An eighth grader at the time, I was lean and lanky, tall but not too tall. I mostly played shooting guard for my middle school team, and as the summer before my freshman year approached, I was keen to replicate the prodigious teenagers I’d seen go viral on YouTube for windmill slams and effortless alley-oops. I wanted to stand out once summer league started, and dunking seemed like the easiest, most eye-catching way to do that.

I was ambitious but not naive. At 5’8” (maybe 5’9” in tennis shoes), I would’ve been content just dunking a tennis ball. I had all of high school to fill out, and a tennis ball seemed impressive enough for now.

I perused chat forums and YouTube channels to find the best possible program, settling on an online academy called “Vert Shock” that was developed by a former pro basketball player. The package included a free e-book and lifetime access to a collection of digital products – mainly training tutorials walking through specific jump exercises. The program promised to raise your vertical by 9 to 15 inches in total, with an initial 4-inch boost right away. I was convinced.

After fine-tuning my sales pitch, my heartfelt case for why this investment would pay dividends, I convinced my parents that the $67 purchase would be worth it. After all, it’d be silly to pass up on my personalized discount of 70 percent off, offered (as my email receipts show) at a time when the company was getting “hammered” with requests. I was promised “secrets you won’t find anywhere else,” since “only the most elite players in the NBA and NFL ever get taught them.”

Soon came the regular stream of emails: testimonials from satisfied users, personalized welcome videos from the founder himself, subject lines like “#1 Blueprint to Staying Motivated” or “Skinny white kid from Maryland DUNKS during tryouts…” I dove into the training videos wholeheartedly, doing calf raises and single-leg jumps while watching March Madness games, strictly following the technique laid out in the videos. After a couple weeks of dedicated work, I decided to put myself to the test at the local outdoor courts.

At this point, you might expect me to say that I jumped no higher than when I started. That it was a complete waste of time and an unadulterated scam. Yet when I laced up my shoes that April day, I touched the rim for the first time in my life.

Maybe there was placebo. Maybe the shoes helped. In reality, the workouts I paid “exclusive access” for were probably available online the whole time at no cost. This was my early introduction to what Equimundo and Reset Tech have branded the “grift economy.” I’m hardly alone. For young men looking to improve themselves, make money, or simply find a sense of belonging, the internet is full of people ready to sell them the answer - often by first convincing them that something is missing.

Last week, we explored the faults behind the “rabbit hole” logic of the manosphere; how grievance-based content is interspersed with the more mainstream content young men are already consuming, and how the cultural pull of the “manosphere” is less quantifiable than we’d like to admit. The freshly released report from Equimundo and Reset Tech, “The Grift Economy: How Young Men Are Being Sold Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online,” punctures conventional “manosphere” wisdom further yet, questioning not only the term itself, but if we have the thinking completely backwards.

“The Grift Economy” unpacks the economic machine that grifters use to exploit young men. This multibillion-dollar industry did not crop up overnight, nor is it a fringe ecosystem confined only to the fever swamps of the internet. As the authors write, influencers in this economy prey on young men by monetizing insecurity and amplifying harm, all enabled by a “complex financial system of affiliated networks, cross promotional deals and stakes in platform equity.”

The grift economy works by turning young men’s aspirations and insecurities into a business model. Influencers draw them in with aspirational content, introduce grievance-based narratives, and then monetize the relationship by selling access, community, or the promise of economic security. Young men’s needs for belonging and financial stability become tools for manipulation, while the platforms hosting these figures profit from their content and advertising. The former is exploited through access to exclusive communities or forums, Discord servers, or other tools to satiate the individual need for connection. The latter is served through investment academies, crypto products, or other ostensible pathways to wealth which are nothing more than get-rich-quick conspiracies. Rebuking the idea that young men are self-willingly flocking to extremist echo chambers, Miles Klee of WIRED commented on the report: “The digital ecosystem that produces red-pilled men is less of a movement than a pyramid scheme.”

Andrew Tate may be the most infamous of the pyramid – he claims that his “Real World” online university has 213,500+ students, the cost now $99 a month – but he’s hardly alone. Last winter, Bloomberg documented the statistically anomalous gambling win rates by Adin Ross and Drake on their livestreams, whose wallets were allegedly refilled by Stake’s owner. The Grift Economy report also notes how Ross once promoted a crypto token to his viewers that later crashed; in response, he said, “I got paid a bag to do that. I don’t give a f***.” Flaunting superfluous wealth is essential to the marketing tactics, and there’s growing recognition of its fallaciousness. Just this week, Andrew Tate’s lawyer stated that the luxury cars and yachts he regularly flexed on social media were rented, all under the ruse of appearing “uberwealthy.”

Legal and regulatory remedies do not need to be drawn up afresh. The authors argue that Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) offers a compelling alternative to Section 230 by requiring greater transparency and ad moderation, as well as stronger protections for minors. We can also look to Brazil, where a recent Supreme Court decision now requires platforms to address serious harms proactively, rather than waiting on a court order. In the U.S., state attorneys general also possess their own tools for cracking down on platforms and specific influencers, with power exceeding that of the FTC in certain cases.

As with the larger discussion about the “manosphere,” the authors recommend that parents and other adult figures shift the conversation away from young men being “radicalized” and more towards scam mitigation, as well as building power via coalitions with other parents or demanding cancellation terms in writing before purchasing subscriptions.

There’s plenty of teenage and young adult boys like myself who simply want to improve in some aspect of their life; who want to acquire knowledge or new skills that appear closed off to only a select few, or who want community that’s lacking elsewhere. These desires are hardly the problem.

Grifters will always search for novel ways to expand and entrench their power, but that doesn’t mean we have to enable them. We must call fraud out as we see it, and recognize that it’s not an accident – it’s part of the design.

The manosphere’s poster boys have rotated over the years – from Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro to Nick Fuentes and Clavicular – and the term itself has ebbed and flowed. Generally speaking, we can think of the “manosphere” as a loose collection of online influencers and spaces that endorse traditional gender roles and criticize feminism’s impact on contemporary society.

The relevance and reach of these influencers are in constant flux. Staying in the spotlight often means doubling down on extreme ideas and seeking spectacle whenever they can find it (see Clavicular’s fall 2026 nationwide campus tour). But the underlying beliefs haven’t abated: that men should be self-sufficient and tough, conform to rigid gender roles, prioritize physical attractiveness and sexual prowess, be heterosexual, and use aggression to resolve conflict – a set of expectations captured in Equimundo’s “Man Box” framework.

Equimundo’s 2025 State of American Men (SOAM) found that about half of men aged 18-45 agreed that “men have it harder than women when it comes to new opportunities,” 45 percent agreed that you “must be an alpha male to get a partner these days,” and three in five concurred that feminism is about favoring women over men. These manosphere-endorsed beliefs are connected to anti-democratic attitudes, and Equimundo’s separate research has documented strong ties between Man Box beliefs and a higher risk of suicide and depression. Men who score high on the Man Box scale are also more likely to commit and experience violence, and to sexually harass women.

But we often race through those findings without affirming this part: more than half of young men don’t buy into the misogyny, anger, hate and rigid ideas about manhood.

It matters that even a minority buy into these ideas. We all stand to lose in a world where these influencers and ideas proliferate, where our leaders actively endorse and propagate their language. To date, though, the diagnosis has often treated the young men who consume this content as powerlessly falling into a “rabbit hole,” while defining the “manosphere” as a fixed thing with a singular culture. The latest report from Harmony Labs and LinkUp Lab – a hub led by Equimundo and Futures Without Violence – pokes a hole in this idea.

The report draws on a nationally representative survey of 3,000 people in the U.S.; an opt-in media panel of 300,000 people in the U.S.; and randomized control testing of 32 videos. Media behavior and content analysis were derived from a mix of streaming, YouTube, mobile and desktop usage, and porn viewership. The ultimate aim was to map different audiences of men online, exploring how they “participate in media cultures; relate to different masculinities; and see themselves, relationships, communities; and how this contributes to their flourishing.”

The study sought to better understand the manosphere culture and the idea of a rabbit hole that men risk falling into online. The researchers selected eight YouTube channels (“anchor channels”) with clear misogynistic and grievance-based content, then tracked the other channels these men watched the same day. The visual representation below shows just how fluid and diverse young men’s viewing is. The only clear pattern is that there is, really, no clear pattern.

The “rabbit hole” metaphor doesn’t hold up, and neither does the idea of a monoculture. The network map shows men regularly intermixing with mainstream media (e.g., ESPN or Saturday Night Live) and consuming more typical male genres like gaming, sports highlights, podcasts, or music during the same browsing experiences. YMRP has written previously about just how diffuse YouTube is, and how apolitical content overshadows political content. Content that most would recognize as “the manosphere” is served up alongside popular “normie” content that in no way rests on, nor builds, right-wing attitudes on the subject of gender.

The sheer preponderance of that less-extreme content is worth pausing on. The table below, which lists men and women overall as well as the five mapped audiences of men, shows channels like ESPN or MrBeast reaching 50-to-1,000x the audience of the most extreme channels, like FreshandFit or Whatever. As the authors write: “Metaphors matter, insofar as they shape our perceptions of problems and suggest solutions. The manosphere as rabbit hole is likely to suggest diversionary re-directions of men’s attention. Our findings suggest such tactics may be superfluous, insofar as men already consume a wide array of content.”

Is the “manosphere” simply a non-issue? Of course not.

We know that extreme figures (e.g., Fuentes, Clavicular) not covered in the list of anchor channels have outsized reach on short-form, algorithmic platforms outside of YouTube. The ideas underpinning this blob of creators and channels aren’t confined to the Tates or FreshandFits of the world; they creep into mainstream spaces and political platforms, where they reinforce Man Box ideas and raise the risk of real-world violence, self-harm, and other dangers. This research looked at direct consumption rather than the full scope of cultural diffusion. In other words, it’s possible for the Tates and Claviculars to have low reach while still shaping culture.

Not all groups of men are impacted equally, either. The researchers found that the “Hold the Line” (described as “provider, protector. Holds things together, delivers. Loyalty and discipline are core virtues.”) and “Locked In” (described as “self-reliant, self-made, competing to make it and build something real.”) personas are most prone to engaging with the anchor manosphere content.

Nonetheless, we’d be well suited to move away from the rabbit hole metaphor. As the authors write, this suggests a “captive, escalating audience,” which this data simply doesn’t bear out. The manosphere may be more effectively treated as a “diffuse cultural phenomenon that propagates via memes, visual styles, and insider language.”

We could debate the semantics of the manosphere endlessly. We should be crystal clear that on YouTube – the dominant social media platform for this demographic – these channels are rarely sought-out destinations, and more often interspersed with what young men already consume. More research is needed across social media platforms and digital life writ large to clarify how exactly we should categorize and understand the processes with which this content spreads.

There is reason for optimism: not only do the most extreme channels have relatively limited reach, but the content they produce may actually undermine the conditions that help people thrive. Grievance-driven content from channels closest to the network’s anchor points was significantly more likely to reduce feelings like joy, inspiration, and amusement – emotions that tend to make people more open to new ideas, people, and experiences – while increasing fear and frustration, which can narrow our attention and make us more defensive and reactive. This is often reflected in the style of the content itself: influencers yelling into the camera, reacting angrily to events, or presenting the world as a constant source of threat and grievance.

As we work to embolden digital voices offering young men more flexible, caring versions of manhood, the researchers conclude that we should operate under the premise of “show, don’t tell.” Don’t lecture men on how to be “healthy” or stop being “toxic.” Engagement and flourishing come easier from putting men inside the action of doing something together: exploring, creating, connecting, simply being decent, curious guys.

It’s become one of the defining questions of our cultural moment. But it’s also the wrong one.

Masculinity occupies a distinctive place in today’s public conversation. We debate what “healthy masculinity” looks like. We worry about “toxic masculinity.” We ask whether masculinity is in crisis, whether it needs redefining, and how boys and men should adapt to a changing world. There is no equivalent public preoccupation with defining “healthy femininity.” While women continue to face intense expectations about how they should look, behave, and live, femininity is rarely framed as a societal problem requiring diagnosis or repair in quite the same way.

The attention on masculinity is understandable. Men’s violence disproportionately harms women, other men, and boys, and the rise of online misogyny has only heightened concerns about how boys are being socialized. Over the past several decades - accelerated by social media and sharpened by the #MeToo movement - the conversation around masculinity has increasingly taken on the language of crisis.

But asking only what is wrong with masculinity is too limited. If our goal is to reduce violence and build healthier relationships, the more important question is not what masculinity should reject, but what it should embrace. The charts below, showing Google search trends over the past five years, illustrate just how much attention masculinity - and especially toxic masculinity - has attracted.

Google search trends for “toxic masculinity” versus “toxic femininity” over the past five years.

Google search trends for “healthy masculinity” versus “healthy femininity” over the past five years.

Yet the imperfect framing does not mean the question itself is irrelevant. Beneath the debate lies a real search: for models of masculinity that do more than tell young men what not to be, but offer a compelling vision of what they can become. In recent years, a range of such frameworks have emerged.

This is the crux of our work here at Equimundo. And if there is one place we believe a more expansive vision of manhood must begin, it is with care. Not because care is the whole of masculinity - there is a reason we speak of masculinities, plural, rather than masculinity, singular - but because the skills, relationships, and values that make care possible are among the most durable foundations for navigating the world today.

What exactly do we mean by care? We mean compassion; accountability; a relationships-first orientation. We mean choosing interdependence over isolation and domination.

Of course, this isn’t a novel prescription. In her 2004 masterpiece The Will to Change, bell hooks described the men “caught in patriarchy’s embrace” as “living in a wildness of spirit where they are utterly and always alone.” Hooks critiqued the strain of feminists that insist upon an “end of manhood,” that treats man’s nature as something intrinsically needing repair. Her guiding tenets of a feminist manhood – self-love, integrity, interdependence, assertiveness – run through our work and that of our feminist partners.

The conversation around male care is bustling right now, especially so around fatherhood. Gen Z polarization, primarily gendered and ideological, on the topic of having children routinely grabs headlines. Darby Saxbe’s Dad Brain is resonating with the masses, offering a science-backed testament to the transformative power of nurturing for fathers. Gender inequities in caregiving have hardly resolved, but the data are affirming that fathers today are spending significantly more time with their children than the generations before them.

We must leverage this moment, responding vigorously and affirmatively that care is the driving force for what boys and young men today should aspire to embody - in their relationships, in their communities, and, for those who become parents, in fatherhood. But we must not stop here. We must apply this lens to the realm where progress has stalled, and where sluggishness is most costly: gender-based violence (GBV). A new Equimundo report from Michael Flood, Taveeshi Gupta, Gary Barker, and Giovanna Lauro applies this perspective.

Close to a billion women worldwide have experienced partnered or sexual violence, and about the same number of men have used some form of intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetime. Yet we also know that about two billion boys and men in total have probably not used this violence and don’t support it. And roughly one billion boys and young men have never taken part in intimate relationships, and are still learning how to be with others. The authors note that it’s an “open question” how this inexperienced group will handle their first serious relationship. This is a big number, and it calls for a big solution.

Flood et al. outline a holistic approach for integrating care into GBV prevention work. We’ve written previously about the robust evidence from Rwanda’s Bandebereho program, which demonstrates what’s possible when parenting support is paired with a vision of caring manhood. Through an interactive, couples-based model that builds caregiving skills while challenging unequal gender norms, the program has achieved significant reductions in intimate partner violence and violence against children, alongside improvements in maternal and newborn health. Solutions also include educational curricula that reach the youngest boys, normalizing caregiving roles and qualities, as well as universal paid paternal leave, a glaring policy gap that leaves the U.S. alone among Western nations in its absence.

Further remedies are included in the report; as always, successful implementation lies in showing, not telling. This is especially true when assessing the power of mass media.

Ted Lasso and Roy Kent didn’t lecture the AFC Richmond squad about toxic masculinity; they extended a warm hand to star player Jamie Tartt as he dealt with paternal issues in the show, while also holding Tartt accountable when he placed individual success over the team’s.

The Wire is a show replete with violence perpetrated against mostly but not exclusively men, while also offering its fair share of male police adulterers. But the show introduces Dennis “Cutty” Wise in the third season: Cutty is fresh off 14 years in prison and finds himself pressured to return to the drug trade and the reflexive violence accompanying it. Instead, he opens a gym where boys can find safety and belonging. As he struggles to adjust to normal life, Cutty is vulnerable with the boys about his mistakes and his ongoing efforts to become a better man.

These characters resonate not because they are perfect, but because they make care aspirational. When popular culture shows men nurturing others, admitting vulnerability, and holding one another up, it expands our understanding of masculinity. It reminds us that strength can be measured by the capacity to love and repair.

When we embrace care in one aspect of life, it becomes harder to remove from others. The Equimundo report cited earlier shows how the empathetic habits instilled in men from hands-on caregiving carry over, correlating with lower rates of IPV. Girl dads are more likely to support gender equitable policies than those without daughters; a helpful data point, though not one we should celebrate. Of course, it shouldn’t take having a daughter to notice the injustice that women collectively go through, just as it shouldn’t take losing one’s life savings to support a safety net that helps those in need. But it shows how porous the borders of caring are – how care trickles over from part of life to the next.

We can and must call out and hold to full accountability the perpetrators of violence. We must inform boys and young men that the portrayals of sex that they’re seeing on pornography are not playbooks but an industry profiting from and normalizing violence. Accountability is a cornerstone of care, and here too, it starts with compassion. As the authors put it:

“Compassionate accountability begins with empathy to validate men’s experiences and build motivation for change, creating spaces for critical self-examination without shame-induced defensiveness, holding harmful behavior accountable, and using relational processes whether one-on-one or in groups to promote self-awareness, peer support and skills.”

This is the guiding star of our work in promoting alternative masculinities fit for the present, and it should be the guiding star of our work in ending gender-based violence, too: starting early with boys, electing leaders who back an economic system that creates the capacity to care, elevating the figures in our media who embody care authentically, boosting the male teachers and mentors who model this daily. And simply showing how it’s in our nature to do so.

As images of Argentina midfielder Leandro Paredes tossing Spain’s Gavi to the ground flashed across the screen on Sunday night, I yawned, switched off the TV, and went to bed. Only the next morning, when I woke up to a wave of media condemnation describing Argentina’s behaviour as disgraceful and damning, did I begin to wonder whether something might have been off. A subsequent Zoom meeting with colleagues brought into stark relief the limitations of my own perspective.

They were shocked, they shared, at what they had seen Argentina do after the final whistle. I sat in silence, puzzled by their reactions. In all honesty, I thought they were being a bit dramatic. It wasn’t ideal behaviour, but what did they expect? Clearly, I concluded, they had never experienced the version of Argentina I had come to know.

I spent the majority of my childhood in rural Argentina, and over a decade of my most formative adult years in Buenos Aires. My first romantic relationships were with Argentine men, and consequently, my early perceptions of masculinity were shaped in that context. In the environment I inhabited, the version of masculinity I most frequently encountered was expressed through football, aggression, and sexual conquest.

And so, drawing on the world I had experienced, I offered the explanation that felt self-evident to me:

“That’s just the way it is over there.”

The moment those words left my mouth, I felt the weight of what I was saying. I realised just how deeply I had allowed one particular expression of masculinity to shape my expectations of men as a whole. That recognition reflects what Equimundo’s research has found for years: ideas about manhood are not innate, they are learned. From childhood, boys absorb messages from families, peers, media, schools, and sport about what it means to “be a man,” including which emotions are acceptable, which behaviours earn respect, and which forms of aggression are excused or even celebrated. Girls come to accept them as the norm too. The fact that the world was outraged at something that I had come to see as ordinary revealed just how distorted my perception of masculinity had become.

To add insult to injury, my lack of reaction to the violence stood in sharp contrast to the profound sense of confusion I felt when scenes of care and kindness appeared on screen. Seeing a tender, post-semifinal hug was more jarring to me than a full on fist fight – the latter I expected, the former I did not. In the model of masculinity in my mind, the confrontation between Paredes and Gavi was the norm, and the heartfelt embrace between Bellingham and Haaland was the hallucination.

The version of manhood I encountered growing up in Argentina wasn’t the only influence that led me to see football, aggression, and sexual conquest as the holy trinity of masculinity – I also absorbed similar messages from lands further North – but it helped establish the algorithm that would shape my perception of men for decades to come. Once that lens was in place, new experiences were filtered through it, reinforcing the assumptions I already held.

Revisiting how I came to perceive masculinity this way is not a comfortable exercise. I can trace part of that process back to a football pitch somewhere on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I must have been about 21, supporting a boyfriend at the time as he played in an amateur football tournament. It was there that I watched him – a soft spoken Argentine with beautifully precise footwork – spit in his opponent’s face after a particularly rough tackle.

I can still remember the shock and disgust I felt when I saw him do it. I remember confronting him about it after the match, demanding an explanation, trying to figure out what had just happened. But he shrugged it off. It was a foul, couldn’t I see that? I clearly didn’t know anything about football if I was making such a fuss. His reaction, and that of everyone else watching, taught me that this was simply another expression of the sport.

Moments like this contributed to my implicit acceptance of the unacceptable. Fast forward 16 years to the 2026 FIFA World Cup final. I didn’t question the violence; I hardly even reacted to it. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped expecting men to choose anything different.

I now surround myself with people who challenge those expectations. Friends who encourage me to question the assumptions I’d mistaken for truths, and who invite me into a broader understanding of masculinity. Yes, I may have experienced one expression of manhood within a particular context, they tell me, but that is far from the whole picture.

And increasingly, I am learning that they are right. The world is filled with men who have a deep capacity for care, tenderness, and empathy – I had simply stopped seeing them. So no, the most disturbing thing about the World Cup final wasn’t the violence itself – it was realising how much of my understanding of masculinity had been built around expecting men to choose it.

Perhaps it’s time I learned to expect something different.

***

This personal reflection from Carolina Beresford is published as part of Equimundo’s ongoing work to explore how gender norms shape our expectations of masculinity. Through research, advocacy and evidence-based programmes, Equimundo works to promote healthier, more equitable expressions of masculinity and advance gender equality.

What happens in the brain when men become engaged caregivers? How does fatherhood shape men’s wellbeing, relationships, and sense of purpose? And what do these findings mean for families, workplaces, and public policy?

In this conversation, Equimundo Founder and CEO Gary Barker is joined by psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Darby Saxbe, author of Dad Brain, to discuss the latest research on fatherhood, caregiving, and why supporting men as caregivers benefits everyone.

Watch the full conversation.

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The data around this topic are admittedly messy. Equimundo’s 2023 State of American Men showed that about two-thirds of men think abortion should be legal in most cases, with support strongest among younger demographics. Yet research from the Survey Center on American Life in 2022 found that young American men and women have “distinctly contrasting views” on abortion’s morality: 52 percent of young women said abortion is morally acceptable “all” or “most” of the time, versus 36 percent of young men. Neat conclusions about young men’s views therefore fluctuate from context to context – what’s clear is that Gen Z is more divided on this issue than any other demographic.

These differences carry into the voting booth. The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that women are eleven percentage points more likely than men to say they’d exclusively vote for a candidate who shares their position on abortion, 43 percent versus 32 percent. Here too, the largest gendered divide on this matter came within Gen Z; though, this was primarily because Gen Z women were especially likely to say they’d only vote for a like-minded candidate.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision, at both the electoral and grassroots level, women have disproportionally channeled their righteous anger into action. The women’s voter registration rate jumped by 35 percent following Dobbs, compared to nine percent among men, and women have been more likely to protest around reproductive rights.

This is where groups like Men4Choice enter the picture. Founded in 2015, the advocacy organization and nonprofit runs a year-round training program educating young men how to organize and be active allies, while building a social media ecosystem of positive role models championing progressive policies. As Men4Choice writes, “more than 60 million adult men in America” are pro-choice, yet these men have “largely been silent bystanders in this fight.”

This approach also reflects Equimundo’s work with boys and men. Our recent report, “What If We Led With Compassion, Care and Accountability?”, argues that engaging men begins with care, empathy, relationality, and accountability, inviting them to see themselves as allies and active partners in advancing gender equality. The easiest way to convince men to join the fight for reproductive rights is to show them the perspective of other men who already have.

We’ve seen how personal storytelling can work wonders. The advocacy group Abortion in America found that Gen Z men were particularly likely to be moved by personal stories related to abortion. After hearing from a man who lost his wife after being denied miscarriage treatment, or a woman who had to struggle for a month to get an abortion appointment, young men were thirteen percentage points more likely to vote for a pro-choice Congressional candidate.

Supporting women’s bodily autonomy also requires more accessible family planning methods. Following the ratification of the Affordable Care Act, abortion rates and unexpected pregnancies both fell in response to the elimination of contraception cost-sharing. In fact, we’re only scratching the surface of male birth control. Plan A™, for instance, is a long-acting, nonhormonal, reversible contraceptive currently in clinical trials, showing early signs of success. In a conversation with YMRP Director Charlie Sabgir this spring, co-founder L.R. Fox described the incredible appetite among young men in college for more effective contraceptive options. Like their female counterparts, most young men believe they should dictate the terms of their family and financial future – scientific innovation can play a key role here.

Part of this fight, then, involves educating young men about the real-world consequences of restricting reproductive rights; sharing the stories of those tragically affected, and warning of the continued harm to come by neglecting action. It means speaking up for the vulnerable, defending those whose voices are shunned and rights are under attack. It means supporting those working on the frontlines, and working collectively to dismantle the inequities that reduce women to second-class status.

Caring masculinity means ensuring that every individual has the right to decide when, where, and how they will have children. This is what “protecting” truly demands.

As we reflect on this sober anniversary, let us acknowledge the draconian restrictions imposed over the last four years and the preventable tragedies they’ve inflicted. Let us praise those doing the dangerous, often life-threatening work to stand up for women and all of those affected. And let us recognize that the window of opportunity to mobilize young men is far from closed.

If there’s one through line in our work with young men, it’s how receptive many are to alternative conceptions of masculinity. When offered clear models tailored around compassion and care, coupled with the tools to be engaged individuals, they are willing and eager to show up for their families and communities.

Now, more than ever, we need to get young men off the sidelines and into the fight for women’s reproductive rights - treating bodily autonomy as a fundamental right that affects real lives, not as an abstract political debate.

Five ways men can support reproductive justice:

• Donate to or volunteer with your local abortion fund, which helps low-income womxn from all over the US to pay for the procedure. Find your local abortion fund here.

• Follow accounts promoting women’s reproductive autonomy over social. Here’s a few accounts to follow: @sistersong_woc, , ,

• Serve as abortion escorts in your community, or show up with cupcakes, coffee, umbrellas, or even just a nice card and grateful words for the escorts in your community

• Vote with your money: see this list of the top corporations who have given to anti-abortion activists

• Read about what a post-Roe America looks like. If you live in a state where abortion is likely to be restricted or banned, consider your options now: If I needed it, could I get the abortion pill by mail? Can I drive to a clinic across a border? Find out the situation in your state and share this information widely.

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Opportunity was one of the few connective tissues among the founders, and today, opportunity remains far more accessible for some than others. Among young Americans, there’s a simmering resentment that opportunity seems to be slipping away, confided in the hands of a select few, along with the rising prosperity only visible to, well, a select few. For young men, faith in attaining the hallmarks of the American dream – owning a home, starting a family – has abated but not altogether been abandoned. The idea that pulling up your sleeves and bootstrapping can propel you to success is, in fact, quite popular. Yet young men no longer trust the American institutions and structures intended to support them in that quest.

In Equimundo/Young Men Research Project (YMRP)’s May survey of men and women ages 18-29, as part of the upcoming State of American Men report, just 17 percent of young men said that Americans are competing on an “even playing field” for jobs and opportunity. Young men think the system is unfair – the second most popular answer (35 percent) was that the economy is altogether “rigged” in favor of certain groups – yet most still adhere to the fundamental meritocratic promise: a plurality (48 percent) said, “some groups have certain advantages, but individual effort can overcome them.” Young men similarly strike the middle ground in their views on American exceptionalism: YMRP’s fall 2025 survey showed that 38 percent of young men believe the U.S. is the greatest country on earth, 44 percent called it no better or worse, and just 18 percent say America is worse overall than other countries.

The survey reinforced the biting hunger among Gen Z for a revitalization of the country their parents and grandparents inhabited, an America with tighter community bonds, clearer career pathways (free from the question, “will AI take my job?”), the pace of life, even the music and entertainment of these eras.

The grass is always greener, so they say, and there’s good reason to push back against the hyper-nostalgia defining the times. But we should also understand why young men and women alike believe America at 250 is not the America it could be – the America it should be.

Young people are lonelier than ever. They’re more anxious than ever. Economic inequality has intensified, wages have stagnated, and the accruing differences in status are now terribly visible, beckoning for us 24/7 at our fingertips. The community groups and spaces that once offered mooring have hollowed out, the burden of isolation falling heaviest on those in underserved areas, on those lacking a college education. Record-breaking heat wave follows record-breaking heat wave, while our elected leaders sit idly by. The inhuman treatment of humans is increasingly justified by those in power. Political corruption at the highest echelons of power is now happening in broad daylight, without remorse. Polarization metastasizes uncontained, further eroding the trust Americans have in our leaders and the neighbors next door.

To be clear, there’s incredible reason to be optimistic about the future. Violent crime has been falling for decades. Medical breakthroughs are happening at warp speed. Human longevity has stretched to a point once unfathomable in human history (LeBron James is averaging twenty-one points per game as a 41-year-old!). Artificial intelligence and computers have democratized education for the masses.

But for all the progress, for all the scientific breakthroughs, for every reason to be rationally optimistic about the grand trajectory of human flourishing, young people today have good reason to turn a blind eye to the aggregates. To feel alienated from the institutions and structures of ages past. To feel they’ve got the short end of the stick, and that things will only get worse.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, how the zero-sum mindset is supplanting the idea of a growing pie. For young men especially, they’ve been fed the fallacy by online and offline voices that immigrants, women, transgender Americans, Jews, and other groups are responsible for this diminishing pie. As Equimundo’s 2025 State of American Men found, those who’ve adopted this mindset are significantly more likely to support the “tear it all down” figures antithetical to our nation’s democratic character. Separate research finds that individuals facing downward mobility are more likely to hold zero-sum views, and this “only strengthens” preexisting attitudes, especially common among men.

The cynicism and pessimism about the direction of our country is more pronounced now than ever. But we must not lose sight that for most young men, nihilism is crowded out by hope.

In the same Equimundo/YMRP May survey, a majority of young men (54 percent) agreed that the “American dream is attainable for me, personally,” compared to 33 percent who disagree. Most young men want to be fathers, and while there is still plenty of catching up to do in equal division of care labor, men are spending more time and doing more tasks than their dads or granddads. The research and programmatic work of Equimundo, YMRP, and other feminist partners repeatedly affirms how adaptable young men are to more compassionate masculinities.

As we reflect on America’s 250th, let us recognize that freedom and justice are not equally available to all. That the idea of the United States as an experiment ripe for tinkering and refinement, its north star pointed towards a more egalitarian and meritocratic end, hasn’t entirely escaped our public imagination. Let us remember the forgotten founding fathers, like Frederick Douglass, who tied liberation for one group to liberation of all groups. Let us recognize that caring masculinity calls on caring policies and collective solidarity – paid paternity leave, reproductive rights that protect women’s bodily autonomy, a social safety net that ensures the dignity of all citizens.

There is bravery in asking these existential questions about America’s promise. There is bravery in fighting for connection, in fighting for a country that promotes benevolence over bigotry. This tug-of-war won’t cease anytime soon. Moving young men toward care, toward a belief that the American dream is truly open to all, requires institutions and leaders who offer them a stake in this project.

The president has long courted the sports world, and since returning to office, the sports world has largely returned the favor. Championship teams rejected White House invitations en masse during his first term. This time around, visiting teams have showered him with “Trump #47” jerseys, including the Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Dodgers, Florida Panthers, and Inter Miami. Trump is eager to be seen as part of the action himself:

Trump’s affinity for UFC, wrestling, football, and other sports is personal, cultural, and political. Those sports reinforce his intended image as a ruggedly masculine, ruthless leader who’s as satisfied throwing punches in the diplomatic arena as in the octagon. His relationships with stars like Dana White, Tom Brady, Wayne Gretzky, and Bryson DeChambeau have helped cement that image.

This cultural pull matters because sports occupy an enormous place in many young men’s lives. Eighty-two percent of young men (18-29) report following sports, according to Young Men Research Project’s fall 2025 poll, while 63 percent say they follow politics at least “some of the time.” At the same time, Equimundo’s 2025 State of American Men found that Gen Z men were the most likely generation to say they wish they were more masculine.

That raises a larger question: what kind of masculinity are young men looking for?

The answer looks different than many politicians and pundits assume. Equimundo’s State of UK Men found that 91 percent of men and women associate friendship with manhood, making it the most widely shared definition of masculinity in the study. Friendship ranked alongside honesty, kindness, helping others, and showing up for the people in your life. Toughness and dominance were far less central.

Sports has become one of the primary places where young men absorb ideas about friendship, belonging, teamwork, and masculinity. Which is why the recent collision between sports and politics has been so revealing. The World Cup raises a contradiction that is difficult to ignore. It is a tournament built around travel, exchange, and participation. Fans cross borders. Players represent countries from every corner of the world. Strangers meet, celebrate, and form friendships that would never have existed otherwise.

For young men paying attention, those moments matter. Sports is one of the primary places where many of them encounter ideas about belonging, friendship, and masculinity. The images that have defined this tournament are not about dominance or exclusion. They are about connection.

That sits uneasily alongside policies that restrict who can enter the country and who gets to participate.

That tension has played out repeatedly before the tournament even started. After arriving at Miami International Airport, beloved Somali referee Omar Artan was placed in a long-term holding cell before being deported. Iran’s soccer federation reported its fans’ tickets had been revoked. Fans from Haiti, Ivory Coast, and Senegal have also been denied entry. Even teams have faced disruptions. Uzbekistan’s squad was subjected to security screening after arriving in New York, and Iran was forced to relocate its training camp from the United States to Mexico.

For many fans, these stories cut against what makes the World Cup special in the first place. The moments gaining the most traction online point to a very different vision of the tournament. South Korea and Mexico fans spent the day of the World Cup opener singing together in the streets, trading flags, sharing food, and celebrating one another’s cultures. Thousands of miles from home, strangers have found reasons to connect.

Those moments get at something deeper than sports. They offer a vision of manhood rooted in friendship, curiosity, generosity, and community. At a moment when so much of the public conversation about masculinity revolves around grievance, fans seem far more interested in celebrating one another. The politics of joy is not an abstract idea. It’s already happening in the stands.

The same dynamic has played out closer to home. As New York rallied around the Knicks’ playoff run, Mayor Zohran Mamdani embraced the moment, promoting public watch parties and communal celebrations across the city.

The appeal is obvious. Sports offers a reason to gather, celebrate, and feel part of something bigger. Mamdani understood that instinct and leaned into it. At a moment when much of politics revolves around anger and division, he offered people an excuse to be together.

The contrast is even sharper with the White House’s UFC event. The administration poured enormous energy into promoting it, complete with AI-generated trailers and a made-for-social-media spectacle. Yet ahead of last weekend’s fight, Reuters/Ipsos found that just 16 percent of Americans said the fight was appropriate, including only 31 percent of Republicans.

The comparison is difficult to ignore. One vision of public life revolves around confrontation, grievance, and political identity. The other revolves around connection, community, and shared celebration.

Source: White House Instagram

The most memorable sports moments of the summer have not been about domination. They’ve been about connection.

That should tell us something. Young men are spending enormous amounts of time in sports spaces. They are also actively searching for role models. What they are responding to is not fear, exclusion, or grievance. It is friendship. It is belonging. It is community.

The politics of joy reflects that reality. Not because people want less competition or less passion, but because they want a vision of manhood that brings people together instead of pulling them apart.

Sports keep showing us what that can look like.

Carlson’s independent media network, TCN, released Fathers Wanted at the end of April, an hour-long documentary led by the conservative American Principles Project and narrated by the group’s president, Terry Schilling. Interspersed throughout the film is a smorgasbord of historians, demographers, politicians, religious leaders, and the voices of a few young fathers themselves.

Unlike his last masculinity flick, Fathers Wanted doesn’t open with a shirtless man tanning his testicles to infrared light, with the score of 2001: A Space Odyssey roaring in the background. Nor does Schilling allocate time to the scientific (and political) benefits of routinely ingesting raw eggs. But the film begins in the same apocalyptic fashion, and carries a warlike cadence at times. Schilling makes clear the film “isn’t about nostalgia, it’s about survival.”

Like The End of Men, this one opens with the sweeping warning of a “slow motion suicide across the West,” a calamity that starts with a supposed war on fatherhood. Carlson veers between demeaning and praiseworthy views of lower-income Americans, claiming that these individuals often become parents because, for “cognitive or cultural reasons,” they can’t “foresee the consequences of their actions.” Yet Carlson believes that poor Americans still win, because they’re ultimately the ones having children – a point punctuated with his characteristically eerie laugh. As for Carlson’s solutions to the larger challenge of a society rigged against families? “Hopefully a soft revolution … but, if need be, a violent revolution.”

Throughout the documentary, there’s a bizarre interplay that reflects a larger pattern within conservative messaging directed at young men, where blame is sprayed at society for stacking the deck against men, and young men for forgoing their natural duties and settling for a hedonistic life. Schilling blames an intentionally ambiguous “they” – a familiar dog-whistle for the elites, globalists, the “soy boys,” and so forth – for denying young people the right to pursue family formation. He laments young men’s supposed drift towards video games, porn, and marijuana, arguing that the U.S. has become a place where men are “afraid to become fathers” and families are “unthinkable.” Producers cherrypick street interviews and TikToks of young adults forgoing kids because of the carbon footprint or because their purpose is “getting [their] nails done” and “going shopping.”

In another segment, demographer Lyman Stone declares that an “Andrew Tate-ification” has warped young men’s aspirations, never mind that Young Men Research Project (YMRP)’s summer 2025 polling found that 79 percent of men aged 18-29 who like and trust Tate agree “having children is important to me,” well above the average. Stone criticizes the government for marriage penalties while Schilling takes aim at tax rates for mothers, gesturing toward a “stay-at-home-mom” tax reduction. Stone also reminds the audience that heterosexual marriages have been the norm throughout human history, while claiming – without clear evidence I could find – that children from these unions have higher “survival rates.”

Historical argument and religious doctrine are wielded to justify a traditional family structure, with pronatalist arguments baked in throughout. Bishop Robert Barron, a theologian with over three million YouTube subscribers, compares the father to a shepherd responsible for “direct[ing] sheep toward their proper end.” Ken Calvert, a historian at Hillsdale College, effectively blames the fall of the Roman Empire on the collapse of fatherhood and birth rates. Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson similarly argues that the “single greatest crisis” America faces is population collapse.

A celebration of tariffs and reshoring domestic industry also features in this conversation, with Sen. Tommy Tuberville and Professor Calvert both arguing that restoring American jobs is essential for bolstering fatherhood; a point not wrong on its face, but one that ignores the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs exactly since Liberation Day.

Unfounded arguments, sheer conspiracy, and what appears as AI slop functioning as B-roll footage abounded. Yet credit where credit is due.

Fathers do, in fact, matter. Research has long affirmed that children with active fathers, compared to households with disengaged or absent fathers, show higher well-being, greater future economic success, lower dropout rates, and better outcomes on virtually every metric. At the same time, research also emphasizes that what matters most is not fatherhood alone, per se, but the presence of engaged, loving, and consistent caregivers of any gender or sexual orientation. Children thrive when they experience stable care, emotional connection, and shared responsibility from the adults in their lives.

Additionally, research also shows that fathers gain a unique and profound gratification that’s difficult to measure in a survey. Equimundo’s 2026 State of the World’s Fathers (SOWF), with data from 16 countries, including the U.S., attests to this: nine in ten mothers and fathers said that caring for their loved ones is one of the most “enjoyable things in life.”

There is also tremendous support for more family-friendly policies among parents, as the subjects allude to, including tax credits for new parents. Equimundo’s 2023 SOWF, for example, found that a “significant proportion of both women and men” in the countries surveyed have taken initiative to improve care policies. And the film recognizes the role that Blackrock and large corporations have played in swallowing up single-family homes and making homeownership more daunting for young adults.

Yet the extent of the challenges fathers do face, and the genuine reasons men do abstain from having kids, are minimized throughout the documentary. That omission is especially striking in light of the central throughline of Equimundo’s 2026 SOWF: a generation of parents “stretched to the breaking point,” losing sleep, sacrificing their time, feeling the pressure of rising housing costs, and often surviving on a single income. While the film acknowledges the inevitability of sacrifice – Schilling saying “sure, [fatherhood] can be a chore at times and it costs money, but it’s all worth it” – the weight of the modern care penalty was not fully captured.

As for the natalist concerns, the Senators who appeared in the film, Jim Banks (R-IN) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), have voted against care policies like paid leave and child tax credits that *might* help alleviate falling birth rates, or at least lessen the burden on families already raising kids. These policies are immensely popular: Equimundo’s State of American Men 2025 found that 61 percent of mothers and fathers support paid parental leave, and 64 percent support child tax credits. Tuberville previously rejected a proposal to expand the child care tax credit, claiming that it was “nothing but another attempt by the left to buy votes in an election year.” Banks, who voted against COVID-era economic relief for families amidst the pandemic, has proposed his own version of a child tax credit expansion; however, it limits support for the lowest-income families by tying the credit amount to earnings.

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Unlike The End of Men, Carlson’s new documentary hides behind his network’s paywall. Its reach is limited to paying subscribers – those who already share his views, or connoisseurs like myself. But it’s hard not to read Fathers Wanted as yet another piece of the broader pronatalist and invasive family agenda being pushed through the Trump administration today, an agenda that includes an all-out assault on women’s birth control access, access to safe and legal abortion, and a push for mass deportations justified by great replacement conspiracies.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs recently released guidance that details a new priority for “natural family planning” alongside plans to gut Planned Parenthood funding in 2027. As Mary Ziegler wrote for POLITICO, this represents the most “serious effort in decades to curb contraception.” Fathers Wanted is a sign of where the right is headed: not merely a celebration of dads, but a rallying cry for a larger movement rooted in expanding control over women’s bodily autonomy and denying same-sex couples the right to marry. As for the great replacement chatter, Brandon Gil, the youngest Republican in Congress, articulated this theory in one segment, claiming that the “governing elite” seeks to “fill the [birth] gap with American aliens,” which drives down wages and “further erod[es] the cultural foundations that all of our prosperity sits on top of.”

Despite the film’s sweeping claims of young men altogether opting for cheap pleasures, YMRP’s research affirms that a majority of young men want to be dads, and fatherhood is central to how this generation thinks about masculinity – more so than being rich or having more sex than their peers. We can and should celebrate young men’s hopes to be fathers.

But we must also grapple with the enormous strains parents face today, which is ultimately economic, and with the legitimate reasons why young adults are choosing not to have children. And we can recognize that policy – paid parental leave and expanded child tax credits among them – have a role to play in helping future and current parents, while also acknowledging that even smart policy goes so far.

We must be optimists, but we must also be realists.

The report draws on survey data from roughly 8,000 parents and caregivers – 5,371 fathers, 2,615 mothers aged 18 to 65 – across 16 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Ireland, Mexico, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Türkiye). Within the tapestry of rich data and unfiltered stories is a consistent throughline: parents who are “stretched to the breaking point,” grappling with economic pressures that both form and reinforce existing obstacles to fully engaged caregiving.

The numbers make this strain unmistakable. Three in four fathers and more than four in five mothers say they’re losing sleep over their financial futures. A majority of parents feel that homeownership is out of reach, and about one in three households reports surviving on a single income. Equimundo found that economic precarity is associated with every care indicator measured in the survey.

Of course, the velocity of these headwinds isn’t uniform. The financial realities of Argentinian fathers aren’t identical to those of Australian mothers, nor are those of Croatian Zoomers to Colombian seniors. In Croatia, for instance, fathers aged 18-30 reported the highest levels of financial insecurity; in Australia, it’s young mothers who report the heaviest financial burden. Other countries show more consistent patterns: in the United Kingdom and Colombia, economic security was relatively constant across age and gender. A few voices from the report speak to these gnawing uncertainties:

“Fifteen years ago, we had a much more comfortable life. Now, we are struggling. I am genuinely worried about our children’s future.” Father, 45 years old, Türkiye.

“My fear for our children is they will not be able to afford a home. We have four adult children who are frustrated with the cost of housing and rent.” Mother, 49-years-old, Canada.

These financial pressures exact a heavy toll; a “care penalty” that demands sacrifice in some shape or form, draining savings, cutting hours, staying in jobs they want to leave, and giving up study and leisure time. Parents across the globe report an average of six to eight sacrifices (choosing from sixteen options) to provide care, the average for fathers ranging from 5.4 in the U.S. to 8.2 in Colombia; for mothers, from 5.8 in the U.S. to 8.5 in Colombia. Varying gendered rules and expectations help explain the distinct sacrifices that parents are making in different countries.

Women report a greater likelihood of leaving the workforce or cutting spending on non-essential activities or items, while men are more likely to work overtime or refinance their homes. As one 35-year-old Canadian mother put it, “I feel like I have spent 13 years [as a parent] running a marathon with constant hurdles, barriers, and challenges that … have left me totally unable to contribute to society.”

Confirming a well-established finding in health research, economic precarity is closely linked with higher mental distress. Notably, the “grinding choices fathers must make explain almost a quarter of why economic anxiety is linked to mental health.” On average, almost 1 in 3 fathers have thought about suicide in the two weeks prior to taking the survey. These caregiving pressures extend beyond the present — 64 percent of fathers and 69 percent of mothers ranked their children’s financial future among their top three worries — nor are they limited to children. About one in four parents are simultaneously caring for older relatives, friends, or other community members alongside their children, the majority doing so with little or no support.

Yet for all the late nights and looming uncertainty — where your next meal will come from, or what your child is browsing online — about nine in ten mothers and fathers say that caring for children or loved ones is “one of the most enjoyable things in life,” a figure that hasn’t budged much since 2023. Fathers today report greater involvement in their children’s lives compared to their own fathers, and there is strong agreement that care work is more normalized than in the past. As a 31-year-old father put it, “Compared to our grandparents’ generation, the difference really is like night and day.”

Fathers want to be active fathers. Yet there are conflicting messages about what this should and shouldn’t resemble, many of which actively clash with the realities of caregiving. Between 2023 and 2026, there’s been a noticeable rise in fathers’ agreement that boys “shouldn’t be taught to cook, clean, or care for siblings,” jumping from 25 percent to 40 percent. Agreement that “changing diapers, giving kids a bath, and feeding kids are a mother’s responsibility” was nearly equal in 2023; by 2026, a thirteen-point margin separated mothers and fathers (36 percent of fathers agreed versus 23 percent of mothers). While the gaps on some of these issues have expanded, mothers and fathers continue to agree that financial provision is a father’s primary role. 58 percent of men in the study agreed “I don’t think I am man enough unless I can provide for my family,” and 62 percent said their job offers them status.

The data show how traditional gender beliefs get in the way of true caregiving. Men who hold traditional beliefs about gender roles were four times more likely to experience couple conflict. The gap in how fathers and mothers perceive the lived division of caretaking responsibilities speaks to this: 88 percent of fathers say there’s mutual support in caregiving at home, twelve points higher than the share of mothers who agree.

What are some remedies? At the household level, the findings are unequivocal: “[T]he more parents communicate … the more everyone wins.” The report finds that mutual communication is associated with improved mental health, higher support for care policies, more enjoyment of caregiving, among other salutary outcomes. Embracing more flexible roles and more expansive definitions of caregiving can not only reduce couples’ conflict and alleviate unequal burdens but, as separate research shows, reduce excessive self-reliance and raise the perceived value of pro-social qualities in friendships.

But there’s much more work to be accomplished beyond the household, in the halls of legislatures. Across the world, parents are asking for parental leave, more affordable childcare, flexible work arrangements, and improved post-natal guidance. There’s a sharp lack of awareness among fathers about the options for support already available, a lack of awareness that sits alongside a fierce distrust of political representatives. Unsurprisingly, parents dealing with the highest levels of financial insecurity were 1.7 times more likely to vote for care policies, and even for the fathers who lean conservative, they say they’d support candidates who champion these initiatives.

As the report concludes, the 2026 SOWF is both a “call to action, and a call for systemic change.” Equimundo, through initiatives like the MenCare Changemakers Journey and continued research, is doing its part to create a world with more capacity for care.

Those of us in the gender equality space write regularly about the parallel realities young adults inhabit today. Climate change enters this conversation less frequently, but it belongs there, as one of many wedges dividing young men and women in the U.S. and around the world. On one of the defining existential threats of our lifetime, young men are increasingly tuning out.

Equimundo research has long found that men are less likely than women to view climate change as a serious threat, underscoring a persistent gender gap in climate engagement. Similarly, a 2024 Ipsos survey across 33 countries found that millennial and Gen Z men were the most likely groups, across age and gender, to hold fatalistic views about climate change – believing it’s too late for action and that individual behavior modification is fruitless. Indeed, Equimundo research finds that men are less likely to support or adopt lifestyle changes that reduce climate impact.

The gap hasn’t always been this wide. And the relationship between masculinity and environmentalism hasn’t always been so antagonistic.

I still recall my first run after moving to Washington, D.C., five years ago, a loop around Theodore Roosevelt Island. At the center of the serene ~1.5 mile trail is a statue of the 26th president, his hand raised alongside inscribed plaques, one of which reads: “The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation, increased and not impaired in value.” In the Rooseveltian era and for much of the 20th century, protecting our land and resources was, in fact, a masculine virtue.

Yet as journalist Daniel Waite Penny has noted, the environmental movement’s public branding shifted in the late 20th century as Rachel Carson became the new face. Climate action has since become weaponized by bad actors as excessively emotional and feminine. Greta Thunberg, the foremost face of the modern environmental movement and a role model for millions, is regularly lambasted by the most macho-posturing corners of online culture. Andrew Tate infamously sparked a Twitter feud with Thunberg in 2022, posting (to 215 million views) a photo of him filling up his Bugatti, boasting of his 33 cars and their “enormous emissions.” Thunberg, and the youthful climate movement she represents, have become regular scapegoats for Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, or Dave Portnoy, for those who promote more individualistic and defiant templates for manhood.

How did the Earth fall into such bad graces?

For one, the narrative of man’s dominion over nature has never abated. Equimundo research shows how dominant ideals of masculinity have long been tied to control, conquest, and dominance over the natural world, shaping how climate action is perceived and resisted today. But we must also reckon with the vast sums of money pumped into the right-wing ecosystem over the past few decades to spread climate skepticism, money used to frame climate science as a threat to “modern industrial rationality,” money that props up the influencers and networks telling young men to look away, or to actively mock the Thunbergs of the world as hysterical true believers. These messages coincide with a conspiratorial age defined by distrust of our institutions and frustration with the elites who fly to Davos on private jets, seemingly only to lecture ordinary people about their consumption. As Penny notes, anti-green industries have targeted non-college-educated men in particular since the 1980s, calculating they’d be most receptive.

Less obvious is how climate action has gotten wrapped up in the language of “care.” Equimundo research helps explain why that matters. Boys are often socialized to be self-reliant and emotionally restrained, while caregiving is coded as feminine, shaping which roles feel acceptable or aspirational. Not unlike in the household, in their communities, and in the workplace, women are increasingly being tasked with caretaking the planet – a project that demands buy-in from every demographic. Tragically, this dynamic comes at a moment when women are already more likely to die from climate-related disasters, and when they carry smaller carbon footprints than men to begin with.

The atmosphere in the U.S. surrounding climate action is rather discouraging. A president who calls climate change a hoax, a Secretary of Health infatuated with massive red meat consumption, a Department of the Interior posting AI-generated images of a cartoon “coalie,” touting the ridiculous notion of “responsible coal mining.” When the men in leadership are actively dragging us backward on an issue that demands nothing but forward progress – and when the real-world impacts of a baking planet are transforming our world on hyperspeed – it’s tempting to write off the next generation of men as MIA in the climate cause.

But read Joseph Richardson’s piece, and you also find something more soothing: young men in local communities managing beehives, maintaining bikes, or pulling their sleeves up in the forests. He articulates how for the young men engaged in these programs, this “isn’t just environmental work. It’s care work. And changing the narrative on who gets to do it is vitally important.”

There are fixes, small (e.g., influencers who model wonder and reverence for the natural world) and large (e.g., increasing funding for national service programs that protect our public lands) that can help embed a caring relationship with the environment into our culture’s understanding of masculinity. The redemptive power of nature is as strong a force as any for true human groundedness and higher purpose. And there’s nothing more manly than that.

Reading the accounts of Chavez’s abuse and the testimonies of the women who survived it, I realized they were silent for the duration of my life. From the time I was a young boy in the 1970s to the present, they have sat mostly in silence with the lifelong repercussions of that violence.

The injustice they faced all those years is appalling at many levels. Perhaps foremost is the silence of the men around Chavez. The men who drove him. The men who worked alongside him. The men who had to have known or suspected. They followed a pattern of so many other men who remain silent in the face of men’s violence against women.

In the Epstein files, we saw that same silence. The revelations detail not only extensive sexual abuse, but also the men (and women) around him who remained silent, at times covered for him. Some, probably many, of the men around Epstein knew of his sex trafficking and sexual abuse, or at the very least knew of the rumors and held their noses. None apparently spoke out.

As a researcher and advocate who has worked for years with men to end violence against women and girls, we often ask: why don’t men who oppose such violence sit in silence when other men perpetrate it? In our research, we hear the usual: he was a man with power. He might use it against me. It’s not my business. I don’t want to rock the boat.

Young men tell us they stay silent because they are afraid that if they speak up to the bullying or harassment of other men, they will become the targets of the violence. They are worried they will fall out of favor with the peer group or the powerful man. Men know the violence of other men, and their fear of repercussions is valid. And it is cowardice.

In the field of gender-based violence, there is a field of interventions – many subjected to rigorous impact evaluation – called bystander interventions. Such interventions or campaigns urge men and women who witness violence or sexist actions to speak out. This means speaking up if you know what’s happening on Epstein’s island, or when a friend boasts of a sexual encounter with an underage person, or intervening when you hear a sexist comment at work.

When men speak out regularly and when other men believe that men around them will repudiate their violence, we see attitude and behavior changes. We’ve seen cases in which gaming streamers called out sexist language in chat rooms, but didn’t report it. Studies in the US military, as well as in schools, in workplaces, and in sporting spaces have found again and again that bystander interventions and other programs – from the US to India – show consistent effects in changing men’s belief that violence against women is acceptable. In these programs, men are encouraged to call out or talk to other men in those spaces about consent, abuse, harassment, or other forms of violence against women and girls.

The prevailing response to gender-based violence is the punitive approach. Punish men after the fact. Terminate him, arrest him, shame him. All of these have their place. Men who harm women must be held accountable. But such actions are not prevention. They come after the harms that affect the one in three women globally who experience physical violence from a male partner, the one in five who experience sexual violence, and – in the United States – 81% who experience sexual harassment and 41% percent who are harassed online.

Prevention – stopping violence before it happens or intervening before it escalates – requires bravery. It takes men stepping in when it is uncomfortable and even when it brings them the risk of violence. Our outrage in the face of Epstein and Chavez will be of little worth if we don’t take this lesson from it: men could have spoken out, and we must speak out. Bystander interventions and prevention work if we invest in them, and if men also intervene.

Many years after Dolores Huerta and other women were abused by Chavez, I worked alongside women’s rights activists in Brazil to design actions to engage men to speak out to other men. We took the conversations to soccer fields, barbershops, schools, and workplaces with the simple message that men should speak out. And we saw men empowered to speak up. Women in those settings perceived differences in how they were treated by the men around them. Such programs don’t eliminate all the factors that drive men’s violence – but they work. And they are even more effective when men with power over other men – policymakers, managers, school principals, coaches, and the like – are part of it.

There is no solace in affirming the obvious: that the men who stayed silent in the face of Chavez’s or Epstein’s abuse should feel ashamed. What we owe Huerta and all the women and girls who have experienced harm from men is to speak out – before it happens and after it happens. To speak out early and loudly. Accountability should not have to wait for Dolores’ lifetime - or mine.

Gary Barker is Founder and CEO of Equimundo, an international NGO that works to engage men and boys for gender equality.

But they miss something more fundamental about how influence actually works in this space. Namely, relying on the assumption that expertise, evidence, and more rigorous argument are the primary tools for shifting attitudes. That assumption is precisely what the documentary quietly challenges.

At Equimundo and Movember, we have spent years studying how young men encounter and engage with content online – across platforms, formats, and communities. That includes focused analysis of the so-called ‘manosphere’: creators who blend self-help with grievance, audiences who treat content as both entertainment and instruction, and ecosystems where identity is shaped through shared references, humor, and peer validation.

For years, experts working in the field of masculinities have defaulted to a familiar playbook – data, logic, and carefully reasoned arguments delivered by highly credentialed researchers. It is a playbook built for credibility. But credibility is not the same as cultural influence.

The assumption behind the expert playbook is straightforward: better information, delivered clearly, will lead to better understanding, and ultimately to changed minds. But that only holds if the audience is operating within a shared frame of logic – if they are open to resolving contradictions, challenging their beliefs, and being persuaded. In much of the manosphere, that premise doesn’t apply. The idea that a perfectly constructed argument will puncture the worldview of the manosphere is, at best, optimistic. At worst, it misunderstands the terrain entirely.

Consider the now widely discussed exchange between Louis Theroux and HSTikkyTokky. Asked whether he would disown his son if he were gay, HSTikkyTokky says yes before insisting this position is not homophobic. Theroux laughs, instinctively, almost involuntarily. And in that moment, the limits of rational debate are laid bare. There is no argument to dismantle, no contradiction to resolve, because the premise itself is not open to reason. Where, exactly, do you go from there?

There is no dataset, no expert, no “killer stat” that can resolve a contradiction someone is not interested in resolving. This is not a failure of evidence from our field. It is a failure to understand how identity and value systems are formed.

What Theroux does instead is something different. He doesn’t arrive as a scold, or as the arbiter of moral truth. Louis Theroux is a documentary film-maker, whose approach is to explore a controversial topic (high-security prisons, post-partum psychosis) through the lens of those at the forefront of that issue, whether as perpetrators or victims, sometimes both. Theroux went into ‘the manosphere’, and hung out with some of its biggest protagonists and supporters. He humanised and problematised the daily experiences of young men.

In the film, Theroux created a space, sometimes uncomfortable, often absurd, where the internal logic of these worldviews plays out in real time. The humor matters. The awkwardness matters. The humanity matters. Rather than stepping outside the culture to critique it, he works from within it, allowing the audience to experience those contradictions for themselves.

And that distinction is crucial. Because if identity is shaped through culture, then it can’t be shifted from the outside through argument alone. It has to be engaged on its own terms.

Cutting to an expert talking head, explaining in jargon and technical language, does more than shift the tone; it breaks the spell. It pulls the viewer out of the adrenaline-fuelled, anarchic world of HSTikkyTokky, an online creator known for chaotic, meme-driven comedy videos, and into the rational, argument-driven world of policy wonks, researchers, and NGO people. In doing so, it would weaken the very insight the documentary is trying to build: instead of helping the audience feel why this content resonates, it creates distance from it. What was experiential becomes explanatory; what was felt becomes analyzed.

What Theroux’s approach reflects is not an exception. It is a signal of a much broader shift in how influence now operates.

The boundaries between politics and entertainment are collapsing in real time. The “serious” interview is giving way to the podcast. The press tour is becoming indistinguishable from the comedy circuit. Influence flows less through institutions and more through personalities who feel authentic, unscripted, and culturally fluent: people audiences want to spend time with, not just listen to.

The rise of figures like Joe Rogan is often treated as an anomaly. It isn’t. It is a reflection of this new terrain, where credibility is not conferred by credentials alone, but by proximity, relatability, and the ability to move seamlessly between information and entertainment.

And yet, while we insist that we need to “reach young men where they’re at,” we too often default to formats designed for entirely different audiences, high-information, highly educated, already persuaded. We speak in the language of panels and reports, while the audience we are trying to reach is living in 90 second vertical clips, memes, and pop culture highlights.

If that is the terrain, then cultural engagement is not a “nice to have” or an afterthought in the comms plan. It is the crux of the work.

This is not about replacing experts. It is about repositioning them. If the goal is to shift narratives at scale, experts should not be the only messengers, nor even the primary ones. Credible messengers, those who can speak in ways that resonate emotionally and culturally, are indispensable. Evidence, research, and analysis remain essential to build the scaffolding that lets culturally fluent messengers—creators, comedians, artists—translate insight into stories and experiences that actually reach young men.

At Equimundo and Movember, this is the thinking behind the Young Men and Media Collective: a network of creators, producers, brands, researchers, and policy-makers working together to understand, and ultimately reshape, what young men see online. The principle is simple. Expertise builds the foundation, but cultural fluency, through the voices of young men themselves, determines whether anything built on top of it will actually reach people.

Our research, repeatedly and consistently, points to something fundamental: young men are searching for belonging, for motivation, for a sense of control in a world that feels increasingly unstable. The manosphere, for all its distortions and harm, offers answers to those needs. Not through white papers or policy briefs, but through community, identity, and culture.

That is the terrain on which this work will be won or lost.

Yet short of a miracle, the conservative rabble-rouser will likely be trounced by Byron Donalds in the Sunshine State’s August GOP primary: a recent Emerson College poll places Fishback’s support at a paltry four percent, against Donalds’ forty-six (with 39 percent undecided). PR nightmares of his own making continue to dog his campaign, the latest being his vile response to a Black heckler, whom he told should be “lynched.” Bullish predictions about Fishback’s electoral future arguably paper over an astonishing level of personal and financial baggage, as well as his penchant for the most confrontational and odious public encounters.

Yet this wouldn’t be the first time a divisive candidate has filled the vacuum of disaffected voters. And there’s no denying that young men are the essential force behind Fishback’s grassroots momentum. His campaign has made a point of spotlighting those proudly casting their first ballot for him, those who’ve switched their party registration for him, and those who’ve altogether soured on both parties but found a spark in him. Indeed, beneath the revolting policy and rhetoric, Fishback has tapped into something real with young men.

From the start, Fishback’s focus has been restoring homeownership and reinvigorating economic optimism.

His messaging and policy are geared toward young men’s top life aspirations: the means to buy a home, start a family, and have kids. Polling from Young Men Research Project (YMRP) and Equimundo bear this out: the 2025 State of American Men (SOAM) found that 86 percent of men ages 18-45 chose “providing for my family” as the top trait they should have; a trait that sits uneasily with the economic headwinds of today.

His pinned Instagram video, which appears to be his most liked, is a clip from his Tucker Carlson appearance in which he calls for divesting Florida’s $385 million in state bonds from Israel and redirecting that money toward a down payment assistance program for young married couples. In that same conversation, he argued that the north star of economic policy shouldn’t be GDP, but whether a 30-year-old man can buy a home and get married. Carlson’s response? “You’ve got my vote.”

Fishback regularly attacks private equity firms and corporations like Airbnb for buying up homes and shrinking homeownership prospects for the state’s young population – hardly his only departure from party orthodoxy. He’s spoken to the young Trump voters who feel “betrayed” by foreign adventurism in Iran; he’s attacked the Department of Justice and Florida Republicans for opacity on the Epstein files; he’s critiqued Palantir’s surveillance powers, and he’s pledged to halt data center expansion. Indeed, Fishback has regularly labeled the two parties as “wings attached to the same bird … flying in the wrong direction.” Fishback is on the popular side of these issues with young men.

Woven into his messaging is the evergreen appeal to nostalgia. In one clip, he tells voters: “I am nostalgic, I am almost homesick for the Florida that I knew growing up in the 90s … where a family could raise a family on a single income, where you could buy a home before the age of 30 and it wouldn’t be a miracle.” The rhetoric of revival is, of course, a defining political theme of the past decade, but it’s a message that lands differently with a demographic that believes previous generations had it easier. Equimundo’s 2025 SOAM showed that three in four men agree that it’s “much harder for my generation to feel financially secure than my father’s generation.”

Fishback also understands the mediums, not just the messages. The bulk of his social media clips comes from appearances on popular YouTube channels like Matan Even and from podcasts that straddle the line of political and apolitical. His most-liked content tends to follow from these appearances, sliced and remixed into reels. Beyond digital media, he launched a statewide tour of Waffle Houses (he’s since been banned), a popular hangout spot for the state’s young adults, and has shown up at Taco Bell Cantinas and other chain restaurants where young people congregate. In terms of meeting young people where they’re at, he’s done exactly that.

But the credit stops here.

The 31-year-old’s background is riddled with red flags and suffused with unvarnished hate, to put it lightly.

Fishback was recently threatened with federal contempt for failing to pay back outstanding debts, stemming from his time at Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund he joined after dropping out of Georgetown. He admitted to siphoning the firm’s proprietary information to his personal email in an attempt to launch a rival firm, and reportedly still owes the firm $229,000 in unpaid expenses, despite making recent purchases the judge described as “extravagant.”

His professional history tells a similar story of fabrication. Despite making the rounds in the media, claiming to be a top DOGE advisor, a senior DOGE official told ABC News the claim was “laughable,” with other members denying he played a role. His former employers at Greenlight and DME Capital Management have also said he inflated his title, presenting himself as “Head of Macro,” a position that never actually existed.

Then there’s his social platform. Fishback has infamously proposed a 50 percent “sin tax” on OnlyFans creators in Florida, adding that these women “need father figures in their lives,” contrasting what he believes to be the lunacy of the U.S. compared to other countries. “Say what you want about Saudi Arabia, there are no women hoeing out on the internet,” he’s said. Fishback has called abortion a holocaust against the preborn and advocated for a total ban with no exceptions. This paternalistic posturing sits alongside previous charges that he pursued a relationship with a 17-year-old when he was 27 – something he deflected in his conversation with Carlson, saying that “false accusations against men are all too common nowadays.”

His brand is tied to bigotry: he regularly calls Byron Donalds a “slave” or “AIPAC Shakur”; he’s proposed banning “goyslop” from school cafeterias, deploying an antisemitic 4chan conspiracy term for junk food; and in his Carlson appearance, he declared that the “only discrimination in America is against white Christian men,” one note in a longer rant about immigrants stealing jobs from white families.

Indeed, everything about Fishback is engineered for eyeballs and shock value. His social media churns out highlight reels and hype compilations set to Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” or the Interstellar score – messaging that often comes off more as a live-action “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids” meme than genuine relatability. Watching his digital content feels like watching a political consultant who exclusively picked out the most sensationalist manosphere coverage and decided that this is what young men are looking for in their politicians.

Want more evidence that Fishback is the manosphere candidate? He’s hopped on Fresh&Fit with Myron Gaines, debating OnlyFans creators about his proposed “sin tax,” and has done street interviews with Hugo Lennon (aka Auspilled), a far-right young male influencer who regularly pushes the great replacement theory. Fishback also spoke with Sneako and Clavicular in January 2026.

Sneako – a subject of Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere documentary alongside Gaines – is someone YMRP data suggests very few young men actually like and trust. And whatever Clavicular’s cultural cachet, most young men aren’t turning to the looksmaxxer for political advice. Yet Fishback was all too eager to win the streamers’ approval, wielding their Gen Z lingo and even agreeing with Clavicular that Gavin Newsom would beat JD Vance in 2028 on looks alone. He joshed about his OnlyFans proposal and vented about how the platform is corrupting young men’s dating lives, playing to the crowd. Ultimately, he earned Clavicular’s vote – not because of his policy, but because Clavicular believes he’s successfully built a campaign that celebrates and altogether embodies the pointlessness of politics (“jester,” as he calls it).

Is Fishback here to stay?

As for the candidate himself, it’s too soon to tell. But the model he embodies isn’t going anywhere, and certainly other candidates might copy aspects of his approach if proven successful.

Fishback is the natural endpoint of a world in which digital nihilism and political nihilism are intertwined – where attention is the sole currency, where if you lose clicks today, you risk relevancy tomorrow — and a world where Gen Z has all but given up on our political leaders.

Yes, plenty of young men are embracing Fishback. They are, by all looks of his campaign stops and online fandom, the vital energy behind his campaign. But it would be a mistake to conclude that he’s the inevitable template for what comes next.

YMRP polling and real-world examples consistently show that young men are highly persuadable; that divisiveness and empty hatred can be defeated by leaders who take their aspirations seriously and acknowledge their vulnerabilities, offering something more than performance. But leaders who sidestep or dismiss Gen Z – their mediums for news, their nagging nostalgia for simpler economic times – will always risk ceding ground to those of Fishback’s ilk. As the 2025 SOAM finds, men frustrated by economic anxiety are more likely to turn to “tear it all down” politicians, those who embody precisely the polarization and bad faith that young men and women are desperate to move past. And this phenomenon isn’t confined to the United States: Equimundo’s State of UK Men shows a similar pattern.

As one commenter wrote on a post about Fishback seizing the Gen Z right: “People being mad that we finally have a politician that serves the interests of young people and not just boomers.” When times feel desperate, and leaders feel indifferent, Zoomers will take whoever shows up.

You can slap any number of monikers on prediction markets. Twisted. Nihilistic. The most craven form of unchecked capitalism. Hotbeds for insider trading. An unwelcome intrusion of gambling into politics. None of it would be wrong.

But don’t call it surprising that, once more, it’s a young man’s game. For a generation that never knew politics as anything but spectacle, prediction markets are hardly a corruption of civic life – they’re the logical endpoint. This endpoint should alarm us all.

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Prediction markets have exploded in trading volume and public consciousness since Trump returned to office. Polymarket and Kalshi, the two leading platforms, function like stock markets: users buy and sell contracts tied to future events, with prices reflecting the odds the “crowd” assigns to each outcome. Browse either site, and you’ll find a dizzying mishmash of available wagers: “Will Trump take back the Panama Canal?” “Will the U.S. take control of any part of Canada?” “Who will win the Nobel Peace Prize?” – alongside bets on college lacrosse games and Oscar awards. Whereas Kalshi is federally regulated by the CFTC, requiring users to disclose their name and social security number, Polymarket’s prediction market is not, though, a VPN circumvents restrictions easily enough.

These platforms are, as we’re discovering in real time, ripe for abuse. Since the start of 2026 alone, two Israeli soldiers have been charged with using classified intelligence to place bets on Polymarket. An anonymous bettor placed over $60,000 on the U.S. striking Iran right before it happened, walking away with nearly half a million dollars. Another wallet collected over $400,000 following Maduro’s capture. And these are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

Young men are driving these markets; though, usage is still relatively minor – eight percent of men aged 18-24 reported using a prediction market in the past six months, per a recent Ipsos/American Institute for Boys and Men (AIMB) survey, compared to three percent of the general public – the volume of bets and frequency of advertisements has risen sharply in recent months.

As these markets have taken off, it’s worth asking: how did we get here? To a place where young men bet on foreign invasions the same way they’d bet on Premier League matches?

Since the Supreme Court legalized state-authorized sports betting in 2018, adolescent boys and young men have become the industry’s prime target. DraftKings, FanDuel and the likes blanket the airwaves with advertising fine-tuned for this demographic: previous analyses of sports betting advertisements found that the lion’s share of “winning” characters are men, with the language often framed around a masculine-coded premise – that staking money is the only way to prove your acumen and nerve.

The marketing has paid enormous dividends for the industry – their profits ballooning year over year – while proving devastating for the young men taken for a spin. AIBM has found that sports gambling is linked with increased bankruptcies and lower credit scores.

Prediction markets are the latest chapter in this story. Polymarket and Kalshi inherited the infrastructure pioneered by companies like DraftKings and FanDuel – but they’ve shown a shrewdness of their own. Popular social media accounts like NFL Memes and Insider History have formed partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket, posting market odds alongside political news and sports highlights, all in one scroll. These platforms know their core audience, and their social media aesthetic delivers: headlines in the meme-coded, big-header style of the edgelord internet (“EPSTEIN FILES IGNITE PIZZAGATE’S RETURN” is one such post), each one another piece of ragebait with trading odds attached.

But the gambling industry alone didn’t teach young men to see bets on Iranian leadership change as synonymous with NHL spreads.

For most of the young men patronizing Polymarket and Kalshi, the crass self-interest of Trumpism in the face of wars and disasters isn’t a departure from “normal” politics – it is normal politics. Young Americans came of age watching four years of unmitigated chaos, culminating in a televised insurrection that should have, in any functioning democracy, been disqualifying. Evidently, it wasn’t. The lesson was simple: politics is an unserious business built for entertainment and self-enrichment, not deliberation.

Of course, Trump’s first presidency also collided with the rise of a nihilistic internet society and combative online politics – a digital culture that elevated and rewarded those of his ilk, reinforcing the theatrical nature of it all. The campus-confrontation model perfected by PragerU and Turning Point USA; the “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos of Ben Shapiro; the viral montages of journalists like Jordan Klepper hunting for Trump supporters to humiliate – this format flourished in an age of shock-value-driven social media, and young men were the primary audience.

Thus, the memeification of Charlie Kirk (“Kirkification”) after his assassination, the POV videos of young men in the Middle East “reacting” to drone strikes, the White House posting Call of Duty-style footage of its strikes on X are all part of the same phenomenon. When war is presented like highlight reels or gaming compilations, when presidential debates are indistinguishable from boxing matches and redistricting wars from scorekeeping, the distinction between betting on a Knicks win and wagering on territorial conquest crumbles.

These platforms market themselves as forecasters simply chiming in on current events. But Kalshi and Polymarket were built for exactly this environment – one where regime change, global conflict, and political chaos of any form translate directly into volume and profit. Instability is a feature, not a bug.

Polymarket and Kalshi are monetizing the wreckage of a gamified politics and ruptured social contract. No, they didn’t create the conditions, but they’re cynically exploiting a generation primed for exactly this moment.

Regulation of these markets is overdue, and the AIBM/Ipsos poll suggests a general appetite amongst the public for it. But the larger battle is bringing young men back into the collective project of democracy — reigniting, in them and in all of us, a sense of common good.

First off, for men who want to become important figures in their child’s life, it helps to be recognized as familiar and trustworthy right from the get-go. Developmental neuroscientists like Tobias Grossmann at the University of Virginia are learning that within the first months of life, a human baby’s medial prefrontal cortex is at work, registering facial expressions, utterances, and voice tones, already beginning to distinguish who is responsive and who is not. Research by developmental psychologists like Kiley Hamlin at the University of British Columbia reveals that well before six months, babies discriminate who nearby is helpful, who is not. But since babies have no paternity-determining built-in DNA lab, they cannot know who their father is. Rather, as developmental psychologists like Ashley Thomas at Harvard are learning, the people recognized as “family” are those the baby has become familiar with and learned to trust.

A father who suddenly shows up at age two or three does not have — from his baby’s perspective — the same emotional resonance as a father responsive to the baby’s needs right from birth. Relationships take time, and the sooner begun, the more readily bonds develop. Far from a waste of time, a man caring for his baby makes an enduring investment in the quality and durability of their future relationship.

For mothers, when the presence of a caring partner during pre-natal visits and in birthing places is welcome and wanted, it can leave them feeling more supported and more likely to receive the care they need and deserve. According to Equimundo, millions of couples report a closer connection when male partners are present during birth. Yet, from our own research and life experience, we are all too aware that globally, men do less hands-on infant and childcare than women. That gap turns out to be a key factor in women’s lower income and constrained workforce participation compared to men’s.

But remedies are not merely a matter of gender justice. Data from Nordic countries, which have long encouraged paternal presence at delivery, along with dozens of other countries that have adopted the practice more recently, reveal that this policy both promotes equality in the home and also enhances father-infant bonding. Encouraging early contact between men and babies from day one promotes contacts on day two, and a man’s increasing confidence in his ability to care, greater trust in him by the infant cared for, leading to a cascade of benefits for all concerned.

It’s time to set aside old tropes about infant care being emasculating, or somehow unnatural for men, when so many participating in caretaking find tremendous satisfaction and meaning in doing so. In surveys undertaken worldwide, men describe fatherhood as one of their main sources of purpose and wellbeing. Other data show that men who have close relationships with their children from early childhood and beyond have better mental health, lower rates of substance abuse, and lower rates of incarceration. While we often focus on what men mean in the lives of children and their partners, men who embrace caretaking gain immensely as well.

Consider the health benefits. Across the mammalian world, males typically die before females do (the exceptions tend to be the rare species where males do a lot of care!). In the U.S., women on average live five years longer than men. Almost certainly, higher testosterone is a factor, rendering men more prone to risk-taking and violence, as well as interfering with some immune functions. Fortunately for committed fathers, testosterone declines in men spending time with babies. Levels of oxytocin, a hormone important in forming affiliative bonds, tend to go up in men in prolonged intimate contact with babies, and these surges may be accompanied by reduced inflammation and increased healing (Horn and Carter). Then there are the psychological benefits. As recently noted by former U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy, feeling lonely, unneeded, or unwanted is bad for psychological well-being. Well, what more powerful antidote than feeling oneself needed by a baby, a baby likely to repay you with smiles of glee and adoration? At a time when three out of five so-called “deaths of despair” are from drug overdoses and suicides in U.S. men, what better way for a man to be reminded how much he matters than caring for someone? It also seems possible that stimulation of dopamine-related reward centers in the brains of men interacting with babies might just render them less susceptible to other forms of addiction from drugs and alcohol.

Finally, there are the benefits to the economy and society at large. As job markets shift and industrial jobs give way to service industry jobs, as AI upends many professions with insecurity becoming the new norm, flexibility at home and work is how parents will survive and still thrive. Countries that offer nationally supported paid leave for all parents – along with subsidized childcare and encouraging flexible work arrangements – will fare better. Along with “technological literacy”, the 2025 World Economic Report on “Jobs of the Future” lists “strong interpersonal ability, emotional intelligence, and a commitment to balancing hard and soft skills” as among the top traits companies will be seeking – just the sort of skills those caring for children are likely to develop.

As for the economic viability of providing paid care on a national scale, we need only look at the economic output and productivity of countries where men’s caregiving is most prevalent: Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and Scandinavia. All have some of the highest rates of productivity as well as workforce contentment. A review of care policies from around the world, developed by the International Labour Office, finds that among all care policies – including paid parental leave and subsidized childcare – the return on investment is consistently around three to one. That means every dollar invested in care policies, including paid parental leave, yields about $3 in benefits.

Yes, caring for babies is exhausting, sleep-depriving, and can be tedious. This is why men who care need support and validation every bit as much as mothers do. Yet as men caring for children becomes more common, it also turns out to be highly adaptable, often essential, in economies where most households need two or more working adults to get by. As for those worried about how women working contributes to falling birthrates, it’s worth heeding the admonition of economist Claudia Goldin in her 2023 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, where she notes that “the last chapter … in the gender gap saga cannot be written until couples share more, and the world of work makes that a less costly thing to do.” How wonderful, then, to learn just how well equipped for caring men are.

Simple truths from the science of fatherhood.

—

Gary Barker is the founder and CEO of Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, one of the world’s leading organizations working at the intersection of gender equality, masculinity, and social justice.

Sarah Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.

Yet the young men actually buying into these figures appeared only in glimpses – typically brief, random public encounters. Viewers could be forgiven for wondering: Who actually makes up these audiences, and what draws them in? Using Young Men Research Project’s (YMRP) summer 2025 poll of U.S. men ages 18 to 29 – weighted to reflect Catalist’s estimate of a +5 Trump electorate – alongside Equimundo’s research, we hope to provide an evidence-based answer to this question.

To best capture the young men within the ‘manosphere,’ we filtered YMRP’s poll for young men who are both (a) familiar with and (b) like and trust Sneako and Andrew Tate. These two rank among the more recognizable (and hateful) figures within this space, though Tate’s footprint is noticeably larger. About 81 percent of young men overall were familiar with Tate, compared to 53 percent for Sneako. Among those familiar with each, 29 percent said they like and trust Tate — six points higher than Sneako. In other words, about one in four young men overall like and trust Tate, and just over one in ten for Sneako.

The data that follows are not meant to confirm causation for any particular question. For many of these fans – though not all, as research finds many young men stumble into misogynistic content by chance – there’s likely a mix at play: predispositions that draw them to this content in the first place, and the real influence these figures and young men’s broader social media diet exerts on their attitudes. That said, the correlation itself is meaningful, and the profiles both confirm and complicate common assumptions about who the manosphere is actually speaking to.

Manosphere fans are not financial nihilists – but they’re no less lonely.

Much of the discourse around the manosphere focuses on economic vulnerability – and for good reason. Most of these influencers follow the cookie-cutter model of funneling their followings into dubious supplements, investment groups, or exclusive academies like Hustler’s University, often at steep prices, and for these influencers’ gain. Gambling companies are deeply embedded in the manosphere economy, too, with Stake paying figures like Clavicular and Adin Ross to gamble on livestream while plastering their watermark across clips that go viral.

The Theroux documentary leaned into this narrative. One of its more poignant moments featured a self-proclaimed fan of Waller and Tate who’d recently overcome being unhoused, crediting his recovery to rejecting a victimhood mindset. “I was actually feeling sorry for myself,” he said. “As a man, nobody’s going to give you a handout.”

While many young men consuming this content are in financially perilous situations – and the promise of ‘getting rich’ is, in fact, central to the manosphere’s allure – those who like and trust these influencers skew higher-income than their peers, and are more optimistic about their futures. Per YMRP’s poll, 52 percent of Tate’s fans place themselves in the upper, upper-middle, or middle class, compared to 42 percent overall, and Sneako’s fans land even higher.

These young men also report greater financial stability and higher confidence they’ll achieve homeownership and afford to start a family: 78 percent of Tate’s fans, for example, say that the “American dream is attainable for me,” twenty points higher than the overall average. To be sure, these young men aren’t living Tate’s jet-setting lifestyle; only a small minority place themselves in the upper class, and they still very much want to get rich. But most aren’t floundering either, and are comparatively bullish about their futures.

Importantly, we find that these young men are no less lonely on average. Per YMRP’s poll, about 55 to 56 percent of Tate and Sneako’s fans agree that they “often feel lonely,” statistically identical to the overall average (54 percent). However, Tate and Sneako’s fans are slightly more likely to feel envious of the lifestyles they see on social media, perhaps due to the excessive focus within masculinity content on wealth, status, and attractiveness.

These young men hold traditionalist views on masculinity and gender.

Again, without pinning cause to correlation, we find that fans (those who like and trust) of Sneako and Tate are more likely to feel “masculine” themselves and to believe society should focus more on masculinity. Fifty-four percent of Tate’s fans identify as “masculine,” compared to 38 percent of young men overall. Similarly, about two in five say they’re glad men are “more focused on being masculine,” nearly double the overall average. While young men overall agree that providing for one’s family is the most important quality for men, Tate and Sneako fans place even greater weight on it, alongside physical strength and confidence.

These young men are also more likely to hold restrictive views on gender and sexuality, out of step with what most young men think. Nearly three in four fans of Tate (72 percent) agree that “things are generally better when men bring in money and women take care of the home and kids,” well above the overall average (46 percent). About two in three in both groups say feminism is about “favoring women over men,” versus 46 percent overall, while 78 percent in both groups agree that guys can have their reputations easily destroyed. In line with Equimundo’s “man box” model – which identifies homophobia as one of its seven pillars of restrictive masculinity – fans of both figures are also more likely to agree that “gay men aren’t real men.”

Resentments extend into dating, too. 75 percent of Tate’s fans and 70 percent of Sneako’s fans say women have “too many expectations” – compared to 60 percent overall – and both groups are more likely to believe society imposes unfair rules and norms upon men for dating.

What can we do?

Equimundo’s research highlights three key vulnerabilities that leave young men susceptible to these harmful influencers and communities: a desire to find community and belonging; a search for clear roadmaps to success; and romantic rejection or frustration. These communities can offer exactly what these young men are looking for, via emotional validation and accountability, as well as the aspirational outlooks that perhaps influence the higher optimism we see in the data. Additionally, savvy search engine optimization is instrumental to these influencers’ ability to pull young men in from innocent entry points, like searches for fitness advice or financial guidance, and push them towards more extreme content.

The harms – which are overlooked in Theroux’s work – extend to the men themselves, who are more likely to be excessively self-reliant, to see vulnerability as weakness, to suffer from greater depression and anxiety, and to even endorse strongman politics. They extend to women, who are more likely to experience violence, subordination, and degradation from those consuming this content: forthcoming research from Equimundo finds that young men in Brazil and South Africa who are exposed to misogynistic content are 2.6 to 2.8 times as likely to perpetrate violence against women and girls. These harms extend to all of us who have a stake in raising the next generation of compassionate boys and men.

The manosphere is filling a void for young men – one that must be filled with care and community. The forthcoming research cited above found that men in Brazil with high levels of social support were 80 percent less likely to perpetrate tech-facilitated violence against women and girls. Equimundo-led programs like the Young Men Media Collective are adapting to today’s digital world, supporting the next wave of influencers who can speak to aspiration and purpose, offering young men the tips and tools they need to feel confident in themselves and their future. Understanding what draws young men in, it’s our duty to reach young men with messages that acknowledge their vulnerability and celebrate their ambition.

One might ask, why was a mass of tradesmen dispensing contraceptives outside the home of the British government? It starts with a policy gap that leaves tens of thousands of new dads without paternity leave.

The Dad Shift, a campaign for improved paternity leave in the UK, Equimundo, and On The Tools, the UK’s largest online construction community, organized Monday’s stunt on behalf of self-employed fathers. Unlike employees, these workers lack the same statutory entitlement to paternity leave. According to The Dad Shift, this translates into about 70,000 new fathers each year – many of them men in trades like construction, plumbing, building, and electrical work – excluded from the system, often lacking the financial bandwidth to care for their baby after delivery. And the demand for care is there: Equimundo’s 2025 State of UK Men found that eighty percent of UK fathers agreed that they should have paid time off to spend with their children.

Nonetheless, a poll conducted by On the Tools showed that around 30 percent of tradesmen didn’t take a single day off after the birth of their last child, with cost cited as the most common reason. 55 percent said they find it difficult to “support a family while making a living,” and over half (53 percent) reported feeling unsafe at work due to exhaustion.

The fix is hardly a financial drain. Forthcoming research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests it could cost the government between £6.8 million and £18.9 million per year to extend two weeks of statutory paternity pay (SPP) to this cohort – a drop in the bucket for the world’s sixth wealthiest country. George Gabriel, co-founder of The Dad Shift, stated bluntly: “It’s unacceptable that working blokes are shafted when their babies arrive, left totally unsupported in one of the most important and challenging times of their lives. It’s time for Labour to fix this.”

Bully for you – the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) is starting to listen. In January 2026, Deputy PM David Lammy addressed the launch of the Labour Group for Men & Boys (LMB), a new coalition within the PLP chaired by MPs Alistair Strathern, Amanda Martin, Kenneth Stevenson, and Sarah Smith.

Recognizing that British boys and men face challenges long neglected, and that progressive politics has left a void for bad-faith actors to promote restrictive ideas of masculinity – the kind captured in Netflix’s hit Adolescence, set in the UK – the LMB hopes to take action and move beyond the zero-sum mindset that’s so pernicious for our collective politics. MP Martin, the mother of three sons, said she’s “proud to be building this group to better support lads like mine and their friends all across the country, and to take head on some of the nonsense being peddled to them online.”

Indeed, the LMB seeks to address the challenges that may feel familiar to American readers – boys falling behind in the classroom, uniquely high rates of joblessness among working-class men, the higher rate of suicides and premature deaths, and, of course, the nation’s poor paternity system compared to European neighbors. Gary Barker of Equimundo is one of the experts who helped get LMB off the ground, alongside Movember, The Dad Shift, and Hope Not Hate.

The Monday spectacle – in addition to dispensing condoms – took place before the group met with MPs, business leaders, and other experts. MP Strathern calls it an “absolute joke” that these self-employed dads get less time off to spend with their child than the time it takes to conceive them.

If you’re a sucker for entertainment, the Westminster stunt was just the opening act. The Dad Shift and On The Tools are using Monday’s event to launch an online campaign where tradesmen call attention to activities that last longer than paternity leave – from relishing a cup of tea to hammering a nail. You can check out some of the content already available:

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From the U.S. to the UK, Kansas to Kigali, there’s an abundance of barriers standing between dads and the time they need to be present from day one. As more and more divides us – in our politics, our societies, our ideas about what “good” parenting even looks like – the army of tradesmen marching on Westminster is a pleasant reminder that dads just want to be dads.

Last week, we explored the incredible desire that young men around the globe have to be fathers, and the understated power that good policy can play in supporting these goals. UK men are no exception: Equimundo’s 2025 State of UK Men found that eighty percent of fathers agreed being a dad is the “most important job in the world.”

A partnership between Equimundo, Rwandan NGO RWAMREC, and the Government of Rwanda, the “Bandebereho” initiative in Rwanda offers a rational (yet seemingly radical) model for governments to provide prospective and current fathers the tools and training to be better partners and caretakers. Couples who participated in the 15 to 17-week program – which connects fathers across communities to be trained in childcare skills, to discuss healthier communication, among other proactive strategies for better parenting – reported 55 percent lower rates of self-reported violence, higher contraceptive use, greater decision-making authority for women, and higher reported involvement of men in childcare. We all have much to learn.

And in the U.S., the road to sound paternity leave and a culture that truly embraces the role of fathers is longer yet. Unlike virtually every other wealthy nation, the U.S. offers no federally guaranteed paternity leave. Despite consistent polling that shows immense support across generational and gender lines, the policy roadblocks are tremendous. But what’s happening in the UK is, at least, a reason to smile.

In a recent podcast with Derek Thompson, Scott Galloway – who has positioned himself as a popular voice on modern masculinity – joked that fathers are “mostly a waste of time or space” in the early months of a child’s life. Galloway cast doubt on the utility of paternity leave, suggesting it “sometimes creates resentment” and is prone to abuse.

For those of us who follow the science of fatherhood, and from working with health ministries to engage fathers in the lives of young children, we have something to say about this. And some lessons from the country that is poised to become the first in the world where fatherhood training is universally available: Rwanda.

The East African nation is poised to become the first country to integrate fatherhood training into its national health system, a milestone built on more than a decade of progress. Gary Barker, CEO of Equimundo, recently returned from Rwanda, where he witnessed the impact firsthand – impact made possible by the radical courage to try something new.

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Since the early 2010s, Equimundo has worked alongside the Rwanda Men’s Resource Center (RWAMREC), and, with input from the Ministry of Health, launched Bandebereho, or “role model” in Kinyarwanda.

Rwandan men are not alone in inheriting a decades-old script about masculinity where strength and control are prized, and care and compassion are pushed aside. As Equimundo’s research into life inside the “Man Box” shows, the costs of this script are borne not just by men, but society as a whole. Men, women, and children alike suffer under an outdated formula that prizes aggression, self-sufficiency, and excessive toughness.

In partnership with RWAMREC and as part of MenCare+ – a multicountry initiative serving men aged 15-35 in Brazil, Indonesia, Rwanda, and South Africa – Bandebereho kicked off in 2013, enrolling over 1,700 couples across four districts.

The 17-week course connects fathers and is facilitated by fathers trained by RWAMREC, rooted in local communities. Groups meet weekly to discuss healthier couples communication, to develop childcare skills, to talk about men’s health, and to participate in other activities. Women join their partners for about half the sessions, with local nurses and police officers also leading certain modules. Equimundo and its local partners have found healthier relationships, more engaged fathers, and improved health outcomes for entire families.

An early randomized control trial, published in PLOS ONE in 2018, showed retention rates hovering around 94 percent among nearly 1,200 tracked couples – clear evidence that men want to show up, and want to be better caretakers. Twenty-one months after participating in Bandebereho, women in the intervention group reported significantly lower rates of physical and sexual violence compared to the control group. The benefits extended to higher contraceptive use, greater participation by men in childcare and household tasks, higher attendance at antenatal care visits, and women reporting a greater authority in household decisions. The report also found lower self-reported rates of violence against children by both parents.

A six-year follow-up study assessing the longer-term impacts of Bandebereho is yet more encouraging. While the full report is yet to be published, preliminary findings show that couples in the Bandebereho intervention group showed 55 percent lower self-reported violence compared to non-participating couples, lower rates of violence against children persisted, men’s participation in household tasks remained elevated, and higher contraceptive use and prenatal care held steady.

Bandebereho pays long-term dividends – but the work is only just beginning. Intimate partner violence, unequal division of caregiving responsibilities and household authority, and other markers of asymmetrical gender dynamics remain rampant in Rwanda, as they do around the globe. But on the merits of Bandebereho’s efficacy, Rwanda’s Ministry of Health now plans to mobilize its 70,000+ community health workers to expand the program blueprint to 27 of the country’s 30 total districts.

The Rwandan experiment begs a larger question: what becomes possible when we’re willing to follow the evidence and explicitly gear policy towards healthy fatherhood? What can the U.S. learn from Bandebereho?

Cultural differences abound, to be sure. Such national scale-up programs will take different forms in different contexts. In Brazil, part of the MenCare+ program, the “You Are My Father Campaign” sparked dialogue around the country about involved fatherhood and gender equality. In Indonesia, Equimundo’s “Generation G” program is working to equip youth leaders with the tools needed to combat longstanding restrictive views on masculinity and gender roles, making room for aspirational fatherhood.

But young men in America are not so different from those in Rwanda, in Indonesia, or Brazil in their fundamental aspiration to be fathers and husbands. Young Men Research Project found in its summer 2025 poll that 63 percent of men aged 18 to 29 agree “having children is important to me” – 64 percent say the same about marriage. The data speaks to why this aspiration has not abated: In Equimundo’s 2025 State of American Men report, fathers were 1.3x as likely to report feeling a sense of purpose compared to men without children.

It is not only possible but provable that public-private partnerships, working from the ground up and recruiting local leaders, can support these aspirations by training young men how to navigate their relationships and fatherhood.

Bandebereho is proof that you can start small, adapt, and build an evidence-based product to promote a more caring model for fatherhood. Rwanda makes vivid the power of good policy and the importance of taking the first step. The U.S. would do well to listen.

In Young Men Research Project’s (YMRP) May 2025 survey of 1,000 men aged 18-29, the most popular life goals were homeownership (78 percent said this is important to them), marriage (64 percent), and having children (63 percent). When asked to choose what qualities define a man, the most popular answer was ‘providing for your family,’ with ‘helping people who need it,’ and ‘being a father’ also landing towards the top. A negligible two percent of young men ranked ‘being wealthier than those around you’ in their top three qualities; only five percent selected ‘winning and being the best.

Indeed, the hallmarks of the American dream still hold weight for young men today, and most actually feel the dream is within reach. 57 percent said they believe they’ll be able to afford to raise children in the near future, and a similar percentage believes they’ll be able to afford a home.

And yet, a plurality of young men today report feeling financially unstable, per YMRP’s summer poll. No small wonder, when the median age of a first-time home buyer is now forty, student loan debt has spiked, and the job market for college graduates has nosedived.

There’s a down-to-earth, grounded optimism behind this contradiction. Sure, today might be hard. But there’s a cautious belief that things will get better. And for many, the evidence that things can get better often manifests in the wealthiest, most powerful faces in society.

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The ‘self-made’ billionaires lionized in American culture offer vivid, viral proof that the old formula still works.

They embody the meritocracy young men want to believe in, even when these men often come from money. Many of these entrepreneurs speak to this deliberately – through motivational speeches, video guides, or self-aggrandizing podcast appearances.

It’s no surprise, then, that so many young men admire them. In the same YMRP survey, 59 percent of respondents familiar with Elon Musk said they liked him, and 65 percent of those familiar with Mark Cuban said they liked him. Cuban was among the more popular individuals polled. Behind “no particular career,” the most popular career aspiration was entrepreneur.

Yet as the Department of Justice continues releasing waves of the Epstein files, a new batch of notorious men are named in association with the disgraced financier seemingly every week. They are, in many cases, the very individuals young men wish to become.

Richard Branson – the billionaire often seen posing alongside luxury aircraft or Vegas showgirls – jokingly told Epstein to “bring his harem” to their next hangout. Bill Gates was mentioned in connection with a suggested extramarital affair in Epstein’s email drafts. Prince Andrew was arrested with suspicions of misconduct tied to Epstein. Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump are among the many billionaires who continued to interact with Epstein after his 2008 conviction. The names span academics, politicians, and celebrities, but they share a few things in common: incredible amounts of money and influence.

Equimundo’s 2025 State of American Men report found that among young men who voted for Trump in 2024, the main reason for going online was for advice on making money. Young Men Research Project’s polling confirms this appeal: these young men are more likely to admire individuals like Elon Musk and Andrew Tate who tout their riches, and to rank “entrepreneur” as a top career aspiration. But the same research shows these men are also more likely to inhabit a zero-sum view of the world – the belief that gains for one group (women, immigrants) come at the expense of another. Musk and Tate, of course, are among the figures most loudly vocalizing this argument.

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Look at this cast of rich men and what you find, beneath the motivational sermons, is pure hypocrisy.

These are men who tout their hard work and grit, who’ve built empires around the language of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ – and who, when push came to shove, stood by a known predator to protect their own interests. They exist in an entirely different reality from the men who admire them: one plagued by utter unaccountability, where the rules that the 99.9% live by simply don’t apply.

We’ve seen this story play out time and time again. The politician brought down by a sex scandal. The athlete whose off-field conduct erases everything he accomplished on the field. The CEO whose infidelity goes viral. The person we decided, as a society, to put on the pedestal turns out to be fallible after all – and occasionally, wielding that very pedestal to avoid accountability.

The Epstein files are, by any measure, a watershed moment – a devastating illustration of how unchecked male power and privilege can enable the most heinous abuses against women. To be sure, they may be the most extreme example. But this moment of cultural reckoning offers a painful reminder that every generation must learn again: wealth is not wisdom, and status does not equal success.

Young men deserve role models who speak to their aspirations – and reflect their cherished values. We must choose more carefully.

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In a moment of darkness and a nation fractured by its politics, it’s easy to forget the decent people already around us.

The firefighters who rush to action without blinking, the nurse pulling a double shift, the teacher who stays late to explain the difference between ionic and covalent bonds, the small business owner who knows his customers by name and treats them with decency. They live and work around us, and they embody the very traits young men say they value most – honesty, community service, protection. They may not have an Aspen getaway. But chances are, they’re more fulfilled than the billionaires working around the clock, estranged from their families, whose sense of worth rises and falls with a stock price.

The pull towards those who’ve achieved more on paper is natural. It’s human. Boys growing up in the twentieth century surely idolized the business titans and athletic icons of their eras. But those boys were also embedded in institutions and community spaces that gave them access to local, palpable role models too – religious groups, Scout troops, afterschool sports leagues. Today, these same spaces have hollowed out, shuttered by rising costs, lack of investment, declining memberships, or simple neglect. As these anchors and groups have dissipated, so too has the access to mentors and everyday role models who often led them. In their place, boys and young men may turn to the most materially successful figures available – often, whoever’s at their fingertips. And we now see where this idolatry can lead.

The firefighter, the coach, the nurse, the teacher, the small businessman – this is not to say they are perfect. But when you’re embedded in your community, your reputation is built on how you actually treat people. Your weaknesses and virtues are more visible, more raw, which means the people around you can truly know you. There’s beauty in this.

It’s okay for boys and men to admire those who have reached the highest heights. Where we fall short is forgetting they’re human too. The role models this generation needs are already out there – they always have been.