Young Men Are Failing and Taking Society Down With Them
What’s the problem with men and how can we fix it?
Hold a man to low standards and he will lie down to reach them.
That’s what happened to young men today. Nobody was expecting much of them, so they laid down in the filth of self-satisfying porn and the fake world of victorious video games and never stood back up.
Not until the manosphere entered the room.
It wasn’t difficult for people like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, or the Liver King to see an immense marketing opportunity lying dormant in the dark basements and sweaty garages of male unmet potential.
After all, these guys rose from the ashes of a demi-smashed patriarchy and made a name for themselves. An infamous and abominable name, but as any good marketer will tell you, any publicity is good publicity nonetheless.
The manosphere showed up to tell young men there’s still hope to live their porn-infused dreams and virtual gaming victories in real life if only they do as they’re told.
And as anyone who gives you enough hope to make life worth living again, they won. Not only did they win, but young men grabbed onto them like life jackets in the middle of a wild ocean.
Which proves just how much need these men had for a guiding light. Someone to understand them, accept them just the way they are, and give them hope they’re worth something.
You can work miracles with hope and clear guidelines.
Sometimes those miracles are a blessing to some and a calamity to others, because for the first time in decades, young men between 18 and 29 showed up in force to vote for the Republican candidate, winning the demographic by 14 points.
That’s the amount of magic you can work when you understand what people need and give it to them.
Women are rising, while young men are failing
This does not in any way imply causality — unless you’re a red pill fanatic and see women’s victories as men’s losses, and are invested in a zero-sum game that you’re going to lose.
The catalyst here is not the ascent of women. Men’s inability to adapt to a changing world is more complex than that.
Men are not failing because women are rising. Women are rising because they’ve finally found their voice, motivation, support, and strength.
At the same time, men lost theirs. Not to women, but to a society that didn’t focus exclusively on them for once. And the results are dire.
There has never been a cohort that’s fallen further, faster than young men living in Western democracies. The percentage of young men aged 20 to 24 who are neither in school nor working has tripled since 1980. Workforce participation among men has fallen below 90%, while median hourly wages are $3 less per hour, adjusted for inflation, than they were in 1970. This is deadly; over the past 20 years, America’s incremental deaths of despair totaled 414,000, exceeding the 407,000 Americans killed in World War II. — Scott Galloway
Should we shift focus back towards men?
While we gave young women a voice and finally recognized them as a valuable part of society, we ignored the same thing in young men, because they already had all that.
They were already the winning class, favored by the patriarchy. So we naturally helped the ones who hadn’t been helped before. It was the right thing to do.
Have we reached gender equality yet? No, not by far. Progress toward gender equality in the United States has slowed or even stalled since 2018.
So then are we in a position to shift focus towards men again? No, and we don’t need to shift focus. We just need to give them a place at our table. Somebody did and they won massively because of it.
Yes, men as a whole are still the dominating class, but men in particular are not. Thousands of years of patriarchy and age-old structures put in place by other men who came before them allow the system to favor 1% of men and crush the rest.
Young men aren’t winning (unless their name is Baron, of course).
Although women’s lot is improving, nobody is winning except the ones who have always won and they’re using the rest of us to achieve it.
What do men need and how can we give it to them?
Both women and men tend to forget that the other side is human too. And they have the same needs all humans do.
For the time being, society offers little of what people need. People in general, not just young men.
Snake oil salesmen belonging to the manosphere caught on to that and focused on the demographic they knew.
They gave men support for their goals and dreams, no matter what they were. They gave them hope and a purpose: that one day they too can be successful with money and women. They gave men role models who understood them, the sense that they matter and belong, and the masculine identity they had lost.
Pretty much what any gang gives you to join their ranks, and then uses you for nefarious reasons.
Yes, their sense of purpose and hope was fueled by blind domination of the world and the female kind, their role models creeps, and their identity based on antiquated self-serving notions, but it was all they had.
Today’s failing young men are just like the young men who join gangs; they do it because they have nothing else. Because they’re looking for an understanding family, a tribe to call their own, who accepts them as they are. For a price, of course. But even if the price is their life, it’s still worth it to them.
Point the finger towards the mirror, please
Men need help to adapt to this changing world. But help can only come from within.
I see a lot of pressure put on the shoulders of women to help these young men out of the hole they’re in right now, starting from the premise that men are this way as a retaliation to the #metoo movement.
What exactly are we talking about here? You slapped me, I retaliated, so you slapped me even harder because I didn’t take it? Women finally took a stand against abuse and they should be punished for it?
No, that’s not what’s going on here, because not all men are entitled abusers. But most men are going through a loss of masculine identity in a world that is redefining gender roles.
That’s why the only help can come from within their ranks. Only other men can help men redefine masculinity and deal with the grief of losing traditional masculine roles and life structures.
It’s no easy feat, and I don’t see many men doing anything about it. I see a lot of finger-pointing from all directions, but at the end of the day, nobody is doing anything about it.
I don’t see powerful positive male role models stepping up to help these young men and pull them on a constructive helpful path.
I see powerful men using other men for their benefit.
But I see no men caring about men. That’s where your answer is.
“we’ve tried doing nothing, and now we’re out of ideas!” -the new matriarchy dealing with this
I agree. It's on men to save themselves. Older men who haven't gotten trapped and calcified in unhealthy and un-useful and destructive ways of being need to work with younger men--their children, or their students, or kids in other contexts: sports, clubs, etc. It's our own fault that we allowed previous efforts to get laughed off the field (anyone remember Iron John) instead of finding what wisdom and healthfulness there might be in them and then adapting them to feel more palatable. But I think we also have to avoid the "should attention swing back to men" language, as though only one sex at a time can get taken care of. We're all in this together, for good or for ill.