Manliness, Insecurity, and Media Discourse in Contemporary France

In January 2026, the Haut Conseil à l’Égalité, a government-appointed institution advising on gender policy, urged the French state to treat the rise of "masculinism" as a national security concern. Against this backdrop, this project examines the relationship between "manliness" and insecurity through the media discourse of two foundational figures in the French debate on masculinity: Élisabeth Badinter, who first theorized masculinity from a feminist perspective for a mass audience in XY (1992), and Éric Zemmour, an early architect of masculinism in Le Premier Sexe (2006). Despite opposing premises—a “fragile” masculinity for Badinter, and a strong one for Zemmour—both now converge on a virile response to what they perceive as "civilizational threats" (eg. "political correctness"). The project explores this tension through a combination of close reading of their books with computational distant reading—lexicometry and exploratory topic modeling—of their media interventions since 2001. It hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the link between "manliness" and "masculinism" in contemporary French public discourse.