“When people ask what I write about, I often mention ‘women’ as a topic I cover,” wrote Alana Massey in her most recent Matter essay. “I’ve realized, though…I actually write about men. Particularly, I write about how the unrestrained, unaccountable emotional lives of men wreak havoc on women.”

So, we are pointing the camera at the Y chromosome. What is actually going on with men, right now? What are they afraid of and unwilling to talk about? How do the inner lives of men affect women, other men, our culture?

These questions led us to a special series that reveals a crisis of masculinity. We see men struggling to define themselves at a time when gender definitions are expanding. We see men dealing, sometimes gracefully and sometimes not, with the weight of their power. And we learn that what it means to be a modern man is just like everything else: complex, messy, and always changing.

What’s inside The Men Issue: