The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It

by Warren Farrell

The Great Law of the Iroquois is that our most sacred duty is to think seven generations ahead in making any decision—to be aware of whether the decisions we make today will benefit not just ourselves and our children, but our children’s children several generations into the future. The Boy Crisis takes this multigenerational view as

The National Academy of Sciences reports that the increase in suicide among white males led to as many white males’ lives lost to suicide as have been lost to AIDS.2 (Only Native Americans commit suicide at rates similar to whites; Hispanics and Asian Americans commit suicide at about one-third the rate of whites—about the same rate as the African American population.3)

Thus, while only 6 percent of the overall population, black males make up 43 percent of murder victims.4 More black boys between ten and twenty are killed by homicide than by the next nine leading causes of death combined.5

When men and women are exposed to similar pressures to perform, as among men and women in the military, the female suicide rate soars almost as high as the male rate.10

Over the last forty years, the median annual earnings of a boy with just a high school diploma dropped 26 percent.5

single women are now buying their own homes at two and a half times the rate of single men.8

Three out of four women say they would not date an unemployed man.11 In contrast, for two-thirds of men, dating an unemployed woman is a nonissue.12

“Boys who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math, and science tests are graded less favorably by their teachers.”

girls make up 70 percent of valedictorians,14 while boys get 70 percent of Ds and Fs.

More men in the UK have died by suicide in the past year than all British soldiers fighting in all wars since 1945.”

Worldwide, boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail to meet basic proficiency in any of the three core subjects of reading, math, and science.7 Among these core subjects, the UN finds that reading is the skill that best predicts future success worldwide—and reading is the core skill in which our sons are doing the worst.8

A large study from the UK finds that boys’ IQs have dropped about 15 points since the 1980s.11 Researchers are discovering many environmental reasons for this.12 One is less time spent with fathers.

When evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse looked at the results of the twenty-country study of premature deaths among men referenced earlier, he concluded, “If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.”15 The average global life expectancy for girls is about 7 percent greater than for boys.16

Suicide now takes “more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined, stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life” around the world.17

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

police are twenty-four times more likely to shoot someone male than someone female.

As for making the world a better place through politics, well, if your son is a bright and sensitive conservative, President Trump may fall short of role model status; if he’s a liberal straight white male, he may be put off by a culture personified by the DNC’s (Democratic National Committee) 2017 email seeking eight new positions on their Technology Team, but saying explicitly that straight white males need not apply.

This is not a historical first. During Japan’s longest period of peace (the Tokugawa period, 1603–1868), with no need for men as warriors, men played women and women dressed as men for the theater, while erotic art celebrated bisexualism and transgender role-playing.

When male vervet monkeys fight in their wars with other groups of monkeys to protect their territory or to get food, female monkeys reward the best surviving “warriors” by grooming them. The social status of these warrior monkeys goes up, and therefore more female vervet monkeys want to mate with them. In contrast, the female monkeys ignore and “snap” at the male monkeys who abstain from battle.2

It is ironic that it is largely men playing the male role that created the industrialization and technology that freed both sexes to have the luxury to value our sons less. But valuing either sex less is unacceptable.