A 20-year-old student and gamer I met in Cedar City, Utah, didn’t seem particularly amused by his own joke that is a cultural cliché. He lived in his grandmother’s basement, and hardly left the house except to go to class. He spends most of his free time online – playing video games, watching porn and hanging out on Discord, a predominantly male communication platform where users gather in communities dedicated to topics ranging from the nerdy to the outrageous. By his own admission, he was brutally lonely.
During the pandemic, he was a moderator of the Discord community, at first mainly dealing with technical issues and removing trolls. But one night, a young boy calls him through voice chat, and begins to share how lonely and depressed he is. He spoke to the boy for an hour, trying to talk and give him hope. The call caused more. Over time, he developed a reputation as an unofficial therapist on the server. When he left Discord for a year or so, he had about 200 calls with different people, men and women, who talked about suicidal thoughts.
But it was the boys who seemed to be the most quiet and lonely. At the site, he said, he found “more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “For men, there is something important about mental health and shame because you don’t have to be weak. You don’t have to be broken. The men’s mental health crisis is flying under the radar.
I have spent the last few years talking to boys as research for my new book, as well as raising three children myself, and I have come to believe that the condition of modern boyhood amounts to a perfect storm for solitude. This is a new problem bumping up against an old one. All the old flaws and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation – The same mass failure to teach men relationship skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social restrictions that push people away from intimacy and emotionality. But in America’s screen-addicted, war-torn culture, we’ve also added something new.
The micro generation that was hitting puberty when the #Metoo movement erupted in 2017 is now college age (and voting). He has lived his entire teenage life not only in the digital age, with its glorious array of virtual options to avoid the social anxiety of the real world, but also in the shadows of a wider culture of toxic masculinity.
We’ve spent the last half decade wrestling with ideas about gender and privilege, trying to challenge old stereotypes and power structures. This conversation should be an opportunity to shed the pressures and old animal norms, and help boys and men become more emotional and involved. But in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect – it has killed them even more.
For many progressives, fed up with the pile of male misdeeds, the refusal to engage with the feelings of men is now almost a principle. For every hard-wing right-winger begging his crying son to “man up,” there are voices from the left telling him that to voice his concerns is to take away air time from women or the more marginalized. In many cases, those who urge men and boys to be more emotionally expressive also take a moral stance that does not listen to what they feel. For many boys, it can feel like they are emotionally drained by both sides. This political isolation has been combined with existing male norms to push anxious male numbers into a kind of resolution, semi-political.
That statistic is starting to sound like a cliché in itself. Over a quarter of people under 30 said they have no close friends. Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend seven more hours a week than their female peers on screen.
As a mother of a boy, I get chills down my spine at this number. And my own research has fed my fear. I talk to boys of all genders. Jocks and incels, popular kids and socially awkward, rich and poor. And the same theme comes over and over for boys who are in the face of it a little more in general. They were quiet.
Some of them are actually isolated. Others have many friends. But almost all of them have a nagging sense that something important is missing in that friendship. He can barely talk to his friends about anything intimate or vulnerable. One teenager described his social circle, a group of boys who had been best friends since kindergarten, as “a support system that didn’t support him.” Others revealed that he could remember only one emotional conversation with a male friend in his life, and even his twin brother had not seen him cry in years. But they felt unable to express this pain or ask for help, for fear that, because they were men, no one would listen.
As the 20-year-old put it, “If any man cares, he’ll get rid of all the so-called privileges.” She added: “They’ll be like, ‘Whatever. Women have suffered more than you, so you have no right to complain.'”
Almost without exception, the boys I talked to craved closer, more open emotional relationships, but did not have the skills or social permission to change the story.
Perhaps it is not surprising that men do not know how to listen and participate in the emotions of friends at any age; after all, no one really engages with that. We are convinced that men and boys have more than their fair share of attention because in a sexist society, male opinions continue to be outsized. But the world – including his own parents – has little time for his feelings.
One study from 2014 showed that parents were more likely to use emotional words when talking to their 4-year-old daughters than when talking to their 4-year-old sons. (From birth, mothers are less likely to talk to boys’ early voices.) A more recent study comparing male fathers with female fathers found that male fathers were less active with their children, spending less time talking about them. sad feelings son and instead they are more likely to roughhouse with them. They even use subtly different vocabularies when talking to men, with less emotion-centered words, and more competition and winning-focused language.
Spend any time in the manosphere, and it’s easy to start to hate men and boys. Extreme misogyny, hateful hate speech, violent threats and threats make it difficult to summon sympathy for men’s concerns, and it is easy to forget the way patriarchy destroys them.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture wars, caring for boys has been subtly coded as a right-wing, dog-whistle cause for unscrupulous politicking. Men have way more than our concerns, the reason being, and now it’s time for them to come down. But for men, privilege and harm intertwine in a complex way – male socialization is a strangely destructive mixture of indulgence and neglect. In patriarchy, men and boys get everything, except the most important thing: human relationships.
Silencing or demonizing men in the name of progressive ideals only reinforces this problem, pushing things further towards isolation and defensiveness. The recipe for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes – to reach out to boys with generosity rather than punishment. We need to acknowledge men’s feelings, talk to our sons the same way we do our daughters, listen and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize them, and engage with them as emotional beings.
He is more than ready to talk. We just have to make sure we listen.
