It’s striking how long men’s troubles have gone unnoticed. Men account for roughly 80% of suicides in the United States and nearly three out of every four “deaths of despair,” a term coined by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton for the combination of deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol-related deaths, and suicides (Case & Deaton, 2021; Reeves, 2022). And this pattern extends past mortality as well: Among Americans aged 25 to 34, 47% of women now hold a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of men, a gap that did not exist as recently as 1995 (Pew Research Center, 2024), while the share of men ages 25 to 54 outside the labor force entirely has roughly doubled since the 1970s, rising from 5.8% to 11.4% (Bengali et al., 2023).
The consequences of men’s struggles affect everyone. For instance, when young men’s economic prospects collapse, marriage and fertility fall along with them, premature mortality rises, and a larger share of children end up in single-parent households below the poverty line (Autor et al., 2019). Unemployment is itself a documented cause of depression, and meta-analytic evidence across hundreds of studies finds the effect is stronger for men than for women (Paul & Moser, 2009). The downstream costs to those children are also well established, with the most rigorous designs continuing to find that father absence reduces high school graduation and harms social-emotional adjustment and adult mental health (McLanahan et al., 2013). Men who are struggling also make less reliable partners and less present fathers, and this places a further burden on women to pick up the slack. Thus, anyone invested in how women and girls are doing has a direct stake in men possessing a positive and healthy masculinity.
Unfortunately, there’s a strong social trend that sees masculinity itself as the problem (APA, 2018; Reeves, 2022), and it’s taboo in many parts of American society to talk about any area where men might have a relative strength. This leads to a portrayal of masculinity as essentially an all-bad category: full of negative traits and entirely lacking in positive qualities. And men who receive this message may feel that they need to choose between being bad and masculine (perhaps in the vein of Andrew Tate) or good and emasculated (perhaps anxious, inhibited, passive, guilty, weak, immature, or self-hating). In short, young men are increasingly struggling to find a sense of their masculinity that is authentic, useful, confident, assertive, valued, sustainable, and fulfilling.
How did we get here? In a recent article, clinician Yedidya Levy identifies three cultural shifts, arguing that each one has bumped up against features of evolved male psychology in ways that are making things worse for men.
How We Talk About Masculinity Now
The first shift Levy describes is how we talk about, and have come to view, masculine traits. Competitiveness, stoicism, and the desire to protect and provide are increasingly treated as “problematic” rather than capacities that could be channeled in useful directions. For instance, in 2018, the American Psychological Association published practice guidelines that classified “traditional masculinity ideology” as a clinical risk factor (APA, 2018). Of course, any trait (whether it’s deemed masculine or not) becomes a liability in the extreme, and indeed the same is true of feminine traits. But as practiced by most men most of the time, competitiveness, stoicism, and the drive to protect and provide are not pathologies. Instead of suppressing them, boys can be taught to channel these tendencies and thrive, becoming more useful and helpful members of society. To label the disposition itself defective, rather than its excesses, is to communicate to young men that the problem is not something they do but something they are. And a lot of them hear exactly that.
Missing Fathers, Missing Rituals
The second shift Levy identifies is demographic: About a quarter of American children now grow up without a father in the home. The research connecting father absence to higher rates of dropout, addiction, and premature death is extensive (Farrell & Gray, 2018). For a lot of boys, their father is the only working example they have of what it looks like when a man effectively manages frustration, takes responsibility for his behavior, and shows up even when he doesn’t feel like it.
And the third shift centers on the dissolution of tradition. At some point, Western society stopped marking the transition from boyhood to manhood. Nearly every pre-modern culture had some public ritual for this, and anthropologists have long noted that the ritual itself was never really the main event (van Gennep, 1960). Instead, what mattered was the announcement: the community telling boys they had crossed a significant threshold, that their community had noticed, and that there was now an important role waiting for them in a society where people counted on them. As society has become increasingly prosperous, we abandoned those rites and never replaced them with anything analogous.
Why These Changes Affect Men So Hard
For most of human history, a man’s standing in his group depended on what he could contribute, whether that be through demonstrating his competence or defending against threats. Among contemporary hunter-horticulturalists, for example, men earn standing both through their skill, knowledge, and generosity as well as through their dominance in physical contests (von Rueden et al., 2011). Yet this mindset is often the very same one now labeled “toxic.”
To the extent the mental health field has helped create an environment in which men feel their core traits are considered defects, then it also bears some responsibility for the consequences. Levy suggests that for clinicians, the most practical way to begin remedying this situation is to make sure that men who need help can walk through the door without expecting to be told, once again, that they are the problem. If any of this deserves the word toxic, it may be telling a generation of boys that who they are is wrong. Perhaps the remedy starts with telling them the opposite.