Can Men Stop Hating Women?

While many of us can agree men are in trouble, few can agree on the exact cause. America has a masculinity crisis. Men are in trouble. The “masculinity crisis” is real. The male loneliness epidemic has received radically different diagnoses from men’s rights activists, religious conservatives, feminists, and heteropessimists. The manosphere, a loose affiliation of men who hold women in low esteem and value “alpha” behavior over weakness, ranges from hardcore redpilled incels and influencers, like Andrew Tate, to those who focus more on maximizing their own physical bodies, like Bryan Johnson and Clavicular. The blatantly sexist, racist, and homophobic language of figures like Christian nationalist Pastor Doug Wilson, who says women shouldn’t vote, and influencers like Myron Gaines has garnered a fair amount of inquiry and alarm—most recently in Louis Theroux’s recent documentary Inside the Manosphere.

But not all men want to treat masculinity as a math problem that cheapens women. Former GQ editor Sean Hotchkiss has recently written a “memoir of male rage and recovery,” provocatively titled Hating Women. After years of engaging in hookup culture, he’s become a life coach focused on creating positive masculinity. 

Hotchkiss joins the chorus of those claiming that heterosexuality is in crisis. Instead of arguing for nihilism, he proposes a kind of radical optimism. Men, he believes, can be reformed. He knows this because he was once the kind of guy who used women for relief. While Hotchkiss never quite seemed to try on the manosphere-inflected world of conspiracy theories and intense fitness, he did enjoy a certain amount of wealth and promiscuity. Yet, he discovers, “women held this incredible power over” him. Porn was his first line of defense in terms of stress relief.