The new year is already underway and we are filled with hope for the future.  We are also battered by headlines of boys and men hurting other people.   Michael Gurian’s first essay of this year, “Boys, A Rescue Plan, Part I,” is this week’s blog post.  During this year, we will share other essays by Michael and our team, as well as other articles, essays, and guest blogs on this important topic.

In this new year of focusing on boys’ issues, none of our work on boys will cause harm to girls or negate issues any sex or gender is having in our culture.  In fact, our GI experience is that if we will come together as a culture to help boys, we will also help girls and all other children in new ways.

There is a secret in our new millennium that many people just do not want shared or known.  It goes against the headlines all around us, against the optics of visible and successful men in our companies and government, and against prevailing social theory regarding sex and gender.  The secret:  In overall physical, cognitive, educational, neurological, emotional, psychological, health, and even in many employment markers, males are doing worse than females.  They are doing worse both individually, in many cases, and statistically, in the aggregate.  In fact, perhaps the bigger secret within the secret is that boys have been doing worse than girls for decades.

Make no mistake, girls suffer, girls hurt, girls need our help.   I have two daughters and they’ve suffered.  My wife has suffered.  Women around me have suffered.  I’ve worked with schools and corporations on girls’ and women’s empowerment for thirty five years.  And let’s make no mistake:  LGBTQ populations suffer and need our help.  We are a hard society to live in and we have a lot of vulnerable people we must serve and assist.  Fortunately in our society, when we recognize the vulnerability of a group such as girls, LGBTQ populations, women, racial and ethnic groups, indigenous peoples, and many others, we do recognize the vulnerability and we do come together in society to help.

But when we identify “boys,” “men,” or “boys and men” as an aggregate group, we falter.  Or, even more distressing, we formulate headlines and politics to tell us that boys are “surpassing girls,”  boys and men “already get most of our social assets,” boys “suffer less than girls,” boys and men constitute “fewer victims of violence” than girls…the comparisons end up disavowing male suffering.  I think we can’t admit the depth of male suffering–or admit that girls are doing better than boys now in many ways–because we feel collectively (and subconsciously) that it would too deeply wound us to do so.  I mean:  we worry that if our democracy did re-calibrate toward equality of male/female suffering, we would have to throw out the dominant academic (thus, our government and media) model for attention of resources in a democracy:  the oppressor/oppressed model that has served the cause of feminism and of racial justice very well.

I will look at our fear and the model in this essay by calling on our culture to 1) accept socially that girls and others are oppressed victims, if we wish, but to no longer accept that males are the oppressors or the victors.  Indeed, in issues of sex in Western democracies, I go further to argue that the oppressor/oppressed model is no longer the right model for the social change we need now–it was good in 1973 but not as useful in 2023 because of its inaccuracy to real life.  Boys are in trouble today not mainly because they are oppressed nor even because they are repressed (this latter has become a very popular headline) but because they have been abandoned.

The First of Two Secrets

Because of our omission of the secret at the highest levels, and because of our over-reliance on an old oppressor/oppressed model, our culture is like a family that has lost its son to disease, violence, school failure, mental illness, obesity, or other suffering but keeps pretending the boy is doing fine.  Until ailing boys do bad things, we don’t even begin looking for new models to understand what they might be going through.  When we try, the bad things they have done become unfortunately recharged proof of oppressed/oppressor, and the cycle of faulty ideas continues, and so does our collective suffering.

Over the last three decades, I’ve published books and articles that, among other things, tell the first secret:  the quality and quantity of male suffering.  My most recent books on boys’ development, Saving Our Sons (2017) and The Stone Boys (2019), are examples; similarly, The Boy Crisis (2020) by Warren Farrell and John Gray, and On Boys and Men (2022) by Brooking Institute Scholar Richard Reeves, provide more details.  Thankfully, too, there are others in our culture sharing the secret publicly, like Sean Kullman of the Global Initiative for Boys and Men (we’ll feature some of Sean’s essays this year).  Here are some generally agreed upon statistics that can help us here, especially regarding boys’ mental/physical health and education.

While statistics on overt depression are dominated by girls, covert depression is dominated by boys.  Covert depression hides behind anger, substance overuse, suicide, and violence.  Boys and men experience suicide and substance overuse at twice to four times the rate of females.  Male brains suffer more mental illness and brain disorders than female in the aggregate and, in many diseases and disorders, much more severely, including behavioral disorders, attention disorders, learning disorders, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder.  Our male mental health crisis bleeds into nearly every aspect of human life from homelessness to family distress to violent death.

In education, girls far surpass boys in the aggregate, beginning in the toddler years and continuing through college and graduate school.  Boys receive two-thirds of Ds and Fs in our schools and comprise 85% of discipline referrals, suspensions, and expulsions.  In state mandated testing, females dominate success data, especially because of literacy:  Where boys are 10 points behind girls in literacy, girls are only 2 behind boys in math/science.  Covid classrooms made things worse, creating more boys than girls unable to succeed in online schooling.  “Achievement gaps” in our schools are mainly boy/young men gaps.

In physical health outcomes, males have been similarly abandoned.  They die five to seven years younger than females depending on race and ethnicity; they dominate death rates from substance use, dangerous jobs, general injury, and violence.  The term “violence” provides a good example of how difficult it is for our culture to grapple with what is really happening around us.  When I ask audiences at my lectures who is more likely to suffer violence in their lifetime, girls or boys, women or men, overwhelming I hear back from the audience, “girls and women.”  People all around us are shocked to learn that boys and men suffer between 6 to 10 times more violence than females on any given day, week, month, year, lifetime.

Easy access points for all of these data sets are in the Bureau of Justice statistics, the Centers for Disease Control websites, and my own and my colleagues’ books and articles.

Suffering sits, like fate and joy, at the center of our human condition, but about suffering, we have made a cultural decision:  to make female privation clear, always, and in protecting that open clarity, to marginalize male suffering via paradigms that keep male suffering relatively secret.  Even when the data gets out to everyone–for example, I and my colleagues have briefed White Houses, Congress, and the United Nations in the secret with very little result–and given that we all know a boy in trouble of some kind, and given, further, that much of what we suffer in society happens at the hands of males, what fear could be locked in our brains that keeps us from grappling with male suffering, and, from there, fixing our social problems?  To avoid truth and social healing, we must be afraid of something worse even than the suffering our males make in our world.

There is a hidden fear, I believe, and it needs to be named, so I have named it:   feminaphobia; the fear of betraying women, mothers, girls, and, politically, the difficult-to-define “women’s,” or “feminist” lobby.  Because “feminophobia” and “femiphobia” connote slightly different fears, I have placed the “a” in feminaphobia.  Where misogyny is an irrational hatred or dislike of women, feminaphobia is a fear (sometimes irrational, sometimes quite rational) that we and our leaders, especially, seem to feel as they (and, thus, we in complicity) construct a society that punishes people for:

1.  Telling the secret of male suffering, privation, and abandonment in fullness as if telling that secret betrays girls and women.
2.  Constructing other models for sex and gender discrimination, and indeed for human suffering, than the useful but limited oppressor/oppressed paradigm.
3.  Answering people who say, “Wait, we’re not afraid of women, we’re afraid of men,” with, “Individually, we can be afraid of certain men, but from a social policy standpoint, our leadership is afraid of offending a perceived stereotype of ‘women’ as if women and men, to be whole, must be at war.”

A meeting in the Hillary Clinton camp during the last months of her campaign for President (2016) is illustrative of our social dilemma, and feminaphobia.  I was not there, so this story is hearsay that gained from a reliable source, but let me use it here as at least allegorical, since I was not there.  What I heard:  in a meeting with campaign staff in summer 2016, Bill Clinton asked Hillary Clinton to talk more in her stump speeches about the needs of boys and men in America.  Bill was saying, “if you don’t at least talk about boys and men, you lose half the population.”  After a lot of discussion, the Hillary Clinton team voted down his suggestion, saying 1) women provided enough base to win the election, 2) talking about boys and men would muddy the voting waters, and 3) backlash from women’s groups and feminists might be severe if boys and men were highlighted.

As you know, Hillary Clinton continued her almost singular focus on women’s issues, and she lost.  Donald Trump won for numerous interwoven reasons many of which had nothing to do with sex and gender, but one of the reasons Trump won is that Trump did talk about male distress.  In large numbers American men, and a huge plurality of women–moms, wives, partners, grandmothers–voted for him.

In my view, (if this story is correct), the Hillary Clinton campaigned struggled with feminaphobia:  fear of women, the women’s lobby, feminists, and a perceived stereotype of “women” as if women are all a monolith.  Despite that Hillary Clinton did not talk about male needs, I voted for her.  My primary reason: she was qualified to be president.  My secondary reason:  I believe our American democracy needs to join India, Israel, Turkey, England, Germany, and nearly every other democratic country in electing a female leader.  In Leadership and the Sexes (2009), my colleague Barbara Annis and I explored how differently women’s leadership styles differ from male leadership styles.  Hillary Clinton would have brought her own style of leadership to our republic.

But in voting for her, I had to sit uncomfortably with my gut sense that feminaphobia would prevail in her White House; that backlash against boys and men at the highest leadership level would only increase during her four or eight years, not decrease.  As it happened, Donald Trump won, then in 2022, Joe Biden won.  The Trump administration told some of the secret of male distress and Joe Biden, like Barack Obama before him, has done some things to help us look at sex and gender, but still, I see little evidence that either the secret of boyhood distress and abandonment or the more secret feminaphobia have yet reached any useful level of revelation in government or society.   Our leaders seem to prefer that true male distress and abandonment remain hidden in social importance so as not to offend.

An Essential Empathy

As our discussion evolves during this next year, we’ll look more at these themes.  I hope to help you and other leaders to fight past our collective feminaphobia.  Aren’t a lot of the people we are afraid of actually parents of sons who have seen the distress?   Why are we afraid of these people?  Why, ultimately, do we give so much power to social projections and gender stereotypes, especially so much power over the collective purse?

It is truly liberating to no longer be afraid.

Crucial to health and leadership going forward will be your own answers to these questions:

1. What is happening where you are–in your schools, your neighborhoods?

2. Do you know a boy—in your own family or a friend’s family—who is getting Cs, Ds, and Fs but should be doing better?

3.  Do you go to your school’s awards and graduation programs and notice far more girls than boys succeeding?

4.  Do you see young women going off to college and less young men doing the same?

5. Which children are severely hooked on medications, marijuana, vaping, videogames, pornography?

6. Which sex is listless, even purposeless, in their teens?

7.  Which boys do you know who are unmotivated to do much else besides gaming?

8.  When you look at the suicides in your town, which sex is ending its life more frequently?

9. In your own home, if you have multiple children, have you found yourself saying to a friend, “My girls are taking over the world, but my son…I’m worried.”

10.  What are you boys and girls themselves saying about their friends and classmates?

Write me at info@gurianinstitute.com with your stories and questions about daughters and sons, women and men.  As GI and I will these essays and blogs during this year, your voice matters.  We are all citizen scientists together in a democracy.  All our children need us.  I hope today’s essay plants a seed of thinking you can share around you:  there are other models available to us than the ones we use, but to accept those models, we will need to push through a subtle, deep, and very human fear of women, feminists, and the women’s lobby.

–Michael Gurian