Look around our culture and society and it’s not hard to notice the War on Men.

The term “toxic masculinity” has replaced what were once called male virtues. In our modern culture men are generally depicted as idiots or villains. Businessmen, the military, and dads are usually portrayed as out of touch and malevolent. Is this good for society? Richard Reeves says no.

Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a dad to three boys, as am I. Reeves tells of an America that leaves vast numbers of its men and boys alone, bitter, alienated, and without meaning in their lives.

In a book review of Of Boys and Men by Reeves published by the National Association of Scholars, Professor Robert Carle notes, “Among men with only a high school diploma, one third have dropped out of the labor force. For men with a job, real wages have declined by fourteen percent since 1979. Forty percent of births in the United States now take place outside marriage, up from eleven percent in 1970.

“Men account for almost three out of four deaths of despair, either from suicide or overdose. ‘Useless’ and ‘worthless’ are the words men who attempt suicide used most often to describe themselves. Divorce is now twice as likely to be initiated by a woman than by a man, and it is harder on men than on women.

“Today in the United States, for every one-hundred bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, seventy-four are awarded to men. Male college students are at higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group, including poor students, black students, or foreign-born students.”

Part of the problem is the hatred of trad men by some in the mental health community. The 2018 APA guidelines note that “traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful.” Dear bloody lord. The Russians, Chinese, and Iranians, must be howling in delight.

Reeves writes, “It is one thing to point out that there are aspects of masculinity that are immature and can be harmful, it is another to suggest that a naturally occurring trait in boys and men is intrinsically bad…Very few boys and men are likely to embrace the idea that there is something toxic in them that needs to be exorcized.” But society drums it into them anyhow.

When traditional men and masculinity are discussed by our culture at large they are dismissed as oafs and brutes. As such, the pseudo-elites overlook facts that do not fit their narrative.

Carle, “But men are also much more likely to risk their lives to save a stranger. Each year, Carnegie Hero Fund, founded in 1904, issues medals to civilians for courageous acts. In 2021, sixty-six of the seventy-one medals were awarded to men.” A casualty of this war on men? Kids.

A noted academic friend of mine, who prefers to remain anonymous, writes, “We know that the absence of fathers has important cellular level impacts. Boys w/o fathers have chromosomal structures that are deficient in a key component that, in and of itself, sentences the male to an early death. Girls w/o fathers enter puberty a year earlier than those with fathers. In short, it appears, strongly & across cultures and incomes, that ‘maleness’ is required in a culture for physiological health.”

Men mostly have fought the wars that have kept us free, wars that have saved the West. Males have been and are at the forefront of science, technology, engineering, medicine, and many other fields. What have men, traditional men, ever done for us? Plenty.

Regardless, the left will keep up its gender war and America will suffer. However, the left doesn’t care. As long as it weakens and degrades this nation they are all for it. If it destroys traditional virtues that have served well for thousands of years, to them, so much the better.