Over the past 12 years, teaching at universities across the country, I have watched something shift in the young men sitting in front of me. They are not apathetic. They are not lazy.
They are lost, and they know it.
They come into my classroom searching for the same things young men have always searched for: meaning, direction, and some evidence that their lives matter. What has changed is where they are going to find it.
Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes have built massive followings among young men. To this subset of young men, Tate and Fuentes are heroes and role models. Commentators on both the left and right decry them as dangerous and misogynistic, but neither has taken the time to ask the all-important question: Why are young men are listening to them in the first place?
Sociology’s answer is that young men need heroes. Heroic role models are among the most basic elements of culture and socialization, in other words, it is not a question of whether young men will look for role models but whom they will look to.
While our mainstream culture ignores or talks down to young men, Tate and Fuentes take their audience seriously. They mirror their resentments back at them, cultivating a shared sense of victimhood and fomenting resentment. Tate and Fuentes are not creating lost and disaffected young men, they are finding them and bringing them together. This is a recipe for disaster, but few alternatives are on offer.
The manosphere has sold young men a worldview in which domination is the highest virtue, women are continually diminished, and relationships are treated purely transactionally. It would be an understatement to stay such a worldview merely tears the social fabric; it leaves it in tatters.
If we want a better way forward for our society and for young men, we must turn to sociologists like Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at University of Virginia. Wilcox and his team documented how young men who were raised in homes without their married biological fathers were significantly more likely to end up in prison.
This suggests the crisis of male formation and the crisis of family formation are the same problem. We need strong families to produce strong men, and we need strong men to build strong families.
Another finding by Wilcox and his team was that young men who were raised by their married, biological parents are nearly 20 percentage points more likely to graduate from college than to end up in prison. This matters because 57% of young men say that marriage and children are the two achieved statues that signal they have reached adulthood.
On a broader societal level, marriage creates economic and household advantages not seen in other household structures. Moreover, upper class marriage rates have remained consistent while marriage rates in the lower social classes have dropped, creating a “two parent privilege” that accrues primarily to the upper class.
To reverse this trend, we will need to address it as a policy matter as well as a cultural issue. For a generation, cultural messaging has treated young men as the problem. That framing is not only empirically thin; it is strategically catastrophic. You cannot spend years telling a group of people that they are inherently dangerous and complicit in oppression and then expect them to heed your guidance on healthy masculinity. The manosphere did not create the vacuum. The culture did.
If there is such a thing as toxic masculinity, there must also be a healthy form. Articulating what that looks like is not nostalgia, it is a social necessity. Regardless of one’s views of gender roles, it is surely significant that all cultures have felt compelled to define them.
Masculinity is not dominance over women; it is sacrificial investment in them and in children. Masculinity is the man who shows up, stays, provides, and protects because he understands that is heroism in ordinary life.
These are not archaic virtues. They are what the research consistently identifies as the conditions under which children, women, and communities flourish most.
Texas has an opportunity to take this seriously. The plight of young men is more than a culture war grievance; it is a genuine civic and policy challenge. Schools, mentorship programs, and community institutions must begin speaking to young men’s search for meaning rather than their capacity for harm.
Young men have been malformed by our mainstream culture and misled by the manosphere. Young men are not looking for permission to be oppressive; they are looking for permission to be needed. It is time we gave it to them, and showed them what answering that call actually looks like.
