People love a truism, don’t they? You could be perched disconsolately on your rooftop waiting to be rescued after torrential waters have carried away everything that wasn’t nailed down or made of marble, and when the helicopter plucks you to the safety of terra firma, some insouciant person will shrug and say, “Well, we need the rain.”
There’s a banal inevitability to the truism that is fundamentally boring: obviously, the rain you needed is not the rain that recently washed away livelihoods and roads. Anything spoken with a shrug and a knowing nod should always be viewed with suspicion. And yet, bizarrely, truisms flourish like weeds throughout our world. For example, it’s fashionable in certain quarters to opine that men are in the grip of a crisis: that because they are no longer permitted to play their natural role in society (stay with me), they are lost, adrift, without value or purpose.
Every so often, some new charlatan emerges like Moses coming down the Mount to claim that every current social concern has arisen because men are no longer allowed to fulfil some instinctual cave-dweller way of being. The cure? More testosterone. More peptides, whatever those are. Let us speak loudly. Let us lift heavy things and praise ourselves when we do. You can choose your media portal of choice and find countless chaps with aggressive facial hair working themselves up into a lather about this ostensibly incontrovertible truth.
These bro-doulas peddle nonsense to people by pointing and shouting, “NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT THIS!” One thing I am sure of is that whenever someone makes that claim, the thing they are referring to has, in fact, been discussed at length and probably in many places. The shouting is meant to grab your attention, and the accusation is meant to make you feel bad.
This is why well-meaning but misguided people take to social media to declare their anxiety about the fate of men and men-in-waiting. The boy-child, we are told with a certain uncritical zeal, has been left behind. Beware of the passive phrase: it spreads blame like a cake spatula. When someone says, “Society has failed xyz”, it is a truism that is also hopelessly vague in identifying the cause of a problem. Everybody at this point in history has been failed by society, due in no small part to the fact that, in most countries, the concept of society is kneecapped before it can benefit anybody.
The purpose of opining about how men are hard done by is to sell rubbish to those people whose sense of fairness is based on the rules of the playground. In other words, those people who think that fairness is like a toy that only one person can play with. This sort of person is all too easily convinced that women have been holding on to the ball for too long and that it’s time to let the boys have a turn again. This truth survives despite all evidence that it is the boys who continue to run the companies that make the balls, continue to make up the rules of the game, and continue to outnumber everyone else on the playground.
Several recent books — think Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man or Mzamo Msito’s This Country Hates Our Boys — have attempted to map the current situation. Their source material (falling university admittance, higher rates of Failure To Thrive, increasing depression) is a valid cause for concern. The problem is that these books use this very material to peddle pablum. As someone tasked with reading things so others don’t have to, I can tell you that there is no great revelation to be had. It’s just about re-centring men in conversations they feel excluded from.
Because I’m loath to indulge that sort of thing, may I suggest that we focus instead on positive imagery that doesn’t have to do with all that hokum about being protectors and providers? I’m certain that someone near you is, or has recently, binge-watched Heated Rivalry, the boy-meets-boy TV show based on Rachel Reid’s insufferably popular Game Changers. The reason people like this show has a lot to do with the way it depicts male vulnerability as something accessible and desirable. Even though they’re two burly ice-hockey players, there’s obviously something about seeing two men be emotionally open that resonates with a lot of people. Give it a watch. Choose a day when it’s raining.
From the June issue of Wanted, 2026
