There's a Legitimate Reason Why Men Are Angry, Too. It's Time We Stop Denying It.

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 anger they feel is from nothing. Is illegitimate. That there is, in fact, no cause. That the stench they think they're smelling is all in their heads. In spite of how much we protest when they gaslight us , I'm afraid we've chosen to gaslight the living hell out of them .

That feeling of injustice deep in your gut isn't real , we say. You 're a man. Things are done for you. Stop being angry at nothing , we say.

It's irrefutable that men's present anger is lacking in sufficient specificity and articulation. As a movement, this should not be feminist to us. There was a time, more than half a century ago, when women's anger and frustration were equally inarticulate. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in search of illuminating what she deemed to be “ the problem that has no name ,” the problem that “ lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women … a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning. ” Her words from the '60s still ring true today:

It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough.

Might we now, 60 years later, say the same thing of men?

Without a movement to teach them or an analysis to guide them, their present anger lacks the sort of precision that could help us feel comfortable with it. It's anger that stems from abstract knowledge, a gut feeling that injustice is being done: words on the tip of the tongue, but never quite spoken. Men don't know exactly what the injustice is, but they perceive it nonetheless. Something is off. A stench without cause. An odor emanating from somewhere .

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Here's the thing: paucity of specificity and inadequate articulation do not render men's current frustration illegitimate; if anything, they bolster the case for further investigation and lay bare the urgency of this historical moment. It's time we entertain the idea that men might be picking up on something real. There has been hypocrisy, and it is worth being angry about.

Men look at the feminist movement and—subconsciously, I think—ask themselves: What is feminism doing to protect me ? I need protection, too, you know.

In general, we dismiss this feeling. Protect you? After what you 've spent centuries doing to us? Protect yourself, asshole.

Though I understand where it comes from, I'm afraid this sort of reaction stops us from asking the important questions. Namely: If we say we abhor the violence of men and want it to cease, what are we doing to stop boys from being recruited into it?

We have not embodied gender equality sufficiently. As a feminist movement, we have worked tirelessly to protect women and girls from the violence that is all too prevalent in their lives but have said next to nothing about the violence facing men and boys. We have fought tooth and nail against institutions that predominantly brutalize women but have done little to combat the institutions—institutions like military bases, prisons, and police training facilities—that so often brutalize men, too. I think that's in part because men operate (and benefit from) these institutions, but that's no reason to ignore them. Just because a man is in charge, that doesn't mean the institution is safe for other men . Men and boys need protection from the violence of powerful men every bit as much as women and girls do. Powerful men—men who are used to enacting violence with impunity—are a threat to us all.

What's worse, we seem to have decried men's anger wholesale. We have labeled angry men as bad men and, in so doing, have lost vital nuance. Because they cannot articulate it to us in sufficient language—because they have yet to locate the precise source of the stench—we have denied any possibility that the anger men feel might be righteous.

Here's the thing: men should be angry, and their anger is righteous, albeit misplaced. If the culture that raised you sees you as little more than a future agent of military, police, or corporate violence, it would be strange for you not to be angry. Men have been ignored. They have been brutalized. They have been told that it is their job to do the policing and soldiering and brutalizing on behalf of us all. They have endured serious gender-based violence, and rather than help them locate it, we've mostly told them they're doing the whole thing up.

Most effective social justice movements are predicated on anger, on people being so fed up and exasperated with how they're being treated, they're spurred to action. Why are we denying men's anger when we should be helping them better articulate it and then using it ? The anger men feel at how they're treated by the world is not only productive, it is necessary .

We should not ask men to renounce the anger they feel about the violence they have been groomed to enact; because doing so entails asking them to renounce their belief in their own dignity and personhood. We should make use of that anger, instead; focus it, hone it, funnel it into tearing down institutions that need tearing down, channel it into creating a kinder and less violent world.

What if we encouraged men to trust their noses instead of instructing them to relieve their frustration? What if, instead of spending energy denying that something is friends, we dedicate our energy to affirming that something is off and join men as they search for the source of the stench? What if we say to men, “ We agree. Something is n't right. Your body and psyche are being exploited to nefarious ends. You were groomed unfairly ,” and then rage and scream and investigate alongside them?

This is where I am flummoxed and exhausted by contemporary popular feminism, if only because it is so obvious. We will volunteer for hours outside an abortion clinic, helping to protect women who are entering from being harassed. We do so because it is both vital and necessary. We do so because we believe in a world where people have agency over their own bodies. But we do next to nothing about military recruitment centers or police academies, institutions whose primary job is to instill violence in men—to take their bodies and their minds and exploit them for the violent ends of the ruling class.

Can we stop scratching our heads and pretending we do not know how America became a nation of such violence? Can we stop acting surprised when, after raising our boys as child soldiers, their violence turns back against us? Can we own up to the truth: that we cannot ask boys to conceptualize ruthlessly killing faraway brown people, then reasonably expect them to turn it off when they come home? That we cannot raise boys to fantasize about guns and war throughout their childhood, then act surprised when they shoot up a school? That we cannot raise our boys to be fine with abusing Afghani prisoners, then expect them not to abuse us, too?

As a feminist movement, it's high time we pick a lane. It's time we take a stand with veterans and against the military. It's time we declare that we're no longer OK living in a violent world. We must decide that the dignity and bodily autonomy of men and boys matter to us enough to fight for them. We must rage against the myriad institutions that insist on making murderers out of our little boys. As a feminist movement, we must categorically decry war, in all its forms.

“But what about when military force and war are necessary?” you might be thinking.