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

I agree with this, up to a point, the patriarchy is bad for men too, women rights campaigners have been saying it for years but men won't listen, which isn't the fault of the 1%, men in general have to take responsibility for that one.

You can't help people who won't help themselves and it's men continuing to ignore women requests for equality because it would benefit both sexes that results in both sexes being disadvantaged, with one sex being doubly disadvantaged because their women.

I'm not sure what you think that's showing.

It seems to me to show that more men know words connected with physics and computing and some Japanese words (associated with violence), and more women know words relating to fabric, clothing and plants.

I don't think anyone would be surprised by this. But it doesn't say anything about differing knowledge of current affairs, which is what you originally claimed.

Interestingly, for the common words, a higher proportion of women know them, indicating that women tend to have a better vocabulary.

Can you explain what you intended to show with these graphics?

Any disadvantage men face because they are not members of the group that hold the power and wealth are disadvantaged due to the factors that prevented them achieving these positions. These factors may include class, wealth inequality, disability, but do not ever include the fact that they are male. Because while men can be powerless and oppressed, they are not powerless and oppressed because they are male. Because even the most powerless man is more powerful than a woman in his position.
A failure to acknowledge this when discussing mens issues takes us down the blind alley of looking at women as though our relative position is relevent as a cause and a solution.

Oh, the fascinating thing about that list is that in the one with made up words that don't mean anything (because they are made up), in nine out of ten of them more men than women said they knew what they meant. The one claimed by more women is the plural of a common surname - so recognisable in an 'I'm going to Macy's this afternoon' way.

It doesn't seem to have asked the respondents to define the words. So all it is measuring is recognition of having seen it before. And spoofing.

The reason I shared that was that you elided "more knowledgeable about current affairs" with "more knowledgeable".

So I wanted to establish (if you agreed) that the fact that men and women know different amounts about different topics is, in itself, not surprising or offensive.

Then the issue just becomes "is current affairs one of those where there's a difference?".

That doesn't seem to be the sort of claim that should provoke the kind of response that you had, which was that such talk is taboo on FWR.

That reaction seemed to assume that a claim that "men and women differ in distribution on X" is a claim that the men's pattern is the 'correct' or better one. It just isn't.

I assumed that it would be clear that my comment about "more knowledgeable" was referring to yours about "more knowledgeable about current affairs".

Current affairs are discussed extensively on FWR, so it seems particularly absurd to suggest that posters here (who are mainly female) are not knowledgeable about such things, which is what I was commenting on.

You didn't post any links, but the ones @OtterlyAstounding posted point out the flaws in these sort of surveys.

Edited to repost the links.
Women know more about politics than you think | United States Politics and Policy

Women Also Know Stuff: Challenging the Gender Gap in Political Sophistication | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core

In which case you have done it again. "Women" doesn't mean "posters on FWR" any more than "knowledgeable" means "knowledgeable on current affairs".

This is as silly as those discussions where someone says "Men are more violent" and someone pops up with "not my Nigel". No, not your Nigel, but the claim wasn't about your Nigel.

Is it your view that topics in which women outperform men in such surveys are down to lack of confidence in male respondents? It's possible, of course, but there is a much more natural explanation, which is that there is an underlying difference being detected.

The fact that they didn't have to define the words, or at least use them in the appropriate context, makes the entire study useless, imo.

I could say I know any words at all, if I'm not asked to prove it!

It's a list of words that men and women are more likely to say they know. It's a subtle difference, but it allows for some people to not want to admit they know what a word means, or to pretend that they know exactly what a word means when they think they should.

Try reading the materials linked about the issue of 'gender gaps' within political knowledge, so that you understand the issue, and why men aren't more knowledgeable about the important political issues. Maybe even read my comment on it, which explains it in summary.

Then feel free to come back and apologise for being so confidently wrong (don't worry, it's apparently a male trait ).

Exactly.

I mean, all that could be proving is that men are more likely to pretend to know 'manly' and 'scientific' sounding words, and to pretend not to know 'girly' and 'sissy' words. I mean, who knows? (ETA: I see now that's basically just me repeating what you're saying, but it's late here, haha).

It's so vague that it says very little of use, frankly.

True. So it could be that there is a social expectation that men know about military/technical words and women know about textiles/medical words, and that men and women know these stereotypes, so they respond on the ones that they think they "should" know according to those stereotypes.

But that explanation still relies on: i) men and women knowing at least that a word is military/technical versus textiles/medical, on ii) them perceiving some stigma to answering correctly to the 'wrong' ones, and iii) them knowing that some words are more heavily stigmatised than others.

It just feels like quite a bit of a stretch, when there is an explanation that accords better with daily observation. At a military gear shop, mostly men, at a fabric shop, mostly women. Neither is right or wrong. Different interest distributions show up in different behaviours and in different word knowledges. I don't see what is particularly threatening about that hypothesis. Neither is inferior.

A random thought occurred to me:

Allowing for cultural differences, broad generalisation, and the fact that this is a freshly formed musing...

Perhaps men are extremely opposed to opening up emotionally and being vulnerable to other men, because they perceive other men as a threat, and wish to maintain a show of strength around them.

They are less opposed to opening up to women, because they perceive themselves as being stronger than women, both physically and socially, which means women are not a threat to them.

Women are probably less opposed to opening up emotionally, partially because we exist in a state of awareness of our own constant vulnerability, in a way that men do not. We are more accustomed to being vulnerable, and strong in spite of it, while men fear it far more.

It makes me think of Ursula K Le Guin's quote from Tehanu, about shame:
"She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame."

Men and women are equal, but equality doesn't mean they're the same. That's the big mistake the 'feminists' in the 90's made, a women doesn't have to have sex like a man, or watch porn like a man, or swear like a man to be a mans equal, we're equal because we're walking, taking, free thinking apes just like men are. It's the same mistake men have been making, they keep say 'well you wanted equality' as if it's some sort of gotcha.

The fact that more men recognised words that are typically related to male interests and women recognised words that are typically related to women's interest should not be a surprise or a big deal.

I notice a thing recently, but has probably be around for a while, equality seems to be replaced by parity, which if the meaning of the word is what I think it is, (and hasn't been just changed arbitrarily) seems like a better word than equality.

Perhaps men are extremely opposed to opening up emotionally and being vulnerable to other men, because they perceive other men as a threat, and wish to maintain a show of strength around them.

That might only relate to the men in the west because from footage I've seen of other culture's around the world, a lot of other men have no problem getting overly emotional.

The reason I haven't been posting studies is that posting individual studies are never really conclusive (it's really not a matter of picking one study and saying "it explains it! You are wrong"). I wanted to look into how much effect removal of Don't Knows has on the effect.

The best meta-analysis I could find is this one which covers 106 surveys from 47 countries, and looks at the effect of 'don't know' and other methodological choices, and many other factors. It's on 'political knowledge' which is not precisely the same as 'current affairs', but is the topic your claim is about.

Their conclusion is that removing 'Don't Know' reduces, but does not eliminate the sex difference found in political knowledge, which is found across almost all countries surveyed and across a wide range of different methodologies.

ttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4968032/

"First, the results reveal that significant gender gaps in political knowledge exist in almost all countries under scrutiny irrespective of how scores are allocated to answers (positive, expressive, accurate). However, the gap is largest if DK answers are considered as incorrect answers."

I don't think either of us needs to apologise to the other. I learned from the study you referenced, and you learned from the one (or the 106, if you like) that I referenced.

I'm not at all afraid of the claim that men are more likely to be confidently wrong. Those pesky trait distributional differences again!

Very true! And historically in the west, men seemed able to be very effusive too. Which is why I'm even more confused by the insistence by modern western society, as well as by GeneralPeter on this thread, that men are somehow incapable of learning to communicate their feelings and be emotionally expressive with each other.

(I'm also confused by what examples of men and women having potentially divergent knowledge distributions, has to do with men's capability to learn to communicate their feelings.)

If the data one is studying is flawed to begin with - such as survey questions being framed around issues that men are more likely to find relevant than women, which has been noted as an issue - I find myself wary of the results.

It did also state itself, "Second, the analyses reveal large differences in gender gap size within individual countries over time. Such fluctuations cast doubt on the validity of the standard instruments measuring factual political knowledge."

But we circle back to: what does any of that have to do with your claim that men are somehow inherently less capable of showing and communicating their emotions?

Its not threatening to acknowledge there are patterns in behaviour in the interests of the two sexes.
It becomes threatening when this is seen as an indicator that a predisposition to a certain interest is based in biology; that the interests favoured by higher numbers of men are more intellectually challenging and worthy than those favoured by women, and therefore greater interest in these areas equates to higher intelligence. When aquiring information in an area is confused with intelligence and potential, and when not conforming to the patterns is seen as undesirable in an individual and discouraged.
These differences between the sexes studies are useful only in what they tell us about the different socialisation and access to opportunities of the sexes.

that men are somehow incapable of learning to communicate their feelings and be emotionally expressive with each other.

This really isn't my claim. My claim (which I thought I'd been quite specific about in my early posts) was that men can do this, just as the middle-set maths class can study more at weekends, learn from stronger mathematicians, and also (to step out of the metaphor) that there are large overlaps in trait distribution such that many men will be very good at this stuff from the outset and many women very bad at it.

My claim is that a wholesale, durable, significant shift in the entire population is very hard, and furthermore that this is at least partly because such differences are in part evolved. I also don't think this means that either men or women's distributions are inherently "better" than others, at least when we are talking about topic interests. But by the same token, that they shouldn't be thought of as politically threatening either.

In fact, I think that treating differences in trait and interest distributions as taboo has in many cases been unhelpful to the cause of sex-based and women's rights. In two main ways: i) some idiots then believe, or claim to believe, that this applies to physical differences also (I suspect not that many actually believe it), and ii) huge numbers of bystanders and commentators, who also don't believe it, do feel that it's somehow taboo to recognise, and they set policy accordingly.

Like... a huge reason not to let men into women's changing rooms is the violence threat. But dignity and privacy matter too. And the test for "is this reasonable" is not "would a typical man mind if a woman did it to him", it's "would a typical woman mind it". If you delegitimise seeing the difference between these two questions, then at best-case you get a sort of averaged-out view being applied, and at worst you just get the man's view being applied as the standard.

I agree with you in specific parts:

It becomes threatening when this is seen as an indicator that a predisposition to a certain interest is based in biology;

Disagree. Why would something being based (to some degree, whether small or large) in biology make it more morally worthy? If we recognise that male chimpanzees commit 90%+ of 'murders' and that this is similar to human males, does that make murder more worthy? I say no.

that the interests favoured by higher numbers of men are more intellectually challenging and worthy than those favoured by women, and therefore greater interest in these areas equates to higher intelligence.

Totally agree on this bit.

These differences between the sexes studies are useful only in what they tell us about the different socialisation and access to opportunities of the sexes.

The 'only' bit seems like a dogma claim. Why couldn't there be other drivers at play other than socialisation and access to opportunities? Northern European countries typically seen as having the greatest gender equality tend to see more 'stereotypical' division of men and women's occupations. It could just be that given more choice, men and women on average choose different things, and also that that is totally fine and not politically threatening.

What's not fine (we agree) is when that is taken as a measure of what is a 'worthy' occupation, or where it entrenches other types of problem. But, in those cases, fix the other problems, there is no need to make a big claim about the sources of the difference being entirely socially-constructed.

@GeneralPeter
"My claim is that a wholesale, durable, significant shift in the entire population is very hard, and furthermore that this is at least partly because such differences are in part evolved"

Prove your claim. Given that men interact far more emotionally in other cultures, and throughout history: prove that they are biologically evolved to be less capable of communicating their emotions.

And in addition to that, this conversation was started on the basis of this statement from you:

"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."

We've established that it's actually nothing like men being biologically faster than women. But the first sentence, that 'men just shouldn't be. They do it to themselves' - well, this is true, actually. They shouldn't be, if they're just going to complain about it. And who else is doing it to them? No one. They are doing it to themselves. So they need to learn to stop doing it. No one said it would be easy, but there it is.

"I also don't think this means that either men or women's distributions are inherently "better" than others, at least when we are talking about topic interests."

Great, neither do I, when they're accurate, and not based on sexist scientific methods, or used to try to enforce behaviours.

I agree we should be wary. But this does feel like an isolated, or at least ideologically patterned, demand for rigour.

We must definitely question whether these measures are good ones, what the reasons could be, etc. But I suspect the impetus for demanding such strong scrutiny of this particular claim is that it's one of the topics where men tend to out-score women. That certainly felt like the implication of "not on FWR!".

Women often outscore men on medical knowledge and other valuable things in similar surveys. But I don't think I'd have been pulled up, had that been the example I'd chosen.

what does any of that have to do with your claim that men are somehow inherently less capable of showing and communicating their emotions?

It's two slightly different claims on the same thread.

The link is that there exist sex-patterned differences in interests and capabilities.

Depending on what you mean by "inherently", I think the fact the same patterns recur across countries and contexts suggests to me that they are at least in part innate, and thus difficult to change durably.

You are of course free to take any view you like on nature vs nurture. To me, I think that almost all facts about human behaviour in society are going to be some mix of both nature and nurture. The 0% and the 100% views both seem extreme and implausible to me.

Can one create a society where women know far more about servos and howitzers and men know more about taffita and doulas? Yes. Are you pushing against very significant headwinds if you want to keep it up at scale for long, or across many cultures? Also yes, I think. What if you want to make men as social-verbal, good at articulating and emphathising as women? In my view, same pattern.

If men find articulating their emotions so hard, why are so many poets male?

Explain. Give references, including but not limited to Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Elliot, Kinsella and Heaney.

Catullus! When speaking about a platonic male friend, no less!

"Veranius, preferred by me to three hundred thousand
Out of all the number of my friends,
have you then come to your own hearth
and your affectionate brothers and aged mother?
You have indeed. O joyful news to me!
I shall look upon you safe returned, and hear you
telling of the county, the history, the various tribes of the Iberians,
as is your way, and drawing your neck nearer to me
I shall kiss your beloved face and eyes.
O, of all men blest than other,
who is more glad, more blest than I?"