Masculinity, Hetconned

How the fantasy of lost simplicity turns isolation into power

The idea that masculinity was once simple before feminism “complicated” it seems to be a particularly sticky one, staying in the periphery of so much discourse about men and their role in modern society. It’s worth noting, before getting anywhere near accepting that premise, that this supposed “simplicity” was never evenly distributed; it was racialised, classed, and always selectively granted. Hetconning in this context retrofits the past as a frictionless environment, scrubbing out conflict, negotiation, and dissent, then presents that vacuum as some lost moral order, not unlike many of the other Restorative Past fantasies we’re going to explore (of which this is one.)

Throughout this essay, I don’t intend masculinity to mean “men” in the abstract, or even in the intimate, idiosyncratic ways individuals understand themselves. Someone’s relationship to their own masculinity is their own business, and I have zero interest in positioning myself as an arbiter of anything to do with it. Rather I use it to refer to an historically dominant social order that organised power, labour, and meaning, in men’s favour, and then mistook that arrangement as something ‘natural’. That mistake has led to the past being smoothed down until it can be marketed as an instruction manual.

Fantasy Diagnostics: Masculinity Edition

Temporal positioning

You can hear this fantasy in podcasts mourning the loss of “clear roles,” and in self-help books promising to restore masculine purpose through discipline and hierarchy. In trad accounts online staging softly-lit domestic scenes where a man’s authority is implied as a given and a woman’s satisfaction is assumed rather than expressed. These are active exercises in historical laundering. Masculinity is presented as something feminism broke¹, and feminism is in turn framed as violent, accused of attacking masculinity itself instead of addressing an unequal social order.

Hetconning does a lot of heavy lifting here. By rewriting feminist critique as an unnecessary complication, the past is reframed as a place where men didn’t need to explain themselves. Accountability is recast as the unwelcome intrusion. Consent is treated as a new and unreasonable standard. The old social order is remembered as generous and protective, even as it relied on women having very little say in what that protection looked like or whether they wanted it at all.

This is why contemporary reactionary masculinity is so obsessed with restoring a feeling rather than building a practice. What is being sold is not a way of living with others, but a way of opting out of all forms of social negotiation. Extreme isolation and “toughening it out” become virtues. The appeal lies in the promise that manhood can once again be self-certifying, answerable only to an internal code. Feminism is blamed for introducing confusion into what was, supposedly, a settled arrangement, concealing how much effort went into keeping that arrangement intact.

One of the tragedies of so much contemporary masculinity discourse is the way it collapses inward, away from politics and toward self-management. The promise on offer is one of relief: a way to feel resolved without having to renegotiate power, responsibility, or being a part of collective life. Masculinity becomes a private renovation project, something to be optimised through habits and discipline, while the social arrangements (and labour) surrounding it are ignored. As Raewyn Connell puts it in her book “Masculinities”, “therapeutic methods of reforming personality treat the individual as the unit to be reformed… The project of remaking the self may represent containment, not revolution.” What is framed as depth is in fact, a narrowing. The problem is shrunk to the size of a single man’s psyche, and his relationship with himself.

The lens can widen, though, but it widens only when the project requires it, when collective fear becomes useful. After all, you can’t get a bunch of navel gazers to go to war for you, they have to look up eventually. The rare instance the inward-focused man is asked to think about wider structures is to instil fear about his own Replacement, or the collapse of Western civilisation. The wider world re-enters the frame only as threat.

This is why figures like Tucker Carlson oscillate so easily between self-help masculinity and demographic panic. His Fox special “The End of Men” turned population-level misinformation about testosterone and sperm counts into an intimate bodily crisis, then recast that crisis as a problem for the nation as a whole. Scale and time are treated as dials, turned inward or outward as the project demands.

What is being forgotten

Masculinities of the past were supported by three kinds of unpaid labour, all of which feminism disrupted or threatened, which I feel the need to make explicit at the risk of messing with the structure I want most of these posts to have²:

Semantic labour - Who got to name the world?

Past heterosexual masculinities felt simple because men controlled the terms. What counted as protection, provision, respectability, and love was defined upstream and handed down as fact. Women were not invited into these definitions. Gay men were often not invited into these definitions, yet they were expected to live inside them. Meaning flowed in one direction, and masculinity was rarely required to explain itself to the people most affected by it.

Feminism intervened by questioning those inherited meanings. Once women began contesting the terms themselves, masculinity could no longer rely on default authority. This redistribution of semantic labour is what gets rewritten as needless complexity. What reactionary masculinity wants restored here is semantic control.

Material labour- Who did the work that made masculinity feel natural?

Masculinity appeared to function smoothly only when its material dependencies were concealed. The labour that made men’s public authority possible had to be displaced into the private sphere. Domestic work, caregiving, emotional logistics, and sexual availability were rendered invisible, even as they sustained the conditions under which men could appear autonomous and authoritative.

Feminism disrupted this arrangement by demanding autonomy, wages, safety, and time. The past is reimagined as a time when things “just worked,” without naming who was working, or why that work was never recognised as such. Hetconning is the political technology that turns this into a marketable nostalgia.

Affective labour- Who absorbed the consequences so masculinity didn’t have to?

The fantasy of lost simplicity is anchored in feeling, not in history. Traditional masculinity outsourced emotional regulation. Women smoothed tensions, managed moods, absorbed fear, and deflected anger. Male volatility was reframed as strength; female endurance was framed as nature, and this emotional buffering insulated men from the relational costs of their authority.

Feminism “complicated” masculinity by withdrawing that insulation. Men were asked to listen, to tolerate anger, to sit with discomfort that had previously been handled for them. Rather than recognising this as the loss of emotional exemption, the story became one of feminist overreach. Contemporary masculinity culture responds by offering private emotional repair in place of collective accountability. The self becomes the site of reform, while the relations that produced the distress remain untouched.

(But back to my normal frame!)

Performance and signalling

The body becomes the place where unresolved social demands are worked out in private isolation, as a site of discipline and constant proving. Strength is pursued past any practical usefulness. Pain is reframed as virtue. Hunger, exhaustion, and injury are recoded as evidence of deep commitment. The gym promises clarity through repetition, and a sense of predictable order that no longer arrives through inherited social authority.

Doomsday prepping and bush survivalism are celebrated as extreme examples of ingenuity and self-reliance, while quietly functioning as a withdrawal from any obligation to others. It’s easier to feel competent when no one else is present to answer to or measure yourself against. But that withdrawal doesn’t resolve aggression, it just redirects it.

When men are taught to turn their bodies into weapons, it begs the question: who are they fighting? A body trained as a weapon must eventually be aimed at something. As Michael Messner observed in his study of sport and masculinity, “the body-as-weapon ultimately results in violence against one’s own body.” There is something quietly devastating about this turn. So much effort, so much discipline, directed inward instead of outward towards one’s community. The damage is real, but it remains framed as self-improvement rather than harm. Masculinity does not become simpler here, or less painful. It becomes lonelier, and harder on the men expected to carry it alone.

Affective economy

While this is a psychically hectic place to be, the fantasy persists because it actually offers relief. It reassures men who feel disoriented that the problem is not structural, and certainly not political. It was those annoying women asking questions. It was feminism insisting on visibility. If those voices could be muted again, the story goes, order would return. This is not nostalgia for meaning. It is nostalgia for exemption. It’s the emotional equivalent of holding yourself and rocking back and forth.

Memory practices

Feminist critique, at its most basic, did not complicate masculinity so much as force it to show its workings. Once those workings are visible, the inequalities are put in stark relief and the numbers start to look ugly. Hetconning steps in to blur them again, and like all good restorative fantasies, it promises comfort, and certainty.

Power, gain, and extraction

At the level of the individual, this fantasy offers relief. At the level of power, it produces men who are isolated, inward-turned, and preoccupied with disciplining their own bodies rather than building collective capacity. This is an efficient arrangement for power, guaranteeing a steady supply of bodies willing to enact and absorb violence on the state’s behalf, what Pete Hegseth keeps insisting we call “war-fighters.”

The masculinity being cultivated here is not a universal condition of being male. It is a specific reactionary formation, historically heterosexual in its assumptions, that trains men to pull their attention inward. A man absorbed in managing his body, his habits, and his interior life is less likely to look outward, to organise, to notice who is consolidating authority in his name.

What circulates online as harmless lifestyle advice scales upward rapidly towards the halls of power. The language of restoration, order, and moral clarity moves from podcasts and self-help manuals into policy agendas and governing projects like Project 2025. These projects do not require men’s active participation so much as their affective readiness. They rely on a constituency trained to experience any kind of accountability as humiliation, and any consolations toward equality as ceding their ground.

The same stories that soothe isolated men also generate political momentum. Grievance becomes fuel. The line between these levels is more of a continuous loop. What presents as a private coping strategy is quietly converted and consolidated into power for others.

The quieter damage is harder to dismiss. Many of the men drawn into this inward turn are not ideologues or architects of policy. They are often lonely, or disoriented by being told their strength is measured by how little they need anyone else. What disappears is the possibility of turning toward others, of finding selfhood through shared responsibility rather than solitary resilience.

These pressures don’t stop at the edges of heterosexual masculinity, either. Queer men are not exempt from being pressured toward the inward turn; often they experience it more intensely, layered with the demands of a social order that has only recently agreed to tolerate them, and the demands of their own in-groups. What is offered as inclusion is frequently conditional, rewarding discipline, self-sufficiency, and resilience while quietly disavowing the collective forms of care that have long sustained queer life. This is not liberation so much as containment, a narrowing of what queer life is allowed to look like.

It rewrites queer history as a march toward respectability and asks us to forget why community, mutual aid, and chosen family were ever necessary in the first place. Isolation makes men more governable, whether or not they agree with those governing them, and the ‘complicated masculinity’ fantasy does not need queer men to identify with it to do its work. The pressure is not (always) to become straight, but to become governable in recognisably masculine ways. It needs to turn them inward enough to be managed, and hetconning makes this damage harder to see.

What is restored by this fantasy, in the end, is permission. Permission not to listen. Permission not to engage. Permission to mistake withdrawal from society for some quiet stoic dignity. The cost is then borne twice: by communities hollowed out through disengagement, and by men, straight and queer alike, taught that shrinking their world is a mark of strength.

What really complicates masculinity is the way men are hollowed out by this fantasy, stripped of connection and pushed inward in ways that are fundamentally bad for the human animal. At the same time, other men are using that hollowing-out to turn the levers of power, advancing projects that entrench misogyny and control. These processes are not in tension with each other. They are the system at work.

Repair begins, if it does at all, with men turning outward again. With participation rather than withdrawal. With listening to women, and to one another. With asking for help, accepting it, and choosing a shared life, in all its mess and difficulty, over isolation.


- Leena

1. (By feminism here I mean not a specific unified movement, but the broad historical challenge to gender inequality.)

2. (Forgive the indulgence, but this extra section takes the place of my Reflexive Position header missing from this post, given I’m a woman and don’t have much to contribute to getting into my personal relationship with masculinity and I’d rather talk women’s labour instead)