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.

Seven Year Itch [Media Notes 160]

I’ve now watched The Seven Year Itch perhaps three full times in the last two weeks. It stars Marilyn Monroe and won a Golden Globe as best actor for her co-star, Tom Ewell. Here’s the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s plot summary:

Richard Sherman is a middle-aged publishing executive in New York City, whose wife Helen and son Ricky are spending the summer in Ogunquit, Maine to escape the city's crippling heat. When he returns home from the train station with the kayak paddle Ricky accidentally left behind, he meets an unnamed woman, who is a commercial actress and former model. She has subleased the apartment upstairs while its owners are away for the summer. That evening, he resumes reading the manuscript of a book in which psychiatrist Dr. Brubaker claims that almost all men are driven to have extra-marital affairs in the seventh year of marriage. Sherman has an imaginary conversation with Helen, trying to convince her, in three fantasy sequences, that he is irresistible to women, including his secretary, a nurse, and Helen's bridesmaid, but she laughs it off. A potted tomato plant falls onto his lounge chair; the seemingly unclad attractive young woman upstairs apologizes for accidentally knocking it off her balcony, and Richard invites her down for a drink.

Notice the order of events. First Mr. Sherman sees The Girl (Marilyn Monroe, she has no name in the movie) arrive, and then he has this fantasy discussion with his wife, trying to convince her of his attractiveness to woman. (Note that in the third of these fantasies he reprises the famous “love on the beach” scene in From Here to Eternity.) Is far as I can tell, that’s the primary driving force behind his interest in The Girl. Yes, he sees that she’s beautiful, but that’s important, not because he appreciates beauty the way an artist does, or even because he takes it as an indicator of sexual pleasure; it's important because her interest in him reflects well on his manhood. If such a beautiful woman is attracted to me, then I must be a manly man indeed! I detect no interest in or awareness of sexual pleasure.

This is a very Girardian world. Total mediation.

Later on Sherman fantasizes himself seated at the piano, wearing a red smoking jacket straight out of the Playboy fashion advisor[1], and playing Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto while nattering on in a thick nondescript continental accent. When The Girl convinces him to sit down at the piano, the best he can manage is chopsticks. She happily joins him and takes it up a notch, having a lot of fun in the process while he bumbles along wondering what’s going on. The whole scene is an elaborate parody of a sexual encounter. To be sure, yes there's a bit where they work together to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne resulting in the expulsion of liquid all over the place, an obvious parody on ejaculation. But that's what it is, a parody, a simulacrum of sex that pointedly elides and mystifies the substance. The movie avoids sexuality in this most elaborate way.

There’s much more to the movie that those two scenes, other actors, subplots, complications, the famous scene of The Girl standing above the subway grate, but really, that’s it. In this movie, the beautiful blonde bombshell exists to convince the anodyne bread-earner that he’s a good man because he’s kind and sensitive. Important virtues to be sure, but also functionally asexual. They’re both effectively neutered. 

Is that middle America in the 1950s? If so, what are we to think about the state of marriage in the 1950s if a story about a typical husband's desire for an extramarital affair is grounded, not in a desire for sexual pleasure with a woman other than his wife, but for a need to feel attractive to other women? What does that imply about his relationship with his wife?

* * * * *

Note: You might want to look at this older post, where I compare this movie with Sex and the City and Madmen. 

 [1] Playboy premiered two years earlier, with Marilyn Monroe as the centerfold. The movie plays on this, with one motif being a photo of The Girl in a bikini lying on the beach.

The Zuck Amuck: TechBros take it to the mat [Fight Club in the Valley]

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David Yaffe-Bellany, The Tech Guys Are Fighting. Literally. NYTimes, May 11, 2025.

Walking into the crowded hotel conference room, Andrew Batey looked like any other tech guy attending ETHDenver, an annual cryptocurrency conference. A venture capital investor based in Florida, Mr. Batey wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the logos of more than a dozen crypto companies, with names like LunarCrush and bitSmiley. He had arrived in town with some expensive footwear — a pair of Off-White Air Jordans, the type of sneaker, he said, that people usually don’t take out of the box.

Mr. Batey, however, was at the conference not to network with fellow crypto enthusiasts but to fight one of them — live on YouTube. At the hotel, a short drive from the conference convention center, he was preparing for his official weigh-in, the final step before a fight the next evening in an arena packed with crypto colleagues. Under the watchful eye of a representative from the Colorado Combative Sports Commission, Mr. Batey, 40, stripped down to his boxers, which were adorned with a cartoon Santa Claus riding a golf cart.

He weighed in at just under 195 pounds, on target for the fight. The bare-chested venture capitalist raised his biceps and flexed for the cameras.

The nation’s tech elite, not content with unfathomable wealth and rising political influence in Washington, have recently developed a new obsession — fighting. Across the United States, men like Mr. Batey are learning to punch, kick, knee, elbow and, in some cases, hammer an opponent over the head with their fists. The figurehead of the movement is Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire chief executive of Meta, who has charted his impressive physical transformation from skinny computer nerd to martial arts fighter on Instagram, one of the apps he owns. A recent post showed Mr. Zuckerberg, dressed in gym shorts and an American flag T-shirt, grappling his opponent to the ground.

Good lord! And these are the dudes leading the AI revolution!

So we have a lot of this and that about techbros working their fight club vibe, all centered on a fight between Batey and Chauncey St. John, a crypto guy from upstate New York. The fight itself:

What followed more closely resembled a schoolyard scrap than a professional martial-arts bout. The choreographed moves that Mr. Batey had rehearsed were nowhere to be seen. Over and over, he threw punches and missed, lunging forward and then lurching back. Mr. St. John swung his arms wildly, whirling in a circle, like a helicopter. Next to the pit, a panel of announcers offered live analysis for the YouTube audience.

“What they lack in technical, they make up for in the heart,” one commentator said. His partner offered a blunter assessment: “It’s hilarious.”

By the end of the first round, Mr. Batey’s nose was bleeding heavily. But soon he forced Mr. St. John to the ground and straddled him, raining punches down onto his head. Within 10 seconds, the referee intervened: Mr. St. John couldn’t continue. It was over.

At the after-party:

That night, Mr. Batey went out to celebrate. He had showered, changed and cleaned up his face, except for a single streak of dried blood that was intact on the bridge of his nose. At the entrance to a party near Civic Center Park, Mr. Batey informed the bouncer that he had featured in “a pro fight tonight, a fight on TV.”

The bouncer didn’t seem impressed. But Mr. Batey found a more appreciative audience on the dance floor, where his friends swarmed him, offering hugs and fist bumps. Soon a chant went up: “Batey, Batey, Batey, Batey.”

Away from the group, Mr. Batey confided that at the arena, not long after the fight, he had approached Mr. St. John to express his respect and gratitude — and to make clear that he was “proud of him, as a human.”

Mr. St. John had fought hard, Mr. Batey said. Maybe someday they would be friends.

“He’s a good guy,” Mr. Batey said. “We’re both just good dudes.”

Come to think of it, that's not so foreign to me. To be sure, I'm not getting in the ring anytime soon. I'm an old man and overweight. But at a jam session, depending on the vibe, I might take heads. I've done it in the past, the distant past to be sure, but I've done it.

So I'm thinking. A jam session is about making music, pleasing an audience, or at any rate, yourself, with your artistic prowess. No one is going to end up bleeding on the floor. But there is one's rep at state, if only for the evening. The combat is real. But it is also artistic. Victory is written in written in grace, elegance, and wit, but – yes! – also virtuosity (sheer technical prowess), and even ferocity.

I wonder how it is with real fighters, professionals. As fighters these techbros are amateurs. "Schoolyard scrap" is what Yaffe-Bellany called. They're not good enough to display artistry. But the professionals, what's the balance between artistry and ferocity? It's one thing to whip your opponent, it's another thing to put on a good show. In pro wrestling it's all about the show. Victory and loss are scripted. Some time they're scripted in professional boxing. But that's illegal and is done behind the scenes. It's cheating.

What's real? That's a real question, and an interesting one at that. How does this dynamic play between nations?