I’ve previously touched on men’s identity struggles, sharing Christine Emba’s thoughtful piece on why men are lost. In a recent NYT essay, Joseph Bernstein explores how the so-called ‘manosphere’ – the bro-y and sometimes toxic masculinist fringe – has reached beyond its digital origins into mainstream politics and culture.

Bernstein frames this phenomenon within an important historical context. Drawing on other authors, he reminds us that this masculine resurgence isn’t new but cyclical, that there is “a cycle of male revanchism against successive waves of feminism. It returns every time women begin to make some headway toward equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the culture’s brief flowerings of feminism.”

What makes it particularly challenging to discuss masculinity today is the breadth of what falls under the manosphere umbrella: “The manosphere can seem, or be made to seem, as harmless as a hobby and as dangerous as a gun; as obscure as a trivial subculture and as encompassing as American manhood itself.”

I really appreciated Ann Friedman’s response, where she reminds us of not letting a narrow definition of masculinity dominate the conversation – particularly at a time when the media is saturated with its most problematic expressions.

After surveying her male readers, Friedman discovered something both revealing and nuanced about their experiences. One respondent articulated perfectly how the conversation has stagnated: “The masculinity conversation has stalled out in this binary of ‘bad/toxic’ and ‘good???’ – the latter either a mystery or a virtue signal. Not an actual engagement with masculinity itself.”

Her survey revealed the tensions in men’s lived experiences. Many men described feeling uncomfortable in traditionally masculine spaces: “Lots of men feel on-edge in very straight, very male environments. It always feels as if there’s an underlying judgment going on of each other’s masculinity. There can be an emotional vacancy to some male friendships, and an attendant sadness.”

This observation captures the exhausting weight placed on men who are caught between rejecting toxic expressions of masculinity and finding authentic ways to embrace their identity as men. “Right now, the cultural narrative of masculinity is dominated by its worst adherents. And so, to everyone else, the pressure to counteract that version is a burden.”

For me, the takeaway from both pieces isn’t simply that we need better role models, though that would certainly help. Rather, it’s that we must resist the temptation to engage in reductive categorisation of men based on superficial signals.

When we hear someone reference an episode of Joe Rogan or see them engage with traditionally masculine pursuits, our immediate response shouldn’t be to mentally file them away as ‘one of those men’. That kind of binary thinking only deepens the polarisation that makes meaningful conversation about masculinity so difficult.

Instead, as Bernstein suggests, we might acknowledge that the path toward a healthier cultural discourse requires recognising that identities – masculine or otherwise – are inherently complex, drawing from varied and sometimes contradictory sources. The optimist in me wants to believe that most men are already navigating this terrain with more nuance than our intellectual debates give them credit for. – Kai