What Is Wrong with Men

Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything

By: Jessa Crispin

Narrated by: Jessa Crispin

A hilarious, ambitious work of trenchant cultural criticism that traces the origins of today’s crisis of masculinity through . . . Michael Douglas’s oeuvre from the eighties and nineties

How to be a Man? That question—and all the anxiety, anger, and resentment it stirs up—is the starting point for a crisis in masculinity that today manifests as misogyny, nativism, and corporate greed; gives rise to incels and mass shooters; and leads to panic over the rights of women and minorities. According to Jessa Crispin, it is the most important question of our time, and the answer to it might be found in an unlikely place: the films of Michael Douglas.

In the 1980s, the rules for masculinity began to change. The goal was no longer to be a good, respectable family man, carrying on the patriarchal traditions of generations past. Not only was it becoming unfashionable, but increasingly difficult: the economic and political shifts—a slashed social safety net, globalization—made it harder to find a breadwinning income, a stable home life, and a secure place in the public sphere. So, then, how to be a man? From the early eighties to the late nineties, Michael Douglas showed us how: he was our president, our Wall Street overlord, our mass shooter, our failed husband, our midlife crisis, our cop, and our canary in the patriarchal coal mine. His characters were a mirror of our cultural shift, serving as the foundation for everything from the 1994 Crime Bill to Trump’s ultimate rise. With wry wit and wisdom, Crispin examines the phenomenon of the Michael Douglas character as a silver-screen seismograph registering the tectonic movements within our society that have fractured it in shocking ways.

Blending feminist arguments and pop culture criticism, Crispin uses the iconic roles of Michael Douglas, from Fatal Attraction to Wall Street to The Game, as a lens to explore men’s and our culture’s ongoing anxieties around women, money, and power. Ultimately, What Is Wrong with Men reveals that the patriarchy has now fully betrayed men, along with everyone else and shows how unpacking one of its most fervent icons can help us envision a pathway forward.

Really excellent and thoughtful analysis

I appreciated that this book went far beyond blaming and pointing fingers and offered solutions about what we need to do. Compassionate and thankfully apolitical, it’s a more serious and academic read than the blurb suggests.

Amazing insights

A way to think about men in a different way. I was shocked at how much I had thought about these ideas and then she wrote them all into essay forms.

Explains the birth of the manosphere.

Post mortem on how the women's movement of the 70's gave birth to the Robber Barons (Oligarchy) of our time through whome blue collarn and later white collar men were disenfranchised. I really enjoyed the insight.