Michael Douglas has been a lot of things in his long Hollywood career: A swaggering international adventurer, an amoral corporate raider, a family man who pays dearly for an indiscretion. He’s been a beleaguered company man–turned–aggrieved vigilante and a beleaguered company man wrongly accused of sexual harassment. He’s been the president of the United States and at least two rogue detectives named Nick.
In role after role as the 20th century lurched to its end, Douglas acted out the confusion, frustration and anger of white men all across the United States who were shocked that social change meant they had to change as well.
These roles have made him something else: an oracle of male anxiety and an early-warning siren for the breakdown of old-fashioned American masculinity. That is, at least, the premise of cultural critic Jessa Crispin’s new book, “What Is Wrong with Men.” Crispin sees a throughline in the movies Douglas made in the 1980s and ’90s, when he was one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars: Each role captured a bit of the upheaval that men were experiencing during a period of time in which economics, women’s liberation and immigration were changing how the country worked and looked.
If you haven’t seen these movies, which include action dramedies like “Romancing the Stone” (1984) and “War of the Roses” (1989), lurid thrillers like “Fatal Attraction” (1987) and “Basic Instinct” (1992) and dramatic unravelings like “Falling Down” (1993) and “Disclosure” (1994) since they first came out, this might be a confusing premise. Michael Douglas? The guy with the chin passed down from his Hollywood legend father, Kirk? The unconvincing sex symbol who was nevertheless constantly paired with scorching-hot women? Growly, jowly Michael Douglas?
Yes, him. In role after role as the 20th century lurched to its end, Douglas acted out the confusion, frustration and anger of white men all across the United States who were shocked that social change meant they had to change as well. But despite his name in the subtitle and on the dedication page, “What Is Wrong with Men” isn’t a book about Michael Douglas, the actor. It’s a book about how global capitalism hollowed out the American masculine ideal and let feminism take the fall, and about the destabilizing effects that ensued and continue to reverberate. There’s no question mark in the title, because what is wrong with men is obvious to Crispin:
“[T]his wasn’t just your usual generational shift, where one father’s priorities look old-fashioned and boring to the son raised on new technologies and ideas. This was the patriarchy abandoning men. This was about the disappearance of the actual structure of laws, cultural norms, financial regulations, and religions that withheld power from the many for the benefit of the few men who met their standards, to be replaced by a structure that instead benefited only the wealthy, no matter their gender.”
“What Is Wrong with Men” isn’t a book about Michael Douglas, the actor. It’s a book about how global capitalism hollowed out the American masculine ideal and let feminism take the fall.
And so began the rise of masculinity-crisis media, which has surfaced at regular intervals in the last few decades. Each iteration brings with it doomily titled books (among them, 2000’s “The War Against Boys,” 2008’s “Save the Males,” 2012’s “The End of Men” and 2020’s “The Boy Crisis”) and buzzy phrases (like the “murderous equity doctrine” exacted by feminists seeking to “undermine traditional masculinity”). More prominently, each also brings with it a determination to pin the masculinity crisis on feminism, multiculturalism, or trans rights.
The masculinity crisis exists, and we can see evidence of it everywhere, from the pattern of school shootings and suicides to the rise of manosphere influencers selling dodgy masculinity-enhancing supplements to audiences of millions. Men and boys are hurting and isolated; they are underperforming in school and drifting aimlessly in the job market. They are unable to form lasting relationships, suffer from depression and drug addiction, and are dying by suicide in alarming numbers. All of this is unquestionably true. But the word “crisis” suggests that all of this is something that befell men without warning, rather than something that was willfully perpetuated on them (and not, spoiler alert, by feminism, multiculturalism, or trans rights).
The hallmark of Douglas’ most indelible characters, writes Crispin, is a malady historically assigned only to women: hysteria. His everymen, forced by circumstance into worlds that were previously invisible to them, who have no vocabulary to help navigate those worlds and no switch to flip that restores them to factory settings, eventually become hysterical: “[T]he typical Michael Douglas character will at some point dive into a state of frenzy and exasperation, shaking his head and waving his arms to say, Look at me! Look at what they are doing to me.”
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And as with the women once diagnosed on sight as hysterical, there is no way to decipher what’s wrong with these men without looking at the social, sexual and economic backdrop of their keening and wailing. So Crispin does, reframing 1987’s “Fatal Attraction” and 1989’s “The War of the Roses” as stories about men who simply never paid attention to the issue of women’s liberation until it b**ch slapped them into the present, and shifting the lens of 1992’s “Basic Instinct” away from the danger of a sexy, ice pick–wielding sociopath to focus instead on the suffocating narrowness of heterosexuality.
The Rosetta Stone of “What Is Wrong With Men” is, unsurprisingly, Douglas’ most iconic role: Gordon Gekko, “Wall Street”’s slick-haired, power-suited corporate raider. The actor has spoken in interviews about the discomfort he feels when men approach him to declare their love for Gekko and credit him with inspiring them to pursue careers in arbitrage or investment banking. In 2012, he appeared in a public-service announcement for the FBI to emphasize that his Oscar-winning characterization of “a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings” shouldn’t be anyone’s role model: “The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.”
Nearly every facet of the masculinity crisis faced by men and boys today results from the unfettered greed of Gordon Gekko’s real-life counterparts.
Crispin, on the other hand, doesn’t understand how it’s possible to not want to be Gekko, whose magnetism is as undeniable as his insider trades are unethical, and who embodied a monumental shift in both global economics and American masculinity. The prevailing model of masculinity in 1987 was the one forged in the aftermath of World War II: Men work hard, stick to their principles and protect both their loved ones and their country; in return, their country enables them — with a giant asterisk excluding Black veterans — to be homeowning, breadwinning family men and, if they live long enough, retirees. Gekko’s self-serving recklessness, Crispin writes, “sever[ed] the actions of masculinity from the values of masculinity” — and in doing so mirrored the self-serving recklessness of the Reagan administration. Loyal, dutiful postwar masculinity couldn’t compete with a shiny new economics of consuming, consolidating and controlling.
The answer to Crispin’s titular nonquestion — what put all these men in crisis — is capitalism. Not the system of capitalism itself, but the enthronement of capital. Nearly every facet of the masculinity crisis faced by men and boys today results from the unfettered greed of Gordon Gekko’s real-life counterparts, who changed America from a production economy to a consumer economy, championed deregulation and privatization and turned the stock market into a Las Vegas casino. The Gekkos who rigged the game won the game, and they did so at the expense of millions of men whose masculine ideals were ground down under the Gucci loafers of the ownership class.
As Susan Faludi chronicled in 1999’s “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man” (one of a small handful of man-crisis books that’s aged well), these men saw their labor unions flattened and their industries offshored. Their healthcare depended on employment, so their physical pain was managed by profiteering pharmaceutical companies. At one sh***y end of the stick, rapacious greed transformed men into conduits for transferring wealth from owners to stockholders; at the other, equally sh***y end, the privatization of prisons made incarcerated men — primarily Black men, and often innocent ones — into sources of passive income.
“What Is Wrong With Men” is, ultimately, a book about the deliberate destruction of the middle class disguised as a travelogue through one actor’s filmography. The crisis of masculinity is real, but the industry around it doesn’t appear to want to solve it because it’s where the money is. The idolatry of capital ensures that the people and institutions that engineered the crisis will never be held accountable; feminists, people of color, LGBTQ advocates, and other minoritized groups will—in perpetuity, by way of threats, policy and punitive measures.
But Michael Douglas will remain Michael Douglas, our reliable hysterical everyman. Most recently, he was in the headlines for announcing that he was not planning to return to acting, and for telling the audience at Sicily’s Taormina Film Festival that he feels embarrassed at the actions of the United States of Trump. In his free time, perhaps he can entice some book clubs into discussing “What Is Wrong with Men” — Crispin has already seen photographic evidence that a copy has made its way into his hands.
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