Young adults are suffering. As a result, young men are becoming more conservative. In fact, they are the only U.S. population group to do so in the last decade. Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends, and 63% of U.S. men aged 18-29 are single, compared to 34% of young women. Teenage boys spend two fewer hours a week socializing than girls. A staggering 44% of men aged 18-23 meet the diagnostic criteria for depression. Despite these facts, discussions about men’s issues remain taboo in most progressive spaces. Progressives must have open conversations about men’s mental health. 

Liberals’ Resistance to Men’s Movements

It is no surprise liberals are wary of these discussions. The phrase “men’s issues” conjures up vivid, and recent, images of anti-feminist reactionary movements. So-called men’s rights activists have focused not on men’s happiness, but on discrediting victims of sexual assault and launching harassment campaigns against feminists. The Men Going Their Own Way movement encourages men to withdraw completely from a corrupted society. For many progressives, talking about men’s issues is seen as de-centering women’s voices.

Women are justifiably frustrated. Current gender relations are rocky at best, especially in a post-Roe America. However, misandry and dismissal of men’s struggles are not the answer. Our frustration should not manifest as a contempt that pushes away half the population. Men’s suffering does not go down as ours increases. There is enough to go around. 

Loneliness Hits Men Harder

Gender roles discourage men from developing proper emotional intelligence and communication skills. Even men with many friends report feelings of shallow relationships. Young men feel adrift, even left behind. It does not help to tell men they are privileged continually. The experience of life under patriarchy is not a strict binary in which men are winning and women are losing. Men did not start winning when abortion rights were stripped away. They do not proportionately win when women lose. We are all losing right now.  

About 49% of men aged 18-23 surveyed in a 2023 national study had thoughts of suicide. A person depressed to the point of being suicidal does not feel privileged, even if their lives do come with certain gendered advantages. 

Opening up conversations about male suffering is necessary. We must admit that privileges in certain areas do not make men immune to pain. Reminding them of this privilege does not help solve actual issues of men’s mental health. Progressives must surrender their framing of society as men winning while women lose. The reality is that patriarchy exists, and we all suffer under its implications.

bell hooks said, “Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others.”  

Influencers Peddle a Scapegoat

The last decade or so has seen the online “manosphere” surging in popularity. The manosphere encompasses a broad range of subgroups, such as pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, the “red pill” community and influencers like Andrew Tate. Their various ideologies are all held together by an underpinning of misogyny.

Manosphere influencers are aware of men’s loneliness and fear, and they profit from it. They give frustrated, atomized young men someone to blame — women.

These men argue that feminism’s gains are made at the expense of men. Much of this ideology is derived from incels. In this worldview, women are depicted as naturally hypergamous, or as aspiring to date those of higher status. Incels blame this hypergamy, coupled with women’s freedom of choice, for men’s loneliness. Hypergamy, female promiscuity and feminism are blamed for the “downfall of the West” at large.

The once-fringe ideology of incels has crept into the mainstream. More popular manosphere influencers preach many of the same basic tenets, just with less doom. Where incels believe their lives to be hopeless, most influencers today promise success. They encourage pursuing a hyper-masculine ideal. Women are viewed as conquest and success is to be found through accruing money and status. Ironically, the ideal of stoicism and manning up peddled by these figures is often the very thing that leads to men’s feelings of perpetual disconnection.  

Progressives ignore men’s problems and enable brash figures like Tate to be runaway successes.  

We must resist the urge to see “men’s issues” as an inherent right-wing dog whistle. It is important to humanize your peers.

hooks said, “It is a fiction of false feminism that we women can find our power in a world without men, in a world where we deny our connections with men.”

Men are our fathers, brothers, friends, partners, classmates, peers. They are struggling.

A liberal or progressive ideology must be motivated by compassion and equity. This compassion must be extended to anyone at the fringes, including those vulnerable to radicalization. We do not win by shunning men. We enable misogynists to resonate with them that much more.

As long as the only people who try to reach young men and boys are conservatives, progressives will keep losing them.  

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@samreaganslc