Are White Men a ‘Lost Generation’? Interview With Author Jacob Savage
The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.
In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.
Savage’s piece, which is rocketing around the Internet this week, describes a bait-and-switch. A generation of young white men raised to believe in traditional liberal principles like racial liberation, equal pay, and gay rights woke up in the early 2010s to discover they’d somehow signed on to a program of disenfranchising themselves. What started out as an anecdotal hassle, dangerous even to whisper about, suddenly became undeniable statistical truth, and millions of men like Savage who didn’t want to leave what Savage calls his “home” (Liberal America) were not only forced out, but left facing the reality of a society “deliberately rooting against you.”
Regrettably, I was part of it. In 2014, the year Savage refers to as “the hinge,” I started work at an American corporation for the first and only time, in a job with hiring responsibilities. I’d left Rolling Stone to work for eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, ostensibly to head a satirical complement to The Intercept. Before the publication had a name, before we had authority to buy pencils or an office computer, we were already rejecting applicants for racial reasons.
The interviews were surreal. Young men in their early thirties walked in with heads hanging, expecting the exact dynamic Savage describes in his article: white-guy Gen-X bosses telling younger counterparts there was no room for them. Making things worse was the fact that my project was meant to be a digital homage to Mad, Cracked, and Spy, publications whose readers were overwhelmingly rebellious boys and young men, so stacks of resumés came in from the grown versions. We had to turn them away, as the Omidyar bosses insisted on stressing diversity goals, which were more than once expressed to me not so much as efforts to hire more women and minorities, but as a cap on white guys. “The world doesn’t need more Gawkers,” is how it was put to me in one meeting.
Six years later in 2020, a writer I’d tried and failed to hire, Lee Fang, got in hot water at The Intercept over a preposterous non-incident. At the peak of Summer-of-Floyd mania, Fang interviewed a black man in the Bay Area who’d had two cousins murdered. The man, who went by the name Maximum Fr, wondered “why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?” For the crime of tweeting that video, Fang, who is Asian — absurdly, there were no white people in this alleged racism story — was accused of being racist by a black female co-worker. To save his job, Fang was dragged before HR and made to issue a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.”
In covering that episode I interviewed a handful of writers from other places who had similar experiences. All were more skittish than bank whistleblowers or intelligence sources. They’d call back multiple times, or late at night, to make sure I didn’t give away identifying details like their beats or, in one particularly weird case, a time zone. Savage described the same issues in writing his piece about what he calls the “Lost Generation” of millennial men:
There were frenzied pre-publication negotiations over what personal details I could include, back-and-forths over words and phrases, requests to change pseudonyms to sound even less like real names. Standing behind it was a fear: that they would end up being that guy.
Savage’s piece is itself written carefully. He doesn’t blame women or minorities or anyone in particular for his own rough experience climbing the not-ladder, scalping tickets for fifteen years while he waited for a screenwriting break that never came. Instead, he focuses on his own experience and regrets, with the most powerful part a personal confession:
Mostly I’m annoyed at myself. Because instead of settling down, proposing to my then-girlfriend (now wife), and earning a steady income that might support a family, I spent a decade insisting the world treat me fairly, when the world was loudly telling me it had no intention of doing so.
You’ll hear more from Savage in the Q&A below, but a word first about an issue that’s long been taboo and matters quite a bit, whether or not you empathize with young men who for the first time are getting a taste of what women and minorities long went through as a matter of course:
Savage cites a lot of statistics. “In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students,” he writes. “By 2025, they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a decade.” The percentage of white men at Amazon dropped 34% in ten years. In some cases, a decade or so was all it took for numbers to go from maybe too high to impossibly low. TV staff writers were 64% white and 71% male in 2011-2012, but just 11.9% of lower-level writers in 2023, compared to 34.6% for women of color.
Well, society has mostly said until now — who cares? When the New Yorker addressed the subject last month in “What Did Men Do to Deserve This?”, the magazine took a weirdly mocking tone, using it as an occasion to make jokes about high-T denizens of the “Übermensch milieu.” Podcaster Scott Galloway was called out in the lede for being “bald, white, and jacked” and for describing a manly ethos of “getting up at fucking six in the morning.” Author Jessica Winter rolled eyes even at truly alarming stats, like young men killing themselves four times as often as women, though women still attempt suicide more. The grotesque suggestion throughout is that all this is a ruse by conservatives who think “men’s biggest problem is feminism,” and want through their whining to “restrict reproductive rights” and “propagandize about traditional gender roles” as a solution.
But Savage isn’t a conservative or one of Winter’s “white guys… discussing Abundance over beta-alanine smoothies and doing pistol squats to the theme song from ‘Pod Save America’” (good lord, caricature much?). He’s a younger version of a lot of men I grew up around who hoped and expected to marry professional women, support their careers, and keep voting Democratic, only to find themselves kicked out of a club they never knew existed. You won’t find many anti-choice men in grad schools, writing rooms, in the bar or in many other professional sectors, but somehow they’ve all been tagged as secret haters of a type most men found laughable a hundred years ago:
The blue team’s snide disinterest in fixing any of this was symbolized by last year’s lunatic presidential campaign, when the DNC trotted out Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff to define masculinity as “men need to support women.” Despite constant propaganda insisting Republican appeals were all about guns and a return to barefoot-and-pregnant mates, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance got a ton of votes by default just by saying things like “you’re not a bad person because you’re a man,” a simple sentiment Democrats — and the Hollywood screenwriting world Savage spent so many years trying to enter — have had an oddly hard time articulating.
The notion that there are only two ways for men to go, “toxic masculinity” and the New Yorker/MSNOW “just get with the program” vision, won’t lead to good places. While there are clearly arguments over just how organic the support is for people like Nick Fuentes, it’s clear he has some following, and a lot of what he’s channelling is anger at a society that’s closing off economic opportunities at the same time it’s burying us in messaging about white men as villains and oppressors, as if today’s 23-year-olds worked for the Botha government in the womb. Millennial men don’t need MREs dropped on their lawns by helicopter or special consideration by college admissions officers, but an end to stupid caricatures and identitarian political fads would go a long way. Or would it? I asked Savage:
MT: It sounds like from reading the piece that you’ve been working on this for a couple of years. Is that right?
Savage: It germinated in my mind a couple of years ago, and I loosely started working on it. If you want this scoop, I pitched it to The Atlantic. They were interested, but then they came back and were like, “It has to only be about you and your experience in Hollywood. You could do some statistics or whatever.” Now, I’m happy, and I am the butt of my own joke a little bit in the piece, but just being like, “Here’s a cute piece about a white guy who’s honest about his resentments and experience” doesn’t move the needle. So I said no.
MT: How did they take that?
Savage: They just didn’t care. That’s fine. I think what was interesting is just as long as it was personalized and not globalized to indict any broader system, it would be okay. I put the piece on ice for a little while, wrote this offshoot piece [about white male authors] and Compact was very nice to me. They said, “You should really just do the bigger piece.” And so, in between scalping tickets on the Internet, I’ve been working on this.
MT: If you had done what the Atlantic suggested, it almost would’ve been making the problem worse, wouldn’t it? Part of the problem is these constant efforts to frame the problem as ironic and funny.
Savage: Yeah, I think it would’ve felt – the point would’ve been to keep it small, and you can’t indict a system just by saying any individual anecdote. This is why, in part, it took so long. Any individual anecdote has been dismissed over the last decade or so as sour grapes or whatever, and in some cases it probably was. When you look at the totality of it, though, not everything here was sour grapes. There was something more insidious going on.
MT: How did you settle on the year 2014?
Savage: It just kept coming up. There were a lot of stats that I didn’t end up including in the final piece, but if you look at all these prestige markers, I’m not sure where it fully began in 2014, but that’s the year I think you can just see this steep drop off start in all these awards nominations, and I think living through it, I don’t think people could realize it at the time, but that feels like in retrospect, the year that institutionally things began to really shift. I think in 2013 you could have written a great novel, sent it to a publisher, had them publish it, and maybe no one bought it, because no one buys books anyway – but I think something just got cut off then, and I had various theories as to why.
MT: So, the devil’s advocate question. Why should people care? If nobody wept for women about the glass ceiling all those years, why should people care about millennial men now?
Savage: No one now – maybe a few people, but mostly no one now thinks that those were good things. Also, I’m not convinced everyone should care. I think it’s fine to be like, “I don’t really care.” I just think “I don’t really care” speaks to a profound incuriosity about our larger political moment. I don’t think you can really explain the realignment of younger men and younger white men without some economic understanding of what they, I think fairly accurately perceived, namely that the Democratic party did not care about their economic prospects in any real way. And that’s true. Obviously I’m talking mainly about elite professions, but I think that that’s true down the entire scale.
Put another way, if you want to know why Trump won, you care. I could imagine someone saying, “I don’t care about this. White men have had it good for too long.” And they hate Trump. So why should you care? You should care because these are political actors in society who have a vested interest in how society is. I think people should care from a macropolitical perspective, but I don’t demand that anyone weep over the fate of millennial white men.
MT: It seems like the toughest audiences are going to be liberal audiences. Was there a bait and switch that went on, in which a lot of us were probably committed to racial equality, gay rights, all of those things? And somewhere along the line, the goals seemed to change. Is that how you perceive it?
Savage: I think part of the issue, which I got to a little in the piece, is that there were no goals. There was never a concrete statement: we need X number. It was a radicalizing thing because legally, there were no quotas, so no one could put a number on what the actual goal was. So the goal ended up just being fewer and fewer white men. I do think that a lot of us would’ve fared much better had there just been a quota that was told to us in 2014, and we could go about our lives knowing that and adjusted expectations accordingly, and perhaps pursued careers in other fields. But it was never stated, so you were just left adrift, wondering what happened,
MT: You talked about how your interview subjects were skittish, that they were calling back, worried about their details. Did you also have reservations? Worries about blowback?
Savage: I didn’t, because the truth is, I’m not in any of these institutions anymore in any sense. So I guess that’s the only reason I could write it. Part of me wondered if this was pretty low-hanging fruit. Most of my statistics came from searching the internet. The anecdotes are real research, but why did no journalist in the last 10 years say, “Hey, what’s the deal?” The [Writers Guild of America] released its stats a few months ago, and just 12% of lower level writers were white men.
MT: Down from 60%, which was kind of amazing.
Savage: That’s completely public, and it’s not like Deadline or the Hollywood Reporter was like, where did the white guys go?
MT: Not easy headlines to imagine, of course.
Savage: I think maybe the only way that anyone could write this is to be so removed from these institutions, which is how I kind of personally feel. There’s no blowback. Obviously, this might wind up being good for my career in some way, I guess at this point, but there was no blowback because I’m not in it anymore.
MT: What should young men do, knowing this now? Do you have advice?
Savage: My hope is that it will change, or I don’t think it’s as bad. I mean, I think it’s still happening today, but I don’t think it’s to the extent that it was in 2020 or even 2015. I think if you’re just graduating college today or going to college, hopefully the world is still open to you, or maybe this article will have crafted that door open a little wider… I don’t know. I don’t have advice. My life has taken a bunch of turns, and it’s not like I know what I’m doing.
MT: Fair enough. Thanks, and congratulations on the piece.
https://www.racket.news/p/are-white-men-a-lost-generation-interview