When Old Certainties Collapse

Olderhood Unfolding 23

I’ve been reading Helen Lewis’s long piece in The Atlantic: “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet” - about the rise of misogyny and “masculinism” in American culture and politics.

Some of what it describes is extreme. But beneath the extremism sits something more interesting, and perhaps more troubling: what happens when social roles change faster than people can psychologically absorb.

As I read, I found myself thinking not primarily about younger men, but about transition itself. About backlash. About status, fear, loneliness, and the human hunger for certainty when the ground shifts underfoot.

And I found myself wondering whether this is really a conversation about gender at all, or whether it is, at its core, a conversation about meaning, belonging, and emotional maturity.

I’ve been here before.

I came of age during the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s, not as a spectator, but as a participant. I was in the consciousness-raising groups, the T-groups, the encounter groups, the long arguments about what liberation would actually look like. I saw, close up, what it costs people, women and men, when identity is destabilised by rapid cultural change. And I watched, over the following decades, how that destabilisation played out in individual lives, in clinical work, and in the research that would eventually become the framework I call ThriveSpan.

What I’ve been thinking about since reading Lewis’s article is not who is right in this culture war. It’s why culture wars keep happening, and what they reveal about human development that we persistently refuse to address.

There are parts of the current conversation around masculinity that I find genuinely concerning.

The reflection continues below, exploring why grievance movements flourish when people lose stable pathways into meaning, identity, and belonging.