The lack of punctuation in Jessa Crispin’s title suggests the gravity of the problem: “What Is wrong with men” is not a question, but a dire assertion of the crisis of white American masculinity and its impact on the world today. Crispin, the author of Why I Am Not a Feminist and creator of the erstwhile lit blog Bookslut, focuses her analysis in a surprisingly acute and intelligent manner: through the films of Michael Douglas.
What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything examines the breakdown of American patriarchy through a comparison of the roles that Douglas and his father, Kirk Douglas, have played in popular films. While the elder Douglas could be a god, a warrior or an artist, Michael Douglas’ choices, particularly in the ’80s and early ’90s, were narrower. In films like Fatal Attraction, Falling Down and Disclosure, Douglas plays a hysterical man-baby, confused and violent when confronted with the changing status of women. In 1987’s Fatal Attraction, Douglas’ breadwinner character, Dan Gallagher, enjoys an affair with Glenn Close’s urban professional while his stay-at-home wife is out of town. The film implies that he deserves a little fun after all that breadwinning, that single women are unhinged, and that the consequences he faces for cheating on his wife and ghosting his mistress like a 1960s Mad Men character are outsized and unfair.
Crispin’s historical analysis situates the younger Douglas’ films against the changes in women’s status, the free-market economy and geopolitics from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Her reading of 1993’s Falling Down is particularly astute in regard to white male grievance, showing how Douglas’ character works out his fury on women and people of color rather than on the white corporate overlords who fired him. Crispin contextualizes this film against ’90s attacks on affirmative action, suggesting a direct path to the current assault on diversity, equity and inclusion in a post-Roe 2025.
Ultimately, Crispin suggests that the problem with white men is a problem of national identity, an inability to let go of the myth of America as the greatest nation of all time. But that myth has always been exclusionary, racist and violent, like Douglas’ characters in so many of these films. And men, she argues sympathetically, suffer from it. “Trying to escape from toxic masculinity in today’s society becomes a deranged Choose Your Own Adventure,” she writes, “where no matter what you decide or which page you turn to you end up falling into the mouth of the volcano.” In 1997’s The Game, Douglas begins to seek absolution. Is rehabilitation possible for the modern man? Let’s hope so.
