The statistics are many and grim and fairly well known at this point: American boys and men are falling behind across a range of educational and economic indicators when compared to their female peers.1 They face higher rates of overdose, suicide, and incarceration; and they are more likely to exhibit deep social problems, such as friendlessness, failure to find romantic partners, and general signs of delayed development, from kindergarten to adulthood.
These figures paint a distressing picture but one that risks turning into a stale caricature before any meaningful response can be mounted from within a complacent or simply uncaring society: a helpless, frivolous, self-pitying, half-formed ersatz man cruelly suspended, Peter Pan–like, in a dim twilight between the illusions of an unnaturally prolonged youth and the frustrations of a forever deferred maturity.
Men in our society, especially young men, are in the position of not knowing who they are, what they want, or how they are supposed to live, and of being, in an anthropological sense, exampleless. The cliché of American masculinity, widely disseminated in the academy, is that masculinity is in a crisis. This is the exact inverse of the truth. Masculinity is desperate for a crisis. It is docile, unsure, and formless. At most, it is at the germinal phase of crisis, lacking a catalytic agent to propel it to its full-blown state, which at least can be registered and reckoned with. After all, crisis implies that something is happening, that something is at stake. The uncatalyzed proto-crisis, or the noncrisis, of American masculinity is repressed, unexpressed, yet omnipresent.
The proto-crisis exists in the first place because tradition has been replaced by representation. Instead of learning from fathers and grandfathers and brothers, from coaches and teachers and priests and pastors, the American male learns from watching images on screens: films and television have been playing the role of surrogate father for a long time now, but at least those media tended to have forms, arcs, and archetypes. Today’s privileged mediatic forms—five-second clips, parasocial personality brands, algorithmically constructed collective identities—do not have even that.
If masculinity arises from tangible experience in a community and the chain transmitting knowledge and ritual has disappeared, then what can be left of it? As David S. Gilmore argues in his seminal work, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (1991), if there is a universal logos of the masculine, it is found in rituals of danger, violence, virtue, learning the limits of the body, testing strength, showing off shame, experiencing shame, experiencing victory, peacocking, wooing women, but it is in the doing of these things together. Men have to prove themselves, but they do so as a unit. They help each other keep score, and elders oversee the process.
In America, we still have elements of this, mainly through team sports. But as I recall my boyhood in the 1990s, I can see how so many of the games that my friends and I played—basketball, baseball, football, boxing, floor hockey, ping pong, poker, Risk, Monopoly, Madden, stickball—were all connected to proving something to each other and to anyone else (like the neighborhood girls) who happened to be watching. But what was already missing from this era was the sense of how these activities related to the organic core of the community. Other than our dads, those who were our little league and hockey coaches, we were on our own for the most part. Paternal influence was present, seen, and felt, but too much of it was rejected as interference.
In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, many of us had immigrant grandparents or great-grandparents, but the idea of learning about the old world, the old ways, the old kind of masculinity didn’t exist. By the close of the twentieth century, the links in the chain of value transmission were under severe pressure, but the whole chain hadn’t completely disintegrated. The internet was new. Teen behavior had not yet turned antisocial. And there were old men around who belonged to things or at least had vivid memories of belonging to mass membership organizations: unions, churches, veterans’ associations, Rotary Clubs, Masons, Elks, Knights of Columbus, neighborhood bars. That kind of communal memory is now largely gone, as any trip to the now virtually empty or decaying physical meeting places of these organizations can attest.
Today, male adolescence largely lacks that primitive, self-organizing spontaneity. Sports has been co-opted into ultra-organized traveling sports. Boys learn from watching role models online and become hyper-optimized one-sport athletes. If they gamble or bet, it’s not over cards on a porch; it’s on a phone, on DraftKings. The steep decline in drinking as a habit for young adults may be heralded as a moral victory of sorts, but its dire consequences for male socialization and dating (outsourced to the antiseptic world of Tinder) are already in evidence, a too predictable development. Even games have become less ritualistic because these are played online with headphones on: enervated, isolated, overstimulated. No real bonding.
I will argue that today’s young men are not just experiencing the technological foreclosure of their own possible development into functional manhood—but are enthusiastically participating in it. They are subject to many of the same social expectations and psychological pressures as men before, yet they are simultaneously living through a warped form of traditional American masculinity that carries all the burdens and drawbacks of that tradition with few (or none) of its former benefits.
By and large, men are still practically expected to be alpha, classically masculine, self-reliant, and stoic, yet they pursue these ideals without physical frontiers, with reduced access to nature, in a diminished landscape of economic and social possibility, and within a wider ideological climate that is openly hostile to the very masculinity that is tacitly demanded of them. American manhood has essentially become schizophrenic: historically determined on one hand, and socially deconstructed and defenestrated on the other.
Unless American masculinity can historicize itself, it will remain in a state of non-crisis, unable to claim the meaningful, productive aspects of its heritage and unable to explain how it got to where it is. To historicize would ask: what kind of initiation rituals once made it possible to become a man in America, and how might they, like native plants restored to a landscape, be reintegrated into American life, especially for the young?
The roots of American masculinity are acquisitive. In very different ways, the ships that touched shore at Plymouth and Jamestown—and the colonies, farms, towns, and states that emerged from those landings—were about acquisition and expansion. In Massachusetts Bay, manhood was discovered and reified in proportion to the godliness and virtue of the community; in Virginia, it was pegged to the sale of tobacco, America’s first cash crop. Our masculinity thus began with two strands, the Puritan and the Cavalier: already ancient pedigrees by the time of the founding fathers, and better, truer, more essential terms than the Jeffersonian and the Hamiltonian, which are later derivations.
American men were motivated by the promise of unlimited liberty, justified by courage, hard work, and self-reliance. European masculinity, traditionally underwritten by the patronage of the aristocrat, operated within entrenched hierarchies; European men achieved status by demonstrating the cleverness with which they could operate within systems, acquiring honor and riches for themselves as well as the houses they served, as the courtier had done from the days of Machiavelli to Goethe. After all, even as the French Revolution broke the old nobility, it just as soon produced a new one under Napoleon, with its own titles and ranks. By contrast, American men eschewed systems: their masculinity, as a consequence, was manifested in proportion to the distance from tradition, order, even the law. The European man was exquisitely determined; the American man was self-determined.
The men of the early colonial era struggled against the land, against scarcity, against hostile natives and imperious royal governors, against that time’s God and the devil, and, at a deeper and less cogent level, against themselves and their sense of guilt. Here were men trying to create new sources of authority, along with new towns and markets, on an alien continent. And there were other men too, soon to follow, men from Africa, men from the Netherlands, men from Spain, men from France and farther afield, all of them in various ways engaging in politics, wars, sex, trade, labor, violence, unsure of whether their task was good or evil, unable to decide if they were powerful or powerless, master or slave. The relative autonomy of colonial politics forced men to look at their own unavoidable imperfection: far from established churches and courts, they knew themselves fallible and sinful. Perhaps the first men to colonize Mars will know how they felt.
Lowborn men from Europe, or men born on the frontier, could mint themselves as great by taking initiative and authority; the difficulty of life was such that to not only stay alive, but to contribute to the survival of the family or the settlement, was a sign of special status. Individualism wasn’t a pure, unalloyed political ideal and these men were not natural libertarians; the individual was rugged out of necessity and their capacity for action and self-direction served the nascent communities that they were helping to build and maintain. This is what the Cavalier and the Puritan had in common and what defines a kind of unified theory of historical American manhood: the enterprising individual served a communal ideal; one without the other was meaningless.
The energy of men like John Smith could not find full expression in insular England, in spheres of action circumscribed by either old feudal obligations and emergent bourgeois mores; only in America, the New World, both the ideal and the real place, could these energies settle, electron-like, around the nucleus of the fragile but vigorous embryonic community.
American masculinity remains true to this basic structure: you have a charter to make something new, and far away from authority, you can build and rule your own domain. This is why America was so suited to republican government. It was not because the monarchical system of Britain was particularly bad (it was, in fact, widely admired), but because the great-grandsons of the men who had carved their farms out of the forest—the generation that launched and fought the American Revolution—were fueled by the possibility of being their own lords. According to E. Anthony Rotundo in American Manhood (1994), by the eve of the nineteenth century, a man’s measure was “no longer his family tree, but his bankroll.”
An emphasis on acquisition only amplified the centrality of self-determination, embodied in the leading figure of the postrevolutionary era, Andrew Jackson, with his blend of martial prowess, political ambition, homesteading, pecuniary avarice, and gentlemanliness.
The productive tension between the individual and communal dimensions of American manhood would play out further west: fortune‑seeking young men looked to gain wealth and stature as farmers or in the gold rushes or in frontier campaigns; they set out as lone individuals but ended up spending their days huddled together in new miniature societies-in-the-making, i.e., crowded mining camps, military forts, ranches, and the first towns and settlements, which were heavily male. Even the achievement of the yeoman ideal, with its promise of self-reliance, usually required a communal apprenticeship, in which men on the make had to work as farmhands (as Lincoln did) for and with others before they could become independent farmers themselves. And the most successful, that is, the wealthiest and most assertive, were prone to entering local, state, or national politics.
As Manifest Destiny and Jacksonian democracy matured, a narrative took hold about the rise of the Common Man as a fundamentally different, more masculine, and more authentically republican being than the still half-Europeanized patrician of the Federalist dispensation. The apparent shift was illustrated in the aesthetic contrast between two manly archetypes: Daniel La Motte, Thomas Sully’s 1812 portrait of a dandyish Delaware cotton merchant, and the earthy Squire Jack Porter, idealized in Frank Blackwell Meyer’s 1858 Independence, a visual paean to Jackson’s legacy.2 But in truth, the object of the nation’s farmers, pioneers, financers, soldiers, and statesmen never really shifted from self‑making: what happened was that a new political and civic language arose to give a more unvarnished expression to the same basic impulse.
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” Emerson observed. “Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. . . . So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself.”
In traditional cultures, manhood is made by the community; men must pass through a series of often concretely physical and painful tests, or face ridicule. Abraham Lincoln wrestled violently with other frontier youths in a crude, informal style known as “catch-as-catch-can,” at the same time as he learned how to read law, conduct business, and elocute like Cicero; such expressions of refinement and savagery, the dueling halves of the masculine soul, were intimately fused and readily exhibited.3 Everywhere during this period, the blend of what Melville calls morbidity and isolation is tied to expansiveness and energy.
The Civil War, which we could narrativize, perhaps, as a symbolic clash between the Cavalier and the Puritan within the American male psyche, settled the terms by which the frontier would be closed, not by the slaver’s whip hand but by the toil of free laboring men and, crucially, by the laying of the railroad, a herald of the coming industrial age, by which masculinity again would have to be tested and reforged.
The manly ideal of the yeoman citizen was extended, however imperfectly, to the freedmen: the promise of forty acres and a mule was not redeemed by the postbellum government but persisted as aspiration. After what Eric Foner calls the Second Founding, enabled by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, black men could, at least by constitutional sanction, participate in the project of self-making and melancholy, rugged isolation. The path trod by the freedman and his descendants would remain fraught with painful setbacks and contradictions.
At the same time, new waves of immigrants began to participate in the larger project of remaking America and themselves: Chinese on the West Coast, and Irish, German, Slavic, and Mediterranean arrivals at Ellis Island. There was always a masculine path to independence, and these newcomers were woven into the larger archetypal patterns first initiated by the Cavaliers and Puritans, adding new variegated elements while remaining recognizably American.
It is possible to view the great injustices of this period, whether the depredations of industrial capital or the ruthless violence of the Jim Crow racial order, as attempts by some men to seize and monopolize these routes to independence and assert their manhood, their rights to the fruits of manhood, above others—most others. Part of the widespread sense of injustice in the late nineteenth century lay in the foreclosure of the generalized dream of being one’s own boss: the buying up of homesteading lands by the railroads, the formation of massive trusts and conglomerates, the obscene concentrations of wealth, alongside deep betrayal of initial Reconstruction optimism and the egalitarian promise of the West all contributed to this feeling.
In many ways, Theodore Roosevelt is the perfect symbol of the transition between the long first phase of American masculinity and the long second phase, which I believe we are now reaching the end of. If American masculinity is rooted in the frontier, in Cavalier ambition and Puritan self-mastery, and in the unleashing of masculine energy to achieve the conquest of nature, we can look at the second phase and its various stages as a sustained collective attempt to put a lid on that energy.
Roosevelt was both identifiably and self-consciously a man of the frontier, of adventure and death-defying feats, but also a member of the Old Dutch American elite, neither Cavalier nor Puritan. He presented a middle way that was suited to the challenges faced by a newly dynamic, industrializing, and urbanizing America, as it healed its internal divisions and faced the world at the turn of the century, not yet a superpower but a formidable, young great power, among many.
Like an eager adolescent let loose in the big city for the first time, American men were ready to engage in feats of both creativity and violence; Roosevelt, remembered now as a lover of war and as the first president to win the Nobel Peace Prize, bore this ambiguity perfectly. “We do not admire the man of timid peace,” he thundered in 1899. “We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.”
TR was a “damned cowboy,” but he also inherited a way of thinking more in line with the Dutch Reformed tradition: more worldly, less austere. After overcoming the frailty of a sickly childhood, he was drawn to boxing, hiking, and big-game hunting, and all that performance helped authenticate his political persona; he did not need it to survive or make his way. Roosevelt took many of the same risks, for instance, as Andrew Jackson did, but Jackson’s early life, his tools, and his battles were struggles of necessity: unavoidable dimensions of frontier life.
Roosevelt’s was a struggle of choice—self-making in the philosophical as well as the physical sense—what he referred to as “the strenuous life.” Roosevelt did not have to charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba, but he did. The Rough Riders themselves were a voluntary society-in-the-making: august Harvard men and Army officers joined together with lowly ranchers, prospectors, and professional gamblers to embody the nation in arms, acting simultaneously as a paean to the communitarian struggles of the lost frontier but also as a preview of the coming golden age of American civil society later celebrated (and eulogized) by the likes of Robert Putnam.
We might say that the reformist twentieth century, the Roosevelt century, meant the end of the self-made man. Men of inherited wealth and status could pursue public service, and prosperity attained through commercial enterprise, and they could become vehicles of civic leadership. TR’s battle scars would not be required by future presidents.
Naturally, as America progressed from laissez-faire to the New Deal under the next Roosevelt, the industrialized man had to have a different script. He no longer participated in settling the wilderness but found a new, cozy role as organization man. What was good for the nation’s large institutions, from the expanded military to the handful of large corporations that dominated the economy, was good for the American man: his participation earned him good wages (perhaps in a unionized position), social and educational mobility for his family, and the dream of propertied affluence.
After the heroic high point of World War II, when the status of the United States as an empire was assured, Norman Mailer, the veteran-turned-prophet of counterculture, saw that the conquered frontier had become a suburban wasteland, where “there is very little honor left in [and] a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.” The acquisitive thrust was still there, of course, but now pointed at the Sears catalog, the surest sign that republicanism had given way to consumerism as the reigning value set.
If Natty Bumppo is representative of the early nineteenth-century American protagonist, then John Updike’s Rabbit is a picture of late twentieth-century masculinity; his was an isolation and despair that Melville would have understood but which was now taking place on a couch in a living room and on the drive home from work. The individualist-communal synthesis that built a country and defeated fascism had broken down and become passé, replaced by a hedonic pop culture that promised a higher freedom but delivered both atomization and conformity instead. And just as the American male grew exhausted, angry, and disappointed, he found vivid but shallow stimulation through the cheap energy (and credit) of neoliberalism, of free trade, cable television and the internet, the globalization of American culture, and triumph in the Cold War.
At this stage, near the “End of History,” all the earlier phases are incorporated into a new, emergent form: the Cavalier, the Puritan, the Dutch Reformist, the Frontiersman, the Merchant, and the Civic-Minded Gentry. They are succeeded and superseded by the last archetype standing, who carries his ancestors’ love of acquisition but little of their high-minded, providential sense of self; this is none other than the Nietzschean Last Man, for whom “things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent.”
This is the starting point of our proto-crisis. The American man is still expected to be courageous and confident, wealthy and proactive, disciplined and independent, so all the old idealizations continue to press on him. Yet he now operates inside a labyrinth. He shares the workplace with women, and his behavior is regulated by forces beyond his comprehension: militant academic and corporate cultures that seem to operate on suspicion, if not outright antipathy, toward masculinity; a panoply of constantly shifting norms and expectations; and the intensifying demands of total competition, for jobs, partners, housing, and respect, all of which are ever more scarce. Ironically, the American man, in this sense, has become like the European archetype he long ago fled from: navigating bureaucratic hierarchies, managing optics, and acting as a subject-spectator rather than a citizen-participant in the affairs of state and nation.
The attacks of 9/11 triggered a masculinist reaction; men enlisted for Middle Eastern wars that achieved less than nothing, and those soldiers returned to find their sacrifices unrecognized or taken for granted. That they were joined for the first time by significant, visible numbers of women in combat zones highlighted the fact that warmaking, like so many other things, was no longer an exclusively masculine domain. (It is hard to imagine TR consenting to command women in the Rough Riders.) In any event, it was the failure of the lands on which forever wars were fought to serve as a viable frontier, as an outlet for masculine energy, courage, and self-sacrifice, that helped to bring about our present condition.
The long era of frontier masculinity has, as we have discovered, had an appropriately long, drawn out finale over the last seventy-five years or more. On the whole, new sources of self-making adventure have not been found; the crises faced by American civilization have largely been minor key and postmodern. This essay’s historicizing exercise leads us to the sober realization that rugged, Emersonian young men have not been needed for quite some time, and the alliance between the masculine individual and the American community has withered away like an umbilical cord.
The virtual replacements are self-evidently pathetic. Sports is more promising, but even the rise of UFC reflects desperation rather than confidence: a few million men gawk and gamble on a few dozen who know how to fight. Unreal competitions for fake goods on screens and parasocial participation in other men’s masculinity from afar are moral embarrassments, and continuing down this path threatens to waste the physical and spiritual potential of millions of young men; the consequences will amount to several lost generations.
That being said, something of the historical conditions that gave rise to American ideals of manhood is present again today: against the reality of accelerating downward mobility, the same acquisitive impulse can reassert itself as young men fall behind not just their female peers but with men of earlier generations, their own fathers and grandfathers, whose routes to middle-class stability and family life are, in many cases, simply no longer replicable. And just as the Jacksons and Lincolns of the old West had to start from scratch and forge paths on uncharted terrain, so too must today’s young men carve a new order out of the desert of postneoliberal decay. Herein lies a way out of the proto-crisis.
The creation of new values is, as we have seen in past ages, a masculine act in and of itself, and that challenge may furnish a new proving ground for masculine virtues today. The daunting task of piecing back together, albeit in novel combinations, the scattered fragments of the American social and economic order—and finding an honorable place for men and masculinity in it—could be this moment’s “moral equivalent of war.”
There is no way to undo history or technological invention. There will be no mass purging of phones or video games anytime soon, as desirable as that might be. Men do have to deal with and accept that the dangerous settings that bred the cherished masculine archetypes of myth and history are gone, and to insist on restoring them, fully, would require a violent counterrevolution that could only end in hubris and destruction. We can no more expect frontiersmen to return to American life than we can expect the samurai to return to Japan or armed knights to return to the plains of Central Europe.
Yet there are clues as to where we might look for our own summons to greatness. If the objective of America in the years ahead is to reclaim global leadership in industrial production, that is, in the making of things in the real-world economy, as opposed to just in the realms of bits and pixels, then new avenues for masculine exertion, discipline, creativity, and camaraderie may arise from such a project.
Whether one is an Ivy League–educated member of the “laptop class” or a tradesman who labors with his hands; a soldier in the military, a farmer in the heartland, or a mariner overseas; a Kansas City trucker, a Washington staffer, a Detroit auto worker, a Silicon Valley coder, a Raleigh–Durham lab technician, or a Texas wildcatter, men in such varied roles will all have parts to play in pushing forward the initiatives and innovations, great and small, that will rebuild the physical and social infrastructures that constitute the American nation.
If the last era of masculinity was about “putting a lid” on masculine energies in a midcentury milieu that had already reached the apex of industrial modernity, the next one must be about reopening that lid and redirecting those energies back into meaningful and productive endeavors, where a man’s individual ambitions and his acquisitive drives (for material wealth and immaterial glory) can be reconciled once more with communal and national flourishing. The Last Man may yet be transcended.
Thus, the prerequisites for moving beyond the proto-crisis are already there. What is missing, however, are equivalents to those masculine societies-in-the-making that were once found around campfires, in the trenches, or across the western plains, where men could find identity, solidarity, and common purpose beyond their social distinctions and imbibe an organic masculine ethos that both arose from and responded to the historical moment.
I cannot say exactly what forms these could take or how to bring them about, only that they must be physical rather than virtual and native to local settings rather than imposed or derived from digital networks, closer to those now largely vacant Rotary Clubs and veterans’ halls than to Discord servers or Call of Duty; I suspect that there are and will continue to be many obstacles to the formation of such spaces, technological as well as cultural. But these “little platoons” will be absolutely necessary to any genuine masculine renaissance, for they alone will provide the arenas for men to once again start acting as examples and exemplars to each other, and through which masculinity can be known, evolved, tested, judged, internalized, and lived out.
“Had ever a man,” Henry James asks of his hero, Lambert Strether, in The Ambassadors, “lost so much and even done so much for so little?” James presents an alternate picture of American masculinity at the tail end of its vigorous, formative stage: melancholy, Europeanized, yet not unmanly—a man haunted not only by the beauty of Paris but also by the life he chose not to lead, the adventures he declined to have.
The cost of inheriting a well-built civilization is that one cannot derive identity from any claim to having built it. To inherit is a completely different kind of action, one that demands self-cultivation, reflection, and gratitude, and only then can the inheritors build, expand, and innovate on what has been given to them. Masculine virtues and martial prowess are, in their purest form, good; in times of real necessity or threat, they are the highest good. In times of domestic peace, however, those energies and primal demands must be intelligently sublimated.
And the one constant, beyond the historic or geographical constraints and pressures that determine the outlines of a general type, might be the very deep constant—the biological, perhaps even metaphysical or God-given constant. The deep truth of what it means to be a man, in the best and highest sense: the willingness to bend—to sacrifice—one’s individual energies, appetites, desires toward the needs of the whole. Not for the sake of martyrdom but out of a deep love of family, home, friends, the species, life itself.
In the process of finishing this essay, I read about Scott Ruskan, a twenty-six-year-old U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer, who personally saved 165 people from the catastrophic floodwaters that engulfed Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas.4 Such extraordinary acts of virtuous, chivalric masculinity—recognizable to our ancestors near and far, in America or anywhere else—are possible at any moment, any time. The parameters of our modern life are not so strict that the more universal elements of manhood might not appear again.
What I’ve called the proto-crisis is nothing more than looking in the mirror and seeing that there are frontiers within as well, even if certain obvious physical frontiers have disappeared. It is, for this current generation of young men, as it was for my own, ten or fifteen or twenty years in the past, a bit harder in the sense that the old rituals of masculinity have disappeared. But it’s also fair to say that if men have more time now to destroy themselves through any of the obvious means—porn, video games, gambling, AI girlfriends, whatever it might be—we are equally in possession of enough time to create new values, open up new frontiers, and actively choose our activities. As cultures of affirmative masculinity disappear, the art of masculinity begins again.
2 “The Age of the Common Man,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, accessed June 2025.
3 Jay Serafino, “Before He Became President, Abraham Lincoln Was a Wrestling Champion,” Mental Floss, August 4, 2016.
4 Marni Rose McFall, “Who Is Scott Ruskan? Coast Guard Hero Saves 165 People from Texas Floods,” Newsweek, July 7, 2025.
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