New Masculinity Puts the Cart Before the Horse
Why Nature Comes First When Nurturing Boys
There are common concerns when it comes to supporting boys at home, in school, and in society at large. Parents, educators, policymakers, and communities with different perspectives share the notion of helping boys thrive—yet they often hold competing visions about how to achieve it.
Some contemporaries are calling for a new masculinity, a message presented in all sorts of ways in our K-12 education, colleges, work-environments, public policy, therapy, and media institutions. Think of Liz Planks, For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity. There are others of course.
One has to wonder how this “new masculinity” message might resonate with our children and the parents, communities, and institutions that aim to raise and support them. What thoughts, conversations, and activities come from this new age mindset? How do children and institutions internalize and exercise this new masculinity?
Phrases like find-your-words and long discussions have replaced rough and tumble play, competition, risk taking, personal responsibility, and other characteristics typically associated with healthy male nature. (The episode below is an example of a typical school interaction that exposes the find-your-words approach over the action solution approach.)
Ask a middle school or high school student about the need for a new masculinity and what you will likely hear is a need to fix something that is broken. Ask those same students about a new femininity and what you are likely to hear is the need to empower the feminine and marginalize the systemic masculine apparatus. My words may be a bit terse, but they are in line with the messaging in our culture.
The academic class has spent decades rebranding femininity and masculinity, and that rebranding (including admonishing masculinity) aims to make something new from what is perceived to be broken or outdated. The new-masculinity framework relies on narratives that find fault in the masculine, embrace a type of cultural androgyny, and avoid notions of male and female difference when it is convenient to do so.
Many scholars and advocates in education, psychology, and media emphasize nurture and cultural influences as the primary driver of behavior, often prioritizing gender sensitivity over innate sex differences. This group falls into a class of new-masculinity theorists (NMTs) who present nurture as the primary construct as opposed to nature as the first principal. They tend to come from the soft-sciences and the humanities class imbedded in our institutions, but not all men and women from this class subscribe to the NMT framework and the reason it’s critical to understand the arguments put forward.
NMTs essentially push the idea that social institutions and policies shape behavior. Poor outcomes are mostly the product of failed institutional practices that simply need new institutional practices. This observation is not wrong of course, but it usually involves implementing theories that are simply variations of the same theme; nurture vs. nature instead of nurturing the nature, a phrase Michael Gurian introduced decades ago to remind us that it is not nature vs. nurture but a process that understands nature first and the necessity to nurture that nature.
Opposing views to the nurture-the-nature approach tend to conflate sex with gender and rely on “gender sensitivity” arguments, a practice that gives gender sensitivity the lead role and sex difference a lesser supporting cast. This approach puts the cart before the horse because nature, and understanding it, precedes nurture.
Educational outcomes, for instance, are impacted by male and female brain difference, as noted in Boys, A Rescue Plan: Moving Beyond the Politics of Masculinity to Healthy Male Development. Some institutions tend to minimize the role of brain-differences in males and females (brain-sex difference). One counterargument regarding male and female brain difference comes from the notion that single-sex schools do not show remarkable differences from coeducational schools. In the mind of the NMT, single-sex school outcomes offer mixed results at best. This observation serves as a type of foundational argument, but like many debates around sex and race, they often fail to disaggregate data and provide proper context.
Students do not have success, in single-sex or coeducational, if lesser pedagogical approaches are employed. The student does not fail because the school is single-sex. The student succeeds because the pedagogical approaches used by teachers at the single-sex school or coeducational school are embedded into a larger curricular framework that recognizes brain-sex difference. A school helps its students find success because it begins with a basic principle that nature comes first and that lessons and the school day (the nurturing) are arranged around that principle. In this model, institutions recognize sex-differences and then plan accordingly so that boys and girls can thrive. In my mind, this is what male empowerment and female empowerment looks like.
This approach unsettles NMTs because it acknowledges sex difference and undermines the soft-science commitment to sex-sameness. Ironically, this same class is more likely to support single-sex schools for girls more so than it does boys under the guise of gender sensitivity, something presented in a Guardian article out of the University of California, San Diego in 2024 by a first-year student, “The all-girls’ advantage.”
“When girls are exposed to high-achieving male students, they are more likely to lack self-confidence and have lower educational goals. On the other hand, over 88% of female students at single-gender schools report they are comfortable being themselves, with higher self-confidence compared to students in co-education. This is likely due to the supportive atmosphere an all-girls environment brings to young girls. In an all-girls environment, girls are more likely to relate and empathize with their peers, creating a safer space.”
Could the above be said about boys in all boys’ schools?
The article does not actually use the words gender sensitivity, but it certainly relies on that framework. The student-author comes to misunderstood conclusions on her own, but those conclusions were probably from many years of cultural stereotypes embedded in educational institutions, media presentations, and government policies that saturate a certain message into our culture. The article goes out of its way to place boys squarely in the problematic zone, where they get in the way of girls’ learning, where there is a cultural bias that keeps girls from thriving, the idea that boys’ more aggressive nature intimidates girls.
The article fails to mention, of course, that the university’s own admissions for the 2024 academic year was 56% female and 41% male and are similar to statewide admissions seen across the entire University of California system.
There are, on occasion, some concessions from the soft science and humanities class when it comes to developmental issues between the sexes. Redshirting, holding children back a year when starting school, has gained popularity and has been a practice among teachers with children. And in some instances, it is the right choice. As a blanket policy, however, it will not lead to sustained success, as redshirting has not been shown to have lasting educational benefits.
The greater benefit will come from best teaching practices that recognize brain science matters. Most educators learn little to nothing about the mechanisms of the brain during learning—such as how to engage the pre-frontal cortex or crossing the midline as part of preparing students to learn. Boys in particularly need movement, not to simply get rid of the wiggles but to stimulate executive function. This is not a maturity thing; it’s a hard wiring thing.
Like the education industry, sex-sameness is often used in mental health programs that use a static therapeutic approach. There is a great tendency in therapy to engage the female mind more readily than the male mind. These approaches certainly contribute to fewer males seeking help, while discouraging males—who do seek help—to drop out of counseling at much higher rates than females. Modern therapeutic approaches often fail to engage the male mind that may need physical action first. The same approach used in schools is used in mental health counseling, where there is a reluctance to acknowledge male and female brain difference and incorporate, instead, the politics of sex-sameness and grievance. The sex-sameness approach and the grievance movement expose a greater problem—an over-reliance on nurture first and an ideology committed to fixing males instead of nurturing male nature.
Think of the counseling office where therapist and patient sit across from one another and talk, maybe about problems or maybe a decision by the therapist to present “oppressor or victim categories to patients, based on their innate characteristics, instead of seeing them as individuals,” something noted by Lisa Selin Davis back in 2023 in The Free Press.
An entire industry has been assembled around changing male nature by using a sociological and ideological framework born from the academic class that relies on grievance therapy and a rebuke of traditional masculinity. The American Psychological Association (APA) created a report that framed traditional masculinity as unhealthy and highlighted the importance of “changing the culture.” The APA has embraced the new-masculinity construct wholeheartedly with a particular bent toward negatively framing masculine traits, see Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided by Jonathan Alpert and an article he released in OutKick earlier this year.
Alpert recognizes the way culture and therapy culture in particular has pathologized traditional masculinity and created a society of more anxious people, despite the increased number of people in therapy. To be clear, Alpert does not minimize the importance of therapy nor does he ignore the way the grievance industry in psychology has harmed men and women. He argues that therapy needs to get out of the grievance industry and the systemic blame doom-loop. Healing, self-empowerment, and resilience are the goals of therapy.
Unfortunately, males are too often the target of the grievance industry and systemic blame, particularly with academics, policymakers, and the media.
In 2015, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young released Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men, where they discuss cultural, political, and technological changes that have done more than displace males but “have altered perceptions of the male body and therefore undermined the foundation of masculine identity” (email communication with Paul Nathanson).1
Replacing Misandry “shifts attention from women and their theories about men to the historic and current facts of life for men. Replacing Misandry examines the history of men—which is to say, perceptions of the male body—over approximately ten thousand years. This is a history of cultural and technological revolutions—that is, the horticultural, agricultural, industrial, military, sexual and reproductive revolutions—and the resulting need for men to establish a collective identity specifically as men. This is their projects intellectual foundation. Nathanson and Young define a healthy identity, whether collective or personal, as one that allows people to make at least one contribution to society that is (a) distinctive, (b) necessary and (c) publicly valued. Without that—and we live in a society that has ceased to value even fathers except as wallets or assistant mothers—men cannot have a healthy identity. Some respond by dropping out of school or even out of life itself and others by turning against a society that has no room for them as men.”
Nathanson and Young’s book is a sweeping historical overview and particularly engaging when read alongside Therapy Nation. (I strongly encourage doing just that.) Although this specific book in the four-collection series by Natanson and Young does not cover therapy in great detail, we find similar themes regarding the unhealthy collective-identity-apparatus that builds upon grievance.
The grievance industry against boys and men moves people away from personal responsibility and engages in cultural misappropriations of nature (XX and XY). This further leads to replacing sex difference with sex-sameness or pitting one sex against the other. So much of this comes from a cultural grievance ethos that ironically justifies misandry in order to create a new masculinity or forward the advantage of one sex over the other. (Think of things like offices of women’s health but no offices of men’s health as justifiable actions for perceived past transgressions or notions of one group being more oppressed than another.)
The dominant voices in our academic, media, and policy class too often use misogyny as a concept to pit one sex against the other while promoting a type of soft or hard-core misandry—much of this is done as a way to supposedly unify the sexes but under the guise of new masculinity. We see it in arguments in support of boys and men that begin with apologies to women.
Long before a boy is born and becomes a man, there are innate evolutionary processes taking place that will prepare him for the world outside the womb and continue to shape him throughout life, yet there is a clear cultural effort to change and marginalize the masculine.
Understanding that nature precedes nurture does not undermine the need for the nurturing that comes after, a nurturing that understands, encourages, and welcomes male aggression, competitiveness, risk-taking, toughness, stoicism, and other aggregate male behaviors into a holistic framework of masculinity that improves self, family, and society collectively. These types of expression are largely removed from schools, policy action, and modern thought. Masculinity needs empowerment and direction—not newness.
Author Note: In a later piece, I will expand upon the notion of male empowerment.
Other works include
Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (2001) originated as the opening chapter of a single volume on misandry. It is about the depiction of men in American popular culture during the 1980s and 1990s. Of great importance in this volume, though, is its chapter on “Making the World Safe for Ideology,” which carefully defines “ideology” as a worldview that has all or most of nine characteristic features (the most important of which is dualism), applies that definition to ideologies on both the Left and the Right, and discusses the danger that any ideology presents to liberal democracy.
The first part of Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men (2006) is about events or trials that journalists have turned into high-profile venues for ideological feminism; the second part is a comparative study of legal changes that have directly or indirectly rigged the system against men in connection with divorce, custody, sexual harassment and so on. Although legislators now express every law in gender-neutral language (except for the law that requires young men in the United States, but not young women, to register for the draft), the interpretation and implementation of some laws by bureaucrats behind the scenes can be anything but gender-neutral.
Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man (2010) is about the use of organized religion to give ideological feminism metaphysical legitimation and, in some cases, to replace or fundamentally alter historic religions such as Christianity and Judaism by introducing goddess worship.