Being male isn’t going so well. Not the way it had in the past.
Men are falling behind big time. By a large margin, fewer men than women are graduating college. In the meantime, job prospects for those with only a high school diploma are plummeting. Many men are failing to launch. The percentage of young men who are neither in school nor working has tripled since 1980. One in five thirty-year-old men still lives at home with his parents. One in four forty-year-old men have yet to marry — a record high, up from six percent in 1980. Whatever you think this is, it surely is a predicament.
To call this a crisis is an understatement. Yet many people don’t want to hear about it, while others have trouble mustering empathy for the present plight of men who’d been riding high for as long as anyone can remember.
To call this a crisis is an understatement. Yet many people don’t want to hear about it, while others have trouble mustering empathy for the present plight of men who’d been riding high for centuries.
Besides falling behind fiscally, the male predicament includes society’s requirement that men adapt to changes in the rules that once favored them. The #MeToo movement and feminist campaigns benefitted women and shifted our expectations of men, stripping them of their once-assumed privilege. Being male differs considerably from what it once was.
Misogyny and the Manosphere
Social change that advances the cause of the disadvantaged doesn’t benefit everyone equally. Someone always pays a price. We are witnessing a serious backlash to changes that improved the lives of women, which many men now feel has come at their expense.
Deeply aggrieved men are crying out. You hear their misogynistic, anti-feminist rants echoing throughout the manosphere — a loose grouping of websites and chat rooms that cater to a range of male appetites. The most malignant segment is populated by angry men commiserating with one another about the present predicament men face. They yearn for a return to the good old days when women were women and men were men. Andrew Tate, the best-known manosphere celebrity, teaches his 10 million followers: “You cannot be responsible for a dog if it doesn’t obey you, or a child if it doesn’t obey you, or a woman that doesn’t obey you.”
This rise of misogyny isn’t new, but socio-political gender-based shifts are pouring fuel on the bonfire.
A Rightward Political Shift
When Bob Dylan sang “the times they are a-changin’,” it was the 1960s — but the changes he was singing about ran in the opposite direction from what we are now witnessing.
Across the globe, male resentment is on the rise. In Germany, young men are twice as likely as their female peers to vote for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. In South Korea, three out of four men in their twenties support conservative candidates who traffic in anti-feminist rhetoric, and polls show nearly sixty percent of South Korean men in that age group strongly oppose feminism. Similar trends have been noted in Portugal, Denmark, and Croatia. In England, over ninety percent of young men can identify Andrew Tate and what he stands for, and a notable minority endorse his views on male dominance and control.
These aren’t isolated data points; they are symptoms of a shared malaise. In a competitive global economy characterized by dwindling opportunity for men, men feel anxious and seek relief. For some, misogyny supplies it. Feminism, cast as evil, becomes an easy target and an effective manosphere battle cry: women took what was ours.
The Rise of Strongman Politicians
The political expression of this trend is the resurgence of the strongman — leaders who promise to restore greatness by resurrecting traditional hierarchy. Strongmen embody a hyper-masculinity that reassures men who feel their status slipping. Authoritarianism is dead set against ambiguity: it glorifies warriors and denigrates worriers, prizes conquerors over contemplative thinkers, fears softness, nuance, and doubt — qualities coded as feminine. Fascistic masculinity is fear dressed up as strength. What a mess we find ourselves in.
What Do Peterson and Galloway Say?
One way of helping men cope with the present predicament is a healthy dose of male mentoring. Two recent best-sellers attempt it: Jordan Peterson’s 2018 Twelve Rules for Life and Scott Galloway’s 2025 Notes on Being a Man. Each identifies a slightly different male malaise and prescribes a slightly different cure.
Peterson builds on the philosophical perspective that life is hard, often tragic — and that one shouldn’t complain or expect it to be otherwise. Rather, one should struggle with the trials of life, which infuses life with meaning. Be a good person, keep your promises, tell the truth, care for others.
Galloway acknowledges that men face formidable changes, but — like Peterson — he advises men to stop bitching and moaning and instead get going. Stop looking for work that aligns with your passion; acquire marketable skills. Focus on becoming financially independent. Stop imagining success is out of reach.
Each author emphasizes personal responsibility. Each advises men to develop discipline, to forgo the pursuit of pleasure in favor of longer-term goals.
Why is It Hard to Empathize With Men and Their Predicament?
Galloway voices an opinion that aligns with my own thinking. He notes the irony that people who find it easy to empathize with the downtrodden conditions of women cannot sustain the same capacity for empathy when it comes to the struggles men are now facing. He notes that many young men are unbearably lonely, failing economically, suffering formidable emotional challenges, and are basically adrift. He concludes: “There is nothing more dangerous than a lonely, broke young man.”
We humans like to think of ourselves as fair-minded — willing to hear people out, slow to judge, generous toward those who have stumbled or suffered a setback. But when we consider the lives of the once privileged, our better self can curdle.
The advantages others once enjoyed can make us see them as having belonged to a different class — the haves — relegating the rest of us to the alternate class, the have-nots. Being a have-not creates fertile ground for envy, resentment, and schadenfreude: enjoyment obtained from seeing or hearing about the troubles of others.
Why We Smirk at the Fall of the Once-envied
Have-nots sometimes feel inferior in comparison to those who have. So when another’s good fortune dissipates, our envy of that person dissipates with it. When someone who had been riding high falls, we sometimes feel relieved, even celebratory. Such reactions are not pretty, but they are a recognizable, if lamentable, aspect of human nature.
A man in power may abuse that power, leaving us outraged. Years later, he falls. We shed no tears. He got his comeuppance. Justice was served. Karma bit him in the ass. He had it coming. Just like that, the compassion we typically demand of ourselves dissipates. If a man who previously reaped the benefits of his gender falls, are we less inclined to feel sympathy for his loss? I wonder.
I know people who privately smirked when multi-million-dollar homes burned down in the recent Pacific Palisades fire. They would never admit it outside the therapist’s office, certain they’d be branded monsters for relishing another’s misfortune. But the relish is there, nevertheless.
A failure to empathize with the present predicament men find themselves in is a serious problem that must be called out for the sake of everyone, not just men.
Summing Up
So here we are. Men in trouble, women understandably wary of hearing about it. This is a strange place from which to launch a blog. Then again, beginnings are precisely what this project is concerned with: how boys become men, what that becoming exacts from them, what it exacts from the rest of us, and what is to be done now that the old script no longer holds.
What this blog is, I hope, is a sustained attempt to look at what is happening to men and boys without flinching and without taking sides. It isn’t a defense of male grievance, nor a brief on behalf of men who would like to roll the clock back to a time when men were on top. It isn’t a salvo in the culture wars, though I expect to be misread as one — that comes with the territory.
In the posts to come, I’ll be drawing on years of clinical work, on the literature of psychoanalysis and gender, and on what men themselves have told me — sometimes in consulting rooms, sometimes over dinner, sometimes in writing they never expected anyone else to read.
We’ll examine the hidden perils of growing up male: how boys learn to disown vulnerability, why so many grown men struggle with intimacy, where pornography and the manosphere fit in, what fuels the loneliness epidemic, and why the sons of well-meaning parents so often end up adrift. Some of what I write will sit uncomfortably with readers on both sides of the gender divide. That, too, is the territory.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re already willing to consider what many would prefer not to — that men are in real trouble, that the trouble is not trivial, and that pretending otherwise will not make any of us safer. I hope you’ll come back. We have barely begun. Stay tuned.