There’s one story of the 2024 presidential contest that says that this election is all about men, and their anger. Men, in this account, have gotten a raw deal: the decline of the industrial economy in the years since the postwar boom means that many of the jobs that gave dignity, structure, and steady paychecks to their fathers are now gone, and some men, especially those without college degrees, have fallen into a cycle of desperation and despair, unable to make the kind of living for which they could respect themselves.

This economic argument about men is usually followed by a cultural one: that women aren’t as nice to men as they should be, or maybe not as nice to men as they used to be. On one end of this conversation, there are paeans to male loneliness and discussions of the male suicide rate, quasi-poetic odes to their depths of despair and acute feeling: women just don’t understand what it’s like to be sad the way that men are sad.

On the other end, writers and commentators point to more recent cultural trends that they say have alienated men, making them feel attacked or unnecessary. They point, apparently seriously, to the fact that some young feminists online have used the term “toxic masculinity,” which they say makes men feel bad, bad enough that their feelings are an emergency for the nation. They point to those t-shirts that were popular in 2017 that said, “The Future Is Female.” This, too, is reflective of a great social pathology, a sign that we as a nation have failed men and boys. Why, they plead, can’t the future be male?

Those who worry for the state of men may be right that........

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