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