2025: The Year Men Broke
The year in men: soft boys, alienated boys, angry boys, performative boys
On November 10, Flesh by David Szalay was announced as the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize. The novel takes readers into the world of István, a taciturn Hungarian man who stumbles into the world of London’s elite. Szalay seems to want to both lean into and lean away from recent discourse around the state of masculinity, saying that writing about sex from the male perspective is a “risk”, but also stating:
“It’s definitely a danger for art to be aware of its own agenda. There were initially far more uses of the word ‘masculinity’ in Flesh than appear in the final version. And I took the others out specifically because I didn’t want them to act as signed instructions to the reader on how to read it.”
Reviews for Flesh were all over the place when the book initially came out, with the Times declaring it to be a cold novel about male alienation and many, many of the reviews on Goodreads being mixed to poor. (I will also admit that I asked over a dozen people what this book was about, and no one could tell me. Manhood, masculinity, isolation, loss: many themes, but very little plot.)
Whether we’re meant to read Flesh as a story of one man’s life or as a portrait of contemporary masculinity, it’s clear Szalay’s win is arriving at a very specific moment in culture.
2025 introduced a series of male literary crises: the opening of a press focused exclusively on male authors (described as “a space for male authors to flourish”), the discourse around men reading fiction (a widely studied and observed gap exists between men and women’s reading habits in the US), a male writer’s beef with the industry as a whole.
In March, Jacob Savage made a splash when he said what he believed to be the quiet part out loud: What happened to all the Millennial white men writing fiction? In “The Vanishing White Male Writer” (Compact), Savage includes a number of data points about the literary world turning its back on young(ish) straight white men. In the piece, an editor says: “I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience.” Of course!
Andrew Boryga, author of Victim (which was one of my favorite books of 2024), responded on Substack, saying: “If you feel so strongly about something, say it with your chest. But don’t do it expecting a parade, a cookie, a fat publishing contract, a call from Oprah, or a nice trophy from the Center for Fiction.” I think of the thousands of people toiling away on novels that they won’t be able to sell because of the market. I think of the thousands of people who do get published and whose books “don’t meet expectations”. The politics expressed by Savage aren’t those of someone who has a deep wish to express themselves, they’re missives from politics steeped in resentment.
It’s also worth pointing out there are white men getting book deals and press: Andrew Lipstein was everywhere doing press for both Something Rotten and The Vegan. Grant Ginder writes fantastic novels and his 2026 book is on a dozen most anticipated lists, Nico Walker had a great deal of press for Cherry, Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends was a beautiful BookTok darling, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection was reviewed *everywhere* and heralded as one of the best books of the year… These are all white men!
(For male Millennial authors of color, I also thought of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Brandon Taylor, Ocean Vuong, Hanif Abdurraqib, Bryan Washington… The unspoken element seems to be a very specific cross section of Savage seeking *straight* white male authors.)
Last year, I predicted that manhood was about to have a moment in popular culture: HBO and Netflix both ordered shows meant to explore manhood and masculinity through stories about brothers, with the logline for HBO’s Half Man literally reading:
It will capture the wild energy of a changing city — a changing world, even — and try to get to the bottom of the difficult question… What does it mean to be a man?”
Netflix’s Black Rabbit followed Jude Law and Jason Bateman’s characters as they struggled with the shadow of their childhood trauma, leading to addiction and chaos (one brother is addicted to substances, the other to detonating his life and using his brother to avoid accountability). Ridley Scott announced an adaptation of The Dog Stars, a popular 2012 man vs. wild story about a man lost in the wilderness, seeking survivors after a global pandemic decimates the world’s population. Paul Mescal was meant to star but was eventually replaced by Jaco Elordi (who recently pulled another replacement act for Frankenstein, replacing Andrew Garfield as the creature).
Hollywood’s swing towards men continued with Vanity Fair’s 2026 Hollywood Issue, “Let’s Hear it For the Boys”, which featured a confusing mix of established male actors positioned as up-and-comers. Some, like Michael B Jordan and Andrew Garfield, have been on our screens for over two decades (Jordan got his start on The Wire, did a brief stint on soaps and then re-emerged on Friday Night Lights, Garfield was on a few episodes of Doctor Who in 2007 before headlining both Never Let Me Go and The Social Network in 2010). Others, like Callum Turner, are unproven on a box office level, but riding high on vibes (Turner is engaged to pop icon Dua Lipa and is rumored to be the next James Bond).
This is not the first time Vanity Fair has had all male covers (1996, 2003, 20071), but the choice felt odd given the swaths of culture writing on the rising levels of conservatism in this country. In his editor’s letter, new global editorial director Mark Guiducci explained:
Our new leading men are something much more radical: mere mortals. Often kind, sometimes vulnerable, each extraordinary—never before has a generation of actors been less performative, and more human. Have you ever wondered what an internet boyfriend becomes when he grows up? A movie star, it turns out.
Movie Star might be pushing it for some of these men (no shade, but I had to make a post pointing out that Harris Dickinson, Drew Starkey, and George Mackay were different men last year. Movie star is…generous), but the idea of the Internet’s Boyfriend has been floating around for years now.
One of the interesting things about the cover is that at one point or another, all of the men featured have been marketed as counterpoints to traditionally masculine stars of old: A$AP Rocky and his fashion bonafides, Andrew Garfield and his sensitivity, Paul Mescal’s penchant for playing the saddest men in the world. The past few years have given us soft boys, Rat Boys, the babygirl, the performative male.
The very question of the performative male is interesting as it buttresses the idea that there is a way to be masculine that’s not a performance: students of Judith Butler would argue that the Bushwick boys in carabiners and the Nashville boys in Wranglers are doing the exact same thing— peacocking for different audiences. The myriad thinkpieces are all getting at the idea that the world is hungry for a new vision of maleness, a man who wears his heart on his sleeve and isn’t the swaggering alpha bro being pushed by provocateurs and violent misogynists on the right. Inter Alia, the transcendent play starring Rosamund Pike, tackles this issue directly by taking us inside the home of a judge whose son is influenced by the ever powerful manosphere. Adolescence received critical acclaim and a number of Emmys by taking us inside the mind of a 13-year old boy radicalized by online misogyny who murders his female classmate.
One can think of Jeremy Allen White and his Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself drag, Jacob Elordi shrinking delicately on late night couches, Josh O’Connor and his demure politesse and acknowledge that the performance is both unexpected and useful in covering up whatever unsavory business might emerge about their personal lives (but you know, only if you care about that sort of thing).
Of all the stars on the VF cover, the one associated the most with a vision of traditional masculinity is Glen Powell, a Texan giant with a megawatt smile. I admittedly have been charmed by Powell— two years ago, I said he simply had the X factor, the unquantifiable sauce you can’t put your finger on and can’t fake. In his September GQ Cover, Powell plays with expectations once more by eschewing traditional body shots in order to don puffy body suits and waxy masks that render his features plasticine and horrifying. He says he “just finds that it’s cool and tough to be open and vulnerable” about his failures before finding success in his thirties, and is declared a modern leading man by the magazine due to playing traditionally awful men with a wink, a nod, and a beating heart.
Outside the realms of publishing and Hollywood, it’s clear something is happening to men. Boys and young men are falling behind in school, attending college less, graduating college less, dropping out of the workforce more, dying by suicide more, dying deaths of despair more2, and lonelier than ever. The numbers for working class men and men of color are even worse3.
It’s easy to understand where the politics of resentment the right is known for spring from. For centuries, the patriarchy worked efficiently, ensuring most able-bodied men would be able to acquire jobs, marry, and contribute to the family’s finances. The last few decades have seen tremendous shifts in both the types of jobs and wages men with a high school diploma can acquire: factory jobs have mostly been shuttled out of the country, entire mining towns have been abandoned. In 2025, retail and hospitality jobs simply do not allow for the fantasy of a single income life when you introduce children into the picture (the average cost of childcare in the US varies, but currently floats between $9,211 for part-day childcare and $15,600 for full-day childcare a year).
Politicians are noticing: Presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom signed an executive order aimed at “showing every young man that he matters and there’s a path for him of purpose, dignity, work and real connection.” Senator Chris Murphy went on a tour of Appalachia in 2023 to understand the multiple crises facing the disaffected population that led them into Trump’s arms. From the piece:
The country appeared to him to be sickened somehow—in the throes of an amorphous ailment manifesting all across our culture and politics.
Gamergate was a harnessing of this resentment, taking bubbling rage at capitalism and the systems that “kept men down” (so much of this can actually be traced back to Reagan but that’s a whole other conversation) and directing it at women and people of color. In their piece in the Times, Putnam and Reeves state:
Hannah Arendt learned from Nazi recruiting in the 1930s that with the breakdown of established social and political structures, lonely, socially isolated young men are vulnerable to totalitarian ideology and appeals to violence.
This isn’t an issue endemic to social media. Socially disaffected young men with nothing to do and nowhere to go become everyone’s problem, and Gamergate, Andrew Tate, and the 2024 election are just symptoms of a societal rot that according to Putnam and Reeves, needs to be combated through interventions by other men showing them there’s another way to exist (outside of stewing in their own rage).
Bugonia (2025) tackles some of this by taking us into a Georgia town decimated by a lack of jobs and the opioid crisis, and young men radicalized by online forums dedicated to proving powerful people are secretly aliens hellbent on destroying the world. I’ll write more about this soon, but young men being radicalized on the internet is a drum thousands of people before me have beat before.
NYU Professor Scott Galloway has made (more of) a name for himself by discussing the masculinity crisis at length. A common fixture on the podcast circuit, Galloway made his name calling out the worlds of tech and business, and advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy. In 2025, he released Notes on Being a Man, “an enriching, inspiring operator’s manual for being a man today”. I took a look through the table of contents and it’s clear Galloway both knows what he’s talking about (we’re citing all the same sources) but is speaking directly to an audience that’s desperate for someone to tell them what to do. The marketing copy of the book directly calls out “the lack of attention to these problems has created a vacuum filled by voices espousing misogyny, the demonization of others, and a toxic vision of masculinity”.
On a Reddit forum for his fans, criticisms of the book were consistent:
“Having read the book, I think it gives decent advice if you can stomach a multimillionaire NYU prof lecturing broke 22-year-olds about “grinding harder” while he name-drops, etc. you’ll find a few solid nuggets on fitness, stoicism, and not being an asshole to women. Good message but needs a better messenger IMO.”
It’s interesting to peek at the “similar topics” pane on Reddit, seeing what men like the commenter have clicked: “I hate being a man”, “What do you actually like about men?”, “self respect is a dying trait among men”. Galloway shares similarities with right-wing orator Jordan Peterson: they’re both conventionally attractive tall wealthy white men telling other men how to live their lives. Are both of them technically profiting off of the insecurities of a generation of men? Sure. Is one of them decidedly less evil than the other? Of course.
Galloway’s press tour hit a snag when “What Did Men Do to Deserve This?” in The New Yorker went viral. In the piece, Jessica Winter debunks many of Galloway’s main talking points: the suicide gap is closing. Many of the jobs men traditionally worked vanished because of industrial collapse, not because of feminism. Men should be steered into teaching and nursing, but they don’t want to because they don’t want to take care of other people. It’s a constant game of appeasement. Winter says:
What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe.
Her argument is powerful. In July, Cosmopolitan also published data about the rates of women’s loneliness being similar to men’s, but less talked about. Both Winter and Cosmo are getting at the idea that men are still being prioritized in every single conversation, even conversations about societal despair.
I’m of two minds about it: Winter is right, of course. The constant kowtowing to the feelings of a population obsessed with its own suffering isn’t productive, but the alternative frightens me. I’ve been writing about incels and the way they reshaped the internet for years. We’re living downstream of Gamergate and Andrew Tate and Trump’s re-election, which led to the collapse of dozens of systems, economic strife, mass deportations, global destabilization, etc. Do you think I want to spend all my time writing about angry men4? No, but it seems all of society is functionally being held at psychological gunpoint: if we don’t find a way to fix this, things will only get worse. Balancing the needs of everyone currently affected by societal malaise, ushering people off their phones and into vocational training programs, and providing mental health support will only enrich everyone, while preventing young women from falling through the cracks while we try to fix the looming disaster coming for us all.
In Vox’s “Traditional gender roles won’t get men what they want”, Rachel Cohen Booth wrote:
We can do for men what feminism did for women: name the harmful pressures, expand what counts as being a “good” man in society, and free people from the norms that make them less healthy and less connected. The valorization of dominance, the stigma around asking for help, and the equation of manhood with control needn’t be the future of masculinity.
The data is the data: when it comes to my generation, Millennial men aren’t holding up their end of the bargain when it comes to doing household chores, forcing working women to work full-time, care for children, do laundry, cook, clean, carry the mental load of the family, and also maintain relationships with everyone in the family’s life. I know why women are angry and tired. Vox’s piece showed this is a structural issue: childcare subsidies and parental leave are the only things that will encourage people to have more children.
Is masculinity broken or are we just talking about it more? Is talking about it more simply giving men the oxygen they feel has been stolen from them in the various discourses outlined above? Are we still placing them on a pedestal if we acknowledge intervention is necessary to prevent another decade of misery? I’m not sure.
2025 surfaced these conversations due to the intersections of conversations around mental health, educational attainment, American Loneliness, the internet, brainrot, and politics all fusing into one festering sore we could no longer ignore. As with most things, I think everyone is a little bit right and a little bit wrong: we need to intervene on behalf of all young people, not just men. We need to prevent another generation of lonely and disaffected people taking out their rage on the rest of American society. Maybe 2025 is simply the year the floodgates opened enough to let the light in. We’re already living in the world men built— the next step is (hopefully) solving some of these problems before we’re living in one they destroyed.
There are 44 links in this? I think that’s my personal record, but omg.
I have 13 links I want to talk about (the merger!!!) but am going to save them for a few days from now. This is already *so* long.
Four more things:
Trump’s ban on DEI could affect white men the most: The rates of college enrollment being skewed already means men receive preferential treatment in the admissions process. Trump taking an axe to whatever affirmative action is left means the people being hurt the most will be the people he cares the most about (and who care the most about him). (The Washington Post)
I also loved Andrew Boryga’s post about male vulnerability last year, a good companion to this conversation: Do we really want more male vulnerability? (Substack)
As an aspiring author, this shook me to my core. But as someone who cares about journalistic ethics (and I’m not even a journalist) I did gasp: Olivia Nuzzi’s ‘Canto’ Sells Just 1,200 Print Copies In First Week (Forbes).
I loved Eternity, and this essay by the director was so sad and well done: Me, My Film, and My Massive Brain Tumor (Time). But also, Time saying the “architects” of AI are the people of the year is deeply embarrassing and will be looked back on in shame when the bubble inevitably bursts.
I only had this handy because I ranked all the VF Hollywood Issues on TikTok. It flopped so I never looked at it again, but if you have six minutes, it’s there for you!
Deaths of despair are defined as “deaths by suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis”. Source. “Men die “deaths of despair” from suicide, drugs, or alcohol at nearly three times the rate of women.” (Harvard Magazine)
“Over the last several decades, multiple gender gaps have emerged in college enrollment and graduation rates across institution and degree types. In 2021, men received 42% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States, the lowest male share on record and approximately equal to the 43% of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women in 1970. Women are 11 percentage points more likely to graduate from a four-year institution in four years and 7 percentage points more likely to graduate within six years. These disparities persist across racial groups and are highest for Black and Hispanic students. Though the trends are not new, the continued growth of these disparities pose significant questions for administrators, policymakers, and students.” Source.
It’s not just white men. From my anecdotal experience as a man of color and observing the podcasts and meme pages frequented by young men of color, the misogyny and rage are just as rampant.
Re: "The data is the data: when it comes to my generation, Millennial men aren’t holding up their end of the bargain when it comes to doing household chores, forcing working women to work full-time, care for children, do laundry, cook, clean, carry the mental load of the family, and also maintain relationships with everyone in the family’s life. I know why women are angry and tired."
If people are bad partners, but sad about being bad partners, but don't want to be better partners, and thus find themselves without partners... I mean. I don't want to shrug at human suffering, but there's something here worth exploring.
Great, thoughtful piece! Made me think about male flight, as soon as women started making a name for themselves as writing 'good' literature, men stopped wanting to be seen as literary, and the same goes for almost everything else in life, as soon as something could be perceived as feminine, queer, emasculating, men run, I tend to feel that there isn't a solution to this problem that doesn't involve men confronting their own deep-seated misogyny and homophobia, and they're always trying to find a way out of 'male loneliness' that doesn't involve that work.