The crisis in young men

David French, What’s the Matter With Men? NYTimes, July 10, 2025.

Jordan Peterson argues that the crisis is primarily ideological:

Men are suffering because of what’s been done to them by malign actors, by people who either hate men or see men as fundamentally flawed. [...]

Peterson’s explanation for the struggles of young men in schools was rooted in the culture war. “The vast majority of teachers are not only female, but infantilizing female and radically left,” he said. Boys, Peterson argued, are “required to sit for hours at a time, which is not in keeping with their nature — especially if they’re active, in which case they get diagnosed with A.D.H.D. and get put on methylphenidate.”

But:

There is a competing thesis about the crisis in young men — that it’s much less related to ideology than it is to technology. The Industrial Revolution and the information age have fundamentally changed our way of life, and we’re still figuring out how to adapt to changes that are inevitable and irresistible. Deindustrialization and the age of information have far more impact on men than any element of the culture war.

Combine the industrial and information revolutions with the lull in great power conflict and the end of the Cold War, and you have factories that need fewer workers (and require less brute strength), armies that need fewer soldiers (and are less dependent on huge infantry formations), and farms that are heavily automated.

Brawn can still be necessary in modern life (I’m reminded of the heroic Coast Guard rescue swimmer credited with saving 165 people from Camp Mystic in Texas), but brainpower is the great equalizer.

At the same time, birth control meant that women were free to regulate the size of their families and pursue careers when they’re in the prime of their lives.

All of these things together not only meant that men feel less uniquely necessary to the family, they also have fewer male-only spaces where they meet male role models and encounter a masculine culture. Against this backdrop, when men encounter rhetoric like, “The future is female,” they can and do legitimately wonder, “Where is my place in this new world?”

Before, a young man could learn masculinity by osmosis. There wasn’t much confusion about what it meant to be a man. Now, a boy has to learn masculinity intentionally. Young men have to be deliberately taught how to find their place and their masculine identity in a very different world.

None of this is to argue that ideology and politics are irrelevant to the predicament of men. They can certainly make matters better or worse (to take one example, overprescribing mind-altering medication can certainly make matters worse), but given the universality of male struggles in developed countries, it’s hard to credibly argue that the outcome of the American culture war is dictating the present and futures of young men in the United States.

There’s much more at the link.