Talking About Men
Noah Gabriel Martin April 28, 2026
How should a man act in the 21st century? Anyone participating in traditional gender roles is going to find it easy to respond to this question—provide for and protect a family, be assertive, get swoll. For those of us, however, who believe in gender equality and freedom, it’s not even obvious how to pose the question.
If you are committed to the bedrock principle that all walks of life are open to all people, regardless of gender, the question “what makes a good man?” seems to collapse into the question of “what makes a good person?”
And yet, living as a man poses challenges that are distinct from the challenges of living as a woman, or as nonbinary. Men seem, more than ever, starved for guidance about how to navigate these challenges when improved gender equality in work and progress in sexual politics have up-ended some of the old “solutions.” If we don’t get better at talking about the problems of men without overgeneralising or falling into archaic tropes, we risk ceding the whole topic to those who argue for a return to traditional gender roles.
To get more comfortable with this conversation, I organised a discussion group in London on the topic of “Being a Man”. 14 men, women, and non-binary people aged 27 to 78 gathered in a room on the second floor of a building near the Courts of Justice.
We quickly ran into difficulty; none of the challenges that affect men, from expectations on boys to be tough, to men feeling as if they have to ‘make the first move’ on dates, affect either men exclusively, or affect all men. We stumbled through the puzzle of how to talk about men without making unhelpful claims like ‘men are aggressive’.
As we talked, a nuance also presented itself—we came to recognize that social burdens which might be encountered by anyone nevertheless affect men differently than women and nonbinary folk.
The ability to provide for a family is a paradigmatic example. A man who earns less than his wife is likely to feel inadequate. Even men who are committed to gender equality might find it difficult to push against internalised messages that his value consists in his ability to support a family or. He may not ever be able to entirely brush aside the subtle, judgmental looks he gets when acquaintances learn that he is not the ‘breadwinner’.
As a philosophy lecturer, I have seen plenty of men in my social circle marry women in more lucrative careers. All of them have had to do hard emotional and existential work to detach their sense of their worth from their income.
The challenges involved in this patriarchal expectation go far beyond the psychological. There are real social costs incurred by men if they are unable to, or chose not to, get into highly paid work. For example: there will be people who will not consider a man who doesn’t earn a lot to be a prospective partner, people who do not take them seriously, and people who will not be interested in friendship with them.
“If we are not all willing to talk about the disease, then that backwards analysis is the only one we will have access to.”
In principle, we can resolutely tell ourselves that we’re better off without materialistic or status-obsessed friends and partners, but that takes a lot of fortitude and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone their self-doubt. Not only that, but given that we live in a world where being able to pay your way on a holiday or put a down-payment on a home really does affect your quality of life, I wouldn’t entirely begrudge the person who takes these material considerations into account when choosing friends and partners.
But are we talking about gender, or are we talking about economic inequality? It gets confusing, because the worries I’m describing are very likely to be felt by anyone of any gender. A woman is also liable to be dismissed by some prospective partners or friends or social circles because she has limited earning potential.
The difference for men, however, is an added layer mixed in with the potent cocktail of economic, social, and psychological troubles surrounding income—the patriarchal expectation to be the breadwinner.
A man in this society has to struggle with the view that a man who cannot feed his family is not really a man, and, since that same worldview suggests that’s the only thing for a man to be, it follows that he is not really a human, not even really anything at all.
It is important to remember that no particular man is going to suffer from economic problems and their social comorbidities more than any particular woman—everyone’s relationship to money is going to be determined by a whole slew of factors, from their circumstances growing up to the goals they set for themselves. On top of that, we must not forget (as reactionaries would like us to) that women are still significantly less financially prosperous than men on average. This disparity has worsened since Covid.
Yet, this way of looking at the features of life as a man can help us understand the specific challenges it poses, without overgeneralising or falling back on gender stereotypes. By looking at the way near universal pressures, such as financial strain, nevertheless affect men in a peculiar way due to the sexist expectations that we are all subjected to, we can make sense of them, give voice to them, and lend them an ear, without succumbing to sexism ourselves.
This way of looking at the problems faced by men today can also help us understand why those who say that the answer to these problems is to go back to a more regressive patriarchal culture are wrong.Their so-called answer is completely backwards—they mistake the poison for the cure.
If we are not all willing to talk about the disease, then that backwards analysis is the only one we will have access to.
Unfortunately, some on the left dismiss the damage inflicted on men in a sexist culture. They chalk up the very suffering of today’s boys and men to the sour grapes that come with loss of the privileges that they formerly enjoyed. There are exceptions, most notably bell hooks, who diagnosed these problems in her 2004 book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. She wrote “Everywhere, men are in power, controlling virtually all the economic, political, and social institutions of society. Yet individual men do not feel powerful—far from it.” hooks challenged versions of Feminism that ignored the need to speak to this feeling. Her analysis is as accurate and needed now as it was then.
Dr. Noah Gabriel Martin lectures in philosophy at the University of Winchester and runs the College of Modern Anxiety, a social enterprise that promotes lifelong learning for liberation. He recently began to study dance, which has taught him a lot about being an absolute beginner.
