The ‘Masculinity Crisis’ Is Real.

[MsAmerica]

The ‘Masculinity Crisis’ Is Real. This Forgotten Book Explains Why.
Why do men find it so hard to connect with other people, and their own emotions?
By Parul Sehgal

Where are we exactly, in this deathless debate about the crisis of masculinity? We stand splattered in discourse, ears ringing from the unceasing alarm over men and their prospects — their lack of education and lack of friends, their porn and gambling, their suicide rates. This while tech elites, sporting their bulgy new bodies, call for an infusion of “masculine energy,” and a hideous new sport is born: “sperm racing.” Is it any wonder that a stance has emerged of principled contempt? The so-called crisis, according to its critics, is actually a crisis of accountability, a refusal on the part of men to regulate themselves emotionally and behave like adults. In this view, men aren’t in crisis, America is in crisis, and to suggest otherwise is to engage in a kind of “himpathy” — to show excessive concern for men’s feelings — and to co-sign a reactionary pushback.

Amid all this conversation, simultaneously so bloated and thin, an old book has been exhumed. Eccentric and a bit embarrassing even in its own time, it is also oddly appealing in its open curiosity and lack of inhibition, even as it exemplifies how any idea, passed through the fun-house mirror of discourse in our moment, gets reflected back in its most grotesque form.

Its author, the journalist Norah Vincent, has been anointed as something of a godmother to the manosphere. In her book “Self-Made Man” (2006), she recounted an 18-month social experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and infiltrated male-only spaces. As “Ned,” she dated, applied for jobs, did a stint in a monastery. She joined a bowling league and lurked at dank strip clubs. Vincent assumed her project would reveal that men moved through life with a kind of ease that women could scarcely imagine. She was brutally disabused. The men she met were lonely and unhappy. Their pain became her own. When she tried to date as a man, the cruelty of women left her shaken and humiliated...

At first it was the world of masculine subtext that felt so exotic, the micro-intimacies she traced, small moments of warmth and deference between men. Even a handshake felt like a revelation: “Receiving it was a rush, an instant inclusion in a camaraderie that felt very old and practiced.” But slowly she began to find the communication between men painfully awkward — “bumper cars trying to merge.” The men she met had a palpable need for one another’s company; they seemed starved for closeness, but they could not speak of anything personal. She wrote of one: “I could feel his loneliness, his need for intimacy so long suppressed, pushing out like the palms of someone’s hands against the window of a sinking car. He was still alive in there, intact behind the dejection and neglect.”

It wasn’t merely that they didn’t choose to speak about their emotions. Some of them couldn’t name them; others weren’t conscious of having feelings at all, as one shared at a men’s rights retreat...

As a child she had envied boys their abandon, but living as Ned, in his narrow emotional register, felt constricting. “I curtailed everything: my laugh, my word choice, my gestures, my expressions. Spontaneity went out the window, replaced by terseness, dissimulation and control. I hardened and denied to the point almost of ossification.” She missed the emotional range women enjoyed — “women get octaves, chromatic scales of tears and joys and anxieties and despairs and erotic flamboyance.” Men had irony and silence and rage. The scrutiny and self-surveillance proved exhausting. “Someone is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, or even children.”

For the whole article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/magazine/masculinity-crisis-norah-vincent.html

https://www.scribd.com/document/970865185/The-Masculinity-Crisis-Is-Real

There's definitely a sense of disconnect, distrust, apathy, cynicism & nihilism that I have come across in young men where they blame women's freedom for their loss of opportunity.

The armchair psychologist in me suspects the roots stem from bad parenting as in unavailable parenting. Today's generations grew up in the 'me me' & 'scheduling' era where parents are more self consumed. These parents weren't adherents of the 'sacrifice' culture before them & it manifests in todays youth mental health problems for both men & women. They also grew up in a culture that highly values status & luxury living so if they don't measure up there's a sense of worthlessness.

In my experience successful child rearing is very time intensive not to mention child centred. Developing trust thru acts of listening & caring not authoritarian or status worship tactics is key to establishing a healthy habits & emotions where they can be open to guidance otherwise they look for parent's guidance else where:

"If the father is not in the home, the boy will find a father in the streets. I saw it in my generation and every generation before me and every one since. If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your home.”

-Denzel Washington

In the case of young men broadly today that 'father/mother' can be racist/sexist/homophobic hate preachers on social media.

Unavailable dads, maybe. But I think mothers are way more attentive today than they were 25+ years ago. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and it was pretty common then for kids to not be listened to, left to get on with things (latch key generation), and pretty much ignored. Mothers today seem to spend a lot more time with their kids and focus on them more than in times past.

Yes & no. A lot of mothers prefer to work full time so aren't available & those that don't sometimes are very competitive who love to indulge in over scheduling pushing over achievement in academics & sports.

I listened to a report on one of The Economist's podcasts that said statistics show that men in the west are getting more and more involved with their children (and doing the house work, they're up to 40% now).

Even in Japan, they brought out a paternity leave entitlement that mostly went unclaimed for years, has seen a large raise in new fathers applying for it.

So maybe the fathers are to blame.

Poor men. How sad. They should really do something about it - after all, they're the ones who shaped this world into what it is, and they have the power to change it. I'm not sure what it has to do with women, though.

ETA: the image awaiting review is the 'bike fall meme'.

Except that they didn't shape the world into what it is; effectively a relatively small group of people with wealth and power shaped the world into what it is today. The 1% didn't shape the world to benefit men as such, they shaped the world into benefiting their own particular interests; much of what they sought to achieve disadvantaged women, either directly or indirectly, but it also disadvantaged many men at the same time.

No people did not, men did. Those elite 1% you talk off were men

men's problems will not be solved by women

odd isn't it how these posts wheats end up in AIBU or FWR and never on dads net

A relatively small group of men. Not only that, but society does benefit and advantage men over women, in practically every measurable regard.

But my point is that men have more power to change things than women do, and if they're unhappy about their lot, then perhaps they should work on that. I'm not sure what it has to do with women, however.

Men's problems in regards to something like...emotional expressiveness, say, is an entirely SELF-MADE problem. It's something that they unnecessarily police in each other, and they could choose to just...stop policing it, and encourage each other to be more expressive and open. It's not being forced upon them.

Men kill, rape, abuse, and degrade women and children the world over, but they're too scared to express their emotions lest they be made vulnerable by them. Hm. My sympathy is limited.

How can this journalist claim that her experience is symptoms of anything ? She was never a young man. She only ever was a young woman pretending to be a man. Of course it was constricting: she had to watch herself all the time to avoid revealing herself. And probably people were "evaluating her Manhood" because they sensed something was off. That's pure bullshit.

Now on the crux of the subject: yes, men have it hard too. It's true they statistically rarely discuss personal and emotional topics with their mates, which certainly leaves them lonely and at a loss when facing personal issues. I'd go as far as to say it's because facing some of those issues is fairly new to manhood as a whole. It's for them to change that. And as mothers of boys, we can help. But only help.

It’s an interesting book, but the conclusions felt somewhat baked into the method.

To be Ned, the author decided she should deprive herself of her emotional and linguistic register, then concluded that men must feel horribly constrained and unnatural.

It would be like me deciding that to go undercover as a women I must refrain from systematizing, politics or problem-solving and then concluding the same thing.

Men, as a group (and with huge variation and much overlap and many exceptions) are definitely less good at social verbal stuff, just as women are less fast runners.

Concluding that men (or women) are therefore deficient is, in one sense, trivially true, but also not very enlightening.

It often seems to jump from that to “well, men just shouldn’t be. They do it to themselves”. This feels like the argument that if women want to stop losing to males at Parkrun they should just run faster. After all, they have limbs just as men do, and could just move them faster. Correct, but not a very useful analysis.

I agree with your first three paragraphs.

But in regards to your last three, I think that's because women are actually physically smaller, weaker, and less athletic than men, as a demographic. They are incapable of running faster. Whereas men are not incapable of sharing their emotions with people should they wish to, and I don't think there's any evidence that men are innately worse at social communication.

Lost me at "an old book has been exhumed. Eccentric and a bit embarrassing even in its own time..."

...2006!

I have socks older than that.

The bounds on women’s strength are ‘harder’ in the sense that they are physical, but I don’t think they are ‘more real’ in a sense that is relevant to whether men as a whole group could/should “just be different”.

Perhaps a better parallel is the top maths set and the bottom one (or the middle one, if you prefer). The bottom set has no physical constraint that prevents them from writing the correct answers. The constraint is in their minds, the way they work, the connections they make, the aspects of the world around them that they notice or don’t notice, the practice they get as a result.

This analogy works well the more I think about it. Any individual bottom-set student can improve their maths by training, and there might be the odd great mathematician in the bottom set who just needs to be unblocked in some way or shown the right techniques etc.

But ultimately, if good maths is what you are measuring on then the bottom set as a whole is always going to disappoint.

Will leave innate to the next reply as this is already getting long!

I think the bounds on women's strength are absolutely 'more real' in a relevant sense - a man can learn to be more emotionally open, but a woman cannot 'learn' to be as strong, tall, fast etc as a man no matter how hard she tries.

But maths performance is a better analogy, absolutely.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be difficult for men to change their mindsets, but it's not impossible, it's a self-imposed problem, and it's also got nothing to do with women.

I also can't help scoffing at the fact that men's big problem is that they're lonely and emotionally isolated (by choice), and not that they and/or their fellow men keep raping, abusing, killing, and objectifying women and children. Talk about priorities!

I'm not going to weep over men's loneliness when, as a demographic, they don't really care about women's rights.

@OtterlyAstounding

I think men being (on average) less social-verbal is a “self-imposed problem“ only in the same way that being bad at maths is self-imposed.

Do those bottom set children spend their weekends doing logic puzzles? Watching maths YouTube videos? Observing how their stronger peers do maths and trying the same thing out? Probably not. So it’s self-imposed. But it’s also a function of a real difference in (on average) aptitudes.

Women are, when studied, less knowledgeable about current affairs than men. Is it self-imposed? Kinda. They could all spend more time studying and discussing the news. Margaret Thatcher, Helen Joyce and hundreds of millions of other women show it can be done.

Would it be useful to write lots of books worrying about women’s inability to get in touch with their factual side? Probably not much. Would it help to say “women, sort yourselves out”. I think even less. Perhaps intellectually interesting to study, but not a useful framing for whatever social problem this is supposed to be driving.

Agree with you on this not being anywhere near as big an issue as male violence. “This isn’t an issue becuase there are much bigger ones”: agree. “This isn’t an issue becuase men (or women) can ‘just change’”: disagree. Often true for an individual. To change it significantly, durably in aggregate: almost impossible I think, becuase I think there is millions of years of evolution in these trait distribution differences.

based on the quotations in the OP and my own life experience the author seems flat out wrong:

the emotional range women enjoyed — “women get octaves, chromatic scales of tears and joys and anxieties and despairs and erotic flamboyance.”

The fuck we do. My 'octave' runs from the first primroses to mild irritation, via a nice cup of tea.

Okay I've had some moments of rage when perved on by a perv.

Men had irony and silence and rage. Women have those too, and it is one of the ways we cope with a life being perved on.

But emotional incontinence is a choice, and the women I know don't choose it.

And men choose to be poets, and artists, and composers, to be passionate about sport, to participate in communities, to love their families. I think she chose to meet some unrepresentative men.

@GeneralPeter
Women are, when studied, less knowledgeable about current affairs than men.

I'm not sure that FWR is an appropriate place to spout unsubstantiated nonsense about women being less knowledgeable than men.

Not ‘less knowledgeable’. Less knowledgeable about current affairs.

This stuff gets studied and there are topics that men and women perform similarly on, topics that women perform better on, and topics that men perform better on.

Does that strike you as a surprising finding?

@OldCrone In a similar vein,
do you consider the attached findings on knowledge differences either surprising or offensive? Why?

Can you post some better images? Those are too small and blurry to read.

At present, all I see is a statement made by an anonymous person on a discussion board. That's not a 'finding', it's an opinion.

The images are in this article. It it a list of words that women know disproportionately or men know disproportionately:

today.yougov.com/society/articles/53790-words-that-men-or-women-are-more-likely-to-know

I like the maths analogy, but it does have one flaw. Those in the bottom set aren't writing articles lamenting how bad they are at maths, there isn't a society-wide wonderment at why they're bad at maths, pinning it on all sorts of reasons like poor parenting etc . If there was, surely eventually they'd realise that putting a bit of effort into learning techniques that work for them would improve the situation.

I don't mean to minimise the issue, but honestly there seem to be endless articles about toxic masculinity pinning it on all sorts of external reasons that are out of men's control. The reality is, most people have something shit going on in their lives, some overwhelming pressure or lacking in one or multiple areas at a personal and societal level.

We all have a duty to engage in self betterment as far as we can. I see women doing this all the time (even with careers and caring responsibilities), but men do seem to wallow and blame everyone else - a man who strives for self betterment is rare in my experience.

Women should not be solving men's issues, men need to pull their heads out of their arses.

@GeneralPeter

Actually, I'm afraid that old study about women's political knowledge doesn't seem to be accurate, given this, which points out that the gender gap disappears if you remove the 'I don't know option' from multi-choice surveys. Which means that in the older studies, all they showed is that women are less confident of their knowledge, not that they don't have it.

Also, in such research, as this study points out, quite often the political questions revolve around information that's considered important to men, but which women - who have different political concerns - may not be so interested in. Not to mention, an inability to rattle off memorised names of State Senators doesn't mean an inability to understand the meat of a particular political issue.

But, should women be behind men in their knowledge of current events, then yes, a perfectly reasonable response would be 'women, sort yourselves out', as who else is going to sort it out for them? Fairies from the bottom of the garden?

As for what you're saying about men - it's patently ridiculous, frankly.

Not only do different cultures worldwide have very different norms about male behaviour and relationships (just look at the emotional ancient Greeks!) but are you actually trying to tell me that 'millions of years' of evolution has left men - who are capable of being charming sociopaths, charismatic cult figures, and sympathy-provoking cocklodgers - incapable of social-verbal communication? Hm

It seems most likely that men don't like to communicate emotionally with other men - or with women, often - because it makes them vulnerable, and they have a deeply ingrained aversion to that (understandable). But also, their problem.

Well put! Totally agree.