We need to talk about men

The multi-award-winning Netflix TV series Adolescence has once again placed the spotlight on questions around masculinity in the 21st Century.

Its timing and popularity – along with public concerns about the effect of the online ‘manosphere’ – have amplified just how unsettled masculinity is right now.

Something structural is shifting, which isn’t just about behaviour: it’s about identity.

The promise of patriarchy

For centuries, Western societies were organised around patriarchal assumptions: men would lead, provide, compete and command. That structure privileged men in most domains, but it also confined them to narrow scripts.

Masculinity was tied to dominance, stoicism and economic provision. Worth was measured in status. Vulnerability was weakness. Emotional literacy was optional.

This system did profound harm to women through exclusion and subordination, but it also shaped men.

Most men were never part of the small minority who held real institutional power. They worked, provided, complied and competed within hierarchies they did not control. Instead of real agency, men were only valued as long as they performed.

Patriarchy didn’t give most men power, just a script to follow.

Rewriting the script

Over the last half-century, that script has been rewritten.

Women’s liberation was necessary and long overdue. It led to legal barriers falling, educational attainment shifting, economic independence expanding and cultural expectations changing.

At the same time, the labour market was transformed in the 1980s as industrial work declined. Stable, single-income households became harder to sustain and the traditional male breadwinner model became less viable.

Men were left to compete, but the rules of the game had changed.

Many men have adapted, sharing domestic labour and childcare, embracing emotional openness, and building collaborative partnerships with their partners.

Others feel disoriented, though.

When identity has been built around provision and dominance, and the markers of that identity lose clarity, it’s no surprise that widespread insecurity is the result. Not because men have lost power they once universally held, but because many were sold a version of power that was never structurally available to them.

Expectation and reality

This gap between inherited expectation and lived reality is destabilising, which we regularly see in statistics, such as those documenting male suicide rates and educational underperformance among boys.

It has shown up culturally, too, in online grievance movements, performative hyper-masculinity and defensive narratives that frame equality as loss. It also shows up more quietly in daily life: in loneliness, confusion about dating norms, reluctance to seek help and in fathers unsure what masculinity means for their sons.

The loudest expressions of this instability attract attention, but they’re not the whole story.

Many men are trying to recalibrate, albeit without a new script to follow.

Harm enough for everyone

We have to be honest about male violence.

Patriarchal norms have enabled male violence and entitlement. Women’s frustration isn’t imagined or unreasonable.

But the same norms have also discouraged men from developing emotional fluency, from building supportive friendships, from measuring worth beyond status.

The harms are different. They aren’t symmetrical, but they are interconnected.

A system that ties masculinity to physical dominance damages relationships and a culture that equates vulnerability with weakness produces isolation. Ignoring male insecurity doesn’t advance equality.

Nor does excusing abusive behaviour in the name of insecurity.

Competition and collaboration

Existing structures often position men and women as competitors for status, resources and validation. Many men feel that equality is a zero-sum game, so any advancement in the workplace, for example, somehow diminishes them. If equality represents a loss for men, we should perhaps consider the privilege patriarchy gave us?

And if men experience women’s advancement as personal diminishment, it merely reveals how deeply the competition for status has been embedded in our understanding of gender roles.

The alternative isn’t a return to the old hierarchies: what we need is a redesign, in which masculinity is untethered from dominance, worth isn’t measured solely by income or power, strength includes emotional competence and partnership, not rivalry, is the default.

It’s a major shift in our cultural, economic and psychological ideas of equality, one that is still very much a work in progress.

Men of the future

The crisis facing men today is not that they’ve lost some sort of universal power: the real story is that the old script has been ripped up without us having a coherent replacement to work to.

Some men are responding to this shift with resentment, but others are grasping this opportunity for growth. The script we follow now will shape families, politics and social cohesion for decades.

We need to talk about men not to focus on them, but to expose the failures of the old system.

A society can’t become truly equal if half of it feels structurally adrift. Patriarchy promised men dominance, but delivered insecurity: the task now is not to resurrect it, but to replace its narrow, outdated concepts with something more collaborative and humane.

That requires reflection, not reaction.

And, most of all, it requires men to decide what our new vision of masculinity should look like, one we are prepared to model for our sons – and daughters.