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

'mens' lower social-verbal ability'

poets novelists

such a nonsensical assumption

Yes, possibly. Or become frustrated and dangerous.

Exactly, has happened time after time. Women used to be heavily involved in IT. I remember male managers being traumatised at being asked to use a keyboard (typing). It works in reverse when women become a significant number wages and status fall and there is male flight. (Men still get the top jobs though eg teaching]

I totally agree with @RoastBanana

A bit reductive no?

Mothers who work can be available, and those who stay at home may not be competitive and over schedulers.

I can provide samples of both! 😁

Can you think of any reasons why there might be more men who are prominent poets, other than their inherent superiority? I can.

I think there are differences in trait and aptitude distribution between men and women, with a huge amount of overlap and exceptions, and that these differences are a product of both nature and nurture. Then how those differences get expressed in society is socially mediated.

What about that do you find “nonsensical”? Why?

It is nonsensical because all your verbiage does nothing to negate the fact that many many men have, and always have had, high social-verbal ability.

Waffle away all you like, you still make no sense at all.

Many many men are not violent, and some women are.

So: nonsense that men are more violent than women?

Crime statistics.

Publication statistics.

History.

Go and read some books and stop demonstrating that you are an idiot.

We agree that men are more violent.

The fact that there are, and always have been, violent women does not disprove that.

You think that becuase men are more published historically they must have better social-verbal skills? Firstly, how social an activity do you think writing a book is? Secondly, can you think of any other reasons why men might have been published more, other than their superiority? (I can). Thirdly are you aware than women authors now (just) outnumber men and that their books sell better?

There’s a ton of confounding factors here. “I can think of prominent men” is not a slam-dunk counterargument against women’s ability.

Seems like a lot of mansplaining going on drawn in by the thread title. Putting that to one side, I’m sorry for both of them, but the book by the journalist Norah Vincent and the article by Parul Sehgal make the same mistake on focusing narrowly on the men that they know and men’s putative lack of emotional bandwidth. For one, more women than men attempt suicide.

For two, there’s a larger argument to be had imo. Whilst it’s true that social conditioning is exerted on both sexes (boys don’t cry and girls are nurturing), it’s too easy to lose sight of how those with wealth and privilege get to decide on the rules of the game. And the rules currently favour an atomised, materialistic, insecure, accumulation dependent life disconnected from nature and with our social relationships mediated through technology. That does not help boys or men but it also doesn’t help girls and women.

Hurts us all, but sure works a treat for those multibillionaires peddling us ever more technological lies. And as that structural influence over policy and politics in the US grows, these tech bros grow bolder in strengthening and expanding their influence over our lives adding AI/GenAI into the world.

To me, that is the greatest threat.

Yeah, obviously people who think there are differernt causes will come to differernt conclusions.

However the argument seemed to be that the idea that some differences are biologically based should not be entertained because people might then act on that in ways that you don't want.

That is, suppressing an idea not because of it is untrue but because it isn't convenient.

Differences that are based in biology will be consistent throughout time and across cultures.

If one ignores the power dynamics, masculinity and its crisis look imponderable.

If one doesn't: patriarchy is a system of taking social power and using it to gain all sorts of benefits. Little things like grabbing money and land and decisions about children. Big ones like not having the right genes to be able to do the dishes.

Everyone here, I'd imagine, sees the patriarchy as a social construct. All the values and traits it assigns to men and women are also constructs, invented to preserve that power.

The masculinity crisis is neither. Actual masculinity, whatever secondary traits flow from a Y chromosome, is never in any danger. Bits don't fall off just because you like cooking or fixing cars.

The so-called crisis is simply that maleness has lost some only some! of its claim to automatic respect. Women, with their lifetime of practice in living without respect, don't usually think much of it except "get used to it." (Too polite to say so, usually.)

Any time men want to have real friends, something they've decided to think of as feminine, they can do it.They just have to get over the sense that it puts them in the lower caste, "feminises" them, makes them less than Men(tm). The crisis is figuring out how to stay in the boys club but avoid its stifling rules.

I have one of each and have always tried to treat them the same way. When I had my son, youngest, I realised how differently a lot of other people treated their sons. Very much stiff upper lip, not much emotional support or as many hugs (with others who had kids of both sexes). Even clothes wise, at the age when girls are still wearing cute things with animals on, boys would be wearing little versions of men's clothes in black and grey.

Really interesting post OP, thank you for sharing. Lots of food for thought.

The numbers of male poets and novelists does not of course show that men have better linguistic/emotional skills. It does however create a serious reason to doubt the claim made here that men have innately worse linguistic/emotional skills.

Perhaps male/female linguistic/emotional abilities are naturally about the same? What a surprising suggestion on a feminist forum!

I cant help feeling that the author was looking at everything through a female lens. I also feel that perhaps strip clubs and men's retreats arent where the most socially adjusted males hang out? A bit like going to a weightloss club and finding a lot of the women there had a complex relationshhip with food.

I'm not going to dismiss that some men are struggling and how they struggle will be male though. I think we can do better with boys.

I also agree that men wrote poems and books - but these are old media? Men now write movies and tv shows, youtube content, tweets, music. Male chatacter cameraderie is massive in films.

Yes. A woman cannot dress as a man, go round pretending to be a man and believe herself to be experiencing what it is to be a man. Its highly likely her experiences and interactions with men were 'contaminated' by the fact the men either knew full well they were engaging with a woman, or at the least found something 'off' about their new mate.
Its also impossible that she didn't indulge in some projection. The 'curtailment' of her natural behaviour cannot be seen outside of the fact she was trying to fool people into believing her sonething she was not. Which obviously puts a limit on her 'spontaneity. The 'cruelty' of the women she dated is perfectly understandable if she gained their consent to date her by deception.
If women want understand men's issues, then there's plenty of them all too enthusiastic about telling us. This woman's charade is just a gimmick and if I read a book by a man who'd dressed as a woman in order to pontificate about femininity I'd find it more offensive than supportive.

First, I hope you don't think that your individual experience is universal.

Second, maybe not all women are as prim and low-affect as you.

I'm very uncertain as to how much can be blamed on parents, but it's certainly true that a lot of men blame women for men's failures.

I think that there are studies showing that, generally speaking, men are less verbally inclined, or verbally adept.

Thank you for your nice comment. I can only give my best guess as to what might be of interest.

:)

I don't know many women who are self-indulgent with an over the top, emotional hysterical reaction to the slightest thing either, they maybe more 'prim and low effect ' women out there than you realise.

'Prim' - lovely word, I'm sure that is how you describe men who display stability and self control.

Or maybe not.

Whatever happens chaps DO NOT keep calm and carry on because low affect is baaaaad, this is the 21st century, you need to work yourself into a state and riot in the streets.