For decades we’ve shamed men out of having any gender expectations for women. But do women get to have their cake and eat it, too?
By: Lisa Britton
Published: May 3, 2026
For decades we’ve shamed men out of having any gender expectations for women. But do women get to have their cake and eat it, too?
I recently came across an article from The Economist about the so-called “Passport Bros”—Western men who are increasingly looking overseas for wives. The trend isn’t new, but the numbers are rising. These men are fed up with what they see as a mismatch in values at home. They want partners who embrace more traditional roles: women who value homemaking, loyalty, and complementary partnership over corporate ambition and constant negotiation over who wears the pants in their relationships. The overall discussion labeled these men “bad,” accused them of reinforcing damaging stereotypes, and warned that their choices “flatten relationships into roles” and “sell them back as aspiration”. In other words, men daring to have preferences about the kind of woman they want to marry is framed as a threat to progress.
For decades we’ve told men that traditional expectations for women like nurturing, supportive, and family-first, are outdated, sexist, and even harmful. We’ve shamed them out of voicing those desires. Yet somehow, the reverse conversation never happens. Women’s expectations for men? Those remain stubbornly traditional, and almost no one in the mainstream calls it out.
I was reminded of this the other day when a woman I know was chatting with me, misunderstanding my messaging when it comes to my advocacy work for boys and men. She’s progressive, successful in her work, and quick to share memes about female empowerment. “Lisa,” she said, “I’ll be honest—I want a real man. The masculine, protector type. The one who provides, who makes me feel safe, who treats me like a queen. Where have all the real men gone? We need to bring them back, right?” She expected me to nod along in solidarity. Instead, I stared at her, trying to find the right way to ask the question no one seems willing to ask: “Okay, but what are you offering him in return? Are you willing to step into a more traditional feminine role? To prioritize home and family like you want him to prioritize providing and protecting you?”
She blinked. The conversation shifted quickly to how that would be “well, sexist” and “limiting.” Suddenly the woman who wanted a traditional man was defending her right to a modern, independent life. It was a perfect microcosm of the hypocrisy I see everywhere.
The data backs this up, even if mainstream outlets rarely highlight it. Studies show that while women have flooded colleges and workplaces, their mate preferences have barely budged. Women, especially educated ones, still overwhelmingly prefer men who are at least as educated and financially successful as they are—or more so. They want emotional strength, financial stability, and physical protection. “Marriageable men” shortages are talked about constantly, yet the criteria for what makes a man “marriageable” remain rooted in old-school provider expectations. Meanwhile, men who voice parallel desires for feminine, family-oriented women are told they’re regressive.
This isn’t just theoretical. I’ve watched it play out in the lives of people I know. Take my friend who endured a brutal divorce. His ex-wife had spent years as the poster child for “smash the patriarchy.” She posted feminist memes, championed girlboss rhetoric, and insisted on total financial independence—until the marriage ended. Then everything flipped. She fought tooth and nail for the beautiful LA house, declaring with a straight face that “the woman always gets the house.” The same woman who had mocked traditional gender roles suddenly invoked them when it suited her. The entitlement was breathtaking. Side note: she’s still living in the house after a decade.
This pattern repeats across friendships, social media, and dating apps. Progressive women rail against “toxic masculinity” and traditional expectations for themselves, yet quietly (or not so quietly) expect men to embody strength, stoicism, and success. They want the six-figure provider who also does 50/50 emotional labor, the tall protector who never makes them feel small, and the decisive leader who still defers to their feelings on every decision. And heaven help the man who admits he wants a wife who cooks, keeps a warm home, and cheers him on rather than competes with him.
I don’t believe we should force traditional roles on anyone. I’m not here to police personal choices. What bothers me, what feels deeply unfair, is the one-sided shaming. Men are constantly told their desires are problematic, patriarchal, and in need of “unlearning.” Women’s desires are treated as sacred, non-negotiable, and beyond critique. If a man says he wants a feminine, supportive partner, he’s accused of wanting a “bang maid” or a doormat. If a woman says she wants a masculine provider, she’s simply “knowing her worth.” The cultural narrative has no problem with expectations for thee, but not for me.
This double standard is driving the very trends we’re seeing with Passport Bros and the broader male disengagement from Western dating. Men aren’t stupid. They notice when the rules are rigged. They notice when women demand traditional benefits without traditional trade-offs. And increasingly, they’re opting out or looking elsewhere.
The solution isn’t to shame women for their preferences but to apply the same scrutiny to everyone. If we’re truly for equality, then either all gender expectations in partner selection are fair game, or none are. Women should be free to want protectors and providers without apology. Men should be free to want nurturers and homemakers without being labeled misogynists. And both sides should be asking the harder question that rarely gets airtime: What do I truly offer someone? What am I bringing to the table beyond my checklist of demands?
Because relationships aren’t transactions, but they are exchanges. Pretending otherwise while enforcing a lopsided set of rules only breeds resentment. If we keep telling men their desires are backward while giving women a free pass, we shouldn’t be surprised when more of them decide the search for a compatible partner leads somewhere other than home.
It’s time to drop the hypocrisy. Women can’t keep demanding the best of both worlds while men are told the world they want no longer exists. Fairness isn’t complicated, it just requires the courage to apply the same standards to ourselves that we apply to the other side.
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There's no shortage of women eager to tell you what they expect of a man. But you never ever hear them talk about what a man can expect of them.
Focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique, Evie Magazine helps women seek truth and find beauty...the kind that really mat
By: Lisa Britton
Published: Apr 10, 2026
Nine years ago, I was an advocate for girls and women who thought outside of the box. I had grown tired of the relentless cultural narrative that painted girls as perpetual victims: less than, held back, oppressed by some invisible force. That story wasn’t empowering; it was self-fulfilling. So I did something about it. I wrote a children’s book designed to help girls reject the victimhood mentality and embrace their own strength and agency. To my surprise, it found an audience. It caught the attention of people in D.C. and even a few in Hollywood who were looking for fresh voices.
At the time, I was beginning to shift my focus toward the challenges facing boys and men. A mutual friend suggested I send my books to Justin Baldoni, the actor who had become a public champion for girls and women. The idea appealed to me: a man standing up for girls, a woman standing up for boys. It felt like the kind of cross-gender collaboration the culture desperately needed. I mailed him the books. He responded enthusiastically and promoted them on his Instagram. I was grateful. At that moment, I believed Justin Baldoni was exactly what he appeared to be: a good man genuinely committed to equality.
Fast-forward to the past couple years and the very public controversy between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively. Like millions of others, I've followed the allegations of sexual harassment and a toxic on-set environment. My first instinct was disbelief. I had experienced only professionalism and kindness from him. But emotional intelligence requires us to understand that one person’s positive experience doesn’t invalidate another’s negative one. I began to wonder whether I had been taken in by the disingenuous “male feminist”—the man who wears his support for women like a badge, only to use it as cover for something darker.
The man I once saw as an ally now looked, at least in part, like the embodiment of the warning I later came to write about: beware the feminist man. He, like others, may be a specific type of misogynist.
As someone who now spends most of my professional life advocating for boys and men, I work across the political and ideological spectrum. I don’t need perfect agreement on every issue before I’ll collaborate with someone. What matters is the shared recognition that boys and men are in crisis—educationally, emotionally, economically—and that ignoring their struggles helps no one. Yet I keep encountering a particular type of man in these circles: the self-described feminist economist or thought leader who will say, “Of course we still have so much work to do for women to reach economic parity with men,” before pivoting to the boys-and-men conversation.
Every time I hear that phrase—“economic parity”—I cringe. Not because I want women to earn less or chain them to a stove. I want women to thrive in their choices. But the framing reveals something deeper and more insidious. The reason we don’t have economic parity is because of motherhood. These men, who believe they’re warriors for women, are actually devaluing womanhood itself. They measure female worth by how closely it mirrors the male career trajectory. Motherhood, the unique biological and emotional capacity that women alone possess, gets treated as an inconvenient interruption to be minimized, outsourced, or delayed indefinitely in the name of closing the wage gap. In their worldview, a woman’s highest value is achieved by acting like a man: competing on male terms, in male timelines, with male priorities. They never stop to ask whether the trade-off is worth it, or whether society might be richer if we valued women precisely for the things men can’t do.
I've had these conversations directly with these men. They grow defensive. They insist they’re being progressive. They don’t seem to hear me when I say that true gender equality isn't about pretending the sexes are identical. It’s about valuing the sexes equally in their beautiful, complementary differences. I believe that the war on womanhood and motherhood these men help perpetuate fuels the boys-and-men crisis they claim to fight. It’s one of its primary drivers. When motherhood is systematically devalued, boys and girls are pitted against each other, and boys and men’s issues are put on the back burner to help girls and women flourish academically and professionally. Boys grow up without a clear vision of what respected masculinity and femininity looks like. Girls grow up believing their bodies and their deepest desires are obstacles to success. Everyone loses.
Online, the pattern is even clearer. I've kept my DMs open since the beginning of my public work. Men—regular, everyday men—have never sent me disrespectful or inappropriate messages. Not once. I believe that’s because I show men basic respect, and respect is almost always returned. Imagine how different our culture would be if we all treated men with respect.
But there’s one group that reliably fills my inbox with venom: feminist men. The messages are often vicious, sometimes even sexually degrading. They call me a “sock puppet”—a crude way of implying I’m merely a mouthpiece for male interests (some even suggesting a sock over male anatomy), as if a woman can’t think for herself unless she parrots feminist dogma. They label me a “pick-me,” suggesting that any opinion I hold that diverges from theirs must be a desperate bid for male approval. The irony is staggering. These men, who pat themselves on the back for being “enlightened allies,” reveal themselves to be the most disturbing misogynists I encounter. They can’t tolerate a woman who refuses to let them define what her interests should be. In their minds, a woman who values motherhood, who warns other women about the very real costs of delaying family formation, who dares to say that boys and men matter too, must be silenced or shamed.
Just this month, I published a deeply personal essay for the Institute for Family Studies. It was a continuation of themes I've explored in my Evie pieces: a candid warning to young women from someone who waited too long to have children. I’m not telling anyone how to live. I’m simply offering my experience. Love, marriage, and children were part of my dream, but it was too late. Society fed me the lie that forty is the new thirty, that career must come first, that fertility is optional and endlessly postponable. I shared my story not to scold, but to spare others the grief of discovering too late that some doors close.
Almost immediately, journalist Matt Yglesias wrote a piece titled “Yelling at ambitious young women won't boost marriage.” He mentioned my essay, framing it as yet another example of shaming, and suggested it’s men we need to shame for the lack of marriages today. He wrote that “Lisa Britton offers herself as an example of a 'cautionary tale of what happens when you put family on the back burner for too long,' leaving her childless and unmarried in her late 30s.” The article positioned my vulnerable testimony not in a positive light but as part of a chorus of scolds. I had described my experience in respectful and honest terms. He turned it into a woman “yelling” because he didn’t like my message.
Here was a man casting himself as the protector of ambitious young women—protecting them, ironically, from the uncomfortable truth—while valuing economic output over the lived experience of a woman speaking honestly about womanhood and motherhood. He was jumping on the bandwagon, again suggesting to women that their ambition is noble if it follows the male script, and that any voice, including a woman’s who is speaking from experience, urging them to consider the risks and the trade-offs, is the enemy.
For decades, feminist ideology has claimed to speak for women while systematically devaluing the very things that make us women. By insisting our value lies in how closely we can emulate men—our earning power, our career ladders, our emotional detachment from family—feminism has practiced a peculiar form of misogyny. The feminist man who parrots that script is not our ally. He is its most eager foot soldier bashing womanhood.
True equality doesn’t require us to erase sex differences. It requires us to stop punishing women for being women. It requires us to value motherhood not as a regrettable detour but as one of the most profound contributions a human being can make to society. It requires us to tell young women the whole truth: you can have a career and a family, but biology is not optional, and time is not infinite. And it requires us to stop letting men—whether they call themselves feminists or not—define what female flourishing looks like.
I have empathy for the well-meaning feminist man. Many of them genuinely want to do right by girls and women. But good intentions aren’t enough when the ideology they champion has spent fifty years telling women that their bodies, their desires, and their deepest callings are problems to be solved rather than gifts to be treasured.
The feminist man may wear the right slogans and post the right memes. He may cry the right tears on camera. But if he can’t look at a woman who chooses motherhood and see her as fully equal—if he measures her worth by a spreadsheet of lifetime earnings—he isn’t fighting misogyny. He’s practicing it, often more effectively than the crude chauvinists ever could.
Women deserve better. We deserve men and women who respect us as women, not as defective men. We deserve a culture that celebrates the extraordinary power of female biology and the unique strength it requires rather than demanding we suppress it for the sake of “parity.” And we deserve to call out the wolf in ally’s clothing, no matter how many Instagram posts he makes about female empowerment.
Because in the end, the man who tells you that your highest purpose is to become more like him may be the one who truly hates what we are the most.
PDF | Four experiments confirmed that women's automatic in-group bias is remarkably stronger than men's and investigated explanations for th
Abstract
Four experiments confirmed that women's automatic in-group bias is remarkably stronger than men's and investigated explanations for this sex difference, derived from potential sources of implicit attitudes (L. A. Rudman, 2004). In Experiment 1, only women (not men) showed cognitive balance among in-group bias, identity, and self-esteem (A. G. Greenwald et al., 2002), revealing that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own group preference. Experiments 2 and 3 found pro-female bias to the extent that participants automatically favored their mothers over their fathers or associated male gender with violence, suggesting that maternal bonding and male intimidation influence gender attitudes. Experiment 4 showed that for sexually experienced men, the more positive their attitude was toward sex, the more they implicitly favored women. In concert, the findings help to explain sex differences in automatic in-group bias and underscore the uniqueness of gender for intergroup relations theorists.
Focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique, Evie Magazine helps women seek truth and find beauty...the kind that really mat
By: Lisa Britton
Published: May 6, 2026
As we toast the United Nations for reaching its 80th anniversary, let’s raise a glass to its noble pursuit of global harmony, and then, perhaps, spill a little for the boys and men it seems to have quietly forgotten.
The UN, the grand institution of peace and equality, has a blind spot when it comes to half the world’s population. And no, it’s not the half that gets 16 dedicated days of recognition, including International Women’s Day, Girl Child Day, and even Rural Women’s Day. Boys and men, it appears, get the short end of the stick, or rather, no stick at all.
So we’ll start with the calendar. The UN proudly champions gender-specific days, with all spotlighting women and girls. That’s fantastic—empowering women is great. I’ve volunteered in areas of the world where girls and women are in dire need of support. But where’s the love for boys and men?
International Men’s Day, observed globally since 1999 to address issues like male suicide, father’s rights, and boys’ education, gets zero official acknowledgment from the UN, and I believe it’s a missed opportunity. Instead, we get World Toilet Day. Yes, you read that right: November 19th, which happens to be International Men’s Day, is also the UN’s chosen date since 2013 to celebrate... toilets. I’d like to think this wasn’t a deliberate jab, but the irony stings.
Nobody is arguing against improved sanitation which has saved millions of lives. I myself got sick on a volunteer trip to Africa and had to be treated in the U.S. But it feels like a snub. If the UN can find room for World Bee Day, surely they can squeeze in a moment for boys and men.
International Boy Child Day, May 16th, the equivalent to Girl Child Day, is also not yet recognized by the UN. Reminder: these are children.
But the oversight runs deeper than dismissed calendar entries. For years, the UN has championed gender equality through initiatives like UN Women, a dedicated agency for women’s empowerment. It’s a worthy cause, but where’s the equivalent? Boys and men face unique challenges globally: higher suicide rates, lower life expectancy, homelessness, overdose, educational disparities, child soldiers, war crimes, and workplace deaths that overwhelmingly affect them. Yet, the UN’s focus remains lopsided. There’s no UN Men, no task force for boys’ education, no global campaign addressing male-specific health crises. It’s as if their struggles are invisible, or worse, irrelevant and dismissed.
Again, I've traveled to regions like Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. I’ve volunteered in communities where girls and women (as well as boys and men) face significant challenges. I’ve seen it firsthand.
As the UN continues to discuss critical global issues, gender equality remains a key focus. But the conversation is one-sided, overlooking the serious issues affecting boys and men. The seventieth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) took place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in March. Maybe it’s time to have a parallel session on the status of our boys?
These are some of the most pressing issues of our time, and a balanced perspective is needed for meaningful progress.
But dig a little deeper, and the picture gets even more concerning. I spoke with two senior UN officials in New York City, in town for the UN General Assembly in September, who revealed a troubling reality: the UN’s obsession with one-sided gender equality has morphed into systemic discrimination—against men. Within the organization, hiring and promotion decisions right up to the top are increasingly driven by identity rather than merit. If you're a young man today hoping to secure a job in the UN, there's no doubt that it will be difficult.
Gender parity has already been reached and maintained since 2018 (50% women) in senior-level roles, and 60% of field staff are women today.
Yet when there’s a selection process, those hiring must indicate that women have received due consideration and, in the case that a man is preferred, explain why. As a woman myself, I find this infantilizing. It suggests that women need a handicap to compete, undermining the very equality the UN claims to champion.
Ignoring men’s issues while mandating justifications for hiring them isn’t equality. That's bias and sexism dressed up in progressive jargon.
For their 80th anniversary, the UN declared it’s time for change, to listen to other views, and find new solutions. Secretary-General António Guterres wants the UN to review its role with the launch of the UN80 initiative, a system-wide push “to streamline operations, sharpen impact, and reaffirm the UN’s relevance for a rapidly changing world.”
Here’s a great start: acknowledge International Boy Child Day on May 16th. It’s a small gesture that could signal a broader commitment to inclusivity and true gender equality, one that includes men and boys. It’s a simple way to show the boys and men of the world that we care. Then, hopefully, we can also acknowledge International Men’s Day on November 19th following that.
Create a task force and work with leading experts to address male-specific issues, like mental health and education disparities globally. And, please, stop justifying hiring men as if it’s a crime. The UN could lead by example, showing the world that equality means lifting everyone up, not pushing one group down to balance the scales.
I’m honored that the phrase I coined in 2019, “The Future is Everyone,” has been chosen as the official theme for IMD 2026. This must be the year where we recognize that ‘inclusion’ means everyone, including boys and men. Men and women can work together to bridge the divide and build a more harmonious world where no one is left behind.
I’m thrilled the UN is open to new perspectives on how to better address the issues of our time and create a more harmonious and inclusive world. Those frustrated with the UN’s approach to boys and men aren’t asking for pity; they’re asking for fairness. The UN has the chance to prove it's listening—not just to women, not just to toilets, but to everyone. I hope they take it.
The boys, men, and fathers of this world matter, too.
Focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique, Evie Magazine helps women seek truth and find beauty...the kind that really mat
By: Lisa Britton
Published: Apr 23, 2026
Nearly ten years ago, I stood in the crowd at the first Women’s March, my phone camera in my hand and my notebook ready to document the historic day.
Ihad spent years advocating for girls and women, traveling to Africa, helping run workshops on self-worth, and cheering on every female milestone in boardrooms and classrooms. I believed in lifting women up.
But that day, something shifted.
I saw a little girl, no more than three years old, sitting perched on her father’s shoulders, wearing a tiny pink hat. She wasn’t old enough to understand the slogans or the chants, yet there she was, absorbing the message: the world is stacked against you, sweetheart. Society doesn’t value girls and to matter, you’ll have to fight like a man.
In that moment, I realized we were teaching the youngest among us to see themselves as victims before they could even spell the word. We were teaching them to be angry. I didn’t blame the dad, though. He thought he was doing the right thing: protecting his daughter, showing his solidarity. After my awakening, I left the march convinced that female victimhood was the most disempowering force imaginable. It was a cancer spreading through our culture, one that robs girls and women of agency, joy, empathy and real connections. I made it my mission to call it out. ‘This could truly help women!’ I thought.
Boy, was I naïve.
The backlash was swift. Women I had been friends with for years, who were supporters of girls’ education and mentors in STEM programs, laughed in my face. Some in DC literally walked me out of meetings. “You’re internalizing the patriarchy,” a woman told me. Another accused me of “gaslighting survivors.” I realized then that the very institutions meant to empower women had become factories for grievance. We were radicalizing girls to view every setback as systemic oppression and every man as the enemy rather than building confidence.
Fast-forward a decade, and the problem hasn’t improved. It’s on overdrive. Young men, sensing the hypocrisy of pop feminism, are shifting rightward in droves. They’ve watched boys get pushed to the back of the line for decades while girls received every resource, most of the scholarships, every “you go, girl” motivational talk, and all the attention for their issues. Now they’re tired of the constant blaming and shaming. As an advocate for boys and men as well for the past 8 years, I’ve watched the very real rise in misogyny closely. Online spaces have filled up with resentment on both sides, but while the “manosphere” gets endless negative coverage, the other side flies under the radar.
Female-led misandry is mainstream, and it’s in our schools, our media, our Hollywood blockbusters, and our university lecture halls. Podcasts hosted by women casually trash men as toxic, incompetent, sexist or irredeemable. TikTok feeds overflow with videos declaring “men are the problem” or “why I’m done with dating.” The hatred isn’t just on the fringes. It’s everywhere.
Look at the 4B movement exploding out of South Korea and now reaching corners of the West. Women there, and increasingly here, are swearing off romance, and they’re also rejecting fathers, brothers, and male friends entirely. No dating, no marriage, no sex and no children with men. It’s framed as liberation, but it’s really a full-scale withdrawal from half the human race.
We’ve all been drinking the Kool-Aid since elementary school: boys are bad, boys are privileged, boys must step aside so girls can shine and, don’t forget, “the future is female!” I grew up with it myself. We then wonder why, years later, young women look around and declare there are “no good men left.”
The divide between men and women is growing in all areas. A NBC News poll of Gen Z Americans revealed a concerning reality. Young men who supported Donald Trump in 2024 ranked “having children” as their top marker of personal success. For young women who backed Kamala Harris, it ranked near the bottom—12th out of 13 options. Instead, they prioritized careers, financial independence, and “doing the things you want.” High school girls today, according to Pew Research, are less likely than boys to list family as a life goal. Article after article in magazines and online outlets reinforces the message: being single is the ultimate power move! Who needs men? You can have it all—travel, promotions, and self-care—without the “burden” of boyfriends or husbands.
Women gobble it up, then double down: the reason they hate men is because “there are no good ones!”
The hypocrisy is frustrating. We spent decades telling boys to shrink themselves, to hand over the spotlight, that they’re inherently oppressive, and to apologize for their very existence. We designed schools to favor girls’ learning styles, poured funding into women’s programs, and celebrated every female first while boys’ issues like suicide rates and declining college enrollment barely registered. How exactly were “good marriageable men” supposed to emerge from that environment? An environment that demonized them and pushed them down? Once you recognize it like I have, you can’t unsee it.
More research drives the point home even harder. Privileged women with college degrees, professional jobs, and economic security drink the victimhood Kool-Aid the most. Studies from Harvard show they’re more likely than their working-class counterparts to believe the world is rigged against them. It makes a perverse kind of sense. When you’ve been handed every opportunity, ordinary struggles feel like injustice. Working-class women, who’ve more likely faced real barriers, tend to be more pragmatic. They know life is hard for everyone. But the elite narrative that I discuss in a recent piece for the Institute for Family Studies dominates our culture, and it’s poisoning all women, as we can see in the marriage rates of working-class women. At least the college-educated and professionally successful still have a pretty steady marriage rate by the time they're 45. Working-class women’s rate has dropped dramatically.
The most visible symptom of this disease is anger. A lot of women today are furious, and they don’t always know why. So they aim it at the nearest target: men. I hear my friends complaining all the time. Scroll through social media or tune into a campus protest, and the rage is there. There’s disappointment in dating, but it’s also a worldview that frames every male success as theft from women, every disagreement as misogyny or mansplaining, and even compliments as sexual harassment.
The New Statesman’s recent cover story, “Meet the Angry Young Women,” highlights this phenomenon. In it, British women in their twenties describe refusing to date or even befriend men with differing politics because “they don’t see you as human.” One student calls young men emotionally stunted for not weeping over global crises the way she does. The piece details how educated, middle-class women (despite their advantages) feel more pessimistic and alienated than ever. They prioritize activism over family and view motherhood as a threat to their identity. The article’s polling mirrors what we’re seeing in the think tanks I collaborate with: young women are twice as likely as young men not to want children, and far less likely to believe the system works for them.
The vast majority of young men have a positive view of women. The vast majority of young women under 25 have a negative/neutral view of men. Do you think this stems from experiences or from being taught since they were young that “men are bad”?
This isn’t empowerment. If you truly open your eyes, you recognize all we do is support women in the West.
Girls and women in the West are not victims. We have more opportunities, more resources, more legal protections and more social support than at any point in human history. Universities bend over backward for female students, corporations chase diversity quotas, and the media celebrates women in every field.
Meanwhile, boys face a rigged game. They have barely any support or resources, they’re punished for normal boy behavior, and they live in a culture that treats masculinity itself as suspect. The data from the American Institute for Boys and Men on male disadvantage in education, mental health, custody battles, and workplace fatalities is overwhelming, yet we’re still teaching girls the opposite. We’re teaching them they’re victims, and they’re becoming radicalized because of it.
The women absorbed in this victimhood can’t see it. The cultural messages are too loud and too constant. From children’s books that cast boys as bullies to university Title IX offices that assume male guilt, the story is the same: women are fragile and men are dangerous. No wonder young women are angry. No wonder they’re opting out of relationships, families, friendships and even basic civility toward the opposite sex.
If we want safer communities, stronger families, and a less divided society, we have to treat female victimhood like the cancer it is. That starts with honesty. We must stop institutionalizing the blame game in schools, stop letting Hollywood and academia teach girls that men are the enemy, and stop rewarding grievance with likes, book deals, and speaking gigs. What we should be doing is teaching resilience. Teach girls that setbacks are normal, that men are not monsters, and that building a life with a good husband is one of the greatest sources of meaning and happiness for human beings. We should celebrate strong families instead of scorning and devaluing them. And we must all acknowledge that boys and men deserve support too, that their struggles don’t cancel out ours.
Mending the divide won’t be easy. It means women need to look in the mirror and admit we’ve been sold a lie, which is admittedly hard to do. Victimhood feels powerful in the moment, but it leaves you bitter. The data and trends all point to the same conclusion: young men are checking out, young women are doubling down on their anger, birth rates are plummeting, and disconnection and loneliness are epidemic. We can keep feeding the cancer, or we can cut it out now and start repairing what’s broken.
Female victimhood is a poison. And if we don’t name it, we’ll all pay the price—men and women. The little girl in the pink hat I saw at the women’s march and all the girls like her need to hear a new narrative. One that unites us and truly empowers us, not one that leaves her angry for life.
And so are we going to see kind of a shift in society as a result of this? We're already seeing it. I mean, the other thing that we're doing is to young boys. Let's talk about what we're doing to young boys.
This starts very young. We basically educate young boys in a way that really favors girls. You know, from a very young age, we talk about being able to sit quietly and regulate your emotions and not be aggressive and not be impulsive. And these little boys are being diagnosed with ADHD, many of them just for being little boys. Little boys need to run around. They have a lot of physical energy. They have tons of testosterone. When you're like between three and six, you have a surge of testosterone, and all you want to do is run and jump and play and be outside.
And what we're doing, we're putting them in school, making them sit in circle time. So we marginalize them, we label them. We say they have a problem, we say that they have ADHD, they have behavioral problems. And in many of them, the stress that I talked about is the stress of making little boys be more like little girls. And that's where it starts.
And so then they go into childhood, and again, the educational system favors the way girls learn, not the way boys learn. How do boys learn? Boys have attention spans for very short periods of time, and then they need lots of physical activity. So ideally, if you go to look at the boys' schools, what do they do? They run the boys like running the dogs in the park. They sit for 45 minutes or half an hour, but then the boys get time off to run around. And then they'll sit another half an hour, and then they'll run around. I mean, they have like four recess periods a day, and so that's really better for boys.
And little girls have more of a capacity to sit quietly in circle time and sort of, you know, they don't have as much testosterone. They don't have that need to run and jump and play to the same degree that little boys do. They do need to play. We're not letting our kids play, boys and girls, because we're trying to force left-brain development on them too early. But we are forcing little boys into this box and they're not doing well in that box. And then they're labeled. They're labeled as having behavioral problems, ADHD, and that label then follows them through childhood, sometimes into middle school, into high school. Yeah.
What would you change? I make you prime minister of the world, president of the world, and you can fix this issue.
Oh, I would have little boys educated separately than little girls in the early years. In the early years, I would have boys' schools and girls' schools because little girls learn differently. Also, there's been a lot of evidence to show that in the early years, when you do single-gender education, little girls will try things, will take risks with things that they wouldn't in front of little boys. And little boys will try things that they wouldn't take risks in front of little girls.
Like little boys are more likely to try art, painting, and music. Little girls are more likely to try STEM and math and all these things that we talk about little girls should do. So the idea is that single-gender education in the early years is better for little kids because they learn differently.
How psychology fails half the population—and how it might be changing.
By: Ari David Blaff
Published: Nov 25, 2025
Steve Farina spends many mornings dipping a paddle in the Alouette River. He’s alone on the water, and it’s here, as herons circle for fish and morning haze scrapes the Golden Ears mountain, that he does the quiet, internal accounting of life. Kayaking’s become a sacred ritual for him, a way to decompress after three decades of firefighting in British Columbia.
“I’m watching the sunrise on the river and I just needed …” he says, choking up. “I’ll be honest with you; I had a few cries on the river. I’m just reliving it, like g-dd-mn.”
Firefighters love their “salty old captains,” the rough-around-the-edges types. It’s a culture that fosters emotional detachment, which, Farina believes, is essential when properly balanced. “You gotta be strong, you gotta show up,” he says of the mindset. “If you are going to a call and it’s someone’s worst day, you have to be operational, you have to be stoic.”
But picking up the pieces after those dispatches is hard. Farina remembers “some really sh-tty calls involving kids and stuff like that.” After those calls, he’d grab a coffee and a sandwich, “load up my kayak and head to the river, first thing.”
Before he discovered kayaking, he coped with the stress like many other guys do: by bottling up his feelings. He filled up his “backpack,” as he calls it, with a lifetime’s worth of traumatic calls without ever taking it off. It got to the point where he became his “own worst enemy”—the “helper who was helping everyone else and just stuffing my sh-t down.”
“I basically had to take a knee [when] I realized that it had caught up to my life,” Farina says. “The work and all of the sh-t that I've been dealing with, all the calls. And I said, Enough is enough. I'm not showing up the best version of myself, for my daughter, and for my friends and for my family.”
When men can’t get the help they need, they often leave a trail of devastation in their wake. Men represent nearly 80 percent of suicide victims and live roughly six years less than women, driven in part by more risk-taking behaviors, higher rates of smoking and drinking, and lower rates of visiting doctors. They make up the majority of overdoses and the homeless. Google “deaths of despair” and the image results are mostly shadowy images of lonesome men, many with their heads buried in their hands.
* * *
Matt Englar-Carlson is a counseling professor at California State University, Fullerton, and founder of the university’s Center for Boys and Men. He spent his childhood bouncing around America, following his dad’s jobs and academic postings.
He swam in the academic currents of his father, psychologist Jon Carlson, and his colleagues. There was the background hum of the mythopoetic men’s movement, a group of self-help guys reconnecting with wilderness rituals and Jungian psychology. In 1991, there was American philosopher Sam Keen’s book, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man. The intellectual richness of his childhood gave him an early curiosity about masculinity.
“Oh, this is how boys are supposed to act,” he realized in elementary school. “I recognize if I cry, there’s a penalty for that.”
These impressions stayed with him through university, first as an undergrad in California and then as a doctoral student at Penn State. He kept seeing the same patterns among the young men walking through his clinic doors in the early days of his career. Untreated, long-term depression. Anxiety. Rough breakups and spiraling, chaotic personal lives.
During his training, Englar-Carlson noticed an emphasis on highlighting problems without solutions, which grated against his embrace of positive psychology, a view that seeks to leverage one’s strengths to maximize personal flourishing. “I was beginning to have this discomfort with the research,” he said. “For the most part, psychology is not about mental health; it’s about mental illness, and we don’t really talk about health.”
This approach failed to recognize that many men came to therapy from a place of shame. He’d seen enough guys walk into his practice “hanging his head like a dog who knew he did something wrong.” How some were discussing men would only make guys less comfortable coming forward, he said.
“We have a huge amount of research that is cataloging all the ills that men do,” he added. “It catalogs the dark side of masculinity, so much so that if you become steeped in this research and you understand it, you kind of wonder where the light is.”
* * *
Fred Rabinowitz is roughly a dozen years older than Englar-Carlson. He grew up in a Jewish home outside Philadelphia and remembers a childhood spent “around men and boys all the time.” There was his mom, but there were also sports, brothers, dad, and poker. His closeness to guys left him with a particular insight: There was a quiet crisis that few cared to understand.
“I ended up realizing that a lot of guys are hurting. A lot of guys are not as emotionally stable or maybe just not able to communicate what they’re experiencing and feeling,” Rabinowitz said.
He decided to dedicate his life to studying men’s mental health. In the early 1980s, he went to the University of Missouri to study counseling psychology and teamed up with a fellow grad student, Sam Cochran, to run a men’s therapy group. In 1995, the American Psychological Association (APA) formed Division 51, dedicated to researching men’s mental health. Rabinowitz soon joined as a member.
Rabinowitz eventually became a psychology professor at Redlands University outside Los Angeles and was elected Division 51 president in 2005. The following year, he was approached by the Division’s co-founder and first president, Ronald Levant, who helped shape one of the foundational indices still used today to measure “traditional masculine ideology,” better known as TMI.
Levant said he’d gotten some funding from the APA to create the association’s first-ever guidelines on boys and men. Was Rabinowitz interested? Englar-Carlson soon joined, and the two became part of a team, alongside Levant and a handful of other Division 51 members, who plugged away for a dozen years on the document.
Released in January 2019, the report received significant pushback. It’s peppered with dense academic terms—“hegemonic masculinity,” “precarious manhood,” “gender role strain”—and was accused of minimizing biological explanations in favor of a view that emphasizes socialization and upbringing.
Although some of the most controversial quotes were misattributed to the guidelines—instead coming from the press release announcing the guidelines—the media buzz confirmed for many Americans that men were being held to an unfair standard by the very professionals responsible for their care; that masculinity itself was under direct attack.
Englar-Carlson was frustrated by accusations linking the report to the concept of toxic masculinity. Although the guidelines don’t use the phrase, many critics saw it as a semantic smokescreen, a hasty attempt to airbrush the document’s thrust. The blowback ultimately prompted Division 51 to publish a clarification.
“They're not for general consumption and they’re not necessarily to be applied to the average guy walking down the street,” Englar-Carlson said of the guidelines. “ But I would say it’s like the guidelines don't say traditional masculinity is wrong. Because, honestly, that's not what the research says … But again, you have to have nuance to read it and I think the guidelines probably could have made that more clear. On that, I think that's totally true.”
* * *
Rabinowitz remembers playing poker at a casino when he looked up from the table to see a mounted screen showing talking heads debating the guidelines. It was a surreal experience. The report was written for a clinical audience, but it had escaped the lab and now became fodder in America’s culture wars.
Newspapers and media were saying that American psychologists thought masculinity was bad for guys. Within weeks, Gillette released a viral ad on “toxic masculinity,” showing men indifferent to violence and sexual assault. The commercial became an instant target for pundits: Joe Rogan and Theo Von made fun of it, and Piers Morgan denounced it. Fox picked it up. Jordan Peterson and Jocko Willink condemned it.
The controversy opened a schism in Division 51, pitting its foundational ethos against a budding movement of male-positive researchers.
“I think that the original men’s movement came out of feminism,” Rabinowitz said. “There’s a sense that I think for some guys, for some psychologists, that they owe their liberation to women’s liberation; that women broke free from their roles, which allowed men to break free from theirs.”
Rabinowitz, generationally, came more from this camp and spent his early career critiquing masculinity as a means of empowering guys to discard harmful behaviors. From this perspective flowed a vastly different model of what a man should be, how to best reach guys, and what kind of support they need.
Helping men, this approach underscored, required highlighting negative behaviors in order to reform traditional masculinity. As Division 51’s founding mission statement outlined, the body endeavored “to erode constraining definitions of masculinity which historically have inhibited men’s development, their capacity to form meaningful relationships, and have contributed to the oppression of other people.”
Following the guidelines blowup, Rabinowitz began to worry that the field was seeding antagonism rather than empathy. Guys were increasingly seen as the authors of their own misery in need of tough love. He believes some of this was motivated by fear: Trump was in the White House, and the #MeToo movement had crested. Rabinowitz thought some feminist-inspired academics were fretting “a return to kind of male domination if men get their sh-t together.”
It was a soul-searching moment for him. A psychologist’s mission was to help their clients open up, and the guidelines touched a very raw fault line which went to the core of the field.
“I think that’s a tension: Some of the old guard still wants to use the feminist breakdown of social roles as the origin and the backbone of male psychology,” Rabinowitz said. “I’m more positive masculinity for sure; I’ve definitely moved in that direction—and I started in the other.”
“I’m looking for solutions now, not just the critique,” he added. “I don’t think the first perspective leaves you with anything. I think it leaves you with: There’s something wrong with me.”
* * *
In 2016, while visiting a local firefighter memorial on Vancouver Island, Farina was struck by all the names on the wall. Firefighters are at a much higher risk of cancer, and most of the names etched on that wall were taken by the disease.
A rookie on his team, Mike Paine—who’d survived testicular cancer—had become involved with Movember, the Melbourne-based charity that went viral in the 2000s by encouraging supporters to grow mustaches during November to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer. He asked if Farina would be interested in helping out.
“I was one of the early Mo Bros for sure,” Farina said. “I go back in my pictures, and I got a lot of creepy mustaches, man. My daughter hates it.”
Despite being happy to help other men, Farina resisted seeking support for his own issues until two doctors who ran a resiliency program for first responders told him he’d likely benefit from it. In 2019, he attended a retreat, and out there in the woods, surrounded by a brotherhood of first responders, something clicked.
“I went through the program and—dude—changed my life,” Farina said. “… I felt safe there. I also felt seen and heard, where I could be vulnerable, and I bawled my eyes out, man. I could cry without judgment and talk about sh-t that I hadn’t; stuff that happened to me—early childhood, adolescence, teenage years—that I’d never thought for a minute impacted me.”
The group that hosted the retreat, Blueprint, was founded in 2015 by David Kuhl, a medical professor at the University of British Columbia and chair of men’s health, integrity, and well-being at Vancouver Coastal Health.
Kuhl first worked in palliative care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. He remembers a young patient calling his father to share the news of his imminent death—and the father didn’t say a word. Just silence on the other end of the line. That pattern repeated: For some reason, Kuhl kept finding that kids were more estranged from their dads than their moms.
It got him curious about how fathers and men dealt with mental health. He’d seen the personal toll enough in his own family. His maternal grandfather committed suicide. His dad was bipolar. But his friends at school never knew what life was like at home. He kept that to himself.
After a decade in palliative care, Kuhl went back to school to study counseling psychology and began working with military veterans. He and another researcher wanted to bring their work beyond the military, and that’s when a friend of Farina’s flagged the issue of mental health among firefighters. Kuhl agreed to help, but insisted the program be “evidence-based” and measure the treatment’s efficacy. The results “exceeded our expectations,” he says.
Kuhl has since found that guys can respond well to wilderness retreats and group therapy. “The essence of spirituality for men is often cultivated in nature,” Kuhl said. “It’s also action-oriented. We get the participants to talk about their lived experience in a way that’s very safe, and we ensure that we talk about the positive features of who they are before we talk about the challenging features of their lives.”
That refreshing perspective is slowly making inroads. In 2022, Division 51 updated its mission statement, shifting its emphasis away from criticizing masculinity. It no longer strives to “erode constraining definitions of masculinity which historically have inhibited men’s development” and ditched its earlier acknowledgement of the field’s “historical debt to feminist-inspired scholarship on gender.”
Several of the body’s latest presidents, including Daniel Ellenberg and Brian Cole, have embraced positive masculinity. Cole specifically credited one of Englar-Carlson’s papers with changing his life.
It can still feel like an uphill battle, though. Men’s Health Week, traditionally celebrated ahead of Father’s Day every summer, frequently goes unnoticed by major media and political figures, a nonevent unworthy of the public’s attention. (The Trump White House was one of the rare voices commemorating the event—and did so partially by denouncing the “vicious campaign against masculinity.”) International Men’s Day on November 19 wasn’t mentioned by the United Nations: The international body instead used the occasion to raise awareness for World Toilet Day.
The politicization and disregard of men’s health is a disservice to boys and men. Their struggles —loneliness, substance abuse, suicide—“have been happening for a long time,” Englar-Carlson said.
“We just had our heads in the sand,” he added. “It’s time for us to shift the narrative in terms of how we’re gonna talk about it. And let’s actually start by talking about it. I think that’s part of what I try to do more than anything.”
Focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique, Evie Magazine helps women seek truth and find beauty...the kind that really mat
By: Lisa Britton
Published: Oct 9, 2025
One minute shame is the stern teacher keeping society’s moral compass in check, the next it’s a playground bully, pushing entire groups into submission. It’s an emotion as old as humanity itself, wired into our social DNA to nudge us toward decency. But like any tool, shame’s value depends on how it’s wielded. Used judiciously, it’s a guardrail for civilized behavior; swung carelessly, it’s a wrecking ball, leaving resentment and division in its wake. So, it's time to ask: is shame serving society, or has it become a blunt instrument for cultural vendettas?
Shame is only as good as its aim. When it’s overblown or misdirected, it smashes self-esteem and sows discord. And let’s be real—society has a long history of swinging that wrecking ball, especially at certain groups. Women, for instance, have borne the brunt of shame’s wrath. Historically, women and girls have been targeted by shame, particularly regarding their roles and physical appearances. Women have faced societal pressure to conform to ideals, whether as homemakers or as embodiments of idealized beauty standards. Shaming women for choosing to work or stay at home or for their body types contributes to widespread issues like lack of representation, eating disorders, low self-esteem and objectification. In response, society has made strides toward reducing widespread women-shaming. The body positivity movement at its best, for example, aimed to challenge unrealistic beauty standards, advocating for self-acceptance and diversity. Cultural shifts have made it less acceptable to shame women for their career or lifestyle choices, recognizing that it limits personal freedom.
Yet, while we’ve been busy liberating women from the shackles of shame, we’ve somehow decided it’s open season on men. Men have increasingly been cast as the root of all evil, the scapegoats for every societal ill from inequality to bad dates to even climate change. Phrases like “men are the problem,” “men are predators” and “the future is female” have gained traction, painting an entire gender as inherently flawed, dangerous and oppressive. Social media only amplifies this, with a daily deluge of videos and posts that portray men as the problem, predatory, or just plain obsolete. Mainstream media piles on, with think pieces asking, “What’s wrong with men?” as if they’re a defective product line in need of a recall.
Men are being blamed and shamed for everything.
The constant messaging that men are responsible for all societal woes, without acknowledging the complexities of individual experiences or historical injustices faced by men, creates a culture of generalized blame. It’s not just unfair—it’s harmful. What do you think this does to impressionable boys and young men?
The constant messaging that men are the enemy pushes a sense of guilt and shame for simply being male. This societal narrative can leave boys and men feeling alienated, as though their identity is inherently problematic.
The psychological toll of this shame on men is significant and often overlooked. Prolonged exposure to shame can lead to feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, and even physical health issues, as the emotional burden eats away at a person’s energy and well-being. For men, this constant shaming can manifest in dangerous ways. We have a men’s mental health and loneliness crisis, and statistics show that men are four times more likely to die by suicide and over twice as likely to succumb to drug overdoses. The psychological weight of societal blame may exacerbate mental health struggles among men, not “make men better.” By framing men as the problem, society risks pushing them further into despair, rather than encouraging positive change.
I once spoke with a young man who shared a story that stuck with me. As a teenager, he felt so ashamed of his masculinity that he questioned his gender identity for years, initially believing he might be transgender. He later realized his desire to transition stemmed not from genuine gender dysphoria but from a deep-seated shame about being a man. Society’s portrayal of men as “heartless,” “predatory,” or “bumbling idiots” in media and pop culture led him to reject his identity, feeling it was incompatible with being a good person. His story raises an interesting question: how many young males questioning their gender are reacting to the overwhelming shame pushed on them for being male? By framing masculinity as inherently toxic, society may inadvertently push vulnerable individuals toward extreme solutions to escape their perceived flaws—only to shame them for that, too.
Blanket generalizations about men as a group do more harm than good. Terms like “toxic masculinity” are often used, applying a broad brush to behaviors that are not exclusive to men and ignoring the pressures men face in society today.
Circling back, the body positivity movement has made some positive strides in challenging societal norms, particularly by advocating against body-shaming women for their weight or appearance. However, this compassion often fails to extend to men. Mocking men for their height or other unchangeable physical traits remains socially acceptable, even humorous, revealing an obvious double standard. While weight can be changed, height cannot, yet society frequently overlooks this disparity, mocking and shaming men for simply being born shorter. This hypocrisy undermines the movement’s principles and demands serious reflection and change.
The consequences of unchecked shame extend beyond individual mental health to societal stability. Men who feel ostracized or vilified may disengage from society, contributing to phenomena like social isolation or the rise of extremist ideologies that prey on feelings of disenfranchisement. There has been an increase in misogyny recently which I believe is fueled by the societal blaming and shaming of men. Some men are reacting to the unfair treatment and it’s coming back around to bite women and society at large.
Shaming men for issues they didn’t personally cause breeds resentment, not collaboration. Instead of blaming entire identity groups, we should target specific behaviors and systems that perpetuate harm, regardless of who’s behind them. Framing men as ‘the problem’ fuels the gender war, turning men and women into rivals rather than teammates.
My conversations with young men reveal a common theme: they crave environments where they can express themselves without fear of being shamed for being men. When given the opportunity to share their struggles, many express relief at being seen as individuals rather than as representatives of a flawed group.
Creating more spaces where men feel heard and valued, without judgment or blame, can lead to healthier outcomes.
To move forward, we must balance shame’s role as a tool for accountability with its potential to divide. Shame should target specific actions that violate ethical standards, not entire identities based on gender, race, or anything else. Broad-brushing whole groups isn’t just ineffective—it’s discrimination, plain and simple.
Encouraging individuals, regardless of gender, to become the best versions of themselves requires a culture of compassion, not condemnation. This means celebrating the progress made in reducing shame for women while extending the same compassion to men. It also means acknowledging that men, like women, have faced historical and contemporary injustices, from workplace expectations to societal pressures to suppressing themselves to expectations of sacrifice. Recognizing these complexities allows for a more inclusive dialogue about how to build a better future for everyone.
Ultimately, the goal should be a society where shame serves as a constructive guide rather than a destructive force. By moving away from blanket blame and shame and embracing a more nuanced approach, we can create a culture that encourages personal growth and mutual respect. This requires challenging stereotypes, questioning harmful narratives, and recognizing the negative impact of societal shame on all individuals of both sexes.
As we work toward a more fair and inclusive world, we must make sure that no group is left drowning in shame for who they are. Instead, let’s strive for a civilization that values accountability, compassion, and everyone’s unique journey.
