Modern Men Aren't Broken

But many are looking for status in all the wrong places

The struggles of men are back in the news with major stories in places like the New York Times (“The Manosphere Continues to Devolve”) and The New Yorker (“The Camps Promising to Turn You—Or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male”).

Both articles highlight data showing declining educational and work attainment; increasing loneliness, isolation, and nihilism; and rising political polarization. They also call out the grift that is the manosphere, where you can spend 40 hours per week listening to podcasts, watching streamers, and, if you want an IRL experience, pay $3000 to cosplay as a soldier at a weekend retreat.

The problems are real. The longing is real. But what legacy media always misses are solutions.

It’s not a “Joe Rogan of the left” or rage-baiting socialist streamers. It’s not to pretend there are no differences between men and women. It’s not to call masculinity toxic. It’s not to give up hope or say there’s no use for men in a post-modern society.

Rather, what we desperately need is to separate performative masculinity from the real thing. And to point out the absurdity of the former while offering examples of the latter—which, as you’ll read below, are more plentiful than you may think.

Let’s start with performative masculinity. It is not about developing world-class men. It’s about converting anxiety and loneliness into anger and tribal loyalty. It’s about turning a young man’s real feeling of being lost into a superficial sense of dominance and belonging, even if that dominance and belonging come from bullying, trolling, and demeaning others or shouting into a void on the internet.

Performative masculinity is extravagant wealth, fancy watches, and sports cars that are the fruits of exploiting a lonely and isolated audience. It is big muscles, often the result of steroids. (It’s never the supplements the alpha male is selling. It’s always the steroids he doesn’t disclose.) It’s online courses, seminars, and overpriced retreats. It is undeniably attention-grabbing but not particularly useful. It sits around, navel gazes, and streams all day. It’s all talk.

You might be tempted to dismiss all of this as being too online or an overblown part of the culture war. But I believe it points to something deeper: whenever you see a bunch of shallow influencers herding around a topic, it’s almost always because there’s an audience to exploit. In this case, there is a crucial need to provide men who are feeling lost with a purpose and path. That purpose and path can be one of performative bullshit, or it can be one of substance. Right now, the performative bullshit variety is winning. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

All humans have foundational psychological needs: to belong, to participate in meaningful endeavors, to feel competent, to cultivate hope for the future, and to have a direction to follow. In short: we all need sources of mastery and mattering; we all need paths to pursue personal excellence.

On average, men (especially young men) have more testosterone than women. People think testosterone is about sex drive and physical aggression, but more than anything, testosterone is associated with a strong desire for status. Understanding this is key to understanding the crisis of modern masculinity.

There are two main routes to status:

1. You can gain it through competence and respect.

2. You can gain it through rote power and domination.

If men don’t feel they have avenues for the former, they all too easily default to the latter. This explains the popularity of the manosphere and chronically online grifters.

The manosphere offers young men the feeling of status through domination—dunking on people online, performing wealth, asserting dominance over women— because it's faster and easier than the very real work of developing one’s character, earning respect, and gaining competence in a craft, career, activity, or sport.

In a chaotic world where young men don’t know where they belong or where they are headed, they grasp onto groups and ideologies that make them feel good in the short term but backfire over the long haul. Without better alternatives, the Andrew Tates of the world fill the gap.

Too many men are being fed the junk food variety of masculinity. They are being forced to choose between the deadbeat dad or the magic bullet, use steroids, dominate others, or the ‘get rich quick’ variety. We’ve got to offer something better, a path that ultimately leads to more success. It starts with being honest about what masculinity looks like when it’s authentic.

It’s okay to be strong. It’s okay to bench press and deadlift. It’s okay to be competitive. It’s actually great. We need to do real things in the real world with real people, perhaps now more than ever.

The problem is when this gets steeped in an us-versus-them mentality; when everything is zero-sum, when you can never ask for help or show vulnerability, when there is always a boogeyman to blame for your problems.

Instead of talking about being an alpha, high-T lion, or whatever other pseudoscientific garbage is on the internet, we need to refocus our attention on what genuine masculinity looks like in practice.

It’s not that there are no great men. There are millions of great men.

The challenge is that these men are too busy out in the world living their lives and being useful to sit around all day preying on young people’s fears.

They are coaching their kids’ baseball team. They are volunteering in their community. They are raising their children. They are mentoring at local gyms. They are starting small businesses. They are working in the trades. They are supporting their wives. They have integrity and honor. They protect the weak. They help their neighbors. They show up consistently. They care deeply about others.

The men who spend all day on the internet building platforms generally aren’t the best examples to follow. Interestingly, these guys seldom have wives or kids, and they certainly don’t do things like coach youth sports, teach, or volunteer. For us to make progress on the crisis of masculinity, we need to get young men out doing stuff in the real world so they can be exposed to real men: on sports teams, in places of worship, in the trades, in men's choirs, in service organizations.

I’m writing this from a family vacation on a cruise. There’s a basketball court on the top deck. It’s called “The Hero Zone.” My 8-year-old son is increasingly getting the basketball itch, which means we’ve been spending multiple hours per day in the hero zone. It’s generally been the same group of 30 or so people. 25 boys, 3 girls, and a few dads (yours truly included). My son is the youngest. Most of the kids are between 12 and 20. Black, White, Indian, Asian. Tall and short.

What I’ve witnessed over the last four days has given me hope that the young men are okay. They’ve included everyone. They’ve played hard but with respect. They’ve worked out confrontations about fouls. They’ve made sure the younger kids get shots off. They’ve joked around and had loads of fun. They’ve even been kind and deferential to the Dads.

What none of them have been is on their phones—because they are too busy playing with each other in the real world. And I think this is the most instructive point of all.

It also reminds me a little of when my community in Western North Carolina was devastated by Hurricane Helene in late 2024. It was absolutely terrible, and there was so much loss of businesses, homes, and lives. But one ray of light was seeing the community come together in rescue and recovery efforts, along with an outpouring of aid from all over the country. This involved all kinds of men. Men with chainsaws. Linesmen. Truckers. Fearless dudes with ATVs. All of these men suddenly had purpose and respect, and it was hard-earned. So many of these men—perhaps usually overlooked by society—were now heroes. They walked with their heads held high. They had status that came from competence and respect.

A basketball court on a cruise is just that—a basketball court on a cruise. And I’m obviously not suggesting that we engineer natural disasters. However, both examples show that there is nothing inherently broken about modern men. When men detach from the internet, cable news, or manosphere podcasts, they contribute and thrive.

All of which makes me think that if there is any battle, it’s not men versus women; it’s the battle of performative masculinity that benefits nobody but the grifters who are peddling it, versus a more genuine masculinity that benefits us all, men and women alike. It is important to win this battle, and it will take many role models stepping up from all walks of life—in schools, in places of worship, on the playing field, and in diverse careers.

My son doesn't know any of this yet. He just knows that the older boys passed him the ball, and that his dad was there to watch. That's enough for now. That might be enough, period.