I work for the military in a small building in the middle of nowhere with roughly eight other guys for 12 hours a day. The building I work in allows no outside electronics inside. There are no phones, no Spotify, no doomscrolling. All we have to pass the time between work is to play cards and to read.
In the last month, two books have made it across the office threshold. My boss brought a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I brought along Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. My boss’s intent was to get one of our more Instagram Reels-addicted soldiers to pick up a book. He promised this soldier, whom we affectionately refer to as an “iPad kid,” that the book was exceptionally violent and that there were some really grotesque characters. Those of us who had read it nodded along behind him in affirmation.
Sense and Sensibility wasn’t met with this adulation. In a room of men whose ages ranged from 19 to 32, there were a few sideways remarks at my expense when it came out of my backpack. The baby-blue fabric hardcover with floral pink patterning didn’t assist my defense against the obligatory name-calling that resulted from something so feminine being introduced into the room.
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But when the back-and-forth hurling of insults simmered down, one of the officers said, “It actually is a decent book.” All of our laughter was instantly lowered, and three other guys assented that they had also read and enjoyed it. Our commander had read it in high school, and he remembered thinking that Mr. Palmer’s character was funny. My boss hadn’t read Sense and Sensibility, but he indicated that Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was one of the most entertaining books he had ever read. He was quick to clarify that he read it at his wife’s behest.
Weekly, I am confronted by a headline bemoaning the end of male literacy or why men’s refusal to engage with female authors spells some incoming societal calamity. These think pieces don’t prepare you for the discovery that half of your work friends — the types who can deadlift 400 pounds, consume an endless stream of nicotine pouches, join the Army, and lose $50 a week on Polymarket — hold Jane Austen in high esteem.
As I began to read Sense and Sensibility, I entered the book no longer solely with the goal of being entertained, but to try to determine why a novel written by a woman in 1811 has some staying power among the kind of men that everyone is concerned no longer read at all.
I tried to over-intellectualize it first. I wondered if there was something that Austen says about masculinity that we were all subconsciously latching onto. Are the men in these books some reminder of the men we would all be if it weren’t for crumbling workforce participation and social-media addiction? For 95 pages, this theory mostly holds up. Many of the men seem to be better and more incorruptible than I or any of my friends are, but the facade soon drops. We meet the funny Mr. Palmer. He’s married to an outgoing woman who drags him to dinners where he’s bored and forces his boredom on everyone. In one scene, his wife asks him whether he agrees with all of the great compliments she’s been paying to her host’s home, and Austen relays:
Mr. Palmer made her no answer, and did not even raise his eyes from the newspaper.
“Mr. Palmer does not hear me,” said she, laughing. “He never does sometimes. It is so ridiculous!”
One can replace Mr. Palmer with any one of the many acquaintances whose eyes rarely leave their phones, even in public, except to stare blankly at others when directly asked a question — acquaintances who seem to take little pleasure in what life offers, who don’t even enjoy the presence of their own girlfriends. Mr. Willoughby, the initial love interest of the impulsive Marianne Dashwood, would sit comfortably in many modern friend groups: leading various lonely, sweet women on, implying he’s in it for the long haul, but savvy enough to make sure he’s never caught saying it out loud, all while spending money he doesn’t have. The men in Sense and Sensibility are modern in their vices.
Maybe, I thought, what makes Austen compelling to some men is this feeling of modernity amid the balls and garden-walk conversations. Modernity shines through in the cracks in Austen-era social norms and high society romance, but these glimpses are fewer than I could make them out to be.
As I read the book, I continually bumped into 19th-century courting norms more often than anything that resembles today’s 29-year-olds as they cycle through endless situationships. Sense and Sensibility’s standoff with 2026 made itself most clear to me when Marianne explains to her sister, Elinor, the exact income that a man ought to bring in to meet her baseline lifestyle needs. She indicates that this number of British pounds would easily sustain an estate, a humble number of servants, two carriages, and some other early-1800s British countryside niceties. I looked it up and, adjusted for inflation and currency, the amount she lists is almost to the dollar what I earned last year. I am not yet close to being able to sustain an estate, a humble number of servants, or other such luxuries.
I finished the book a few days later, delayed by its being borrowed here and there. I found that I primarily enjoyed one Austenian trick above all others: setting up a really annoying type of person and cutting them down to size. After Austen exhibits Mr. Palmer’s full capacity for antisocial behavior, she shines a sterilizing spotlight on his motivations:
His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman; but she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it. It was rather a wish of distinction, she believed, which produced his contemptuous treatment of everybody, and his general abuse of everything before him. It was the desire of appearing superior to other people. The motive was too common to be wondered at; but the means, however they might succeed by establishing his superiority in ill-breeding, were not likely to attach any one to him except his wife.
WHAT JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA CAN TEACH US ABOUT CULTURAL APPROPRIATION
Austen’s ability to re-create a version of someone we all know and take them down, in a way that’s biting, with a harshness one degree removed from cruelty, is what makes her feel most modern and relevant to me, and, I think, to other male readers in 2026.
This realization reminded me of a conversation I had with my wife shortly after we got married. She and her girlfriends would watch The Bachelor on Monday nights in our living room. I’d drift through and catch a scene of two contestants yelling at each other, interspersed with shots of them seated in front of a camera, proffering their own editorializations about the fight they just emerged from. I’d linger in the back of the room for five or 15 minutes, and eventually one of them explained that I could just watch it if I wanted — there was no shame in it. I explained that I didn’t really enjoy it. I was just entertained by the annoying people bickering and being exposed as crazy and conceited. My wife asked, “Why do you think we like it?”
Nate Hanrahan is a writer and engineer. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of the Department of War or the U.S. Army.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
