The “Man Enough” Ad: Actually, Men Have Reason to Fear and Dislike Female Power

Not because they’re insecure in their masculinity

I wasn’t going to write anything about the Man Enough political ad that came out last week, an awkward attempt to woo male voters by a group calling itself Creatives for Harris (a “grassroots collective of ad execs, TV writers, and comedians”). The ad acknowledges a growing gender divide in the U.S. presidential election, especially among younger voters, as feminist belief or lack thereof has become a significant indicator of party affiliation.

By the time I had heard of the ad, there were already dozens of reactions to its bizarre masculine stereotypes and ponderous feminist messaging. It has been called “the Mount Everest of Unintentional Comedy,” “The Most Self-Sabotaging Political Ad Ever” and “an attempt to gain votes by insulting the people it’s courting.” (It also received plaudits from many voters who support Harris.)  

Cramming into 90 seconds every feminist cliché of the past two decades about regressive and progressive masculinities, the ad was so cartoonishly overdone as to leave some viewers unsure whether it was a parody or not. How could anyone have thought that undecided male voters would respond positively to an obese chicken farmer boasting about his ability to rebuild carburetors, or a muscular black man telling us that dead-lifting weights doesn’t prevent him from “braiding the sh*t out of my daughter’s hair.”

All of the men in the ad, after first touting their hyper-macho proclivities (for weight-lifting, steak, Bourbon, motorcycles, trucks, hay bales), then assure us that as manly men (“I’m a man, man,” says one), they are more than willing to emote, cry, and—above all—give support to “women who take charge.” I’m surprised we weren’t also told how happy they are to vacuum, and to take submissive postures during sex.

Being pro-woman, according to the ad, means supporting every choice a woman could make, including killing her unborn baby. The ad even comes with an accusatory warning near the end: real men like these are “sick of so-called men domineering, belittling, and controlling women just so they can feel more powerful.”

Statements from the ad’s main creator, Jacob Reed, a comic who has worked for Jimmy Kimmel Live and other productions, proclaimed the ad a genuine attempt to appeal to men, a humorous yet sincere invitation for them to embrace pro-feminist masculinity. Reed mentioned in interview that earlier versions of the ad, which had actually been even more preachy and censorious, with lines like “I’m not afraid of a woman having rights because what kind of creep would I be then?” had been toned down out of respect for male viewers.

“Reed realized the last thing he wanted to do was condescend to his potential audience,” wrote Fast Company author Joe Berkowitz approvingly. “Ultimately, he decided viewers would be savvy enough to intuit the negative implications of the opposing viewpoint without having it spelled out.” How broad-minded of Reed not to spell out the loathsomeness of non-feminist men!

Far from offering a parody of feminist dogma, then, the ad was a straight-up celebration of it.

I don’t want to make too much of it: the ad was not endorsed by the Harris campaign and is merely one, perhaps hastily produced and certainly ill-conceived, male-feminist representation. I realize that there are plenty of non-feminist men planning to vote for Harris for their own reasons. Yet in its ham-fisted buffoonery, the ad is a useful reminder of how thoroughly the ruling class (including significant portions of the Republican machine) misunderstand and have contempt for the concerns and perspectives of many American men. Here I want to respond seriously to the ad’s suggestion that only knuckle-draggers want to “control women.”

What struck me most powerfully about the ad is how little idea Jacob Reed seems to have of what most men actually do, and how crucial their work is. That’s why the ad’s presentation of traditional masculinity (the Bourbon, the horse) is such a belittling pastiche.

I am reminded of an interview by YouTuber Chris Williamson of evolutionary biologist Joyce Benenson in which both agreed that the technological advances of modern society had made it possible for women to outperform men just about everywhere (see 26:30), leaving a large swath of men playing videogames and, in Williamson’s words, “basically sedated […] out of their usefulness in the real world” (1:03:00). At one point in the conversation, Williamson asked Benenson (27:00) to explain whether men have any use left now that their former roles in war and big-game hunting were no longer relevant.

Benenson, expressing compassion for men and boys, thought it unfortunate that society had not “come up with more community-based ventures for men” (28:20) such as tree-planting or recycling to keep them productively occupied. One can only shudder at the thought of university-educated women directing such ventures.

Like Williamson and Benenson, Reed seems never to have encountered the millions of American men who use their strength and skills to build and maintain the vastly complex transportation, construction, energy, automation, manufacturing, food, and sanitation networks that make modern life possible. He seems genuinely to believe that qualities such as physical toughness, stoicism, and interest in technology are relics of the past with no connection to modern manhood.

If women aren’t flooding in to firefighting and road paving, sewer repair and long-haul trucking, according to this vision, it isn’t because men are more inclined for such essential physical work. In the progressive view, men’s relation to machines and physical competence can only be ironic and postmodern. Not just the lack of respect but the utter incomprehension are staggering.   

Reed similarly seems to have no idea what many men today think about female leadership and female power, which is why the ad is fixated on the notion that only a paranoid fantasy in the fragile male psyche—a pathetic, atavistic belligerence—has caused men to turn in fear from the prospect of womanly competence. The possibility that men have looked for such competence and not found it could never, of course, occur.

The men I know don’t spend a lot of time contemplating women’s place and status in the world other than to be taken aback by the decades-long hissy fit in which so many women have indulged. Most men are happy to work with talented and committed women but have not so far found such talent or commitment in enough abundance to justify having women “take charge.”

Some men, indeed, have had run-ins with women—a feminist teacher who made their son’s life a misery, a feminist judge unconcerned with reason or evidence—that have left a bad impression. Still, most men don’t vote based on sex: they assess policies and results that matter to them. Emotions and self-perception—especially about their masculinity—play almost no role.

Yet while the vast majority of men don’t have a problem with women in positions of leadership, men are noticing that at least some of those women (and a goodly number of feminist men) have a problem with them. The casual, unapologetic misandry embodied in the ad and in so much else that feminism proclaims speaks for itself. Even when the misandry isn’t overt, it’s clear that boys’ and men’s lives simply don’t matter much to the majority of feminist pundits and leaders, who seem to think of men mainly in relation to the more they can be got to do to improve women’s lives. If that seems exaggerated, take a look at the White House National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, which has nothing to say about male disadvantage in its 42-page discussion of a “whole-of-government” approach to providing services and increased representation for girls and women.

Men have seen their standard of living decline in relation to women’s in all the areas that economists measure. Over the past four decades, their earnings have stagnated, especially for the least educated and the youngest males, their employment rates and occupational stature have declined, and their numbers at institutions of higher education have fallen dramatically. As researchers David Autor and Melanie Wasserman demonstrate, the prospects are particularly poor for male children raised in single-mother households.

Proponents of gender equality do not concern themselves with these gender inequalities; instead, such ideologues participate in giggly debates over whether men are obsolete. Some even write books with triumphant titles like The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (Hanna Rosin), Are Men Necessary? (Maureen Dowd); or even I Hate Men (Pauline Harmange). They bathe in male tears, and so on. Anyone trying to address the problems of men and boys, whether suicide, substance abuse, employment discrimination, homelessness, or incarceration, will be met with indignant claims that women suffer more and must always be the first and the main priority (on this score, see Kamala Harris’s speech to the UN).

What the ad never broaches is any actual reason why a society governed by feminists and run according to women’s preferences should be appealing to men. It’s well known that women have a strong in-group preference that leads to biased outcomes (men, too, are biased—in favor of women): punitive sexual harassment legislation; dubious accusations of misconduct that destroy men’s careers and reputations; the fantasy of rape culture; affirmative consent legislation at the college and state levels; diversity initiatives that have made anti-male discrimination a common, lauded practice; the trumpeting of female superiority in business, government, academia, law, and medicine; and statements of anti-male hatred, even of the desire for a world without men at all, tolerated in a manner impossible to credit if made by men about women.

Though reluctant to see women as their enemies, some men can no longer shrug off the evidence of anti-male indifference or contempt. They’re talking to one another about the family court system. They’re concerned about diversity policies that ignore merit. They’re shocked by the feminization of the military. They don’t want to see their forefathers dishonored or their sons and nephews sidelined.

The tone-deaf Man Enough ad was an attempt to paper over men’s growing discontent by pretending that the most masculine men in America love the idea of even more feminism.

But it’s not working. The years-long sermonizing embodied by the ad has at last pushed more and more men into recognizing themselves as a dissident voting bloc, ill-served by intersectional-feminist preoccupations. Across racial lines, men are seeing the impact of feminist ideas and policies that have fractured family ties, produced raging women, and ignored the needs of children. The good news is that younger men recognize the problem most easily and feel it most emphatically. Their justified sense of betrayal by women in power will not be easily forgotten or assuaged. It turns out that, whoever wins the election in November, the future may not be so female after all.