People keep saying boys are in crisis. That claim has been around for more than a century. In 1907, The New York Times published an op-ed lamenting that boys were lazy, selfish, overfed, overdressed, and suffering from too much of their mothers’ influence. The article celebrated a father who built a “boy bungalow” to isolate his six sons from the household so they could learn responsibility. It even declared that the “boy problem” was the most serious problem of modern social life.
Fast forward to 2025, and Richard Reeves is making almost the same argument. The boy crisis is a recurring panic in American society. At the start of the twentieth century, immigration and economic shifts fueled it. Boys were cast as dangerous, and their supposed decline was blamed on women, especially the rising number of female teachers. Even Theodore Roosevelt weighed in, promoting strenuous manhood through boxing, hunting, and scouting as antidotes to “softness.”
By 1900, teaching had become a feminized profession, with women making up about 75 percent of teachers, the same percentage we see today. From the beginning, boys’ struggles in school were blamed on women’s presence in classrooms rather than on structural issues. By the mid-2000s, commentators were still recycling the same claims. A 2006 Washington Post op-ed called out the myth of the boy crisis, pointing out that when you account for class and race, the gender gap shrinks. The issue was not gender. It was poverty.
But poverty is not an easy problem to solve in a patriarchal capitalist system. It is easier to point at women and accuse them of undermining boys. That has been the pattern for more than a century.
A Refusal to Engage
Today the narrative persists. Reeves sounds alarm bells about falling male college enrollment, declining wages, and rising male disconnection. But the truth is more complicated. The problem is not a lack of resources or opportunities for men. It is their refusal to engage with the opportunities that exist, especially when those opportunities challenge traditional roles.
A 2023 Wall Street Journal analysis found that nearly seven million prime-age men in the United States are neither working nor looking for work. One in nine men between 25 and 54 has opted out. Research shows they are not choosing this because jobs do not exist. They are rejecting available work in health care, education, and elder care, industries that are growing quickly but coded as feminine. Many men surveyed admitted they avoided these jobs not for logistical reasons but because they did not align with their “values.”
This is not about ability. It is about masculinity tethered so tightly to dominance and control that some men would rather do nothing than take a job associated with women.
Who Carries the Burden
When men disconnect, it is not the state or their peers who pick up the slack. It is women. Mothers, sisters, partners, and grandmothers support these men with wages, labor, and care. That dependency maintains the status quo. By framing male disconnection as a crisis, think tanks and commentators shift the burden back onto women and away from systemic issues like inequality and toxic masculinity.
The solutions we hear are always the same: more male teachers, more Boy Scouts, more mentoring. These are recycled answers that avoid the real problem. Patriarchy built this crisis, and patriarchy cannot fix it.
The Root of the Problem
Masculinity, as our culture has defined it, is rotting from the root. Instead of acknowledging that the soil is toxic, commentators keep watering the same plant and wondering why it will not thrive. Worse, they blame the “healthy plants” around it, women, queer people, and gender-nonconforming people who manage to adapt and grow despite the same hostile conditions.
Masculinity is not under attack. It is refusing to evolve. The skills the modern world requires, cooperation, adaptability, emotional literacy, are the very skills men have been taught to reject. And now they are drowning.
Reeves may have good intentions, but good intentions are not enough when the analysis avoids patriarchy itself. The truth is simple: men do not want to change. They do not want help if it means confronting the system that privileges them while also stripping them of humanity.
Men are not in crisis because of women, education, or even the economy. They are in crisis because they built their identities on rejecting everything coded as feminine. Until they are willing to confront that, they will remain stuck. Women cannot fix it, not because we will not, but because we cannot. We tried. The tools are there. The solutions are known. The only thing missing is the will to change.
Do not blame us when they refuse. We already tried to help. They do not want it.
