Earlier this year, three novelists — Phil Klay, Sean Thor Conroe, and Daniel Lefferts — took the stage at the 92nd Street Y for a panel called “The Trouble with Men”, billed as a roundtable on “what the crisis in American masculinity means for our culture.” T. M. Brown’s New Yorker essay argues the panel was missing the one writer who has been working the problem longest from the only angle that works: Danny McBride, of Eastbound & Down and The Righteous Gemstones, whose debut story collection Thrilling Tales of Modern Men came out this summer.

The book is ten stories, each narrated by a man absorbing a specific humiliation — old age, baldness, psychotic co-workers. In the standout, “The Institute of Men”, a balding forty-two-year-old takes an experimental treatment to get his hair and swagger back and enjoys the results right up until they turn on him.

Brown’s best move is historical. The crisis is not new:

  • Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s “The Crisis of American Masculinity” ran in Esquire in 1958 — “men are more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem”
  • Sam Allis’s Time essay “What Do Men Really Want?” (1990) blamed the women’s movement for driving the “strong, stoic John Wayne-type into the sunset”
  • David French made a version of the same argument in the Times last July, via Jordan Peterson: “Before, a young man could learn masculinity by osmosis”

Brown asks what “before” any of them are talking about. He also points out that Schlesinger — the genre’s founding father — wrote that “masculine supremacy, like white supremacy, was the neurosis of an immature society.” Not exactly a red-pill ancestor.

McBride’s version is less diagnosis than deflation: being a man is embarrassing, and therefore worth making fun of. He calls his characters “fucked up Don Quixotes” with delusions of grandeur, and described the collection as a love letter to men who “grew up watching Rambo and now you work at Geico.”

Schlesinger’s own 1958 prescription was satire, art, and politics — satire meaning “the belief that nothing is sacred.” Brown’s closing suggestion is that laughing at masculine self-pity beats both the solemn literary mode and another decade of magazine columns about men’s troubles. It’s a modest proposal, and a more honest one than the panel’s.