavior and contributing to their propensity for self-harm.

Historically, this type of biological essentialism has been linked by scholars to white supremacist patriarchy. 

Hart wrote about the intersection of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy in her book Nasty Work: Resist Systems, Explore Desire, and Liberate Yourself, and sees a larger pattern in the platforms being given to white men like Reeves today to opine about gender. 

“He [Reeves] appears to be celebrated in the white mainstream media precisely because he hearkens to one of the most common and relatable themes among cis men and boys of all races: a hatred of Black women, femmes and girls,” Hart said, describing the “male loneliness epidemic” as part of “state-mandated strategy to further transphobic and anti-Black tropes.” 

Reeves and Galloway are joined by many commentators and pop psychologists like Jordan Peterson who point to testosterone as that defining factor in differentiating men — now echoed in official U.S. military policy. But this theory has been widely debunked by anthropologists and scientists who have documented the history of the hormone intentionally being linked to masculinity as early as the nineteenth century to further the devaluation of women.

Six out of the seven ballot measures seeking to limit trans girls’ involvement in sports and trans youths’ ability to access gender-affirming care have passed in the 2026 midterm elections. Hart also linked a broader obsession with trans people in sports — or the media coverage of and number of bills dedicated to excluding them — to the broader desire for cisgender men to remain in power. 

“To maintain this, the fallacy that cisgender men are inherently powerful, strong, athletic providers needs to be upheld,” Hart said. 

Galloway, on the popular Vox Media podcast, Raging Moderates, which he co-hosts with Jessica Tarlov, has praised President Trump for “bringing T back to leadership” and understanding that “the government is increasingly being feminized.” Tarlov is also an occasional co-host of The Five on Fox News, anchored by right-wing commentator Jesse Watters, who once described fights for trans rights and the #MeToo movement as part of a period of “mass psychosis culturally in the United States” which “we've finally snapped out of.”

“Once [the media] comes up with a framing, then the question is always going to become ‘Has this gone too far?’,” Solomon said, reflecting on the backlash to Black women’s organizing efforts over the past ten years. 

While sexism and patriarchy never went away, she added, “now that we’ve all metabolized #MeToo and people have tried to turn it into a cliche, that really distorts the original intent of the movement … [as] a survivor-centered movement.” 

Black feminist and queer writers continue to work independently to capture the full nuance of intersections between race, gender, sex, and society as mainstream news organizations face critique for their reporting on sexual violence in Palestine and coverage of trans communities. 

Dionne, for instance, helped found The Flytrap in 2025, “a worker-owned, intersectional, and expansive feminist media group.” New publications like Hammer & Hope, co-founded by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, have popped up and old ones, like The Rumpus, have returned with new leadership. And Hart, in addition to promoting Nasty Work, regularly posts a variety of challenging and educational content to a large, engaged social media following.   

Ziyad, whose work was initially lost when Afropunk’s URL was sold at auction this year, has begun re-posting that writing to a personal Substack — including “My Gender is Black.”

“Gender identity under whiteness is a tool, not an end,” Ziyad wrote. “How do we get to that end, that world in which all of our genders or lack thereof aren’t used as the basis for our inhuman treatment? That is the question.”

Imran Siddiquee (they/them) is a writer and filmmaker based in Philadelphia.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Jen Ramos Eisen.