In many domains, the old moral vocabulary remains in place even as the social pattern has reversed, or at least become far more complicated. Women now outperform men across most of education, earn the majority of advanced degrees, and have made major gains in professions once considered male strongholds.
If the feminist view of modern society were fully adequate, one would expect male advantage to be obvious across the institutions that shape everyday life. But the pattern is far messier than that. Men have lower college enrollment and graduation rates, higher suicide rates, greater incarceration, higher rates of homelessness, and are far more likely than women to be sentenced to death, even for comparably heinous crimes.1 Those are not marginal anomalies but central social facts, and any framework that continues to describe men, in general, as the unambiguous beneficiaries of systemic privilege must somehow explain why so many of society’s worst outcomes are concentrated among them.
Education is perhaps the clearest example. Boys now underperform girls on nearly every major academic indicator. Girls do better in reading and writing, earn higher grades, and graduate from high school and college at higher rates. Women now receive the majority of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.2 The National Center for Education Statistics reports that by the fall of 2022 women made up 52 percent of all faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions.3
Large-scale initiatives continue to be organized around improving outcomes for girls and women, while boys’ declining performance is treated less as a social emergency than as an awkward fact that does not fit the script. In the most recent national NCES/IPEDS completion data available, in 2023–2024 female students received about 59.4 percent of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees combined. NCES’s current projections nevertheless show the imbalance persisting: in 2024–2025 female students were projected to receive about 61.3 percent of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees combined, rising slightly to about 61.7 percent by 2031–2032.4 There is no equivalent national campaign to address male educational decline, no broad moral consensus that boys are being left behind, and little appetite for asking whether the institutions themselves may be serving them poorly.5, 6, 7
The college gender gap is now wider than it was when Title IX was enacted, only now in the opposite direction.
Even mainstream commentators who are not writing from an anti-feminist perspective have begun to acknowledge the scale of the problem. In The Atlantic, for example, Derek Thompson noted that American colleges now enroll roughly six women for every four men, and that men accounted for more than 70 percent of the enrollment decline over the previous five years.8 Richard Reeves has likewise argued that boys and young men now lag girls on almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgraduate study, and he notes the striking irony that the college gender gap is now wider than it was when Title IX was enacted, only now in the opposite direction.9 Then it was a national crisis demanding legislative reform of the educational system, today it is barely discussed in the halls of Congress.
Even some elite technical universities appear to admit women at substantially higher rates than men despite drawing much larger male applicant pools. In a recent analysis of IPEDS data from 2001 to 2024, for example, James Nuzzo found that female applicants were admitted at higher rates than male applicants every year at MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon, and in most years at Georgia Tech. The average female-to-male admission ratio was reported as 2.20 at MIT, 2.23 at Caltech, 1.54 at Carnegie Mellon, and 1.31 at Georgia Tech. These findings do not by themselves prove unlawful discrimination, but they do complicate the familiar claim that women remain systematically excluded from elite technical education.10
The same asymmetry appears in health and psychological well-being. Men are less likely to seek help, more likely to die by suicide, and are often underserved by the very systems put in place to care for those experiencing vulnerability. Although men make up about half the population, they account for nearly 80 percent of U.S. suicides. The federal government maintains an Office on Women’s Health, but there is still no directly comparable HHS Office of Men’s Health, despite repeated calls for one.11, 12 The relatively limited institutional attention paid to male-specific problems such as prostate and testicular cancer, male victimization in domestic violence, and male sexual assault reveals how easily men’s suffering is overlooked. These are not obscure issues. They are serious, measurable forms of suffering. But because they happen to men, they do not easily trigger the same public expressions of compassion or the same assumptions of structural injustice that similar patterns affecting women would almost certainly generate.13, 14, 15
A psychologically serious framework should ask when traits are adaptive, when they are maladaptive, and under what conditions they serve human flourishing.
What is especially telling is that concern about boys is now surfacing even from figures whose public careers were built around advancing girls. In a 2025 Time essay, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani wrote, “While we were pushing our girls forward, we were leaving our boys behind,” and went on to note that boys and men are less likely to go to college and more likely to die by suicide or overdose. Her point was not that girls no longer matter, but that a culture serious about fairness can no longer afford to treat male struggle as an afterthought. That concession matters precisely because it comes from someone who can hardly be dismissed as hostile to women’s advancement.16
Criminal justice tells a similar story, and in some ways an even harsher one. Men make up the overwhelming share of the incarcerated, the violently victimized, and the death from high-risk aggression.17, 18 Male victimization rises sharply beginning in adolescence and peaks in the mid-twenties, when men become far more likely than women to be killed. For example, in the United States in 2023, men accounted for about 78 percent of homicide victims, compared with 22 percent women.19 These patterns are highly relevant to any honest discussion of sex, power, and vulnerability. Yet they are rarely centered in mainstream feminist discourse, because they complicate the cleaner narrative in which men are primarily portrayed as perpetrators and women primarily as victims. A skeptical observer might conclude that male suffering is not denied outright so much as downgraded—acknowledged in passing, then quietly absorbed into a framework that still insists men are the privileged sex.
The problem, then, is not simply that some people fail to care enough about boys and men. It is that the dominant interpretive model is poorly equipped to recognize male disadvantage as disadvantage. When women struggle, institutions are encouraged to ask what social barriers are holding them back. When men struggle, institutions are more likely to ask what is wrong with men. The first response invites reform; the second invites diagnosis, moralizing, or indifference. That difference in framing matters because it determines which problems receive resources, research attention, and public sympathy—and which are treated as self-inflicted wounds.
This is where the language of privilege becomes especially misleading. Of course, some men hold enormous power, just as some women do not. But it does not follow that men as a class are uniformly advantaged in the institutions most people actually inhabit: schools, clinics, family systems, low-status labor, or the criminal justice system. What we are witnessing is not universal male dominance. That blind spot persists because an ideology built to detect female oppression has difficulty recognizing that men, too, can be on the losing end of institutions, norms, and cultural assumptions.20
The blind spot is not merely institutional; it is cultural as well. Even explicitly anti-male hostility is often treated as less serious than hostility directed at women. A recent peer-reviewed analysis of extremist Reddit communities found no systematic differences between misogynistic and misandric groups in their linguistic, emotional, and structural features, suggesting that gendered hate directed at men and women may be more similar than our public discourse is comfortable admitting.21 This does not mean online misandry is the central issue, nor does it prove broader institutional discrimination against men. But it does show that contempt for men exists in recognizable, organized form and deserves to be taken more seriously than it usually is.
Once this becomes visible, the next question is unavoidable: what happens when institutions stop merely overlooking male disadvantage and begin actively interpreting masculinity itself as a problem?
The Pathologizing of Masculinity
The problem is not merely that institutions often overlook male disadvantage. In some cases, they go further, treating masculinity itself as something suspect. Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.22 The guidelines are explicitly grounded in a feminist and social constructionist framework, one that treats masculinity primarily as a culturally imposed set of expectations rather than as a complex human reality shaped by biology, development, temperament, and culture together. That theoretical choice shapes how male behavior is interpreted from the outset. Masculinity is no longer approached first as something to understand, but as something to critique.
Masculinity is no longer approached first as something to understand, but as something to critique.
This posture becomes most obvious in the document’s treatment of traditional male traits. The guidelines state that “traditional masculinity”—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—is, “on the whole, harmful.” They further instruct psychologists to examine the role of “power, privilege, and sexism” in the development of boys and men. The cumulative effect is unmistakable: characteristics long associated with masculinity are framed less as neutral traits with potential strengths and weaknesses than as liabilities linked to oppression and dysfunction. In this framework, masculinity is not simply a style of being; it is a clinical problem in need of correction.23
That is a remarkable stance for a therapeutic profession to adopt, especially in fields where women are a clear majority.24 A male client who enters therapy seeking help for depression, anxiety, loneliness, or failure is already vulnerable. If the institutional framework guiding his therapist encourages her to see stoicism, competitiveness, assertiveness, or traditional role commitments primarily as symptoms of power, privilege, or social harm, then therapy risks becoming something other than care. It risks becoming reeducation. Instead of helping men understand themselves, the profession begins by telling them that the very traits most central to their identity are morally suspect—a mental-health framework that positions male identity as inherently problematic, fails the test of neutrality, and may undermine trust from the very beginning.25, 26
The trouble here is not that masculine traits can never become destructive. Of course they can. Risk-taking can become recklessness. Stoicism can harden into emotional isolation. Dominance can become abuse. But the same is true of traits more commonly associated with women: empathy can become overaccommodation, agreeableness can become passivity, nurturance can become self-erasure. A psychologically serious framework should ask when traits are adaptive, when they are maladaptive, and under what conditions they serve human flourishing. What it should not do is begin with the assumption that one sex’s characteristic tendencies are, on balance, harmful. Yet that is precisely the impression the APA framework leaves. It offers a language of critique, but very little language of appreciation, balance, or contextual understanding.27, 28
The consequences are not merely theoretical. Men already underuse mental-health services, are less likely to seek psychological help, and are far more likely to die by suicide.29, 30, 31 Under those conditions, a therapeutic model that implicitly tells men their identity is part of the problem is badly timed, to put it mildly. Rather than meeting men where they are, it risks alienating them further. Rather than building trust, it may confirm their suspicion that elite institutions do not understand them and are not especially interested in trying. The guidelines may do more harm than good: by pathologizing traditional masculinity, they may repel the very population they claim to serve.32, 33
Behind all this lies a deeper ideological issue. The APA guidelines do not simply offer clinical advice; they import a broader critical-theory view of sex and identity into therapeutic practice. Masculinity is interpreted through the lens of power, privilege, and structural domination, while alternative explanations—biological, developmental, evolutionary, or even straightforwardly temperamental—receive little serious engagement. The result is ideological narrowing whereby male psychology is no longer treated as a subject of open inquiry. It is treated as a moral field to be managed. And once a profession charged with healing begins from that premise, it should not be surprising if many men conclude that it has stopped trying to understand them and has started trying to correct them.34, 35, 36
When women struggle, institutions are encouraged to ask what social barriers are holding them back. When men struggle, institutions are more likely to ask what is wrong with men.
Boys and men are commonly told that they should open up, seek help, and be vulnerable. But when they do, they enter institutions increasingly shaped by theories that view core aspects of their identity with suspicion. The message, however politely phrased, is hard to miss; it is an ideology of care that too often begins with suspicion and blame.
Skepticism and the Need for Symmetry
A skeptical culture should demand more than slogans, moral urgency, and politically convenient explanations. It should insist on symmetry. The same standards of evidence applied to claims of female disadvantage should also be applied to claims of male disadvantage. The same openness to structural explanations granted when women fall behind should be granted when boys and men do. And the same willingness to consider biology, temperament, incentives, development, and choice in explaining male outcomes should also be permitted when explaining female outcomes. Concepts such as patriarchy and social construction too often function as starting assumptions rather than as hypotheses subjected to serious empirical testing.37, 38, 39
A more rigorous approach would begin by admitting that sex differences and sex disparities do not explain themselves. Some reflect injustice. Some reflect trade-offs. Some reflect evolved predispositions interacting with modern institutions. Some reflect cultural expectations that help one sex in one context and hurt it in another. Serious inquiry should sort among these possibilities rather than treating one ideological narrative as morally mandatory. Feminist scholarship has too often narrowed that inquiry by treating alternative explanatory frameworks, especially evolutionary ones, as politically suspect before they are even evaluated on their merits.40, 41
A mental-health framework that positions male identity as inherently problematic, fails the test of neutrality, and may undermine trust from the very beginning.
This is why the issue is larger than feminism alone. It is about whether our institutions still believe in the basic norms of intellectual fairness. A skeptical institution should not decide in advance who counts as oppressed and who counts as privileged, then interpret every new fact through that template. It should be willing to discover that women are disadvantaged in some places, men in others, and that both realities can be true at once. It should be willing to ask whether schools serve boys poorly, whether therapy alienates men, whether current diversity programs are aimed at yesterday’s inequities rather than today’s realities, and whether moral prestige has become detached from empirical evidence.
If skepticism means anything, it means resisting explanations that flatter our politics while ignoring contrary evidence. It means asking, with equal seriousness, what harms women and what harms men. Until that symmetry is restored, our gender debates will remain less a search for truth than a competition among moral narratives.
