The Politics of Boys and Men

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Boys have been placed in the middle of a political tug-of-war. From the left and the right, competing visions to the boy problem are seeping into the political landscape.

The challenges boys and families face is not new. Since at least the 1990s, different writers, researchers, and citizen scientists have noted the need to help boys and men. Many of them have written numerous books on the subject. The books below are just a few worth dipping into or that have been promoted in the media.

• Sean Kullman and Michael Gurian (Boys, A Rescue Plan—2025)

• Richard Reeves (Of Boys and Men —2022)

• Warren Farrell (The Boy Crisis—2018)

• Leonard Sax (Boys Adrift—2007)

• Christina Hoff Sommers (The War on Boys—2000)

• Michael Gurian (The Wonder of Boys—1996)

• Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power—1993)

• Robert Bly (Iron John—1990)

Those who are familiar with the subject area certainly know these books, but these books are not as ubiquitous in our academic institutions as one might expect.

While there are competing visions when it comes to policies that will help males, females, and families thrive, they are often too one-sided in academia, policy, and media for reasons I will discuss in later pieces.

The institutions that oversee education largely lean left and are reluctant to include books of the type above unless they fall along certain political or ideological lines. It’s the reason so many policymakers, business leaders, academics, teachers, and parents today are timid at a time when robustness is needed.

Acknowledging male and female difference, for instance, can often become a non-starter in our more progressive academic institutions, and the reason there is a certain academic and political quid-pro-quo when it comes to what constitutes accepted and unaccepted material and what constitutes accepted and unaccepted people in the space.

Any school of education that does not, for instance, introduce Boys and Girls Learn Differently into its training of teachers will largely fail to solve the problem. When it comes to mental health, those relying solely on the social-sciences will miss the opportunity to integrate nature, nurture, and culture into therapy. Why do women have more success in therapy than men? It’s not a defect of the patient; it’s a defect of the service.

In 2022, there were 271 suicides among female Veterans (80 fewer than in 2021) and 6,136 among male Veterans (83 more than in 2021), according to the 2024 National Veteran Suicide Report. That’s an increase of 1.4 percent in male suicides and a 22% decrease among female suicides. Males account for 83% of the military personnel and 96% of military suicides. That does not include other serious concerns, like drug overdoses, alcohol deaths, and homelessness. Cultural stereotypes for these differences are the biggest threat.

Suggesting that social and cultural influences are more predictive of outcomes while ignoring XX and XY is simply willful ignorance at a time when technology is providing more detailed information regarding male and female brain differences.

A study out of Stanford Medicine falls into a long line of studies that should encourage policymakers to look at brain differences more robustly. The Stanford study used artificial intelligence to help identify the deeper neural components that distinguish the difference between male and female brains. In the study, “researchers tested the model on around 1,500 brain scans, [and] it could almost always tell if the scan came from a woman or a man.”

The team at Stanford “wondered if they could create another model that could predict how well participants would do on certain cognitive tasks based on functional brain features that differ between women and men. They developed sex-specific models of cognitive abilities: One model effectively predicted cognitive performance in men but not women, and another in women but not men. The findings indicate that functional brain characteristics varying between sexes have significant behavioral implications” (Stanford Medicine News Center).

It is fair to argue that there are people in academia and government who generally care about the outcomes of boys and men, but whose ideological perspectives too often leave them cornered and afraid. After all, there is a lot of money to be made thinking a certain way.

Competing Visions

I’ve been particularly harsh with the political left and measurably disappointed with the political right. The right generally worries about large government programs that are rife with fraud—maybe to such a degree that they underperform when it comes to investing in measurable solutions. This, of course, does not mean fraud does not exist or that it does not need to be addressed.

The left has largely abandoned males, unless—of course—they fit into certain categorical boxes that too often look to emasculate or segregate them into protected and unprotected classes. White males are one class of people, black males are one class of people, people of color are another class of people, and so on and so on. These are the greatest pitfalls of all.

Any conversation that begins with race and not the disaggregation of race and sex cannot be trusted in general. Notions of toxic masculinity should generally be dismissed as nothing more than part of the lexicon of discriminatory practices against a group. After all, any person can be toxic (harmful), regardless of race or sex.

Over the next several weeks, I will be writing about competing visions to the problems facing males, females, and families. By competing visions, I will be referring specifically to the way conservatives and liberals generally look at challenges, best practices, and solutions. Some of these conversations will be difficult and controversial but certainly grounded in data and the philosophies of the ages that have shaped policy formation and the way our cultures think about these problems and their solutions.