My Favourite Parts From: The Boy Crisis

A much needed book about the sorry state of boys and men in modern societies, both Western and Eastern.

More men in the UK will die by suicide this year than all British soldiers fighting in all wars since 1945. Some more mind-bending stats:

• A UK study found that boys’ IQs have dropped about 15 points since the 1980s. Why? One reason is less time spent with fathers. 

• In the UK and US, one in three children in both countries grow up without a dad.

What links suicide, IQ decline, and fatherlessness? It’s what Warren Farrell and John Gray call The Boy Crisis. In the first part of their book by the same name, the authors discuss males’ mental, physical, and economic health, their education, and global patterns. I detail some of the remarkable data below.

First, male health. When the evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse looked at the results of a twenty-country study of premature deaths among men, he concluded:

Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death […] If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.

Suicide is one of the biggest contributors to that life expectancy gap. The facts:

• Suicide now takes “more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined, stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life” around the world. 

• In many countries the rate of increase in suicides is growing much faster for men than for women. For example, the rate of increase in male suicide in India is growing at more than nine times that of female suicide (37 percent versus 4 percent since 2000).

• More US veterans commit suicide each year than were killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even that staggering number is probably a vast underestimation of the true suicide rate because many men choose to make their death look like an accident so that the life insurance will pay out for their family.

• The National Academy of Sciences reports that the increase in suicide among white American males led to as many white males’ lives lost to suicide as have been lost to AIDS.

• African American males, by contrast, have a much greater murder problem. While only 6 per cent of the overall population, black males make up 43 per cent of murder victims. 

• More American black boys between ten and twenty are killed by homicide than by the next nine leading causes of death combined.

• Suicides increase as the pressures of the male role and hormones increase. Before puberty, the suicide rates among males and females are about equal. Here’s what happens after. By the time we get to the 20 to 24 range, the rate of male suicide is between five and six times that of females.

• Three out of four women say they would not date an unemployed man. And a man who is unemployed is twice as likely to commit suicide as an employed man.

Regarding employment specifically, here’s a wonderful quote from Farrell and Gray:

Most of us take for granted how the home we live in was created at the risk of the lives of young men. For example, the wood in your home likely began its journey with young lumberjacks risking their lives as loggers. The trees they felled were then hauled by long-distance truckers (another hazardous profession) to a site near to what would become your home. On their way, the truckers repeatedly stopped for fuel extracted by other men who had risked their lives on oil rigs (as in Deepwater Horizon). And the wood was ultimately used by construction workers and roofers—who, in the United States, die at the rate of one per working hour.

Next up is education.

Boys scored lower than girls in the sixty-three largest developed nations in which the PISA, a set of international standardised tests, was given. As Farrell writes:

Developed nations each have unique colloquial terms to describe their boy crisis: In China, they say yin sheng, yang shuai, which means the female (yin) is on the way up, while the male (yang) is on the way down—a gender stock market. In Japan, they use the derisive expression soshoku danshi (“herbivores”) and hikikomori (“socially isolated”) to describe the new generation of boys. In European countries, the acronym NEET describes young men who are “not in education, employment, or training.

Worldwide, boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail to meet basic proficiency in any of the three core subjects of reading, math, and science. Among these core subjects, the UN finds that reading is the skill that best predicts future success worldwide — no prizes for guessing which area boys are doing the worst at.

In the US, at the college level, men have gone from 61 per cent of college degree recipients to around 39 per cent. Young women, from 39 per cent to around 61 per cent. The number of boys who said they don’t like school has increased by 71 per cent since 1980. Boys are also expelled from school three times as often as girls.

What’s more, boys who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math, and science tests are graded less favourably by their teachers. Interestingly, the boys who behaved in the classroom in ways the study identified as more commonly associated with girls — for example, by being attentive and eager —did receive grades equal to girls who scored equally in standardised tests. Farrell and Gray speculate that boys might feel teachers are discriminating against their gender typical behavior, which understandably leads them to like school less.

It’s also important to note that grades translate into expectations about one’s future. And boys’ lower expectations can translate into depression, one of the major symptoms of which is obesity. Around a quarter of Australian, British, Canadian, German, Polish, and Spanish boys and men are obese.

We could go on. If you want evidence that the way we’ve been raising boys in the last half century is leading to a deterioration in their mental health, you won’t find a better US statistic than the 700 per cent increase in the US prison population between 1973 and 2013. Of that population, 93 per cent are male and disproportionately young. 

When we hear statistics like that, we often think about the disproportionate number of black men in jail, or poor men’s mental health, or young men dying in dangerous professions. But the lowest common denominator is always the noun, not the adjective: men.  

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