Young men aren’t toxic, so much as they are unformed. The major paths to community, life advancement, and social and personal intelligibility have all more or less disintegrated in the past few decades. That disintegration was accelerated dramatically, even completed, by the pandemic.
Which means that men aren’t getting the formation they desperately need to become good men — and that they have historically received.
One in four of American young men report feeling lonesome. Many of them have either been excluded from or dropped out of their generation’s dating scene.
Their educational attainment and motivation continue to fall further and further behind those of their female peers. Suicide rates among men — and especially young men — are growing at alarming rates. They’re also worryingly prone to political and religious radicalization.
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A generation of malformed or unformed young men is a serious social and political issue, in addition to being a real tragedy for each and every young man struggling this way.
But when discussing how and why young men seem to have lost their way, we tend to over-focus on the problem and over-simplify the solution. We tend to discuss all the ways these young men fail themselves and others, and focus far too little on what has failed them.
Our culture is quick to take the worst expressions of male behavior and label masculinity as toxic. But as Scott Galloway writes in “Notes on Being a Man,” “[There’s] no such thing as ‘toxic masculinity — that’s the emperor of all oxymorons. There’s cruelty, criminality, bullying, predation, and abuse of power. If you’re guilty of any of these things, or conflate being male with coarseness and savagery, you’re not masculine; you’re anti-masculine.”
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Masculinity itself is not and cannot be toxic. But individual men can be. They often are, if they’re left unguided.
What’s failing young men today isn’t who they are, but the absence of guidance and formation shaping who they’re becoming.
Learning how to be a man is a crucial and difficult process. You just can’t do it alone. I certainly didn’t. I look back on the men who reached out to me in high school and college — managers, teachers, coaches and friends of my family — and marvel at how different my life could have been without their intervention.
One of my earliest mentors was a man named Mr. Lewis. He taught me how to play basketball with the city kids. My mom told me I needed to play on their team, so she dropped me off and introduced us.
And he changed my life. He challenged me. My teammates challenged me. He helped me feel safe, helped me learn confidence and humility. I was one of the worst players on the team, but I loved it — largely because I loved him.
Men need loving, mature, stable relationships with people who care about them and can guide them well. They need mentors, friends, managers, coaches, colleagues, teachers, professors and neighbors who will help guide them into flourishing masculinity. They need all of us to remain explicitly and charitably committed to supporting their formation.
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I’ve also seen this underscored repeatedly, working with young men over all my years as a pastor. Young men who flourish have other men who care for them and are willing to actively and specifically guide them. Young men who struggle usually don’t.
That’s why I think the crisis of masculinity is in fact a crisis of men. It’s a failure of men who need to help form other men, but don’t; and a failure of men who need formation and don’t receive it.
One precipitating factor in this crisis is simply that the formation young men need is opposed to the kind of autonomy we’ve unleashed on society in recent decades.
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We tell men to self-define, self-direct, self-construct. We replaced formation with autonomy, and they began to destroy themselves. Society labels this kind of direction as control, when in fact, it’s formation.
In ‘Why are single men so miserable?’ Allie Volpe explores the emotional and social difficulties young men face when they try and fail at self-directed formation and end up lonely.
“A lack of social support has myriad negative effects, regardless of gender: higher risk of mortality, depression, poor sleep quality, weakened immunity, anxiety and low self-esteem,” Volpe writes. “Having a network to rely on has been found to strengthen a person’s coping abilities, and quality of life, even while stressed.”
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Social media doesn’t fix the isolation, no matter how much it may feel like it connects us to movements, meaning and other people. The “formation” young men in particular receive from social media, influencer culture or television is often just another form of destructive self-creation. After all, they choose (to some extent) the content they consume. They are shaped by their interests and prejudices and unformed desires.
But nothing they consume online can give them the depth or direction they need to grow into good men. Nothing they can find online will give them the resources they need to endure real hardship or suffering. Their “autonomy” is just tragic, deforming isolation.
And this confusing, isolating, fractured digital “formation” that has largely begun to serve the purpose of bygone mediating institutions.
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The local organizations that used to so richly populate our lives asked something of us — responsibilities, expectations, standards — and in doing so, helped us all grow, individually and together. We had labor unions, civic societies, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, a rich school club culture. Churches were active and socially dynamic.
Towns used to have many generations closely tied together, so that the very young and very old were regularly in contact and developed friendships and mentor relationships with relative ease.
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These embodied, specific, personal relationships embedded in and organized by real and lasting communities are essential for young men’s formation. There simply is no internet substitute.
All of these institutions helped support strong men with clear formative and normative relationships. Every single one fostered the kinds of social interactions men are more prone to engage in and provided them a social network to lean on.
While almost all of these institutions are a faint shadow of what they once were, this remains unchanged: Formation requires real people, real sacrifice, and real community — and young men will not flourish without it.
If we want good young men — and we should — then we must stop outsourcing their formation to screens and self-direction, and once again take responsibility for shaping them with our presence, our intention and our lives.
