Beyond the Binary: How Both Extremes Fail Our Young Men
This piece follows my recent appearance as a matchmaker in the CBS Reports documentary “Boys to Men: Why America’s Sons are Struggling.” The conversations sparked by that documentary made me realize I needed to share a fuller picture of what I’ve witnessed across different worlds and ideologies.
I grew up in Chicago, and when I moved to the suburbs around age 10, my family enrolled me in Catholic school. It was there that I watched boys fall into pack mentality, performing actions they thought were masculine based on what they’d learned from older brothers or conservative fathers. They gathered in groups, mirroring each other’s postures, their laughs, their cruelties. There was always an “alpha” at the center; the loudest voice, the quickest to anger, the one who set the temperature for everyone else. The other boys orbited around him, copying behaviors they believed made them men.
Getting into fights was currency. Humiliating pranks were bonding rituals. I watched, I got along with people, but something in me refused to play along. While my peers were copying what their fathers and brothers had modeled, I was quietly maintaining what I didn’t yet have words for: my own sense of who I wanted to be.
The Right’s Prescription: Be a Man (Our Way)
At 15, I was sent to military school in the middle of nowhere Indiana. Two institutions; Catholic school and military academy, promised to make boys into men, to teach us honor, discipline, sacrifice. What they actually taught was conformity dressed up as virtue. This was the Bush era, the Iraq War years, when masculine duty meant not asking questions, when being a “good man” meant following orders and calling it patriotism.
The hypocrisy was staggering. We were indoctrinated with rigid codes about what made a man good or bad, strong or weak, worthy or worthless. Yet the men doing the indoctrinating often embodied the very toxicity they claimed to be correcting. The message was clear: masculinity isn’t something you discover in yourself; it’s something we install in you.
I saw young men broken down and rebuilt according to someone else’s blueprint. I saw the manipulation and physical intimidation that this process required. And I saw how it created men who could only relate to the world through dominance and submission, who measured their worth by their ability to control others.
The Left’s Prescription: Your Gender Is Fluid (Trust Us)
Fast forward to me spending years in Los Angeles and now the last seven years in New York City. Living on the coasts, where the ideology is vastly different from the Midwest I grew up in, I encountered the same fundamental problem, just from the opposite direction. Now the message to young men wasn’t “be a man our way” but rather “maybe you’re not a man at all — have you considered that?”
I want to be clear: for adults, gender fluidity and exploration is a valid form of personal freedom and self-expression. I support that completely. But what I’ve witnessed is something different, a wholesale messaging campaign directed at impressionable youth that suggests their gender identity should be constantly questioned, that the body they were born in might be wrong, that certainty about being male or female is somehow regressive.
The progressive circles I’ve moved through treat gender as infinitely malleable for everyone, not just for those who genuinely experience gender dysphoria. Young boys are told that traditional masculinity is toxic, which it can be but they’re offered no vision of what healthy masculinity looks like. They’re left in a vacuum, told to deconstruct their identity without being given tools to build something authentic in its place.
The Exodus to the Manosphere
Is it any wonder that young men are fleeing to the conservative right and the so-called manosphere? These spaces offer something the progressive left won’t: certainty. The certainty that being born in a male body means something. The certainty that masculinity, even a toxic version of it, is better than the void.
Gender fluidity as a universal prescription has inadvertently erased decades of progress both men and women made in dismantling misogyny and toxic masculinity. Instead of helping boys understand that they can be men without being domineering, aggressive, or emotionally stunted, we’ve suggested that perhaps the problem is maleness itself.
Young men hear this message and run toward the only voices telling them it’s okay to be male. Unfortunately, many of those voices are peddling the same old toxic masculinity I grew up around, just repackaged for the internet age.
The Real Problem: Identity Obsession on Both Sides
Here’s what both extremes share: an obsessive fixation on identity over character. Both the far right and far left have abandoned the simple principles that actually matter; respect, curiosity, kindness in favor of rigid prescriptions about who you should be.
The right says: “Real men act like this. Follow these rules. Join our tribe.”
The left says: “Your gender might not be real. Question everything. Join our tribe.”
Different words, same dynamic. Both are preying on the insecurity and confusion of young people. Both are offering certainty in exchange for conformity. Both are more interested in recruitment than in actual human development.
Meanwhile, what are we not talking about? Famine in the third world. Casualties of war. The socioeconomic struggles that actually determine whether young people will have opportunities or dead ends. These identity battles are clickbait, marketing campaigns disguised as social progress, distractions from issues that actually matter to the future of the world.
The Mental Health Crisis We’re Creating
As someone who advocates for improved mental health care and receives treatment for depression and anxiety, I’m alarmed by the mental health challenges we’re presenting to our youth by swinging to ideological extremes.
We’re telling young people that their core sense of self should be constantly interrogated. We’re suggesting that the discomfort of puberty and adolescence; which has always been difficult, might actually be a sign that they were born wrong. We’re replacing the hard work of building resilience, character, and authentic identity with the shallow work of choosing labels and declaring allegiances.
The result? A generation struggling with unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and confusion about who they are. And rather than addressing the root causes; economic instability, social media toxicity, lack of genuine community; we’re adding more layers of identity complexity.
A Third Way: Respect, Curiosity, Kindness
I maintained my individuality growing up because I refused to accept that masculinity meant what the pack leaders said it meant. I didn’t need to reject being male; I needed to reject their version of maleness.
What young men need now isn’t another prescription, whether it’s “be this kind of man” or “maybe you’re not a man.” They need permission to figure out who they are without a political movement breathing down their necks. They need to see models of masculinity that include emotional intelligence, vulnerability, integrity, and care for others.
They need the same thing young women need, the same thing all young people need: to be taught respect for themselves and others, curiosity about the world and different perspectives, and kindness as a baseline for how we treat each other.
These aren’t gendered values. They’re human values. And they’ve been desecrated by both sides of this culture war.
Conclusion
I’ve lived through both extremes. I’ve seen the damage that toxic masculinity causes, and I’ve seen the confusion created when we tell boys that masculinity itself is the problem. Neither approach works. Both create more pain than they solve.
The answer isn’t to swing between extremes. It’s to step off the pendulum entirely. It’s to stop obsessing over identity and start focusing on character. It’s to raise young men who know that being male doesn’t make them toxic, but that their choices and treatment of others define who they become.
It’s to remember that before we are men or women, conservatives or progressives, we are human beings trying to figure out how to live with dignity and purpose in a complicated world.
And that work begins when we stop telling young people who they should be and start teaching them how to think, how to question, how to build themselves from the inside out.
That’s the work that matters. Everything else is noise.
Nick Rosen is a matchmaker and founder of Met By Nick, and Co-Founder of QUALITY.
