Sophie Kemp considers the recent and ongoing radicalization of young men in the United States.

THERE IS A STORY my mother often tells about the day the towers came down.

A cloudless blue day in September. I was five years old -- a few days into my very first week of kindergarten. My youngest brother had been alive for less than one year. A fat and happy baby. It was around the first time he ever crawled. She said this was something that gave her hope. That a terrible thing could happen but that babies were continuing to crawl, finding their unsure and beautiful footing in the world. Babies like my brother. Babies that were wanted by their parents. Babies that would grow up with all the comforts of the American upper middle class: summer camps and ski lessons, grandparents with condos in coastal cities, and family vacations to quiet, remote parts of New England.

I am in the cohort of people who are the youngest to have any memory of 9/11 at all. I remember it in the way that a child remembers childhood. It is all a dull flicker. Something about wearing a purple shirt to school that day. A blue headband. The click of the VCR in the teak living room of my childhood home. A white house with black shutters on a quiet suburban street. A vague memory of my mother crying -- my aunt worked down the street from the towers, and no one had heard from her in hours. She would be fine. She would take a cab from the Financial District to the Irish part of the Bronx. I would not know any of this until I was much older.

I do not say any of this to imply that the fall of the towers in September 2001 is at all the same as Trump's second inauguration. I do not mean to say that when I watched Donald Trump become president again on the television in Lower Manhattan this past week, a 10-minute walk from the World Trade Center, I felt like the world was ending. Trump is of course a direct by-product of 9/11, of the Iraq War, of two decades of American realpolitik in the Middle East. But that is not why I bring it up.

I am bringing this up because of what has become of very young children, specifically men, who were born into this political climate.

My brother and I are both adults now. I am pushing 30; he is pushing 24. He is bright and kind. He is intense like me, but much more soft-spoken. He was a child when Trump first entered the public consciousness as a political threat. He was a college student when the pandemic hit. He has not and will never vote for Trump. He is perfect to me. I do not feel this way about other men his age. This is what I would like to talk about: American masculinity. I would like to talk to you about these men, who are in the cohort that is slightly younger than me, and what has become of them now that they are adults.

It's so easy to backslide into if you are bored and hateful. Something about the ancient Greeks. Because of Mesopotamia. How thousands of thousands of years ago, civilization began to take shape around hierarchy. A father and his wife, his children, and their slaves. An eye for an eye -- if you throw your enemy into the Euphrates and fill his pockets with rocks and he somehow survives, you will be tossed in too. There is a fantasy about all of this: a man sits in some sort of olive grove, looking out at the Aegean, and discovers a new fact about the triangle. A wife sits at the table brushing her daughter's hair, perfect and subservient. Empedocles and how he jumped into Etna because he knew he would be reborn a god. "You're not reborn as a god," declares the fascist writer Bronze Age Pervert. "Maybe there's a girl waiting. Her pussy is warm and inviting."

Bronze Age Mindset (2018) is a fascinating document because it is very boring and stupid. If you don't know what it is, I am happy for you. It is a self-published pamphlet by a Romanian American man. It is a little dated at this point. It has become a skeleton key for a kind of anti-intellectual irony-poisoned fascist guy. I have never finished it, because I would rather actually read the Stoics and because I am not an idiot. I would not recommend reading it, not just because the vision it presents of masculinity is apocalyptically evil, but also because it is completely brain-dead. But I'd like to bring it up because of the seductive vision it presents to young white men: This is your world, and it always will be. Hierarchy in the time of antiquity allowed us to make great intellectual leaps. A woman -- your woman -- should always be available to you. Let her pussy be warm. Let your cock be rock-hard. Let everyone who is not a beautiful, virile white man bend to your will. Eat big plates of meat. But you probably know all this already -- these visions of masculinity have been reported to death. They are not surprising, nor are they even subversive. Andrew Tate. Jordan Peterson. Nick Fuentes. They all promise the same thing: a man liberated from the shackles of girlbossery. A return to the hierarchy of the family.

This is appealing to young men ages 20-29, nearly half of whom voted for Trump, for a variety of reasons. None of those reasons are particularly satisfying to me. One friend I asked said it had something to do with the way talk of consent has been codified into the American education system. This friend, in his mid-thirties, said that when he was in high school, there was still a prevailing sense of ownership among men, that sexism was allowed and encouraged (he also mentioned that during this time he often did things like try to suck himself off while watching Mind of Mencia).

Another friend, a woman my age, said that we have too much choice now, that many people need to be told what to do, and some people would like it if we went back to the way it was done in the past, where just men did this. The pandemic also probably had something to do with it. A third friend, a man in his mid-twenties, said that Trump went on Nelk, Theo Von, and Adin Ross. That he came off as approachable, "a guy you want to get a beer with," and this is enough for a man in his very early twenties to make a decision about whom to vote for.

What I do know is that we are in an era marked by a crisis of masculinity that is neither warranted nor deserved. That young men feel very alienated. That they are very online. That there is a paradigm shift away from what has been true for the past 60 years: boy leaves home; boy reacts against his parents' puritanical values; boy becomes some sort of a leftist for a little while, has some sort of romance with American communism for a little less than a decade; boy gets job; boy maybe becomes Democratic rank and file; boy maybe becomes a centrist with a soft spot for social issues.

What I have been seeing lately is something more like this: boy comes of age on the internet; boy has access to a cosmos of information; boy goes in chat rooms where boy talks to girl; boy goes on early YouTube and hears slurs; boy hits puberty; boy enters global pandemic; boy games while teacher teaches; boy engages in a slurry of content that makes boy feel alienated from female peers, from nice, well-meaning Gen Xer parents; boy enters particle accelerator; boy is spewed out the other side vaguely conservative; boy meets other like-minded boys who validate his feelings about woke SJWs, that they are the machine and must be raged against. For girls, it is like this: I want to be liked by men; I do what I can to recreate myself in their image. I am troubled by all of it.

All of this, of course, comes back to sex as a power exchange. A way to subjugate and to be subjugated.

Not long after it became clear that Trump would become our 47th president, Nick Fuentes posted a video where he said this: "Your body, my choice." Then he laughed maniacally. There it was on my phone, there it was on X, nestled between fascist VSCO girl memes and YouTube links to emo songs. It is an expression that is too awful for me to even fully unpack. That a man should have the right, ordained by god, to tell me what to do with my body. To say that in this new world order, we will return to hierarchy, that a man on the internet can laugh and make fun of me and the decision whether or not I should have the right to terminate a pregnancy. I guess this makes me a lib. But when I heard Fuentes say this, my main thought wasn't anger; it was not fear either. My first thought was that I felt seduced by it. Like that kind of control over my body, by someone evil, felt like a relief. My second thought: These young men feel so pathetically small and alienated that this is how they think they can get their power back. And no one should ever have that kind of power over someone.

This more than anything feels like the prevailing pathology of men in this cohort. They feel small. They are looking for a way to get their power back. They do not deserve that power, obviously, but they do feel entitled to it. And women, to an extent, are enabling it. They are enabling it in the kind of sex they are having, in asking for things that they shouldn't ask for. They are enabling it by mud wrestling with other women, by being a "pick-me girl," by letting men say terrible things to them and remaining submissive about it. It is a brand new way to be antiestablishment: to be kind of trad.

And how could that not be seductive, to an extent? To be told what to do. If young men crave hierarchy, it would only be natural that women would too. That all these ideas would circle each other, have the snake eat its tail, let the oil circle the drain. I am seduced by it. There was one time recently when I was wearing a prom dress at a bar and I let a man say something despicable to me and I liked it. Because I am exhausted by a certain kind of politics around consent. So are many other women that I know. It becomes very easy to backslide into this way of thinking, dangerously so.

Not long after the towers came down, Susan Sontag wrote a brief essay for The New Yorker about how we got here. "The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures [...] is startling, depressing," she wrote. "[T]his was not Pearl Harbor. [...] Politics, the politics of a democracy -- which entails disagreement, which promotes candor -- has been replaced by psychotherapy." This is how I feel right now, thinking of the swirl we are living in since Trump was elected for his second term. That there was an inevitably to all of this. That we were being stupid about all of this. We are living in a new era of Sontag's psychotherapy, where talking about your feelings always feels like an affront, meant to stay in the past. The liberal urge to therapize feels embarrassing, more fuel to the fire.

But in September 2001, I did not know any of this. I was a child. My grandparents had come up from their wealthy Jewish enclave in Westchester County to sit with me on the back porch. I looked just like my mother. I was a very agreeable child and did what I was told. My brothers were both babies. They played with toys in the dirt. We dumped buckets of water on our heads in a plastic pool. As I mentioned, my youngest brother was learning to crawl. Nearly 25 years later, the children of my generation have inherited the world. All of this, I can see now, was very predictable. We have come of age. I am terrified by how we will mold it.