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Feb 15
The Youth of the 21st Century is in Crisis — And We're Failing Them
Young People Aren't Just Hurting — They're Being Taught to Hurt Each Other, and It's a Crisis that We Need to Talk About
You don't have to look too hard to see it. Our kids are in crisis. And it's a serious crisis. There's going to be the kind of guy — you know the type — who dismisses this out of hand, saying something like, "I had it tough, too!" Maybe you did, but the evidence, which is generational speaks for itself. And when you look at it, the findings are dire. What do I mean? Try this on for size.
Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
1 in 3 girls. Up 60 percent in a decade. Those are startling numbers. They should give us all pause. That a third of young women are considering killing themselves is a Big Deal, and no…
It hasn't "always" been like this. When issues like this are discussed, there's a reactionary tendency on the internet, an assumption of what social scientists call "mean reversion." It's always been like this, and we're just talking about it openly now. In this case, that's dead wrong. The statistics, which, like I said, are generational, are damning and shocking. Just 5% of people over the age of 50 say they've had a "major depressive episode" — but the number's triple that amongst young people. And that's likely a tremendous undercount, as these things tend to be. Here's another number that's probably truer: 45% of high school students say they've felt sad or hopeless in the last year, and 20% say they've had suicidal thoughts.
Still not convinced? OK, let's keep going, so that there's a good understanding that this a very real crisis.
Self-harm and suicide both skyrocketed after 2010 in the U. S., and those results cannot be explained by self-report issues.
How much so? Rates of self harm more than tripled, which is what suicide rates did. Think about what it means in a society that young people's suicide rates are exploding off the charts.
So, no it hasn't always been like this. This is new, it's different, and it's grave.
And there are differences by gender, too. Girls seem to have it worse than boys, and that's saying something, because, make no mistake, it's not as if boys are sailing on smoothly by.
So what's going on here? What's this crisis about? Well, on one level, it's pretty easy to understand. Young people are probably feeling overwhelmed. By…all of it. The state of collapse of their societies and the world around them. The return of the old poisons of fascism and hate and violence. Economies stagnating and shrinking. The sense we're all haunted by — is there even going to be much of a future, when lunatics and billionaires and lunatic billionaires are hoarding the very resources we need to fix democracy, the planet, and life on it…or this it? Again, sure, you can be that guy. "Man up! Things have never been better!!" Only…
That's not true. You see, things haven't "never been better." What else is going in the world these days? Well, progress, for the first time in centuries, has flatlined and gone into reverse. And that begins to explain a lot.
Why are girls affected most? Well, if you understand progress going into reverse, then everything snaps into focus a little bit more. They have the most to lose. Girls are the beneficiaries of decades of progress. It wasn't so long ago that being a woman and having a professional career was a non-starter, and even today, of course, there are huge, huge gaps in everything from incomes to opportunities for women. Famously, the S&P 500 has more CEOs named Mike and James than… women.
Girls have the most to lose. Well, among the most to lose, if you want to nitpick, though I'm not sure that's really worth anyone's time. As progress comes undone…well, you can already see what they're up against. Let's take the story of, say, someone like the mega-influencer guy who recently got busted for sex trafficking in Eastern Europe. Figures like that make fortunes from…teaching young men to objectify, hate, and despise women, to literally sexually exploit them, to aim very real violence at them.
When I say "the reversal of progress," it might sound abstract to you, or you might think of something numinous and vague, to happen in the future…but it's happening to girls, right here and now. They probably feel as if they're under attack. From every angle. They turn on social media, just want to share their lives, and the next thing you know, manfluencer-trained boys are calling them every sort of name under the sun, threatening to hurt them, and so on. And the feeling of being under attack isn't just feeling. It's real.
You might think, again, I'm just exaggerating, or drawing a conclusion that's not really warranted, so let's keep going, because you'd be wrong.
Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.
The first increase since the CDC began tracking it. That's "the reversal of progress" happening before your eyes…to girls. Only maybe they hide it, or try to, or we turn a blind eye, or both.
If you think about every 10 teen girls that you know, at least one and possibly more has been raped, and that is the highest level we've ever seen," said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health who said the rise of sexual violence almost certainly contributed to the glaring spike of depressive symptoms. "We are really alarmed," she said.
Let me highlight part of that. "That is the highest level we've ever seen." The idea that girls are under attack isn't some kind of conceit or exaggeration or joke. It's real, and if you really want to play semantic-internet-who's-smarter games, go ahead and substitute another word in that sentence for "attack" all you like. You'll be hard pressed to find a good one. One in ten teen girls has been raped? What else do you call that but an attack?
And again, it hasn't always been like this. As the Director of that Division at the CDC point out, this is a "spike."
So if girls are under attack…who's attacking them? Well, the blunt instrument in this case is boys, and other girls, but more so, obviously if you grasp the point above, boys. Sexual violence appears to be increasing. And that's committed mostly by males. So what's going on here? Well, the radicalization of manfluencers who teach young men that women are there to be assaulted, belittled, demeaned, and exploited…appears to be working.
It's working on multiple levels. Such figures have huge, huge follower counts, which are largely young men. But worse, these followers appear to be really listening to them. It's not "just" banter or "boys being boys" or what have you. It appears to be having real-world consequences, dire ones — a spike in sexual violence, aimed at girls. That's hardly surprising, when you think about just how incredibly misogynistic the internet is. Want to call some random woman names? Send her death threats? Go right ahead — Elon Musk is hardly going to stop you.
But boys, it should be said, are just kids, too. It's not that they're innocent, but they're hardly adults yet. In this case, they're blunt instruments. The question we should ask is: why are boys so easily radicalized in this day and age? You see, we used to think of radicalization as something mullahs did to young men in faraway lands. But this is radicalization, too, in much the same way — women are objects to be hated and exploited and demonized and violently abused? Well, the Taliban would be proud of that particular point of view.
Boys are easily radicalized because they confront growing up in the teeth of a bitter, fearsome paradox. They're held to the old ideals — macho competitiveness, rugged individualism, never show weakness or emotion. And yet they're growing up in a world that's upside down. Being that kind of young man doesn't work. As in it literally makes you dysfunctional. You can hardly hope to develop a career or even get a date anymore as a guy like this. And so young men are being failed, too, in profound ways — still acculturated and socialized into an era and kind of masculinity that, when it's not toxic, is obsolete, unable to really help them achieve the most basic goals we have as humans.
Let me put that another way. We still teach boys the same old stale stuff — they have to be dominant, at the top of the hierarchy, lead a pack, rise up ladders of status, and so forth. We send them off to schools where this is beaten into them, then at college they join "fraternities," LOL, probably the most backwards organizations on the planet, and then they enter workplaces where if you're a certain kind of mediocre guy, you can fail upwards, right past women and minorities and so forth. So of course when manfluencers come along and tell boys an exaggerated version of the old story of masculinity — replete, sometimes, with swords and guns and so forth — they respond, eagerly, eat it up. We give them the signals that being a real man is being dominant and indifferent and exploitative and ruthless.
And yet while we might teach boys that, the truth is that they have to grow up in a profoundly different world than the old one masculinity equipped them for. Sure, maybe you can be the kind of guy that frats his way through college and then fails upwards to be the VP of some pointless corporation — but that's rarer and rarer these days. Precisely because progress has been made by other groups, like women, and also because, well, the world has become incredibly unstable, and risk dominates everything now. So there we are, telling boys to be strong and silent and indifferent and ruthless — and in a risky world, where the basics are in doubt, they're beginning to lash out in fear and rage and despair, because it all has to go somewhere.
And along the way, many of them, far too many of them, are clearly being radicalized into genuinely violently regressive attitudes. What do manfluencers really teach young men? If I come along and say to you things like "I can teach you how to seduce any woman," which is pretty mild for this kind of thing, or worse, "women are there to be exploited and abused, and that means your job is turning some young woman into a camgirl by beating her, your role in life is to be a pimp" — what is that, really? It's the very misogyny at the heart of fascism. This industry, this group of people, is teaching young men that it's OK to hate other groups of people as subhumans. Beginning with women. Which was precisely Simone De Beauvoir's radical insight that sparked modern feminism — women, she said, were a "second sex," as in, a lower caste.
Think about that for a second with me. Here we are, watching figures teach young boys that violently abusing women is OK. That pimping them out as camgirls, through coercion, is a totally normal career path. Easy money! Side hustle! Gig economy! None of that's OK. Coercing and manipulating women who don't want to engage in sex work is sex trafficking. Why are we pretending this is OK?
Even when it's becomingly increasingly clear to see the effects of all this? That young men might not think they fall for this routine, and they might not, in explicit ways — but what it does is alter norms of decency and make sexual violence increasingly OK, to the point that it spikes.
Let me try to put all that in perspective. We all know that young people are growing up in a troubled, scary age, where everything seems to be disintegrating. But we don't often enough, I think, stop to see what's really happening to them. What do downward mobility and economic stagnation do? It produces waves of fascism. When I say that, people think — quite rightly — of Weimar Germany becoming Nazi Germany, and abusing, then attempting to annihilate, the Jews. But fascism comes with many different faces. This, too, is a form of fascist collapse, and now let me put it much, much more clearly.
There are young people, feeling increasingly hopeless, in the world we've left them. All the institutions that it was once normal to take for granted — none of them really work anymore. From the big ones, politics and economics, to the small ones. Social norms have been shattered, and who knows when some lunatic's going to shoot up a school? The future of the planet itself is under dire threat — just today, the Secretary General of the UN warned of a "Biblical scale" of flooding from sea level rise…and he's not talking about a century from now, he's talking about next decade. It's not hard to understand why young people are hopeless.
But what's happening next is something gruesome, perverse, and tragic. Fascism. Only we don't see it that way when it comes to young people. But it is. If I told you that some demagogue was telling an in-group to scapegoat others for their woes, and think of them as subhumans, you'd understand that as fascism. This isn't any different. The demagogues in this case are the manfluencers, and the scapegoats are girls, and the in-group is boys.
The boys, at risk, feeling profoundly insecure, as the old model of masculinity fails — how will I provide a future for myself and my family, even if I do all that, act that way? — are being preyed upon by the demagogues, who tell them that the answer lies in hate, violence, exploitation, and bigotry. Just hurt a woman. Go demean one! Call her a sl*t, b*tch, wh*re, threaten to rape her, threaten to kill her, shame her and her whole family. You know who'd be proud of that, as in, literally? The Taliban. And the Nazis. The boys, in turn, are acculturated and resocialized, by the demagogues, to become predators — taught that the answer to their woes is that they're not masculine enough, not that masculinity itself is failing, and needs change, but that they need to resort to a kind of absurd caricature of hyper-masculinity, where the only "real man" is the one who can literally make women his…slaves.
What do we call people whose labour we take by force? Whose bodily integrity can be violated at whim? Who have no claim to rights and dignity? Who are just economic agents for our profit, to be pushed to the brink, broken, and discarded? Who are to be punished when they don't deliver enough labour, violently? We call them slaves. And yet this is what manfluencers are teaching young men women should be. Young men might think of it as all as "banter" or "just a joke" but none of this is a joking matter. It corrodes norms and rules and codes, and ends up going way, way too far, and that's if you overlook that, from the very beginning, all this is hate.
Our kids are undergoing a fascist collapse, my friends. You might not see it that way, but I hope that I've made a somewhat persuasive case. It's hard enough being young these days, with so much broken all around you, the sense that things won't be OK.
We often sympathize with kids, because we imagine that's all they're going through, and that much is easy enough to understand. But that's not all they're going through. They're being preyed on by demagogues, who teach them that violence and hatred are the answer, that slavery is the solution. To the problems they face in this world. Hey — just hate a woman, enslave her, brutalize her until she's broken, and does whatever you command. And then it goes further, of course. Hate a minority. Shoot up a school. Why not machine-gun those hated gays down at the nightclub while you're at it? They're the reason your life feels so difficult and insecure. You? You're not enough of a real man.
You have to be hyper-masculine, in the old sense — not an evolved version of it — but even more brutal and violent and hateful and bigoted and indifferent and exploitative to get anywhere in this world. Show me someone you can hurt. And I'll tell you — you're becoming a real man. This is the manfluencer's game.
And we're all paying the price. Young women are paying the price, of course, in trauma and despair. But young men, too, are being stunted and warped by all this. Are we really OK letting boys become basically a lot like the Taliban or the Nazis in their attitudes to women, the LGBTQ, progress itself? The rest of us, too, pay the price — because young people are those who are to create tomorrow's breakthroughs. Obviously, if they're being trapped, deliberately, in a cycle of hate, there are going to be a whole lot less of those.
Our kids are in crisis, my friends. I know that many people will object to the way I've described things here. But how else do you put it? What else do you call it, when vulnerable people are being taught by demagogues that the solution to their woes is to hate, subjugate, enslave, and violently abuse those even more vulnerable than they are? Go ahead, you tell me. You can call it patriarchy, if you like. It is, but that's almost too gentle a word, at this point, to describe what our kids are experiencing. Maybe hyper-patriarchy, as I've called it before. The sharp edge of the blade of regress? The one glittering with fascism, bigotry, hate, ugliness, annihilation, theocracy, slavery? It's aimed at our kids, and it's beginning to cut away their hearts. To me, that's a great tragedy of this age. That is why they're crying out in pain. But are we listening?
Umair
February 2023
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