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What’s the Matter with Men?

By Idrees Kahloon

First, there was Adam, whose creation takes center stage on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Then, fashioned out of Adam’s spare rib, there was Eve, relegated to a smaller panel. In Michelangelo’s rendition, as in the Bible’s, the first man sleeps through the miraculous creation of his soul mate, the first woman and the eventual mother of humanity. Many of our foundational myths are, in this way, stories about men, related by men to other men. The notion of female equality is, historically, an innovation. “Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “ The Second Sex ,” published in 1949. “And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.” Nearly three-quarters of a century later, that change has continued. By a variety of metrics, men are falling behind parity. Is the second sex becoming the better half?

Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “ incels ” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide. And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics, premised on a return to better times, when America was great—and, unsubtly, when men could really be men. The question is what to make of the paroxysm. For the revanchist right, the plight of American men is existential. It is an affront to biological (and perhaps Biblical) determinism, a threat to an entire social order. Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.

Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, and a self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” would like to skip past the moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them: beset by bewildering changes that they cannot adapt to. His latest book, “ Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It ” (Brookings), argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what the sociologist David Morgan calls “ontological security.” They now confront the prospect of “cultural redundancy,” Reeves writes. He sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations. All this, he says, has landed hardest on Black men, whose life prospects have been decimated by decades of mass incarceration , and on men without college degrees, whose wages have fallen in real terms, whose life expectancies have dropped markedly, and whose families are fracturing at astonishing rates. Things have become so bad, so quickly, that emergency social repairs are needed. “It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity,” Reeves writes. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.”

That either-or can be disputed; the transformed social landscape that men face cannot. When Beauvoir was writing her manifesto on the plight of women, she noted that “the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women,” and that “a man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.” Nowadays, there are many such books. Self-doubt has broken through the supposed imperviousness of masculine self-belief. Reeves’s book is only the latest; it is also one of the most cogent. That’s not just a consequence of his compelling procession of statistical findings. It’s also due to the originality of his crisply expressed thesis: that men’s struggles are not reducible to a masculinity that is too toxic or too enfeebled but, rather, reflect the workings of the same structural forces that apply to every other group.

Reeves excels in relaying uncomfortable truths to his fellow-liberals—a talent that he displayed in his previous book, “ Dream Hoarders ,” about how well-meaning, college-educated parents are hindering social mobility. Still, he says, when he brought up the idea for “Of Boys and Men,” many people tried to discourage him from writing it. Progressives are generally happier to discuss current social disparities that go in the expected direction (such as the Black-white gap in life expectancy) than those which don’t (the fact, say, that life expectancy among Hispanics is slightly higher than among non-Hispanic whites). Besides, if our model of gender politics is zero-sum, the educational and economic decline of men may even be welcome. Women had to endure centuries of subjugation and discrimination; should we really be alarmed that they are just now managing to overshoot gender parity in a few domains?

“Of Boys and Men” argues for a speedy response because the decline in the fortunes of present-day men—not only in comparison with women but in absolute terms—augurs so poorly for men several decades on. “As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world,” Reeves writes. He notes that schoolgirls outperform schoolboys both in advanced countries that still struggle with considerable sexism, such as South Korea, and in notably egalitarian countries like Sweden (where researchers say they are confronting a pojkkrisen , or “boy crisis”). In 2009, American high-school students in the top ten per cent of their freshman class were twice as likely to be female. Boys, meanwhile, are at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and twice as likely to be suspended; their dropout rates, too, are considerably higher than those of their female counterparts. Young men are also four times as likely to die from suicide.

This story pushes to the side the male-favoring disparities in the world of work. The gender pay gap is usually described by noting that a woman earns eighty-four cents for every dollar earned by a man (though this is up from sixty-four cents in 1980). Barely one-tenth of the C.E.O.s in the Fortune 500 are women (and that is itself a twenty-six-fold increase since 2000, when only two women were in the club). The #MeToo movement began just five years ago; the sexual harassment that women face has hardly been extinguished. Even in the workplace, however, gender convergence may be arriving sooner than anticipated. An axiom of policymaking is that disparate educational achievement today will manifest in disparate earnings later. Reeves points out that women earn roughly three-fifths of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded. They are the majority of current medical and law students. And they’ve made extraordinary gains in subjects where they had once been highly underrepresented; they now constitute a third of current graduates in STEM fields and more than forty per cent of students in business schools.

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Much of the gender gap in pay, as Claudia Goldin, a labor economist at Harvard, notes, is driven not by direct discrimination—our conventional understanding of a sexist boss paying a female employee less than an identically situated male one—but by differences in occupational choice. A more elusive target has been indirect forms of discrimination, including those sustained by social conditioning (which helps explain the gender skew of certain occupations) and domestic arrangements that favor men. Within occupations, there’s often no wage gap until women have children and reduce their work hours. “For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite,” Reeves observes. “For most men, it barely makes a dent.” Goldin’s analysis is blunt: “The gender gap in hourly compensation would vanish if long, inflexible work days and weeks weren’t profitable to employers.” Yet there may be reason for optimism. The years-long pandemic and the subsequent labor shortage have forced employers to be more flexible in scheduling—particularly within the most highly remunerated white-collar professions. If that situation endures, the gender pay gap could continue its decline, and boardrooms may become more balanced by attrition.

Good things can also come about for bad reasons, though. Even if, as the French economist Thomas Piketty has suggested, global wars have helped reduce inequality between the rich and the poor, egalitarians should hesitate to become warmongers. And so it’s chastening to realize that the substantial decline in the gender earnings gap is partly the result of stagnating wages for working men (which have not grown appreciably in the past half century, adjusting for inflation), and partly of the steady creep in the number of men who drop out of the labor force entirely.

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We have some idea of why blue-collar wages have stagnated: a macroeconomic shift that greatly raised the value of a college degree, owing in part to the decimation of manual labor by automation and globalization. White men experienced a specific blow that Black men had felt earlier and even more acutely. In a classic study, “The Truly Disadvantaged,” the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that early waves of deindustrialization after the Second World War devastated the lives of working-class African Americans, who were buffeted both by economic forces, in the form of greater rates of joblessness, and by social ones, including worsened prospects for marriage. Later came the effects of the so-called China shock—the contraction of American manufacturing, a male-skewing sector, as a result of increased trade. David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., estimates that normalizing trade relations with China in 2001 cost as many as two million American jobs, often in places that had not recovered even a decade later. A shelf of popular books about the white working class—Arlie Hochschild’s “ Strangers in Their Own Land ,” Amy Goldstein’s “ Janesville ,” even the newly minted senator J. D. Vance’s “ Hillbilly Elegy ”—have sought to reckon with the social consequences of these economic transformations. None of them conveys much optimism.

What should we make of the growing tendency of men to drop out of the workforce? In the past half century, fewer and fewer men have returned to work after each recession—like a ball that can never match its previous height as it rebounds. In 1960, ninety-seven per cent of men of “prime age,” between twenty-five and fifty-four, were working. Today, close to one in nine prime-age men is neither working nor seeking work. In the recently reissued “ Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition ” (Templeton), the conservative demographer and economist Nicholas Eberstadt points out that men are now employed at roughly the same rate as in 1940, back when America was still recovering from the Great Depression. Citing time-use surveys—the detailed diaries that the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles on how Americans spend their days—Eberstadt reports that most of these hours of free time are spent watching screens rather than doing household labor or caring for family members. Instead of socializing more, men without work are even less involved in their communities than those with jobs. The available data suggest that their lot is not a happy one.

It would help if we had a firm grasp on why men are withdrawing from work. Many economists have theories. Eberstadt believes that “something like infantilization besets some un-working men.” He notes the availability of disability-insurance programs (roughly a third of nonworking men reported some kind of disability in 2016) and the over-all expansion of the social safety net after the nineteen-sixties. In 2017, the late Alan Krueger, who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, calculated that nearly half of all nonworking men were taking pain medication on a daily basis, and argued that the increased prescribing of opioids could explain a lot of the decline in the male labor force. Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, thinks that the rapid improvement in video-game quality could account for much of the especially deep drop in work among younger men. Anyone who has recently played (or momentarily lost a loved one to) Elden Ring or God of War Ragnarök can grasp the immersive spell that video games cast. But, in the end, most economists admit that they cannot settle on an exact etiology for the problem of nonworking men. The former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, who is not known for his intellectual humility, recently surmised that “the answers here lie more in the realm of sociology than they do in economics.” Reeves, too, thinks that we can’t explain the economic decline of men without looking at non-economic factors: “It is not that men have fewer opportunities. It is that they are not taking them.”

An intersectional approach may prove useful here. Consider a recent landmark study of income-tax returns, in which it was definitively established that Black Americans go on to earn substantially less than whites even if their parents were similarly wealthy. Remarkably, the gap is due entirely to the differing prospects for Black men relative to white men. In fact, Black women earn slightly more than white women who came from economically matched households. Sex-specific variables—like the extraordinarily high rate of incarceration among Black men—are evidently holding back progress. Although boys are as likely as girls to grow up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty or in fractured families (sex at birth being almost a pure coin toss), an emerging body of evidence suggests that boys may be less resilient to such adversity. In a paper titled “ The Trouble with Boys ,” the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan found that “boys raised outside of a traditional family (with two biological parents present) fare especially poorly,” with substantially worse behavior in school and considerably lower skills in “noncognitive” areas, such as emotional sensitivity and persistence, that increasingly matter in the workplace. The gender gap in school suspensions, already large, more than doubles among children with single mothers.

Reeves offers a wide menu of policies designed to foster a “prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world.” He would encourage more men to become nurses and teachers, expand paid leave, and create a thousand more vocational high schools. His signature idea, though, is to “redshirt” boys and give them all, by default, an extra year of kindergarten. The aim is to compensate for their slower rates of adolescent brain development, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making. Reeves, who places great stock in this biological difference, also places great stock in his proposed remedy: “A raft of studies of redshirted boys have shown dramatic reductions in hyperactivity and inattention through the elementary school years, higher levels of life satisfaction, lower chances of being held back a grade later, and higher test scores.”

If that sounds too good to be true, it may well be. One of the studies he cites concludes that “there is little evidence that being older than one’s classmates has any long-term, positive effect on adult outcomes such as IQ , earnings, or educational attainment”; on the contrary, it finds “substantial evidence” that the practice is linked to higher high-school-dropout rates and lower over-all earnings. Reeves insists that he’d be vindicated if the protocol were applied more widely, but his case isn’t very strong. We might hesitate before prescribing half the population an unusually strong and uncertain medicine. Still, he is at least proposing serious solutions. Many of his fellow-liberals remain undecided about whether below-par outcomes for males even merit attention, let alone efforts to remedy them.

The political right has eagerly filled the void. At the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, the Republican senator Josh Hawley gave a keynote speech on the crisis of masculinity, in which he blamed “an effort the left has been at for years now,” guided by the premise that “the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men.” Hawley, who is planning to expound upon his thoughts in a forthcoming book titled “Manhood,” argued that the solution must begin with “repudiating the lie that America is systemically oppressive and men are systematically responsible,” and with rebuilding “those manufacturing and production sectors that so much of the chattering class has written off as relics of the past.”

Meanwhile, the mass-market appeal of the contentious cultural commentator Jordan Peterson suggests an appetite for quasi-spiritual self-help (“Stand up straight with your shoulders back”) in a secular age—Goop for young men. The vintage machismo that Donald Trump so prizes may explain why the gender gap in the popular opinion of him was so large. And the swing among Hispanic voters toward Republicans is being driven, in no small part, by Hispanic men. How men are faring in school and at work may not arouse everyone’s concern, but how men choose to pursue politics inevitably affects us all.

Gender theorists have described a perennial struggle among multiple masculinities. In this scenario, nobody who values the prospect of eliminating gender hierarchies can afford to be a bystander. Masculinity is fragile; it’s also malleable. The shapes it will assume in the future have consequences. ♦

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International Edition

21 Reader Views on the Masculinity Crisis

“There’s no reason to feel guilty about falling short of an ideal masculinity that has been repeatedly revealed to be less than ideal,” one reader writes.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked, “Why are men and boys struggling? What should we do about it?” No other question has elicited so many responses, and they were especially varied, so this is a long edition.

Tim argues that we are confronting a perennial problem, not a new one:

The modern world is no harsher to men than the ancient or early industrial world. There have always been drunkards, criminals, vagabonds, and hermits, and more men than women among them. Men account for the overwhelming majority of megalomaniacs, warlords, sexual predators, and terrorists, past and present. I don’t know why men are more likely than women to engage in violent, self-destructive, or antisocial behavior, but we’ve been that way since the dawn of history. The only difference: Modern boys and men are going head-to-head with girls and women for the same grades, school placements, and jobs, instead of living in a completely different sphere.

In contrast, Alice believes that today’s world is unusually alienating to men and boys:

Largely due to social-media influences, males are expected to be “more sensitive” to women’s issues, while at the same time what makes them male, and therefore different from women, is being ignored or harshly criticized. While there is no harm in trying to raise boys to understand women a little better, I think it is equally important for women to understand that men are not women. They are men. And men and women are different in a number of ways. We would never tell women to try and not become good mothers—this would go against every notion that we have about women. Yet men are constantly being denied (in a subliminal way) the right to be masculine. They are being cut off from the things that make them happy to be male. And these things are not exactly the same things that make women feel (essentially) feminine. I grew up with three brothers. We liked to watch different TV shows and do different social things, but we always stayed close. We need to teach our young girls that boys are different from them. Despite a lot of criticism, most men are wonderful people. We girls are grateful to have them in our lives. So, let’s stop trying to feminize our boys; it is about as unnatural for them to do this as it is for a fish to try and breathe out of water. Both sexes should be allowed to grow and develop as God intended for us to do.

Glenn believes today’s moral culture is ill-suited to boys and men:

Imagine that you can be loved or respected, but you can’t have both. Given that false choice, I suspect most women would choose to be loved and most men would choose to be respected. Today’s culture gives boys plenty of opportunities to be loved, but young men shrivel on the vine for lack of a balanced diet of social nutrients. Give them an opportunity to earn respect and watch them thrive. Respect is not antithetical to love; it is, to some extent, an expression of love written in a masculine emotional language.

Stephen writes from the perspective of a man in a nontraditional role:

I earn nothing. I’ve read the entire Harry Potter series aloud, more than twice. I quit my job of 10 years to become a stay-at-home dad. When I began, people looked at me as if I had stolen a baby. Then the “Mr. Mom” jokes began. Many could not fathom that I could actually change diapers and read bedtime stories, or that I would even try to do so. I do struggle to feel like I contribute to the well-being of the family, and I don’t typically feel like that as much as my wife does—but I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. A myth is “a traditional story accepted as history.” [Myths] tell us how the world works, and what we should do in it—what we should be. If your myth of “what a man is” results in a belief that no longer holds true in this world, what happens to your identity? The world is different. Many have begun to acknowledge that women are equal to men, when traditionally this was not the case. However, virtues once set aside for men and women separately are not appreciated equally. Should men be beautiful? Should women be big and strong? Should a husband bake cupcakes? Should a woman repair the car? What if Mom is the breadwinner? What if Dad does the laundry? Do we even think these things are virtues, or are these just lazy stereotypes? We invest in identities that no longer fit the world we live in. We should simply try and become good people, yet we no longer seem to know what that means and grasp at predetermined roles from bygone days. As a father who stayed home to raise boys: You help them to become what they will become and encourage them to be someone they can be proud of being. They want to be good people. Ask them what that means; they’ll tell you. You don’t decide who someone else should be anymore. Finding yourself can be hard. Pretending you’re someone you’re not is acting, or fooling yourself. Our myths are too old––we need new ones that are worth believing in.

Read: The trouble with boys and men

Mike’s time serving his country informs his own identity and how he believes boys and men could be helped:

Addressing this issue sometimes forces you to say things that are sort of cringey, but in the interests of honesty, I feel like I earned my “man card” by entering the military as a young college-educated officer. Although I was only “in” for about seven years (Operation Desert Storm veteran) my service is a critical part of my self-identification and confidence. I think we have a confluence of issues which could be well-addressed with a national service requirement. We need to infuse boys/men with purpose, and shared work in service of a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, if you haven’t heard the term) is a great way to do that. I would reasonably reduce the active-duty military and put more money into the National Guard/Reserves. This opens up more realistic options to young men who would benefit from crawling through the mud with their fellow soldiers during training and committing themselves to something bigger. We should take our military-worship (“Thank you for your service,” etc.) and begin to cultivate similarly elite designations for wildfire fighters and other climate-related units (post-hurricane rebuilding). Climate change isn’t a shrinking problem. Those western firefighting jobs are frankly more dangerous and studly than virtually all military jobs. We can tie “America First” from the right (e.g., working to defend Americans rather than Iraqis or Ukrainians) with “Environmental Adaptation” from the left (e.g., acknowledging that climate change is a common threat). Yesterday: “My brother is a Navy SEAL.” Tomorrow: “My brother is a smoke jumper.”

Stephen worries that “a society which prizes competition overly much as we do in the U.S. condemns a majority to failure.” He writes:

Most of our students will not be valedictorians or quarterbacks. Schools have to reorient their criteria for success. The responsibility of each student is to learn who he or she is. And it is a life-long process. We should be abandoning class rank and ensuring that each child has mastered the skills deemed necessary (reading, rhetoric, and reckoning). Then the child should be given a say in what else they will learn as they discover who they are. Every person has a unique set of gifts, and society will benefit from all of them as long as they are not poisoned by a sense of inferiority created by a misguided effort to teach everyone (and test everyone) on the same standards.

Andrew is similarly skeptical of the prevailing socioeconomic ethos:

American culture is uniquely unsuited to “helping” boys and men because our core drive, over and over, is “success.” In that framing, what does it mean to “help” boys and men? Does that mean helping them Succeed but Better in the same role they’ve been doing forever—provider, big boss, hard worker—and just accepting that liberal capitalism has successfully defined both men’s and women’s ideal roles? The “man” box is enforced both overtly and subtly by everyone you meet, if you’re a boy or man. Unlearning these roles makes you unattractive to both the job market and the dating market. It’s as much economics as sociology—men just need a damn break.

Nicole wishes that her late father’s evangelical religious community had taught a different message about manhood:

My dad was a good man, a loving father, and my mom’s best friend. He died by suicide at 52. The world is a worse place without him. His suicide was a shock—we didn’t even know he was struggling. There is no single cause of suicide, no single person or entity to blame. That said, I feel anger towards the gender stereotypes that dominate evangelical churches. I felt constrained by the church’s definition of a “good woman,” not to mention rampant gender-based abuse. I left the church my family belonged to; my dad didn’t. And I never considered how the church’s messaging might affect him, too. My dad listened to Christian music, regularly read his Bible, and would quote scripture as a source of wisdom and inspiration. He internalized the supposedly “biblical” message that men are to be leaders, to be rocks, to be strong, to be providers. He carried that burden alone, despite a relatively egalitarian marriage. He never asked for help, never communicated pain. The church taught that anxiety and depression are symptoms of a faith defect, rather than a complicated biological disease. He quoted verses saying, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication let your requests be known to God,” as an argument against traditional psychiatric medicine. He thought that more faith and more prayer was the answer to mental illness. The church plays a role in the prevalence of dangerous mental-health and gender myths. Too many men stifle their emotional needs to maintain a facade as a “strong man of God.”

Jim offers a psychological account of what ails men:

Boys and men struggle because so many of them have no idea how to deal with their advantages. There has never been a lack of males willing to use their advantage over smaller or weaker individuals. By taking advantage, [men and boys] create for themselves a metaphysical debt and impoverish those whom they disadvantage. Instead of holding their advantages in abeyance for when they’re needed to protect the weaker, they keep taking and taking in order to accumulate wealth and/or influence. Accumulation has one good purpose, and that’s to aid all. So men and boys become indebted to their de facto subordinates and have no idea how to dispense with their debt, leaving them with no ruling principle besides hypocrisy. It is not a simple thing to assign blame. Too many are victims of an overwhelming global system that relies on consumption and acquisition. Besides the harm to the social fabric, struggling men frivolously waste their energy on acquiring, protecting, and spending their treasures, exhausting themselves physically, intellectually, spiritually, and ethically. The gentle methods of cooperation and care are not out of their reach, but are the opposite of what they’ve been taught to value. If men exercise their advantages to protect, there will be no place in their hearts for selfishness or aggression to enter. If advantages are used to nurture, the strong party gains the trust of the weaker, plus resiliency for their community. The weaker gains security, acceptance, and opportunity.  

Travis has a theory about what causes some boys to give up relatively early in life:

As a teenager I did a two-year stretch in juvenile detention. I was a C student at best in high school. Then I went into the Marines and became a three-time combat veteran by 21. I almost never went to college because I thought I was still as dumb as I had been in high school. My ex talked me into it by saying, “You don’t understand how many truly stupid people have diplomas. You’re actually smart; you’ll be fine.” She turned out to be right. I went to college on the GI bill, graduating at 26 with a 3.9 GPA in a hard-science major. I believe the decline in success rates for men follows the increase in successful folks tending to date or marry other successful folks. If getting into the upper 10 percent of society seems to require one postcollege professional marrying another postcollege professional, you might as well give up on that if you’re not one of the guys who will do well in college. How does a blue-collar man who doesn’t think of himself as being cut out for college plan to get into the top 10 percent––[winning] the lottery, or somehow marrying a doctor without also being a doctor? Many men give up before even trying. If individual college-earned success paired with marrying someone similar is what determines who makes it in this country, then it’s very easy for a lot of men to give up on themselves at very young ages.

Mitch reflects on vulnerability as his father related to it:

I am the son of a Minnesota farm boy who was the first person in his family to go to college. Stoicism isn’t a practice for Minnesotan boys who grew up on the farm—it’s the default way of being. I once saw my dad fall off an eight-foot ladder putting up Christmas lights, his femur landing directly on the concrete step leading into our house. My mouth hanging open, I watched him get up, grimace, and proceed to “walk it off” (he was a running back in high school, and no, he didn’t break his leg). He didn’t cry. He didn’t say anything. The message was clear. A man doesn’t show vulnerability, especially when in pain . To be clear, my dad is a crier. I’ve seen him sniffling at weddings and dabbing his eyes at the climax of a movie. It isn’t about crying; it is about vulnerability. In a world where connectivity is prized but we’re separated by filter bubbles; where so many entry-level jobs are dehumanizing (I’ve been a cook for years); where the male role models evincing stereotypical masculine ideals are obvious hypocrites, it would make sense to open up about one’s concerns with a trusted confidant. But this is antithetical to the consciousness of most men. Asking for help is a sign of failure, but internalizing an inflated sense of responsibility in an uncontrollable world is necessarily going to provoke feelings of despondency and inadequacy. Cue the guilt that comes for not living up to standards. And then the subsequent repression of that guilt leads to more problems. What do we do about this aversion to vulnerability, among the other issues hamstringing men and boys? Find a way to communicate to boys that expressing emotions other than anger and ambivalence are legitimate ways to be a man. If you’re in pain or confused, it’s okay to ask for help—it doesn’t make you lesser; it makes you stronger. There’s no reason to feel guilty about falling short of an ideal masculinity that has been repeatedly revealed to be less than ideal (to put it lightly) over the course of history.

R., a professional statistician, got an unusual glimpse into how boys and young men think about the future:

Four years ago I was asked to analyze data for an organization that traditionally serves boys but also serves girls in middle and high school. The survey was about college and career plans. More girls than boys intended to go to college, but what caught my eye were the leading career choices. In middle school, the top careers for both boys and girls were actor and musician. By the middle of high school, the top choices among girls were nursing and teaching. Among boys, it was professional athlete, actor, and musician. The lack of realism among high-school boys as they are making decisions about their future (often without realizing it) struck me. Maybe it’s a disparity in maturity, or maybe it’s in the way girls are taught (probably both, and more, like most phenomena). High-school education needs to include mandatory counseling, perhaps even a daily class inclusive of household economics and financial literacy, coupled with some form of career exploration, to introduce teens and especially boys to the facts of adult life and steer them to jobs and careers and the training for them, especially for those who aren’t college-bound. I’m not suggesting we track kids (though it’s not the worst idea), but that we formalize guidance so that it’s something every student receives, not just those who seek it out. We’ve instead let boys figure out their prospects through hard experience.

Read: 12 readers on what the rest of the world does better than the U.S.

Karen presents a different argument about failing schools:

Ordinary schools do not work for most boys, and one primary reason is the expectation that children will sit still for long periods of time. All three of my children found this challenging, but my eldest, who also had a severe learning disability, struggled most. In the end, we wound up with our kids first in a Catholic school and then in expensive private high schools. In the Catholic elementary school, the teachers were expected to get the children moving—running around the school a couple of times was common—between the regular recess and lunch breaks. The boys’ high school required not just in-school PE but a mandatory three further hours of physical activity each week, on non-PE days, fulfilled either on competitive teams or via things like bike clubs. Meanwhile, the public schools continued to cut requirements for PE. Initially, we barely afforded the schools our kids needed—my husband was a pastor. We lived for a long time with all three kids in one bedroom. We took only camping holidays. In the end, all three children were on full scholarships for high school. We were unbelievably fortunate. My grandson is highly gifted (he was reading at a grade-11 level at 7) and has mild ADHD. Once again, our family is working to keep a child in a private school. The psychologist who did his testing described his needs in a way that made it clear no public school could meet them. He’s happy as a clam—or perhaps some more active animal––because he learns best when moving, and both in his school, where he can study his subjects at his actual level, and in his beloved Saturday Mandarin classes, he’s allowed to stand and move around, so long as he isn’t disruptive. The results are astonishing. He’s years ahead in Mandarin because they tried letting him walk quietly around the edge of the classroom and discovered he learned faster than anyone else in the class.

Joseph’s observations about schools build to a controversial suggestion:

I have spent a lot of time in very gender-specific environments: I am both an aerospace engineer (very male workforce) and a figure-skating coach (very female sport). Observing as a coach, young boys are very different developmentally from young girls. It’s often hard to keep the boys in my classes under control for the length of the class, so I cannot imagine how these same boys could sit still in a classroom for six hours a day. The whole structure of the school environment seems like an unnatural fit for boys. We need to deliberately recruit more male teachers so that boys have role models for proper male behavior, possibly by offering scholarships only open to men (scholarships only open to women have long been standard in engineering; we should consider the reverse in other fields). Boys are often wild and should have time in the school day to be so. Recess needs to be mandatory, and recess environments should not be completely sterile/rubberized. And teachers need not just deploy methods to help boys focus on learning, but also to occasionally allow them to learn through not-so-focused methods. Boys are also far more frequently the receivers of discipline in school. We need rules and consequences to teach boys that certain actions are unacceptable, but many of these actions are inevitable and the punishments need to be minimally disruptive to boys’ learning. Making a boy sit outside because he is distracting other students means he is missing out on direct (i.e., from the teacher) and indirect (i.e., social skills with peers) learning. Having a time-out during recess is an illogical punishment; if the boy cannot sit still now, why try to make him do so later too? These punishments only serve to further slow kids’ development. I’m not entirely sure what would make a good discipline system, but to be honest, I think there is some merit to whacking wrists with rulers. While there are downsides to this, it does make an immediate and quick intervention.

Neyda argues that “red-shirting” boys, as the author Richard Reeves suggests in our October issue, is an imperfect solution:

I taught high-school English and journalism for 16 years at a public high school. I agree that children do often benefit from being “red-shirted,” but I worry about the implications of making “red-shirting” a rule. Ideally, education would be treated as an ongoing process. If a student wasn’t prepared to move from kindergarten to first grade, they wouldn’t. Unfortunately, that is not how it works. There is fear and disappointment (mostly from parents) at being held back. That could impact a kid’s self-esteem. But only if we treat it that way. Not being ready to move up a grade does not have to be considered a failure. When our kids were infants, pediatricians told us that kids often reached milestones (talking, walking, etc.) at different rates. But public education is not built that way.

Lynne also critiques the proposal to “red-shirt” boys: “I totally get why you would want to have boys start a year later than girls,” she writes. “But I don’t want my 14-year-old girl in classes with boys of 15 and 16.”

Nels asks a pointed question:

Are boys actually getting worse at school, or are girls simply showing that, when placed on an equal footing, they can surpass us? We have always known that boys are more likely to make bad decisions and become criminals, so it seems likely that this was an inevitable thing to happen to a society that becomes equal. Perhaps it is natural that girls should be more highly educated and more suited on average to work that requires more education.

Jaleelah wants women to be treated as role models for boys:

My generation is purposeless and lonely. That loneliness, however, is not equally distributed: My generation is populated by lonely, angry men. In my experience, women are great at getting along with men in non-romantic contexts. Women understand that friendships can be deeply rewarding; they see men as more than just potential opportunities for sex. Large numbers of men, however, can’t envision a happy life without a loyal female partner. That’s because people refuse to see women as sources of skill and knowledge. Society laments the lack of empathetic male role models for its sons. Why can’t it teach boys that women’s friendship-building skills are admirable and useful? The solution for men’s anger isn’t to convince women to return to being their domestic servants. Society must teach boys to look up to empathetic women, who can in turn teach them to build stronger platonic and intellectual relationships.

Robin wants to bring back the tradition of teaching skills:

My suggestions are to revitalize the Boy Scouts, or a new version of it, and to reinstitute “maker” courses in high schools, such as woodworking, mechanics skills, welding, etc. The common theme is to teach boys skills that used to be a source of pride and achievement. I think of my husband’s upbringing in Scouts and the joy the boys had at a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California. They cooked on a wood-fired stove; they hiked in mountains where they had to watch for rattlesnakes; they tied knots; they brought water up from a creek; they played pranks on the men by way of letting them know they adored them; they taught the younger boys. It reminds me of David McCullough remarking, in 1776 , that George Washington’s army was made up of coopers and farmers and men of practical skills who could install cannons in Boston Harbor overnight without the British hearing them. Learning practical skills is a source of accomplishment and grounding that could help our boys and men.

Melanie argues that childhood trauma is an underacknowledged factor in this discussion:

Why are boys and men struggling? Because we allow children, as a whole, to suffer vast, largely preventable trauma; we don’t recognize or mediate it; and we get it especially wrong with boys. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study published in 1998 demonstrated that two-thirds of all the children in a sample experienced a childhood trauma so profound that it had the potential to affect physical, mental, social, and financial health throughout their lives. When today’s children are asked the same questions, a huge and rather similar number reveal significant traumatization . This traumatization causes massive pain and massive destructive tendencies; boys and men have traditionally tended to direct that pain outward. Women and girls have traditionally directed that pain inward. Addiction and suicide measure pain directed inward; crime measures both (since so much crime is related to drug use and some is related to violence). We shouldn’t see the rates of suicide and deaths due to long-term alcohol and drug use as a result of a sudden paradigm shift, but rather the cumulative consequences of a lifelong struggle with pain. Suicide can be conceptualized similarly––someone who was dealing with significant emotional pain as their backdrop lost their grip on something that was keeping them from plunging into the abyss. That can mean the loss of a relationship, a status, such as a job or role in the community. The traumatization also causes difficulties in formal educational settings and employment. Not only have we failed to invest in the programs that prevent adverse childhood experiences, but we have failed to normalize discussion of surviving them in any meaningful way. This takes a particular toll on men. According to the ACE Study 15 percent of boys are sexually abused as children; it typically takes survivors decades to disclose, and it typically takes male survivors longer than female survivors. We have yet to embrace child sexual abuse as a social issue that deserves concerted attention (current right-wing hysteria around “grooming” does not count!), and we have yet to consider the voices of abuse survivors as distinctive and worthy of being heard. The delay in disclosing abuse is related to a delay in how survivors process and acknowledge abuse; that this trauma is predictably processed in middle age could be another factor contributing to the increased suicides and substance abuse among men in this age bracket.

And Shawn urges advances in storytelling:

All the statistics in the world won’t change most minds, but good stories can change the world. The problem is, we really like stories of powerful men who accomplish great things and hate stories of ordinary men who fail. Since we mostly tell stories of powerful men who succeed, we think men must be powerful. Anything that contradicts this idea won’t ring true, even if it is. Most people won’t address the problem because they can’t believe it is real. I don’t know how to tell a story of a struggling man and make people want to hear it. Until someone figures that out, helping men will never gain much traction.

Why we need to stop talking about a ‘masculinity crisis’

Adjunct Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin

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The recent outpouring of sexual harassment cases makes people wonder: what is wrong with men? After all, the vast majority of those accused of sexual violence are men. The simple and perhaps shocking answer is that we, as a society, tell men to be violent. We speak about “real” manhood and call men to “grow a pair” to prove they are manly enough.

And, crucially, we describe men’s anxieties about their changing social roles as a “masculinity crisis”.

In doing this, we suggest that manhood is something universal, even primeval, and thus unchangeable. But masculinity is a social construct. It has a history.

Our ideals of masculinity – the model to which men are supposed to aspire – is very old-fashioned. Even though our culture changed drastically over the course of the 20th century, the qualities we value in “real men” – such as domination, control, physical strength and emotional restraint – are unchanged. These qualities were promoted during the high period of European imperialism in the 19th century – when nations sought above all else to dominate other cultures.

As boys grow up, their peers, parents and even girlfriends tell them “boys don’t cry”, “don’t be a girl”, “be strong”. They learn to feel ashamed of emotionality and vulnerability. They are expected to “prove” their masculinity and, often, that means aggression. Sociologists and psychologists, such as Stephen M. Whitehead , or Victor J. Sadler tell us that only by connecting with their emotions can men look at themselves critically and change their behaviour.

Another old belief is that men can become “real men” through sexual conquest. In 1886, Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote in Psychopathia Sexualis, the most influential book on human sexuality, that for men, sex with women was a biological force, a “natural instinct … demanding fulfilment”. The idea that healthy men need to satisfy their instinct through sex was commonly accepted as the truth -— the norm regulating relations between men and women. So the traditional and still dominant idea of masculinity means accepting and even encouraging male sexual conquest, the man’s power over others and emotional restraint.

However, emotions, including sympathy and empathy, are actually crucial for healthy social interactions. Thanks to them we understand how other people feel and know how to respond properly -– including responses to sexual harassment.

Changing roles

More recently, we’ve begun to talk about a “ masculinity crisis ” – commonly used to describe how the changing work patterns and new family demands put pressure on men who feel distress and insecurity about their new gender role. Many straight men find it hard to reconcile the traditional view of gender with the new approach based on partnership and equality of men and women at home and in work. The sense of failing to perform the male ideal promoted by advertisement, Hollywood films and porn movies can provoke defensive reactions in men – machismo, resentment towards women and all-too often aggressive or abusive behaviour.

Clearly, the problem doesn’t lie simply in the pressures of the changing culture but in the old-fashioned ideals of masculinity that can often only be achieved through predatory and sexist attitudes towards women. Sexism is a huge part of bonding among men who define themselves as heterosexual. Let’s be clear, the sort of thing that Donald Trump refers to as “locker room talk” is not just banter, it’s an accepted, encouraged and repeated practice of objectifying and denigrating women. Many men also find it difficult to speak out if they object to it.

A man who is sexist can’t be a woman’s ally –– so why do we continue to value masculinity based on sexism? Even though this outdated and restrictive model of masculinity actually makes men unhappy, it prevails because the culture at large continues to enable it.

Redefining masculinity

Speaking about the masculinity crisis detracts our attention from a real issue: our failure to reform the way we think about masculinity and how unfit it is for the culture in which we now live. The crisis narrative can become an easy excuse of inaction, or a handy justification of some men’s violent and abusive behaviour.

The word “crisis” even seems to fuel a backlash against movements such as #metoo. When some men feel their status is under threat, blogs such as The Voice for Men emerge producing sexist content blaming women for the challenges faced by men.

While it’s extremely important to discuss the changing roles and position of men, the language we use to do that has crucial consequences. The Irish campaign “Man up” is one example how to teach, particularly young boys, positive values and change the meaning we understand strength in men. This project promotes men’s strength as not being in muscles but in active participation of men in preventing domestic violence.

The campaign also encourages men to speak up about their emotions because “silence can kill”. The high number of suicide among men before their 50s is linked to men’s restraint in sharing their emotions.

The negative narrative of the crisis stops men from joining the debate that there can be multiply ways of being a man and there is no shame in breaking with the old patterns.

Turning the story into something more positive —- inviting men to actively participate in redefining the norms of masculinity —- is how our concept of masculinity can be reformed. We should ditch the word “crisis” when speaking about the experiences of boys and men to end the cycle of recrimination.

• Sexual harassment
• Masculinity
• Toxic masculinity

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The New Politics of Fatherhood pp 69–121 Cite as

Masculinities, Crisis and Men’s Movements

• Ana Jordan 4  
• First Online: 06 July 2019

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1 Altmetric

Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences ((GSSS))

This chapter analyses masculinity ‘in crisis’, an idea which has shaped, and been shaped by, men’s movements. Recurring crisis-of-masculinity narratives throughout history are discussed, suggesting that ‘crisis’ is internal to masculinity. Contemporary men-in-crisis debates are also reviewed, especially regarding men and work, and male suicide. A distinction is made between ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ crisis narratives. Conservative narratives reassert traditional masculinity, presenting women’s equality/feminism as provoking crisis. Progressive accounts, in contrast, highlight traditional masculinity’s harmful effects for both women and men, and recommend reimagining masculinity. These perspectives are illustrated through analysis of recent (non-academic) constructions of crisis. Both narratives reinforce harmful, essentialist, binary notions of gender. The language of crisis is argued to be problematic, reifying gender and erroneously positioning men as ‘the new gender victims’.

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Jordan, A. (2019). Masculinities, Crisis and Men’s Movements. In: The New Politics of Fatherhood. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31498-7_3

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Transcript: The Crisis of Masculinity

MR. CAPEHART: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post and host of the “Capehart” podcast. Well, concerns about masculinity and the American male has increasingly become an interesting and fraught part of societal and political discourse. We’ve got two great voices coming at this conversation from different vantage points but coming to similar conclusions. Christine Emba is the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation” and a Washington Post opinion writer who penned the recent essay, “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.” And you see below her, Richard Reeves. He’s the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of the book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.”

Christine, Richard, welcome to Washington Post Live.

DR. REEVES: Thank you.

MS. EMBA: Thank you so much for having us.

MR. CAPEHART: I'm really looking forward to this conversation with both of you, because, as I said, you're both coming at this really interesting conversation from different vantage points.

Christine, let me start with you. In your Opinions Essay, you took a closer look at the changing narrative around masculinity as revealed through your research. What does the modern man look like, and what does society expect of him?

MS. EMBA: So that's the real question. The modern man looks confused. In my research, I talked to young men around the country, really, and sort of asked them what they thought it meant to be a man in this day and age and whether being a man had become harder over time. And so many of them said that, yes, it had become harder because they no longer knew exactly what their place was in the world. In a really personal sense, you know, they've been brought up with at least some masculine ideals of being the provider, perhaps being a man in the house, taking the lead in some ways, and yet they saw their female friends and classmates surging ahead, you know. When it comes to college education, for example, there are only 74 men getting college degrees for every 100 women. When they used to rely on sort of strength and physical prowess and be able to depend on that in the workforce, they're realizing that soft skills are sort of what is looked for in the new economy. There's no longer really the possibility of sort of getting a male factory job and providing for a whole family for the rest of your life.

And then they were missing role models, really missing role models, and this was the thing that I found most alarming. Many of them said that they didn't necessarily have father figures in their lives or men that they really looked up to or that the adults in their lives felt nervous about prescribing any particular model of masculinity and just said, "Well, go be a good person," which wasn't enough instruction for them. So they were turning to these influencers like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, who were providing, if not a good path, at least a very clear one.

MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. And to your point about lacking role models, I think one of the first people you talked to was like a postdoctoral student or professor in a tweed jacket who had younger folks coming to him looking for advice, and he was like, "Why?" He was confused, like "Why me?"

But, Richard, you have three boys of your own. You dedicate your book to them. One of the opening lines in your book is that you are worried about the boys. Two questions. Why? And have the conversations you've had with your own sons fed that worry?

DR. REEVES: Yes. Christine has already set out some of the statistics that I think are also covered very well in her essay, I want to say. I think her essay is an incredibly important moment in this debate. It could be seen as something of a landmark, frankly, given kind of who and where it's coming from.

And what was happening to me was that in my day job as a public policy wonk, I was seeing these stats, including in education but also the decline in male earnings, the surge in youth male suicide, the much higher death rates of men from covid, et cetera, et cetera. And what I felt was--and then I'm talking to my sons about their own experience in education and the dating market and so on and realizing there was a real disconnect between their experience of what it was like to try to figure out how to be male today and the narratives around them and, as Christine said, in both directions. On the one hand, there is a narrative which is, well, don't worry about being masculine, or gender doesn't matter anymore, or just get rid of the toxic bit, if you wouldn't mind, could you just like--like an appendicectomy almost, just like take that bit out and you'll be good. But on the other hand, they were all, in one way or another, intrigued by this other group of men, who Christine calls the "manfluencers," who were just saying, "Yeah, here's how to be a man," and it's how we've always been men.

And so they felt trapped between a world where one side--and this would be more typically a progressive side--was almost turning its back on or ignoring the problems of boys and men or dismissing them. On the other hand, a bunch of guys who came along with a prescription that effectively amounts to turning back the clock and not least turning back the clock on women, most young men aren't satisfied with either of those answers.

And so the starting point is, is there a question here based in data that is worth answering? And the clear answer to that is yes, and then the question becomes who's answering it, and what are the answers.

MR. CAPEHART: I have so many questions that I want to ask as my next question. I don't know which one to start with. So what I want to do is to get each of you to respond to what the other has written. So, Christine, let me get you to react to something that is in Richard's book. He writes, "What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality. We must help men adapt to the dramatic changes of recent decades without asking them to stop being men. We need a pro-social masculinity for a post-feminist world, and we need it soon."

MS. EMBA: I think that's exactly right. I think he's totally on point, and in fact, that's why I ended up talking directly to Richard for my own piece.

DR. REEVES: Right.

MS. EMBA: I think this is the conflict that we see in these sort of models--and I'm using quotes because they're not really very good models--that are being offered by the men who are offering something today. When you see someone like Andrew Tate, say, who was just interviewed by Tucker Carlson, and then Elon Musk, who's quite publicly struggling with his masculinity right now, retweeted it just this morning--you think maybe they're watching this live--you see a model for masculinity, but it is totally amoral. It is, in fact, antisocial.

Andrew Tate talks about, you know, slapping women around, only getting money for himself and his friends. He has a famous line where he says that if he saw a man, you know, falling to the ground because he's had a heart attack, he wouldn't give him CPR because he only gives CPR to hot females. It's like a totally self-centered, selfish version of masculinity that, yeah, it's the opposite of pro-social, and this is what young men are getting today.

But unfortunately, that is what's on offer, and what I write about in my piece is the problem that instead of offering an alternative, here's another version of masculinity, a better model that you could use that also happens to be for society that seem unwilling to even acknowledge that masculinity is a thing. And so they're not offering anything at all. There's just kind of an empty space, and, of course, who surges into the void?

MR. CAPEHART: Right, right. And the way you described Andrew Tate, the instant phrase that popped into my head is "toxic masculinity," and I want to get into why that is problematic, that phrase.

But, Richard, let me get you to react to something that's in Christine's essay, where she--a college student she interviewed for the essay told her this: "I feel like there's a lot of room to be proudly feminine, but there's not, in my opinion, the same room to be proudly masculine." Do you agree with that statement?

DR. REEVES: I do, and--[audio break].

MR. CAPEHART: Oh, looks like Richard is frozen. Hopefully, we--there. Richard?

DR. REEVES: And that's problem if you happen to be male.

MR. CAPEHART: Richard, we missed your entire answer because you were frozen. So repeat what you were saying.

DR. REEVES: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I think that for a lot of young men, they feel as if the term "masculinity" is framed in an entirely negative way, and that's bad if you happen to be a male. And so finding positive ways to talk about, acknowledge, and model masculinity is, I think, a real issue. And so, again, to kind of echo back what Christine said, I think that the conversations she had with young men are capturing something real. There is nothing good about a society where femininity is seen as positive and masculinity is seen as negative or--[audio break].

MR. CAPEHART: That's a great way to be frozen.

Richard? Do we have Richard back?

Finish the last part of what you were saying.

DR. REEVES: Sorry.

MR. CAPEHART: It's okay.

DR. REEVES: Yeah. I'm sorry about this. I seem to be losing my connection here.

But we don't want a world in which either femininity or masculinity are seen as bad or good or better than the other. We have to find a way to make them both compatible and positive and right now the only, quote, "positive models" of masculinity are the ones that Christine writes about. And they're not actually very positive because they're individualistic.

MR. CAPEHART: Right. So let's talk more about this phrase "toxic masculinity," because I think it's become salient, because a lot of the--a lot of the people who are occupying the space that young men are gravitating towards are--as Christine pointed out, Andrew Tate--I'm sorry--is to my mind not a good masculine role model. He's not someone I would want to emulate or I would want any of my male relatives or friends to emulate. But you both have a problem with that phrase, "toxic masculinity."

So, Richard, let me go to you first on this, because you think it's problematic as it's being discussed coming from the left.

DR. REEVES: I do. First of all, putting those two words next to each other just inevitably creates a sense there's something toxic about masculinity, and so that's just a very negative message to start the conversation. It's not a good way to call men into the conversation, and most feminists, actually, that I've spoken to agree with that now.

But at a deeper level, the problem is that there's a failure to articulate a non-toxic masculinity, even if that's really how low we're setting the bar. Very often, those people who are using that term fail to come up with attributes of masculinity that are distinct, on average, from, say, feminine traits and yet are good. So if there's no non-toxic masculinity, then that means there's only toxic masculinity, and that's just a really bad place to end up in.

I'm struck by some polling that "masculinity" is now used in almost an entirely negative way, and that's, I think, a real cul-de-sac culturally. And so instead, as Christine's essay says and as I say in my book, we've got to start, A, addressing the actual problems of boys and men more seriously, just more prosaically, more straightforwardly. Look at the education problem. Look at the surge in suicide among young men. Just like you wouldn't ignore it if it was your son, son's problem or your brother's problem. So let's just not ignore those problems. That's number one. And then number two, start to make sure there are role models for young boys and men that are not online and are in their classroom or on the playing field.

MR. CAPEHART: Christine?

MS. EMBA: Yeah. I totally agree with what Richard is saying here in that just using the phrase "toxic" constantly, you know, when we talk about masculinity especially in progressive spaces, it almost always seems like "toxic" is either the word before it or the word after it.

To young men, especially the young men who I talk to, they feel kind of stigmatized by that. You know, they sort of say, "It's not my fault that I'm a man. Is just being a man a bad thing? Are men in general bad?" And that's unfortunately added onto by what has become kind of a common way of joking, especially in feminist spaces where we talk about, you know, men are trash, you know, we should ban all men. That first, I mean, it causes a feeling of, I think, actually deserved hurt and then also causes a feeling of resentment. You know, "Well, if you think men are trash, if you think men are bad, if you think I'm toxic, I'm not going to listen to your advice. I guess I'm just going to keep being me. Sorry if I'm toxic. Maybe I'll even be a little bit more toxic," which is literally a line that Andrew Tate has used.

So I think that we--if we want to talk about solutions for men, we also have to make them feel invited into the conversation, not just stigmatized for existing, frankly.

MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. And also, as you were speaking, Christine, some men might decide to be, well, I'll be a little more toxic, or as we're seeing, men just withdraw, and they withdraw to these online spaces where they don't have to come into contact with anybody who will make them feel toxic.

I want to go to this audience question from a man named Ronald Levant from Ohio, who just happens to be the former president of the American Psychological Association, but we found that on our own through our own sleuthing. But here's what he asked: "To what extent do you think boys' and men's problems today are the result of adherence to outmoded and restrictive masculine norms?"

Richard, what do you think?

DR. REEVES: I think to some extent but not completely, and the question actually gets to this whole issue of the extent to which we're blaming masculinity for the problems of boys and men; in this case, the outmoded version. And that's if there's a good part of this story, which is, look, if old-fashioned masculinity men, you know, not being able to be emotionally available, not seeking help for your health care, the stoicism that the APA actually talked about in its own guidance, can that be a problem for men's health and men's social connection? For sure.

But on the other hand, there are aspects of masculinity which are distinctly male on average, which are around more physicality, more competitiveness, et cetera, and those need to be channeled in a kind of positive direction rather than framing it in such a way as if we could just get rid of this old masculinity would be great, unless we replace it with something much more positive.

So I think there's some truth to the fact that these old models of masculinity have hurt men as well, but that doesn't mean we should just abandon them and not replace them. That creates a dangerous vacuum.

MR. CAPEHART: Christine, I would love your thoughts.

MS. EMBA: Yeah. No, I think that's a really interesting question and really well put. You know, I've been entering the danger zone and reading the comments on this piece. There are more than--

MR. CAPEHART: Oh, my gosh, Christine, why would you do that? [Laughs]

MS. EMBA: Because I think this question is really interesting, you know, and I'm clearly not a man. And so also just hearing men respond to this is fascinating to me.

And one of the things that I keep seeing coming up in a response to this piece is, okay, you're trying to put forward these modes and models for masculinity, but as our questioner says, having this one strict model of masculinity has hurt men in the past, has left a number of men feeling left out, like they don't live up to whatever they're supposed to be. And it's especially troubling, I think, for men who identify as queer or LGBT or anywhere else on the spectrum that wouldn't fit into the traditional John Wayne model.

And so I actually think that the solution is not to totally throw out old modes or sort of old forms of masculinity because, as Richard says, some of them do have qualities that are helpful, that actually do acknowledge something about sort of the physical embodiment of being male and what to do about it.

What actually I think we're looking for in this moment is new, better, and extended models of masculinity. There might be norms, but you can sort of branch out anywhere from those norms. You can be any kind of man. You just have to figure out how to be a good one.

DR. REEVES: Yeah.

MS. EMBA: And there is a character of character, not just biology, a character of duty and responsibility that comes with being a good man or, in fact, a good person, and we need to have clear models for how to do that, not just say either men are bad, don't be a man, or just be nice, which doesn't really convey very much information, especially for a young person who's searching for a clear path.

MR. CAPEHART: Right. I would like--

DR. REEVES: Yeah. Or sometimes be more like your sister. Be more like your sister is sometimes what men hear, is why can't you be more like that? But as the question gets at, the big divide here, I think, is actually, do we need to abandon or adapt masculinity? And there is a view that we've got to abandon it, which I think to some extent comes through in that question. Or do we adapt it to the modern world? And then, of course, there are the manfluencers who just say, "No, we don't need to adapt it. We need to go back."

But the truth is that very few men actually want to go back, right? Most men glory in the world where there's more equality, but nor also do they want to be told that they need to stop being masculine in order to be equal.

I think Christine and I both use a similar line, which is that you don't have to have androgyny to have equality, and if that's what's on offer, we shouldn't be surprised that many men are running away.

MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that was an excellent line.

And, Christine, in your response, I really loved it because one of the reasons why the masculinity conversation always just sort of gets my shoulders hunched, it's because, look, I'm an out gay married man, and the conversation doesn't--I feel like it doesn't include me, and that a lot of the folks having this conversation would not consider me to be masculine, however they're going to define it. And so I agree with both of you that masculinity needs to be adapted to our modern world.

Richard, in your book--and you also talk about this as well in your essay, Christine--about how schools and some programs are geared towards girls, and I think you both mentioned former President Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative as a program specifically designed for Black men and boys that got a lot--received a lot of controversy. And I wrote about it from its inception through all the years, and at one point--and this is going to be a little name dropping for a minute, but bear with me--the late opera singer, Jessye Norman, there was a little birthday dinner for her in New York, and some of her close friends were there, including Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon. Gloria Steinem and I got into a heated argument about My Brother's Keeper and about how unfair it was to women and girls, and we had this pitched battle where I was like but no one's paying attention to Black men and boys, and the president is a Black man. And so it would--I think it's great. But she thought it was problematic because maybe he was too close to it.

So talk about how programs being geared more to girls in schools is leading to the alienation that boys, who then become men, are feeling.

DR. REEVES: Yeah. So I'll jump in here. First of all, your exchange with Gloria, I think, illustrates a real problem with this debate, which is that if it's framed as zero sum, if this is framed as--okay, but by paying more attention to boys and men, in this case, a specific group of boys and men, Black boys and men, that will distract attention from the ongoing need to do more for women and girls, and that's just not true. That's like saying to a parent who has a son and a daughter, you're only allowed to care about one of them. That's just not how societies work, and so I think that zero-sum framing is false, and I think it's been very damaging, because it's actually made it much harder for people to talk about this issue without being seen as in some way anti-women. If you can't be worried about men without being cast as somehow anti-women, then we're in real trouble. And I think that's why I'm hopeful this is moving on, because it is true that just educationally, we see huge gender gaps, which are much wider for boys of color and especially Black boys and men.

But just to give you one data point, there's a bigger gender gap on college campuses today in the U.S. than there was when Title IX was passed in 1972, and of course, Gloria had quite a lot to do with that. There's a bigger gap, but it's the other way around. So women are further ahead of men today in higher education than men were ahead of women when we passed Title IX. Now, that's a non-trivial reversal of that gender gap, and it seems to me that both are worthy of attention, have different causes, and the education system as a whole is somewhat more female friendly than male friendly, not always and not for everybody. That's a policy issue that we should take seriously, and certainly, we shouldn't be relaxed about the fact that there are fewer and fewer male teachers in our classrooms every passing year without anybody seeming to want to do anything about that. There's 23 percent of our teachers now are male. That's 33 percent only a couple of decades ago.

So if we're really worried about boys, then why are we just emptying our classrooms of male teachers and not apparently doing anything about that? That's a very practical issue, I know, but it seems to me that's where we need to move this debate.

MR. CAPEHART: Christine, love your thoughts on this as well, of course.

MS. EMBA: Yeah. No, it is an interesting question, because I also actually--I feel Gloria's tension, and I sort of talk about it in my essay. There is, I think, a real fear among progressives, among feminists, who have worked so hard for the women's movement, so hard to garner some attention for women's issues that you know we aren't done yet.

As we saw in the covid-19 pandemic when women were beginning to drop out of the workforce en masse, the gains for women have been fragile, and there's a fear that, okay, if we turn away from that question and just start focusing on men now, we're going to forget about women again. And then there's a sort of resentment I think too, you know. Men have been in charge, in some sense, for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Are we really going to totally shift our focus and get upset because men are sad that their, you know, female--[audio break]--finally, really that we need to focus on?

But, you know, I say in my piece that men and women depend on each other. The sexes rise and fall together. If men are, as one woman put it, in their flop era, then women are going to be upset too.

And again, reading the comments, also reading emails, I've gotten a number, like a surprising number, actually, of emails from men who--or professors are or were teachers or volunteered in classrooms who've said, you know, I do think it's important to have all male spaces in some ways for young men to be able to come together and sort of talk about their issues without being worried about what the girls are thinking, and every time I try to do that, say, have kind of like a--there's a play, and, you know, women get together for sort of a women's hour and exchange stories before the first--you know, the first performance, and men have gotten together separately. But I get in trouble because we're not supposed to do that anymore. It's seen as not inclusive to have separate places for men to get together.

And even in our politics, I think there's this fear of not being inclusive if you speak specifically to men or specifically to men's problems, and so there's this broader ethos of, well, we'll just talk to everybody at once.

MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm.

MS. EMBA: But when you're talking to everybody, the message gets really muddled. It doesn't seem like it's directed towards anyone, and so it's simply less effective.

MR. CAPEHART: You know, as you were speaking, Christine, your signal glitched there for a second, and folks caught me looking over here, because I'm scrolling through your piece trying to find something where you point out in your piece about Richard how--and I think, Richard, you're quoted as saying you don't exactly go there in terms of putting out a road map or a plan for how to get to where we need to get to have boys and men have a better or a different vision of masculinity. Why?

DR. REEVES: One reason, Jonathan, is the reason that you alluded to earlier, which is that there are many different ways of being a man, and we shouldn't lose, in this discussion, about the fact that there are real problems for lots of boys and men. We shouldn't sort of revert to any kind of idea that there's a sort of single model of masculinity. So to me, I want to leave as much space as possible.

But frankly, because there are lots of practical problems facing boys and men--and Christine is focused to some extent on the cultural aspect of this issue, but I'm very worried about the fact that only 60 percent of Black boys in Michigan graduated high school on time. I'm really worried that there's a massive rise in the number of young men committing suicide between 2020 and 2021. I'm really worried about declining wages for men. And so there's a bit of a danger that we lose the opportunity to just talk about practical issues that are actually facing men.

And actually, Christine in her essay has this really nice example of a missed opportunity. Pete Buttigieg was challenged by Joy Reid on MSNBC. She called the infrastructure bill, a kind of White man's bill or something, and he just denied that was true and talked about people of color and men and women both benefiting from transport and so on. What I'd like him to have done is actually to know, because he would know if he looked at the numbers, that, yes, it goes to working class men, by and large, the infrastructure spending. Two-thirds of the jobs will be to working class men, but just as much to Black and Hispanic working class men as White working class men. And then he could have said, "And is that such a terrible thing, given the trends in the economy? Is it so bad that we have a bill that's going to help working class men of all color?" We're doing lots of things over here to help women and girls in education. We should continue to do those. Not a zero-sum game. So instead, he just had to deny that this was actually a pro-male bill, and I think that's a missed opportunity, especially for the left, and it creates a real opening for the right to be able to claim, with too much legitimacy, that the left don't care about men.

MR. CAPEHART: And, Christine, we have zero time left, but I want to give you the last word here, especially since you've sloshed through what to my mind is usually the sewer that is the comment section on all our pieces usually. But given that you've done it, what's the one thing you've learned from the comments that was the most unexpected in response to your essay?

MS. EMBA: Ooh, that is a hard question. I don't know if it's--if it was unexpected. It was a surprise to me. I think the reason why there are so many comments, actually, and why this essay seems to have spread so far is that people were waiting to talk about this. There are so many people who are concerned, whether it's moms concerned about their sons, fathers concerned about their sons, women concerned about their boyfriends and the men that they know who they see changing in weird ways. And that was my impetus for writing this piece.

But there's almost a fear of talking about it, as if by talking about men specifically, you are a bad progressive or a bad model or a bad--[audio break]. And so people have just kept to themselves. Having a space to have this conversation seems really, really key.

And actually, one more thing, I would say.

MR. CAPEHART: Yep.

MS. EMBA: There is some, again, pushback for--towards the old ideal of masculinity that says men have responsibilities, men are called to do something. There's this idea that like, well, we shouldn't force anyone to do anything actually. People should just do what they want.

But in the comments, in the responses I've been getting, so many men are actually saying, "No. I want you to tell me what to do. I want you to give me a job. I want to be called to something. I want something to aspire towards." It's not that men want to retreat or want to do less or even feel oppressed by some of the expectations that they've been given. It's that it seems that they don't feel like they have the space to fulfill them in a way, that they don't actually feel called to something higher than themselves. And I think all of us want that. All of us want to be called to be better than who we are, to have something that we're moving towards, and that feels like something that's been lost but is really important.

MR. CAPEHART: Christine, I agree with Richard. Your essay entitled "Men are lost. Here's a map out of the wilderness" in The Washington Post, it is an important moment. It is so well done. Congratulations on that piece.

Richard Reeves, your book of "Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It" is also an important read.

Thank you both very much for your work and for coming to Washington Post Live.

MS. EMBA: Thank you so much, Jonathan.

MR. CAPEHART: And thank you for joining us and staying a little bit over time. To check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com .

Once again, I'm Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. Thank you for watching Washington Post Live.

[End recorded session]

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The new crisis of masculinity

What’s the matter with men — and how do we fix it?

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What’s going on with men?

It’s a strange question, but it’s one people are asking more and more, and for good reasons. Whether you look at education or the labor market or addiction rates or suicide attempts , it’s not a pretty picture for men — especially working-class men.

Normally, more attention on a problem is a precursor to solving it. But in this case, for whatever reason, the added awareness doesn’t seem all that helpful. The “masculinity” conversation feels stuck, rarely moving beyond banal observations or reflexive dismissals.

A recent essay by the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba on this topic was different. It was — apologies for the cliché — one of those pieces that “broke through.” Besides being well done, Emba’s treatment of the topic was uncommonly nuanced, which is increasingly hard to do when tackling “controversial” topics.

So I invited Emba onto The Gray Area to talk about the state of men and what she thinks the way forward might look like. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Sean Illing

Worrying about the “state of men,” as you say in your piece, is an old American pastime, so what makes this moment different?

Christine Emba

I think that now we have actual data showing that men do seem to be in a real crisis, and we also have data on how the world has changed. We can all see this in our own lives. Our social structure, our work structure, our economy, has changed really significantly over the past 30 to 40 years. And that necessarily changes how people fit into the world.

A lot of the changes have had a direct effect on men specifically. So we can look at the stats that we have right now about how men are doing, and we see that for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, only 74 are awarded to men . We know that when you’re looking at deaths of despair, which is a more recent phenomenon, 3 out of 4 of those deaths are males .

And then there are social factors, too. There’s been a change in who the high earners in our society are. In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husband or romantic partner. And in 1960, that was fewer than 4 percent of women.

So we’ve seen the economy change in ways that have moved away from the strength jobs, from traditional union jobs and factory and labor jobs that were mostly seen as male jobs and helped promote this idea of the man as the provider who can take care of a whole family on one income. Now it’s more about soft-skilled credentialism and that favors jobs that tend to skew toward women. Because of the feminist movement and women’s advances — which, to be clear, is a great thing — women have entered schools and the economy in force and they’re doing really well. And I think men are beginning to feel a little bit worried and lost in comparison.

Why is this such a difficult problem to talk about, especially for people on the left?

This was actually one of the major inspirations for writing this piece, because I was trying to get at that question, and I even felt as I was working on this piece my own reluctance to attend to it empathetically. I theorize that there are a couple reasons for this.

First of all, justifiably I think, progressives and people on the left want to preserve the gains that have been made for women over the past several decades. The feminist movement and movements for women’s equality are still pretty fragile. We saw during the Covid-19 pandemic that suddenly it was women dropping out of the workforce en masse. It’s really easy, on the left and just in politics generally, to think of things as being zero-sum. So there’s this fear that if we start helping men, then we’ll just have forgotten about women and there won’t be space or time for women anymore. I think that’s a mistake. We should be able to do two things at once. We can recognize that both women and men are members of our society and we should want to help everyone.

I think there’s also something really appealing to someone with a progressive mindset about the idea of gender neutrality, or gender neutrality as an ethos that we should aspire to and avoid making distinctions between men and women or masculine and feminine. We’ve moved in liberal society toward a real ideal of individualization; the idea that there could be one form of masculinity or manhood that’s good risks alienating people who don’t necessarily fit into that box. And then ascribing certain traits to men, especially if they’re positive traits, might create worries that we’re subtracting those traits from women. If we say that men are leaders, does that mean that women are always going to be followers? Or if men are strong, are we actually saying that women are weak? I think there’s a fear of doing that.

Finally, I think there’s a generalized resentment, especially after the Me Too moment — but also after a feminist movement in the 2010s that encouraged a pretty silly and uncritical form of man-hating and misandry where it was cool to be like, Men are trash, men suck. Wouldn’t the world be better without men? What are they even for? It was a feeling that you needed to do this sort of thing to prove your liberal bona fides that you love women enough.

There’s also the fact that because progressives in the mainstream have not really taken up the masculinity question, the people who have taken it up tend to be on the right and often they tend to be problematic figures. You see incels and men’s rights activists and Ben Shapiro burning Barbies, and there’s a fear that if you speak up for men, everyone’s going to be like, You seem too interested in this. Are you one of them? It’s a branding problem.

It’s definitely true that the left, for all of these reasons, has ceded this space to the right and the right has happily filled the vacuum. So what do you see happening with people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate ? These are very different people, I’m not equating them, but they inhabit this space in revealing ways.

It’s a super interesting question. I do think that it’s important to try and draw distinctions here. There’s sort of a spectrum of what I call in the piece “the manfluencers” — a ridiculous word for a ridiculous phenomenon. But there is a range of people who are maybe slightly more benign. I think Jordan Peterson started out as more benign, although he’s gotten fringier since, to people like Andrew Tate, who I think are just straightforwardly bad people. And you have also people like Josh Hawley and Joe Rogan and Bronze Age Pervert and all of these people in between.

I think it’s just factually accurate that conservatives and the right have always been more invested in — and more clear about — gender roles. So it’s almost natural that they have a clearer vision of what manhood is and what men should do. But I think they realize that there was an opening here. Young men especially are looking for role models and realizing that they feel unsure and uncomfortable of their place in the world.

There’s a young man who I interviewed for the piece, who was like, I just want someone to tell me how to be. If the progressive left is like, We’re not going to tell you that, just be a good person, you don’t need rules. And then young men are like, No, I’m really asking you. I really want rules, actually , the right is happy to give them those rules.

If people have an identity as a man or masculine, the right is not going to say it’s toxic and only talk about toxic masculinity. They’re positive about it and they frame it as something that you want to aspire to, that’s actually transgressive and great and historically superior to whatever’s going on today, for better or worse. And being told that your identity is a positive thing, and here’s a road map to how to fulfill it, whether it’s actually good or bad, that something is going to beat out nothing anytime.

I think there’s something earnest about Peterson’s project, or there certainly was, but the Tate phenomenon is different. To me, this is what happens when masculinity becomes steeped in fear and resentment. With Tate, unlike Peterson, there’s no pretension to anything virtuous. It’s just, Hey, the world hates you. The world wants to make you weak, wants to make you soft, so take what you can get, crush your enemies, abuse women, double down on everything they hate about you. It’s the weak person’s vision of a strong person. It’s the 19-year-old Nietzsche reader who didn’t make it past the preface.

But I still don’t think a lot of people quite understand Tate’s reach. Do you see him as a creature of a very particular moment or do you think he represents something bigger and more enduring?

The Tate phenomenon, as you say, isn’t just about Tate. There’s a whole space with very online figures like Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, who wrote this book, Bronze Age Mindset , that’s become a very conservative phenomenon. I think you’re exactly right. This is a vision of masculinity that’s super basic and sort of tailored to a 15-year-old who doesn’t know any better. It’s all about just shouting and showing off your cars and your women and your money, and that’s what being a man is. It’s very clear: just work out and be mean. It’s simple and it’s superficially appealing because there are a lot of fast cars and pretty girls. And I guess that appeals especially to young men who haven’t thought about it very much.

But I do think, in the absence of better road maps, in the absence of other models, people like Tate present a very clear, visible model. He’s everywhere. You see him everywhere if you’re a kid online. I think that’s also part of what has let him be underestimated. His reach is enormous among younger men, like middle school through high school-aged kids. They’ve all heard of Andrew Tate, to the point that, actually, in Britain, where he’s from, there was a campaign last year where teachers in high schools and middle schools were talking amongst themselves about how to combat Tateism in the classroom because these middle schoolers who had watched Andrew Tate videos were getting up in class and telling their female teachers to shut up, because they don’t listen to women, and that’s what Tate taught them.

His videos spread on TikTok and YouTube and Facebook before he was banned from all of those sites. Fifty-five-year-old dads weren’t necessarily on TikTok, and I think didn’t realize how much reach he had and how much of a hold he had. And the same with all of these online figures who are sort of flying under the radar because they’re online. But I do think it’s important what you point out about their immorality.

Jordan Peterson, and even to some extent the Josh Hawley figures, are saying, Well, it’s good to be a man, but also being a man means being responsible in some way, contributing to society in some way. The Tateist version of masculinity is totally divorced from anything positive. It’s just about defining yourself in opposition to women and taking what you can get. But it’s a clear path and it feels almost transgressive, which I think is part of its appeal because he’s like, Call me toxic. I love being toxic. I am toxic masculinity. To a 15-year-old edgelord, that is aspirational, I guess. But it’s really ugly and it’s not good for society in any way.

What do you think a truly healthy masculinity looks like? You identify three traits in the piece — protector, provider, and procreator — and I know a lot of people will hear that and, not without reason, immediately think of the patriarchy of yesterday. Do you think that’s a mistake?

Another great question. Even when I was writing the piece, I was wrestling with my reluctance to try and define masculinity or cheer on masculinity too much and my belief that we actually need to do just that. One of the things about the piece that seemed to strike a lot of people was the fact that I admitted that I like men. I want them to be happy. And I also do think that there is something distinctive that one could call manhood or masculinity that is a different thing than womanhood or femininity.

So you pulled out the concepts of protector, provider, procreator, and I got those from the anthropologist, David Gilmore, who did this cross-country study a couple decades ago looking at what it meant to be a man in all of these different groups across several continents. He found out that almost every society did have a concept of masculinity that was distinctive from just being male. It was something that you earned and was also distinctive from being female. It had to do with being someone who protected the people around you in your community, who provided in some way for your family. That often looked like not just providing, but creating surplus in some ways and sharing that with others. And then there was the idea that procreating, having a family, was what being a successful male looked like.

In our modern moment, I think that can look like a lot of different things. In my essay, there’s a callout where I ask people to write in and tell me about their ideal of masculinity. When I think about masculinity myself, there are a couple of attributes that seem to come up a lot, and it’s stuff like strength used well and responsibility, performing your duties, looking out for people who are weaker than you.

The pushback that I get very often when I talk about this is what I was saying earlier, people are like, Why do you have to say that’s being a good man? Why is leadership or ambition or adventurousness a male trait? Aren’t women leaders? And of course, yes, but I do think that being a good person is not a clear enough road map. It’s not a strong enough, clear enough norm, and that’s what younger people especially are looking for.

I think what it means to be a good person is in some ways tied to your embodiment, to your human form as a male person or a female person. For instance, [younger] men tend to be — though not always — much stronger than the average woman or old person. So being a good person, if that is your embodiment, necessarily means thinking about what that says about your responsibilities. What do you do with that strength?

Richard Reeves, who wrote the book Of Boys and Men , talks about how masculinity and femininity, or male and female, overlap a lot. But on the far ends of the spectrum, there are very big differences, and that tends to be where our definitions of male and female come from.

It’s true that you can’t talk about masculinity and femininity without acknowledging some differences between the sexes. And yet, that acknowledgment is utterly compatible with the reality that much of what we call gender is a performance, is a cultural construct. And I don’t know why we seem unable to avoid this zero-sum trap. You see this in lots of other cultures where there’s a respect for the masculine and feminine ideal. There’s no zero-sum relationship. These are poles at opposite ends of the continuum, and possessing virtues at both ends of the spectrum is seen as wise and healthy. I don’t know why we can’t do that.

America really likes extremes. I think we like things that are very clear-cut and we’re used to seeing things that way and seeing them used to marginalize people or somehow denigrate people who don’t fit the exact norms. I think people who think of themselves as good progressives and liberals really don’t want to do that, and so shy away from espousing norms because they might leave someone out. And I understand that. But for the people who are asking for a road map, who want to be told who to be, just saying B e whoever you want to be, but be a good one is just not helpful.

There’s also an age factor here and I noticed this in the responses to the piece. There were older men who would write in and say, What’s the problem? I’m a man, I feel great about it. I don’t see the issue. That’s great for you, but for young people, who don’t have that much life experience, who are trying to figure out who to be, having some kind of norm or ideal, even if it’s loose, can be helpful. And then as you grow older and you get life experience and you figure out how you fit in the world, you make the norm up for yourself. But they’re looking for a starting point.

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here , and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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This Father's Day, men are experiencing a crisis of masculinity. The solution? More feminism.

We are experiencing a crisis of masculinity.

That's the claim of Canadian psychologist and self-help author Jordan Peterson. Peterson argues that feminism and policies like no-fault divorce have destabilized traditional family and social structures. As a fix for this, Peterson recommends a variety of things including " enforced monogamy " — a solution that implies men are oppressed due to lack of consensual sex.

Peterson’s claims have been broadly criticized but he does have his defenders as well. These often argue that the crisis of masculinity has been caused by feminism, which has led to "evolving norms…generating confusion and mixed signals," in the words of Cathy Young writing in the Los Angeles Times. Feminism has set men adrift. They are no longer sure how to be men, and as a result they are struggling economically and psychologically.

This weekend is Father’s Day, a holiday typically celebrated with displays of testosterone and gendered clichés. It’s also as good a time as any to acknowledge that there is indeed a crisis of masculinity.

This weekend is Father’s Day, a holiday typically celebrated with displays of testosterone and gendered clichés. It’s also as good a time as any to acknowledge that there is indeed a crisis of masculinity. But it isn't caused by feminism and changing gender norms. Rather, men experience violence and oppression because norms are not changing. And it is, in general, powerful men who enforce these unhelpful and sometimes dangerous masculine expectations, not tyrannous feminist women.

As one example, consider male suicide rates. Men are the victims of three-quarters of suicides in the United States. This isn't because feminists have successfully carried out a campaign to keep men from having sex. Rather, male suicide rates are tragically high because of traditional, stereotypical standards of manliness.

Our culture tells men that they are supposed to be emotionally and physically strong and self-contained. It is not surprising, therefore, that men are less likely to seek medical help for mental health problems. A 2016 YouGov survey found that 28 percent did not seek out mental health care despite experiencing distress, as opposed to only 19 percent of women. A third of women told friends or family they had mental health problems within a month; only a quarter of men did the same. As Ally Fogg writes at the Guardian , "we tell boys not to cry, then wonder about male suicide."

Encouraging boys not to cry is dangerous; encouraging boys to love guns is even more so. "Guns are historically, stereotypically a masculine sort of thing," Lisa Gold, a psychiatry professor at Georgetown told Quartz . Connecting manliness with gun ownership exacts a brutal toll. Statistics compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that in 2016, men accounted for a staggering 85 percent of gun deaths in the United States .

Men own guns at three times the rate that women do . As a result it’s not surprising that they are more likely to be hurt or killed in a firearm accident. And it also makes them much more likely to die when they attempt suicide. Women tend to prefer poison to guns when they try to kill themselves. Men use firearms — and firearms are a very effective way to inflict harm.

Gender expectations and stereotypical views of men contribute to another crisis — imprisonment. Mass incarceration disproportionately affects black people and people of color. But it also, and relatedly, affects men.

Rates of female incarceration are rising; between 1980 and 2014 they increased by 700 percent, according to the Sentencing Project. But even so, men still make up close to 93 percent of prisoners . This is not just because men commit more crimes. A 2012 study found that men receive much longer sentences than women for the same crimes .

It's true that white feminists have at times weaponized stereotypes about the hypermasculinity and violence of marginalized men.

It's true that white feminists have at times weaponized stereotypes about the hypermasculinity and violence of marginalized men. Women's rights activist Frances E. Willard advanced her crusade against alcohol by suggesting that white women in the south were threatened by drunk, "dark-faced mobs" — an argument that implicitly justified lynching. Hillary Clinton infamously referred to some criminals as "superpredators," a racist dogwhistle.

But the penal system is not run by feminists. Instead, it’s run by politicians, who too often seek to bolster their own masculinity through tough-on-crime rhetoric. When Trump calls Mexicans " rapists ," he's demonstrating his own masculine resolve by calling out and denouncing (supposedly) dangerous men. In this way men are ground up in the prison industrial complex in order to fuel the egos and the political careers of other men .

The crisis of masculinity Peterson's fans talk about is deliberately vague. The real crises of masculinity, though, are much more quantifiable. There were close to 45,000 suicides in the U.S. in 2016. There were approximately 38,000 gun deaths . There were around 2.3 million people in prison. Men bore the brunt of all of these problems. And yet the solid, demonstrable problems facing men are rarely discussed, while the fictional crisis of men oppressed by a lack of sex has obsessed putatively serious pundits.

Feminism isn't killing men — toxic masculinity is. And it will continue to do so until both women and men are fully equal, and fully free.

Part of the reason why this happens is that the men most harmed by the real crisis are black, brown, poor, and mentally ill, and so are easier to ignore or erase. And part of the reason is that a narrative about women and feminists oppressing men seems dramatic and counterintuitive. A narrative about powerful men oppressing less powerful men is less exciting, and requires more self-reflection.

For Father’s Day, though, we should focus on actual challenges facing men, rather than imaginary ones. We are not in a zero sum battle of the sexes, in which gains for women’s equality erode male security.

Indeed, men need more feminism in their lives, more gender equality and a relaxation of rigid and counterproductive gender norms. In other words, feminism isn't killing men — toxic masculinity is. And it will continue to do so until both women and men are fully equal, and fully free.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer and critic in Chicago.

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The Crisis of Masculinities – A Brief Overview

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• The Crisis of Masculinities – A Brief Overview - May 10, 2018

The so-called crisis of masculinity has drawn much attention and concern by politicians, academics, the public, and most dominantly, the media. This crisis is characterised by a widely perceived fear, uncertainty, and hysteria about the alleged decline of traditional Western manhood, threatened by women’s emancipation and other, “new” forms of masculinity. The men’s-rights promoter and sociologist Walter Hollstein describes it as such:

“Men used to be the ruler of the world for centuries, hunted in the wild, protected women and children, and made fields arable. Men were considered the creator of culture. Nowadays everything has changed. Men are stigmatised as oppressors. They are accused of abusing women and children” [1]

To understand where this perceived crisis actually comes from, whom it concerns, and what its risks and implications are, it is necessary to give it greater scrutiny, and dissect some of its main (mis)conceptions. This article will first highlight some examples of the crisis, then trace its structural roots, and look at the way it is used to the advantage of politicians and right-wing movements, and finally it considers some of the crisis’ less examined dimensions, particularly in the field of intersectionality and displacement. The article does not attempt to be exhaustive, but offers a brief overview of different masculinities and the challenges they undergo through historical, economical, and societal changes. These changes require a redefinition and renegotiating of traditional ideals of masculinity, in order to move beyond the so-called crisis.

Failed heroes and shamed abusers

Incidents like the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne in 2016, and the #metoo movement stirred new discussion on a heterosexual man’s conflicting role as simultaneous protector and abuser of women. On the one hand, German men were criticised for being unable to protect their women, [2] when many were sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve by groups of men, reportedly from a North African immigrant background. The media presentation of these incidents revealed a racial dimension of the crisis, in which the non-white, foreign man – the black or oriental “Other” – is portrayed as a savage, dangerous sexual predator, whilst the civilised, white German man has to play the noble hero by saving women from this threat. Protests against the so-called “Rape-fugees” and comments by the publicist Cora Stephan, who said German men all acted as “Weicheier” [3] (cowards) are well known.

The structural roots of the crisis

Male insecurities about being a “real man”, a protective father, a dominant leader, a breadwinner for the family, and, ironically, at the same time sexually attractive to other women are nothing new. In 1994, the psychotherapist Roger Horrocks was one of the first to talk of a “crisis” for men in Western cultures. In many of his male patients he observed insecurity and self-destructive behaviour, as they could not live up to the ideals of masculinity that patriarchal society expected of them. [6] This leads to the simple paradox that men feel broken by their own privileged position of power, which advocates domination, a rejection of the feminine and homosexual, and a denial of all vulnerabilities and weaknesses. [7] But even before the 1990s have conceptions of masculine identity become more challenged and precarious. During the Belle Époque, from the end of the 19 th century till the outbreak of the First World War in Europe, the appearance of the New Woman and outspoken homosexuals like Oscar Wilde seemed to pose a threat to the patriarchal order and traditional gender relations. [8] Other scholars argue, that in the 1980s in America, the end of the Vietnam War resulted in a generational conflict between sons and their negatively perceived father figures. [9] These fathers returned home as veterans, traumatised and confused about what it actually meant to be an honourable man, and simultaneously muted and invisible in a society, which looked on them as failures or unaccomplished. [10] This illustrates that not only man’s relation to women can become de- or constructive to his own sense of self, but also their relation to their older brothers, friends, and fathers. Nowadays, scholars like to point at rising suicide rates, educational underachievement, gang membership, alcohol and drug abuse, prison sentence in one’s twenties, and violent extremism [11] , to show that men are much more susceptible to this than women, and that these problems may already start in their early childhood. Interestingly, educational underachievement and the lack of male role models at kindergartens and schools, where they are often treated by teachers as if they are girls [12] , are the more recent phenomena that seem to aggravate male insecurities, and leads to the feeling of being misunderstood. However, some of the aforementioned problems, like violence and drug abuse, may either be a cause or consequence of the crisis of masculinity, where societal changes, gendered expectations, and biological determinants are all deeply intertwined, and hard to distinguish. This suggests that the crisis on an individual level is not necessarily new, but may be present in all societies that put high expectations on an idolised form of manhood. Of course, not every man experiences these difficulties in his adolescence, and even if they suppress their vulnerabilities, feel emasculated, or insecure this does not always have to result in a crisis. There is not one single masculinity, nor are all masculinities toxic or aggressive. Instead, we should see them as multiple, fluid, complex, and capable of change.

Weaponization of male insecurities

The societal aspects of the crisis nowadays can be traced back to the dramatic changes of the public and domestic sphere in the West. Despite the persisting gender wage gap, sex segregation in certain professions, and a lack of women in leading or managerial positions, women’s educational, economic, and political opportunities have slowly, but decisively improved in most countries. Next to that, there is an active feminist and gender-right movement at universities, in social media, and in the general public, that vehemently aims to dismantle patriarchy and man’s sense of entitlement. Though these thoughts are widely popular in the humanities and social sciences, for instance, it can cause polarisation and resentment elsewhere. However, the widespread unease and panic over the perceived erosion of man’s privileges is, again, not only about women’s emancipation and gender right activists, but also about a new hegemonic model of masculinity that has emerged through globalisation. The sociologist Michael Kimmel argues that this hegemonic masculinity is best exemplified by a cosmopolitan, wealthy businessman with liberal tastes in consumption and sexuality, and conservative political ideas. [13] Those who cannot identify with this model of success, or have been left out and disappointed by global changes, try to redefine their wounded masculinity, by rejecting this elitist, Western ideal. Among these may be the ordinary, white, lower class workers, who supported Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, as their manual labour seemed to have lost its dignity, and they were scorned as uneducated by the elite in the metropoles. Calls to make “America great again!” and to bring back the British empire during the Brexit campaign express a longing to re-establish an old patriarchal order. Yet also in Russia, the Middle East, and Central Asia men have a strong resentment against the feminised politics of the West, its allegedly “softened” men, and its tolerance for homosexuality. Kimmel observes that this is especially the case for right-wing extremists, whether they are neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, or Taliban members in Afghanistan. [14] Although these are quite strong examples, one could argue that there is the desire to reassert one’s masculinity in opposition to the establishment, or any other scapegoat that made them a “loser” of the globalised world.

Masculinities in displacement

Whilst much of scholarly research has been done on white, heterosexual masculinity, it is also interesting to focus on the men from other cultures, now living in Europe or the United States, to see how they experience this so-called crisis, to what extent it is different, and which other factors play a role in shaping their sense of manliness. This could be about the Mexican immigrants in the U.S., or the people from Syria, Afghanistan, Mali or Eritrea who arrived in Europe because of the so-called refugee crisis. As the term suggests, this is where two crises meet, or where one generates another. Complex social identity markers, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity, become intertwined with migration and the trauma of displacement, and are therefore renegotiated again, by one self, and by the perceptions of others. The aforementioned anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe, and its problematic relation to local masculinities, causes the paradox that newly arrived refugees are expected to integrate and redefine their own identity in a culture that is often alien and hostile to them. On top of that, their countries of origin are often marked by much stronger gender divisions in the public and domestic sphere, and higher expectations of masculinity and femininity, relating to family honour, religion, and culture. This is also reflected in their migratory journey, as many young men come to Europe first to build up a life there, so they can bring their families later via a safer route, or send remittances to their home. In addition to these high expectations on their ability to provide for the family, their sexual success is also put into question by Western societies who tend dismiss “other” men (Muslim, Middle Eastern, Central Asian…) as oppressors of women, and are therefore sceptical towards any form of sexual relationship with them. In a study on Iranian men in Sweden, the anthropologist Shahram Khosravi argues how these men become displaced from their power position at home, where they enjoy a controlling gaze on women, into a position, where they become the object of the Swedish majority gaze. [18] This renders them invisible as an individual, but visible as a stereotyped migrant. Their masculinity that was highly regarded in Iran, is now seen as primitive, compared to the “civilised” Swedish masculinity. [19] Many migrants from Muslim-majority countries experience this racism, discrimination, and Islamophobia, and continuously struggle to balance their own cultural learnings with those of the receiving country without giving up too much of their fundamental values.

There is an abundance in masculinity studies, and this text aimed to address a few of the main themes concerning the so-called crisis of masculinity. With all the variations, it is crucial to remember that the crisis concerns multiple masculinities. It is in a close interplay with other identity markers, and is therefore experienced differently by men from diverse cultural, class, sexual, ethnic and educational backgrounds. Nevertheless, as the rate of extremism, violence, suicide, and radicalisation is disproportionately high for men, it is necessary to become more self-aware of the patriarchal forces that shape one’s ideals of manhood. More education and deliberation on this issue could foster the development of a healthy masculinity that embraces certain vulnerabilities and characteristics, but also acts inclusively, without marginalising women and others. Finally, promoting a dialogue between men from different cultural backgrounds, local men, and also women with traditional or strong feminist ideas could pave the way towards more mutual understanding and greater social cohesion.

[1] Qtd. in Pohl, R. (2015). „Gibt es eine Krise der Männlichkeit? Weiblichkeitsabwehr und Antifeminismus als Bausteine der hegemonialen Männlichkeit.“ Vortrag zum „Frauenempfang“. Rathaus Nürnberg. 26.03.2015.

[2] Seidl, C. (2016). „Wo sind die echten Männer?“ FAZ Feuilleton. 01.03.2016. Available at: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/krise-der-maskulinitaet-wo-sind-die-echten-maenner-14094469.html

[3] Ibid. 1.

[4] Poirier, A. (2018). “After the #MeToo backlash, an insider’s guide to French feminism”. The Guardian . 14.01.2018. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/14/french-feminists-catherine-deneuve-metoo-letter-sexual-harassment

[5] Paiva, L. (2017). „Schools can help prevent more #metoo stories” Education Week. 17.11.2017. Available at: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/11/16/sexual-assault-prevention-needs-to-start-early.html

[6] Horrocks, R. (1994). Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies, and Realities. St. Martin’s Press: pp. 1-210.

[7] Ibid, 25.

[8] Mafi, M. (2012). The Crisis of Masculinity and the Outbreak of the First World War . Available at: https://history.sfsu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/ExPostFacto/Malcolm_Mafi_Crisis.pdf

[9] Karner, T. (1996). ‘Fathers, Sons, and Vietnam: Masculinity and Betrayal in the Life Narratives of Vietnam Veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ American Studies , pp. 63-94.

[10] Ibid. 65-66.

[11] Hopkins, P.E. (2009). ‘Responding to the crisis of masculinity: the perspectives of young Muslim men in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland.’ Gender, Place and Culture , 16.3, pp.299-312; McDowell, L. 2000. The Trouble with Men? Young People, Gender Transformations and the Crisis of Masculinity. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24.1, pp.201-209.

[12] Winters, B. (2017). ‚De juf wil van elke jongen een meisje maken‘. Algemeen Dagblad . 18.03.2017. Available at: https://www.ad.nl/dossier-nieuws/de-juf-wil-van-elke-jongen-een-meisje-maken~af6cda38/

[13] Kimmel, M. (2010). ‘Globalization and its Mal(e)contents: Masculinity on the Extreme Right.’ In: Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities : pp. 143-160. Rutgers UP.

[14] Ibid, 148.

[15] BBC, (2018). “Elliot Rodger: How misogynist killer became incel hero” 26. April 2018. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43892189

[16] Ibid, 2.

[17] Johnson, P. E. (2017). ‘The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery’ In: Women’s Studies in Communication 40.3. pp. 229-250.

[18] Khosravi, S. (2009). ‘Displaced Masculinity: Gender and Ethnicity among Iranian men in Sweden’. In Iranian Studies 42.2 pp. 591-609.

[19] Ibid, 591.

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Men or mice: is masculinity in crisis?

With his criticism of ‘dysfunctional’ unmarried men, Iain Duncan Smith added to the clamour of concern over the male psyche. From football fans to ‘feminised’ workplaces, Ross Raisin asks if men really do have a problem with modern life

W e are in the midst of a renewed discussion about masculinity in crisis. The latest contribution comes from Iain Duncan Smith, who this week suggested at a Tory Conference fringe event that unmarried men from poorer backgrounds are prone to become “dysfunctional” human beings who can be problematic for society. His words mirror other recent descriptions of masculinity as “toxic”, “broken” and, especially, “in crisis”.

The rise of this purported crisis debate is indicative of the fact we are living in a time of significant social change. Because so many of the historical constructions of society are fundamentally patriarchal, when those ossified structures are loosened – whether by a movement (first- and second-wave feminism, for example) or circumstance (de-industrialisation, financial crisis, or the fracturing of political predictabilities) – then any one-size conception of masculinity buried within them is thrown into the open.

Football, with its rigid and simplified codes of accepted behaviour, can provide a very clear lens for viewing the relationship between what a man is expected to be in a particular world, and what can become of a man who does not meet those expectations – both inside the squad , and on the terraces.

And nowhere is the triangular relationship between football, place and hard-clung hegemonic ideals more pronounced than in the post-industrial heartlands of the north: Glasgow, Liverpool and the north-east. Which, statistically, are the areas where men are markedly “in crisis”.

The most recent ONS figures show the north-east has the highest avoidable mortality rate for males in England. Suicide, the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, has its second highest rate in the region – a fact that, for many commentators, bears some relation to statistics on joblessness and employment precarity. The north-east had the joint-lowest average actual weekly hours of work by men during the last tax year.

Throughout history, a common instigator of the masculinity-in-crisis conversation has been the shifting of cultural constructions of the workplace – and it was one such fretful period that gave rise to the institution of football in the first place. As Victorian men moved from the fields into factories, so grew a fear that their sons, now spending more time at home with their mothers, were at risk of becoming feminised, or “inverted” (the Freudian term for homosexual).

Organised sport, with its emphasis on male bonding and toughness, was a concerted work of remasculinisation. Over time, as football clubs gained popularity, that masculine paradigm remained in place, bolted on to the parallel institutions of heavy industry that grew alongside the sport.

For a great many men, there is still a safety in the familiarity of that structure. The industry may be gone, but the way of life – the kind of man – it embodies still echoes out from every empty shipyard and derelict factory. Picking apart the threads of its masculine tradition can, to some, feel tantamount to the denigration of a people’s history. Take away the external edifice to expose the inner core of any man with a fixed belief system – one that might traditionally promote hardness over shyness, the repudiation of emotional expression – and what is often revealed is an anxiety of relevance.

The Men’s Voices Project gives an absorbing insight into this anxiety. It is a sound exhibition curated from dozens of interviews with men and boys in the north-east – from Deerbolt Young Offenders Institution, Barnardo’s Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programme and The Woodlands Pupil Referral Unit – in which we can hear, as the undercurrent to many of the conversations, the issue of control.

One of the notable refrains is an unease, particularly of older men, at the so-called feminisation of the workplace, as clerical and service industries have taken the place of manufacturing labour. Even though these newer industries are themselves mostly insecure forms of employment, a private insecurity repeatedly shows itself at the idea of a man not being the breadwinner:

“If my missus was … the sole provider, I think there’d be a lot of friction in the house, because my manliness would be gone… I would feel really angry at her, and at myself. But probably at myself more.”

To some men, the balance of power has reversed and, in the words of another interviewee: “It’s the man that needs the equal rights, not the woman. It’s the man that’s getting put out.”

‘Lost sense of masculinity’

The loss of industry over the last half century has taken with it a vital signifier of identity for many men. And in their reconstruction of who they are, their football club is sometimes the last remaining bastion.

There are men in the stands at Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesbrough, as there are throughout the north, who used to work in factories, shipyards, steelworks. It is natural enough that their sons and grandsons beside them might feel a connection to that heritage, steeped as it is into the culture of match day – from the names of the pubs they drink in before the game to the stories at the bar of times gone by, that lock together into a framework of belonging.

But thinking of that framework as inviolable is problematic. For one thing, the match day environment is, slowly but surely, moving with the times. As Simon Bolton, of the Middlesbrough Official Supporters Club , puts it: “If you want to mix purely with other men and feel that you’re in an environment of male dominance, forget going to a match at the Riverside … Boro fans come in all ages, young and old, and all genders. If the men of today want to use football as a way of regaining any lost sense of masculinity, they’d best look elsewhere.”

Furthermore, a preconceived identity can be a burden as much as it can be a celebration. The image of the Newcastle supporter, in particular, can be a trying one to live up to. I spoke to one fan whose father worked as an oil rig electrician, and whose grandfather was a foreman joiner at the Swan Hunter shipyard. Dan, however, “can’t wire a plug”. He works in new media, and moved away from the city two decades ago. His own sense of belonging comes, now, from the outside, and he has an honest appraisal of the typecast of a Newcastle supporter:

“I’ve always felt it became a parody of itself. There’s a real media perception of what Geordie men are like, that becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a kernel – it comes from reality – but the perception of it means that you actually live up to that stereotype. It’s an inherited way of behaving.”

When I asked him what that way of behaving is, he told me a statistic about champagne drinking: that Newcastle has the highest rate of champagne consumption per capita outside of London. “Hedonistic,” he says, “is an apt word for the Geordie man.”

Hedonism, certainly, is associated with the popular perception of the city, in a way that, in the other post-industrialised urban centres of the region, it is not. And hedonism as an identity, a stereotype, can be a difficult cross to bear too.

‘Love the lunatic’

Dan grew up in Whickham, the town next to Dunstan, birthplace of the ultimate Geordie self-fulfilling prophecy. Paul Gascoigne was the son of a hod-carrier father and a mother who worked in a chip shop and as a cleaner. He came from a background of working-class masculinity – and signed as an apprentice for Newcastle with the purpose of taking on the role of family breadwinner.

From this lineage of Geordie Men, as the cultural fabric of the area began to change, the persona of “Gazza” led the way for a new kind of post-industrial masculine identity. He was every inch a Geordie, but one that came to represent the hedonistic, hard-drinking party spirit that started to brand Newcastle in the nineties. He was daft as a brush, drunk; yet limitless, messianic.

The constraints of such an act, however, can have the consequence that, once the structure around that life falls away, so too can the individual attached to it. Gascoigne’s struggles, pre- and post-retirement, with alcohol, mental illness, bankruptcy, gambling and bulimia have been lengthily documented. His ex-wife has written about the years of domestic abuse he subjected her to. He has been prosecuted for assault and, more recently, racist abuse.

But throughout his psychological and physical deterioration, when what he has clearly needed is a supported departure from his old way of living, it is notable that the barometer of his health has habitually been measured, publicly, not by signs of a new Gascoigne, but by applauding any reversion to the man he used to be ...

“Great to see Gazza back on form” ... “Great to see Gazza in such sparkling form. Love the lunatic.” (Piers Morgan and Gary Lineker tweets after Gascoigne’s appearance on the Fletch and Sav show, 2015)

It is not only Paul Gascoigne who has found himself emotionally and socially hamstrung by that tagline: “love the lunatic”. The expectation to behave in a prescribed way (which, pertinently, for Gascoigne does involve showing emotion) brings us back to the anxiety of relevance that many men feel.

A recent book about Tyneside, Akenside Syndrome: Scratching the Surface of Geordie Identity by Joe Sharkey, describes an alienation felt by those men of the area who are not in tune with accepted codes of masculinity. The author outlines “four pillars” of Geordie identity – class, accent, drink, football – to which the Geordie male is supposed to conform. There is a pressure to be that person which comes from the outside, as Dan describes, and also from within.

Andrew Hankinson, the author of a brilliant, bruising narrative about the Tyneside murderer Raoul Moat, You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) – a story that Gascoigne has a brief, bizarre connection to, as he tried to bring a chicken and a fishing rod to Moat during the police stand-off – explained to me his own feelings of Akenside Syndrome:

“There’s an unreconstructed nature to masculinity in the north-east and I don’t come up to scratch: I don’t have a Geordie accent, I’m not into football, I don’t go out on the piss on Friday nights, I do childcare ... I once had a ticket inspector on the metro ask me why I was looking after my kids on a weekday.”

Hankinson ascribes a similar feeling of not fitting in to Moat himself: “He hardly drank, he didn’t like football. People assume he was trying to overcome a crisis of masculinity by working out and developing big muscles and being violent, but I actually think his crisis of masculinity was as evident in what he said and wrote about money.” According to Hankinson, “he regarded an expensive car and big house as status symbols of masculinity, but he couldn’t achieve them, and it made him feel horrible about himself.”

‘I’m crying, I’m angry’

Performing a man is not the same thing as being a man. There can be a security in the performance, though, because it sidesteps the difficulty that confronting emotions and thoughts entails. One of the Men’s Voices conversations that most struck me was one in which an interviewee admits the emotional challenge of walking his dog – because being alone, without the surrounding noise of work, sport and banter, can be hard:

“I find myself, the longer the walk goes, [getting] more upset … Well, actually, more de-stressed – but through that period to being de-stressed, I’m crying, I’m angry, I’m running … It takes a while to get to that place.”

What some men need – not only in the north-east, but in all those areas of life (private and public) where an old, familiar order has broken down and men have yet to let in different kinds of identity – is help getting them to that place; acknowledging rather than avoiding the difficulty of the transition. Focusing attention on the everyday crises that people are facing is part of that. Support (together with its counterpart: governmental relieving of the policies and ideologies that put men, and women, in economic and social hardship) is another.

And such support is growing. The Men’s Cree project in County Durham is one such initiative. Set up by the East Durham Community Trust in 2010, each cree (a vernacular word for a pigeon shed) provides an encouraging environment for men to come and simply talk. From 11 crees the project has grown, by the time of the council’s recent taking of the project in-house, to 41 across the whole of the county.

Much of the spread was achieved, the trust’s chief-executive Malcolm Fallow told me, by word of mouth: “At bus stands, or by people mentioning it to men who they knew had been bereaved or lost their job.” The success of the scheme is in its straightforwardness. There is always an activity – repairing bikes; growing vegetables; stonemasonry; heritage site visits – around and through which the men can talk to each other.

Fallow related one especially moving story about a former miner who used to do the shopping “for his wife”, as the man saw it, and would not tell her if he knew she had missed items off the list, knowing it would mean he’d get another trip to the shop. “That would fill his afternoon in. But once he had the [pigeon] shed to go to, that wasn’t necessary.”

For this man, as for many others who have benefited from the project, simply finding a new activity to organise his time around improved his mental health. Replacing an entrenched structure with nothing is an inevitable cause of real crisis. Replacing it with a new box to be put in is not healthy either.

Dialogue, openness, empathy and equality are what is needed by us all – men and women – both to aid those in trouble, and to move the crisis conversation on from “how to be a man” to “how to be a person”.

• A Natural, by Ross Raisin, is available from the Guardian Bookshop at a saving of 15% on RRP
• This piece was originally commissioned for Durham Book Festival 2017 in partnership with Changing Relations. The Men’s Voices Project is on display at The Empty Shop Think Tank (TESTT) in Durham from 7–15 October
• Men's health
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David French

The Atmosphere of the ‘Manosphere’ Is Toxic

By David French

Opinion Columnist

To understand the state of men in this country, it’s necessary to know three things.

First, millions of men are falling behind women academically and suffering from a lack of meaning and purpose. Second, there is no consensus whatsoever on whether there’s a problem, much less how to respond and pull millions of men back from the brink. Third, many men are filling the void themselves by turning to gurus to guide their lives. They’re not waiting for elite culture, the education establishment or the church to define manhood. They’re turning to Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and a host of others — including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson — to show them the way.

Not all of these influencers are equally toxic. Tate, for example, is in a class by himself. He’s a pornographer who is facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania. Peterson, by contrast, mixes good advice with a bizarre ideology . He’ll swing between compassionate insight and wild conspiracy. I’ve known men who genuinely improved their lives through elements of Peterson’s teaching. But to spend time watching and reading these gurus as a group is to understand why men continue to struggle even though the market is now flooded with online advice.

It’s as if an entire self-help industry decided the best cure for one form of dysfunction is simply a different dysfunction. Replace passivity and hopelessness with frenetic activity, tinged with anger and resentment. Get in the weight room, dress sharper, develop confidence and double down on every element of traditional masculinity you believe is under fire.

Yes, men are absolutely feeling demoralized, as Richard Reeves put it in his brilliant book “ Of Boys and Men : Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.” But what is the influencer advice in response? Lash out. Fight. Defy the cultural elite that supposedly destroyed your life.

I’m reminded of my colleague David Brooks’s distinction between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” As David described it, résumé virtues “are those skills you bring to the marketplace.” Eulogy virtues, by contrast, “are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?” Most of the “manosphere” influencers look at men’s existential despair and respond with a mainly material cure. Yes, some nod at classical values (and even cite the Stoics , for example), but it’s in service of the will to win. Success — with money, with women — becomes your best revenge.

The problems with this approach are obvious to anyone with an ounce of wisdom or experience, but I’m reminded of a memorable line from “The Big Lebowski”: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” It’s hard to counter something with nothing, and when it comes to the crisis confronting men and boys, there is no competing, holistic vision for our sons.

One reason for this vacuum is that any discussion of the crisis among men almost immediately devolves into a debate over masculinity itself. Is traditional masculinity toxic? Or is it toxic to abandon traditionally masculine approaches to raising boys? What is traditional masculinity anyway? Is “masculinity” even a concept worth pursuing, or does it jam too many boys into stereotypical boxes, magnifying their misery?

After reading a new book, I’m wondering if there is another, better way. Can we sidestep the elite debate over masculinity by approaching the crisis with men via an appeal to universal values rather than to the distinctively male experience? In other words, is there a universal approach to shaping character that can have a disproportionately positive impact on our lost young men?

The book I am talking about is called “ The Pursuit of Happiness .” It’s by Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center (where I’ve spoken at a number of events), and it’s not a self-help book, nor is it a guide for young men. But it does contain a superior moral vision for the good life, one that is directly connected to the philosophy of the founding generation.

The core argument of the book is that the phrase “pursuit of happiness” — Thomas Jefferson’s memorable phrase in the Declaration of Independence — is fundamentally misunderstood. We think of happiness as the pursuit of pleasure, Rosen writes, “but classical and Enlightenment thinkers defined happiness as the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good.”

He explains how several of the founders imperfectly but quite intentionally and systematically listed the virtues they aspired to uphold and engaged in critical self-reflection about their own faults. As Rosen writes, “The classical definition of the pursuit of happiness meant being a lifelong learner, with a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to character improvement, self-mastery, flourishing and growth.” The emphasis is on the word “lifelong” — the pursuit of happiness is a quest, not a destination, in part because we are always a work in progress, even to our last days.

And what are these classical virtues? Benjamin Franklin’s list included temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility. I prefer the shorter and simpler formulation in Aristotle’s four cardinal virtues : prudence, justice, temperance and courage.

None of these virtues is distinctly male, of course. Rosen speaks of the influence of classical virtues on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s moral development, for example. At the same time, however, I’ve never met a struggling young man whose life wouldn’t be enriched by greater commitment to any one of those cardinal virtues, much less all four. Regardless of your definition of masculinity, is there any world or any relevant ideology in which a prudent, just, temperate and courageous man isn’t a good man?

In Rosen’s book, you’ll find both the people and the philosophy that can replace the influencers of the modern manosphere. Franklin, John Adams and other founders were hardly perfect, but their ideas and examples are orders of magnitude more positive than the ideas and examples that dominate masculine discourse today.

Too much of our education establishment and too many of our nation’s parents are focused on success ethics, not virtue ethics. Our schools train students for careers, and parents push their children toward success, hovering over them to monitor their progress or snowplowing to clear their way. In the success ethic, virtues are often a means to an end. Prudence, temperance and industry can contribute to your success, but that is not their ultimate purpose.

Yet success ethics are ultimately empty, and our children feel that emptiness. If they fall behind, they feel panic and dread. But even when they succeed, their success doesn’t fill that hole in their hearts, at least not for long. Virtue, however, is different. Perfection is impossible, but virtue is a purpose all its own. And it’s that pursuit of virtue, not mere achievement (and certainly not resentment), that ultimately defines who we are.

I fall back to these universal values not because I reject the idea that young men have a distinct masculine experience, but rather because the argument about ideal masculinity is diverting our attention from the more urgent quest, to fill the hole in the hearts of our children, to provide them with a purpose that is infinitely more satisfying than the ambition and rebellion that define the ethos of the gurus who are leading so many young men astray.

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David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation .” You can follow him on Threads ( @davidfrenchjag ).