Toxic Emasculinity
1st June 2025
In 2012, the Tumblr blog “Nice Guys of OKCupid” spotlighted a now-familiar archetype: the self-proclaimed “nice guy” whose progressive, sensitive façade masks entitlement, resentment, and self-absorption. Matt Gasda’s new novel, The Sleepers, animates a pretentious, Ivy League version of this archetype. Set in Brooklyn, it follows Dan—a hyper-online, upwardly mobile academic—steeped in some of the central tensions of the millennial era.
The year is 2016, and Dan is dating the beautiful but “aging” actress, Mariko, a Tisch graduate whose stagnant performances are precise but uninspired. (“Aging” in quotes because she’s only 32, yet frets over her supposed crow’s feet and fading glow.) As the 2016 election simmers in the backdrop—notifications humming ambiently across Twitter and Facebook—The Sleepers unfolds, saturated in paradox.
Perhaps the most central of those: that so-called male feminists often make the worst boyfriends—their performative wokeness a Trojan horse for ego, entitlement, and resentment. But subtler paradoxes surface, too: that Mariko, the neurotic older sister, is less professionally successful than her free-spirited sibling, Akari; that Dan, a proto-“Social Justice Warrior” online, yawns at the suffering of individuals in real life. There’s also the paradox that the meritocratic hamster wheel he builds a brand critiquing is his only source of meaning. And that his separation from it is only possible through the patrimony of a father whom he scorns, both in the abstract (deeming the nuclear family an “overrated configuration”) and the concrete (his unwillingness to be a decent, communicative son).