What's Going On With Young Men Today?
The Desperate Man by Gustave Courbet (circa 1843)
Source: Wiki Commons
Of all the best lines uttered by Al Pacino, this one’s as sweet as it is sobering: “Nothing is what it seems.”
That quote goes back to 2003, when a spy-thriller called The Recruit hit theatres that fall. The flick’s about a wily CIA agent (Pacino) charged with recruiting the next best thing for the infamous agency, which, in this case, happens to be a tech-savvy dude played by then newcomer, Colin Farrell.
The Recruit was competent, if not taut and clever at times. But if you do watch it, half the fun stuff they do at the “The Farm” (what the CIA colloquially calls Camp Peary, its Virginia hinterlands-based training ground) doesn’t happen in real life. And legend has it actual CIA recruits who watched it found some parts “ridiculous”, though entertaining, nonetheless.
“Nothing is what it seems,” is what the legendary Italian actor tells Farrell’s “James Clayton” as he tears up a daily before seemingly putting it back together.
And while that line feels right at home in an espionage film, there’s more to it.
It’s the sort of thing that never leaves your head, an old adage that’s got your back when the bell rings.
One thinks “nothing is what it seems” when, say, one watches a doc about drug-addled Rock star who went from hero to zero.
You could even apply that line to something that looks off, but is, in fact, great. Think a nice beef tar tar with a squirt or two of lemon, or a garbage collector gig with great benefits.
But if you want a perfect example of what that saying really means, that’s easy — take one good look at the current state of our young men and boys.
We live in a time when terms like “toxic masculinity” go from buzzworthy to instalments in our everyday lingo, morphing from mere words to a full-on, sweeping generalization — and that’s precisely when it becomes dangerous. Indeed, there are men on earth who are toxic by nature, and as such, any form of masculinity expressed by them will be sullied by said toxicity. But that doesn’t necessarily prove the existence of a “toxic masculinity.” Besides, if a certain, big-name shaving brand would’ve had it their way, boys wrestling in their parents’ backyard would been deemed “toxic today.”
Thankfully, common sense has a way of finding its way through the mire.
We live in a time when you don’t have to be wrong to sound wrong, a time when good folks accept unproven presumption in lieu of proven fact, particularly if it supports a popular notion that’s pervaded forever. And worse, many who know better will stay mum so as to not draw the wrong set of eyes. “Toxic masculinity” and the myth of total male privilege are two of these prevailing notions, even though over 90% of workplace fatalities are men, and even though men and boys are three times more likely to die by suicide than women (though women do harm themselves more.)
These notions influence how we view (and treat) men, like it or not, and they may help explain why so many young men are falling while no one bats an eye.
Here’s the kicker: None of this is technically new. Just look at this Government of Ontario doc from all the way back in 2004. In it, results from official tests in literacy were already looking rough, with boys in grades three and six scoring markedly lower than girls, while high school boys continued to score poorly in reading in writing. That report also published that boys are more likely to enter special education than girls, and that boys drop out of school more than girls.
Today, things are the same, if not worse in some cases.
Record amounts of young men continue to abandon college, though, part of that could be for a rising popularity in entrepreneurism and a general human dislke for debt.
Still, articles like that Wall Street Journal one quote actual male students as feeling generally “lost.” This USA Today piece from last year confirms a data-backed, rising “gender gap” in high school graduation rates across the US, with girls graduating at 88% and boys, 82%.
And articles like these by edutopia.org always do the same thing; they’ll share facts, like how only one third of American boys ages 12-17 sought help for depression in 2020, compared with 45 percent of girls. Then, in the same breath, they’ll blame this lack in communication on societies teaching them to bottle it in, and that stoicism is equitable to this, instead of an awesome trait that helps preserve an indestructible sense of self-discipline. In other words, boys have issues… because they’re boys?
What the hell’s going on, right?
If you’re a young man who ails, or a parent of one, a four-year-old book holds the answers (and even some solutions). Plus, it leaves no issue untouched, no matter how touchy, from fatherless homes to ADHD to suicide.
Without further ado, here’s an excerpt from The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling And What We Can Do About It, written by best-selling author and mental health expert, Warren Farrell, and John Gray, PhD, otherwise known as the guy who wrote Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.
The Infinite Consequences of Uneducated Boys
While boys who are motivated can become many of society’s most constructive forces—becoming inventors and implementers of what the invent (the Amazons, Apples, Facebooks, Microsofts and Googles)—boys whose energies are poorly channeled can become society’s most destructive forces—our serial killers and prisoners.
Ironically, as our sons become less educated, our daughters increasingly desire partners who are more educated. In 1939 women ranked education as only the eleventh most important attribute in a husband. Recently, women rank education as the fourth most important. And with less education leading boys to the unemployment line, it creates what I call the drop-out, left-out cycle:
In neighbourhoods where marriage is scarce, fathers are scarce, and more than half of boys don’t finish high school. The boy drops out.
The less education a young man has, the more likely he is to be unemployed or underemployed. He’s left out of the workplace.
Women who desire children think of an uneducated young man as undesirable, and an unemployed man as “another child”—hardly marriage material. He’s left out of marriage and fatherhood.
Some of the women with whom he nonetheless ha sex become pregnant, and raise children without him. Thus, we’re back to step one: The left-out dad and the drop-out son.
How Schools Can Help Boys Make A Transition From Muscle to Mental
In the future, much of the muscle in manufacturing and construction will be replaced by the mental: robots and artificial intelligence. If your son wants a good job as a welder, he will also need physics and chemistry. If he wishes to make a living with computers, he will need to know how to code, program, and develop software. Grandpa and dad may have worked on appliances like cars, refrigerators, and thermostats; your son will need to master how these appliances collect and exchange data using embedded sensors. This, he need to understand the “internet of things.” The common denominator? His mind. His mind educated in boy-friendly ways.
What’s a boy-friendly way for a non-academically inclined boy to use his mind? Having a concrete goal. If a boy has a concrete goal of being a welder, that catalyzes motivation to study the physics and chemistry necessary to become a high-paid welder.
How might a school encourage this? By increasing vocational education. Instead, most schools have been decreasing vocational studying.
Japan has vastly increased its vocational education programs, with 23 percent of the Japan’s high school graduates studying at vocational schools. The result: 99.6 percent of Japan's vocational students received jobs upon graduation. The psychological and economic implications of that difference are infinite. (Incidentally, some Japanese schools are actively recruiting foreign students).
Our schools are perpetuating the boy crisis in a second way. Girls learn emotional intelligence as part of the socialization to be female. For boys there is an ever-widening gap between the heroic intelligence that it took our sons to be respected as men in the past and the emotional intelligence needed for your son’s future. Yet few schools are teaching communication skills and empathy training to help boys make that transition.
Here’s why I predict emotional intelligence will be paramount for our son’s future: the more sophisticated artificial intelligence becomes, the more we will yearn for humans to fill the emotional intelligence void. The more caring professions (e.g., health care, home care—professional currently dominated by women) will thrive even as the traditional male careers shrink.
Can’t artificial intelligence mimic emotional intelligence, as illustrated in the movie Her? To a degree, yes, but within the span of your son’s career, it will not replace the nuances of emotional intelligence needed by a dad, male partner, health care or home care worker—for example, the ability to respond sensitively to body language, tones of voice, hesitation patterns and eye contact. Or knowing when to listen, when to talk, when to be proactive, and when to create space. These are the voids AI will create, for which we will increasingly value (and pay) those most able to fill them.
Can your son learn empathy and emotional intelligence, or is this something that girls and women are just better at? Studies reveal that when observing casually, women pick up more accurately what others are feeling. But here’s what’s fascinating: when both sexes are offered pay should the assess the feelings of others accurately, the empathy generated gap disappears. The implication? The capacity for empathy and emotional intelligence is latent inside boys and men; we just have to let guys know we’ll value them for focusing on it.
Even when emotional intelligence is so underdeveloped that hate becomes an unchecked bonding mechanism, as among hard-core white supremacists, Life After Hate groups have successfully reversed the hatred of thousands and replaced it with empathy, love, and self-forgiveness. There are, then, ways to emotional intelligence and empathy can be learned even by those we might assume are hopeless.
There is a second application of training for emotional intelligence and empathy. If the haters can learn empathy, maybe we can learn empathy toward the haters. When our only response to haters is to hate, we increase our brain’s training to hate and decrease its training to empathize. We become a bit of the enemy we hate.
How can schools help? Currently our schools are funded to stop bullying. However, both bullies and the build have three things in common; both come from negative family, school, and community environments; both have low self-esteem; and both have poor social skills. That is, both the bullied and the bully are similarly vulnerable, and teaching the skills that will help both simultaneously is a positive-sum strategy. Since empathy and emotional intelligence can be taught, and these skills are key to preparing our sons for professions that will be in the greatest demand, we need to integrate this curriculum into our schools in the formative years. (We’ll see more about how that can be done in part V, “Heroic Intelligence Versus Health Intelligence.”)
Exacerbating the Education Crisis: Caring Less
It’s 2016. I receive an email from UCLA (an alma mater) promoting the PhD dissertation presentations of ten of their leading young political scientists. I notice something: all ten are women. I call the political science department and inquire as to why there are no men. The response? “Oh yes, you’re right. I didn’t notice that.”
We don’t notice the norm. In the fifties, the normal was few women in MBA and MD programs. It took the women’s movement to help us notice. Today, boys’ absence from lists of achievers in education has become the new normal.
It’s easier to notice when we care. Friends of mine recently attended their daughter’s graduation. Their daughter was co-valedictorian with another girl, and a member of the honour society, which had but a sprinkling of boys. Their son was a junior in the same school. He and his male friends had as many Ds and Fs as As and Bs.
His parents cared, so they noticed. It didn’t surprise them to hear that nationwide girls make up 70 percent of valedictorians, while boys get 70 percent of Ds and Fs. In fact, it made them feel less disappointed in their son.
My friends grew up in the era in which girls were doing badly in math and science. They recalled how we concluded the trouble was with the schools. They also saw how now that boys are doing badly in almost every subject, we say the trouble is with the boys.
Solving the boy crisis, in education and in the other areas we’ve discussed, starts with noticing its happening—not just here in the United States, but worldwide.
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The Boy Crisis: Our Boys Are Struggling And What We Can Do About It, by Warren Farrell P.h.D. and John Gray
Running Press, 2018