Yet another take on the masculinity crisis
it's not what you think tho
We’ve all heard about the “problem with young men.” Those opining about it all seem to have their own miraculous solution…as if it were a simple issue you could just solve, an oil change for your car, really—a stop at a Midas Oil Change, a Pep Boys (no pun intended), and we’re ready to go!
Scott Galloway, who is 61 and calls himself “Prof G,” 1 thinks young men need to drink more in order to socialize and have all the sex they’re currently not having, which will apparently make them more normal, more manly. In an appearance on Bill Maher’s show last November, Galloway—obviously having planned the whole thing ahead of time—came onto stage for the show’s “Overtime” segment, beers in hand for Maher and the panelists, in a tightly-fitted suit, wristbands on one arm, a watch on the other. Ready for the frat party, Prof. G — rad, dude, rad!
Aboard the Acela a while back, I saw a middle-aged lady reading Galloway’s latest book, Notes on Being a Man. I haven’t read the book, and don’t plan on wasting my time doing so.2 But I thought I’d at least ask this nice lady what she thought of it. Her criticism was that its conception of gender was a tad “old-school,” but she otherwise found it compelling.
This, I thought to myself, is precisely who Galloway is actually reaching, certainly with his book, but also with his media appearances, the YouTube videos, the Instagram reels even, what have you.3 Ladies aboard the Acela who probably also read The New York Times and watch CNN or MSNBC (sorry, MSNOW!). These are the people concerned about the problem with young men.
Gee, Boomers, thanks for Woodstock and creating an ever more materialistic, shallow, and self-obsessed American culture. Now you can go talk about how your grandchildren have been screwed over, and why Galloway is right that all they need to do is just drink a few beers! I exaggerate, but only a little.4
Enough with the Boomer hate (for now!).5 From my vantage point as a Gen Z male attending Columbia—and in a largely middle-to-upper-class milieu, not entirely of my own making—this is (briefly, observationally, anecdotally) what I see:
You go to any random club event, and there’s just men roaming around, not really able to talk to anyone—male or female. You approach them and try to strike up a conversation, if only out of pity, and either it’s not going to work (cue incessant tisming, lack of eye contact, jitters) or they will speak to you with a breath that surely indicates a lack of brushing and general hygiene. They might be dressed in simple T-shirts, or even worse, virginal-looking, terribly-fitted Lacoste polo shirts their moms probably plucked out for them from some Macy’s rack in asphalt-no-place suburbia.
Sometimes I think to myself: What do these guys do? Go around getting A’s in their classes they try way too hard at, to thinking grabbing a coffee with a random girl amounts to a “date,” to staring awkwardly, to looking at me weirdly whenever I light a cigarette outside Butler Library, to frequently watching porn in their communal dorm bathroom? (All real examples.) Whatever you think of JD Vance, he’s correct to continuously call out this striverism endemic to America’s meritocratic institutions.
This isn’t specific to Zoomers, to be sure. But it is definitely part of the problem of whatever this elusive “problem with young men” is, especially for those who are “privileged”—financially, in the college they attend, or otherwise. When “success”—defined in cold, rawly capitalistic metrics—replaces personality, cultivation, community, and intellectual flourishing, you get robots. Zoomer male robots. And when these robots try to be human beings…voilà problème.
You have guys who aren’t doing well on the dating market—a terrible phrase altogether, we look at this all (love? sex? romance?) way too materialistically, and especially in this country, but I digress—while a number of good-looking girls I know can hop on Hinge or Raya and match with a successful, older man who offers stability, who’s in finance, tech, defense, or whichever other occupation may earn one “status,” or an $8,000-a-month apartment, in the West Village.
This isn’t to say young girls (or some of them) haven’t always sought older and established and rich men out, but it’s now been made remarkably easy. From their dorm in Morningside Heights they can just simply browse through the men in FiDi, no burdensome 1 train required for them to even get picked up at a bar or club in SoHo, the East Village, North Brooklyn.
Yes, though good progressives might call it “empowerment,” the objectification of the modern, online dating market goes both ways! Men certainly are pigs, but women can be equally as self-interested in their own way. And of course, it’s not the individuals you should blame in this parasocial, apersonal, hyper-individualized dynamic, but the system which has bred it.
In a different sense, there’s also a way that “the problem with young men” is an especially middle-class problem. Having gone to public schools, been totally isolated in their single-family homes during Covid, and now racking up debt in college without financial aid, the American middle-class student has been especially confined, prescribed an incredibly terrible (worse than usual) socialization forming an especially terrible bourgeois morality.
Now, I’m not implying that there aren’t many working-class and upper-class students who suffer from the same, or similar, ills. But, to put it all in an over-simplified nutshell, the working-class has nothing to lose, and many of them are already on substantial financial aid anyway; whilst the upper-class kids have inherited a great deal of confidence, not only financial, of course, but also social. My best, most entertaining, no-bullshit conversations at Columbia (and beyond) have been either with very rich or very poor students. There’s a certain social ease, a certain willingness, a certain self-assuredness that both ends of society have which makes them, sorry to say, just cooler—as interlocutors, as romantic partners, as young men making it in the world.
As the American middle class shrinks, as the physical manifestation of its once-glory—the suburbs—decline, it is reduced to mediocrity.
The root of the problem—which my more Marxist sensibilities tell me is the case with (almost) any big issue—is an economic one. Upward mobility—the very justification for “American Dream” free market capitalism—has rapidly declined, America has higher levels of economic inequality than any other major developed country, rents are rising beyond reason (why there is a Mayor Mamdani), Wall Street is quite literally competing with families for homes. I could list myriad other examples, but this is no academic study.
At the same time, the story of the past decades—especially outside big and mostly well-off cities like New York (real as its issues may be, and for the working class in particular)—has been one of de-industrialization, young men in ghost towns left with little more than a crippling addiction to porn, SSRIs, and Oxy. And it’s not only Middle America.
Go to any random mid-sized city in this country, and it may not be West Virginia or the desolate Middletown, Vance (back to Vance, not to fanboi!) describes in Hillbilly Elegy, but even a few hours outside New York and malls will be closing down, middle-class restaurants will be getting shittier, life altogether will reveal itself as wholly depressing. In other words: exit America’s few but highly impressive enclaves of global capital, and find an unimpressive nation which can only produce, again sorry to say, a lot of ailed people: socially, economically, culturally—dare I say even spiritually, perhaps?
It’s Douglas Coupland’s America: a neoliberal, masturbating, drugged-up prison. Shopping in Jail .6 America, for all its “greatness,” has young men—and people overall—more depressed, more aimless than not only the nice European countries we’re told of, but even regimes that are apparently so terrible and “anti-American” we must be engaged in constant battle with them, like Russia.7
The system is bigger than just the men not doing well. Changing it isn’t as simple as getting men to drink or banning cellphones (as Jonathan Haidt would have it). It requires a radical re-thinking of the places we live in, of our economy, of our society, and the mores that are espoused from them.
American men have been totally demoralized and destroyed. As has—in so many ways—their nation, their societies, their communities. The men are only the obvious, weird symptom of the far bigger problem.
Fixing the problem would mean working toward a normal country. And America today is anything but that. But maybe one thing we could do right now—I beg of you, mainstream publications—is to stop commissioning all these pieces about what’s wrong with the young men!
Just read this one, and read none more. “#Manifesting.”
Galloway is supposed to be a professor of marketing at NYU Stern, but you wouldn’t be able to tell so from how much he talks about what ails young men, and how little time he now spends talking about marketing.
Galloway, it’s worth mentioning, abhors populism though—which, however imperfect, is at least purporting to try and address America’s systemic issues in a way the 1990s-style do-nothing centrism, of which Galloway is a member, is obviously not: continue with the underlying social and economic status quo, and you will be saved by the free market and normal postwar liberal-democratic procedures! Galloway of course hates President Trump (just one example here)—and though that’s increasingly seeming more justified than ever, he’s hating Trump for the regular Boomer reasons—but he also dislikes with a similar conviction New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani.
I’m also Zoomer-brained in this sense—read: short attention span—and, lamentably, really do need to pick and choose my reading.
And maybe also whichever youngster is left from that since-imploded, early 2020s IDW era.
One of the best, incisive rants to have come from Tucker Carlson, coincidentally Charlie Kirk’s last appearance on his show before his tragic assassination, from which this sentiment takes inspiration.
No hate for them as individuals, making generalized statements about the overarching mentality — the vibes, if you will — of a generation here…
This isn’t to say all of Gen Z is terrible—there’s some really impressive Zoomer kids, men and women and like, but when it comes to endless despair and lack of direction and general social ineptness among all the other things, a subset of Gen Z men do obviously excel.
Don’t get me wrong, Russia has its share of issues—it’s a country at war—but they also have more young people in relationships, lower use of SSRIs, universal healthcare, free college, clean metros, the examples go on and on.
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Leave us virginal Lacoste polo wearers alone
The root cause is not economic, it is ideological. It is that the idea of any interpersonal moral-cultural authority beyond the philosophically liberal, anti-normative structures of laws, procedures, and material progress, has become odious in our culture. Yet that kind of authority and its ideals and mission are what most men tend to crave, whether they seek to lead it or merely serve it and know it exists.