Young men arent toxic, so much as they are unformed. The major paths to community, life advancement, 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 arent getting the formation they desperately need to become good men â 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 .
Their educational attainment and motivation continue to fall further and further behind those of their female peers. Suicide rates among men â and especially young men â are growing at alarming rates. Theyre also worryingly prone to political and religious radicalization.
A generation of malformed or unformed young men is , 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,” “[Theres] no such thing as toxic masculinity â thats the emperor of all oxymorons. Theres cruelty, criminality, bullying, predation, and abuse of power. If youre guilty of any of these things, or conflate being male with coarseness and savagery, youre not masculine; youre anti-masculine.”
Masculinity itself is not and cannot be toxic. But individual men can be. They often are, if theyre left unguided.
Whats failing young men today isnt who they are, but the absence of guidance and formation shaping who theyre becoming.
Learning how to be a man is a crucial and difficult process. You just cant do it alone. I certainly didnt. I look back on the men who reached out to me in high school and college â managers, teachers, coaches and friends of my family â 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 â largely because I loved him.
Men need loving, mature, stable relationships with people who care about them and can guide them well. They need , 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.
Ive 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 dont.
Thats why I think the crisis of masculinity is in fact a crisis of men. Its a failure of men who need to help form other men, but dont; and a failure of men who need formation and dont receive it.
One precipitating factor in this crisis is simply that the formation young men need is opposed to the kind of autonomy weve unleashed on society in recent decades.
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, its formation.
In Why are single men so miserable? Allie Volpe explores the emotional and social difficulties young men face
