Men Are The Reason Men Are Struggling

Or: You Broke It, You Fix It

Shortly before the election I made this video bemoaning the recent New York Times reporting on the plight of today’s men. In case you missed it, a lot of ink was spilled (both there and many many many other places) about the fact that American men are falling behind.

To be clear, men still make up the vast majority of Congress, Fortune 500 CEOs, tenured professors, judges, venture-back startups, and a full 100% of our nation’s presidents. So the problem we’re talking about isn’t one of absolute power, but of relative power: men aren’t advancing at the same rate as women, and it is a national catastrophe.

Young boys are struggling in school, young men are being outpaced by women in the workforce, and marriage rates continue to decline because women everywhere have started to realize if they married their contemporaries they’d be, to put it biblically, unequally yoked. On top of this, men are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, and four times more likely to commit suicide than their female counterparts.

I want to be very clear - I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of men in this country; the suicide rate alone demands some national reflection. The thing is, my sympathy only runs so deep when, predictably, society is rushing to blame these ills on women, and task us with fixing them. We’ve been told we need to retreat from our careers and get back in the kitchen to restore the chaos we’ve enacted — but this of course ignores the plain truth: patriarchy is the root cause of these evils, not women.