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Editor's note: The opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the AAMC or its members.
Men in the United States die by suicide at a rate four times higher than women. And yet, men are diagnosed with depression and mood disorders at far lower rates. Why is this?

Too often, society blames men themselves for their struggles. They are the ones who often turn to substance abuse and violent behavior rather than getting help for their mental health. They are the ones who struggle to keep up with a changing workforce and gender norms. They are the ones who too often embrace unhealthy attitudes and beliefs at the expense of their own well-being.

But this approach of placing blame on individuals has produced little by way of clinical, social, or structural interventions to improve men's mental health.

Men aren't the problem. The way that we - society as a whole and health care providers specifically - treat them is.

It is time that primary care physicians, mental health service providers, and policymakers look critically at the accuracy and utility of their assumptions and explanations for men's rates of depression, anxiety, burnout, substance abuse, and other common mental health conditions. The current framework has limited our ability to offer real solutions that meet men where they are and give them the tools to not only survive, but to thrive.

Unfortunately, in the United States, men's health and well-being has reached a critical point. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the crisis of men's mental health. Studies found that during the pandemic, U.S. men reported slightly lower rates of anxiety than women, but had higher rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation than their female counterparts. The uncertainty of the pandemic, loneliness from social distancing, financial stresses, relationship challenges, and other contextual factors contributed to increased rates of men having difficulty sleeping, alcohol and substance use, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms triggered by the experience of mechanical ventilation treatment and hospitalization. Consequently, at one point in 2020, the rates of men seeking mental health care services in the United States increased more than five-fold over the prior year. These rates were greater than the rates of women seeking mental health care services during this time. Yet, by 2021, just 40% of men with a reported mental illness received mental health care services in the past year, compared with 52% of women with a reported mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Even when men seek care, that care often falls short. Data from Canada and the United States found that more than 60% of men who died by suicide had accessed mental health care services within the previous year. When men do seek mental health care services, it is not uncommon for them to feel that providers mislabel and underestimate their needs, and that these providers do not seem to have a genuine interest in their problems. For some time, research has shown that mental health providers may miss or misdiagnose psychological problems in men because of their own gender biases. They might believe that men simply need to "man up" and stop showing weakness, or that the symptoms they present are not consistent with diagnostic tools. Mental health providers may not consider that these tools do not take into account gender differences in experience or symptoms that men are more likely to exhibit.

For men to seek mental health care in the first place is already a challenge, with social barriers such as societal stigma, fear of judgment, and lack of skills to communicate emotions keeping many from doing so. It's unconscionable that bias and a lack of effective treatment approaches on the part of mental health providers would create even more barriers. Men do bear a responsibility to seek help, but it's far from illogical when they choose to avoid it.

The impetus is on those of us in the medical and mental health fields to ensure we're empathetic to the struggles that men face in a changing world. Research has shown that men often struggle to differentiate depression from stress, and to know when to seek help if symptoms are severe enough. Men (and health care providers) may not label men's symptoms as depression if the symptoms are tied to an external factor like unemployment. Traditionally, men are socialized to define their worth by their ability to contribute economically to a household. However, as the labor market has shifted away from traditionally male-dominated jobs, men must now redefine their worth outside of their employment, income, and home. The notion of " precarious manhood," which is the belief that manhood is an achieved social status that must be earned and constantly defended, means that men may feel it is their character - rather than their behavior - being judged during more tumultuous economic times.

Even men who do achieve and maintain a certain level of manhood they perceive as successful are likely to put unreasonable expectations on themselves that can lead to burnout. An imbalance between job demands and job skills, lack of control over tasks at work, lack of reward or acknowledgement of effort, and prolonged work stress are some of the leading factors contributing to burnout. As we think about the ways gender influences how men present with mental health symptoms, it is important to keep these contextual factors in mind.

The fact that men are diagnosed with depression at lower rates than women, despite their higher rates of suicide, substance use, and violent behavior, suggests that more could be done to improve the tools used to diagnose men with depression. Several scholars have noted the importance of increasing the capacity of mental health care service providers' ability to consider gender in the presentation of mood disorders among men. While some mental health care service providers may be gender sensitive and recognize the ways that aggressiveness, alcohol use, and risky behavior are part of the presenting symptoms men with depression may exhibit, there are few courses and trainings that focus on gender differences in mental health, potentially leading to mental health care service providers being less equipped to serve and offer gender-sensitive resources to men.

Given the data and the unique contexts and aspects of men's mental health, there is a need to create more opportunities for health care providers who serve men to learn to be sensitive and responsive to their male patients' needs. Along with efforts like the Movember Foundation's Rooted and Rising Collective and the Canadian Men's Health Foundation MindFit Toolkit, Table 1 below highlights selected programs and e-health tools that have been designed to be sensitive to the presentation, needs, and preferences of men. These resources demonstrate examples of gender-sensitive interventions to promote men's mental health. Part of what makes these programs successful is that they recognize that men are not a monolith, and that it is critical to develop culturally sensitive interventions that consider the ways groups of men are unique.

The reasons men may need mental health resources and support are not simply due to how men think, or because of their attitudes about masculinity. Using a lens this narrow hampers our capacity to effectively address and improve men's health. It is important to consider the gender sensitivity of mental health services, and the broader contextual and structural factors that influence men's mental health and well-being. It is time we consider men's mental health in its full context, and shift the focus to the ways our health care systems and providers are equipped to deliver services to improve men's mental health.

Program or Initiative

Overview

What can public health professionals do?

What can health care providers do?

ALEC and R U OK? provide a guide map for how to check in on those who you think may be struggling.

Aim to focus more research and resources related to the specific signs of male suicide.

Provide more opportunities for conversations with male patients to help overcome the stigma related to talking about mental health, and help improve the overall status of mental health among men.

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Men and mental health: What are we missing?

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Physicians need better training and empathy for the distinct symptoms and societal expectations men face to treat them effectively.

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Frontiers | Gender-Specific Differences in Depressive Behavior Among Forensic Psychiatric Patients

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BackgroundWomen are almost twice as likely to develop depression than men, but men commit suicide more often. One explanation for this paradox is that curren…

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You are a lone wolf. You are an independent thinker who makes his own rules. You are confident and competent. Women are drawn to you, but you don't really care about them. Your day begins at 4.30am with a cold shower, followed by a punishing workout and an even more punishing skincare routine. You shun conventional career paths and run your own business, probably in crypto or real estate or vigilante crime fighting. You are that rarest of males - you are a sigma.

Either that or you're a bemused bystander who has had a hard time avoiding content about sigma males and the "sigma grindset". In the past few years, sigma masculinity has blown up. It's all over social media - and it's helped define what could be a masculine archetype for our times, supposedly exemplified by characters played by the likes of Keanu Reeves, Cillian Murphy, Bryan Cranston and Christian Bale, plus the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate as well as actual, real life wolves.

All of these and more have gone into the meme-culture blender when it comes to the sigma phenomenon, which could well be an indication of how deep it has seeped into the mainstream, and by extension into the minds of our impressionable, smartphone-addicted youth. It has been described as " extremist thinking" and " a new kind of toxic masculinity ", although as we shall see, these fears may be overstated.

Either way, YouTuber Lily Simpson probably summed it up best in a viral post on Twitter/X from January 2021 that helped put the whole thing into the mainstream: above four images of various permutations of sigma male content, it read: "What the fuck is going on with men?"

Maybe it's easiest to start with the wolves. You're probably familiar with the concept of the "alpha male", as in the dominant male in a social group - confident, good at sports, a natural leader who's admired by his fellow men, the betas. The term is derived from "dominance hierarchy" - the way in which many species of social animal organise in hierarchies beneath a dominant male, who usually gains his place through size or aggression, and earns food and mating rights as a result. Dominance hierarchies are found in species from monkeys to hens (the "pecking order") but the example most often seized upon is wolves, which turns out to be completely wrong. The original notion of the "alpha wolf" was based on a 1940s study that observed wolves in captivity, which is a bit like making sweeping assumptions about humans by studying prisoners. In the wild, it was later discovered, the prevailing wolf grouping is actually the family unit.

Anyway, these "natural" systems of social organisation were inevitably mapped on to humans. "Women use the dominance hierarchy to select mates," the conservative thinker Jordan Peterson told Joe Rogan on his show in 2017. "There are influential men that rise to the top and the women take them." This is evolutionary science, Peterson argued: "Dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects heroes and then breeds them." The problem today, in Peterson's view, is that some men can circumvent this immutable order: "Pathological guys who are out there bolstering up the feminists ... they compete as 'allies', let's say. Very sneaky."

This kind of thinking has found fertile ground in the modern manosphere - the loosely connected network of online groups who broadly agree that masculinity (invariably meaning straight, white masculinity) is in crisis, and that the cause is some combination of feminism, leftwing politics, immigration, "wokeness", vegetarianism ... who knows? Subgroups would include pickup artists: men who effectively seek cheat codes to the dating game, in the form of "rules" and tricks to attract women. And "incels": men who are involuntarily celibate and resentful about it, and have been known to resort to violence.

The "sigma male" emerged from this primordial testosterone swamp largely thanks to a 55-year-old American science-fiction writer and publisher named Theodore Robert Beale, who blogs under the name Vox Day. A proud Christian nationalist, racist and misogynist, Beale has argued that black men are genetically more inclined to violence than white men, that women should not be allowed to vote, and that feminism was "a seductive but destructive Jewish ideology that was more incoherent than communism, more bloodthirsty than nazism, and more histrionic than fascism".

In 2010 Beale wrote a blog post in which he attempted to expand the "overly simplistic" division of men into alphas and betas. He came up with his own "sociosexual hierarchy", with alphas at the top - "the male elite, the leaders of men for whom women naturally lust" - followed by betas, deltas, gammas, lambdas, right down to omegas - "the losers". Sitting outside this imaginary pyramid of masculinity were sigmas - "the lone wolves". Beale defined sigmas as "outsiders who don't play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow" and who "often like women, but also tend to be contemptuous of them". They were on a par with alphas, but just didn't show off about it.

"There is very little - if any - convincing science behind the notion that personality types exist or are fixed," says Debbie Ging, professor of digital media and gender at Dublin City University. "It's basically a really simplistic, misguided and bio-determinist account of human behaviour, which doesn't take into account the sociocultural construction of gender identity or the impact of economic and political forces on people's choices or lack thereof."

But the appeal of this stuff to some men is understandable, Prof Ging says: "It's pretty obvious that the whole manosphere project is deeply regressive and rooted in concocted nostalgia and the notion of a mythical past, and comes from a place of insecurity and anxiety about progress and relinquishing or sharing power."

These ideas remained largely confined to manosphere chatrooms and forums until about early 2021, around the time of Simpson's tweet, when interest in, and content about, the sigma male suddenly skyrocketed.

Beale cited Clint Eastwood's movie persona as his prime example of a sigma, but online culture has found many more: Reeves' John Wick, Cranston as Breaking Bad's Walter White, Murphy's Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders, Ryan Gosling in Drive, Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Joaquin Phoenix's Joker, the evil superhero Homelander from The Boys, Mads Mikkelsen's depiction of Hannibal Lecter ...

And then there's Patrick Bateman, created by Bret Easton Ellis in his 1991 novel and later played by Bale in the 2000 movie American Psycho: a 1980s Wall Street banker who's wealthy, gym-toned, well-dressed, woman-hating, terminally narcissistic and a delusional serial killer. Somehow, Bateman has become the arch-sigma, though he's a curious choice of role model. Far from being a lone wolf, he's fixated on status among his peers (who obsess competitively over the design of their business cards), he dresses like every other Wall Street wannabe, and he has utterly mainstream taste in music (such as mansplaining the brilliance of Huey Lewis and the News) - which was kind of the point: American Psycho was supposed to be satire.

Bateman was already a fixture of the manosphere via "hustle culture", as in the celebration of a particular type of male wealth, characterised by hard work, self-discipline, fitness and grooming. Other hustle culture heroes include Gordon Gecko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (wolves again!), Elon Musk and, of course, Tate, who has successfully parlayed his notoriety as an unrepentant misogynist into some kind of guru status. Tate's online Hustlers University promised to teach men how to "uncover the hidden secrets of success", "escape The Matrix" and make life-changing amounts of money - mostly by paying Tate a monthly subscription and promoting his content online. Tate is awaiting trial in Romania on human trafficking and rape charges.

The overlapping of these strands gave birth to a new viral incarnation: the "sigma male grindset" - a set of motivational rules and maxims by which successful men supposedly live. Celebrities such as Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson have paved the way for this by broadcasting their absurdly punishing workout schedules. (Wahlberg's viral routine began at 2.30am and took in a 90-minute workout, breakfast, prayers and golf all before 8am.)

Sigma content is now a fixture on social media. On YouTube you'll find innumerable videos along the lines of "14 signs that you're a sigma" or "15 Things Women INSTANTLY Notice About Sigma Males" or "How to Become SIGMA Male - RAREST MALE TYPE" - most of them recycling the same pseudoscientific tropes. You'll find annotated scenes from shows such as Peaky Blinders and Breaking Bad illustrating the familiar sociosexual hierarchy - "sigma male realising again how superior he is", "omega woman crying because she can't handle the sigma energy". You'll find motivational quotes by the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, lists of "sigma male grindset" rules, memes about how "if you're aged 20-30 and your main circle isn't discussing" stuff like real estate, committed relationships, fitness, etcetera, it's time to "elevate your circle". There are "sigma male grindset" playlists on Spotify. There's even a "sigma face" - an exaggerated "Oooh!" expression, in imitation of Bale during a scene from American Psycho - as modelled by social media stars like Mr Beast and Khaby Lame. There have been some attempts to get "sigma female" trending, but they have not really taken off in the same way.

The phenomenon might well have reached a tipping point with a bizarre campaign ad by presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis last year, which sought to appeal to this subculture by proudly trumpeting DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ+ stance.

Between images of DeSantis looking macho and threatening trans rights, the ad included clips of Bale as Patrick Bateman, DiCaprio in Wolf of Wall Street, Murphy in Peaky Blinders, Pitt in Troy and other muscular, manly men, plus slogans including "a real wolf had arrived". The whole thing was bafflingly weird and unwittingly homoerotic.

While we should worry about the conduit from toxic manosphere fringe to teen-friendly TikTok fare, if the plan was to brainwash a new generation, it doesn't seem to be working very well. In fact, sigmas have become a bit of a laughing stock.

"One of the first things I would say if somebody was coming to me asking what a sigma male was, is 'Don't take it too seriously'," says Don Caldwell, editor in chief of Know Your Meme, which tracks meme culture. "I'd say 90% of the time it's being used ironically, in a joking fashion." Almost as soon as the sigma male went viral in 2021, "people started to meme it, because they thought the concept was really funny and silly", says Caldwell.

When I ask a small sample of 15-year-olds what comes to mind when they hear the word "sigma", the universal response is: "cringe". Cringe at hearing someone of their parents' generation using the term, but also cringe at the general idea of sigmas.

"I've never in my life heard anyone use it in a serious way," says Mabel.

"You might use it to take the piss out of someone," offers Alex. "Like, if someone posted their workout video online you'd go, 'Oh he's being a sigma.'"

They've mostly come to sigma content secondhand, after it's been recycled and chopped up and folded into TikTok videos and the like. They're familiar with sigma types like Bateman and Tate, but have no idea of the term's manosphere roots or its original meaning.

"The type of male who's like masculine and strong and provides," says Alex.

"I think it's sort of like an alpha, wolf kind of person?" says Mabel.

"The existing worry is that as these terms travel from the fringe of the web to the mainstream, they surreptitiously spread their reactionary messages, but that assumes that the meaning of these terms stays the same as they travel across different platforms," says Dr Daniël de Zeeuw of Amsterdam university, who studies online culture. Just as offline language changes and evolves continuously, so too does online language, says De Zeeuw, except at a much faster rate. "You differentiate yourself by way of these mimetic innovations, so constantly coining neologisms, bending and transforming language and visuals."

This is what has happened with sigma, the teenagers say. Describing someone as "sigma" might be a compliment or an insult, depending on the context. They might say "that's so sigma", meaning something is broadly cool. The expression " What the sigma?" - derived from another viral meme - is in vogue, though by the time you read this, it will probably be passé. All of this feeds into what's described as " brainrot" - easily scrollable, low-quality content that gives meme culture an extra whiz in the blender. So "sigma grindset" will be mixed in with other overused meme slang like " skibidi toilet", "rizz", " only in Ohio ", to form an almost meaningless babble that's a parody of online obscurantism and its logical conclusion: a language virtually no adult can make sense of.

"You're normalising problematic discourse, but also in that normalisation, the meaning of these terms changes and gets reappropriated by different online communities. And ultimately, it ends up with people using it in a very different way than was probably originally intended," says De Zeeuw.

So if there was ever a concerted plan to inject manosphere toxicity into the mainstream, it seems to have fallen flat, neutralised by the hive mind - or perhaps mindlessness - of meme culture. Perhaps we don't need to be as afraid of the big bad sigma wolf as we initially feared; the rest of the pack is doing fine without it.

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The sad, stupid rise of the sigma male: how toxic masculinity took over social media

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His heroes are Patrick Bateman, John Wick, Tommy Shelby and Walter White. He follows Andrew Tate and idolises wolves. And he has quickly become a laughing stock. Welcome to the world of the sigma male

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From bone smashing to chin extensions: how ‘looksmaxxing’ is reshaping young men’s faces

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Chiselled jaws, pouty lips, hunter eyes: everything is up for grabs in the quest to increase ‘sexual market value’. But how did this extreme cosmetic craze become mainstream?

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In the early 1940s, American society expected its men to adhere to specific characteristics that defined masculinity. In addition to courage and bravery, men strove to develop traits such as aggression, competition, stoicism, toughness, and independence in order to prove to others that they were truly masculine. Historian E. Anthony Rotundo teaches that Americans even believed that physical and "fighting virtues" played significant roles in a man's identity because they built character. It is no wonder then that after the Great Depression-the greatest threat to one's sense of manhood at the time because it threatened men's positions as providers-World War II provided American soldiers with the opportunity to develop and prove their manhood to themselves and others. To be sure, the war provided opportunities for soldiers to foster their sense of manhood, but it also challenged these notions, particularly for men who were injured or faced lasting psychological trauma.

Moreover, at war's end, changing social emphasis from war to peace prompted new ideas of manhood better suited for peacetime. Indeed, the war catalyzed a change that shifted the focus from the "tough" characteristics of masculinity to the need for veterans to create an idyllic postwar life with a family and a stable job. In short, the time had now come for these men to become good American citizens and contribute to the nation's postwar advancement. However, the war's physical and psychological legacies often made it difficult for men to reintegrate into civilian life and fulfill these duties.

The war challenged prevailing ideas of manhood in part because war required women's participation, both civilian and military. As military service pulled men from industrial work, women began performing those roles to contribute to the war effort. As historian Elaine Tyler May writes, "the war emergency required the society to restructure itself and opened the way for the emancipation of women on an unprecedented scale." American society promoted women's expanded roles as a form of patriotism, but as soon as the war ended, many Americans expected women to return to the home to fulfill their domestic duties to prepare themselves for the time when they became wives and mothers. Employers now pushed women from higher-paying and secure wartime jobs to the service sector to make way for returning veterans. Thus, entering the workforce and becoming fathers and husbands now became the hallmarks of American masculinity after the war.

As scholar Michael Kimmel argues, returning veterans who just experienced the horrors of war expected a home with a family to provide them with a sense of security in a world that was increasingly becoming more insecure with the advent of the Cold War. Because they now embraced the move to domestic life after the harrowing war, veterans were okay with these changes. Many felt they had demonstrated how "manly" they were by serving in the military and used the benefits of that service to transition to civilian life.

In the years after World War II, and with the help of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, which provided ample educational and occupational opportunities, veterans now "sought to anchor their identities as successes as men" not by their military service but by being capable fathers and earning a living to support their families. However, these chances were limited for racial minorities and lower social classes. For example, Ira Katznelson teaches that Jim Crow laws limited African American veterans' ability to use the GI Bill at all public institutions in the South; African Americans could only attend all-black colleges. Thus, future employment prospects were bleak for African Americans.

In addition to these limited opportunities for racial minorities, a significant number of veterans found that a smooth return home from the war and quick reintegration into society was not always possible. Many of them experienced physical wounds that made it difficult to be independent breadwinners for their families. During this period, the country relied on "whole" bodies to convey messages of national strength. Scholar Christina Jarvis asserts that the government used the male body and its sense of masculinity to demonstrate to the world that the United States was now a superpower. US citizens also subscribed to this ideal. The problem, however, was that 678,000 American soldiers suffered combat injuries that caused physical disabilities, and any returning men whose bodies were not "whole" challenged this message. More importantly, any physically disabled man could not always live up to the new standards of manhood.

Woman From Army Corps Helping A Wounded Soldier. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

Physical wounds from the war, then, created a sense of insecurity among veterans. These disabilities prevented many from entering the workforce and providing for their families. Popular literature during this time emphasized that women were to love and care for the physically wounded, but depending on women added to men's feelings of inferiority. Jarvis further contends that the pamphlets' and movies' "focus on women's agency . . . often leads to an erasure of men's own self-healing powers and to readings that obscure the consolidation of male power in postwar America." Americans perceived that a woman's love could rehabilitate and restore a man's sense of masculinity. But the "catch-22" of this assertion is that men had to rely on women to rejuvenate their identity. These men could not prove their masculinity by fixing themselves, nor could they always provide for their family; instead, they now depended on their families, especially their wives, for care.

World War II not only caused physical problems, its consequences affected men emotionally. These psychological scars also impeded veterans' ability to contribute to society and become breadwinners. Men did not anticipate that the war would continue to have ripple effects on their mental health for years afterward. Roy Grinker and John Spiegel, two psychiatrists in the US Army Air Forces who dealt with thousands of psychiatric casualties, declared that psychological wounds created "inferiority feelings or socially unadapted behavior." Moreover, an emotionally broken man had "shattered confidence and continued helplessness." Thus, there was a prevalent fear among civilians and government officials that, due to psychological illness, veterans could not fulfill their new roles as citizens, husbands, and fathers.

In fact, Americans worried so much about veterans' mental health and the need to treat these wounds that Congress passed the monumental National Mental Health Act of 1946 to create the National Institute of Mental Health, which earmarked significant funds for mental illness research. Testifying before the House of Representatives during the congressional hearings for this act, Colonel Samuel Challman, the deputy director of the neuropsychiatry division in the Surgeon General's office, declared that this act was necessary for veteran rehabilitation and reintegration to society. He declared that during the war, "mental illness was the greatest cause of noneffectiveness or loss of manpower." He seemingly worried that if the government or military did not find a way to treat mental illness, that "noneffectiveness" would carry over into civilian life after the war. Indeed, he testified, "we are concerned about the fate of the men we have been dealing with during these past 4 years in service. We know there are a large number of them in the Army now, and many of them are going to need help when they get back into civilian life."

One Congressman, Walter Judd (R-Minnesota), mirrored Colonel Challman's sentiments. Moreover, Judd's testimony is more detailed and thorough concerning the American man's new responsibilities. He remarked that the act was necessary to ensure that veterans specifically became productive citizens and family men. To accomplish this task, Judd declared that society first needed to stop unnecessarily stigmatizing psychological casualties. He continued:

"Part of our purpose in this bill is to correct that attitude which is based on ignorance. The most terribly tragic figures coming back from this war are not the boys with their legs off or their eyes out, or their backs broken. Rather they are the men with their spirits broken. If they can have the right kind of psychiatric study and assistance and guidance and training during these first critical months of readjustment, most of them can become again self-supporting and self-respecting useful citizens."

In short, Congress understood that for veterans to become contributing members of society-to embody the new standards of masculinity-they needed psychiatric help. Thus, on July 3, 1946, less than a year after World War II, President Harry Truman signed the National Mental Health Act of 1946 into law.

At the societal and individual levels, World War II and its consequences redefined American masculinity. And although some lingering desires for strong and stoic masculinity remained, the American public embraced a broader understanding of masculinity based in the home, workplace, family, and fatherhood-not exclusively through military service. At the end of the war, Americans expected returning veterans to contribute to society by entering the workforce and becoming successful husbands and fathers. However, the nation first needed to address war's physical and psychological consequences to ensure veterans fulfilled these new responsibilities. Ultimately, though, the end of World War II prepared the way for the development of the nuclear family that became so prominent during the Cold War. Nevertheless, this broadened sense of masculinity later introduced more challenges to come in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Meet the Author

Jorden Pitt received his BA from the University of Wyoming and his MA from Kansas State University. He is currently a PhD student at Texas Christian University. His research focuses on twentieth-century military flyers and the psychological problems they endured. He also looks at how these mental illnesses became stigmatized and how they affected gender issues in the military and in general society.
This article is part of a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible by the Department of Defense.

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American Masculinity After World War II | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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In the early 1940s, American society expected its men to adhere to specific characteristics that defined masculinity. In addition to courage and bravery, men strove to develop traits such as aggression, competition, stoicism, toughness, and independence in order to prove to others that they were truly masculine. Historian E.

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Part one of Man Up! - a three-part series exploring masculinity in crisis.

*Originally published on May 18, 2023.

The troubled state of masculinity seems to be nearly everywhere. Countless books, articles and films feature titles like: What's Wrong with Men?, Boys Adrift, Angry White Men, and Patriarchy Blues.

"Is there a crisis of masculinity? I think there's really a lot of evidence that many men are suffering," said Michael Kimmel, a sociologist and the author of several books on male identity, including Guyland, and Healing from Hate and Manhood in America.

Many social scientists agree that men aren't doing well - they're dropping out of the workforce in greater numbers, their addiction rates are climbing, and they're three times more likely to commit suicide than women.

In Canada, France, South Korea and other countries, girls have been outperforming boys in primary and secondary school - although women ultimately make less money in the job market. In Sweden, researchers say their country is facing a pojkkrisen, or "boy crisis." In India, girls score higher marks than boys but their enrolment numbers end up dropping. In the United States, female undergraduates outnumber males by almost two to one.

"The question for me," Kimmel asks, "is are men suffering because women are succeeding, or are they suffering because they've inherited an ideology of masculinity that no longer works for them in the way that it did for their grandfathers?"

He says while the masculinity crisis has been ramping up in the 21st century, "the crisis runs much deeper and extends much further back in history."

Ancient anxieties about being 'man enough'

The origins shaping masculinity go back 2,000 years, to ancient Greece, according to Simon Goldhill, the author of Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives.

"It's part of the pervasive imagery of masculinity because there was a huge cultural anxiety about not being a 'real' man. It's there - all through the Greek comedies and tragedies," Goldhill said.

The ancient world was preoccupied with gender, added Mary Beard, a Cambridge University classicist and cultural critic. It was obsessed with proving that men are "naturally more powerful" and that it "sees the duty of men as saving civilization from the rule of women."

Beard says that in many ways, "the patriarchy has been doing this ever since."

She points to the snake-haired Medusa as a "classic myth where the dominance of the male is violently reasserted against the illegitimate power of the woman."

Medusa was punished for being raped, her hair transformed into a head of writhing snakes, and if anyone dared to look at her, they turned to stone. Then Perseus, son of Zeus, became the Greek hero for decapitating Medusa as she slept, triumphantly presenting her head to the world as a trophy.

And in this century, Beard points to an example portrayed a few years ago when Donald Trump supporters evoked this image of Perseus brandishing a decapitated female head.

"It is with Hilary Clinton... there were plenty of images produced by Trump supporters in the presidential campaign showing her with snaky locks," Beard said.

"This is about patriarchy's desperation to see this as natural. The underlying point of principle [was] that it was the duty of men to save civilization from women."

Communal manhood

Men in ancient Greece competed in sports, theatre and intellectual pursuits. Sexual activities were varied, and might have included sex with their wives, slaves and younger men.

By the Middle Ages, however, men often entered into a different competition: that of battling sexual desire. This could take the form of abstinence, fasting, penance or prayer - or combinations thereof.

In her book, Love, Family and Marriage in the Middle Ages, Jacqueline Murray writes that some men engaged in punishing activities.

"Saint Jerome in the desert talked about how he'd be starving and living in a cave... it was a way to stave off visions of dancing girls and great feasts."

Castration, a common act in the Middle Ages, was sometimes employed as a way to deny a man sexual pleasure. But at the same time, Murray observes that for wealthy men, the masculine ideal was the outward display of virility; namely, having lots of children, especially boys.

From the late 1700's onwards, masculinity would be transformed once again. Historians call this period "communal manhood", with one's prescribed behaviour earmarked by the vertical rung on the social ladder one was born onto. White men, such as farmers, merchants, tradesmen and tenants worked from the home or nearby. Duties to family, church and community created social bonds that were valued within societies.

Enter the self-made man

Nothing short of a metaphorical earthquake occurred with the advent of capitalism. Men no longer viewed themselves as strands in a larger social web.

Men competed to climb the ladder as greed and self-interest were by then the new values to admire. Enter the "self-made man". This notion became the "natural" way for men to be in the world. And to this day, we still hear versions of the idea, from figures like Jordan Peterson who states, "men are naturally business-like, organized and capitalistic."

Historian Anthony Rotundo says capitalism not only affected wives and children but also men's relationships with each other.

"If you look at a picture of an American college football team from the 1880's or '90s, you see men randomly arranged in a room, draped on each other. Someone's arm on someone's shoulder, a hand on the knee of a teammate. Then, 20 years later, you see team shots and you get men neatly arranged in rows... like ice cubes in a tray."

In the Victorian era, it seemed everyone was worried about boys. Mothers were the primary parent, and school teachers were all female - as were Sunday school instructors.

A common perception developed that boys were becoming effete. So a conversation developed about clothing. Perhaps young boys and girls should not wear dresses and jumpers.

Historian Joe Poletti tells us that back then, "boys wore red as red was considered a powerful colour, while girls wore "pale, ethereal blue."

With cultural concerns mounting about boys and "manliness," parents soon decided that blue was the colour of power and that's been that way ever since.

Making men out of boys

In the early 20th century, once again, great concern about the welfare of boys became a cultural flashpoint.

The Boy Scouts announced: "boys suffer from shaky nerves and doubtful vitality." J.H. Kellogg agreed. The health reformer believed his Corn Flakes could make men out of boys.

Kimmel says Kellogg went even further by launching an anti-masturbation campaign targeting boys because he believed it weakened them greatly.

The cultural hysteria was widespread, some doctors prescribed that men eat rare steak twice a day.

Kimmel adds the early days of the Calgary Stampede was another effort to masculinize society. He says the invention of the dude ranch was meant for city slickers to get back to their wild roots and re-experience authentic manhood.

"Let's go back to the rough and hardy ways, the ropin' and ridin' sort of thing, shootin'. Well, that whole idea was a creation," Kimmel explained.

"That's the language that we use today, too. We have to restore, reclaim, retrieve masculinity. It's somehow been lost and we have to get it back, right? Make masculinity great again!"

Guests in this episode:
Michael Kimmel is one of the world's leading experts on men and masculinities. Among his many books are Manhood in America, Angry White Men, The Politics of Manhood, The Gendered Society and the best seller Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University in 2013.

Mary Beard is a fellow emerita of classics at Cambridge University and the author of Confronting the Classics.

Anthony Rotundo is the Alfred E. Stearns instructor in history and social sciences at Phillips Academy Andover. His book is American Manhood: Transitions in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era.

Jacqueline Murray is professor emerita of history at the University of Guelph. She is the author of Love, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages.

Simon Goldhill is a lecturer in classical archaeology at the University of Sheffield and the author of Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives.

Michael Kaufman has spent a lifetime as an activist, writer and speaker, addressing issues about masculinity and how to transform mens' lives, including The Time has Come: Why Men Must Join the Gender Equality Revolution.

Angus McLaren is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Victoria and has written The Trials of Masculinity, amongst other books.

Eva Keuls is a classics professor at the University of Minnesota, and the author of The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens.

Tanner Mirrlees is an associate professor and an undergraduate program director of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University.

*Man up! The Masculinity Crisis is a three-part series produced by Mary O'Connell.

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'Man Up!': How history has shaped masculinity | CBC Radio

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In recent decades, social scientists have noticed a trend: men are dropping out of the workforce. And their addiction rates are climbing. Men are also three times more likely to commit suicide than women. IDEAS explores the state of manhood in a three-part series, Man Up!: Masculinity in Crisis.

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(Lars Leetaru for The Washington Post)

I started noticing it a few years ago. Men, especially young men, were getting weird.

It might have been the "incels" who first caught my attention, spewing self-pitying venom online, sometimes venturing out to attack the women they believed had done them wrong.

It might have been the complaints from the women around me. " Men are in their flop era," one lamented, sick of trying to date in a pool that seemed shallower than it should be.

It might have been the new ways companies were trying to reach men. "The average hoodie made these days is weak, flimsy ... " growled a YouTube ad for a "tactical hoodie." "You're not a child. You're a man. So stop wearing so many layers to go outside."

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Once my curiosity was piqued, I could see a bit of curdling in some of the men around me, too.

They struggled to relate to women. They didn't have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys - including ones I once knew - just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn or sucked into the alt-right and the web of misogynistic communities known as the " manosphere."

The weirdness manifested in the national political scene, too: in the 4chan-fueled 2016 Trump campaign, in the backlash to #MeToo, in amateur militias during the Black Lives Matter protests. Misogynistic text-thread chatter took physical form in the Proud Boys, some of whom attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Young men everywhere were trying on new identities, many of them ugly, all gesturing toward a desire to belong.

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It felt like a widespread identity crisis - as if they didn't know how to be.

Who is your ideal of masculinity, and what characteristics do they embody? Tell The Post.

"This is such an ongoing thing," Taylor Reynolds sighs. "I had this kid show up - well, I say 'kid,' but he's an undergraduate here. I mentor them sometimes. He came over to my house and asked me if we could speak privately."

Reynolds, 28, is a doctoral student at an Ivy League university. With his full beard, mustache and penchant for tweed sport coats - plus a winsome Southern accent, courtesy of a childhood spent in rural Georgia - he reads as more mature than many of the professors roaming the campus.

"And the first question this kid asked me is just ... 'What the heck does good masculinity look like?'"

He grimaced.

"And I'll be honest with you: I did not have an answer for that."

Anxieties around masculinity aren't unique to this moment.

As early as 1835, Washington Irving lamented the new American upper class's tendency to "send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe." His alternative? "A previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness ... most in unison with our political institutions."

Skip ahead a few decades, and new worries about faltering masculinity turned into an obsession with fitness. An October 1920 issue of Physical Culture magazine advertised to men instructions on "How to Square Your Shoulders" (and to women, some advice: "Shall I Marry Him? A Lesson in Eugenics").

Still, by 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that "the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline." Writing in Esquire magazine, he added, "The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male's conception of himself."

Worrying about the state of our men is an American tradition. But today's problems are real and well documented. Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labor market dramatically, and not in men's favor - the need for physical labor has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded. Growing numbers of working-age men have detached from the labor market, with the biggest drop in employment among men ages 25 to 34. For those in a job, wages have stagnated everywhere except the top.

Meanwhile, women are surging ahead in school and in the workplace, putting a further dent in the "provider" model that has long been ingrained in our conception of masculinity. Men now receive about 74 bachelor's degrees for every 100 awarded to women, and men account for more than 70 percent of the decline in college enrollment overall. In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners - a huge jump from fewer than 4 percent of women in 1960.

Then there's the domestic sphere. Last summer, a Psychology Today article caused a stir online by pointing out that "dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise." No longer dependent on marriage as a means to financial security or even motherhood (a growing number of women are choosing to create families by themselves, with the help of reproductive technology), women are "increasingly selective," leading to a rise in lonely, single young men - more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner. Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 "deaths of despair," either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.

And while the past 50 years have been revolutionary for women - the feminist movement championed their power, and an entire academic discipline emerged to theorize about gender and excavate women's history - there hasn't been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world. At the same time, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement has made the gender dynamic seem less stable, less defined.

Because men still dominate leadership positions in government and corporations, many assume they're doing fine and bristle at male complaint. After all, all 45 U.S. presidents have been male, and men still make up more than two-thirds of Congress. A 2020 analysis of the S&P 500 found that there were more CEOs named Michael or James than there were female CEOs, period. Women are still dealing with historical discrimination and centuries of male domination that haven't been fully accounted for or rectified. Are we really worrying that men feel a little emasculated because their female classmates are doing well?

But millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success - and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.

"It's kind of terrifying that he thought I was the best person to come ask this," Reynolds went on to tell me about his underclassman visitor. "I'm not even a parent. It seems like there's been a breakdown, right? But there's a very real way in which, at this moment, a lot of guys don't know - they have no sense of what it means to be them, particularly. They have no idea what it means to be a man."

Past models of masculinity feel unreachable or socially unacceptable; new ones have yet to crystallize. What are men for in the modern world? What do they look like? Where do they fit? These are social questions but also ones with major political ramifications. Whatever self-definition men settle on will have an enormous impact on society. Yet many people, like Taylor, hesitate to be the one to try to outline a new standard of manliness. Who are they to set the rules?

Only one group seems to have no such doubts about offering men a plan.

A manly appeal from the right

In 2018, curious about a YouTube personality who had seemingly become famous overnight, I got tickets to a sold-out lecture in D.C. by Jordan Peterson. It was one of dozens of stops on the Canadian psychology professor turned anti-"woke" juggernaut's book tour for his surprise bestseller "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." The crowd was at least 85 percent male - the remainder seemed to be made up of long-suffering girlfriends, plus moms who had brought their sons in hope that they'd shape up.

Surrounded by men on a Tuesday night, I wondered aloud what the fuss was about. In my opinion, Peterson served up fairly banal advice: "Stand up straight," "delay gratification." His evolutionary-biology-informed takes ranged from amusingly weird to mildly insulting. (Female lobsters are irresistibly attracted to the top lobster, as are human women.) His three-piece suits seemed gimmicky.

Suddenly, the 20-something guy in front of me swung around. "Jordan Peterson," he told me without a hint of irony in his voice, "taught me how to live."

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If there's a vacuum in modeling manhood today, Peterson has been one of the boldest in stepping up to fill it. He has gained fame, notoriety and millions of book sales in the process. And he's only one of many right-aligned masculinity gurus - of better and worse quality - who have amassed huge audiences over the past decade.

There are more straightforwardly political options: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) attracted significant notice for a 2021 speech railing against the left's supposed attacks on traditional masculinity and translated the idea into a book that blames "the tribunes of elite opinion" for the collapse of American manhood and masculine strength. Hawley's "Manhood" (the jokes do, rather unfortunately, write themselves) went on sale in May.

There are fringier individuals, such as the pseudonymous online figure "Bronze Age Pervert" (BAP for short, real name Costin Alamariu), who became cult-famous for his Twitter feed, a stream of far-right culture-war takes interspersed with homoerotic photos of bodybuilders. BAP's self-published 2018 manifesto, "Bronze Age Mindset," teaches readers how to, in the words of its Amazon description, "escape gynocracy and ascend to fresh mountain air" through a mix of Nietzsche, questionable readings of antiquity and a regimen of "sun and steel" (that is, weightlifting and, uh, going outside). A positive review from Trump administration official Michael Anton turned it into assigned reading for young conservative elites.

Some right-wing models tip over into the obviously unsavory. 2022 saw the rise of Andrew Tate, the kickboxer and failed "Big Brother" contestant turned massive social influencer, whose extreme misogyny got him booted from TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. He's a caricature of masculinity - constantly shouting about his sports cars and women (multiple of each, naturally), a cigar surgically attached to his hand. But his advice about how to become an "alpha male" attracted an enormous following of teenage boys, to the point that schools were circulating information about how to counteract his messages in the classroom.

I went to that 2018 Peterson appearance as a skeptic. But his appeal - along with that of his fellow "manfluencers" - has become clearer since.

What's notable, first, is their empathy. For all Peterson's barking and, lately, unhinged tweeting, he's clearly on young men's side. He validates his followers' struggles and confusion. He also tells them why they're still needed and why they matter. No, it's not just you - school is tailored to girls. Yes, it does suck that a house and a family feel so out of reach! You're right: It is harder to be a man today.

This is especially compelling in a moment when many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don't feel part of. For young men in particular, the assumption of a world built to serve their sex doesn't align with their lived experience, where girls out-achieve them from pre-K to post-graduate studies and "men are trash" is an acceptable joke.

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Then there's the point-by-point advice. If young men are looking for direction, these influencers give them a clear script to follow - hours of video, thousands of book pages, a torrent of social media posts - in a moment when uncertainty abounds. The rules aren't particularly unique: get fit, pick up a skill, talk to women instead of watching porn all day. But if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips ("Clean your room!" Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation. Plus, the community that comes with joining a fandom can feel like a buffer against an increasingly atomized world.

As one therapist told me: "I have used Jordan Peterson to turn a boy into a man. I used him to turn this guy without a strong father figure into someone who, yes, makes his bed and stands up straight and now is successful." The books, she said, "do provide a structure that was clearly missing."

It's also important that the approach of these male models is both particular and aspirational. The BAPs and Hawleys find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience - from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator - that other parts of modern society have either derided as "toxic" or attempted to explain aren't specific to men at all. At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness - protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability - and encourage them, making "masculinity" out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honorable and desirable. And the fact that they're willing to define it outright feels bravely countercultural.

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Take BAP's laughable yet weirdly compelling depictionof the masculine ideal, attractive in part because of its transgressiveness: "Imagine a Mitt Romney, but different ... a Romney who was actually capable of acting like he looks." This Übermensch is a modern-day Alcibiades, as one admiring reviewer of BAP's "Bronze Age Mindset" puts it: "a piratical man of adventure who attempts to engineer a coup in the United States, sleeps with Vladimir Putin's wife, and then dies fighting the U.S. empire alongside wild tribesmen in Afghanistan."

A similar energy infused a documentary called "The End of Men" by (now former) Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, a trailer for which captivated the internet in the spring of 2022. Bathed in soft lighting and accompanied by a military-esque soundtrack, ripped, shirtless figures flipped massive tires, shot guns, wrestled each other and chugged raw eggs. A fully nude man stood on a mountaintop, head tipped back and arms outstretched, his genitals obscured by what looked like a giant USB stick emitting red light.

"Once a society collapses, then you're in hard times," a British-inflected voice-over intoned. "Those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive. They go on to reestablish order, and so the cycle begins again."

The imagery might be ridiculous, but the message is clear. Even as masculinity comes under attack, real men still exist, and this - blond, chiseled, violent - is what they look like. Despite what "woke" (and, presumably, clothed) society might tell you, male dominance is the natural order of things. Without it, the world will fall apart.

This is where the right-wing vision of masculinity runs off the rails.

Much of the content in the online men's space is misogyny masquerading as being simply pro-male, advocating a return to a strict hierarchy in which a particular kind of man deserves to rule over everyone else. Decent advice becomes an on-ramp to darker viewpoints: You can get from Tate urging his followers to work hard to his announcing that women are property within seconds.

Meanwhile, politicians such as Hawley are eager to ascribe men's increasing dysfunction to malice on the part of women, progressives and "elites," instead of the true cause: major social, economic and cultural changes that in some cases (North American Free Trade Agreement, anyone?) began with conservatives and in others (the Equal Pay Act) were long-overdue moves toward justice. And for all the overheated rhetoric deployed to engage men's sympathies, what's mainly on offer is the impossible suggestion that they reenact the lives their grandfathers led, followed by encouragement to blame society when that inevitably fails.

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Social identity theory says people inherently protect their identities, and when their identities are maligned in public, the natural response is to stand up for what they see as fundamental to their being. Is your masculinity being challenged? Act even more masculine; defend masculinity more aggressively than ever before; glorify its stereotypes, even the worst ones.

Of course, a masculinity defined solely in opposition to women - or to the gains of feminism, more specifically - doesn't provide a true road map to the future. Perhaps most alarmingly, many of the visions of masculinity these figures are pushing are wildly antisocial, untethered to any idea of good. Men are urged to situate themselves in a mythic story in which the world was always meant to be under their control. The fact that it no longer is becomes fuel for defensiveness and a victim complex, one that has corrosive and tragic effects.

For all its humor, "Bronze Age Mindset" is unquestionably racist, violent and homophobic. Its definition of masculinity is predicated on nihilism, barbarism and the subjugation of others. And Tate's proud misogyny and disdain for social norms, it turns out, weren't just harmless playacting. Last month, he was indicted in Romania on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming an organized criminal group.

A mainstream reluctance to define or speak up for men

Ronan Bray was swigging directly from a half-gallon of apple cider as we sat outside in Gainesville, Fla., last autumn. "It's seasonal, right?"

A baby-faced, 19-year-old University of Florida freshman with short, white-blond hair, Bray was wearing a hoodie despite the heat. (He grew up in Sarasota, so he was used to it.) He had agreed to talk to me about how he saw uncertainties about masculinity playing out on his campus.

First, he laid out his liberal, Gen Z bona fides - he's in a fraternity, but many of his close friends are LGBTQ+. He feels that old versions of masculinity might be dissolving for the better. "There's a lot more of an effort now to broaden the idea of what masculinity really can be," he said, "and how there can be strength in doing some things that ordinarily would be considered feminine - like talking about your feelings or crying in front of others."

But then he got candid. He doesn't really identify with the manosphere, he told me, but can understand why others might. "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."

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Men were constantly told to be "better" and less "toxic," he said, but what that "better" might look like seemed hard to pin down. "You pretty much have to figure it out yourself. But yet society still has the expectation that, you know, you have to be a certain way."

Then he turned wistful. "I don't feel like men in general have the same types of role models that women do, even in their own personal lives. ... Just because you're in the majority doesn't mean you don't need support."

Technically, men are slightly in the minority in the United States. But apart from that, Bray had a point - and what he said explained a lot about why the left and the mainstream are losing men.

In 2018, the American Psychological Association released its "Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men," which it described in a news release as declaring that "traditional masculinity - marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression - is, on the whole, harmful." The guidelines suggest that "there is a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence," and that these standards are damaging to mental and physical health.

Conservatives raged. But progressives mainly shrugged. That's because the mid-2010s were the high-water mark of anti-male sentiment in progressive spaces. As the #MeToo movement rose, with its tales of horrendous male behavior and ensuing corporate coverups, "ban men" became a rallying cry. The word "masculinity" seemed to rarely appear without the descriptor "toxic" accompanying it, blamed for everything from rape culture to climate change.

Even today, some progressives react touchily to any efforts to help men as a group.

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In 2014, President Barack Obama announced the My Brother's Keeper initiative, a $200 million program meant to improve the lives of at-risk boys and men of color. The pushback came immediately: More than 1,000 women signed an open letter criticizing the program for not including girls. More recently, when news circulated in 2022 that President Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure act would likely create thousands of jobs for working-class men, MSNBC pundit Joy Reid dismissively called it a "White guy employment act."

As a result, there's a temptation to minimize men's problems orerasereferences to masculinity altogether. One Democratic strategist told me about how specific references to men in political speeches are often stripped out for fear of offense or to signal broader "inclusivity." A father staying up late worrying about losing his job, for instance, used as an illustrative example in a speech about health care, is turned into a nonspecific "parent."

The strategist described his party as having almost an allergy to admitting that some men might, in fact, be struggling in a unique way and could benefit from their own tailored attention and aid.

"But when you strip out the specificity, people feel less seen," he said. "There's less of a resonance. If the question is what scripts we have for men, how are we appealing to men, then being willing and able to talk about men is a pretty key component of that."

What ends up happening is that, if women are still seen as needing tools to overcome disadvantage, men are often expected to just shape up by themselves. For a group that can be focused to a fault on addressing microaggressions, it's surprisingly acceptable for those on the left to victim-blame men who are struggling themselves. "So we just let men off the hook? Maybe we should give them electroshock therapy for their hysteria," a progressive female friend of mine joked when I told her about this essay.

To the extent that any vision of "nontoxic" masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight. It's the equivalent of "learn to code!" as a solution for those struggling to adjust to a new economy: simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune.

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The thing is, I get it. I understand the reluctance to spend time worrying about men. And I say that as someone who loves them: as friends, romantic partners and members of my family.

Justifiably, progressives want to preserve the major gains made for women over the past several decades - gains that are still fragile. It's easy to mistake attention as zero-sum, to fear that putting effort toward helping men might mean we won't have space for women anymore.

There is something appealing, too,in the idea of gender neutrality - or at least rejecting gender essentialism - as a social ethos. After all, attaching specific traits to men will redound to women, too. If we say "real" men are strong, does that mean real women must be weak? If men are leaders, are women destined to follow?

I'm convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular - that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There's a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.

Take Richard Reeves's book "Of Boys and Men," omnipresent in the discourse since its 2022 release. The Brookings Institution scholar has offered wonky potential solutions - "redshirting" boys by delaying kindergarten entry one year, creating scholarships for men in HEAL (health, education, administration and literacy) jobs. But even he acknowledges he has felt pressure to shy away from some of the harder questions his subject matter raises.

Reeves told me that in his writing, he tried to stay descriptive, only going so far as saying there are some differences between the sexes that need to be taken into account to create the most viable solutions. He frames the biological differences between the sexes not as a binary but as overlapping distributions of traits - aggression, risk appetite, sex drive - with clusters of one sex or the other at the extremes.

But when it came to writing any kind of script for how men should be, the self-possessed expert scholar faltered.

"That's a question I basically dodged in the book," Reeves told me. "Because, candidly, it's outside of my comfort zone. It's more personal. It's harder to empirically justify. There are no charts I can brandish." After all, as he said, he's a think-tank guy, a wonk.

"But I think I'm now trying to articulate more prescriptively, less descriptively, some of these discussions about masculinity and trying to send some messages around it" - here, his speech became emphatic - "because, honestly, nobody else is f---ing doing it except the right."

Reeves, who is launching his own institute focused on men and boys, knows there's a danger inherent in seeming too eager to help men or too intent on promoting a particular vision of masculinity.

"As soon as you start articulating virtues, advantages, good things about being male ... then you've just dialed up the risk factor of the conversation," he said. "But I'm also acutely aware that the risk of not doing it is much greater. Because without it, there's a vacuum. And along comes Andrew Tate to make Jordan Peterson look like a cuddly old uncle."

A new script for men

If the right has overcorrected to an old-fashioned (and somewhat hostile) vision of masculinity, many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be.

In the conversations I had with men for this essay, I kept hearing that many would still find some kind of normative standard of masculinity meaningful and useful, if only to give them a starting point from which to expand.

Scott Galloway agrees. On his podcast and in his newsletter, the author, entrepreneur and professor at New York University's Stern Business School has made a specialty of talking about the crisis of unattached, rudderless young men and helping them aspire to more. On a Zoom call with me from his home in London, "Prof G," as he's known on his eponymous show, reclined, biceps bulging from his fitted shirt as he clasped his hands behind his shaven head. Periodically, he unfolded to push the snout of his large dog out of the frame.

"I mean, there are certain attributes around masculinity that we should embrace. Men think about sex more than women. Use that as motivation to be successful and meet women. Men are more impulsive. Men will run out into a field and get shot up to think they're saving their buddies."

He was careful to point out that he doesn't believe that women wouldn't do as much but that the distributions are different.

"Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that - they don't want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they're right, and think it's a good narrative, but they don't want to partner with them."

I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.

"And so men should think, 'I want to take advantage of my maleness. I want to be aggressive, I want to set goals, go hard at it. I want to be physically really strong. I want to take care of myself.'"

Galloway leaned into the screen. "My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you're really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people."

Richard Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtly. "I try to raise my boys" - he has three - "to have the confidence to ask a girl out, if that's their inclination; the grace to accept no for an answer; and the responsibility to make sure that, either way, she gets home safely." His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway's: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast.

This tracked with my intuitions about what "good masculinity" might look like - the sort that I actually admire, the sort that women I know find attractive but often can't seem to find at all. It also aligns with what the many young men I spoke with would describe as aspirational, once they finally felt safe enough to admit they did in fact carry an ideal of manhood with its own particular features.

Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.

But, in fact, most of these features are scaffolded by biology - all are associated with testosterone, the male sex hormone. It's not an excuse for "boys will be boys"-style bad behavior, but, realistically, these traits would be better acknowledged and harnessed for pro-social aims than stifled or downplayed. Ignoring obvious truths about human nature, even general ones, fosters the idea that progressives are out of touch with reality.

The essentialist view - that it's in men's nature to be brave, stoic and in charge while women remain docile, nurturing and submissive - would be dire news for social equality and for the vast numbers of individuals who don't fit those stereotypes. Biology isn't destiny - there is no one script for how to be a woman or a man. But despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don't actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes in.

"Femininity or masculinity are a social construct that we get to define," Galloway concluded. "They are, loosely speaking, behaviors we associate with people born as men or born as women, or attributes more common among people born as men or as women. But the key is that we still get to fill that vessel and define what those attributes are, and then try and reinforce them with our behavior and our views and our media."

What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.

A bit more than 20 years ago, anthropologist David D. Gilmore published "Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity," a cross-cultural study of manliness around the world. He found that almost all societies had a concept of "real," "true" or "adult" manhood that was seen as a valuable and indispensable ideal. But masculinity had to be earned - and proved.

Men achieved it by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating. In the modern moment, however, all three of these goals seem less celebrated and further from reach. Young men who disappear into online forums, video games or pornography see none of the social or personal rewards of meeting these goals, and their loneliness and despair suggest how painful it has been to lose track of this ideal.

The other feature of Gilmore's findings was that boys generally had to be ushered into manhood and masculinity by other men. And that seems to be a key link missing today.

"When I talk to my friends, I can literally count on one hand the number of friends I have who have a good relationship with their dad and actually have learned things from him," said Reynolds, the Ivy League grad student, mulling the reasons students were turning to him for advice. "Part of the thing is that that's just an ongoing societal problem."

Many of the young men I talked to for this essay told me they had troubled relationships with their fathers, or no father figure in their lives at all. The data bears this out: Since 1960, the percentage of boys living apart from their biological fathers has nearly doubled, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

As Reeves told me: "If you're growing up in a single-parent household, and you go to a typical public school and typical medical system, there's a decent chance that you will not encounter a male figure of authority until middle school or later. Not your doctor, not your teachers. No one else around you. What does that feel like?"

And while progressives have embraced the rise of single-parent and female-led homes - or at least assume them to be inevitable as a new status quo - it's still clear that male role models help boys especially to thrive.

In 2018, Harvard economist Raj Chetty published a groundbreaking study on race and economic opportunity. Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys. However, those boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present - even if not their own - had significantly higher chances of upward mobility.

"Ultimately," Reynolds mused, "it's about relationships and finding older men who, you know - they're not flashy, they're not 'important,' necessarily, but they actually are living virtuous lives as men. And then being able to then learn from them."

This cultural shift is one reason why the crisis of masculinity might take time to fix: because fostering positive representations of manhood requires relationships and mentorship on an individual level, in a way that can't be mandated. Even aspirational public representations of men are scarce on the ground. Political figures who in the past might have been obvious models - Barack Obama, say, or Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) - are, in our moment, polarizing. Fathers in popular culture are still often stereotyped as ineffective or idiots. New archetypes are forming - the "soft daddies" of cartoons such as "Big Mouth" and "Bob's Burgers," any role actor Nick Offerman takes on - but they're still rarities. And the everyday men most secure in their masculinity usually aren't the ones pronouncing it in the public square.

Some policy interventionscan increase the number of role models within communities, according to experts. Programs such as the Boys2Men Community Foundation in Chicago offer one-on-one mentorship. And nearly every thinker on the masculinity problem advocates getting more men into classrooms, from kindergarten up - not just for their effects as teachers but also because they're more likely to serve as coaches, especially of boys' sports.

But as Galloway put it, the change will need to come from the bottom up - from everyday men who notice the crisis of identity hitting their younger counterparts and can put themselves forward to help. "Ninety percent of this, if not 95, is on us, is on older men, is on society," Galloway said. "To realize this is a problem that warrants investment and attention. And it's on young men themselves to take responsibility and embrace masculinity and redefine it."

A path forward

For all their problems, the strict gender roles of the past did give boys a script for how to be a man. But if trying to smash the patriarchy has left a vacuum in our ideal of masculinity, it also gives us a chance at a fresh start: anopportunity to take what is useful from models of the past and repurpose it for boys and men today.

We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist - risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social - to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.

Influencers on the right have found an audience by recognizing and exaggerating these tropes. What else is an incel but a stymied procreator building an identity out of his failures? Who are Tucker Carlson's tire-flipping civilizational guards but the protector, made absurd? Right-wing political figures such as Josh Hawley have clearly latched on to many men's desire to provide, but their solutions are often 1950s throwbacks that depend on castigating women for providing for themselves.

What critics miss is that if there were nothing valid at the core of these constructs, they wouldn't command this sort of popularity. People need codes for how to be human. And when those aren't easily found, they'll take whatever is offered, no matter what else is attached.

For the left, there's room to elaborate on visions of these qualities that are expansive, not reductive, that allow for many varieties of masculinity and don't deny female value and agency.

In my ideal, the mainstream could embrace a model that acknowledges male particularity and difference but doesn't denigrate women to do so. It's a vision of gender that's not androgynous but still equal, and relies on character, not just biology. And it acknowledges that certain themes - protector, provider, even procreator - still resonate with many men and should be worked with, not against.

But how to implement it? Frankly, it will be slow. A new masculinity will be a norm shift, and that takes time. The women's movement succeeded in changing structures and aspirations, but the social transformation didn't take place overnight. And empathy will be required, as grating as that might feel.

It is harder to be a man today, and in many ways, that is a good thing: Finally, the freer sex is being held to a higher standard.

Even so, not all of the changes that have led us to this moment are unequivocally positive. And if left unaddressed, the current confusion of men and boys will have destructive social outcomes, in the form of resentment and radicalization.

In the end, the sexes rise and fall together. The truth is that most women still want to have intimate relationships with good men. And even those who don't still want their sons, brothers, fathers and friends to live good lives.

The old script for masculinity might be on its way out. It's time we replaced it with something better.
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Opinion | Men are lost. Here's a map out of the wilderness.

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No one's offering men a model except the right. It's time for a new plan.