Notes on Being a Man

Donald Trump pulled off a stunning political comeback because of … young men. While the Democrats ignored this demographic, the far right rushed in to fill the void, flooding the manosphere with rockets, Hulk Hogan, coarseness, and crypto. The last presidential election was supposed to be a referendum on women’s rights. It wasn’t. It was a referendum on struggling young men.

Five years ago my advocacy for young men sparked a hostile response. Today society is ready to have a productive dialogue, rejecting the far right’s attempts to send non-white people and all women back to the 1950s and the left’s belief that young men don’t have problems but are the problem. This isn’t a zero-sum game. We can build on the gains women have registered over the past three decades and ensure there’s room for boys and young men in the conversation. Democrats are starting to tackle the crisis, but we can’t rely on prominent party leaders to drive the change. We can count on the tech industry, however, to keep supporting their massive valuations by connecting profits with the sequestration and enragement of young men. Men ages 20 to 30 now spend less time outside than prison inmates. 

Men of my generation have a debt to these young men. Our unfair advantage must be paid forward (or backward). We need to get involved in their lives, advocate for policies to right the ship, and model a healthier vision of masculinity. All of us have a role to play in giving young men a code — a positive set of principles — to live by. 

Below is an excerpt from my new book, Notes on Being a Man. This one is personal. I hope it resonates with you.

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Falling Farther, Faster

One of the semi-exciting perks of being an academic and “thought leader” is uncovering data, especially when it’s both obvious and hidden. Years ago, the alarming state of American boys and men overtook my attention. I track closely the emails I get. Most are from parents, particularly mothers, concerned about their sons, along these lines: “I have a daughter who lives in Chicago and works in PR and another daughter who’s at Penn.

My son lives in our basement, vapes, and plays video games.” Moms, not dads, were leading the charge. Others were either ignoring the problem or didn’t want to talk about it. Absent, too, was any sober, data-driven analysis. The gag-reflex cultural response seemed to be Wow, men are worse than we think, and that the issues they face are a function of their awfulness, and haven’t we spent the past forty years correctly focused on the struggles of other, more deserving groups? 

I connected to this topic on a personal level. I thought back on where I came from, my mom’s irrational passion for my well-being, the generosity of California taxpayers who made it possible for an unremarkable kid with mediocre grades to attend college and business school, and all the obstacles, temptations, and traps that could have easily hampered my socialization — smartphones, online dating, porn, gambling, video games, remote work. I wondered why what was happening to boys and young men was in fact happening and how I could raise my sons in a world where they — and males of any age — thrive.

The data around boys and young men is overwhelming. Seldom in recent memory has there been a cohort that’s fallen farther, faster. Why? First, boys face an educational system biased against them — with brains that mature later than girls’, they almost immediately fall behind their female classmates. Many grow up without male role models, including teachers — fewer men teach K–12 than there are women working in STEM fields — with Black and Hispanic school instructors especially underrepresented.

Post–high school, the social contract that binds America — work hard, play by the rules, and you’ll be better off than your parents were — has been severed. Seventy-year-old Americans today are, on average, 72% wealthier than they were forty years ago.

People under the age of forty are 24% less wealthy. The deliberate transfer of wealth from the young to the old in the United States over the past century has led to unaffordable and indefensible costs for education and housing and skyrocketing student debt, all of which directly affect young men. It’s why twenty-five-year-olds today make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, while carrying debt loads unimaginable to earlier generations. Neither the minimum nor the median wage has kept pace with inflation or productivity gains, while housing costs have outpaced both. As the costs of college have soared beyond the reach of most families, many of the manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a college degree and were often a ticket to the middle class for (mostly) men have been offshored. A prohibitive real estate market is a contributing factor to why 60% of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four live with their parents and 1 in 5 still live with their parents at age thirty. Stuck and unable to afford greater economic opportunities in nearby cities, they find the same crush and collision of density, stimulation, humanity, creativity, eroticism, and conversation that urban areas offer on their phones instead. In Manhattan, a four-hundred-square-foot apartment costs $3,000 a month. In its stead is a seventeen-square-inch mobile studio apartment costing roughly $42 a month, served up by AT&T, T- Mobile, or Verizon. 

Meanwhile, algorithmically generated content on social media contributes to—and profits from—young men’s growing social isolation, boredom, and ignorance. With the deepest-pocketed firms on the planet trying to convince young men they can have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen, many grow up without acquiring the skills to build social capital or create wealth. The percentage of young men aged twenty to twenty-four who are neither in school nor working has tripled since 1980. Workforce participation among men has fallen below 90%, caused by a lack of well-paying jobs, wage stagnation, disabilities, a mismatch of skills and/or training, and falling demand for jobs traditionally held by prime-age men.

This is deadly. From 2005 to 2019, roughly 70,000 Americans died every year from deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning — with a disproportionate number of those fatalities being unemployed white males without a college degree. Excluding deaths caused by the opioid epidemic, America’s suicide and alcohol-related mortality rate for all races is higher than it’s been in a century. It’s also a mating crisis, as women traditionally mate horizontally and up socioeconomically, whereas men mate horizontally and down. Up until the mid–twentieth century, homogamy — marriages between men and women from similar educational backgrounds — was more common than not. Today, hypogamy, where women marry men who have less education than themselves, is on the rise. When the pool of horizontal-and-up young men shrinks, there are fewer mating opportunities, less family and household formation, and not as many babies. Here’s a terrifying stat: 45% of men ages eighteen to twenty-five have never approached a woman in person. And without the guardrails of a relationship, young men behave as if they have … no guardrails. 

Why are we so averse to identifying and celebrating what’s good about men and masculinity, and why does it matter? Because we won’t prosper if we convince boys and young men that they’re victims, or that they don’t have to be persistent and resilient, or that their perspective isn’t valuable. If we do, we’ll end up with a society of old people and zero economic growth. If we can’t convince young men of the honor involved and the unique contributions inherent in expressing what makes them male, we’ll lose them to niche, rabid online communities. 

As my Pivot podcast cohost Kara Swisher commented once, it should matter to everyone if men aren’t thriving. Women and children can’t flourish if men aren’t doing well. Neither will our country.

Life is so rich,

P.S. Notes on Being a Man was published this week and is available in all the usual places.