Wanted: Men of Purpose

The Manosphere. This online, man-made safe space serves as a kind of glasshouse of masculine performance, there for observers to imitate or revile. However one might measure the relative percentages of truth and lies on offer in the Manosphere, however one might separate the true masculinity on offer there from the Manosphere’s many vain effeminacies masquerading as virile strength, one thing is clear: men are in the middle of an identity crisis.

We could leave aside the various instances of that crisis that emanate from the sexual Left, by which I mean the LGBTQ emporium of options for how one might live out one’s manhood. But why should we? Left, Right, and Center—we can’t agree on what it means to be truly manly. A central cause of the present crisis is that America’s men have almost a complete lack of experience with single-sex education before college.

While I agree completely with Scott Yenor’s point regarding military academies and the fittingness of especially male preparation for the work of war, my primary advocacy for single-sex education concerns pubescent children, whose faculties require immediate and urgent shaping, modeling, and self-discipline in sex-specific environments, especially during the critical years of middle school and high school. The now multigenerational ubiquity of coeducation and the resulting erasure of manly memory and tradition have come home to roost in the not-so-climate-controlled hothouse of the Manosphere. The result is nostalgic guessing and ludicrous—and sometimes hideous—innovations about what it means to be a real man.

The physical shapelessness of boys today has been much commented on by everyone from Bobby Kennedy Jr. to the weightlifting bro on YouTube with 30 views of his morning workout. The moral shapelessness of boys, however, has been less clearly established.