The 20-year-old college student and gamer I met in Cedar City, Utah, didn't seem particularly amused by the joke that he was a cultural cliché. He lived in his grandmother's basement and rarely left the house except to go to class. He spent most of his free time online, playing video games, watching porn, and hanging out on Discord, a male-biased communications platform where users congregated in communities dedicated to topics ranging from harmlessly nerdy to outright terrifying. By his own admission, he was terribly lonely.
During the pandemic, he served as a moderator for the Discord community, initially mainly responsible for solving technical issues and removing trolls. But one night, a teenage boy called him on voice chat and began confiding how lonely and depressed he felt. He spoke with the boy for an hour, trying to calm him down and give him hope. That call sparked more similar calls. Over time, he built a reputation as an unofficial therapist on the server. By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he had made about 200 calls with various people, both men and women, who said they were thinking about suicide.
But it was boys who seemed the most alone and isolated. “There are a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women,” he tells the site. “Mental health and shame are so important for men, because men shouldn't be weak, they shouldn't be broken,” he adds. A male mental health crisis was brewing in secret.
I've been talking to boys for the past few years, both in researching my new book and in raising my own three sons, and I've come to believe that the modern context of childhood is one of loneliness' worst. It's a new problem colliding with an old one. All of the old flaws and blind spots of male socialization are still there: the same massive failure to teach boys relationship skills or emotional intelligence, the same rigid codes of masculinity and societal proscriptions that alienate them from intimacy and emotion. But in a screen-addicted, culture-war-torn America, new ones have joined in, too.
The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty when the #Metoo movement exploded in 2017 is now college (and voting) age, and they've lived through their adolescence not only in a digital age with its fantastic virtual options for avoiding real-world social anxieties, but also in the shadow of a broader cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.
We've spent the last five years wrestling with notions of gender and privilege, seeking to challenge old stereotypes and power structures. These conversations should have been an opportunity to unleash old pressures and norms around masculinity, and to empower boys and men to be more emotionally open and engaged. But in many ways, this environment has clearly had the opposite effect, closing them off even more.
For many progressives, exhausted by the mounting cases of male misbehavior, refusing to listen to men's feelings has now become almost a rule. There are right-wing tough guys urging their crying son to “be a man,” while there are left-wing voices telling him that voicing his concerns means taking away airtime from women and more marginalized people. Often, the same people who urge boys and men to be more emotional also take a moral stance on listening to how they really feel. For many boys, it may seem like their feelings are being ignored by both sides. This political isolation, combined with existing masculine norms, has driven a disturbing number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-political retreat.
The statistics are starting to feel like clichés in themselves: More than a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends. Teenage boys spend two hours less per week socializing than girls, and they spend about seven hours more per week looking at screens than their female peers.
As the mother of boys, these figures send chills down my spine. And my own research only compounded my fears. I spoke to boys of all kinds: athletes and incels, popular and outgoing, rich and poor. And among boys who, on the surface, had little else in common, the same theme emerged again and again: They were lonely.
Some of them were truly isolated, while others had many friends. But almost all of them had an insecure feeling that something important was missing in their friendships. They felt it was nearly impossible to talk about intimate things or be vulnerable with their male classmates. One teenager described his social circle, a group of boys who had been his best friends since kindergarten, as a “very unsupportive support system.” Another confided that he could only remember one emotionally open conversation with a male friend in his life, and that even his twin brother hadn't seen him cry in years. But they felt unable to put this pain into words or ask for help because of the fear that no one would listen because they were boys.
“Whenever men express concerns, they are brushed off with so-called privilege,” one 20-year-old woman told me, adding, “They say, 'Whatever, women are suffering more than you, so you have no right to complain.'”
Almost without exception, the boys I spoke to longed for closer, more emotionally open relationships but lacked the skills or social permission to change their situation.
It's perhaps not surprising that boys don't know how to listen to their friends' emotions and relate to them on a deeper level. After all, no one is really connected to their emotions. Because men's opinions carry disproportionate value in a sexist society, we're convinced that men and boys already have our full attention. But the world, including their parents, doesn't devote much time to their emotions.
A 2014 study showed that parents speaking to 4-year-old daughters tended to use more emotional language than parents speaking to 4-year-old sons. (Mothers are less likely to respond to baby voices when boys are born.) A more recent study comparing fathers of boys with fathers of girls found that fathers of boys were less attentive to their boys, spent less time talking about their sons' sadness, and tended to play around with them instead. When speaking to boys, they used slightly different vocabulary, fewer emotion-centered words and more words focused on competition and winning.
It's easy to grow to hate men and boys if you spend any time in a man's world. The extreme misogyny, cheerful hate speech, and tones of violent threats and intimidation make it hard to muster sympathy for men's concerns, and easy to forget that patriarchy harms men too.
Perhaps it's not surprising that in the midst of the culture wars, caring for boys has been subtly implied as a dog whistle for right-wing ideology and bad politics. Men have already received more than they deserve of our attention, the logic goes, and now it's time for them to shut up. But for boys, privilege and harm are intertwined. Male socialization is a strangely destructive mix of pampering and neglect. Under patriarchy, boys and men have everything except what they value most: relationships.
“Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of progressive ideals only exacerbates the problem, pushing them into isolation and defensiveness. The prescription for producing a generation of healthier, socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the broader political debate as it is in the home: treat boys with generosity, not punitiveness. We need to acknowledge boys' feelings, talk to our sons as we do to our daughters, listen and empathize rather than ignore or discount them, and treat them as feeling beings.”
They are more than ready to talk, we just need to make sure we are listening.
Ruth Wippman is the author of Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
