Entering the Belly of the Beast
The Tana French and Gillian Flynn of newsletters is learning new vocab, setting up a Beta Mom-Wine Mom catfight (!), and never watching Zoolander again.
Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreademists,
How often have you heard the word masculinism, a mirror term for feminism? It’s been bumping around academia for decades but feels relatively new to your Spreaditors—two people who, as you know, keep our eyes trained on this space like Trader Joe’s shoppers pouncing on the last tote bag. Well, gird your loins: Masculinism, the movement, is the star of a sweeping Atlantic cover story that dropped today. In it, the one and only Dame Helen Lewis makes the case that—more than race, religion, and the price of beef—masculinism is the true ish of modern conservatism, the superglue sticking Trump’s toupee in place, the peanut butter at the center of the whole New Right sandwich. Online, her story is called “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet,” but Lewis’s title (read to you by Lewis herself—in her dulcet English tones, whatta treat!—in the audio version) is “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote. Or Work. Or Have Opinions.” That sounds like hyperbole or satire but, remarkably, the men she interviews cop to exactly those beliefs. Lewis writes about the usual tentpoles of the manosphere grifter ecosystem (Tate, Rogan), but the men she’s really zeroing in on here are ones we’ve heard less about: educated types who hold real clout in major institutions (like, say, the US government) and are in some ways more worrying. They have both the sophistication to spout ten-dollar words and the ability to make their wacko beliefs sound almost… sensible. One, Douglas Wilson, the pastor whose denomination counts Pete Hegseth as a member, is fond of saying out loud that he would like to repeal the 19th amendment.
Masculinist rage is of course fueled by men’s real and/or perceived loss of power. But while we have talked ad nauseam about “working-class economic anxiety,” Lewis argues that the true animus is far simpler: Who took men’s power away? Women! How do we fix it? Put ’em back where they belong!
A few fun data points to keep in your back pocket when you corner your friendly neighborhood wine mom (more on her in a minute) at the school fundraiser:
83 percent of Republican men under 50 believe society is too “feminized”
College-educated Republicans are more likely than non-college-educated Republicans to hold that view
Gen Z men in 30 countries are far more likely than Boomer men to say feminism has gone too far and hurt men
Keep reading, friends—many of this week’s stories turned out to be variations on this theme. We keep trying to believe that the manosphere is a terrible moment that will pass. Lewis’s story makes it clear that we ignore, or underestimate, these forces at our own peril.
Wine? Someone say wine?
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. This coming Tuesday night your Spreaditors will ascend the sparkling escalators of Brookfield Place mall in New York City to attend the National Magazine Awards—aka the ASMEs—where we’ll chin chin our fellow nominees and sit shoulder to shoulder with the industry elite (if you’ve seen the recent documentary The Devil Wears Prada 2, can you please suspend disbelief for us just this once?). Who will take home the top prize for best newsletter in all the land? Watch this space!
A Tale of Two Moms
The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter digs into the cultural trope of the Wine Mom, which for a hot second meant just a mom who needed a lil break—perhaps over a cool glass of pinot gris—before being co-opted by the right as a shorthand for whiny, white, liberal, book club-frequenting suburban gals, aka uppity types who won’t even give moms.gov a chance! Wine Moms belong to the sisterhood of Karens, AWFULs, and in Winter’s reframing, they—we?—are an important and potentially decisive voting bloc for the midterms. The Wine Mom’s secret weapon? Her kids’ school: “What appears simply as a P.T.A. meeting or a group of parents waiting outside the school gates at dismissal can double as a wellspring of political organization and mutual aid,” Winter writes. “That’s partly why Moms for Liberty was able to take over school boards so quickly after the pandemic, and it’s partly why a center-left counterstrike dominated by mothers could so quickly take them back. The left-leaning Pipeline Fund, which started in 2018, helped Democrats in Florida pick up fifteen school-board seats in 2024, and plans to back candidates in school-board and other down-ballot races across twenty-one states in the next midterms.” But while we are organizing our own communities and harnessing every modicum of optimism we can muster, history is not on our side here: Winter points out that the last time the majority of white women voted for a democrat was when Bill Clinton was first elected. That was 1992.
Meanwhile, over at WSJ magazine, we’re treated to a proper introduction to yet another mommy archetype. The Cool Girl has grown up, trading her enthusiasm for chili dogs, beer, and poker for a nonchalant style of parenting. She is now: the Beta Mom, the antidote to the helicopter parent. She is not played by Anne Hathaway in the movie version, but rather Emily Ratajkowski or Zoë Kravitz or—duh—Jennifer Lawrence. Beta Mom does not juggle multiple extracurriculars, stalk the ever-loving shit out of her children via Life360, or wring her hands over whether they’ll get into a good college—hell, maybe there’ll be no point in college by then anyway, ever heard of AI?? When you ask her, Do You Know Where Your Children Are? she ostentatiously answers that no, she doesn’t, but that she’s confident they’ll be home by curfew. Beta Mom is chill as hell, and she is aspirational. The actual story is less catty than we’re being—perhaps author Rachel Wolfe is less of a basketcase than your Spreaditors—and also positions the Beta Mom as something of a crusader against screen zombification. A Beta named Sophie Jaffe persuasively puts it this way: “I would rather them be out, making memories, than sitting on their videogames.” BRB—calling the doc to double our Lexapro.
Read “The Political Power of the Wine Mom” here.
Read “The Era of the Tiger Mom Is Over. Enter the Beta Mom.” via Apple News here.
Why stop here? Sashay over this pesky paywall to read about the injections that are turning man-mush into titans (sperm be damned); Ezra’s little helper; the real families rocked by the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner; a survival theory about Gisele Pelicot; and real life Showgirls!!!
