What Do Men Want

Photo of a pride parade in New York, 2023. Available via Reclaim Pride Coalition NYC © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.

I was prompted to write this article after experiencing a round of despair at male suicide trends—a topic about which I and many others are wounded. When I contemplate the extraordinary rates at which men are voluntarily rapping on the door—so to speak—I pull back and see suicides among a constellation of dysfunctional behaviors. What’s going on with the violence against themselves, ourselves, the fear, the hatred, the extreme politics, the mistrust of authority, the redpillers, the hucksters, and shills?

If this were all personified in a sole man—say, Bob, living in Nottingham, who likes toffee and drives a '13 Renault, he’d promptly be snatched by authorities and psychoanalytically scrutinized. I’m curious what they’d conclude. I wonder what they’d think he sees. What’s Bob fearful of? Is he right or wrong? Why isn’t he happy? Why did Bob quit HR and start grinding options trading?

When I started writing this article, I was aiming to take a purely economic view. The economy is like a monolithic Quaking Aspen from which necessities like food, fuel, and shelter grow. When it starts to recess, or die, or fails to produce necessities within easy reach of common people, we—the dependents grow restless.

A graph showing all leading parties across global democracies falling behind in votes, 2024. Available via the Financial Times. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.

Everywhere, but especially in the West, we’re unhappy with all of our political options. Take a look above. That graph shows that all ruling parties in developed democracies have lost voting share this year. This has never happened before.

We vote in party A, complain, admonish, and vote in party B who surely fail just as critically. Because the economy is a cosmically massive beast which cannot be corralled or persuaded without it snapping its jaws at us, drawing blood. No matter the leader, they lightly massage the economy, our currency weakens further, and our pittance is paid at wages set at a time when Leona Lewis was singing Bleeding Love.

The British ONS reported in 2020 that 10% of households hold half the wealth. This statistic is similar or worse in many other developed nations. For fear of taxing the wealthy and driving them and their money out, plus aversion to taxing the poor, the middle class are wrung dry. This squeezes them from the middle into a K-shaped graph where large volumes of people are either low or upper class.

When large populations are driven into poverty, as we saw in Argentina in 1998-2002, social unrest follows. How does social unrest manifest? It manifests in demonstrations, but also in increased crime rates. In Argentina, crime rose a staggering 245% between 1991 and 2007. There is nothing special about Argentina that made it susceptible to social unrest. This happens everywhere where large swaths of people are made poor.

You’ve seen the films where a gang of strangers find themselves stranded somewhere with limited resources. Their tight social bond quickly breaks down. Within a week they’re getting suspicious, in another week they’re hanging a scapegoat, and by the third week, they’re hacking each other to pieces. This is the sort of thing happening now. It’s happened before and it happens all the time. Sometimes it’s catastrophic. Sometimes it’s just tough.

Bob is in the middle of all of this. He’s hanging on, but he’s getting poorer by the year. He’s disillusioned by the 40k HR role. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to afford a house. But the thrill and the gains in options trading might change it all. What’s he got to lose? What would he save for anyway? He wonders why it’s all going to pot, and so he does what we all do when we wonder—he looks around—takes stock.

To Bob, the world’s a weird place now. Women are men, men are women, words he could boldly toss around 20 years ago catch in his throat now, immigrant populations have boomed, everyone's using American words, the films are worse, and the music’s shit. He feels like a foreigner in time.

He took what he knew about being a man of his nation and filed it right next to facts like “How tall is Mt. Everest” and “How many BHP in an '97 GTR?”—not in the same place as changeable facts like his waist size, or the price of milk.

Poster of Rambo First Blood Part II, 1985, image from Studiocanal. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.

Solid, foundational ideas started to change in his society, and he felt uncomfortable. The political correctness of the right—reverence of leadership and country—transformed into the political correctness of the left—reverence of the underserved, addressing historical wrongs. At the same time, the economy took a tumble. The price of milk doubled. £20 got him half the petrol. The government raised his taxes. He slid down the economic graph. From Bob’s frame, it looks like a new world is being built, and this one is full of unrest, poverty, and new accents.

There is so much more to say about male disillusionment. Much of it is contested, self-imposed on men, perpetuated by grifters, and even foreign adversaries who intentionally deepen civil discord. The issues facing young boys in education aren’t what men of Bob’s age face, yet they are increasingly being drawn into similar political movements.

I repeat the original economic theory because I do indeed think it holds water. But after a foray into some research material, I discovered another layer to the discontent fueling male dissolution. It comes from The Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Focusing mainly on the West, they outline a cyclical pattern of stability, change, fragmentation, and finally crisis occurring roughly every 80-100 years.

It starts with stability, following a crisis. The stability was hard-earned, and with lessons learned, new laws, social structures, philosophies, and institutions spring up. They are enjoyed for a few decades before a new, restless generation comes of age. This first turning is most comfortably applied to the post-war period.

The new generation picks holes in the existing stability. They feel discontent that their problems aren’t represented in the prevailing ideologies and begin to slowly foment change. Slowly, because the opposition who created the status quo are still relatively young, powerful, and driven. According to The Fourth Turning book, this last happened around the ‘60s.

The third turning occurs is typified by fragmentation. The old guard begins to retire and die. The seats of power begin to fill with new faces. Institutions begin to mutate. Each new generation is more energetic and rebellious than the last. The ideas set forth by older generations in the first turning, their institutions, ideas, feelings, and justifications fade from memory as the men and women of that old time retire and die. At the same time, younger people who wish to conserve the status quo grow in force.

The fourth turning is a crisis. An aggressive, historically violent clash of ideology between the new generations and their variously aged conservative opposition. Conservative, because they wish to conserve the typical way of things and protect it from change.

In the book in question, we are apparently in the fourth and final turning with no end in sight. This expanded cyclical view of male misbehavior and destructiveness makes it no less palatable, but it’s nice to have context. It’s also nice to know that long-lasting stability may just follow soon.

Taking the economic view and integrating it with the inescapable 4 turnings, I feel satisfied that anger, scapegoats, extremism, and violence are accounted for, but not suicides. Why are ~80% of all suicides in the west committed by men? And why is it on a long upwards trend? Well, here’s an experimental and novel idea.

Unlike in the past, the third and fourth turning is not being initiated in the main by men. The cultural opposition is largely comprised of men, and men withdrawing from society. They are earning fewer degrees, have fewer friends, and work less. Despite this, the walls are still holding up, because this time women in work and education are enough of a bulwark to keep things from falling into disarray.

The destruction has not worked or is working only very slowly. We may all be suffering through a protracted fourth turning. To put it in a line: Subsets of men have tried to fight in the fourth turning to win, but have wound up in a war of attrition. Think of it like an unconscious, group-minded social immune response.

This is perhaps why men are participating in society less and winding up in intolerable life circumstances. Mark Kaplan, et al. published the surprising statistic in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, that 60% of men who commit suicide had no prior history of mental illness, including depression.

This means that 60% of male suicide victims simply decided in a dry and sober headspace that there was no joy or contentment left in the life ahead of them.

This would be a good place to deploy some more stats. A 2021 American Perspectives survey reported that 15% of men report not having a single friend. For unmarried men under 30 that number is 25%. In the American Time Use Survey from 2023, men from 18 to 23 spend 22% more time alone than women of the same age.

Male enrollment into higher education is dropping year on year. In the UK in 2021, 43.9% of first-time graduates were men, according to the Equality in Higher Education Stat report, 2021.

12.4% of “Prime age” men in the US have entered into long-term unemployment, according to Male Labor Force Participation: Patterns and Trends, 2021.

If withdrawing, anger, and suspicion hasn’t yielded structural change, what comes next is anyone’s guess, but there aren’t many options.