The real crisis in young men

During the sentencing, which he was too craven to attend, the judge ruled that Clifford would never be released from prison. But while he poses no further threat to women, the toxic misogynistic ideology that fuelled his killing spree is a real and present danger.

Young men are constantly told that they are in crisis, that they are being wronged, that they deserve much better – and that they deserve a desirable, compliant woman whose priority is fulfilling their every need. 

The so-called manosphere radicalises awkward and angry young men, turning them into a danger to women but also a danger to themselves, making them less likely to be happy, to succeed, and – ironically enough – less likely to secure a healthy relationship. 

Part of why so many young men are so susceptible to the grift manosphere influencers are selling is that the mainstream has agreed that there is a crisis among that group for a decade or more. 

This consensus spans the usual political divides: one of the first people to sound an alarm about young men in the UK was Diane Abbott, who said a “crisis of masculinity” was arising connected to poor performance in schools, lack of father figures, shifts in society and more. 

This narrative was picked up by figures as wide-ranging as Reggie Yates, to arch-critic of liberalism David Goodhart, to right-wing and far-right figureheads like Martin Daubney and Jordan Peterson. Their prescriptions might be drastically different from one another, but there is widespread agreement that there is a genuine crisis facing young men.

However, just because there is a wide political consensus behind a thesis doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily correct. And when you unpick the data, it seems that while we have spent a decade saying with increasing urgency that we need to talk about the crisis facing young men, it’s not entirely clear what that crisis is supposed to be.

One thing that is definitely true is that boys are comprehensively outperformed by girls at every stage of education – though at GCSE level this gap is narrower than it has been in decades (and boys fractionally outperform girls at maths alone). This is reflected in who attends university: there are more young men than more young women (because there are more boys born than girls), and yet 57% of undergraduates in the UK are women.

But this educational outperformance by girls and women doesn’t translate into the workplace in adulthood. A key measure for young people is how many people are NEETs – Not in Education, Employment, or Training. According to official statistics, 12.2% of men under 25 are NEETs, which is slightly higher than the 11.5% of women – but even this gap is not statistically significant.

What is particularly noticeable is that despite the fact young men did worse in school than young women, and were less likely to go to university, they still earn more than their female counterparts – and this gap only grows as they get older, not least because a large part of the gender pay gap is in reality a motherhood pay gap. 

All the same, men in their 20s earn 1.3% more than women, rising to 4.4% in their 30s, and 9.1% in their 40s. That’s not because millions more young men than women are sitting unemployed, or out of the labour force entirely, either through choice, ill health, or some other reason – termed being “economically inactive” in official statistics. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, the male unemployment rate is 4.2%, versus 4.0% for women, while just 8.5% of men are economically inactive – versus 16.5% of women.

So, once they’re past the age of adolescence and the earliest years of adulthood, young men are more likely than women to be in the workforce, and earn more on average than women do, too. On the social side, there are more young men that are single and have never been married than young women, but the ratio (52 to 48) has been unchanged for decades. Men report having about half an hour more leisure time every day than women, on average.

Men are more likely than women to be victims of violent crime at the hands of a stranger or acquaintance (this reverses for domestic violence) – but violent crime is lower than it has been in decades. In 2004, 2.9% of people reported being a victim of violence from a stranger of acquaintance in the last year. By 2014, this had dropped to 1.6%. Last year, 2024, it was just 1.2%. 

Even mental and physical health doesn’t disfavour boys and men: at age 8-16, around one in five boys and girls alike have “probable” mental disorders, but by ages 17+, they are more prevalent in young women – and by adulthood, women are far more likely to be chronically ill than men.

On measure after measure, trying to find a crisis that uniquely affects young men draws a blank. Where disparities do exist, such as in education, or in suicide rate – much higher among men than women – they are longstanding, rather than new. The idea that there is some genuine crisis facing young men is a decade-old narrative. It also seems to be…false.

And yet it’s clear that we still have a problem, just perhaps not the one that we as society thought we did – and certainly not the one young men are relentlessly being told they have. Young men are doing about as well as young women, but everywhere they look there are people telling them they deserve more, that society is stacked against them, that their prospects are dwindling.

Perhaps the problem is simply that young men aren’t as far ahead as they used to be – the odds are still slightly stacked in their favour economically, but not as much as they once were. Young men are prone to delusions of grandeur, to anger, to having their egos stroked and fed, and there are people more than willing to play on their sense of entitlement for their own enrichment.

The manosphere is essentially a parasite playing on the expectations of young men, using their natural impatience. Almost every young person feels like they should be doing better than they are, whether that’s having their love life sorted out, owning a home yet, or having a better career. 

Hyper-masculine influencers are rolling in and exploiting those natural fears, and are selling young men a story that they’re being victimised by society, by feminism, by “DEI”. As the acclaimed streaming series Adolescence puts it, it’s “that Andrew Tate shite”.

Ironically, they do this while financially predating on those young men themselves, making them pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for courses, products, and more – almost all of which trap men in their new cults of masculinity and hurt their chances of actually building real-life success.

Andrew Tate and the masculine influencers who imitate him are nothing more than snake oil salesmen for the digital era. They should be tackled as such, ridiculed and dismissed as exploitative and false. Instead, the mainstream tends to feed their narrative and buy into the idea that men are being uniquely failed by society – only to fail to offer any fix that matches the miraculous claims the hucksters can make. Honest policymakers are always going to do a worse job fixing imaginary problems than grifters who just make stuff up.

There are reasons for young people in society to feel angry and alienated by mainstream politics. Economic growth feels like a thing of the past. Housing is unaffordable anywhere with good jobs, even just to rent – and buying feels like an impossible dream for far too many young people. The concerns of Westminster politics feel entirely disconnected from the needs of anyone under 50, let alone under 40 or 30.

Allowing a dialogue that there is some unique problem among men does nothing to fix this problem. Instead, it feeds into the narrative which is being so effectively exploited by the manosphere influencers. We need to stop saying “we need to talk about” young men. Instead, we need to change the conversation.