The Crisis of Masculinity
Young men are struggling.
Look at the data. It’s not pretty:
Education: There is a significant gap in high school graduation rates and college enrollments. Women graduate college at significantly higher rates than men in every state in America.
Mental Health: the suicide rate for men is four times that of women.
Intimate Relationships: Nearly half of male teens have never dated, almost double the rate of previous generations.
Friendships: According to survey data, thirty years ago a majority of young men had over six friends. Today, it’s half of that. Meanwhile, fifteen percent of young men report having no close friends.
None of this is to say that young women aren’t struggling too, but the data is clear that there has been a significant change over the last few decades that has impacted young men to a larger degree.
While the reasons behind the struggles of young men are vast and complicated, we wanted to explore one small but significant facet: how we conceptualize masculinity.
Naval Ravikant is a technology investor who has become known for his pithy sayings on the internet. Over the weekend, we were struck by one of his tweets:
Naval’s tweet epitomizes the recent rise of what we’ll call internet masculinity culture.
At the extremes of internet masculinity, you find people like Andrew Tate, who draw young men in with promises of riches, women, and superiority over minorities. Slightly less extreme is the rise of the alpha bros, who suggest that real men are alphas: they are dominant, take what they want, and are obsessed with winning. We even see it in the podcast world, where people like Tucker Carlson have had specials on the End of Men, with one of his solutions being tanning your testicles. Yes, that really happened
On the one hand, the alpha masculinity being peddled by tech bros who have never excelled in any physical pursuit and who wouldn’t last more than an hour playing pick-up basketball or football with the neighborhood kids is pretty dumb.
On the other hand, the alpha masculinity being peddled by a subset of people who may be great athletes, but who have no integrity or values, is equally, if not more, abhorrent.
It’s easy to dismiss all of this as being “too online” or an overblown part of the culture war. But we think it points to something deeper. Whenever you see a bunch of shallow influencers who live on social media herding around a topic, it’s almost always because there’s an audience to exploit.
We can laugh at the testicle tanner, but underneath the nonsense lies something important: a crucial need to provide young men who feel lost with a purpose and path.
That purpose and path can be performative bullshit, or it can be one of substance. Right now, the performative bullshit variety is winning. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Losing Direction
All humans have foundational psychological needs. We need to belong, participate in meaningful endeavors, feel competent, cultivate hope for the future, and have a direction to follow.
When we lack these foundational psychological needs, when it seems like making friends or being “successful” in life is nearly impossible, our brain goes into protective mode. We look for the fastest and easiest way to fill the void and to overpower the loneliness, hopelessness, and sadness that comes with it.
We become like the person who hasn’t eaten for a long time, and we reach for the quickest food that will satiate our hunger. We binge on the candy, especially when there are people offering gobbles of it. This isn’t just conjecture. It’s the premise of my new book, which shows that this holds true for everything from choking in sport to feeling lost and burned out in work.
Research shows people are, by far, most likely to fall for conspiracy theories when they feel lonely, overwhelmed, anxious, or lost. Believing in a conspiracy moves us from being uncertain to the illusion of control, from being alone to being part of a special community. Conspiracy theories aren’t about logic or facts. They are about feeling good and eliminating anxiety and disconnection.
When we look at masculinity, we see something similar. In a chaotic world where young men don’t quite know where they belong or where they are headed, they grasp onto groups and ideologies that make them feel good in the short term but backfire over the long haul. Without better alternatives, the Andrew Tates, Tucker Carlsons, Jordan Petersons, and Naval Ravikants of the world fill the gap.
These dudes aren’t world-class men. But what they are is world-class at converting anxiety and loneliness into anger and tribal loyalty. They turn a young man’s feeling of being lost into a superficial feeling of being dominant, even if that dominance comes from trolling people online or ‘owning the libs’. It’s why people like Naval frame it as a battle. They are exploiting emotionality. And since there is no substantive basis, for the grift to work, everything must be based on emotion.
It’s funny that the same extreme who often shouts facts over your snowflake feelings tends to be as beholden to feelings as anyone. Projection is one helluva a drug…
What Can we do About It?
We’ve got to offer a better alternative—a path forward that provides young men quality nourishment for their foundational psychological needs. We’ve got to teach young men to reach for the vegetables instead of the Snickers bar. And a big part of that is on us as a society. We’ve done a poor job of outlining what that path looks like.
We need a more realistic and positive view of masculinity.
Of course, we’re talking in broad generalities here. But we must offer counter narratives for young men that are in juxtaposition to the ones peddled online by right wing grifters, but also to those that deem high-school football as being “toxic.” (Though it is dangerous!)
To understand the roots of masculinity, it can be instructive to turn the page back a bit. In the Middle Ages, chivalry represented a kind of moral and social code. It wasn’t perfect (the Middle Ages were a rather misogynistic and gruesome time), but chivalry in particular represented a mental model for what a knight was. As Ian Mortimer describes in his book Medieval Horizons,“Knights were supposed to be pious, honest, loyal, brave and respectful of the weak, especially women and children.” That was the core of what it meant to have chivalry. In his epic The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer described the character of a knight as one that “‘loved chivalry, truth and honor, freedom and courtesy.”
While we’re not trying to romanticize the Middle Ages as some sort of utopia, there was, however, a clear mental model for the values that a knight upheld. Regardless of what you think about the mental model, it existed and men aspired to it.
The same could be true for a modern version of masculinity. Instead of talking about being an alpha, high-T lion, or whatever other pseudoscientific garbage proliferates on the internet, why not refocus our attention and create mental models for masculinity that include the following qualities:
Being a good father, brother, friend, and husband.
Having integrity and honor.
Caring deeply about others.
Showing real toughness based on equanimity and embracing challenges instead of a fake and performative machismo that avoids feelings and emotions.
Pursuing meaningful work and showing up consistently.
A path toward mastery and modeling a diverse array of career paths, from elementary school teacher to welder.
Being a protector of the weak.
Showcasing your physicality in competitive pursuits (if you are so inclined), and doing so within the rules and ethics of those competitive pursuits.
In essence, we need to model what it means to be a decent human being for half of the population that, on average, is born programmed to have higher testosterone than the other half of the population.
Of course, these same values apply to women as well. But the role model effect is real. We can see it in schools with the impact of having a teacher who you can relate to. We can see it in our careers, where kids who had a career-based role model who shared their identity in middle and high school are more likely to report career and financial satisfaction years later.
We must show young men a path forward and offer them a mental model of what they should aspire to, and how they should act to get there. It’s true at all levels of society. From local community teachers, coaches, and pastors, all the way up to how men are portrayed in Hollywood films.
Right now, too many young men are being fed the junk food variety of masculinity. They are being forced to choose between the dead-beat, low-skill Dad or the magic bullet, use steroids, dominate others, get rich quick on Crypto Alpha. Clearly, we’re not doing a good enough job championing a more sustainable and healthier version of masculinity, one that ultimately leads to more success than the bastardized concept of an alpha-male.
If there is any battle, it’s the battle of a performative masculinity that benefits nobody but the grifters who are peddling it versus a more genuine and authentic masculinity that benefits all of us, men and women alike.
— Steve and Brad
Addendum: We’ve gotten some wonderful feedback on this piece, thank you! Many have asked for more specifics. While this piece was meant to start the conversation, we wanted to oblige. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some policies and ideas that might help:
1. We need more clubs:
When we were a tribal society, researchers found that whenever the tribe got above around 150 people, fighting and chaos would break out, and the tribe would split in two, a pattern that kept repeating itself (Steve goes deep on this research in his new book). A large part of the problem was moving from a society where you basically knew everyone to one where you didn’t. So what allowed tribes to break through the 150 person limit? That’s where one breakthrough occurred: the introduction of men’s clubs.
Essentially, men needed something where they could get to know their neighbors and could fill their time without getting in violent spats. When societies introduced activities or clubs for men, violence decreased, and they were able to get beyond 150 people.
As Robert Putnam outlined decades ago, too many people are bowling alone. We need to bring back groups, activities, and other outlets for proximate social connection. And this hits men particularly hard, because on average, they aren’t quite as socially adept as women. Whether it’s run clubs, bowling leagues, community board game nights, sports teams, art clubs, or men’s groups. We need a push towards more community and in-person activities.
2. Increase male role models in caring professions:
Steve’s wife is an elementary school literacy specialist. How many male teachers are in the entirety of her school? Two. But they teach PE and art. Both great subjects, but ones that students are only exposed to a couple of times a week. Of the regular classroom teachers, there are zero men.
As Richard Reeves outlined in his book Of Boys and Men, we need more men in caring professions like teaching. In no small part for the reason we mentioned above: the role model effect is real. When we have people who share our identity in a career, we think that career is possible for us too.
3. Make it easier to have a family and be a dad:
We need policies that make it easier for families. One of the often neglected issues when we talk about young boys (and girls) struggling is their parents! Let’s be frank for a minute. We can’t expect young kids to navigate this world without parental support. We need to do a better job of preparing parents and supporting them in handling the immense load of raising a child.
Part of that is acknowledging that our current world where two parents have to work is much different than decades past. We need to do things that make it easier for families to raise kids. We’re no policy experts, but policies like child income-tax credits, universal pre-k, nutrition programs for kids in need, strong parental leave for both women and men, and more, go a long way to help families raise kids and to help men bond as fathers.
4. It’s the phones:
A large part of what we outlined above was a feeling of loneliness, of not pursuing anything meaningful. It’s easy to fall into that trap when you replace real connection with a superficial variety, when you replace angst and anxiety with temporarily calmness, just by pulling out your phone.
We need policies to get phones out of schools so kids can learn how to focus and connect in real-life. We need policies on social media for young kids so that they don’t get sucked into a game of constant comparison, never ending scrolling, and otherwise predatory content.
5. Rework youth sports:
Look, sports are not a cure all. Sports have their problems. But the athletic field is a place where boys can pursue excellence, especially those with innately higher levels of testosterone.
But recently, we’ve moved from sports being about growth, development, and character, to a singular pursuit of the college scholarships and money. The result is parents losing their minds at little league games and too many kids burning out and quitting sports before they even hit high school.
We need to rework sports, moving away from pay to play and the professionalization of everything to something more akin to the Norwegian model, where youth sports are for all and more about character development than winning and losing. (And you know what, on the highest level, Norway still wins a lot!)
6. Provide Avenues for Meaningful Striving.
We all need status. As Steve outlines in his book, we either get it through prestige or dominance. The former is about doing something meaningful, it’s displaying knowledge, skill, or expertise. The latter is about using fear and intimidation. What the performative view of masculinity has done is pushed people towards believing dominance is the only path to status. It isn’t. Prestige is a much healthier and sustainable path. Yet…if there are no relevant avenues for prestige, which way is a man to go?
Men benefit when they have something in which they are striving for mastery and excellence, whether it’s lifting weights, running, making music, welding, or teaching in a classroom. It provides prestige and status.
Part of the problem, though, is that society has defined excellence or greatness too narrowly. For example, consider education, where we (wrongfully) neglect the trades in a push for everyone to attend college, when many people would be better off (and happier) being an electrician than an accountant. It’s also true in the performative online world, where masculinity is tied to a mixture of physical pursuits and a get rich entrepreneurial path. All the super “masculine” male movie stars were in choir and starred in the high-school drama. Same with the best male singer-songwriters. The reality is there are many paths to mastery. And the more we can role model, the better.