The Crisis in Masculinity?

Ever since the film Adolescence was released last year there has been a flurry of articles in the media talking about a ‘Crisis of Masculinity’. 

In the film a 13 year old boy, having been radicalised by on-line misogyny, murders a female classmate when she rejects him. Some commentators have dismissed the so-called crisis as an irrational moral panic; other say that this is nothing new, in every generation there has been a crisis in masculinity; some say that what is described as a crisis is better understood as a period of social transition, in which outdated norms are being challenged rather than masculinity itself collapsing. Others have tried to suggest how the crisis might be addressed.

What is clearly supported by research is that 46% of boys and men between the ages of 16 and 29 years believe that feminism has done more harm than good to society. 42% of men felt the need to be the main household breadwinner (compared with 13% of women), while 29% of men believe that if they lost their job their partner would see them as “less of a man”. Added to this manual jobs in industrial production have declined in the UK. Much work is seen to have been ‘feminised’. So there may be a class-element here with mainly working-class young men feeling they have been displaced and losing their role.

In the UK the proportion of men aged 16 to 64 participating in Britain’s labour force has dropped from a record high of 84% in 2009 to 81% in 2024 – a much bigger drop than in the US. Men are working shorter hours too, with only those over 65 putting in more hours since Covid.

The outlook is particularly worrying among young men, as a growing number are not entering the working world at all. The number of 16—24-year-old men not in education, employment or training (NEETs) is up 40% since Covid, compared to just 7% among women.

Males commit 78% of all suicides the highest rate in 15 years. Women are more likely to be depressed. But depressed men are less likely to seek help, making them more susceptible to suicide.

On the other hand men still earn more than women and continue to rule the roost in powerful leadership positions, but in reality, that high-profile club makes up a small percentage of the male population.

Boys need to learn what it is to be a man. It’s learned from family, workplace, school, playground, film, TV, computer games, friends and increasingly on-line through social-media. A major on-line influence now is the manosphere: a collection of online communities that share a misogynist and male supremacist worldview, where men are believed to be innately superior to women and to possess the right to subjugate women. Feminism is blamed for robbing men of their rightful place in the world, leading to men losing their rights and control of society. Men and women are pitted against each other.

It seems that social changes in work patterns have led to a lot of young, working-class men  feeling dislocated and malign social-media has come to fill a vacuum in their lives.

So what is to be done? Merely controlling access to mobile phones is unlikely to be enough.