What Men Are Learning About Masculinity

Most men learned what a man is supposed to be long before anyone talked with them about it, and many are still learning it now. The lessons come from fathers and coaches, from friends and group chats, and from a feed that never stops.

I wrote a paper at Columbia on how boys form their sexual values, and one idea from it holds well past adolescence. Values form in layers. The closest layers are family, school, and friends. The outer layers are media, platforms, and an economy that profits from attention. When the closest layers say little, the outer ones fill the silence, and that does not stop at eighteen.

Where the lessons come from

A man picks up his first lessons at home and at school, from what the adults around him say and from what they leave unsaid. Later come teammates, coworkers, and friends. Now there is also a feed. Podcasts, influencers, and online communities can hand a man a plan for becoming a man, a place to belong, and an explanation for why life feels hard. Many of them treat masculinity as status and dominance and treat tenderness as weakness. Pornography can supply a model of sex built around performance and detachment, and algorithms reward whatever holds attention, which tends to be whatever is loudest.

Men who feel isolated or unsure of themselves often take these messages in most deeply. The needs underneath are real. A man wants to belong, to be respected, to be wanted, and to know what he is doing. The source is the problem.

Where I have seen it

At an all-boys middle school in the Bronx, I asked a group of students whether they would rather have love or money. Every one of them said money, and one named an online influencer as his reason. I told them the internet and the people on it can be misleading, and a few of them changed their answers.

I do not want to make too much of that. It was one room and one conversation, and I have no way to say how long it lasted. What it showed me is how quickly a person will reconsider something when someone takes him seriously and does not lecture. Another day I overheard an adult tell a young boy to hide his emotions because men do not let others see them struggle. That one sentence teaches a person to carry things alone.

How the lessons change shape with age

• In boyhood and the teen years, the lesson is to hide what hurts and to treat feelings as weakness. A boy learns it from the adults around him and from whatever he finds online.
• In young men it often becomes pressure to perform, in sex, in status, and in having everything figured out. Porn and social media can sharpen the comparison with other men.
• In adult men it can look like work, silence, and distance from a partner. Stress goes unspoken for years, a body or a desire that does not cooperate brings shame, and many men fear repeating what they saw in their own fathers.
• In older men it meets losses that are harder to hide, such as retirement, friends who move away or die, a partner who is ill or gone, and a body that changes how sex and confidence feel. Many have never said any of it aloud and assume it is too late to start.

The thread through all four is the same. A man carries things alone because asking for help feels like losing.

The space therapy can create

Men are raised to turn away from their feelings. It is my job to turn towards them because when you do, you find yourself grounded and able to create better relationships.

Therapy can give a man something a feed cannot, which is one real person who listens, stays curious, and does not flinch. Nobody is performing for an audience. At any age a man can say what he has watched, what he wonders about sex, what he fears about his body or his future, and what he has never told anyone, without being laughed at or told he is wrong.

Good work on this topic does not lecture. It asks what a podcast, a community, or a habit gives him, whether that is respect, belonging, information, or relief from pressure. Those needs are real even when the source is poor, so the task becomes finding better ways to meet them. It also means answering questions plainly, saying so when something he has absorbed is misleading, and welcoming his pushback.

The space looks different at each stage. A boy needs room to ask questions and be taken seriously. A young man needs room to talk about sex, dating, and the pressure to have it figured out. An adult man needs room to say what is true to a partner. An older man needs room for grief, for who he is without his job, and for closeness at a stage when it may look different. Each of them needs a place where the old rule does not apply.

The change tends to reach past the man himself. Learning to say what is true shifts how he talks with a partner, how he handles sex and desire, and what he passes on to the boys who are watching him.

Closeness can be built in more ways than most of us were taught. For many men the first step is one place where they can say what is true and not be judged for it.