At one point in Netflix’s new documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, one of its central figures, Justin Waller, who founded a construction company at the age of 24, looks out over the Miami skyline and declares that men “literally built society.”
The message is clear: men made the world; women did not.
That claim is not just offensive. It ignores history. It confuses who got the credit with who did the work. Women have always helped build society. They built it in ways the law often failed to recognize, the market often refused to reward, and history too often neglected to record. They built homes and businesses, schools and churches, communities and institutions. They raised children, stabilized families, sustained neighborhoods, started companies, led movements, and carried the invisible burdens that made the visible world possible.
And yes, they helped build the visible world too.
If the argument is about commerce, the numbers alone should end the debate: women own 14.2 million American businesses generating roughly $2.8 trillion in receipts. That is not symbolic participation. It is enterprise and risk-taking. It is wealth creation and building.
If the argument is about buildings themselves, the skyline itself gives the lie away. Women design buildings. Women develop projects. Women work in architecture, engineering, construction, finance, planning, and the civic systems that make cities possible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported about 1.2 million women working in the construction industry in 2020, roughly 1 in 10 workers. That is lower than it should be, but it is still millions of women literally helping build the country. The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards says women are 27% of U.S. architects today, and more than 2 in 5 new architects are women, which means women are not only in the profession but increasingly shaping its future.
But the real problem with this kind of statement is deeper than factual error. It reveals a broken definition of what it means to build a society. A society is not just steel, concrete, and glass. It is not only skylines, cranes, corner offices, and deeds. A society is trust. It is discipline. It is caregiving. It is education. It is entrepreneurship. It is moral formation. It is the unpaid and underpaid labor that allows paid labor to exist at all. It is the person who raises the child, steadies the household, stretches the family budget, teaches the young, tends the elderly, starts the small business, and keeps hope alive when institutions fail.
That work does not always come with a plaque in a lobby. But without it, there is no lobby. This is the sleight of hand at the center of this question. It asks, “Whose name is on the tower?” when it should ask, “What did it actually take to build the world in which that tower could rise?”
The manosphere survives by teaching insecure men that dignity comes from domination. It tells them that if women rise, men must be falling. It frames partnership as weakness and grievance as strength. It sells a brittle idea of masculinity to boys and underdeveloped men who are desperate for certainty in a changing world.
Real men do not need to diminish women to affirm themselves. Real masculinity is not built on erasure. It is built on responsibility and the confidence to share credit without feeling diminished by it. The strongest men I have known did not spend their lives announcing what women could not do. America was not built by men alone. It was built by generations of people, often unequally rewarded and unequally remembered, who carried the nation forward together. Some laid brick. Some laid track. Some built firms. Some built families. Some wrote laws. Some built movements. Some built the human capacity without which no market, no democracy, and no nation can long endure.
So when someone stares at a skyline and declares that women built none of it, he is not revealing a truth about history. He is revealing the poverty of his own imagination. And in a country already struggling with loneliness, resentment, and confusion about what it means to be a man, that kind of blindness is more than offensive. It is dangerous.
And it’s worth taking another look at that Miami skyline one more time. One Thousand Museum, one of the city’s most recognizable towers, was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. Miami developer Lissette Calderon broke ground on a high-rise on the Miami River at age 28, and her company went on to deliver multiple multifamily projects in the city. Miami’s built environment was also shaped by Marion Manley, a pioneering architect who helped plan the University of Miami campus and contributed to South Florida’s urban development for decades. Turns out, women literally built it.
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