So Seriously, Are The Boys All Right?
It’s not so much the decline of masculinity as the reshifting of masculinity, and people not wanting to see the old model go.
I’ve been writing about masculinity and dude stuff and male friendships and shifting definitions of what it means to “be a guy” for about 10 years now, with maybe a hyper-focus in the last 2–3. I’m also not famous and in general am “not” a man in conventional terms: my dick don’t work super well (can’t seem to get my wife pregnant) and right now my income is a bunch of small contract work that isn’t helping out my financials. If you view the two main barometers of masculinity as “siring children” and “making bank,” I’m not those things. Maybe that’s why I write about this stuff a lot.
An organization who is famous would be The New Yorker, and Richard Reeves (I believe he works at Brookings) is getting some run for his new book on boys and men. This is an article from The New Yorker that’s somewhat a review of the book and somewhat a review of the literature around modern masculinity, and I’ll go ahead and make a little image gallery of cool screenshots from it: