This piece is from the book Before They Were Men by Jacob Tobia. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted with permission of Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

American men are angry right now. American men are frustrated: with women, with feminism, with social justice, with politics, with seemingly everything. We all feel it on some level. Whether it’s online or on a political podium, their anger is raw, visceral, and everywhere. They smell something awful and hypocritical in the world but have yet to find the carcass. They know something is wrong; they just can’t quite locate it.

Instead of helping them place their anger, I’m afraid we’ve denied that there’s a stench in the first place. We’ve told men, en masse, that the ang

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