Luke Ford

We all do it. We sit in our quiet, temperature-controlled, HR-compliant offices (or Zoom rooms) and fantasize about a different time. We imagine the chaotic energy of a 1980s newsroom, a fiercely competitive law firm, or a “Glengarry Glen Ross” sales floor.

We yearn for a workplace with “edge.” We want directness. We want the thick skin and the raucous laughter that comes from surviving a high-pressure environment together. We look at the modern, softer, consensus-driven (“feminine”) workplace and feel bored. We feel stifled by the politeness.

But then, memory kicks in.

Once you strip away the nostalgia, the picture gets ugly fast. The “masculine” workplace wasn’t just about stoicism and banter; it was often built on humiliation as a management tool.

One veteran of a high-stakes trading floor described it not as a meritocracy, but as a hazing ritual. “If you weren’t being screamed at, you were being ignored, which was worse. You didn’t learn through mentorship; you learned through trauma.”

We romanticize “being direct,” but in those environments, directness often morphed into sadism. Tearing someone down wasn’t about making the work better; it was about establishing dominance in the hierarchy. The adrenaline we miss? That was actually cortisol. It was the “fight or flight” response triggered by a boss who viewed fear as a motivator.

In the hyper-masculine office, you had to wear armor 24/7. You couldn’t admit burnout. You couldn’t admit confusion. To show weakness was to bleed in shark-infested waters.

We tend to roll our eyes at the modern, “feminized” workplace—the endless focus on culture, the “bringing your whole self to work,” the obsession with safety. It can feel cloying. It can feel passive-aggressive.

But we have to admit what it gave us:

Longevity: You can actually survive a career here without an ulcer by age 40.

Psychological Safety: You can propose an idea without the visceral fear of being publicly eviscerated if it’s wrong.

Sustainability: The “soft” workplace recognizes that burning the candle at both ends isn’t heroic; it’s inefficient.

When we say we miss the “masculine” workplace, we usually don’t miss the abuse. We miss the consequence.

We miss the feeling that this matters. The screaming and the yelling, as toxic as they were, signaled that the stakes were high. The modern, softer workplace can sometimes feel like a padded room where nothing creates a spark because there is no friction.

The goal shouldn’t be to return to the brutality of the past, but to figure out how to reintroduce friction and stakes without reintroducing the abuse. We want the camaraderie of the foxhole, but we forget that to have that, you have to be in a war. And frankly, most of us are tired of fighting.

It is a luxury to be bored. It is a luxury to find your workplace “too soft.” It means you aren’t in survival mode anymore. We romanticize the war room because we forgot how much it hurt to be a casualty.

Large swathes of life look stupid from the outside, but when you understand the incentives, they make perfect sense.

I hear people wailing about all sorts of things they can’t be bothered to understand.

I find that everything makes sense if you work at understanding the incentives that create reality.

If you don’t like the idea of microaggressions, for example, you probably like 2025.

Microaggressions lost currency in 2025. While the behavior it describes is still discussed and punished, the word itself is in retreat.

It is suffering from a “pincer movement” of criticism: it is being abandoned by the corporate center for being too politically charged, and critiqued by progressives for being too imprecise.

As part of the broader rollback of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives in 2024 and 2025, many corporations have scrubbed specific academic buzzwords from their training materials to avoid controversy. HR departments are swapping “microaggression” for more neutral, descriptive terms like “subtle acts of exclusion” (SAE), “everyday incivility,” or simply “unprofessional conduct.” “Microaggression” implies intent (aggression) and victimhood, which tends to put employees on the defensive. The new language focuses on “impact” and “belonging,” which sounds more corporate and less activist.

The culture has reached a saturation point with “therapy speak”—the use of clinical or academic psychological terms in everyday life (e.g., gaslighting, trauma, toxic). “Microaggression” falls into this bucket.

In 2025, there is a palpable cultural shift toward resilience and “anti-fragility.” The constant policing of minor slights is increasingly viewed, even by some liberals, as socially exhausting and counterproductive to genuine connection.

The concept is now often critiqued for encouraging people to interpret ambiguity in the worst possible light (catastrophizing), rather than giving the benefit of the doubt.

The term is also waning on the left, but for a different reason: the “Micro” prefix. Many activists argue that calling racism or sexism “micro” minimizes the harm. They argue that if an action excludes someone, it is just “aggression” or “exclusion,” and the “micro” qualifier acts as a euphemism that protects the perpetrator. You will see more focus on “structural” or “systemic” issues rather than interpersonal slights, as the latter is increasingly seen as a distraction from material equity.

There has been a quiet but steady rise in successful legal and academic challenges to mandatory microaggression training. In both universities and corporate settings, mandating that employees avoid “microaggressions” has legally bumped up against compelled speech doctrines. To avoid lawsuits, organizations are making the language vaguer. The work of psychologists like Scott Lilienfeld (who questioned the scientific rigor of the microaggression framework) has gained more mainstream traction, leading evidence-based organizations to distance themselves from the term.

The concept isn’t dead—people are still sensitive to subtle bias—but the label is becoming a relic of the 2015–2022 cultural era. It is currently being metabolized into broader categories of “workplace culture” or “civil discourse.”

The major HR consultancies and data firms (SHRM, Gartner, McKinsey) have largely coalesced around three distinct categories of replacement language in 2025.

You will notice a pattern: the new terms act as “political heat shields.” They remove the accuser/victim dynamic inherent in “microaggression” (which implies a perpetrator) and replace it with language about standards, culture, or processes.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)—the biggest governing body for HR professionals—has gone all-in on “Incivility” as the replacement framework. It sounds objective and universal rather than political. It reframes the issue as a breakdown in professional manners rather than an act of oppression.

The 2025 Metric: SHRM now publishes a quarterly “Civility Index.” If you are in an HR meeting in 2025, you are likely hearing about “civility scores” rather than “bias incidents.”

Consultants who focus on management theory (like those writing for HBR) have moved toward specific, descriptive terms that focus on the mechanism of the act, not the psychology.

“Exclusionary Behaviors” (popularized by Ruchika Tulshyan and others) has a variant: “Subtle Acts of Exclusion” (SAE).

Thes terms bypass the debate over “intent.” A “microaggression” implies you meant to be aggressive (or that your subconscious is aggressive). “Exclusionary behavior” simply states a fact: You did X, and it resulted in Y being excluded. It is harder for a manager to argue with.

Big corporate consultancies like McKinsey and Deloitte are scrubbing negative terms entirely. Instead of tracking “bad” things (microaggressions), they track the absence of “good” things.

You see departments renaming themselves from “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) to “I&B” (Inclusion & Belonging). “Belonging” is a positive, warm metric. It is legally safer to say “we need to increase belonging” than “we need to police microaggressions,” which can trigger “compelled speech” lawsuits.

General HR departments and SHRM are replacing “microaggression” with “Incivility” or “Everyday Incivility.” They use this terminology because it sounds neutral and focuses on professional manners rather than identity politics.

Management consultants and publications like HBR now prefer the term “Exclusionary Behavior.” This phrasing is widely used because it focuses strictly on the outcome of the action rather than the questionable intent of the speaker.

Fortune 500 companies and firms like McKinsey have shifted to using “Belonging Barrier.” This positive framing is popular because it emphasizes a constructive metric and is generally safer from a legal compliance standpoint.

Finally, tech-focused HR groups like Gartner are calling these incidents “Communication Friction.” This choice treats the offense as a technical inefficiency to be solved rather than a moral failing to be punished.

They are pushing “Nudgetech”—AI tools that flag “friction” in emails or Slack messages before you send them.

This turns a moral failing (racism/sexism) into a technical inefficiency (friction). It treats an offensive comment as a “bug” in communication rather than a character flaw.

I used to get mad at gatekeepers because I thought they were blocking me from where I deserved to go. Then I realized that they were an archetype and they had a job to do.

It wasn’t personal.

Many men in particular take HR way too personally.

HR is not the moral arbiter, it an internal risk management firm embedded within the company.

If you can shift your view of HR from “culture police” to “corporate insurance adjusters,” their behavior becomes much less personal and much more predictable. They are not writing men up because they necessarily believe in this or that academic theory; they write you up because you represent a statistical probability of a future lawsuit.

Lawsuits are built on negligence, a pattern of behavior, and a failure to correct. HR operates with the mindset of a Defense Attorney who is terrified of liability.

HR creates a paper trail demonstrating that the company does everything it can to stop negligence. “We did not condone this behavior. Look, we corrected Jack on March 15, 2025.”

HR departments operate on a corporate version of the “Broken Windows” theory of policing. The logic is that if they tolerate “low-level” offenses (microaggressions, coarse jokes, awkward compliments), it creates an environment that breeds “high-level” offenses (sexual harassment, discrimination lawsuits).

In a highly litigious state like California, a “hostile work environment” does not require a specific firing or demotion. It only requires that an employee feels “unwelcome” based on a protected characteristic. HR creates zero-tolerance policies for “micro” issues because they are terrified that if they let the small stuff slide, a jury will view the entire workplace culture as “pervasively toxic.”

California law is significantly stricter than federal law regarding harassment. Under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, an employer must take “all reasonable steps” to prevent harassment from occurring. A write-up is the legal definition of a “reasonable step.”

HR attempts to impose certain moral norms onto the rough-and-tumble marketplace. They are not trying to attack men personally; they are trying to minimize liability. They are like the biological interface for a liability software program. They input data (a comment) and they output a result (the write-up) to balance the company’s insurance premiums.

Here are ten things that often look performative, weak, or irrational to men in the workplace, but are actually highly rational moves when viewed through the lens of liability insurance and risk management.

1. The “Pence Rule” (Never being alone with a female colleague): To many men, refusing to have a closed-door meeting or a solo business dinner with a female colleague looks like paranoia or sexism. However, from a risk management perspective, it is a rational defense against “he-said/she-said” scenarios. By ensuring a third party or a glass wall is always present, you eliminate the evidentiary vacuum where a harassment claim can germinate, effectively zeroing out the risk of a specific type of lawsuit.

2. Pronouns in Email Signatures (He/Him): For a standard male employee, adding pronouns can feel like forced political speech or empty virtue signaling. For the corporation, however, this is a zero-cost “shield” against gender identity discrimination lawsuits. It signals to a court or a regulatory body like the EEOC that the company is “proactive” about inclusion, which can mitigate damages if they are ever sued by a trans or non-binary employee.

3. The Death of the “Merit-Based” Hire (DEI Initiatives): To a pragmatic worker, hiring based on anything other than raw skill looks like a recipe for mediocrity. Yet, for the corporation, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores determine access to cheap capital and investment funds. Furthermore, having a diverse workforce is the primary defense against “disparate impact” class-action lawsuits, where a company can be sued simply because their statistics don’t match the local population demographics.

4. The Immediate Suspension Without Due Process: When a man is accused of misconduct and immediately walked out of the building before an investigation, it looks like a betrayal of the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” Rationally, the company is avoiding a claim of “negligent retention.” If they let the accused stay one more day and a second incident occurs, the company is liable for punitive damages because they knew of the risk and failed to act.

5. The Prohibition on “Edgy” Humor: Men often bond through roasting and transgressive humor, so a ban on jokes feels like a sterile, joyless imposition. However, legal liability for a “hostile work environment” is cumulative; a joke told in 2023 can be dredged up in 2025 as evidence of a “pervasive pattern” of toxicity. HR bans the joke today to break the chain of evidence required for a future lawsuit.

6. Mandatory “Unconscious Bias” Training: Sitting through training that tells you you are inherently biased feels like an insult to your character and intelligence. To the company, this training is the legal “Affirmative Defense.” If you harass someone later, the company can point to the training records and tell the jury, “We told him not to do that; he went rogue,” thereby shifting liability from the deep pockets of the corporation to you personally.

7. The “Love Contract” (Consensual Relationship Agreements): Requiring employees to disclose relationships to HR looks like a creepy invasion of privacy. The incentive here is to prevent a “quid pro quo” harassment suit if the relationship ends badly. By getting both parties to sign a document stating the relationship is consensual now, the company inoculates itself against one party claiming later that they were coerced into it by a power imbalance.

8. The Over-Documentation of Minor Errors: When a manager sends you an email summarizing a casual conversation you just had, it feels like passive-aggressive nagging. In reality, this is the “papering the file” strategy. In at-will employment states, you can be fired for any reason, but to avoid a wrongful termination suit based on discrimination, the company needs a thick file of “objective” performance issues to justify the firing.

9. The Ban on Compliments: Being told you cannot compliment a female coworker’s dress looks like the destruction of basic human warmth. However, sexual harassment law focuses on “impact,” not “intent.” Since a manager cannot control how a compliment is received (and whether it contributes to an “unwelcome” environment), the rational administrative move is to ban the category of speech entirely rather than risk a subjective interpretation.

10. “I Feel” Statements (Therapeutic Speak): The corporate push to use “I feel” rather than “I think” or “You did” can look like weak, feminine communication to men accustomed to direct confrontation. The incentive is that feelings are subjective and therefore legally harder to challenge. If you say “You are incompetent,” that is a statement of fact that can be defamation; if you say “I feel unsupported by your work,” that is a subjective experience that is nearly impossible to disprove in an HR hearing.

To make the modern workplace more like the TV show Mad Men—or at least neutral to male behavioral norms—you would need to reverse the specific legal and financial incentives that currently force HR to act as a “risk police.”

I wonder how many people want to return to a Mad Men office? How many people want to return to an office where it is OK to scream at a subordinate? The more feminine office of today is a safer place than the 1950s office.

I know old blokes who used to do coke with their secretaries and have sex in the parking lot.

There is a significant, measurable backlash against the sterile, therapeutic office—and surprisingly, it is not just older men who want a return to “Mad Men” dynamics. The data from 2024–2025 reveals a “Horseshoe Effect”: The oldest workers (Boomers) and the youngest workers (Gen Z) both crave the structure and socialization of the traditional office, while the “Millennial Middle Management” class remains the primary defender of the therapeutic/safety culture.

Here is the breakdown of who wants to return to the “Mad Men” office, and which specific parts of it they want back.

While Gen Z is often stereotyped as “woke,” 2025 data shows they are actually the most pro-romance and pro-office generation. According to 2025 SHRM and Forbes data, Gen Z is more open to workplace romance (33% approval) than Millennials (only 15% approval). They reject the idea that work should be a desexualized, sterile zone. They view the workplace as a primary social venue, much like the 1960s model. Gen Z reports the highest desire for clear hierarchy and in-person mentorship. They find the “flat,” ambiguous structure of modern tech firms confusing. They want a “Don Draper” boss who tells them exactly what to do, rather than a “supportive coach” who asks them how they feel.

The “Mad Men” office was defined by repression (you didn’t talk about feelings), whereas the modern office is defined by expression (you must bring your “whole self” to work). Surveys in 2025 show rising annoyance with “therapy speak” (terms like holding space, capacity, bandwidth, trauma).

There is a growing nostalgia for the “Stoic Office”—a place where you could just do your job and go home without having to perform emotional vulnerability. People miss the “status closure” of a clear boundary between public work and private life.

The desire for the “vices” of the 1960s office is split:

Smoking: Almost zero desire to return to indoor smoking.

Drinking: High desire. The decline of the “company expensed dinner” and the office bar cart is widely mourned as the death of camaraderie.

Flirting: Moderate to High desire, but highly polarized by gender. Men and younger women often miss the “playful” dynamic; older women and HR professionals view it as a liability minefield.

The desire for a “Mad Men” office is essentially a desire for Adult Liberty. The modern office treats employees like dangerous children who need to be padded, monitored, and scripted. The 1960s office (for all its genuine flaws regarding sexism and exclusion) treated men like adults who could be trusted to drink gin at 2 PM, have an affair, and still land the Chevy account.

The “return” to Mad Men culture isn’t happening because of culture; it’s prevented by insurance. We cannot have a “Mad Men” office because we cannot afford the “Mad Men” premiums.

The current system is not necessarily “anti-male” out of malice; it is anti-male because the liability laws make “masculine” behavior (risk-taking, direct conflict, edgy humor, stoicism) an uninsurable risk.

Here are the specific Legal, Political, and Social changes that would be required to shift the incentives back towards Mad Men culture.

The biggest legal shift required would be to move employment law away from “risk management” and back toward “justice.” Currently, under laws like California’s FEHA and federal Title VII, harassment is often judged by “impact,” not “intent.” If a listener feels uncomfortable, the speaker is liable, regardless of what they meant. Legislation would need to amend Title VII to state that for a comment to be “harassment,” there must be proof of intent to demean or exclude. This would create a “Safe Harbor” for jokes, clumsy compliments, or “manly plain speaking” (agonism). If you didn’t mean to be sexist, you couldn’t be sued for it. HR would no longer need to police “microaggressions” because they would no longer be legal liabilities.

Currently, if a supervisor makes a single sexist remark, the company is often “strictly liable” (automatically guilty), even if the company didn’t know about it. A shift to a “Negligence Standard.” The company should only be liable if they knew about the bad behavior and failed to stop it. Companies would stop preemptively monitoring and sanitizing men’s speech. They would only intervene after a problem was reported, rather than trying to prevent every possible future offense.

In “At-Will” employment states, it is safer to fire an accused man immediately (zero risk) than to investigate and find him innocent (potential risk of “negligent retention”). Legislation ending “At-Will” employment for misconduct firings. If a company wants to fire someone for “harassment,” they must prove it in a quasi-judicial hearing with a neutral arbitrator. This forces HR to become a “court” rather than a “hit squad.” They would have to gather real evidence before destroying a career, eliminating the “guilty until proven innocent” culture.

The political battle would need to focus on how “equality” is measured. Currently, neutral tests (like cognitive or physical tests) are illegal if they statistically weed out more women or minorities than white men (the “Disparate Impact” theory). If a test is neutral and predictive of job performance, it should be legal, regardless of the demographic outcome. This would allow a return to “objective meritocracy”—hiring based on raw data and test scores rather than “holistic” personality fits. Men often thrive in systems where the rules are clear, objective, and performance-based, rather than social and linguistic.

Juries in California can award millions of dollars for “emotional distress” even if there was no financial loss. Strict caps on damages for “emotional distress” in employment cases (e.g., capped at $50,000). If the payout for “hurt feelings” is low, plaintiff attorneys will stop taking these cases. If the lawsuits stop, HR will stop caring about feelings. The workplace would re-center on output (money) rather than input (emotional safety).

The culture can undergo a vibe shift. There might be a disruption to the monopoly that the “Therapeutic Class” currently holds on workplace norms. The current corporate ideal is “consensus” and “collaboration” (typically feminine-coded norms). Direct conflict is seen as “toxic.” A cultural shift that values Agonism—the idea that truth and excellence come from the clash of opposing ideas.

The effect? “Argument” would no longer be a write-up offense; it would be a performance metric. Men who are “disagreeable” (in the Big Five personality sense) would be seen as assets who prevent groupthink, rather than liabilities who hurt feelings.

To make work friendly to men, you don’t need to “center men.” You simply need to de-risk risk.

If you make it legally safe for men to be direct, competitive, and occasionally offensive without bankrupting the company, the culture will naturally drift back toward a middle ground. The current “woke” culture is just a corporate immune reaction to the threat of a massive jury verdict. Remove the threat, and the antibody reaction disappears.