What is really behind the present backlash against the ‘woke agenda’ and the ‘crisis of masculinity’?
Last Wednesday I led a discussion group for professionals. I was joined by an imam from Burundi, an activist from Malta, and a Dutch veteran of gender justice. We read and discussed a recent report by the MenEngage Alliance, titled ‘Resisting Backlash’. You can watch the whole panel here. Below are my reflections from it.
How hard is it to move on?
As long as there have been movements advocating for equality, there has been a backlash against them. It doesn’t matter if it’s about feminism, wokeness, racial equality, or slavery, there have always been people who argue against progress, saying it ‘destroys our traditions’ and ‘corrupts the youth.’ The ferocity of the current backlash is testament to how much progress we have achieved.
One of the main narratives of the backlash, one that galvanises its male base, is that ‘men have been left behind.’ That’s a nice catchphrase. Let’s unpack it.
I think that it’s true that when traditional social structures started changing to take into account that women are humans, too, men lost not just a claim to privileges but also their life coordinates. They once knew the answers to questions such as what am I for? or how should I behave? Now, they’re told that those answers are wrong and they should instead reinvent themselves in a new world. Many don’t want to – and so it’s not that they were left behind – they are leaving themselves behind by refusing to move forward.
Now, the problem is that reinventing yourself in the new world sounds empowering until you try it. Especially if you didn’t have the class privilege of a good education, spare time, or financial stability. You know, the privilege that people who talk a lot about intersectionality tend to somehow forget, as they discuss the details of feminist theory they picked up at the uni their parents paid for, sipping 9$ almond milk lattes in metropolitan city cafes, during the flexible lunch breaks of their remote jobs.
Finding meaning is hard work. Not everyone has the capacity to spend their evenings reviewing everything culture told them they should be. And thus, there emerges a hot market of all the men who have failed to move on and left themselves behind – and who would rather somebody gave them a new direction, instead of working it out themselves.
Is it surprising that many do? Promising answers is good business. They tell men who they are, who robbed them of that identity, and how to reclaim it — ideally by subscribing, donating, or voting the right way. Their worldview is simple enough to tweet: you were strong until feminism, righteous until wokeism, centred until diversity. They strip away all complexity, but offer certainty, clarity, and belonging. The remarkable thing is how well this works.
The real culprits are the ones selling solutions
The reactionary movements always get the diagnosis roughly right. They recognise the anxiety, the dislocation, the exhaustion men experience. And then… they point at the wrong cause and sell you the wrong solution. They tell you that you’re right to feel cheated and that it’s all their fault. Who are ‘they’? Whoever makes a good scapegoat: trans people, queer people, the ‘woke agenda’.
Disorientation easily turns into grievance. When men lose status, the market tells them to try harder; politics tells them to check their privilege; social media tells them to build their brand. None of these restore dignity. And when legitimate economic frustration is left without a convincing political explanation, it happily migrates into the cultural sphere, where somebody will be blamed for it soon enough.
Backlash, then, isn’t simply a response to feminism; it’s the emotional sediment of an economic order that has exhausted its promises. It feeds on the gap between how life feels and how it’s advertised. The targets change — women, migrants, “elites,” trans people — but the mechanism stays the same. Anger sells because anger feels like agency.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as cultural regression, but a subtler force is at play: neoliberalism. For half a century, our economies have been telling people that competition is freedom and precariousness is meritocracy. We dismantled stability and rebranded it as flexibility. The result is a generation of men who were told to be entrepreneurs of the self but were never given capital — social, emotional, or financial — to start the business.
The ironic thing is that the reason why they don’t have that capital is because it was taken away by a bunch of rich people who fill their pockets at our expense and call it ‘neoliberal economics.’ They want the dominance-based culture to prevail, because they are on top of the food chain – and so they fuel the backlash, misdirecting men’s anger at their genuinely precarious situation towards scapegoats. And telling them that they need to double back on supporting the dominance-based system which makes them miserable, simply because it’s more ‘manly’ to do so.
Why does the Left keep failing?
The cultural and political Left seems somehow incapable to effectively respond to all this. It mostly fails on a purely rhetorical level. The right offers stories; we offer reports. They give people villains; we give them data. It’s a mismatch of genres. The conservative narrative of manhood — heroic, embattled, simple — fits neatly into a video reel. The progressive one — plural, relational, contingent — struggles to fit into a book.
But clarity doesn’t have to mean crudity. We can tell better stories too, ones that admit complexity without requiring a degree in gender studies. For instance: men are not “left behind” by equality; many are simply stuck in a system that offers them no dignified role except dominance. The way out is not a retreat to old hierarchies but an update of the script — strength redefined as reliability, pride redefined as integrity, success redefined as contribution. It’s not less masculine; it’s just less brittle.
It was great to have a Muslim imam in our discussion group – he made a striking point: when he preaches women’s rights from Islamic sources, people in Burundi accuse him of importing Western ideas. Yet the Qur’an, properly read, granted those rights centuries ago. What provokes the backlash isn’t the content of equality but the loss of control it symbolises. Patriarchy, after all, is not the rule of men in general — it is the rule of a few men over everyone else. Most of its supposed beneficiaries are merely just a little bit less screwed over by it.
There is a great opportunity there for the Progressives. Men are suffering. They have real problems. They are sold ‘solutions’ that don’t work. They are made to support the system that oppresses them. The Right doesn’t really listen to men – it just sells them quick fixes and gives them someone to blame.
We should instead really listen to men, to what they struggle with, and then give them better solutions. Ones that directly benefit them and also build a better system. Or better – give them the tools to find those solutions themselves.
And for heaven’s sake, make them simple.
This reflection is based on a recorded discussion I had at the first “Discussing Men” reading group. My thanks to Aleks, Edouard and Jan for the thoughts that shaped these pages. You can watch the full discussion here:
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