Lisa Britton is a writer and advocate for men, boys, and especially for intact marriages and families. She's good at it too, and I really appreciate her perspective on these issues. So few people — especially women — do the kind of work she does, and she can reach women where they are at far better than I can because she is not an old fart who rants for a living.
So when I saw her column that hit the sweet spot on the decline of marriage in young people and the growing alienation of men, I dove into it. And, for the most part, I agree with it, with some caveats.
For decades we told men to step aside. We treated fatherhood as optional and masculinity as a problem to be fixed. We ignored boys falling behind in school, mental health, work, and hope for the future. We gave them almost no public encouragement and a great deal of shaming.
— Lisa Britton (@LisaBritton) August 30, 2026
We… pic.twitter.com/pRtwK9pRso
For decades we told men to step aside. We treated fatherhood as optional and masculinity as a problem to be fixed. We ignored boys falling behind in school, mental health, work, and hope for the future. We gave them almost no public encouragement and a great deal of shaming.
We let technology go to work on their vulnerabilities—cheap dopamine, easy access to porn and gambling, frictionless comparison, a dating market that can make ordinary men feel invisible. After all of that, we look at a generation of unmarried prime age men and scold them with headlines about being “duds.”
I can’t get over how unfair this is. I will go further: there’s something cruel in it. You can’t spend years relentlessly telling men they are the obstacle and then act shocked when men react with backlash.
A Sunday read from me over on S: https://lisabritton.substack.com/p/give-young-men-something-worth-coming?r=18qcjz&utm_medium=ios
Don't get me wrong, her piece is really good and worth a read. The core argument is that society has been at what amounts to a war on boys and masculinity, and that explains quite a bit about why marriage and birth rates have dropped like a rock hits the mark.
But for all the talk about the crisis many young men are facing, she leaves out a good chunk of the equation: women and girls, for all their increasing academic, social, and economic "success," are in a greater mental health crisis and are even more alienated from the social norms and attitudes that really make people happy and keep society functioning.
When young men see headline after headline like “The Good-Man Shortage Has Gotten Exponentially Worse”—recently from New York Magazine—do you think that makes them feel good about themselves?
For decades we told men to step aside. We treated fatherhood as optional and masculinity as a problem to be fixed. We ignored boys falling behind in school, mental health, work, and hope for the future. We gave them almost no public encouragement and a great deal of shaming.
We let technology go to work on their vulnerabilities—cheap dopamine, easy access to porn and gambling, frictionless comparison, a dating market that can make ordinary men feel invisible. After all of that, we look at a generation of unmarried prime age men and scold them with headlines about being duds.
I can’t get over how unfair this is. I will go further: there’s something cruel in it. You can’t spend years relentlessly telling men they are the obstacle and then act shocked when men react with backlash.
They worry about easy divorce in a world where divorce can mean the loss of a house and the destruction of family life. They worry they will never be “enough” on paper: not rich enough, not tall enough, not credentialed enough, not emotionally fluent in the exact way the current moment demands. They worry that the culture that demands they provide but refuses to honor them accordingly.
Yes, the culture has been deprecating men for a long time, and we can see the results everywhere we look. A lot of men and boys out there have gotten the message that they are classified as "toxic," that they aren't good enough, and that unless they make six figures and are six feet tall, they are losers who are and should be incels.
The results are startling:
In 2000, there were 20.7 million unmarried men in America between the ages of 20 and 39. Today there are 30.4 million. Married men in the same age group have fallen from 18.1 million to 15.4 million. Unmarried young men now outnumber married ones by nearly two to one.
Except, as Lisa notes, men aren't so much checking out of the desire to have family and children; it's that they despair about whether they will ever be valued as partners and providers, and they are, for the most part, right. Women on the dating scene are quite open that they believe that only about 10 percent are worthy of even being considered as mates.
Young men today still aspire to marriage and family more than young women do. Pew has found that 12th-grade boys are now more likely than 12th-grade girls to say they want to get married someday: 74 percent of boys, compared with 61 percent of girls. Thirty years ago it was the reverse. Girls’ desire for marriage dropped by more than 20 points! Boys barely moved.
Among young adults without children, men are more likely than women to say they want to be parents. An Institute for Family Studies survey of men 18 to 29 found that 68 percent of the unmarried ones want to marry someday. Only about one in ten say no.
So the chart isn’t a portrait of men who have abandoned the family or hate women. It’s a portrait of a disconnect. Young men want to get married. They also feel that the odds are stacked against them in terms of dating and settling down with someone they can trust. We need to ask why young men are so demoralized, and how we can move them towards the married life they say they want.
Notice something? The social crisis is not that men don't want to get married. It's that, as a group, today's women don't want to marry them because they believe these normal guys are losers.
12th grade girls are less likely than boys to say they want to get married someday https://t.co/bC1O6Qn1ay
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) November 17, 2025
If the societal hostility to men is a problem for them, it's largely a result of an increasingly female-dominated society classifying normal men as toxic and unworthy of respect. In other words, it's not "society" that has caused a crisis in men and boys — men and boys, for all their struggles, are more psychologically healthy by a long shot than young women, among whom mental illness has skyrocketed — it's a large portion of women who have achieved dominance in the institutions that shape our culture who have created a culture hostile to men, and in the process have hurt young women.
A new study analyzing two decades of international data reveals that the mental health gap between teen boys and girls has expanded faster in countries with high gender equality. Rising academic pressure on young women partly explains the divide. https://t.co/dSoMbQaVEN
— PsyPost.org (@PsyPost) March 25, 2026
The feminist movement, which was founded on a mission of creating social equality for men and women, has become anti-man, anti-marriage, anti-natalist, and it demands that feminist values dominate in all aspects of society. Helen Andrews' diagnosis is that as more and more industries and cultural institutions become female-dominated, the imbalances in society have grown, and toxic wokeness has come to dominate in many aspects of life.
BREAKING: "Nearly 3 in 5 teen girls felt persistent sadness in 2021... and 1 in 3 girls seriously considered attempting suicide, according to data released on Monday by @CDCgov."
— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) February 13, 2023
"The rates of sadness are highest reported in a decade..." https://t.co/BcYoyzoeXU
She's right. Feminine values are a necessary complement to masculine ones. The problem is that feminine values now dominate, and as a result, our society is collapsing in on itself.
A well-functioning society needs a balanced Yin and Yang in order to thrive, and we are light-years away from such a balance. Part of that is the effort to have women supplant men in traditionally masculine realms, including in the economic sphere, and part of it is that women focus too much on real and performative compassion and the appearance of social unity over competition and the necessary, visible harshness that undergirds social order, especially in matters of dealing with criminals.
Both women and men can be cruel, but in different ways. Men tend to punish what they consider bad behavior, especially violence toward the weak and criminality, with harsh physical punishments. Women tend to use social sanctions mixed with a bizarre tendency to identify with malefactors who can claim victimhood. That's why social cancellation and wokeness grew as women grew dominant in societally important institutions.
The irony is that women don't thrive in feminist-dominated institutions or a society that prioritizes feminine traits any more than men do, and arguably less so.
The mental illness crisis is far greater among women than men, with liberal women who lean more toward wokeness than any other group leading the pack. Women looking for a dating partner will often complain that they can't find any worthy men, but they are the ones who have defined the median male as unworthy.
They "swipe left" whenever they see a guy who makes $40,000 to $60,000 and is 5'8". The average guy at 27 is 5'9" and makes $60,000 to $70,000 (according to Google, at least), yet he is ineligible as a partner for the vast majority of women in a similar category. The median single woman is competing for men in the top 5-10 percent of men, and that man has a nearly infinite number of potential sexual partners, so he is much less likely to want to settle down.
There's no shortage of eligible men. Women, who have become increasingly politically and socially extreme, have also categorized ordinary men as losers.
We — and especially women — have categorized masculine behavior as toxic and feminine behavior as superior, and the result has been that both males and females are much less happy than they used to be, and our society is not reproducing.
We are less free because women prefer surface unanimity and compliance to conflict, and less happy because men and women no longer can use their complementary virtues to build something better than a society completely dominated by one sex over another.
This is all a result of a toxic feminist cultural movement — not "feminine," but "feminist." It's not something that can be reversed in a week, a year, or even a decade. But reversed it must be, and it has to start in schools and colleges, which will resist any change with the ferocity of wolverines.
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