Unless you live under a rock, you’ve likely heard that young men in America today are struggling. It feels as though the one constant in cultural dialogue these days is the discussion centered around the struggles of young men. And young men are struggling indeed.
The constant presence of the topic in cultural dialogue is exemplified by the fact that you have just about everybody that makes a living talking about current events or society putting in their two cents regarding the issue; some because they can clickbait and get easy attention, and some because they genuinely see the fact that young men are struggling as problematic for society.
And since everyone has an opinion that they think everyone else needs to hear nowadays, I figured it’d be appropriate to go ahead and throw my hat in the ring, especially given I am a member of the group in focus. I am a young man. And we are a group who, at least from what I see, appear to be very minimal in contributing input to this conversation despite our being the focus—it seems to me that most people engaging in conversation regarding this topic are either middle-aged men or older or women. Although I am an idiot, so I’m probably just blind.
Now, before I go any further, I feel I must make a disclaimer.
Firstly, I am going to make plenty of generalizations throughout this piece. Given this is a piece involving the two sexes, who are not only different enough from each other but also consist of billions of highly different individuals within each respective sex, generalizations are a highly useful necessity. I cannot possibly nail down each individual, so broad strokes.
Secondly, throughout the course of this piece, it is entirely possible that I come across as someone who hates women and is primarily trying to demonize them in this piece because, yes, I am going to be critical of women. But I do not hate women, nor is that even remotely the primary purpose of this piece. And, furthermore, I am not going to let men off the hook, scot-free, in this piece either. In fact, I’m going to start with the problems men are responsible for first.
So, with all that being said, let us proceed.
I know the phrase is “ladies first,” but I feel as though taking us young men to task first is a must in order to cut off at the pass anybody who might potentially say that I’m only attacking women in this piece.
Some of the reasons young men are struggling today are self-inflicted. It is important to recognize this as men because our first response as a sex whenever there is a problem in our lives, either individually or societally, needs to be that of looking in the mirror. Men should always look at themselves and acknowledge their own shortcomings first. Then we can look at society and start pointing out problems.
To do this for whatever part of your life you’re struggling with, think about how you could be doing better in that arena.
Take dating, for example. That’s quite a relevant societal topic right now because the dating market is a bigger train wreck than the one in East Palestine.
An important question for a young man to ask himself when it comes to dating—especially post-college when dating seemingly becomes significantly more pragmatism-based—is, “What makes me worthy of a wife?” And that should be the specific question you ask yourself for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it displays the correct approach to dating; dating is for marriage, not for fun. If you’re dating just for “fun” and all that entails, my advice to you is to grow up because you’re still a boy definitely unworthy of a serious, high-value woman. Furthermore, you don’t have the moral justification to gripe about anything because you’re part of the problem; that type of behavior is what contributes to the dating market being a disaster. And not only are you morally and characteristically underdeveloped, but you’re mentally underdeveloped as well because, if when dating, you’re with the right woman—i.e., the woman who’s going to be your wife—dating is probably going to be fun anyways.
Secondly, the question forces you to actually consider what a man needs to be in order to attract a woman. And, newsflash, it’s going to be difficult to have success with women if you have no clue about what not only piques their interest but also keeps them interested and along for the ride of life. I’m not going to go into the specifics, but it seems as though physical attractiveness to the best of your abilities—so fitness and diet—, social standing/career success/stability—so work ethic, intelligence, and drive—, and personal character are the broad categories to focus on that help make a man significantly more attractive to women. And I definitely have the authority to speak on this because I am definitely not a lifelong bachelor. But in all seriousness, if I’m near the mark with those broad categories regarding what women find attractive in men, then you can just use those, look at yourself, and think about where you are for each of them.
For example, if you’re a guy in his early/mid-twenties who’s still living with his parents and trying to find his path in life while either working on starting his own enterprise or who has a job where some of his colleagues are high schoolers—so very likely little to no income—you need to have the self-awareness that you’re not worthy of a high-value woman’s attention. You’re just not. You’re not in a position with regard to social standing, career success, or stability to say, “Hey, look at me. I’m successful and can provide for a family.” You’re not an attractive candidate to be a woman’s mate for life in that regard. That’s not to say you won’t ever be. You just have to work to get there.
If you’re in a similar boat—not necessarily the specific circumstances, but insofar as having work to do in order to level up your attractiveness per se—the point I’m trying to get across is just how important self-awareness and personal accountability are when it comes to finding a mate. Please don’t immediately jump to griping about how awful young women are or how much social movements and ideologies have screwed up the dating market—even though both are true to varying degrees, especially the latter—and act as though those are the primary reasons you are single instead of your own doing. Be a man and take some accountability because, well, unlike women, society will probably force you to even if you don’t want to.
And speaking of young women’s flaws and society’s screwups, let’s now discuss how those have contributed to the struggles of today’s young men.
There’s a major problem with how we educate young people today, regardless of sex. I can speak on this with some expert authority, given I got my degree in education and did a semester of student teaching. But how we educate boys specifically on the formal front is a disaster.
The very structure of the school system is highly unfavorable to boys, especially in younger childhood. Expecting a seven-year-old boy to sit still and pay attention for six out of seven consecutive hours with only half an hour for both lunch—if not shorter—and recess, respectively, is a pipe dream. It’s not going to happen. And yet, it is still what we expect boys to do from the ages of 5 to 18, five days a week, for nine and a half months out of the year. This disastrous structural flaw certainly explains some of the behavior problems we see in boys at the elementary school level, when they’re still much too young to even have a chance at articulating what is ailing them in their formal education journey.
See, in my experience, males are, for lack of a better phrase, “do the thing” oriented—better in a hands-on environment than just merely sitting and listening to instruction or sitting and doing some group discussion activity. Here is where high school-level and, even worse, collegiate instruction often fall short. Starting junior year of high school at the latest, young men should be getting hands-on experience in some field. Thankfully, many high schools have made great strides in trying to achieve this goal, although many are still lagging painfully behind. Furthermore, technical schools have had a firmly rooted partnership with high schools for years now. Oftentimes, these places become a setting where young men either discover or rediscover their love of learning, primarily because the teaching approach is much more “do the thing” oriented. I know because I have seen it firsthand.
I spent my junior year of high school going to a technical school for half of the school day. The vast majority of my schoolmates, and I’m talking 85-90%, were male. And they were guys who you could just tell did not have any affinity for traditional formal education—four core subjects and electives—in the slightest. But when my classmates and I from the videography/news journalism class would go around and film the other classes to see and “cover” what they were up to, you could just tell they felt educationally fulfilled. These guys enjoyed the fact they were getting to work on a car or go through firefighting simulations. And they enjoyed it, I believe, because, on a deeper level, men want to feel useful and capable with their hands. We want to be able to make or fix something and not need to possess ridiculously complex engineering or programming knowledge to do it—and if you think I’m wrong in my assessment that men want to be able to fix things with our hands, just look at how popular Lego is as a company. But the traditional education system does not nourish this craving in men; instead, young men are “taught skills” that will supposedly aid them in their identity as an economic agent in our industrialized economy. In reality, these “skills”—which are knowledge-based rather than hands-on-based—are often things that are either oversaturated in the current market, potentially at risk of being replaced by AI in the future, or not actually that useful or necessary to society. So, oftentimes, formal education is a miserable and, even worse, unfulfilling thirteen to seventeen years—if you include college—for American boys.
Not only do we do an abysmal job of educating young men formally, but our cultural education of them for, well, the better part of this century has been awful too. We have done a terrible job of raising young men.
Why?
Well, color me a clichéd conservative, but I wholeheartedly believe feminism is the primary culprit here. More specifically, later stages of feminism are to blame. And they are to blame because later stages of feminism can be quite misandrist, both in theory and reality. We know this is true for reality because we’ve lived it in the last decade and a half. The misandry of the later stages of feminism reared its ugly head in the fallout of MeToo and the toxic masculinity craze. And in the fallout, central characteristics of traditional manhood (e.g., ambition, masculine assertiveness, a desire to be more emotionally stoic, etc.) were demonized, a demonization that continues to this day. Part of this demonization has included a vehement encouragement of young men that we suppress these natural masculine characteristics in favor of feminine ones (e.g., empathy (particularly to an unhealthy extent), emotional vulnerability, etc.).
Unsurprisingly, this entire process has made both young men and women unhappy. Some young men rebel and check out, some young men are made sickeningly weak, and women, who are not attracted to modern “masculinity” no matter how much we are told otherwise, either by “experts” or women themselves, cannot find a mate they deem attractive enough with whom they can spend life. So everybody’s miserable.
People need meaning in life. I’d argue the best source of true meaning is found in Christ, but I’ll leave the specifics of that line of thinking for another time. For the purposes of this particular piece, I want to focus on two different categories of meaning: subject-oriented meaning and object-oriented meaning. The former is constituted by finding meaning in things like family, faith, community, etc.; the latter is constituted by finding meaning in pursuing material gain, oftentimes for self-indulgent means, tangible pleasure, etc.
Now, permit me to make an obvious statement: men and women find meaning in different ways. And with regard to subject- and object-oriented meaning, both men and women are going to be subject to these forces to varying degrees. Acknowledging that fact is not what is important; rather, what is important is which type of meaning takes precedence. If not already self-explanatory, subject-oriented meaning should be the primary type of meaning driving people’s lives.
Generally, men are less materialistic than women—there’s a reason the stereotypical bachelor pad is a couple of lawn chairs, a used couch, and a futon in the corner with minimal to zero decorations around the living space. But why does it matter that men are generally less materialistic than women? What does that have to do with meaning? Well, we live in a hyper-materialistic society. A society that incentivizes object-oriented meaning. Therefore, if men are indeed less materialistic than women, it is easier for us to resist the hyper-materialistic tendencies of the society in which we live and keep subject-oriented meaning as the primary driver of meaning in our lives. Furthermore, on top of society incentivizing object-oriented meaning, we also have the strong, independent woman, boss babe, alpha female idea that we’ve shoved in everyone’s face and heavily inculcated young women into for decades now.
Unfortunately, many young women have leaned into this idea of the object-oriented, strong, independent woman. As a result, many young women now appear to be much more career-driven than marriage-driven. Furthermore, an unfortunate side effect of women buying into this idea is the fact that young women now are more promiscuous than ever in our society because this idea also encourages women to “independently own their sexuality”—i.e., behave like a ho. Sorry that I have to be so harsh and vulgar. Now, men love female promiscuity when the men themselves are engaging in degenerate promiscuous behavior. However, when a man is looking to do one of, if not the most manly thing a man can do—get married and have a family—female promiscuity is like a crucifix to a vampire. It’s repellent for serious men. Look, I’ll just be brutally blunt and potentially crude. When a man is looking to get married and start a family, an innocent virgin is highly attractive. She is very likely the ideal, largely because she’s the likeliest candidate to not be high maintenance or have a bunch of baggage in her past that could cause serious relationship problems. In other words, she’s the likeliest to not be seriously screwed up. Again, sorry I have to be so harsh.
But young men look at the landscape of young women today and see fewer innocent virgins and way more promiscuous young women. Now I should point out, the environment a young man is putting himself in is going to have a significant impact on the quality of girls he is meeting. Obviously, a weekly churchgoing girl, who is also involved in church community activities, is going to be much likelier to be marriageable material than one of the girls at the bar or the club—although feminism has certainly invaded the evangelical church in the US, which is a major problem. But that, like the best source for finding true meaning, is a conversation for another time.
With that being said, the young male perception of the eligible female landscape is what it is, and, as a result, many young men have given up hope on the prospect of ever getting married and having a family—well, because of that and the marriage and divorce laws in this country being so horribly skewed in favor of women. In other words, many young men feel as though they are never going to experience the truest form of subject-oriented meaning, apart from faith, a man can experience. So many have totally checked out, and yes, that of course includes their work pursuits. Because of course it does. Subject-oriented meaning for a man includes providing for a family. Men want to do that.
But if young men feel as though they will never get to have the privilege to do that, why push harder for career success? What’s the point? Oh, to contribute to society, you say? Yes, contribute to a society which increasingly consists of people living by themselves in pods surrounded by other people living by themselves in pods in a massive concrete building surrounded by other massive concrete buildings consisting of the same; contribute to a society where you work in a pod surrounded by other people in pods in a massive concrete building surrounded by other massive concrete buildings with people working in pods, all working for different multinational, global corporations that don’t actually care about any of the people in those pods working for them, nor do they provide any true value to the society beyond economic, which I will grant does have value, but the point of the illustration still remains. And that point is that we live in a society that has cultivated a culture where object-oriented self-indulgence is promoted, the most important part of your identity is that of being an economic agent, and your primary purpose is not faith, family, and community, which are actively discouraged, but rather to produce, consume, produce, consume, etc. And more and more young men, I believe, see and understand this, either intuitively or consciously. And many, therefore, are done. But, hey, what do I know? I guess I’m just an angry young man who’s an incel, right?
But hey, we’re all for feminism and, more specifically, gender equality, right? So what’s the problem with young men checking out then? We can all just be househusbands for our beautiful and brave working wives. But in all seriousness, I’ll tell you the problem. Gender equality, at least with regard to male-female romantic relationships, is an abstract fantasy that completely falls apart when even a tinge of reality seeps in. You know what happens to a guy who expresses his wish to not work and, instead, be a stay-at-home husband and father? He stays single! That’s what happens! Women can express their support for gender equality all they want, but nothing causes a barren womb in a woman more than a man with no ambition for future prospects. It just doesn’t work. Or, to use a phrase more common in this part of the country, “That dog ain’t gonna hunt.”
Just as female promiscuity is repellent to a serious man, a man who has no ambition to go out into the world and earn his keep is repellent to a woman—both the serious and promiscuous ones. Yes, there are exceptions, but this is certainly true for most women. So, men still have to act traditionally masculine—go out into the world, make something of themselves, and earn their keep—but men have to be okay with women ceasing to act traditionally feminine in favor of acting traditionally masculine. That’s what “gender equality” actually is in practice. Got it? Wonderful.
So to say that I am against “gender equality” and am in favor of traditional gender roles and the patriarchy would be an understatement.
And I’m in favor of these frameworks because, when you get down to the brass tacks, what these frameworks serve to do in people’s lives is to provide them with both subject-oriented meaning and stability. These frameworks do this through clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of each respective sex, hence acting “traditionally masculine” or “traditionally feminine.” Now, I’ve already discussed subject-oriented meaning, so I’ll leave that part of the conversation where it is. With regard to stability, clearly it is something that people must have in their lives in order to function in an upward trajectory in life. The funny thing about stability, however, is that it oftentimes is a vital part of discussion only when children or what is best for children is the central topic of discussion. At least, that's the case when I think about it or hear conversations where stability is a prominent theme. But stability doesn’t just benefit children. It benefits humans throughout the duration of their lives. Therefore, from a purely logical standpoint, the patriarchy and gender roles seem far better options than the one we’ve chosen the last sixty-odd years, where individual independence is at the top of the hierarchy, which has created severe instability, both in people’s individual lives and society at large.
Now, with all that being said, this is not to say that I am in favor of women being mere servants. I’m not against education for women. I’m not even against women working, especially in marriage pre-kids; I’d actually encourage it. It can only make a single-income household more feasible for when kids come along, which isn’t nearly as easy as it should be in our modern economy.
But women need to understand that their career success is not what makes men attracted to them, except for maybe the prospect of having more money to put away for the family in preparation for kids if the man is not already firmly established financially. But even many of those men would likely want the woman to understand that the ideal is, “Well, you know you’re not working when we have kids, right? That’s my gig. I got us.” Now if the man is established, then, girls, I’m just going to be straight with you. He almost certainly couldn’t care less about your career. Can you cook? Are you sweet and tender? Are you intelligent enough to educate the kids adequately? Do you have the qualities of a great wife and mother? Almost certainly as his grandmother and/or great-grandmother did because that’s how women were raised back then. That’s what he cares about. Acting in a traditionally masculine manner—i.e., pursuing a career—is not attractive to most men…AT ALL.
Because men are still expected to behave as men in reality, there’s less work to do than women in order to get things on a more correct path. However, as I clearly discussed earlier, that does not mean men are perfect as is and have zero work to do. We’re not, and we do.
Firstly, turn to Christ. Center your life around Him. Fortunately, a lot of young men seem to be taking that first step. Stick with it.
Beyond that, the main goal I have for young men is to not check out. I repeat, young men, DO NOT CHECK OUT. Even if you feel, see, or understand the things I’ve discussed thus far—and what you feel or see is, indeed, valid—do not give in to despair. Don’t be blackpilled. Find your subject-oriented meaning in your potential future wife and children, even if you’re skeptical about the prospect of getting to have them in your life. Let the potential of having them in your life in the future drive you.
I realize this may sound foolish, not to mention super cheesy and corny, but let me throw a hypothetical at you. You’re a 28-year-old guy who suddenly meets a beautiful girl who’s just graduated from college—i.e., she’s not consumed by a career yet, even in our modern society—and you realize she’d be an amazing wife and mother. Man to man, we both know you’d much rather be way further down the road towards being firmly financially established, if not outright established, for her than still making $40,000 a year because you were complacent and wholeheartedly believed you were never going to get to be married with kids. So, again, let your potential family in the future be your subject-oriented meaning.
For the young women, I’m afraid I must bear bad news. There’s more work to do for you all. You all have to shed an entire ideology.
Firstly, as with the young men, if you haven’t already, turn to Christ, and center your life around Him.
Then, reject modern expectations for women. Embrace femininity. Don’t just learn how to be a “tradwife” like you see on TikTok. Learn what it actually means to be a traditionally feminine woman. And hey, just a heads up, the Bible is a wonderful place to learn how to do just that.
Furthermore, focus on finding a husband. That is way more important than your career. And, girls, I know this is a hard truth to swallow, but it is the truth, so I’m going to hit you with it: you do become a less attractive candidate to be a wife and mother as you get later into your 20s and into your 30s. We all, both men and women, become less physically attractive as we age, and you all specifically become, to be blunt and potentially vulgar, less fertile as you age. And that combination makes you all less attractive to men as you age. That’s not to say that men are just automatically able to remain attractive as we age. It’s just that age usually comes with success, which is what aids in attracting a woman. But if a girl gets to choose between a successful older man or a successful man closer to her age, she’s choosing the latter. A lot of guys will act as though they can just wait and still be able to pull a ridiculously attractive girl. That’s not necessarily the case. Although he definitely has a higher chance of doing so than a woman who waits until she is older, but I digress. So, if somehow you’re a girl coming across this that is in high school, college, or right out of college, DON’T WASTE TIME. Don’t “live it up” if you haven’t already. Keep your innocence, which makes you more attractive, and find a husband instead.
Now collectively, as young men and women, we have to reclaim our culture. We have to use social media and entertainment to, yes, advocate for the correct values and the correct structure of male-female relationships and roles.
Unfortunately, this reclamation will not be immediate. Yes, things move faster now in the post-internet age, and the reclamation can be achieved quicker than it would have been pre-internet and social media. But this is still going to take time. We are, after all, living in the results of a multigenerational degradation. Therefore, the reclamation, too, is going to have to be multigenerational. But it can start with us.