Better late than never, I guess. The New York Times has finally acknowledged that American boys aren’t doing so well.
It’s Not Just a Feeling: Data Shows Boys and Young Men Are Falling Behind. Boys’ educational achievement, mental health and transitions to adulthood indicate that many are not thriving. https://t.co/QLdBA3ht41 via @NYTimes
— Carl Hindy (@DrCarlHindy) May 13, 2025
A single story does not a trend make, but it is still good to see a straightforward story that acknowledges what lots of people on the right have been pointing out for more than a decade: our society has become anti-male, and the consequences for young men have been dire.
For decades, there has been an obsession with giving girls a hand up, and by traditional measures, the results have been that girls have leapt ahead of boys in many measures of achievement.
Unfortunately, a lot of that improvement has been at the expense of boys doing well, and what began as a mostly good-hearted attempt to ensure that women and girls had the same opportunities as boys has been warped into a full-scale war on masculinity.
Boys and young men are struggling. Across their lives — in their educational achievement, mental health and transitions to adulthood — there are warning signs that they are falling behind, even as their female peers surge ahead.
In the United States, researchers say several economic and social changes have combined to change boys’ and men’s trajectories. School has changed in ways that favor girls, and work has changed in ways that favor women. Boys are often seen as troublemakers, and men have heard that masculinity is “toxic.”
Young people themselves tend to agree that girls are now at least equal to — and often doing better than — boys. Many young men say they feel unmoored and undervalued, and parents and adults who work with children are worried about boys. It’s not just a feeling: There’s a wealth of data that shows that boys and young men are stagnating. Below, I’ll explain what some of that data is.
I’m pretty sure you won’t find lectures about “toxic femininity” in America’s schools, and that any educator or media figure who ventured into that territory would garner a lot of hate for saying so. But you can build a lucrative career promoting the idea of “toxic masculinity” and giving DEI lectures about how to crush it.
By most measures, the well-being of boys has been declining for quite a while. Educational achievement has been going down, suicide is on the rise, and men are less likely to enter the workforce and rise up the ladder than in the past.
It’s not that men’s relative achievements have declined due to an increase in women’s achievements–objectively speaking, men are doing worse than they have in the past. And that, I would argue, is because men are being beaten down by a dominant culture that keeps punishing them for being male.
Is it any wonder that so many boys are “discovering” that they are girls? By making that simple change, a toxic male can vault above a natal female in prestige. So much so that any girl who objects to a boy strolling into their locker room and using their male strength to outcompete them is attacked as a transphobic bigot.
The war on boys is good for nobody, not even girls, who, on first blush, appear to benefit. And in this, I am not just referring to the transgender insanity.
Girls and boys, women and men are complementary. Members of each sex bring things to the table that, on average, members of the other sex don’t excel in. Men tend to be stronger, more aggressive, analytical/systematic, and ambitious. Men build and defend things.
Women provide the glue of civilization and direct male aggression and ambition toward productive things. Left to their own devices, men are generally a mess. Put them in a family and a social structure that directs their masculine impulses, and you get a civilization.
Men manipulate things, women deal with people. I suspect that is why most surgeons tend to be men and, in my experience, the best patient-facing doctors are women.
Masculine or feminine characteristics are not “better” one way or another. They complement each other, at least when both are encouraged to flourish. That’s why the primary social unit is or should be the family, not the individual.
Modern Western values have come to denigrate the masculine traits, and when masculine traits are devalued, they don’t go away–they become destructive. Hence, the increase in suicide rates.
During the 2024 election season, I argued that we were witnessing the testosterone vs. estrogen election, and we were not better off for it. Trump is an alpha male, and if you believe, as I do, that America is in crisis, then it is an alpha male we need, just as we needed Patton in World War II.
But I can’t deny that in less fraught times, a more balanced administration–one that combines strength, ambition, and a desire to build, matched with a higher emotional quotient and less aggression would be less exhausting.
We need to nurture the masculine virtues once again and tame the toxic femininity that has come to dominate our culture, but not at the expense of the feminine virtues that sustain our civilization and, indeed, make America great.
We should all reject the war between the sexes. It diminishes us all.
