Why Boys Today Struggle With Human Connection

Opinion | Why Boys Today
Struggle With Human

Connection
Ruth Whippman
9–11 minutes
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Guest Essay
Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing

That’s Most Worth Having
Credit...Chloé Milos Azzopardi
Ruth Whippman
Ms. Whippman is the author of “Boymom: Reimagining

Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.”
The 20-year-old college student and gamer I met in

Cedar City, Utah, didn’t seem particularly amused by his
own joke that he was a cultural cliché. He lived in his
grandma’s basement, and barely left the house except
to go to classes. He spent the vast majority of his free
time online — playing video games, watching porn and
hanging out on Discord, the heavily male-skewed
communication platform, where users gather in
communities devoted to topics ranging from the
innocuously nerdy to the utterly horrifying. By his own
admission, he was brutally lonely.
During the pandemic, he was a moderator for a Discord

community, at first mainly sorting out technical problems
and weeding out trolls. But one night, an adolescent boy
called him over voice chat, and started sharing how
lonely and depressed he was. He spoke with the boy for
an hour, trying to talk him down and give him hope. That
call led to more like it. Over time, he developed a
reputation as an unofficial therapist on the server. By
the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had
about 200 calls with different people, both men and
women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.
But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately

lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot
more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He
added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental
health and shame because you’re not supposed to be
weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male
mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.
I have spent the last few years talking to boys as

research for my new book, as well as raising my own
three sons, and I have come to believe the conditions of
modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for
loneliness. This is a new problem bumping up against
an old one. All the old deficiencies and blind spots of
male socialization are still in circulation — the same
mass failure to teach boys relational skills and
emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms
and social prohibitions that push them away from
intimacy and emotionality. But in screen-addicted,
culture war-torn America, we have also added new
ones.
The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty as the

#MeToo movement exploded in 2017 is now of college
(and voting) age. They have lived their whole
adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious
array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world
socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural
reckoning around toxic masculinity.
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We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with

ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge
the old stereotypes and power structures. These
conversations should have been an opportunity to throw
out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to
help boys and men be more emotionally open and
engaged. But in many ways this environment has
apparently had the opposite effect — it has shut them
down even further.
For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male

misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings
has now become almost a point of principle. For every
right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,”
there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express
his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or
someone more marginalized. The two are not morally
equivalent, but to boys, the impact can often feel similar.
In many cases, the same people who are urging boys
and men to become more emotionally expressive are
also taking a moral stand against hearing how they
actually feel. For many boys, it can seem as though
their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political
isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to
push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful,
semi-politicized reclusion.
The statistics are starting to feel like their own cliché.

Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close
friends. Teenage boys now spend two hours less a
week socializing than girls and they also spend about
seven hours more per week than their female peers on
screens.
As a mother of boys, I get a chill down my spine at

these numbers. And my own research has fed my fears.
I talked to boys of all types. Jocks and incels, popular
kids and socially awkward, rich and poor. And the same
theme came up over and over for boys who on the face
of it had little else in common. They were lonely.
Some of them were genuinely isolated. Others had

plenty of friends. But almost all of them had the nagging
sense that something important was missing in those
friendships. They found it almost impossible to talk to
their male peers about anything intimate or express
vulnerability. One teenager described his social circle, a
group of boys who had been best friends since
kindergarten, as a “very unsupportive support system.”
Another revealed that he could recall only one
emotionally open conversation with a male friend in his
life, and that even his twin brother had not seen him cry
in years. But they felt unable to articulate this pain or
seek help, because of a fear that, because they were
boys, no one would listen.
As one 20-year-old put it, “If a man voices any concern,

they get deflected with all of their so-called privileges.”
He added: “They’d be like, ‘Whatever. Women have
suffered more than you, so you have no right to
complain.’”
Almost without exception, the boys I talked to craved

closer, more emotionally open relationships, but had
neither the skills nor the social permission to change the
story.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that boys don’t know how to

listen and engage with their friends’ emotions on any
deeper level; after all, no one really engages with theirs.
We are convinced that men and boys have had more
than their fair share of our attention already because in
a sexist society, male opinions hold outsized value. But
the world — including their own parents — has less time
for their feelings.
One study from 2014 showed that parents were more

likely to use emotional words when talking with their 4-
year-old daughters than those speaking to their 4-year-
old sons. (Right from birth, mothers were less likely to
chat back to boys’ early sounds.) A more recent study
comparing fathers of boys with fathers of girls found that
fathers of boys were less attentively engaged with their
boys, spent less time talking about their son’s sad
feelings and instead were more likely to roughhouse
with them. They even used subtly different vocabularies
when talking with boys, with fewer feelings-centered
words, and more competition and winning-focused
language.
Spend any time in the manosphere, and it’s easy to

start to hate men and boys. The extreme misogyny, the
gleeful hate speech, the violent threats and thrum of
menace make it hard to summon much sympathy for
male concerns, and easy to forget the ways that
patriarchy harms them, too.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture

wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a
right-wing cause, a dog whistle for a kind of bad-faith
politicking. Men have had way more than their fair share
of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s
time for them to pipe down. But for boys, privilege and
harm intertwine in complex ways — male socialization is
a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect.
Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except
the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.
Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of

progressive ideals is only reinforcing this problem,
pushing them further into isolation and defensiveness.
The prescription for creating a generation of healthier,
more socially and emotionally competent men is the
same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own
homes — to approach boys generously rather than
punitively. We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to
talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters,
to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or
minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional
beings.
They are more than ready to talk. We just need to make

sure we are listening.

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Opinion | Why Boys Today

Struggle With Human

Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing

Ms. Whippman is the author of “Boymom: Reimagining

The 20-year-old college student and gamer I met in

During the pandemic, he was a moderator for a Discord

But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately

I have spent the last few years talking to boys as

The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty as the

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert

We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with

For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male

The statistics are starting to feel like their own cliché.

As a mother of boys, I get a chill down my spine at

Some of them were genuinely isolated. Others had

As one 20-year-old put it, “If a man voices any concern,

Almost without exception, the boys I talked to craved

Perhaps it’s not surprising that boys don’t know how to

One study from 2014 showed that parents were more

Spend any time in the manosphere, and it’s easy to

Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture

Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of

They are more than ready to talk. We just need to make

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