We need to talk about what our culture is doing to boys.

Forget feminism and “toxic masculinity,” the choice is between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

Being a ten year-old boy in 2025 must be utterly baffling.

I have a ten year old son, which means I have to spend a considerable amount of time in daycare’s, public libraries, the principle’s office, and other places that one typically finds children. This means that I spend quite a lot of my time immersed in environments designed for children and as such I see much of the messaging that gets directed toward children. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is floating around in the ambient culture. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry (although examples of that exist) it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes, and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules, and standards of behavior in most places where children can be found (schools, day-cares, indoor play structures, Sunday school) are almost always feminine coded and cater to the sensibilities of girls and women.

This manifests itself in a number of ways, the first of which is that the ambition of young boys is at best taken for granted, and at worst actively pathologized as an expression of power hungry male privilege and entitlement. Men are consistently told that they need to “step aside” and “make room” for women, where young girls are encouraged to “lean in” and “take charge.” The expressions of ambition by young boys are met with a disinterested “that’s fine johnny” while the expression of ambitions by young girls are met with joyful encouragement – “Susie that is amazing, don’t let anyone get in your way!”

My son is in grade 5 at a public school, and within the culture of the public school system one finds the rather consistent pathologizing of any mode of play or learning that boys might find engaging and enjoyable. And so my rather energetic 10 year-old is required to sit quietly in a classroom for 8 hours a day and engage in little to no competitive or athletic behavior, save for the occasion gym class and a 15 minute recess. Anyone familiar with children knows that young boys are never going to win the “sit still and listen for long periods of time“ contest with young girls. Nearly every organized activity that he participates in is run by women, summer camp is run by women, the teachers and staff member in his school are women, his church’s Sunday school is run by women, and his extracurricular activities are run by women. Every single authority figure in his life, except for me, is a woman, and yet the messaging that he receives from the ambient culture is that women are oppressed and that men run everything and play life on easy mode.

Meanwhile, the culture at large is filled with messaging telling young boys that they are on the receiving end of nearly endless male privilege, while at the same time forcing them to spend nearly all of their time in feminine coded institutions that cater to the sensibilities of the girls while being run almost exclusively by women. My son recently came home to me with the rather exciting news that his school had hired a male classroom assistant, which was noteworthy to him because he had never seen a male teacher before. He is in grade 5.

I can’t express just how bewildering this state of affairs must be for a ten year-old boy.

It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of Social Justice. What I want to point out to you is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of the average ten year-old boy. So…

Imagine living in a world where all the authority figures in your life are women: Your babysitter, school teacher, principle, play center staff, and daycare workers are all women, and you're raised by a single mom. The protagonists in all the movies and T.V shows are women, and girl power is a theme present in a majority of the entertainment directed toward you. You rarely see your dad, every dad on TV is a loser, and there are few strong men in your life. School caters to the girls in the class who have better grades and are more likely to go on to college. The forms of communication are feminine, the norms are feminine, and the expectations are feminine. You're constantly told masculinity is toxic, and expected to act like the girls act, talk the way they talk, and relate in the way that women and girls relate to one another. Meanwhile, the culture at large is telling you that your natural proclivity to run around and engage in aggressive play is some kind of pathology that needs to be fixed while constantly telling you to be more like the girls, and you’re told that you’re playing life on easy mode and have enormous privilege given to you by thing called "the patriarchy" that gives all the advantages to boys. The society that he is told he lives in is a world that no 10 year-old boy on earth has ever experienced.

The entire experience must strike him as very strange.

Can you imagine how utterly bewildering this must be to the average ten year-old boy who just wants to catch Pokemon, play sports, and run around? How, exactly, is a ten year-old boy supposed to make sense of this state of affairs? I’m an adult who is reasonably well educated and informed about why these things are occurring, and I understand the ideas and perspectives that are driving all of this; so I can make sense of what is going on. My son, on the other hand understands none of this. He spends large portions of his day immersed in social and cultural environments designed by women and which reward the behavior style of girls while being told that men have all the advantages. As a result, the messaging that he gets from the ambient culture and from his authority figures strikes him as completely ridiculous. He regularly tells me that people in his life tell him things that make no sense with his most recent example being that he was told that a boy can choose to become a girl. I cannot describe to you how strange he thought that was.

I sometimes think me son must get up each morning wonder what new perplexing absurdity he will encounter that day.

All of this is coupled with an ignorance pertaining to the inner life of a ten year-old boy. As near as I can tell the feminine coding of the institutions that children inhabit has created a situation where the people in charge completely lack a theory of mind for ten year-old boys. One sometimes gets the feeling that the school system treats boys as though they are defective girls. All of this has the unfortunate consequence of making it very difficult for him to feel like he is being understood. He struggles at trying to articulate the reason he has difficulty navigating this environment, and regularly complains about being misunderstood. After all, he spends large portions of his day being forced to navigate situations according to rules that, to his ears, seem absolutely arbitrary.

Again, Being a ten year-old boy in 2025 must be utterly baffling.

Our culture is incomprehensible to boys, and this serves to utterly discombobulate boys and make it very difficult for them to orient themselves in the social world. One of the most pernicious consequences of identity politics has been to prioritize the advancement of women and girls to the point that boys have been allowed to fall behind, and almost nobody in our social institutions seems to care.

In his book “To Own a Dragon” Donald Miller discusses a documentary about a group of orphaned elephants that had been rescued and taken to a nature reserve. The girl elephants adjusted quite fine, but the boy elephants created a great deal of chaos and engaged in highly destructive behavior. The boy elephants would attack the local rhinoceroses at the watering hole: they would impale the rhinos with their tusks and then push the rhinos into the water and hold them under until they drowned. When the boy elephants would come across each other the result was usually that they engaged in extremely violent fights with each other. These young male elephants had become adolescentsand did not know how to control their newfound energy, and they had no idea what they were supposed to do with all their size and muscle.¹

When male elephants become adolescents they go through what is called a “musth” cycle which is marked by a green liquid secreted that rolls down the hind leg. Typically, when the first musth cycle begins the young elephant goes out in search of a mentor, an older male elephant to serve as a guide; and the scent of the liquid on their leg alerts an older male elephant to the fact that the younger boy elephant has reached adolescence and is in need of a mentor. When a mentor is found, the musth cycle ends. At that point “the older and younger begin to travel together, find food together, to protect each other, - the older one teaching the younger one what its strength is for, and how to use it to benefit the whole elephant tribe.”² In the absence of an older male elephant to teach them how to use their strength, work together, and get along, the younger elephants had grown incredibly powerful and aggressive without any idea how to properly channel that strength for the benefit of their elephant tribe. The result was a large number of aggressive male elephants running roughshod over the nature reserve harming each other and the other animals.

Boys are like that.

They need strong male mentors to teach them the ropes of being a man if they don’t know how to get by in the world and how to channel their strength and energy into something productive, they will channel that energy into something negative. Boys who are falling behind in a world that make no sense to them are going to look for a guide, and if they can’t find it at home they’re going to look elsewhere. Boys are going to look for men, they are not going to seek out those whose rallying cry is “The Future is Female.” Boy are going to look for strong male mentors, and if they cannot find good father figures many of them are going to fall under the spell of pathological male influences. Some will join street gangs, some will become bullies, and some will fall under the spell of immoral online influencers selling them a caricature of masculinity.

Boys need a strong male father-figure who is willing to teach them the ropes of being a man so they learn how to put their strength and energy into something good. Boys want a bigger, stronger version of themselves to show them what they can be, and they will look for another male father-figure to come alongside them and tell them what to do with all their newfound energy and strength. This means men are going to seek out mentors and if they can’t find good ones they will find bad ones, but they are going to look for someone.

Our society is faced with a stark choice: we can give men good mentors to teach them how to be strong and good, or they will find bad mentors who teach them to be aggressive and immoral. The choice is not between feminism and “toxic masculinity,” the choice is between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

1. Donald Miller, “To Own a Dragon,” p.31-33

2. Donald Miller, “To Own a Dragon,” p.33