Are Men Okay?

In the summer of 2023, the British journalist Jon Ronson’s adult son Joel attended what was billed as a party at a real-life castle in Connecticut. But there was no party. Inside the vast, nearly empty hall, the guests learned they’d wandered into the orbit of Chris Mark, an aging heir to a Gilded Age manufacturing fortune who had built a medieval-style stone monstrosity for his TikTok star daughter. 

Mark had lured Joel and his friends inside the castle as part of a half-baked plan to film a reality show called 101 Princesses, in which women from around the world compete for the favor of their crowned host. In one filmed scene we’re privy to, a velvet-cloaked Mark rescues a dirt-smeared princess and takes her to Burger King. But we soon learn that the scion’s motivations are more sordid than producing reality TV—he’s on a mission to collect pliable young women to serve his sexual and emotional needs. In short: a personal harem.  

The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men
by Jon Ronson
Riverhead Books, 336 pp.

If this sounds like a story custom-built for Ronson, it is. The gonzo journalist has spent much of his career wandering into strange subcultures and the company of cranks, extremists, and outcasts, following their private obsessions until they reveal something larger about the world outside. ​​​​ 

Yet The Castle has much more on its mind than telling the story of a single eccentric rich asshole; it’s merely the drawbridge that leads into the lives of a host of other lost boys and a larger societal conundrum: “Is the American man passing through a dark night of the soul?” Or, to borrow the snotty parlance of social media: Are men, like, okay? That riddle has preoccupied the media-industrial complex every time Donald Trump—a Chris Mark-like character himself—wins an election, as male grievance once again becomes a skeleton key for explaining American politics. Why are so many males dying in middle age, dropping out of the workforce, retreating into online bubbles of the manosphere, or withdrawing completely into themselves?  

No one has a definitive answer to these questions, and it’s clear that Ronson, a longtime chronicler of fringe groups and marginalized souls, doesn’t have a straightforward diagnosis of men’s collective illness either. Still, his quixotic search for it is mesmerizing. The Castle is part true crime, part autobiography, part op-ed, part shaggy travelogue, with Ronson roaming from Indiana steel country to the homes of disgraced YouTube stars and a rural Connecticut castle—sorting his specimens into a field guide of contemporary male types: the Vulnerable Man, the Doofus Man, the Manosphere Man, the Separatist Man, and a fresh mutation he calls the Disinhibited Man. What they all have in common is that they are, in Ronson’s phrase, “men out of time”—men who have lost a world, or think they have, and retreat into one they can control. Chris Mark builds an actual castle, but others hide out in their houses or build moats around their social media ecosystems. 

In The Castle’s most satisfying side quest, Ronson follows the Mark family money backward in search of answers. Chris Mark’s great-grandfather, Clayton Mark, was the steel magnate who, a century before the castle, undertook an even grander vanity project: Marktown, a utopian company town in East Chicago, Indiana, built to keep his steelworkers loyal and sober. Marktown was inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, itself a response to Britain’s turn-of-the-century “man problem”—a panic about the “physical deterioration” of working men in which eugenicists proposed rounding up the unfit for sterilization. In contrast, Howard proposed towns where men would stroll to the factory and grow strong amid regular allotments of fresh vegetables. Similar paternalistic company towns sprang up all over America in the late 19th century, places like Chicago’s Pullman and Hershey, Pennsylvania (which is now getting its own gauzy biopic).  

In 1901, the Garden City utopians wrote to George Bernard Shaw for support. Shaw found the idea “immensely attractive” but warned them that a worker-centered town would have to be funded by capitalists, and a capitalist’s “primary aim” is “not to make a Garden City, but to make money. If he cannot make it pay, he will simply let the Garden City go to the devil.” Which is precisely what happened. After World War I, the government stiffed Clayton Mark on surplus armor plate, and he sold the factory. BP, which runs the vast refinery next door, started buying the workers’ homes at lowball prices and demolishing them on public holidays to make a parking lot. (They later rebranded it “green space.” Oops.)  

Marxists might call this the historical materialist explanation for the downfall of men. The post-industrial age of capitalism has made many men economically disposable at precisely the moment that older sources of social identity—union, neighborhood, church, stable family life—have also receded. Men, and Ronson includes himself in this analysis, were trained to identify themselves with paid work and then blamed for floundering when that work became scarce, precarious, or humiliating, a bit like removing someone’s chair and diagnosing him with a sitting disorder. Ronson interviews Anne Case and Angus Deaton about their research into “deaths of despair,” which describes the rise of suicide, alcohol-related disease, and fatal overdose among middle-aged men without college degrees, for whom what vanished was not merely income but status, routine, recognition, and a believable future. 

Ronson also engages with Brookings scholar Richard Reeves on what amounts to the Great Male Retreat of the 21st century: By 2022, one in six American men aged 25 to 54 wasn’t working, and two-thirds of those weren’t even looking—6.7 million men who, in Ronson’s phrase, “just … bowed out.” The old conservative warning was that unneeded men would run riot, but the opposite has happened. Crime has cratered, and the men have settled onto the couch, where economists log their five daily hours of screen time as “leisure.” When Ronson asks Reeves for stories about those men, he can’t supply any.

So Ronson decides to find his own. In Granite City, Illinois, three hundred miles from Marktown and just as depressingly barren, there’s Greg Chism, a lawn-care guy who discovered the “new way”—the creator economy—to success, but also rode it to ruin over a viral clip of a prank he pulled on his daughters. Chism’s tragic rags-to-riches-back-to-rags story illustrates how the YouTube of 2010 sold itself as a post-institution utopia, but the men who thrive have to dance to the algorithm’s ever-changing rhythms and/or are narcissists—“just some guy who, as institutions collapse, fills the vacuum with big charismatic declarations and wounded, histrionic rage.”  

The male crisis, Ronson suggests, is also representational. In one of the book’s funniest chapters, he meets Ed, an actor who specializes in playing the harmless male dope in TV commercials. Fifty years ago, he observes, the Marlboro Man rode the horse; now the man in the commercial has to be the horse. Ronson calls the type “Doofus Man”: domesticated, inept, and safe, the clueless husband who cannot operate a dishwasher without flooding three counties. At the opposite end of the machismo spectrum stand superheroes, steroidal influencers, and pornographic tycoons. A survey discussed in the book found that boys and men, asked to name admirable male characters, produced a list dominated by Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, Iron Man, Thor, and their superpowered kin. Between the caped demigod and the guy who can’t work the dishwasher, there’s a lot of empty space where a regular man used to be. 

It doesn’t help that a wing of liberal institutional culture—from Hollywood and the media to academia and corporate America—helped create this vacuum by treating masculinity primarily as a risk to be managed. Ronson revisits the American Psychological Association’s 2019 formulation that a cluster of traits associated with “traditional masculinity”—stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—was “on the whole, harmful.” The message that reached many boys was inevitably cruder: The qualities they associated with manhood were defective, while the approved replacement was an abstract emotional fluency and a speak-when-you’re-spoken-to attitude toward women. If the only public stories about men are domination or deconstruction, the manosphere will eagerly supply a third: revenge.  

In a sense, The Castle feels like a sequel to Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which asked what public punishment does to its targets; this book might be subtitled Men, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. But unlike the manosphere, which wears misogyny and male victimhood on its sleeves, Ronson refuses to divide his subjects neatly into heroes and villains—he neither sneers at their wounds nor permits those wounds to excuse cruelty. A culture-war YouTuber who believes himself banished by liberal gatekeepers may have legitimate grievances, but he also turns grievance into a career and a counterfeit life; comedy writer Graham Linehan loses a professional world with his anti-trans social media posting but, Ronson dryly observes, helps lay the dynamite himself. His acquaintance, actor Armie Hammer, can feel frightened and lost while remaining a rich, famous man whose unsavory sexual conduct has been the subject of serious allegations.  

Perhaps Ronson could do with a little less even-handedness at times. The Mark family is as close to an antagonist as you’ll find in a nonfiction story. Clayton and his descendants—as it turns out—survived Marktown’s downfall far better than his workers. Then Clayton’s daughter eloped with a Rockefeller. His son ran an instant-coffee empire. His grandson became a senior vice president at Morgan Stanley. His great-grandson built a castle and tried to fill it with princesses he could treat like disposable dolls. Mark deludes himself into believing that he’s the benevolent king in a fairy tale he’s written, while he’s actually the villainous monster. Meanwhile, the Garden City that is America continues to go to the devil. 

Then again, Ronson’s refusal to produce a single culprit may frustrate readers looking for an indictment, but it points toward the only sane position in the modern War of the Sexes: conciliatory moderation. Women’s freedom does not require male humiliation, just as male dignity does not require the restoration of female subjugation. The men in this book do not need another influencer to tell them they are secret kings; they need work that matters, friendships that survive disagreement, institutions that ask something of them, and models of adulthood more attainable than Batman and less useless than the husband in a detergent commercial. A castle can keep the world out, but it cannot make anyone want to remain inside.  

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