It’s hard to be a boy. Let me introduce you to three of them. One was my friend in primary school, another my friend from mini-rugby, the final being a student two years below me in secondary school. All three are dead, all three died from suicide. Whilst each and every suicide is devasting, I must admit that I’ve become desensitised to the news at this stage. I wept when I heard of the first suicide to affect someone close to me, I failed to process the latter ones, it felt almost inevitable. Multiple young men who were students at my university when I was there committed suicide. It has started to feel like an all too common tragedy, a fact of life. In Ireland, suicide is the leading cause of death for young people, and young men are much more likely than young women to be its victims [1]. I can’t say why, it’s far too complex an issue to be resolved in a few lines, but it is a clear indication that things are going badly for boys and young men, and we’re struggling to talk about it.
It’s hard to be young, alone, and full of angst. Young people, and specifically young men (at least those on the internet), are the loneliest demographic in society [2]. This is not necessarily surprising; we are told to get jobs we don’t want, to grow up, to fend for ourselves out in that big, bad world. We must deal with the large-scale upheaval of our lives as we transition from boys to men, but we don’t really know what men are anymore. And when this transition goes wrong, it can be catastrophic. Just ask the hikikomori, if you ever get a chance [3]. Originating in Japan, the term hikikomori is used to describe members of society who experience severe social withdrawal and isolation. What this means in practice is someone who doesn’t feel comfortable leaving their house or perhaps their room for extended periods of time, stretching into years or even decades. The majority of Japanese hikikomori are men. The first generation of hikikomori reached adulthood just as the Japanese economy, which had been booming as if indefinitely, came to an abrupt halt. It unceremoniously left a forgotten generation in its wake, unable to fulfil the roles society expected of them, for which they had been preparing for their entire childhood. Hikikomori are not solely a Japanese cultural phenomenon, though their emergence during the Japanese economic crash is enlightening. The transition from boyhood to manhood is always challenging, but if you add a massive shock to this tumult, you might just get 1 million Japanese men receding from public life.
It’s hard to be a young man. We are now outperformed in school, outnumbered in university, and outearned as graduates [4], [5]. We will be poorer than our parents, with neither housing nor earning potential nor planet to live on [6]. We are more likely to die from suicide, homicide, and in war, to be homeless, to recede entirely from public view [7], [8], [9]. We spend more time in prison [10]. We are more likely to be injured or die during work [11]. We die younger [12]. We are more likely to have no friends and live with our parents [13]. We struggle to find romantic attachment [14]. We live in turbulent times. We were told to sacrifice the best years of our lives during the pandemic, so that those who have already lived their best ones could have a few more. We were told to come together so that the health services that our governments failed to service wouldn’t collapse. We were locked-down, locked-in, locked-up. How could we grow up locked up? Many of us have failed, our reading ages plummeted, while some of us will never grow old [15]. What did we get in return? Social media separating us, a planet that’s simmering. The art of the deal would suggest that we’ve been fucked, the social contract in tatters.
Whilst the challenge of embracing adulthood is neither unique to our generation or to men, the everchanging societal expectations of what it means to be a modern man has left many adrift, unable to catch up. Few in the mainstream are willing to address, and seek to resolve, the problems of men. Those who do usually only habiTate the right, the alt-right, or the far right. In mainstream opinion, it feels like gender parity appears only to be a problem when it is men and the patriarchy on top. Blamed for being boys, blamed for being men. What does that even mean? How can I be the personification of both toxic and fragile masculinity at the same time? We are faced with girls and women who have caught up and surpassed us in many facets of life. We look upwards and see a system with men still very much on top, but they’re not from our generation. And rather than tackle gender inequality at their level, those on top feel grandfathered in whilst enforcing “solutions” on us. Many say that this is progress, that it is the inevitable swinging of the pendulum, the rebalancing of historic injustice. But to boys born in the 21st century, it’s hard not to feel oppressed rather than the source of oppression. I’ve never experienced maleness or masculinity being openly celebrated, only castigated. I’ve never witnessed as strong attempts to attract men into fields dominated by women like those to bring more Women into STEM. The international days of women and girls are impossible to ignore whilst the UN has failed to embrace the days of men and boys [16].
What started as simply listing the struggles of boys and men has quickly become a comparative task in estimating the true worthy victim of gender-based oppression; boys or girls. The words just flowed, it was invigorating, I barely realised I was doing it. And that’s how they get you. They feed on the real, genuine concerns of young men, and twist them into zero-sum game thinking of in-group vs out-group dynamics, with women, immigrants, and LGBTQ quickly becoming culture war enemies, with the real issues of men being silently forgotten [17]. On one side, you have people screaming no, it’s hard to be a girl. Whilst the statement that it’s hard to be a boy makes no allusions to the challenges faced by women and girls, the comparison is inescapable. The gap left on men’s issues by reasonable parties is being filled by unreasonable ones [4]. They start by acknowledging that it’s hard to be a boy, affirming your lived experience. “Why yes it is hard, it’s undeniably hard to be a boy! Yes, it feels like no one wants to help, so let me”, they’ll gargle. Maybe they’ll sell you a skewed version of their opponents’ positions. “Men are the problem, and therefore you are the problem”. Maybe they will slip in some good old-fashioned misogyny, telling you to “man up, stop complaining, stop crying. Life is a struggle, real men are forged in the fires of pain”. They’ll prey on your subsequent feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, their reasoning will squelch with squeezed snake oil. They’ll attempt to provide certainty in this chaotic world. They’ll promise to teach you the one true path to become a man, which more often than not involves imposing yourself on top of others. And there are many paths, many gurus, many ways to make money, none of which address the actual root causes of the issues faced by men. I know what they do, because they did it to me too. When I was 16, I became enthralled in a culture war I never intended on joining.
I’m not so sure that I want to talk about my own experience, but for a reason that lies somewhere between catharsis and masochism (not machismo) here I am. I had hoped that by rereading the diary entries of my 18 year old self I would find answers to the allure of alt-right ideology. Maybe I would find examples of my inherent misogyny and chauvinism which I could subsequently chastise in an attempt to placate my woke overlords. But honestly, all I found was a sad, scared kid grasping at any source of knowledge to help provide clarity and meaning in a chaotic world. There was nothing inherently wrong with me, I wasn’t a misogynist, I just wanted answers to questions that were being ignored or ridiculed in the mainstream. It seems inevitable that when someone searches for answers to a question that only one subsection of society is willing to address, they can be easily captured. Combined with an algorithm hungrier for attention than a caterpillar, this innocent search can be so smoothly coopted and corrupted. I remind myself now that it was my algorithm that was toxic, not my masculinity.
I began by seeking commentary on the problems faced by men and the failings of feminist ideology to recognise their existence. I wanted genuine acknowledgment of the struggle of boys, but these discussions weren’t voiced or tolerated by those who I saw as in power, like my teachers. Due to these real world shortcomings, I was forced to find a refuge, a “safe space”, online. This is the social media age, where else do you turn when you have a question that needs answering? My journey was fuelled by YouTube and Reddit, and as they say, the medium controls the message [18]. On YouTube, I could watch 7-10 minute segments to dip my feet in, on Reddit I could read angry rants and peruse frog memes. It felt rebellious. But YouTube search is a dangerous tool in unsuspecting hands. A simple question about feminism led to videos of feminist fails, Ben Shapiro destroys, and Milo Yiannopoulos takedowns clogging my suggestions, and I must admit, it’s very intoxicating to receive a point of view that sounds oh so reasonable and yet is shunned by more palatable entities. This quickly escalated into longer video formats; I could watch hours of Steven Crowder changing no minds and debating with an eclectic use of logical fallacies, not that I cared, against unprepared and uninformed “woke” university students. The mere act of standing up to status quo thinking was enough to entrap me. I can’t say what is to first encounter the messengers on TikTok, I can only assume it’s much worse, much more insidious.
Whereas on YouTube my active search was being rewarded, what went from being funny memes on Reddit, turned into dives ever deeper submerged in the darkest of subs. I received an education in gender relations that I wasn’t looking for, beyond enjoying laughing at frogs. Did the experience become infectious? Were the recesses of r/MGTOW and r/MGTOW2 (for anyone not in the know, Men Go Their Own Way separate from women) the places to learn about relationships? Did their constant talk of false rape accusations lead to me distancing myself romantically from women out of fear? I literally had never even kissed a girl, why I was so concerned about accusations? On Reddit, I was taught to see empowered women as something to fear; single mothers as a drain on taxes and thus the hard-earned incomes of men. I saw men as the predominant contributors to a tax system that worked against them. I saw parenthood as a prison run by women to ensnare, entrap, enslave men, to steal their money and their offspring. I saw divorce as a means to squeeze out alimony and custody. I wholeheartedly rejected the concept that feminism could be about equality when it’s very naming convention focused on one gender. Reddit taught me all the terms of the incel lexicon, all its cartoonish characters, its Staceys and Beckys and Chads and Betas and Pepe and Keke. Was it all just a meme? Had I become the meme? I was a red-pilled, blue-balled passive sponge soaking in their hate.
Interest in the incoherence of specific sections and segments of 4th wave feminism which had ignited my initial search had become well and truly corrupted. It was doused in jet-fuel and set alight. I became aware of so many male injustices that I had never even thought about, and that weren’t reflective of my real world experience. The offline failings I had started my journey focusing on became irrelevant; I was now on a team, and I wanted my team to win. More than this, the world I saw reflected back at me through my screen was far more frightening and dangerous than the one I would see when I put down the screen. A vicious, perpetual cycle ensued forcing me to delve ever deeper to find comfort and solace from the chaos. Did I need Jordan B Peterson telling me to embrace my inner lobster, to tidy my room, and to pet cats so that I may be free of chaos? Whilst my parents might argue about the merits to my newfound crustacean cleaning routine, all I wanted was to wrestle back control in what appeared to be an increasingly disordered, divided existence. There was the truth online, and no one recognising it offline.
By being further entranced by the online world, what started as a purely online relationship started to spillover into my offline life. I became a troll. The Irish abortion referendum in 2018 was a trollable moment, and I carpe diemed it. In the real world, there was an accepted and acceptable viewpoint. There was my English teacher, the girls in my class, my family, all telling me I was wrong to question the perceived wisdom on abortion. In class there was no room to discuss ethics and morality, to explore edge cases and where the line should be drawn, nor was there any attempt of neutrality or impartiality on the part of my teacher. Far from fostering inquisition, I felt “woke” feminist ideology was being imposed upon me, telling me that abortion was a women’s issue, and that I should shut up. When you’re told you cannot hold a certain view or even take part in the discussion, it certainly makes dissent feel alluring, enticing, a forbidden fruit to feast on. To me, the establishment was not the decades long unbroken chain of men at the top of politics and the church who held a stranglehold on Irish society, the very men who denied contraception and divorce, and who institutionalised single, pregnant women, forcing them to work as slaves and then to give up their children, that is if both mother and child survived birth. The same men whose policies continued to vilify and ostracise women up until the referendum, forcing them to flee filled with shame overseas, and forcing many others to die during pregnancy and childbirth. No, to me, those that needed to be challenged were the women who taught me, they were the institution, the mainstream, the authority figures.
Feeling silenced by the “establishment”, I pushed back, I felt I had to. Fortunately, I was a parrot well-prepared to trigger and troll having consumed copious quantities of alt-right America’s abortions critiques and devilishly devised talking points. Each and every dinner time was turned into a frenzied battle ground on abortion, where I imposed my devil’s advocacy (or that’s what I told myself) on my weary family – but at least we were talking and not using our phones at the table. The question, “If you cannot debate a topic, then what’s the fucking point?” encapsulates my thought process. For that’s all the abortion referendum was to me, a topic to be debated. To me, the debate lacked any emotion or real implications, just like the ones I experienced online. Turning Point USA and PragerU meant that I was well versed in the stages of prenatal development; I knew when the heart starts to beat, when brain waves can be detected, and when surviving outside the womb is possible. I had seen so many images of ultrasounds that arguably I could easily have been mistaken for an expectant parent. Yet, all this time online failed to make me see abortion as a personal, painful human issue. It was just a debate to win against “woke feminists”. Sorry Mum.
Back in school, a mock referendum was held to teach us about civil institutions and democracy. As it was run by a group of girls wearing Repeal jumpers, perhaps it could be better classed as a mock-ery. Boom. You just got triggered. Of course, I voted no just to stick it to them. Whilst the mock held no weight, and the actual referendum passed, elsewhere the alt-right online machine gained momentous success offline with the overturning of Roe vs Wade thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court picks. Unbeknownst to the lamestream mainstream, the alt-right had already set the debate rules, the battlegrounds, the divisions, recruited an army of trolls to fight, and they celebrated when Trump enabled their political wet dreams (let us hope they keep on only wet dreaming for pregnancies in the US have become very dangerous. However, that would be a women’s issue, far from this polemic and any of theirs). What started offline, festered and stewed online, until it returned unrecognisable to the real world, like a virus unchallenged and untested on the offline defence mechanisms. Trump 2016 was only the beginning.
It’s hard to be a young man; we are much more likely than young women to vote for right, alt-right, far right, and fascist parties. Now just wait here a second, that’s something new. Indeed, I started this journey hoping to prod you into political engagement. And you did become politically engaged, and you influenced elections. Vindication on the theory is sweet, but it had nothing to do with me and my 3 WordPress subscribers, with only 1 of whom I’m not personally acquainted. Unfortunately, President Musk and his billions in blood diamond money got to you first [19]. But the ground work started long ago. The house of cards came caving in, one Joe Rogan episode at a time. I’m not angry at young men, how could I be? I’m just disappointed. Only joking, I’m fucking angry. What did we just do? You were angry, and you changed the course of politics and continents. Only you voted for Trump and the AfD and Farage and the rest [20], [21, [22]]. What were you thinking? Now I have to deal with 50 y.o. political pundits attempting to diagnose the woes of male gen Zs. Stay in your lane, Stewart!
Why are young men voting for far right parties across Europe and North America? Put simply, I believe it’s a combination of real, offline challenges, like economic and social upheaval, corrupted by social media influencers, as well as the space on men’s issues being not only ceded by established institutions, but denigrated by them. For the world, on average, it is the best time to be alive [23]. However, for me, a privileged, white, Western man, things have certainly been better, or at least in modern times never have things felt, comparatively speaking, so bad. Pandemics, housing crises, climate crises, mental health crises, masculinity crises. Rather than address these concerns, if the only message surrounding masculinity you receive is the dangers of its toxicity and fragility, that it is the problem, boys and men may start to internalise this messaging. If you continue to tell someone that he is the problem, that he is deplorable, he may start to believe it. He may look to those willing to embrace him, manipulate him, transform him into their Frankenstein’s monster. He will hate the villains, the women, the immigrants, the minorities, the LGBTQ community. He may take semi-automatics to schools, riffles to rallies, flamethrowers to the social contract. Genocides are orchestrated by evil, but are carried out by naïve, young men [24]. As are fascist regimes, and unfortunately, fascists have already realised the opportunity presented by a lack of orthodox concern, they need only drop the match, for the forest is dry and will need no words of encouragement to go up in flames.
…
How did I get out? The same way I got in, by mistake. One day on YouTube a new face, that of Andrew Yang, appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience, the very same podcast I first made contact with alt-right figures like Steven Crowder [25]. Inquisitive as always, I sat down to watch and immediately became entranced by this unorthodox challenger in the US 2020 Democratic primary race, this political outsider who felt like everything establishment Democrats (and establishment Dubliners) were not. In much the same manner as the alt-right figures who came before him, Yang connected with many young men during the course of his two hours on Joe Rogan. Yang addressed the concerns and fears of men head on, he saw us. From the very beginning, he made it clear that issues faced predominantly, but not solely, by men were worth fighting for. Yang acknowledged that white, working class men swung to Trump in 2016 in part due to real, economic concerns about job losses caused by NAFTA and automation, rather than simply by being deplorable individuals. It didn’t matter to Yang that these men were mostly white, and thus in many eyes too privileged to deserve concern, he was focused on alleviating suffering no matter the sufferer. Yang didn’t avoid gendered statements either; he spat facts and figures that felt lost, if not banished, from the dialogue of traditional Democrats. Yang said, according to the data, that being jobless affected men’s mental health much worse than women. This was not the type of statement that I was used to hearing from those left of centre. Thanks to Ben Shapiro, I had begun to believe that facts and feelings were diametrically opposed, so to hear a Democrat disrupting status quo thinking with science-based evidence was revolutionary.
Like modern day manosphere hacks such as Andrew Tate and far right politicians like Trump, Yang occupied the ground ceded by those unwilling to address men as people who deserved champions, political or otherwise. He evidenced the same ability to connect with men and their issues, and grow a movement, but it’s how he chose to deal with male issues that set Yang apart. Trump and Tate both seek to profit out of your issues; Tate and the rest of the alt-far right circus mobilise young men against women so that they can be rich, not you. They don’t give a fuck about you, you are an income stream. No more, no less. Trump exploits your fears, and vilifies immigrants and trans people as the source of your issues. Fear of the other is just a tool to win your votes, not improve your lives. There is no solution to be found there. Yang, on the other hand, provided a solution which attempted to alleviate suffering and improve lives. His main policy platform, universal basic income, was an attempt to negate the effects of unemployment on men displaced by automation, whilst simultaneously being a means to address the likely increase in wealth inequality that automation would bring if its fruits were only enjoyed by the already rich tech giants rather than the public more generally. His campaign had a resounding message of optimism which painted the future as something to be changed for the better. He didn’t divide, or deride, he attempted to unite. I loved Yang, if I may he was the yin to my yang, and I couldn’t even vote.
Andrew Yang provided me with a positive vision of masculinity; a compassionate, eloquent problem solver who not only cared deeply about making the world a better place, he was willing to do something about it. He showed me that men could be the solution to the world’s problems, not their source. He let me feel happy and grounded and chaos free. I was able to start living offline. I grew up. I gained empathy. I managed to break the cycle of constantly consuming the algorithm’s poisonous delights. Now, I am more aware of the world’s failings than ever before; men are being failed, women are being failed, young people are being failed, poor people are being exploited, immigrants are being vilified, trans people too. The world won’t get better sitting watching Andrew Tate on TikTok, nor by voting for parties who promise to bring back the glories of the past only to usher in a new era of “masculine” autocracy and oligarchy. But actual, positive male role models who can do something to reverse this creep are few and far between online, and unfortunately, as a society, we’ve moved past relying on offline figures as role models.
Yang didn’t set out to influence; he had to if he wanted to attract voters. However, most people who discuss men’s issues online do so to profit, rather than from pure altruism. Hence, most voices skew towards hate because hate sells on the internet. It gets amplified by the algorithms, and we can’t take our eyes away. I don’t see that changing any time soon, not least in the USA where the tech bro class are bending the knee and swearing fealty to the green dollar crown. Any semblance of rule or regulation that could help restrict or limit content fuelled by hate won’t come into existence in the next 4 years. The EU may follow a similar path if Musk can promote the AfD in Germany to chancellorship. Faced by these encroachments and threats, perhaps what we need is a masculine hero, with dark bushy eyebrows, why he should be so manly that it’s in his very name. If not him, then a mass movement should suffice. In any case, all political parties need to realise that men’s issues are voter issues. Every time they fail to properly appreciate this fact, someone else will. We all will suffer if they can’t. And they need to understand the importance of communication in the social media age, it’s no good attempting to address the issues faced by young men if we’re oblivious. We need to know that you’re working for us, that you see us, that the policies you propose will lead to positive changes in our lives. If not, we’ll continue to be the angry generation, and anger is currently only heading in one direction.
[2] Less easy to prove than I initially thought.
The BBC Loneliness Experiment with 55,000 participants, the largest of its kind in the world, found that young men were the loneliest demographic in society, at least according to The Irish Examiner. I can’t find the data broken down by age and gender so I’m somewhat suspicious. If the Irish Examiner is reporting it correctly, then maybe we can say young men are the loneliest cohort on the internet (where the study gathered its participants). This would make sense, lonely, young men are probably quite likely to be found on the internet.
Another study by the ONS has found young people being the loneliest, but no breakdown is given on young men vs young women. The study did find that women in general reported being lonelier than men did. The study also highlighted single, young renters as a group at greater than normal risk of loneliness, sound familiar?
Other studies on the topic, including meta analyses, show a toss-up between young people and very old people. All in all, young men are certainly up there.
[3] Hikikomori is a bit of a buzzword at the moment when it comes to men, specifically young men, so why not join the trend? It used to be thought that the vast majority of hikikomori were men, but it’s actually roughly 60%. There are around 1.5 million hikikomori in Japan as of 2023.
[4] Of Boys and Men (2023) Richard V. Reeves
This book gives a very good account of the problems of boys and men, and the struggles we face in addressing them adequately. This essay was aided significantly by ideas raised in the book, so it’s worth a read if have more time on your hands.
[5] Are young women now outearning young men? In Ireland and the UK it appears so (barely). In the biggest metro areas in the US, the answer is the same. Interestingly, in a article about the pay gap, CBS News quotes experts who label the “reverse pay gap” as a sign of progress…
[6] Will Gen Z be poorer than previous generations? Well, to answer that you’d need a time machine. However, comparing gen Z to previous generations when they were our age in terms of home ownership, debt, and inflation adjusted earnings suggests that we are currently worse off than our parents were. We also have access to technology that they didn’t have, for better or for worse.
[7] Global Study on Homicide (2013) UN Office on Drugs and Crime
Men are 80% of homicide victims. Men are also 95% of homicide perpetrators … it’s all in the framing.
“men are more likely to die during conflicts, whereas women die more often of indirect causes after the conflict is over.” It’s easy to imagine men as combatant fatalities, we usually ignore what happens in areas post war.
[9] In pretty much every country, men are more likely to be homeless than women. Exceptions include the UK and New Zealand.
It makes me wonder why are the UK and New Zealand outliers in this respect? Women experience homelessness primarily because of domestic abuse, maybe the UK and New Zealand are just better at providing shelter to those women in need. Maybe countries with lower rates of female homelessness have hidden women trapped in patterns of domestic abuse. This all goes to show that data is easily manipulated to suit certain perspectives. And now I’ve started being concerned by women’s issues rather than staying laser focused on men, smh.
[10] 90% of prisoners in Ireland are men. This is roughly true for most developed countries.
Men also receive harsher sentences than women even when controlling for crime.
[11] Men are 9 times more likely to die, and 1.4 times more likely to be injured. Hendricks KJ, Hendricks SA, Marsh SM. Workplace Injury and Death: A National Overview of Changing Trends by Sex, United States 1998-2022. Am J Ind Med. 2024 Dec 15. doi: 10.1002/ajim.23687. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39674912..
[13] 52% of young men living with parents vs 44% of young women. 28% of men have “no close social connections”. Survey Center on American Life (2021) “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss”
[14] This wild stat that 63% of young men are single vs 34% of young women. Pew Research Center (2023) If this questionable statistic doesn’t convince just google gender ratios on dating apps to find out just how thirsty young men are…
[15] In the US, the pandemic did have an adverse effect on reading performances.
National Center for Education Statistics (2022)
In other countries, the pandemic actually closed some educational attainment gaps between girls and boys, though as it was boys catching up to girls (or girls falling back towards boys) was never framed as a good thing. I wonder what would happen if the genders were reversed?
[16] 7 days involving women, 4 days involving girls, 0 for men and boys.
[17] Focusing solely on men, a lot of the above statistics miss some important points. Rich men are doing pretty well. Poor men are doing badly. Are rich men really at elevated risk of dying at work? Or going to prison? Or becoming homeless? Or their sons falling far behind in school? What is often missed, and is highlighted in Of Boys And Men, is that poor men specifically are doing badly, as are poor people more generally if you look at increasing wealth inequality. However, by focusing on gender, culture wars easily distracts from the real, systemic challenges. Yes, on average, boys are doing worse than girls in some facets of life, but the far larger gap in attainment and success is between kids who grow up rich and those who don’t.
[18] Well actually, “Medium is the message” is the quote I was thinking of.
[19] This is a joke. It was emeralds not diamonds. In a court of law I request that I am viewed as responsible for this content as X/Twitter is for the content it hosts/publishes i.e not responsible.
[20] The gender discrepancy, and the shift in attitudes is easiest to see in the US election.
[21] It is also visible in the German elections
[22] And the recent UK election
[23] “Enlightenment Now”, Steven Pinker
alternatively, watch Hans Rosling’s Ted Talk, “The best stats you’ve ever seen”
[24] A Problem from Hell (2002) Samantha Power. See specifically the Khmer Rouge Cambodian Genocide as a reference, but any example demonstrates the point.
The Angry Generation 
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