Challenges To Masculinity

The New Challenges All Men Face Today (And How To Overcome Them)

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In a remote area of the Amazon rainforest, in territory belonging to Brazil, there lives an indigenous tribe known as the Sateré-Mawé, who have survived in the region for centuries. You can get a sense of how difficult life has been for them by considering their famous initiation ritual, in which young boys aspiring to become warriors are forced to wear a glove interwoven with Paraponera clavata, or “bullet ants” — so named because the pain from their sting is said to be comparable to the pain of a gunshot.

The Mawé do not hate their young boys, nor do they take any pleasure in watching them suffer; they are simply preparing them for the challenges of their world, where courage, fearlessness and a high tolerance for pain are attributes necessary for survival.

I thought of the Mawé this past November 11, a day when most nations of the Western world commemorate their own fallen warriors. My grandfather, before he turned 20, was fighting Germans in France during World War I; my uncles lied about their age to enlist during World War II. If you’re reading this, you probably have similar stories to tell about your forefathers, whether they fought in Vietnam, in Europe, in Korea or in Iraq.

By contrast, my first trip to Europe was a vacation; I have never fired a weapon, nor have I ever had anyone depend upon me for their very survival. The generations of men born in the late stages of the 20th century and after have largely escaped the cultural impositions that forged the men of decades past. We are free, as men have never been before, to write the scripts of our own lives.

The Institutions

And yet, in the void created by the sexual revolution and the slow, steady recession of religious institutions, men, by almost all traditional metrics, are floundering. In education, for example, the picture is bleak: Girls outperform boys in almost every subject, with yawning gaps in reading that doom many boys before they even graduate high school. Disciplinary violations, learning disability diagnoses and dropout rates all likewise plague young boys in particular.

These failures in early education translate into decreased college attendance. In 1970, men made up roughly 60% of all undergraduates in America; today, that ratio has reversed, and at precisely the time when a college degree was becoming the sine qua non for entry into the middle class. Decreasing educational attainment and a dearth of well-paying manufacturing jobs have taken their toll on men’s incomes as well: single, childless women under 30 now out-earn men in nearly every metropolitan city, and fully 20% of working-age men are unemployed, up from 5% in 1950.

The Culture

The consequences of these developments are captured in the titles of the books and articles that purport to explain them: The End Of Men, Boys Adrift, "Boy Trouble" and Women After All, to name just a few examples. Perhaps, as Hanna Rosin and Melvin Konner have it, women are simply better suited to success in the knowledge economy. Or, if psychologist Leonard Sax is to be believed, some pernicious combination of substance abuse, pornography and video games has derailed men from the traditional pursuits of career, marriage and family. (Incidentally, when Fallout 4 was released mere days ago, Pornhub reported a 10% drop in traffic, which must cheer Dr. Sax.)

Kay Kymowitz, author of Manning Up, has a different theory, albeit one that subsumes aspects of each of the others. Looking at a pop culture landscape that celebrates male puerility in films such as Knocked Up and Wedding Crashers, and a social landscape that sees men imitating their Hollywood heroes in avoiding responsibility for as long as possible, Hymowitz posits that these men are a symptom of “our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men.” As she put it in the Wall Street Journal:

It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers.

When women are increasingly well educated and financially independent, she wonders, what exactly do they need men for? Her question speaks to the last of the challenges facing modern men: our social role.