All that they really needed to do to feel comfortable keeping their own dysfunctionality alive, was to double down on their own frequently reinforced toxicity, with the support of their toxic friends, and seek out scapegoats for their failures, while keeping their critics from being heard.
These are the sort of people who can be seen proudly telling everybody that they don't read books and don't "have no fancy college degrees."
People who will try to bully university students into dropping out of their degree programs and signing up for trade school, insisting that real men "work with their hands."
People who then scream incoherently about the conspiracies holding them down, as they discover that their GEDs, their substance abuse, their fanatical religious fundamentalism and their eagerness to seek out menial work, together did not form the winning combination that would make them rich.
That's what "masculinity" in the Manosphere has become, something that has left millions of mediocre, undisciplined men with resentments that the opportunistic Mr. Trump was happy to play on. Referring to those resentments as "gender anxiety" isn't crazy, at all.
We are, after all, talking about the incels and their friends. Most women, after high school (if not sooner) do seem to notice just how pathetic the class clowns always were, and don't seem very eager to become their girlfriends or wives.
Kind of a hard blow for a pack of acute testosterone poisoning cases who define themselves around a confident belief that they can bully everybody and everything into doing their bidding, and end up noticing that the "nerds" and "geeks" they looked down on, keep succeeding where they have failed.
Including finding girlfriends who eventually become wives. The "alpha males" have been quite open about how unfair they think that is, a number of them going so far as to call for the government to assign them girlfriends, who would be forced to have sex with them, ie. government-mandated rape.
Renewable Energy is something still under development by those hated, highly educated "nerd and geek boys." Oil drilling and digging for coal, on the other hand, often rely on already developed technology, which can be carried out by "real he-men who work with their hands."
It's only going to get worse as gen Z enters the workforce in increasing numbers, because one of the STEM community's long held dreams is finally coming true.
More and more girls and young women are holding onto their love of Math, Science, Engineering, and Medicine and refusing to give up on their dreams. Social pressures to do so are still there, but they're standing up them.