It is usually an unremarkable event. Someone tweets an article to me that they think I might want to read or share. This time, it was my friend and colleague Melissa Langsam Braunstein who sent me a link to David French’s National Review article about the feminization of boys.

I clicked. I read it. I don’t have any substantive complaints about it. French wrote a basic introduction to the Boy Crisis.

And that is the problem.

It sounds like the Boy Crisis is some new revelation based on fresh looks at the latest research. But this knowledge is far from new. We are 16 years past Christina Hoff Sommer’s The War Against Boys, five years past Dr. Helen Smith’s Men on Strike and Kay Hymowitz’s Manning Up — and those were by no means the first books about the troubles facing males.

First call distinction probably needs to go to Neil Lyndon, erstwhile writer for The Times of London. In 1990 he wrote an article questioning feminism, which The Sunday Times titled, “Badmouthing”. That article and the follow on book, No More Sex War, turned him into a marked man and career martyr for stating what should have been obvious and has certainly proven to be prescient: Second Wave feminism did not seek equality with men but dominance over them.

Lyndon published his book about the time Camille Paglia exploded on to the scene with warnings about romanticized notions of sex neutral indoctrination in Sexual Personae. (That was only one of her warnings; I say she “exploded” on the scene because she saw so much that came to pass, very little of which was popular at the time.)

1990. We are coming up on 30 years.

The Boy Crisis is known. In fact, I’ve capitalized “Boy Crisis” throughout this post because the challenges facing boys and men have a proper name, the Boy Crisis. Warren Farrell, generally considered the intellectual father of the men’s rights movement, has a book coming out on it soon. It is his 8th, perhaps, on issues facing men and will cover the “5 pillars of the Boy Crisis”: mental health, physical health, education, employment, and the one at root of them all: Fatherlessness.

A few years ago, Neil Lyndon grew hopeful that maybe something was changing for men. Lyndon republished his book in 2014, stating:

I would deeply prefer not to lose all my income and my home and be bankrupted again, which happened last time this book came out. Equally, I am not eager to subject my family and those who care about me to the distress of seeing me and my character grotesquely lampooned and my work ruthlessly, deliberately misrepresented. I am not yearning for another round of the vile monstering I received at the hands of the noble media, which was exceeded in its ludicrousness and hatefulness only, perhaps, by the horrible scurrilities meted out to Kate and Gerry McCann. I would rather dig field latrines every day for the rest of my life than go through that again. Even so, there remain sound, strong reasons to republish that book. One: this is the first time the text will have appeared, in full, as I wrote it. Two: perhaps there might be a chance that, this time somebody might actually read it. That would make a welcome change.

That’s what I thought of when I read David French’s otherwise fine essay. Has anyone read what has come before? This problem is not new, and even an overview should testify to that. We’ve been talking about the Boy Crisis for almost 30 years — and it’s getting worse. It hasn’t even stabilized.

A few hours later, another unremarkable event happened. I got a link via an email discussion group. This one didn’t have much commentary. Specifically, it was a link to Lyman Stone’s tweet, and tweets do not allow for much commentary:

According to the abstract, the study found that dual income parents with affluence result in more obese children. Again, not a bombshell. I first read about this in-depth — I had seen other commentary for at least a few years at that point — in Mary Eberstadt’s Home Alone America from 2004. The discussion of the growing popularity of quick convenience food with the rise in parental working hours might have made an appearance in David Elkind’s The Hurried Child. That book had a 25th Anniversary release with a “things have gotten worse” update back in 2006. So that “ruh-roh” has been around at least 10 years.

These topics are not unusual. So many times we think something or some observation is new when it isn’t. These are just the topics that came to my attention this week and prompting me to ask, how long are we going to busy ourselves talking about a problem? When do we decide that we have enough data, research and anecdotal, to start working toward solutions? I do know that the longer we treat things as new, the longer we will fail to act. “We need to study and consider this,” we will say. Then someday, pointing to heaps and mounds of research and broken personal experience our children might justifiably wonder why we dithered for so long.