Raising Strong Sons in the Age of Weak Men

On Trading Donald Trump for Ward Cleaver

Ward Cleaver with His Sons

Fight Club and the Hollowing of Masculinity

There’s a scene near the end of Fight Club where the narrator, looking down the barrel of his own chaos, finally turns the gun on Tyler Durden—his alter ego, his fantasy of freedom, his masculine ideal. It’s a haunting moment of self-awareness, but it comes too late: the bombs have already been planted.

For years, Fight Club has been misread as a manual rather than a mirror. Tyler Durden became a meme before memes existed—a middle finger to the corporate world, a god for the disillusioned, a red flag on every college dorm wall. The irony is that the film, and the novel it’s based on, was never meant to be aspirational. It’s a warning about what happens when men, stripped of meaning and emotional language, look for salvation in violence, dominance, and the cult of personality.

That warning has never felt more relevant than now.

What Fight Club understood is that masculinity under capitalism is a hollowed-out thing. Men are taught to suppress vulnerability, outsource their self-worth to jobs and gym routines, and find purpose in conquest rather than connection. In Fight Club, this leads to Tyler. In the real world, it leads to Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, and Donald Trump.

But where is the left in this conversation? Where is our alternative narrative for what it means to be a man?

bell hooks and the Politics of Love

In The Will to Change, bell hooks offers a quietly radical counterpoint to the Tyler Durden fantasy. She writes:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

Fight Club dramatizes that mutilation. The narrator splits in two—one half civilized and neutered, the other feral and free. But hooks asks us to imagine a third way: not repression, not explosion, but integration. She argues that men need space to feel, to grieve, to connect—and that real strength comes not from domination but from wholeness.

Her message isn’t just personal—it’s political. The left, she argues, has failed men by abandoning love as a political project. Instead of helping men unlearn domination, we often mock their confusion, pathologize their desires, or offer them a checklist of identity markers to apologize for.

The Manosphere and the Void

Enter the manosphere. Enter Trump. (Elsewhere I have written more about Trump’s connection with the manosphere. Click the link to read more about that).

Both thrive in the absence of a compassionate, confident leftist response to male alienation. In a world that ridicules traditional masculinity but offers little in its place, young men gravitate toward spaces that validate their pain—even if those spaces ultimately exploit it.

They’re told: You are broken and betrayed. You are fragile and need to become a warrior. And the world doesn’t need your empathy—it needs your violence.

Sound familiar? Not too far off from Project Mayhem.

The far right speaks to men in the language of agency, power, and pride. The left too often responds with shame, bureaucratic identity politics, or complete silence. It’s no surprise which story feels more compelling when you’re 19, online, and furious.

The Grift That Looks Like Power

The manosphere—a loose online network of influencers, forums, and self-proclaimed "alpha male" gurus—presents itself as a place for men to reclaim their power. But what it actually delivers is a seductive trap. The most insidious part of the manosphere isn’t just the misogyny—it’s the scam.

What’s being sold to young men isn’t really strength or purpose. It’s a performance of power, built on insecurity. Scroll through TikTok or YouTube and you’ll see it everywhere: influencers flaunting supercars, penthouse apartments, and “alpha” lifestyles. The message is always the same: If you don’t have this, it’s your fault. You’re not hustling hard enough. You’re weak. They are told this weakness is rooted in the rise of feminism, and that if they don't seek to dominate, they will be dominated. It pits them against the world, fosters alienation, and encourages antisocial pathology.

This is not just ego inflation—it’s psychological warfare. In a society where political choices have hollowed out opportunity for the majority, where wages stagnate and housing becomes unreachable, these men step in and say: It is the system—it’s the Matrix. They claim to offer the red pill, to awaken men to the truth. But the pill they offer doesn’t liberate. It doesn’t make you Neo—it makes you an Agent. What they promise isn’t freedom; it’s a role within the very system of domination they claim to resist.

The model they offer to young men is one built on manipulation and exploitation. Many made their money by exploiting women in the online sex industry, often under coercive or abusive conditions. Others promoted online gambling platforms aimed at teens and vulnerable users. Some sold overpriced "hustle" courses that delivered little more than empty hype, all while cultivating an image of success they never earned. Still others built pyramid-style affiliate networks that rewarded only the earliest adopters—systems designed less to empower than to extract. What they sell isn’t liberation. It’s the illusion of power, bought at the price of integrity.

This isn’t masculinity. It’s predation.

And even when it’s not overtly criminal, it’s spiritually bankrupt. Young men are being pulled into an economy of vanity—taught to value virality over wisdom, clout over community, money over meaning. They’re learning how to posture, not how to grow. They’re optimizing their Tinder bios instead of learning how to listen, how to build friendships, how to confront loss or raise a child.

And for those who can’t fake the performance? The despair turns inward.

That’s where the incel pipeline begins—where young men, unable to embody the hypermasculine ideal, begin to see themselves as defective. The result is not healing, but resentment. Not solidarity, but isolation. Not hope, but radicalization.

This is the real Project Mayhem.
Not a secret revolution, but an open marketplace of exploitation—selling disconnection to the disconnected.

Raising Boys

Reading bell hooks’ The Will to Change helped me see how many of the struggles I’ve faced—and the struggles I see in so many men—aren’t signs of personal failure, but symptoms of a culture that teaches boys to disconnect early and often. It helped me name what patriarchy does to men, not just what it demands of them. It revealed the cost of numbing ourselves and the quiet violence of emotional suppression.

And perhaps most importantly, it offered a way forward.

hooks doesn’t give us a twelve-step plan to fix masculinity. What she offers instead is a framework for reimagining it—one rooted in love, not shame. She challenges the idea that masculinity has to be defined by power over others, and instead opens up the possibility that it can be defined by connection, compassion, accountability, and care.

As a father, that’s become the foundation of how I think about raising my sons.

It means teaching them that vulnerability isn’t weakness. That their feelings matter. That tenderness is not something to outgrow. It means modeling emotional honesty—not perfectly, but intentionally—and creating space for them to be whole human beings, not just stoic performers of boyhood.

And it means resisting the cultural pull that tells boys their value lies in domination, achievement, or sexual conquest. That if they’re not rich, ripped, or relentlessly confident, they’ve already failed. hooks invites us to imagine another measure: Are they kind? Are they curious? Can they express their needs? Can they be loved—and can they love back?

That kind of masculinity isn’t less powerful. It’s just quieter. Deeper. More lasting.

What I Want My Sons to Know

I think often about what I inherited and how I want to pass something better on. My own father gave me the best that he had to give. Though he practiced forms of punishment I’ve chosen to leave behind—like spanking—he rarely did so without first sitting me down to talk. He would ask me what happened, listen to my perspective, explain why he believed I had acted wrongly, and discuss how I could handle things differently next time. He was intentional. I don’t believe spanking teaches discipline so much as it administers punishment, and I won’t use it with my own children. But I can see now that my father tried to reach me through relationship, not just control. That imperfect foundation may have given me the awareness—and the tools—to try to do better. We don’t have to get it all right. But we do have to keep reaching, keep revising, and give our children a better starting point than we had.

We don’t have to invent this from scratch. As hooks points out in All About Love, even mid-century television once imagined fathers as emotionally present, patient, and capable of loving discipline. On Leave It to Beaver, Ward and June Cleaver modeled something we rarely see today: parenting grounded in calm reflection, open communication, and relational guidance. Ward was consistently shown sitting down with Beaver or Wally to ask what happened—not to catch them in a lie, but to understand their thinking. He explained the reasoning behind rules and consequences without resorting to fear or shame. His goal wasn’t to humiliate but to cultivate responsibility, gently helping his sons see how their actions impacted others. In these moments, he acted not as a disciplinarian, but as a moral guide—someone whose authority was rooted in integrity and care. June mirrored and supported this ethic with emotional availability and trust.

“As you go through life try to improve yourself not prove yourself”-Ward Cleaver

Similarly, My Three Sons offered another glimpse of loving, if imperfect, fatherhood. Steve Douglas, a widower raising three boys, wasn’t overly demonstrative, but he was consistent and fair. He listened to his sons, expected accountability, and worked to maintain a sense of balance and warmth in a household without a mother. In both shows, fatherhood wasn’t defined by punishment or emotional distance, but by presence, patience, and a desire to raise thoughtful, decent men.

These weren’t flawless depictions, but they showed what was possible: a masculinity defined by listening, teaching, and loving accountability. What hooks saw in those portrayals wasn’t nostalgia—it was possibility. A reminder that we’ve already imagined a masculinity rooted in love and guidance, not fear.

The Cost of Failing Our Sons

What bell hooks helped me understand most clearly is that the way we raise boys and the way we define masculinity doesn’t just shape the lives of individual men—it shapes the world they build.

When men are taught to fear vulnerability, to chase domination, and to define success through performance and power, the consequences don’t stop at the edge of their own psyches. These beliefs ripple outward—into our politics, our economies, our communities, and even our planet.

We see it in our politics, where male fragility is exploited by strongman leaders who promise clarity through control. When boys are raised to believe that strength means never backing down, never apologizing, never admitting fear, they become easy marks for authoritarian movements that speak in the same language. Empathy begins to sound like weakness. Pluralism looks like chaos. And suddenly, anti-democratic ideologies feel like salvation, simply because they restore a sense of order and purpose that’s been stripped away elsewhere.

We see it in our economy, too. Neoliberalism thrives on atomized individuals blaming themselves for systemic failure. The manosphere, for all its anti-establishment posture, feeds the exact same narrative: if you don’t have wealth, status, or women, it’s because you’re not hustling hard enough. Just like the marketplace itself, it teaches men to compete rather than connect. To brand themselves rather than build solidarity. To strive endlessly, alone. And in doing so, it fractures the very bonds needed to create a more equitable society.

The consequences stretch even further—to the environment, to the family, to the very possibility of a sustainable future. How can we expect men raised on conquest and consumption to embrace restraint, cooperation, and care? How can we cultivate a generation of fathers, partners, and citizens who are capable of nurturing life—human and ecological—when we’ve told them that nurturing is women's work? The climate crisis requires humility. The work of raising children and sustaining communities requires patience. And yet we’ve spent generations telling men that these are feminine traits to be discarded, not cultivated.

And so, the pain doesn’t stay personal. It becomes political. Structural. Global.

A world of emotionally disconnected men is not just sad—it is dangerous. It is unstable. It is anti-democratic. Because men who cannot feel cannot build. Men who cannot grieve cannot change. Men who cannot be vulnerable cannot be trusted with power.

This is why the work of reimagining masculinity cannot be treated as a niche concern or a personal pet project. It is nothing less than civilizational. If we care about the survival of democracy, the health of our families, the restoration of our climate, the future of our children—then we must care about what kind of men we are producing, and what kind of masculinity we continue to reward.

Cultivating Masculinity

We don’t need men to be less. We need them to be more—more present, more whole, more human. That requires a new story. One rooted not in conquest, but in care. Not in domination, but in dignity. Not in fear, but in love.

We have a choice to make about the kinds of masculinity we elevate. On one side is a vision shaped by men like Donald Trump—figures who embody cruelty, performative dominance, and emotional fragility disguised as power. On the other is a quieter, steadier model, exemplified not perfectly but meaningfully by a character like Ward Cleaver: a father who led with calm, listened with care, and raised his sons not to conquer, but to grow. Neither man is the point—each represents a different story we tell about what it means to be strong and what masculinity should look like. The future depends on which one we choose to tell again and again. One story builds homes. The other builds walls.