Response: End Thwarted Belongingness

While systemic privilege for men can be argued on a macro level, it's crucial to recognize that many men are also victims of a different, more intimate collapse. This overlooked crisis of male suffering and disengagement is creating a dangerous void in modern society.

The work of psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K) is vital for understanding this issue. Men are dying by suicide in staggering numbers, often without any prior history of mental illness. The primary cause isn't just depression; it's what researchers call "thwarted belongingness" which can be understood as the profound, soul-crushing pain of being repeatedly told your suffering is illegitimate. When a generation of men is struggling and the culture's primary response is, "No you're not, you're privileged," a dangerous vacuum is created.

This void is eagerly filled by "manosphere" gurus and digital father figures. Their appeal is simple: they are the only ones looking these lost men in the eye and saying, "Yes, your life is hard. I will show you a way to make it better." The rest of the culture often offers only critique, which serves to herd these men into the arms of the only groups that offer them a tribe.

This crisis in men is rooted in a crisis in boys. This essay notes the fact that girls now academically outperform boys and frames it as a simple success story. However, Jonathan Haidt's work reveals this isn't just a story of female achievement but also one of profound male disengagement.

Boys aren't merely being "outperformed"; many are withdrawing from academic life altogether. They often find the structured, de-risked environment of modern schooling inhospitable, retreating instead into the virtual dopamine loops of video games and pornography. Their academic decline is a symptom of their disappearance from the real world. This is a complex reality that an obsession with simplistic power dynamics, often fueled by critical theory's blind spots, completely fails to grasp.

This is why the conclusion that men should simply "step aside and let women lead" feels like a tragic misreading of the moment. The problem isn't a surplus of healthy male ambition; it's a terrifying deficit of it. A society of withdrawn, lonely, and unmoored men is not a stable foundation for anything. It's a powder keg of emotional neglect.

The goal, then, shouldn't be for men to cede the floor, but for society to build a bridge back to reality for these lost boys and men. We must model a masculinity that is not predicated on dominance, but on duty, resilience, and a deep, internal sense of purpose that no online ideologue can give and no critic can take away.

The world doesn't need fewer men; it needs better ones. And we have been failing, catastrophically, to raise them.