Untilled Earth: The Causes and Dangers of America’s Single Young Men
In an article for Psychology Today, family psychologist George Matos outlined a foreboding phenomenon in American society: “Younger and middle-aged men are the loneliest they’ve been in generations, and it’s probably going to get worse.” In our current age of gender consciousness, it can be easy to lack pity for young men. After all, American men still earn more money than women, are less likely to be victims of sexual assault, and are more likely to be promoted at work. For a society obsessed with addressing inequality, it is far more appealing to dismiss the musings and hardships of young men when there are still gender gaps to bridge and mechanisms of institutional male privilege to dismantle. However, the growing number of teenage boys and young men without sexual, romantic, or even platonic relationships threatens the very foundation of any society. The particular demographic of the restless, angry, and single male, which has recently garnered infamy in the news with the likes of figureheads like Andrew Tate, is at risk of accelerating the pressures of societal instability and young men resorting to crime and violence. “Manosphere” movements like the one led by Tate, and others that eschew interactions with women altogether, will grow in volume and intensity if the causes of the single male phenomenon are not properly examined, addressed, and corrected.
Decision Paralysis
This year, a timely Valentine’s Day report from the Pew Research Center found that 63 percent of participating American males aged 18 to 29 were single. They are, by a longshot, the most single age bracket of men—about thirty percent higher than women of the same age, who are reported as 34 percent being single. This number is the largest Pew has ever recorded, and research shows that this number has been rapidly growing. The exact same poll taken in 2019 showed that only 41 percent of men aged 18 to 29 reported being single, over twenty percent less than the current figure. Comparing the two polls shows that while other demographics' change in single status has more or less remained static, only young men in this age bracket have seen this kind of significant change. So what’s behind this phenomenon and what can be done to stop it? The research points to one main culprit: adults, and single men in particular, are increasingly less interested in finding romantic partners. From 2019 to 2022, the percentage of single men looking for dates has dropped from 61 percent to just 50 percent. This is a wide margin when compared to single women, who from 2019 to 2022 have gone from 38 percent to 35 percent. We are now presented with an undeniable fact: young men are increasingly more single, and year-by-year, show less of a desire to change this fact. But why?
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is one possible explanation for the decline in romantic relationships across all age groups, but it does not explain this decrease amongst young men, as the percentage of other demographics in relationships have only decreased incrementally while the young man’s in particular has plummeted. In his article, George Matos instead chiefly pins the blame for the rise in single young men on the ultra-competitive nature of dating apps. To support this argument, over half of adults aged 18 to 49 have taken up dating apps within the past year. On apps like Tinder and Hinge, users are presented with hundreds, if not thousands of potential dates, which leads to a dizzying array of potential romantic candidates. With so many options to choose from, why should one settle for just one date when they can just keep swiping until they find a better one? This psychological phenomenon, which some call “decision paralysis,” can do great damage to our decision making abilities. If there are too many options to choose from, people may be overwhelmed with the fear of choosing the wrong one, and ultimately refrain from choosing anything at all—or fail to give an option a fair shake with another just a few swipes away.
The Manosphere
The meteoric rise of dating apps and their tendency to induce decision paralysis is only one possible, and perhaps the most innocent, of the reasons young men may be struggling to find romance in the present day. Any observer of Internet culture in recent years surely knows of the nascent online communities of the “manosphere”: ostensibly noble movements designed to assert the importance of masculinity in society that have ultimately led to chauvinism and the insulation (and sundering) of men from relationships with women. The rise of this relatively novel online movement (which roughly coincides with Gen Z’s reaching of sexual maturity) originated out of opposition to the third-wave feminism that has taken a primary seat in contemporary U.S. politics. It has since mutated into an outright hatred of women and reactionary rhetoric that has corrupted the minds of many young men who see a plot to root-out masculinity’s role in society and replace it with the feminine image.
Some of the most vocal movements within the manosphere are those who view women as inherently untrustworthy and thus avoid any relationships or interactions with them altogether; for example, MGTOW, an acronym for “Men Going Their Own Way.” Those who feel entitled to sexual relationships with women but have no ability to obtain them: (incels, a portmanteau of “involuntary celibates”). And finally, “pick-up artists” who view women as sexual conquests and not worthy of meaningful relationships or even platonic friendships, à la Andrew Tate, the so-called “king of toxic masculinity.” All three of these movements have online roots and operate almost solely on internet forums and social media platforms. At least one of them, the incel movement, has been linked to sexually charged violence in numerous cases throughout the past decade, according to a report by the Secret Service. Considering the pervasive nature of these movements, particularly in the Internet circles inhabited by Gen Z males, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that less young men are seeking out relationships with women. If teenage boys and young men are facing an unyielding online onslaught of anti-female sentiment, why would they seek to form meaningful relationships with them?
The challenges that the information age presents for men’s perceptions of women and relationships does not stop at toxic Internet personalities and communities. Access to social media, video games, and pornography–all of which are designed to be hyper-addictive–has also driven a wedge between young men and romance. Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations to have lived most, if not all, of their lives with access to the Internet. Fred Rabinowitz, a psychologist and professor at University of Redlands, said that young men “are watching a lot of social media, they’re watching a lot of porn, and I think they’re getting a lot of their needs met without having to go out. And I think that’s starting to be a habit.” The artificial lives that users can create on social media and video games, as well as the artificial sexual satisfaction that can be created from watching pornography, can supplant the desire to make relationships in real time. For a generation raised on the internet and video games, where social and sexual satisfaction is just one click away, why bother with anything else? Why pursue the “arduous” task of building meaningful relationships in the real world?
Vice and Violence
Besides the instances of violence coming from men like those in the incel movement, history shows that a surplus of young men without romantic relationships or families to care for tend to turn to crime and political extremism. In their article “A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace,” scholars Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea Den Boer argue that an imbalanced ratio of men to women in a society inevitably leads to a surplus of single men. Basing their argument on historical events from medieval Portugal to modern China, Hudson and Den Boer claim that these uncoupled young men “will be prone to seek satisfaction through vice and violence” due to the lack of a familial anchor and an unshakeable feeling of socioeconomic hopelessness. Indeed, research has suggested that unmarried adults are 11 percent less likely to have a bachelor’s degree, 11 percent more likely to be financially vulnerable, 26 percent more likely to be living with their parents, and earn $14,000 less annually than their married counterparts. Some of the activities that Hudson and Den Boer prescribe to untethered young men include a propensity for forming gangs, joining violent political groups, and being three times as likely to commit murder than a married man of the same age.
It should be noted that Hudson and Den Boer’s research is primarily focused on the phenomenon of young single males in societies which have large gender imbalance ratios, a problem mostly experienced in Asia and not in the United States. The difference between these societies and ours is that in societies with far more men than women (not just single men to women), it is statistically impossible for a large proportion of men to ever be able to find a partner. In the United States’ current situation, it is at least possible for these single men to find partners–they just cannot or do not want to. Nevertheless, the findings of Hudson and Den Boer should serve as a warning: if this trend continues, and this demographic of single young men remains single, we could be facing increasing amounts of violence and political extremism. In fact, we already suffer the consequences of this phenomenon. From 1966 to 2020, 96 percent of mass shooters were men, of whom forty percent were between the ages of 18 and 29. Most of these men were single. When we have discussions about gun violence in America, we shouldn’t just be talking about accessibility to firearms. More spotlight needs to be put on the men who are being fundamentally deprived of the emotional connections that inspire love and companionship: the very emotions that make being human so worthwhile. Not only do men who lack these relationships turn to violence against others, they turn it against themselves: men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women are.
In Closing
This is not all to say that young men have it so hard in the United States that they alone deserve the utmost attention of society. It is apparent that all young Americans, male or female, are suffering in this dizzying, paradoxical world of instant communication and information cascades, that, while ostensibly connecting people from across the world, is making young people lonely. While young men are finding themselves more single and thus more violent, teenage girls in this country are suffering from more suicidal thoughts and instances of sexual assault than ever before. According to the CDC, “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma,” which is being connected to the culture of social media, internet use, and sexual violence.
What can fix this malaise of America’s youth and young adults, and how do we stop young men from leaping off the precipice of social stability into misogyny, depression and violence? A reevaluation of the usefulness of social media in our society seems to be pertinent to solving this problem. For years, parents have droned on about how the internet and social media would turn their children’s brains into mush. Fortunately, it seems that the scientific community is now catching on to what was once just a household bogeyman and explaining in clear words what mothers around the country have already suspected: social media is harmful to brain development and mental health. Even Washington, D.C. is catching on, although it is doubtful any meaningful legislation could emerge as law for some time. In his 2022 State of the Union address, President Biden promised to “hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”
Beyond possible government restrictions on the Internet, pornography, or social media, the responsibility of getting young men back on track towards social success and building healthy families lies, unsurprisingly, in the hands of young men. The past decade or so, in which the 18 to 29 age bracket has been raised, has been littered with misandrist and misogynist political rhetoric–just another front of the culture wars that the United States has become engulfed within. Political theorists, social media companies, academics, and technocrats should have no one else to blame for this crisis of young men than themselves, for they have created this hostile atmosphere of toxic gender-hating and online artificiality that today’s youths have been raised in. If we truly want to solve the problem of youths’ discontent in this country and hold men back from their death march towards violence, we need our society’s leaders to teach young men that relationships with women are meaningful, worthwhile, and more rewarding than anything that can be achieved over a computer.