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Jane Coaston: It’s Tuesday, May 26th, I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, a show that is not whimsy-maxing, partly because I don’t know what that would require me to do, partly because I do not want to. [music break] On today’s show, a lot happened over the holiday weekend. We’ll tell you what we do and don’t know about President Donald Trump’s alleged Iran deal, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigns. But let’s start with misogyny. You may have noticed that misogyony is kind of everywhere right now, especially online. As American women continue to move further to the political left while gaining economic and cultural independence, men on the American right appear to have responded by losing their minds completely. For example, this is Doug Wilson. He’s a pastor in Moscow, Idaho, with close ties to Secretary of Defense/little boy, Pete Hegseth. Hegsath even invited him to lead a Pentagon warship service back in February. And boy, does Doug Wilson have a lot of fun views on the role of women in the world. Here he is speaking to CNN’s Pamela Brown last summer. 

[clip of CNN’s Pamela Brown] What role do you think women play in society? 

[clip of Doug Wilson] Um. Women are the kind of people that people come out of. 

[clip of CNN’s Pamela Brown] So you just think they’re meant to have babies, that’s it? 

[clip of Doug Wilson] No, well. 

[clip of CNN’s Pamela Brown] They’re just a vessel? 

[clip of Doug Wilson] No, it doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce biologically. The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three or four or five eternal souls. 

Jane Coaston: In other words, I’m not a person, I am a person production vehicle. Fun! Then there’s Scott Yenor, who has said that women today are quote, “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” And Helen Andrews, a conservative writer who argues that the quote, “feminization of the workplace has ruined everything.” Two more people to not invite to your next house party. Helen Lewis, a staff writer for the Atlantic, calls these people masculinists in a recent article. I wanted to ask her, what is driving this movement, and what is it doing to our policy. Helen, welcome to What a Day. 

Helen Lewis: Thank you very much for having me. 

Jane Coaston: Before we get into the nitty gritty of your piece and this movement such as it exists as a whole, how would you define masculinism? 

Helen Lewis: Right, I wanted a word that wasn’t the same as manosphere, because I think to people that says Andrew Tate, that says influencers, um people who are chasing the viral algorithm. And I wanted to make the case in this piece, I was talking about the people, like one step up from that, right? We’re talking about people who work for think tanks, people who write for very impressive academic and intellectual journals, people who’ve got, you know, links to the White House. So masculinism is anti-feminism. Or a movement to reassert the primacy of men, to say really that men should be dominating politics, the law, the military, all of this kind of stuff. They want a world ruled by men, and women restored to what they see as their proper place, which is secondary. And and they’re very serious about the ways that they’ve been thinking about doing it. They have a whole intellectual backing of it, and that is, to me, masculinism. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, it’s also, to me, differs from the manosphere, because I remember writing about the manospere like 10, 15 years ago, and at some point, there was an idea of like the manosphere being a place where you talk about how to get women. Masculinism is not about how to attract women at all. It has nothing to do with that whatsoever. And it’s also interesting because, as you mentioned, it encapsulates a lot of different people. There are pastors and podcast bros and incels and incel adjacent people, but also women who seemingly support this broader movement. What beliefs are tying them together? 

Helen Lewis: It’s interesting you say that, because I came away thinking that a lot of these men are men who exist primarily and are most interested in their relationships with other men. 

Jane Coaston: Yes. 

Helen Lewis: Being in kind of status hierarchy with other man. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Helen Lewis: You know, they, in the case of Scott Yenor of the Heritage Foundation, he’s a member of an all male society, um which is dedicated to kind of letting men be their best selves. It was set up by an Indiana haircare magnate, which is a phrase I can never say enough. Um, you know, and in the case of, uh, Charles Cornish-Dale, raw egg nationalist, a lot of that is about bodybuilding. And he has, he gets very cross about the fact that people always think that pirates and Spartans are gay because actually straight men need to be able to reclaim the idea about hanging out sweatily with other men. So I think that’s one of the things that’s interesting. Women are kind of slightly secondary to this vision in all kinds of ways. These are people who would be happier to work with other men, take orders, you know political orders from other men, and actually women are very much like the plus one of the world to them. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, it was interesting, though, because you mentioned um a writer named Helen Andrews um who has written about about the feminization of the workplace. I’m using air quotes. Then you mentioned Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, speaking with Laura Ingram on a show. And someone made the point like two women with jobs talking about how women shouldn’t have jobs. So how do women fit in here? They’re obviously they are the object of derision, the object of wanting to be pushed out of society but there are women who are talking about this as being a good thing. 

Helen Lewis: Right, and I don’t want to dismiss that these women do think these things and are making an intellectual case, but there is something else parallel to that that’s going on. There’s a great moment in the um drama Mrs. America, where Cate Blanchett plays Phyllis Schlafly, who led the kind of reaction against the Equal Rights Amendment getting ratified, where she’s trying to talk about defense policy, which is her great enthusiasm, and none of the men around her care. And then she says, but of course, you know, this women’s lib has gone too far. And suddenly they’re like, oh, hello, because they know that a female messenger for that subject is much more appealing, you know. If you’re the woman who will say that women are getting a bit you know a bit uppity, there will be a warm welcome for you. And people have subsequently filled that market niche. But Helen Andrews has got a really coherent thesis that she lays out. I don’t think it’s a very compelling one when you look at the evidence particularly, but this idea that basically some sectors of society now have majority female in them. So in America, the majority of undergraduate medical degrees are being taken by women now. And then the feeling is that because women um are ruled by their emotions, not logic, they care more about feelings than they do about facts, they will make bad doctors, and the profession will become more about you know diagnosing people with made-up illnesses. And the thing that’s interesting to me, she diagnoses a lot of trends that I have some sympathy for. I think there are real trends in American society that have happened at the same time as a couple of industries have become more feminine. So she talks about the universities. Now, I would be the first to admit that I think American universities have had a pretty rough decade trying to deal with and digest this kind of new ideology. But whether or not that’s really about the entry of women to them or if that’s a broader social shift. The same thing with the idea that we’re not we don’t want to take risks anymore. I think that’s much more likely to do with the fact that we are an aging society. We’re dominated still by that baby boomer generation who are now in their 70s and they are shaping the cultural norms. Right. And what they want is a is a safer world with less you know kids on their lawn playing loud music. That to me seems more likely to be shaping our attitude to risk than maybe it does the fact that we’re feminized. 

Jane Coaston: So, as extreme as masculinist ideas are, for example, the idea of, you know, we got to restrict the vote from women, or women should not be allowed to work in pretty much any outward-facing field, or the idea of you know the vote you can only vote if you’re a man with women and children. They aren’t fringe anymore. There are people in the Trump administration who actually believe this stuff. So how has the rise of masculinism influenced American politics? 

Helen Lewis: Well, the thing I hadn’t really thought about before, is that the MAGA right has now got some pretty serious and obvious fractures through the middle of it. A very obvious example of that would be the Iran war, right, the kind of old fashioned neocons hanging in there versus this larger group that think, you know, the America first people who think, why are we getting involved in the Middle East again? Um. The role of Israel in American politics. You know, there are still bits of the Republican party that are default reflexively pro-Israel. But there are bigger bits of the coalition who contest that in the same way that they’re on the left and that argument’s happening in the Democrats. The same thing with Trump’s tariffs versus the people who believe in free trade. These big splits exist. The one thing that basically Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Scott Yenor at the Heritage Foundation, Doug Wilson, who’s Pete Hegseth’s pastor, you know all of these different factions, these moving parts from the MAGA can agree is traditional gender roles are better. The left has gone crazy on gender. And actually, wouldn’t it be better if we rolled the clock back a little bit? 

Jane Coaston: So you and I, well, actually, I hope, mostly me, spend a lot of time online. And you see this kind of conversation happening all the time. And some of this seems like insane. Like it seems to me like the online discussion is almost edging into kind of um, I think you quote, there’s a writer who called it like the based ritual where you just compete in these right-wing circles by saying the most based or terrible thing you can think of, you know. Oh, yo. Women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Oh yeah, women should be only used for breeding, which is something Nick Fuentes once said. So my question is how much of this is kind of like an online attempt to get content and clicks and how much of it is people trying to be like, no, we actually should try to take away voting from women, are we seeing these ideas in policy yet? 

Helen Lewis: Right. I think that’s the interesting question that merits exploration because there are very influential people. And I mentioned Heritage because Project 2025, disavowed by Trump during the campaign, but essentially with the blueprint for his second term, that has got lots of things in it about, you know, very stealthily reducing access to abortion pills, for example, just by upping the regulatory burden. You know, that kind of thing. And you can see a similar way in which you would try and create more like your traditional families, right? So there is another report by the Heritage Foundation out in January that said you know we need to think about whether or not we restrict single parent benefits. 

Jane Coaston: They’ve also mentioned attempting to restrict women from going to graduate school. 

Helen Lewis: Right. 

Jane Coaston: Because you know, over education is a problem. I believe that paper was written by someone who has a–

Helen Lewis: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: –doctorate, so. 

Helen Lewis: This is I mean this is like the kind of thing that every trad wife is actually running a small business, right? 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Helen Lewis: There’s just a kind of quite a lot of like, do as I say, not as I do. But, you know, stuff like rolling back no fault divorce. Um. You know, I wrote a history of feminism, which looked at the time before. I mean England only got no fault divorce relatively recently, but that was, you know, that the idea of blame, like the divorce a divorce is about blame has historically been very bad for women because it becomes that, you know you’re going to have your children taken away from you because you were a bad woman. Like all of those things, whether or not like change, like small changes to the tax code, for example, you know, things like that that have been absolutely fought for by American feminism. There is an obsession with the birth rates, for example. Right? And it’s very striking to me that the one thing that never really comes up is, shall we make it easier financially for people to have children? Even shall we make it easier financially to stay at home with their very young children? You know, I live in Europe, as you might be able to tell from my accent, and it’s kind of always been shocking to me the entire time I’ve been writing about America but there is no federally mandated maternity leave. You get these situations in which women are cobbling together their holiday allowance, right, or they are having to go back to work and then like pump in the break room or whatever it might be. America, you know, has a higher birth rate than Europe, but does not have very family-friendly policies, but you never hear about the carrot, right? It always seems to be the stick, and that suggests to me that there’s something, you know there’s an ideological belief about, that underpins all of this. 

Jane Coaston: Helen, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. 

Helen Lewis: Thank you. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Helen Lewis, staff writer at The Atlantic. I’m a woman who will be telling you what happened in the world. If you’re okay with that because you’re not a deranged misogynist, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what you may have missed. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Senator Thom Tillis] Look, we we were told about 11 weeks ago by Hegseth and the Department of Defense that they had obliterated Iran’s defenses and it was just a matter of time before we had the nuclear material. Now we’re talking about a posture where we may accept the nuclear material remaining in Iran. How does that make sense at all? 

Jane Coaston: That was North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis speaking to Jake Tapper on Sunday and asking the question many of us are thinking. What exactly is this Iran deal and what’s the point of it? President Trump announced over the weekend that Iran and the United States are getting close to a deal to end the war. But stop me if you’ve heard this before. The deal might not really be a deal. Iranian officials told Reporters Monday that, quote, “no one can claim that the signing of an agreement is imminent.” Some of Trump’s biggest allies seem to already hate what they’re hearing about the alleged deal. Oh, and on Monday, Trump added that part of an agreement with Iran would be that Qatar and Saudi Arabia would join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel, something these countries do not want to do. Here’s what we do now. As of Monday, the deal reportedly involves a 60-day ceasefire, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and continuing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear materials. The Straight, you’ll recall, we closed. And the nuclear materials, those were allegedly why we went to war in the first place. Also on Monday, U.S. Central Command announced that U. S. forces struck targets in Iran in quote, “self-defense strikes.” Tulsi Gabbard resigned as director of national intelligence on Friday, saying she needed to leave office as her husband battles cancer. She is the fourth cabinet member to depart during Trump’s second term. All women. Gabbard, a veteran and former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, built her political name on her opposition to foreign wars, but Trump’s overseas military operations had seemed to put the two on a collision course. President Trump quickly announced her replacement on Truth Social, Gabbird’s principal deputy Aaron Lukas. A criminal case in Tennessee against Kilmar Abrego-Garcia has been dropped. The Maryland man was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March of 2025, after a traffic stop in Baltimore. Weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to bring Abrego Garcia back. He was returned to the US in June and charged with human smuggling, based on a Tennessee traffic stop from 2022. That case was dismissed on Friday after a federal judge found evidence of, quote, “Vindictive prosecution by the Justice Department.” What? No, not this Justice Department. Abrego-Garcia still has a civil case in Maryland where he’s challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts to deport him to an African country. Pro-Palestinian activist and former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after a federal appeals court put the government a step closer to deporting him on Friday. Federal officials have accused Khalil of leading activities, quote, “aligned to Hamas.” However, they have not presented evidence to support the claim and have not accused him of criminal conduct. The ACLU, which is involved in representing Khalil, released a statement saying the decision quote, “is not the final word. And we still strongly believe in arguments going forward.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Monday that she has quote, “no issue with her country hosting Iran’s World Cup team for the summer soccer competition.” [clip of Claudia Sheinbaum speaking in Spanish] Quote, “they asked us, can they spend the night in Mexico, and we said yes, that’s no problem.” The team will still play its group stage matches in the U.S., but its base has been moved to Tijuana, Mexico. Scheinbaum said at a news conference Monday that she was told by a FIFA representative the US was reluctant to have the Iranian soccer team spend time outside the games on U.S. territory. And that’s the news. [music break] 

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, relish on the first enhanced games apparent failure, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how the sports competition that encouraged athletes to use performance enhancing drugs, featured fitness influencers, sparse crowds, and a lot of non-enhanced athletes winning their events, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and past their prime men taking a lot of supplements and trying to impress people with their physical capabilities, sounds like something that should just be for RFK Junior. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Fohr, Erica Morrison, and Adriene Hill. Our team includes Hayley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]