While society has rightly focused on advancing women’s equality, we’ve left young men behind. Joe Downy asks what should be done about it.
A few years ago I was part of a Christian men’s group – full of men from early 20s through to mid–60s. We would get together once a week to eat, pray, but mostly to talk – about careers, childhoods, hobbies, sports, loneliness, social media – in short: life. But only once did we talk about masculinity, about what it meant to be a man.
I can feel the tension already. Talking about gender identities is fraught with it, and most of the time I would rather ignore the issue. Which is what I wanted to do when the group devoted a whole session to it. We went around the room and each of us described what being a man meant to us – it meant being strong, a protector, a provider, someone with wisdom, someone you feel you can turn to for support.
These were all perfectly reasonable answers, all good things to strive towards, but to me they felt outmoded. After all, don’t women also fulfil most of these criteria? To me (as I eventually expressed to the group), it was more important that we prioritise being fully ourselves and not worry about how ‘masculine’ we are. It felt too much as if we, as a society, were placing too much pressure on men to conform to fit this vague and murky notion of ‘masculinity’, whatever it may be.
Now I don’t know if I was right, but it said a lot that no one else knew either. Because masculinity (and femininity) is so ill–defined, fluid, subjective and individualistic on the one hand, and yet simultaneously universal on the other, shaped by common culture, common media, common ideals. And of course, the two are inextricably entwined. As much as we’d like to separate our desire to be individuals from these gender expectations, we are invariably influenced and shaped by what we consume – on social media, the TV shows we watch, the friends we keep, the places we work. While Christians believe God created man and woman as imago dei, made in the image of God, the meaning of our gender identities and purpose is more ambivalent – as is the degree to which it is or isn’t a “cultural construct based on group needs”, as psychologist David D. Gilmore writes in his book Manhood in the Making.
What has become clear over the years is that masculinity is undergoing something of an identity crisis. And not talking about it is having some very real and harmful consequences.
In the UK, suicide remains the highest cause of death for men under 50, with more than 5,000 cases in Britain in 2023 alone, more than the number of road deaths for the same year. Three in four of all suicides are male, with that figure on the rise since the pandemic. Boys are also suffering academically, with girls aged 16–18 outperforming them in almost all test results. Boys are also more than twice as likely to be excluded than girls, which means that men are less likely to graduate to higher education (men are also more likely to drop out of university than women). In prisons, the male prison population outnumbers the female by a factor of almost 24.
I have the privilege of being a mentor to teenagers through my church’s youth group, and too often I see these young men struggling with the expectations placed on them by society and social media to live up to unhealthy masculine ideals – that men should be rich, successful, good–looking, muscular, sexually active, the list goes on. This is striking for two reasons: firstly, that at the centre of all these is power or dominance; and secondly, that nowhere on this list is humility – famously lauded by St Augustine as the “foundation of all other virtues”.
All this to say that, while in recent decades we have rightly focused our attention to advancing the cause of women (we still have a long way to go on that front mind you), we should be able to accomplish this while also looking to our young men and boys.
Whereas the traditional role of men in the 20th century was broadly understood, if not agreed upon (provider and protector), today these have been hollowed out without being replaced. Men have become rudderless.
This has contributed (at least in part) to a worrying rise in misogyny and backlash against women, the overwhelming majority of which takes place online. One in four women aged 16–34 in the UK have experienced online abuse, with nearly half (45%) being sexually explicit, and two–thirds directed from strangers. In a recent YouGov poll, 21% of Gen Z men saw dominance as a positive trait compared with 7% of Boomers, while 21% of Millennial men believe that the purpose of feminism is to put men down, compared with just 3% of women.
We see this reflected in the rise of controversial public figures such as Andrew Tate, the Netflix series Adolescence, incel movements, as well as a recent finding that more than a third of teachers in UK schools had witnessed misogyny, while 61% of teachers who had been teaching for more than five years had seen increases in misogynistic behaviour among pupils since they started teaching.
Within Christianity too, there has been a push in recent years to portray Jesus and the Christian faith as something ultra–masculine. Mark Driscoll, the pastor of Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, said in an interview that “In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” Of course, the irony here is that Christians must worship a guy we can beat up, since this is precisely what Jesus endured in his torture, crucifixion and death. And while within the Christian faith Jesus is the archetype of what a man is (in the sense that he was fully man as intended by God), he goes against so many of our modern tropes: a man who wept openly in public, who taught that we should turn the other cheek, who allowed himself to be crucified. St Paul also taught that we should not boast in our strength but in our weakness.
What should be done about it?
In a recent conversation, Richard Reeves, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, said that “too often we ask what is the problem with men, instead of asking what are the problems of men”. We tend to place the problem at the level of the individual rather than with society.
There is a clear and present need for more healthy male role models and for more men in roles traditionally seen as more caring or nurturing. In 1966–7, 42% of teachers in the UK were male compared with 58% female. Today, that number is at 24% and falling, and in primary school it is as low as 14%. Similarly, the number of male therapists in the UK is lower than 25%, while the number of men in the NHS is less than 20%. Part of the issue is that we as a society have devalued these roles and pigeonholed them as ‘feminine’, when young men and boys are in need of male leadership in their mental and emotional wellbeing.
What’s more, we need to take care that this is not viewed as a zero–sum game when it comes to gender, and male and female identities. We should be able to acknowledge the good things that men offer without this being interpreted that they are somehow superior to women. We should be able to hold two ideas in our heads at the same time and advance the cause of women in society while still addressing the issues affecting men and boys. We should be able to say to boys and men that they are seen and valued while still uplifting and empowering girls and women.
But perhaps most importantly we should talk – about gender expectations, roles, virtues, and challenges. These can be uncomfortable conversations, but to some extent they should be. Challenging our preconceptions and ideals is innately painful but the alternative is to let society and social media be the father figures and role models for boys and men. This is where churches and faith communities can play such an important role, in providing those rare and much–needed spaces for men of all ages to talk about their mental health, their deep–felt struggles and desires.
What does it mean to be a man? I don’t know, but I do know we need to talk about it.
