We’ve Made a Mess of Masculinity, but I Believe It Can Change

My partner and I go to the movies. The theater and our conversations after, on the drive home or at the bar where we’re regulars, this routine is our most consistent intimacy.

We are in couples therapy, have been for many years now. The current cadence is once a month. In this season of my 30s, dry and lacking direction like I’m in the deep desert of Arrakis, a month can feel like a year. So much effort but no change. All pain and no gain.

Powerless, like many men tell us they feel.

Not long ago, after hours of writing classes on Zoom, I sat down for our telehealth session needing to talk about how the two of us can be in the same room, refilling the Brita, emptying the dryer, and I can feel totally alone. It’s made worse that we feel like soulmates when my childhood wounds aren’t inflamed.

Our therapist started by asking if there was anything either of us wanted to discuss. I rubbed my eyes, fake-smiled, and said no.

Lying, as dudes do about height, dick size, drugging wives.

The couples therapist asked how it’s going with my writing career. This annoyed me, the need to download him on the bad news, to re-process what I’d processed to pieces with his colleague, my individual therapist Matthew. As I replied about agent this, editors that, and he asked questions that I thought would lead to validation, I closed my eyes, tired from screen time. I knew I was being rude, but I had the excuse of the classes, self-improvement, I was being a good man. He asked if I was okay, said that something felt off with me.

Annoyed with the line of questioning, feeling like he wanted me to blink, I said, “Are you prompting me to talk about the suicide stuff? I’ve talked to Matthew about it. He said he’d pass it on to you. I had to sign a form and everything.”

“Oh! No,” he said, likely shocked but acting composed. “It’s the first time I’m hearing about it.”

I no longer doubt the quality of my writing, the value of what I have to say.

So I talked about the weeks of suicide ideation. I used the phrase “end of my rope,” which felt macabre, on the nose, I don’t know. I’d told my other therapist and my partner on separate occasions, but this time, in a Zoom room of three, I was both more detailed about those weeks in the hole (when I was alone, disassociating in traffic, I’d imagine crashing into the divider) and more keen on assuring them that I was okay (our therapist asked me to imagine what would cross my mind the second before impact and I said how foreign the thought experiment felt, more proof that I hadn’t gone farther than thinking about it; then I said I don’t know, maybe that I’d die and it wouldn’t really matter).

Those weeks when the thoughts flitted like flies, I felt out of hope and cut off from purpose. I’d done everything I was supposed to do to publish a book. I’d put in the work, paid my dues. I had tried to make a difference, be great. Was I not good enough or was this injustice? Is it a liability to be an Asian man? I thought society didn’t care about people like me. I believed it was easier for Asian women to publish. I had a hard time telling up from down.

Every time I reach the next rung of the ladder, it breaks and I fall to the ground. Rejection’s broken my back a few times. With the help of my therapists and partner of 10 years, I’ve pieced my spine together straighter and sturdier. I no longer doubt the quality of my writing, the value of what I have to say. I believe in the merit of my work. What hurts most this time is the lesson that merit doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t guarantee a book. Nice sentences and a message don’t count when “the market” wants “easy” and “light.” Can you blame anybody? Things are heavy and hard. My friends tell me to keep going, but I’m not strong enough to hang in there much longer.

That’s the fear, at least. After all, am I really a man? I like dicks and quads and pecs. I love a good handbag. Once in a blue moon, I wear skirts and dresses. I’m often in designer, always stylish. “[F]or a man to dress too fashionably,” writes critic Julian Randall in GQ, “to be so fluent in fashionspeak that he can correctly pronounce Loewe and Jacquemus is to diminish his romantic prospects, apparently”, with women, implicitly, of course.

When this nation panics about masculinity, hand-wringing about isolation, radicalization, my gay ass receives no compassion. If the term “heteronormative” has ever felt abstract to the point of alienation, look no further for examples than the coverage about masculinity in every magazine with “New York” in the title. You’d think from reading these articles that only straight men want to be swole. No one else embodies masculinity. At the risk of sounding like a lib, it hurts to consume media that pretends like I don’t exist.

Because I have shoulder-length hair, when I sit with my back to the room, waiters greet the table with “ladies.” I don’t use “they/them” pronouns, but the way I move through the world says the same thing. I learned that gender is more performance than biology my first semester at elitist Brown. I epitomize the manosphere’s problem with America. Well, I would except I am Asian, which disqualifies me from the whole “man” conversation. Case in point, K-pop stars are one of the few subsets of Asian men that some Americans find desirable. At the same time, in the comments, trolls ask, “Why are Asian guys all always pretty like girls?” We’re the last people who’d be called “masculine.”

So I don’t worry about “acting like a man.” I sang along to a love song at the Florence + The Machine concert and I cried in my car playing back Everybody Scream. GQ tells me that “if you truly are cool, you don’t care about a magazine’s cookie-cutter mold of masculinity.” Thanks, sis.

But let me not lie by omission. I put creatine in my shakes. I have the best legs in the gym though it’s partly cuz I grew up fat. Even though I drink too much to have a six-pack, I run shirtless whenever I can.

Notice me! Want me. I am a man after all, demanding everyone’s attention.

There’s been so much content about men. “You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex,” writes Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Even coastal elites’ glossy magazines are cashing in, making readers feel bad for men, many subscribers likely liberal women.

This essay started out as a defense of the witches in the lambasted Wicked: For Good. I didn’t want to write about masculinity. I thought we were polarized enough. But a new friend and my long-standing editor encouraged me to zoom out.

Defined by Lewis as “a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men . . . masculinism has become the single most force uniting the American right.” In GQ’s special report on “the state of the American male,” there’s a roundtable of “8 voices spanning the great masculinity divide,” from a family therapist who calls Trump “a celebration of shamelessness” to a venture capitalist who says Donald has “a lot of balls.” I resonated most with Jerrod Carmichael, the Emmy-winning comedian, a Black man who came out as gay in an HBO special. “[I]f I say something violent, that is motivated by fear, wanting to be seen, to feel brave, to not acknowledge the fear, it’s not truthful. Trying to make work about my biggest fears actually feels more dangerous than the dangerous stuff,” a reference perhaps to transphobic rants, straight-comic fodder. In the course of revising this essay, it became about my biggest fears. Trying my best and failing. Feeling like I’ll never be enough. These are the “genuine feelings of ennui experienced by many young American men.” The manosphere, in Lewis’s words, “lays the blame at the feet of the elites.” In particular, these men believe “[i]t’s the women who took their status,” says Laura Fields, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Some of these men are so impotent, they work at the White House.

People whose belonging is actually up for debate, queer men of color like Carmichael, like myself, hold the power to lay bare a community to outsiders as well as the in-group. I want to talk here with men, especially those of us who feel different, and I want to do it without pointing fingers. If there really is a crisis among men, let us talk through it intimately.

The headlines run the gamut. Men in overalls, pink sweaters, and Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel all spawned so much coverage. Speaking of clothes, the “I’m elegant, I’m classy” TikTok by @whois.jason, the Black man who made quarter zips viral, sounds a lot like @joolieannie’s “very demure, very mindful.” It’s a clear example of how culture originates with trans women. Then there’s the obsession with the male-loneliness epidemic. NPR complicates this, noting “there’s only a 1% difference in reported loneliness between men and women” but flagging that “men made up nearly 80% of the suicide rate in 2022.” Men also go to dangerous lengths for a square jaw and broad shoulders. The New York Times Magazine calls this the “Testosterone Moment.” It’s authorized by the worst Kennedy, amplified by bad podcasts, and put into action by average Joes on Reddit. Libtards, ofc, have low T, which is “synonymous with low status, weakness and sexual inadequacy.” Even the abandoned monkey who didn’t know how to make friends carried around a “stuffed orangutan toy to build muscle strength,” says the Times.

If there really is a crisis among men, let us talk through it intimately.

These stories fill the paper of record even though most of them come out of TikTok. I didn’t see the same rampant interest in the killings of three Black women by their male partners, all in the span of four weeks. During this time, a man killed eight children and shot two women, including his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh. This was “[t]he deadliest mass shooting our country has witnessed in two years,” notes scholar Brittney Cooper. Black femicide was not all over my feed. Neither was CNN’s investigation of “a hidden, online world” where “men encourage one another to drug and assault their wives, and swap tips on getting away with it.”

When the “grab ‘em by the pussy” president rage-baits by tweeting policy, it’s hard to tell which crises are real and what’s just algorithm and vibes. Contributing to the confusion is liberal media’s endless reporting on the far right’s male influencers. I learned about “AWFULs” in The Atlantic and “mogging” in The New Yorker. ICYMI, “AWFUL” is an acronym for “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal” and “mog” derives from “AMOG,” which is short for “alpha male of the group.” Platforming the extreme makes it mainstream.

As alarming as the headlines is the collective shift they reveal: an undoing of painfully earned gains, a rewriting of what defines worthiness. After Time’s Up and summer uprisings, all that reckoning with systemic injustice, men are rewriting the story, this time emphasizing effort and how we deserve to be at the top. As though wanting something badly, hungering and hunting, justified every kill.

Men are using the scripts of meritocracy, I worked hard for this so I deserve it, to reinstate patriarchy. They’ve internalized the language of identity and grievance, which had made them feel like the enemy, and rebranded themselves the real victims. The right has taken the tools of the left. They’re beating us at our own game.

This switchback in common sense has shown up all over culture. New York Magazine ran a piece about “penis anxiety” in which a guy who runs a “girth-enhancement clinic” says his clients “leave his clinic emotionally healed.” Pumped with scrotum filler, they gain what he calls a “more natural way of perpetuating dominance, this dominant alpha-male persona that begins to come from within.”

A grievance-lacquered sense of entitlement also clouds my judgment. I’m the wrong kind of minority, not one whose suffering matters. What can I put on or take off so that people see me, choose me, read me?

I’m getting ahead of myself. Now that we’ve seen the lay of the land, let’s take a step back and ask how we got here.

By the time of #MeToo, certain feminist critiques were part of everyday chatter. Think “male privilege,” “manspreading,” and “rape culture,” all ways of naming entitlement that fell under “toxic masculinity.” As nonbinary author Jacob Tobia puts it, “We went from proclaiming men as sometimes wielding a toxic substance to proclaim[ing] men as a toxic substance.”

Once “men” was synonymous with “problem,” the rehabilitation project began: reading lists and earnest how-tos about being a good man. Except the internet had no time for articles like “The Reality That All Women Experience That Men Don’t Know About” or “I Won’t Tell My 4-Year-Old Son to ‘Man Up.’ Not Now. Not Ever.” In mockery of the defensive “But not all men,” it became standard to insist “Yes, all men,” to double down on the systemic over the individual, the view that all men were puppets of patriarchy.

I went out of my way to be the exception. Whenever I ended up behind a woman on the sidewalk, I slowed down enough to increase our distance or got off the curb and sped ahead. On dates, I’d ask guys question after question. The next day, between sets of deadlifts, I’d complain to my trainer Rachel about self-centered men, not knowing I was closed off, emotionally unavailable.

Even now, there are efforts to rebrand masculinity. In the UK last year, Esquire relaunched under a new editor and introduced the “Better Men Project.” On all three covers, the messaging’s the same: “Not perfect, just better.” In contrast to the sincerity of print media, the “performative male” popped out of TikTok like a jack in the box. To be “the antithesis of the toxic man,” says the Times, these Gen Z men acted out what they thought would appeal to liberal women, sporting “on-trend markers for softness, stylishness and a feminist leaning that he may or may not actually possess.” These props included matcha and a tote bag and the bell hooks bestseller All About Love. At the same time, “[a]lmost a third of generation Z men and boys think a wife should obey her husband,” according to a survey of 23,000 people conducted by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. Compared to 44 percent of Baby Boomers, 57 percent of Gen Z men agree that “we have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men.” It tracks, then, that in a survey conducted by a Manhattan surgeon specializing in men’s sexual health, “Gen Z reported the lowest confidence in their penises.”

I went out of my way to be the exception.

The trend of reading in public to court women gave rise to the term “performative reading,” a phenomenon as old as Infinite Jest, the thousand-page novel that turned 30 this year. David Foster Wallace, my first favorite writer, killed himself on my birthday my first semester of college. 18, wanting to be great, but far from calling myself a writer, I took the coincidence as a sign from the universe that I’d inherit his status as a genius one day. People would study my every word, just as I was idolizing his.

Fast forward to adulthood. Writing workshops, publications, a PhD. Yet it still feels impossible to publish a book. So I started a Substack read-along of Wallace’s 1996 compendium of loneliness and addiction. I e-mailed writing friends and mentors about it, even my two therapists. One kind friend said she was excited about my book club while reminding me, because I had known, that Wallace was a known abuser of Mary Karr, a professor and bestselling writer. I proceeded with the Substack, setting out to examine the man’s magnum opus.

In 2018, Karr tweeted that Wallace “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on[.]” This was not new information at the time. “The horror stories had simply been subsumed into the broader story . . . of Wallace’s personal genius,” writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic, “as evidence of his uncontainable passion, of the singular depth of his wanting.”

My post-Wallace literary favorite was another code-switching, MacArthur-winning nerd. Junot Díaz is a brown immigrant, a self-professed intersectional feminist. Díaz was a role model during my 20s. I was teaching high-school English in LA, creating a safe space in my classroom. Everything was new for this kid from the suburbs. Díaz showed me a way to be down beyond the male bravado of the ’60s, raised fists and tests of endurance. He seemed so at ease in vulnerability. In his image, with my friends, I organized to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement. After championing my students’ right to learn their own history, I left my job to pursue writing.

In January of 2018, fresh off of grad school applications, seeking guidance on becoming a writer, I drove early from LA to San Diego to get a good seat at one of Díaz’s talks. After, signing my copies of his books, he complimented my outfit, like he’d done at the last talk I went to. In March, fans filled my local indie bookstore to celebrate Díaz’s new children’s book. I spotted his partner and friends off to the side. In April, he wrote an essay in The New Yorker “detailing the sexual assault he experienced as an 8-year-old boy.” In May, the New York Times published an article. “The Writer Zinzi Clemmons Accuses Junot Díaz of Forcibly Kissing Her.” Since then, on the rare occasion I see his byline or blurb, I look away, curious but ashamed.

This spring, in light of well-documented allegations, the founding chef of Noma, once the top restaurant in the world, stepped down from a Los Angeles residency. In the same month, after the Times’s delicate and harrowing investigation, California announced plans to rename Cesar Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day. To echo Garber, the “dangerous romance of male genius” unravels seasonally, but it always seems to re-form.

It’s hard to care about “the state of the American male” when monsters’ heads always rear.

It’s hard to valorize greatness when skeletons fall out of closets.

We’ve talked about where things stand and how we got here. The big question is, what’s the problem?

From the darkness of the manosphere to the lights of movies’ biggest night, something pernicious is happening in culture. Fuck goodness. Men are doing whatever it takes to be great.

In what already feels like the worst timeline, everything seems to start and end with Joe Rogan and his disciples, men with expensive equipment and costly opinions. They interview looksmaxxers, weirdos dignified as a movement by liberal media. An offshoot of “involuntary celibates,” these guys “accept the premise that appearance is destiny but reject the incels’ resignation to congenital ugliness.” Instead, The New Yorker reports, they break their face with a hammer and take testosterone until they’re infertile. They do so to “ascend” to “Chad” status, the highest on an eight-point scale that “sorts men into three tiers.” Clavicular, the nom de guerre of the figurehead, an AI-looking white guy that Armie Hammer might enjoy as a snack, says the scale is “all very objective . . . all very well researched.” Armed with outlandish jargon, looksmaxxers insist that beauty is scientific. They’re just cracking the code. In reality, Wired reports, their judgment is far from neutral. Harassing Black looksmaxxers, trolls post in the comments “Jbw,” an acronym for “just be white.”

In this corner of the internet, it’s accepted that the world is unfair, but men are the victims of injustice. “One of masculinism’s central claims,” Lewis observes, “is that no one is talking about men.” The fervor of this grievance burns through any arguments about privilege and patriarchy. There but for the grace of God go I.

In another moment and milieu, maybe “looksmaxxers” could have “called folx in” about “pretty privilege.” But nowadays, new norms dictate that anybody can look good. The New Yorker reports the options: “Rhinoplasties, jaw surgeries, ab implants, limb-lengthening, whatever.” Appearance is everything in an age of optimization, screenshots, and Zoom. If you want to look better, you’ll do what it takes, and actually, it might not take all that much. Just ask Chat. In the permission structure created by GLP-1 pills and protein lattes, which make the unattainable seem within reach, people who don’t get what they want, with their outdated talk of injustice, are just losers who won’t go the distance.

Rob Rausch went all the way. He’s the latest winner of The Traitors and “a preeminent internet boyfriend.” Alan Cumming, the host of the campiest game of Mafia streaming on Peacock, called Rob one of the best Traitors in the history of the show.

People kept bringing up Rob’s appearance. Interview Magazine says he’s “blessed with devastatingly good looks.” Honestly, guys, he’s just white, which is how he got away with dressing so badly on what’s functionally a show about style. Asked if he ever got “the sense you’d sort of cast a spell over everyone,” Rob insists he won because he made “strategic decisions.” A stable genius, “I’d get home from my Traitor duties and I would lay in bed and close my eyes . . . I would say, ‘What if this happens?’” Rob’s saying he outworked and outthought. He won cuz he mastered the craft. It’s not because he’s straight and from a red state. It’s got nothing to do with the minorities he played to claim the $220,800 jackpot all for himself.

In this corner of the internet, it’s accepted that the world is unfair, but men are the victims of injustice.

Thankfully, not every man gets his way. My friends, it’s time to talk Chalamet, who’s generated so much discourse. I use that word not just in the colloquial sense of online chatter. I also mean the ingredients in the making of common sense. Everything that we’re tracking, down to Punch the Monkey, reshapes social norms: what’s permissible, what’s thinkable. By paying attention to discourse, we see where society’s headed. We decide when to step in.

The Atlantic calls Chalamet “the movie star for this social-media-obsessed, parasocial-relationship-building moment.” He’s been playing on a loop. Citing the writer Hunter Harris, Vulture points out that Chalamet’s “essentially been on a never-ending publicity tour” since Wonka opened on Christmas in 2023. Even his courtside appearances at Knicks games were a reset before the third Dune.

What a hard-working man. From the queer-coded confectionary eccentric to the fiercely straight table-tennis player, he’s played “characters defined by otherworldly gifts, monomaniacal drive, and a cold-blooded disregard for the concerns of others.” So, he’s been playing himself. One performance gave the internet pause. In his 2025 acceptance speech for Best Actor at the SAG Awards, he said, “I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.”

Then his loud ambition turned all the way up doing press for Marty Supreme. In case orange blimps and throwback windbreakers didn’t get this across, the movie’s about a little guy who’ll do whatever it takes for the world to recognize his, wait for it, supremacy.

Orange and ego-driven. Sound familiar?

All of Chalamet’s publicity stunts, from staging a marketing meeting on Zoom to shouting at the top of the Sphere, formed what Vulture calls a “I Am My Character” campaign for the Oscars. Chalamet was talking his shit even before the movie’s Christmas release. (We get it, Timmy, your work is a gift.) In a posted-then-deleted YouTube interview, he said, “[I]t’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances . . . The discipline and the work ethic I’m bringing to these things,” key terms when talking meritocracy, “I don’t want people to take for granted. I don’t want to take for granted.” I talk this way to myself, but I’d never say it aloud. He told Good Morning America, “I’m confident I know what it’s gonna be by next summer.”

Less than a month before the Oscars, he took “shots” at ballet and opera, calling them “things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive.’” He triggered a backlash.

The week after Chalamet lost, it was spring and hotter than summer. I have a hard time believing that slighting pursuits of greatness associated with women was the silver bullet at his once-foregone golden statue. He’d already forsaken the gays, the ones lured with Call Me By Your Name, catching a Chanel contract along the way. Then he was “getting overly familiar with the trappings of inner-city Blackness,” says the critic Craig Jenkins. “But in dialing his tastes and mannerisms back,” swapping streetwear for Givenchy suits, “he exhibits a luxury not available to the people whose culture he champions.”

Betraying sexual and racial minorities didn’t stop Chalamet’s ascent. I don’t have reason to think the Oscars were holding him accountable for belittling women.

It wasn’t just him. While Chalamet was building his grindset, film critics were tearing women down.

Consider the uncanny parallels of these three films’ trajectories. Disney’s live-action Snow White remake seemed doomed from the casting announcement. Rachel Zegler, the Colombian American star of West Side Story, would play the titular heroine. This made MAGA see red cuz Snow White had to be white. Then the internet left got blue in the face because former Miss Israel Gal Gadot was playing the Evil Queen. By the time that I saw the trailer, including the seven CGI companions excised from the title, skipping the movie was a no-brainer. I’d forgotten all about it until talking with a friend about this essay. He said Snow White was actually pretty good. Alison Whitmore at Vulture said it’s “totally about lefty infighting”, would watch.

When I saw the first trailer for The Bride!, I took it as yet another take on Frankenstein, this one directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, featuring actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. I didn’t recognize the actress in the lead role. Then my partner and I watched another movie that I knew little about, only that it’d somehow connect to Shakespeare. For most of Hamnet, I expected a movie about a male genius and his canonical play even as he kept leaving behind Agnes, his wife, played by Jessie Buckley, the star of The Bride!. She’s why we ended up seeing Gyllenhaal’s movie.

I don’t have reason to think the Oscars were holding him accountable for belittling women.

In the theater, I got so fed up, I thought about walking out, but that would’ve embarrassed my partner. After the credits, driving to the bar, we had a hard time finding the words. Gyllenhaal’s feminism, with a reference to #MeToo, got the best of the movie. She felt too strongly about the material to make edits. Why didn’t a reasonable person take the wheel? It’s not smart to work with your brother and husband. Pinpointing the flaws of the movie, we heard our misogyny loud and clear. When critics posted their reviews, I was relieved that we weren’t alone. “I Have No Idea What The Bride! Is Trying to Say,” Whitmore wrote, “But It Sure Is Loud About It.” The movie’s at 57 percent on the Tomatometer.

The last time I came across a Rotten Tomatoes score that low for a movie I’d watched, it was Wicked: For Good in the mid-60s. That’s a D and not the fun kind.

Leading up to opening weekend, I came across mean headlines on Insta, squirming as I scrolled past. The New Yorker posted a picture of Glinda in her new Good Witch gown for the sequel, frowning amidst piles of propaganda painting Elphaba as the Wicked Witch. The title? “Wicked: For Good Is Very, Very Bad.”

This insult got in my head. Part one of the musical-turned-film was deftly satirical, the laughs many, the tone wonderfully strange. I grew attached to Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. I wanted the sequel to do well, be great, so the bad reviews worried me. Their schadenfreude made me defensive. This bad weather followed me into the theater for the adaptation of Act II. I kept looking for problems like I was squinting to pass an eye test.

After the movie ended, adjusting to the bright hallway, I told my partner what I thought might be wrong with the movie.

“I mean, I guess she was doing a lot? And the whole thing has soap-opera beats.”

When I finished, he said he was surprised. “I thought it was great. What do you mean?”

I told him about the reviews, the little I knew.

“I’m so glad I’m not online like that,” his social media usage limited to academic LinkedIn and a YouTube that’s equal parts Ts Madison and Dune.

The rest of the way home, we went back and forth about the sequel, concluding it was even better than the first.

As awards season unfurled, Hollywood turned out to be as confused as I was. After the blitzkrieg of negativity, the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review both recognized For Good as one of the top films of the year. The Golden Globes nominated both leading ladies for the second time. When the Oscars released its shortlists, For Good was on eight of the twelve, a feat matched only by Sinners.

In a final reversal, For Good received no Oscars nominations. The Hollywood Reporter called it completely shut out, an outcome that masculinism explains. By the end of For Good, the green witch turns the ginger beta into tin and the mogging heartthrob into straw. Talk about dehumanizing. And who ends up on top but the pink witch, the AWFUL who deposes the Wizard. For Good is the manosphere’s bogeywoman. F1, the Brad Pitt vehicle, was nominated for Best Picture.

While many of the reviews talk about the Wicked sequel as the lesser of the two films, they disagree on where things went wrong, which layer of the palimpsest is cracked. The 2003 musical that the movies are based on. The 1995 novel that the musical adapted. The 1939 classic that the novel complicated. The 1900 novel that the film brought to the screen. Could any adaptation of Act II have soared or is the source material that shaky? This archaeology resembles the question of the times. Where did the US go wrong? How did the country once again become the home of the Wizard?

The industry’s flip-flopping about Wicked is consistent with the ongoing struggle over myths. Which origin story is valid? Can anyone’s telling be just? Trump is dismantling the education department over these questions about history and narrative. Storytelling relies on heroes and villains, a binary that’s gendered and racialized. Changing a character’s race inverts the gravity. That’s why Hamilton still moves me. When people of color fill the cast list and when Black people take center stage, white audiences predictably lash out.

Changing a character’s race inverts the gravity. That’s why Hamilton still moves me.

Revision is no simple matter. It determines who belongs.

Snow White, The Bride!, and For Good all contend with the canon. Updating narratives that are practically myths, the trio is intimately aware of stories’ influence on culture. What the Wall Street Journal says about the Disney remake is true for all three. There’s a “tension . . . when remaking beloved movies made at a different time with different social norms,” whether that’s changing Snow White’s lore so her name’s no longer about the whiteness of her skin to casting a queer Black woman alongside a white pop star to examine the construction of American morality, the tension between goodness and greatness.

These are all stories about power. They center women and care about justice.

Critics berated these movies. Meanwhile, lauded as “a movie of our moment” by The New Yorker, directed by a man whose white-male “films are studies of American loneliness,” One Battle After Another won Best Picture. Weird connection: OBAA director PTA studied creative writing with DFW. Are initial bros a thing? Idk. Jbw.

A culture with limitless grace for “great” men and endless content about bad ones has no patience for stories about women. Contributing to this climate, Vanity Fair dedicated a whole issue last year to “our new class of leading men.” In “The People’s Princes,” writer Ottessa Moshfegh says men ranging from Jonathan Bailey to LaKeith Stanfield represent “the almost approachable, appealingly authentic modern actor.” They are all Internet boyfriends, so many boyfriends!, “accessible, kind, vulnerable, and recognizably human,” the same qualities that drew me to Wallace and Díaz. I took after Dave’s long hair and Junot’s speech patterns. “The true internet boyfriend doesn’t want to be mothered. He already has a mother, and he loves her.”

It’s a good thing that Chalamet didn’t win the Oscar, this child who diminished the artistic communities his mother and sister belong to for the sake of appealing to men. Even better, Chalamet lost to a man who brought his mother to every award show.

The story of celebrity pageantry may seem distant to the point of irrelevance. To me, they’re a statement of values. Whether a receipt or a budget, I’m not sure, how things should be versus how they are, but Michael B Jordan’s recognition matters. He who played monster and men.

There’s an Internet theory about Sinners. Before Jonathan Majors attacked his then-girlfriend and was found guilty of harassment and assault, the former Marvel villain might have played Jordan’s twin in the vampire movie.

As I remember Majors’ rise, there was a point that crystallized his image as an artist, an actor’s actor, a good man rocketing to greatness. The Times published a photo shoot of Majors and Jordan side by side, in embrace. As publicity for Creed III, they showed a form of male friendship that was tender and unguarded. I revisit the portrait now. Majors’ arms slung around Jordan, their cheeks pressed. Their gaze directed at mine. Jordan’s brows arched like a wave. I see an intimacy that I long for. I wish I held onto men with such ease instead of thinking I’m unworthy of touch. In couples therapy last week, I said aloud for the first time something I’ve believed most of my life. If there’s a man I find attractive, he would never look my way. Since saying this, I’m coming to realize that my assumption may not be true.

A friend told me about the Sinners theory. Rasheed Newson, a showrunner with a new novel called There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, traced the images of Jordan and Majors to the closeness of their predecessors, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. Jordan thanked Poitier in his acceptance speech for Best Actor. Meanwhile, Majors’ next movie is produced by manosphere mobster Ben Shapiro. In another Choose Your Own Adventure, Timothée Chalamet will return in one of the biggest movies of the year. Armie Hammer appeared in one thing last year. There weren’t enough reviews of it for Rotten Tomatoes to give a score.

These splits in the road are stories about good guys and bad. It’d be easy to say I’m on the right side of history, disidentify from the “geniuses” whose violence gets folded into creativity. The men whose ambition writes a permission slip for carelessness and exploitation. Whose “loneliness” is cover for societal sabotage. But if I’ve learned anything from the discourse about men, it’s that I’m not so different from them. I fear I have no place in society. It got so bad, I imagined my death.

I was sick of pouring my heart out only to find a blank slate. He was sick of doing his best only to hear it wasn’t enough.

With that said, so do men who do the unthinkable. The father who killed his own children had told family members about suicidal thoughts, reports the Times. But, as Dr. Cooper argues, mental illness is a spurious cover for “a patriarchal reset, in which men are heads of household and women and children are their willing and devoted subordinates.” To get in the way where we can, I hope the left takes more seriously how our excesses and hypocrisies brought these nightmares to life. To echo Julia Gillard, the chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, how do we “dispel the idea of a zero-sum game in which women are the only beneficiaries of a gender-equal world”? What’s a rhetoric that’s got more meat on its bones than the skeletal logic of grievance? This discursive work is urgent because, as Lewis reports, masculinism “is a movement with real policy goals,” including “affirmative action for men.”

The other day, at the end of a long week, my partner and I went to the bar to reconnect. Hoping it’d go well, I chose a seat in the middle of the house. Then we had our version of a fight. We sat side by side, unable to speak, making our bartender friends uneasy, maybe. I was sick of pouring my heart out only to find a blank slate. He was sick of doing his best only to hear it wasn’t enough.

We chose to meet each other where he was at. I explained that my unease with silence had more to do with my parents than it did with him. He said that if I ever felt neglected, bring it up in a light way on the spot. Then we closed out and made it to the theater in time for Project Hail Mary, a heartwarming sci-fi blockbuster that shows Ryan Gosling, no longer Ken, is not only redeemable but fundamentally good. Two incompatible men can learn to be close, even a hunky scientist who wears chunky cardigans and an alien rock that speaks in animal sounds.

Other standout movies this year include Is God Is and The Drama. Young women, twins and a bride, navigate what’s good and what’s wicked in the wake of male violence. Both films are formally inventive and tonally expansive, as entertaining as they are smart. In a year of too-big-to-fail tentpoles like The Odyssey and Avengers: Doomsday, let’s keep an eye out and our minds open to women’s ambivalence and ambition.

Personally, I’m letting go of wanting to be great. I’m learning more tender reasons to live. I fail and find I’m still worthy.

A man who is not a man, I peel myself open again and again, hoping for my other’s touch.

At night I rest my hand on his side. In the dark we write our own story.

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