What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything

by Jessa Crispin

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593317624
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

JESSA CRISPIN is the author of several books, including Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, The Dead Ladies Project, and My Three Dads. She is the editor and founder of The Culture We Deserve as well as host with Nico Rodriguez of TCWD weekly podcast. In 2002, she launched Bookslut.com, one of the first and most treasured literary websites of the era; it ran for fifteen years. She is originally from Lincoln, Kansas, and currently lives in Philadelphia.

Read an Excerpt

Fatal Attraction: Caught in the Crossfire of the Mommy Wars

Gender is a performance. While this was a radical idea when Simone de Beauvoir mainstreamed it in her 1949 philosophical feminist masterpiece The Second Sex, it’s become generally accepted thanks to the work of feminist thinkers who followed and the widespread introduction of gender studies classes in universities throughout the 1970s.

Gender is a role that we play in order to get along in society and achieve our goals and desires. It is shaped by our interactions with other people, through attempts—both successful and failing—to get what we want at our jobs or in our love lives, and the inspiration we see from other people performing the same gender.

But the roles we play, gendered and otherwise, are dependent on the roles other people are playing. If you’re onstage in the middle of A Streetcar Named Desire and your scene partner launches into a soliloquy from Macbeth, the whole performance falls apart.

The roles of men in Western society were and are supported by the roles that women play. One woman’s refusal to play along can disrupt the whole system. (Well, not literally—they’d just drag you off to give you a lobotomy and put you back onstage to dust the set pieces.) But in our understanding of a performance, someone refusing to do what is expected of them unsettles everyone else around them.

Which is why Fatal Attraction had such a tremendous impact on popular culture when it was released in 1987. The setup of the story was not radical—a married man cheats on his wife, so what. A tale as old as time. But the twist was so shocking that the film changed the lexicon (the phrase “bunny boiler” immediately entered slang to describe an unhinged woman), was quoted endlessly (“I’m not going to be ignored, Dan”), and spawned endless think pieces about the state of gendered relations. And that twist was simply that one woman refuses to play the role assigned to her, the role of mistress. Because rather than fading away after the man is done with their dalliance, she threatens and stalks him. She invades the private sanctity of his home, she shows up at his work and threatens his reputation. The man is supposed to be the one who is in control, but her refusal to play the role expected of her turns a romance into a horror movie.

To put it bluntly, the mistress’s role is death. The mistress is supposed to die when the man is finished with her. The woman who is not fit for marriage, who does not exist within the protection of the family in a patriarchal society, is something to be used and discarded. This is the story of the murdered sex worker, the lesbians who die at the end of their films, the bohemian women who die of tuberculosis, and the rejected mistress who turns to suicide after her lover leaves her for another. It even shows up in Fatal Attraction, through repeated references to Madama Butterfly, Puccini’s 1904 opera about a Japanese woman abandoned after her affair with an American soldier. When Butterfly is discarded by a man who marries a more appropriate match, she kills herself with a seppuku knife—the ritualistic death that restores honor to the subject after their disgrace.

Alex’s refusal to die, her almost supernatural persistence and intrusive presence in Dan’s life, marks a turn in the culture. Women could survive outside of men’s protection. She has a job, a social life, love and sex, money, the kind of arty loft apartment in the Meatpacking District that your average Manhattanite would pay through the nose for these days. Alex refuses to play any role that someone like Dan could recognize.

But the fact that Alex does eventually die—not by Dan’s hand but by his wife’s—shows just how destabilizing the ability of a woman to live outside of men’s structures really was. The patriarchal man isn’t the only one threatened by Alex and the “career women” who crept around in the shadows of mass media’s imagination like a baby-­eating Baba Yaga. Alex is also a threat to Beth, the traditional wife and mother.

When we meet Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, in a character named Dan, he is on his way up. We see the head of his law firm praising him and inviting him out for dinner, he’s looking into buying a house in the suburbs, he is doing quite well for himself and his wife and daughter. He’s doing so well, in fact, that he, like a lot of ambitious men, starts to feel cramped in his own home. He comes home from a successful business event to find his daughter has taken his position in his bed. His wife seems distracted and busy, her attention focused on real estate decisions and parenting obligations and her own parents, rather than on him.

And so, like any successful man in a man-­ruled business, he decides to have an affair. He’s entitled to one. Infidelity was supposed to be his reward for success. How many films, books, operas had taught our Michael Douglas figure and his upwardly mobile peers that this is what a successful man deserves? Isn’t this why men ascend into the professional classes, why they fight their way into exclusive universities, why they work long hours to meet impossible expectations for billable hours, why they stifle anything interesting or unique about themselves way down deep to present a smooth, successful surface? Because once you accumulate enough wealth and power, the rules of morality and decency that govern other people, the common people, no longer apply to you. The king has courtesans; the big-­name lawyer has mistresses.

There has always been a steady supply of extra women in the world, ready to service the great man’s needs: secretaries, sex workers, mistresses, service workers, students, the unmarriable, scenesters. Women looking for a way into whatever industry he might be gatekeeping, women who can’t find the loving attention of a husband and family themselves because they so poorly play the role of the wife, wild women who can’t be domesticated, women with “daddy issues,” naïve young women who are still confusing wanting to be like a certain person with wanting to fuck that person.

There have always been risks involved with straying outside the marriage for the successful man. There’s the looming threat of divorce or scandal (or, depending on how you go about it, jail time). But these relationships with women usually have pretty clear trade-­offs. Whether you are paying them off with money, romance, material goods, or access to your world, there are boundaries. Rules. Most of those boundaries, at least on the women’s side, are maintained through fear. Fear of losing his affection, fear of getting dumped, fear of being publicly shamed or cast out of his society, fear of his displeasure turning into violence.

Because once they are no longer wanted, the extra women are easily discarded. Give her a cash settlement and an NDA, or maybe dump her body in the river if it’s really not going very well. For the most part, the extra women of the world have known what part they are there to play, and there have not historically been many second acts for them. Mistresses, sex workers, and victims have often kept quiet, or at least waited until the man has passed to spill their secrets. Inhabiting the role of the successful man requires that women play their assigned parts with the same devotion and limitations. Men can get away with infidelity, rape, harassment, and other mistreatment without consequences only if women refuse to talk about it. Marilyn Monroe had an affair with a president and took the story to her early grave; Monica Lewinsky did the same and went on national television.

And it’s not only Alex who is refusing to stay quiet after Dan tries to discard her after their passionate weekend. The only legal case we see Dan working on is related to a sex scandal. A woman who had an affair with a politician has decided not to stay loyal and keep his secrets for him—she wrote a book about it instead. Not even the threat of legal action will silence her. There is nothing the politician can do to prevent being smacked in the face with the consequences of his own behavior.

Ironically, Dan is working on the case on the side of the politician’s mistress and the publisher who wants to help sell her story. And yet still he naïvely has his own affair—with a work colleague—despite having this lawsuit right in front of him, the brief for which might as well have been written by Cassandra: ruin is coming, Dan.

The reason Alex can pose a threat to Dan is because of the protections afforded to her and other women like her by the feminist movement. Dan appeals to various forms of authority to protect him from Alex, but there is nothing to be done. Alex tells Dan she is pregnant; unable to coerce her into terminating the pregnancy, he asks for legal advice to see if there is anything to be done to protect him from being declared legally responsible for this child. There is not. When Dan fears that Alex will reveal to his wife and child their affair, he goes to the police to see about a protection order. But since he can’t prove she has done him any real harm, they can’t intervene—not even to “scare” her as he asks. These scenes are an interesting way of looking at how laws and regulations changed during this era. These institutions of law and order were designed to protect people exactly like Dan, property-­owning white head-­of-­household men. Why won’t they come to his aid?

As the Nobel Prize–­winning economist Gary Becker noted, “the family is the foundation of all civil society.” Which is why it was worrying to those in the American government when during this era the foundation started to show some cracks. Divorce rates were up, single parent households started to rise, and the middle-­class nuclear family became endangered.

One major concern was that the welfare state was simply too robust. Families that split apart, leaving single women with low paying jobs, or no jobs at all, responsible for the care of children could turn to social programs like food aid and housing subsidies to replace the man’s wages. The government would be expected to foot the bill for what some called man’s dereliction of duty.

As Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1976, he frequently told the story of Linda Taylor, who he and other right-­wing political figures deemed the “welfare queen.” She had been receiving welfare checks under several different names and was accused of defrauding the government. The politicians who wanted to reform and gut the social welfare programs pointed to her as just one of many devious women who invented children who did not exist, created fake names to apply for benefits, and ran other scams to use welfare money to buy cars and fur coats. A backlash against welfare recipients started to grow, as people who relied on this supplementary income were tarnished as freeloaders and con artists. This created the pressure required to make sweeping changes to what was up until then a successful and efficient system for preventing childhood hunger and devastating poverty.

One thing both the political left and right agreed on in this era of increased political polarization was that welfare programs had to change. As Melinda Cooper writes in her 2017 book Family Values, both the neoliberals and the neoconservatives agreed that the restoration of the nuclear family to the center of the American economy was essential for growth. “Although they are much more prepared than are social conservatives to accommodate changes in the nature and form of relationships within the family,” she writes, “neoliberal economists and legal theorists wish to reestablish the private family as the primary source of economic security and a comprehensive alternative to the welfare state.” In order to decrease the burden carried by the government, the goal was to shift that burden over to the individual.

Many of these changes were designed to protect the state against irresponsible women: women who divorced their partners, women who had children outside of marriage, or women who birthed children without health insurance. Barriers were put in place to prevent these women from easily accessing welfare programs. But many of those barriers also punished men. And the more disadvantaged the men, the more vulnerable they were to these new policies that exposed them to increased surveillance and interference by government programs.

One major victory in this pursuit was the establishment of the requirement that before a woman could receive government support for her children she first had to attempt to collect child support from the father. The Child Support Enforcement program was established in 1984 to help ensure that men not present in the household, either because of divorce or children being born outside of wedlock, still contributed financially to the cost of raising children. These payments were a crucial part of creating financial stability for the rising number of single parent households, but they were also not directly tied into welfare programs. But in 1996, due to the “family first” welfare reforms, the establishment of paternity and the attempt to recoup funds from the absent spouse became a requirement for receiving welfare programs. If the partner applying for benefits did not want to involve the other parent—and many people who had suffered domestic violence at the hands of their partner did not want to involve them in this legal process—then they were not eligible for benefits.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

PART ONE: MICHAEL DOUGLAS AND WOMEN
Fatal Attraction: Caught in the Crossfire of the Mommy Wars 14
War of the Roses: Court-Mandated Fatherhood 31
Basic Instinct: What If We Just Got Rid of All the Men? 49

PART TWO: THE ECONOMIC ACTOR
Wall Street: A New Economy, and a New Masculinity, Emerges 73
Falling Down: The Aspirational Mass Shooter 89

PART THREE: A WHITE MAN IN A BROWN WORLD
Black Rain: America Hits Its Midlife Crisis 113
The American President: Finding Meaning in the Drone Bomb 130

PART FOUR: THE PATRIARCH FALLS
Disclosure: Please Report to Human Resources 155
The Game: Bringing Patriarchs Back to Life 171

PART FIVE: WELCOME TO THE POSTPATRIARCHY
Teaching Michael Douglas to Love: Age Gaps, Power Imbalances, and Other Heterosexual Indignities 196
Daddy Issues: Father Hunger and the Search for an Heir 211
Speculative Masculinity: The Rise of the Masculinity Influencer 225
Conclusion: Imagining a Post–Michael Douglas World 241

Selected Bibliography 249

Editorial Reviews

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: BookPage, LitHub, The Millions
A New York Post Buzz Book

“Crispin’s byline has long made me sit up straighter. . . . What Is Wrong with Men, which argues that Douglas’s portrayals in the ’80s and ’90s provide a kind of road map for the current masculinity crisis, has reeled me [in]. Like Absolut and cranberry: What a pairing!”—The New York Times

“Crispin reveals how huge social and economic shifts, in the wake of new waves of feminism, have impacted the fundamental nature of patriarchy.”—New York Post

“Astute and wildly funny. . . . Not only a thought-provoking read, it’s also a great—timely—time.”—LitHub

“A dire assertion of the crisis of white American masculinity and its impact on the world today. Crispin . . . focuses her analysis in a surprisingly acute and intelligent manner.”—BookPage

“A keen, original, and intrepid social critic[, Crispin draws] on astute research, intellectual clarity, and droll wit, [to track] the crumbling of the patriarchy in a bravura performance pegged to Michael Douglas’ ‘blockbuster’ movies of the 1980s and 1990s. . . . Cogently argued and thought-provoking.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“Crispin’s adept cultural synthesis is delivered with amusing snark and an undertone of increasing anxiety, pontifical concern, and moral urgency designed to confront the current moment. A fiery synopsis of a formative period for American masculinity.”—Kirkus

“Crispin’s expansive cultural analysis is astute and well researched, showing how men, rather than redefining gender dynamics alongside women, saw the ’80s and ’90s as ‘a time of disempowerment’ and turned instead to a winner takes all individualism.”—Publishers Weekly

“Using one actor's filmography as a codex, Jessa Crispin has done what so many sociologists, psychologists, and other experts have not been able to: clearly, shrewdly locate the origins of our ongoing ‘man crisis’ not in feminism but in rampant, extractive capitalism. In Douglas's leading men, Crispin finds a timeline of the bait-and-switch that hollowed out American masculinity, leaving in place the old ideals, but not the opportunities.”—Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once

“The most surprising thing about Jessa’s prescient, rigorous, and sneakily hilarious What Is Wrong with Men, is how quickly and easily (and, for me, shamefully) she shifted my ‘Michael Douglas explains the modern man? Really?’ skepticism to ‘Get out of my brain!’ and then to ‘Wait . . . am I Michael Douglas?’”—Damon Young, author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker

“Jessa Crispin told us what is wrong with contemporary white, bourgeois feminism in Why I Am Not a Feminist. In her new book, she tells us—and not a moment too soon—what is wrong with men, slyly examining the transformations, adaptations, and metamorphoses of masculinity through Michael Douglas' cinematic roles. What is Wrong with Men is whip smart and hilarious, an unforgettable condemnation of patriarchy, and the cultural, economic, and political institutions that uphold it.”—Tanya Pearson, author of Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the 90s

From the Publisher

2025-04-17
A cultural critic traces a nebulous redefinition of masculinity to the last decades of the 20th century.

In her new work, Crispin’s tools of critique are the erotic thrillers in which Michael Douglas starred in the 1980s and ’90s. The characters he played during this time, the author suggests, all reflect a “new masculinity” trying to find purchase in the wake of not only feminism’s second and third waves, but also shifts to America’s global position at the end of the Cold War. Women had achieved, even if imperfectly, new freedoms and had built resourceful networks of community and advocacy to propel themselves from patriarchy’s grip. Men, however, floundered in the face of perceived disempowerment. Failing to discern a new model of masculinity in their changing world, they become narrowly—even dangerously—reactive, shaping manliness into something marked by paranoid outrage, monetary greed, and cruel individualism. This is a niche period, both for Michael Douglas as a celebrity—his work after the turn of the century is only barely covered in the text, with some films not mentioned at all—and for the creation of a post-patriarchal society. The Douglas films offer examples as touchpoints for the author to discuss stereotypes like midlife crisis and nostalgic nationalism, as well as upheavals like no-fault divorce and the savings and loan banking crisis, all of which give way to the confusion, denial, and ultimately defensiveness and grievance that fuel a widespread conversation about how “men are failing to thrive” today. The author’s preoccupation with Douglas’ portrayals often distracts from rather than reinforces her argument, which can itself be winding and overgeneralized. Nevertheless, Crispin’s adept cultural synthesis is delivered with amusing snark and an undertone of increasing anxiety, pontifical concern, and moral urgency designed to confront the current moment.

A fiery synopsis of a formative period for American masculinity.

Kirkus Reviews