In a primary school in Buenos Aires, a group of seventh-grade boys created a WhatsApp chat that excluded the girls. “We’re tired of being labeled as harassers or sexist any time we do something they don’t like,” said one of them. Twelve-year-old boys.
The miniseries Adolescence offers, in four raw and devastating episodes, a stark portrait of the current state of gender relations among teenagers—something we, the adults responsible for them—parents, teachers, and authorities—seem to misunderstand or simply ignore. As a result, we are unsure of how we would even begin to address it.
But the phenomenon is not confined to youth. It is increasingly visible among adults as well. Married men, good fathers with no significant marital strife, speak of feeling imprisoned in their own homes—longing not for divorce, nor to abandon their children or financial responsibilities, but for liberation from the constant scrutiny, judgments, criticism, and expectations from family members which feels suffocating. They want the freedom to come and go without explanation, to maintain their space and habits—neat or messy—as they please, without being held accountable to anyone. Their yearning rarely centers on extramarital affairs, though some might include that in their personal sense of escape. At its core, it’s about the desire for autonomy and peace.
So, what is happening with men—boys, adolescents, and adults alike? What crisis are they experiencing? What has changed?
Masculinity, clearly, is under scrutiny. What it meant to “be a man” no longer holds. The feminist movement—decades in the making—has shifted cultural expectations and perspectives for both sexes. The traditional Western male identity, built on dominance and patriarchy, has lost its legitimacy. And rightly so. Feminist activism has led to a necessary and just cultural reckoning. But in recent years, the discourse has grown increasingly radical, rigid, and adversarial. Everything masculine has been equated with machismo, and as such, it is condemned, vilified, and rejected with such fervor that some have termed it feminazism. I prefer a different word: femalism.
Femalism is the counterpart of machismo—just as authoritarian, oppressive, and aggressive. Its extremism has fueled a backlash, a pendulum swing that has given rise to a growing masculine rebellion, now evident in the digital underworld known as the manosphere. This space channels a form of virulent, reactionary machismo that expresses deep hostility toward women. One offshoot is the incel movement—short for “involuntary celibates”—whose members accuse women of being dismissive, hyper-selective, and discriminatory. Some even justify or promote violence as a response.
Today’s men are expected to feminize their behavior—to be empathetic, emotionally aware, and gentle in their speech. They are urged to understand and respect that female desire operates differently, and to accept that. Most recognize the fairness in these demands and genuinely try to meet them—though doing so often clashes with their own biology, upbringing, or cultural conditioning.
They are also expected to bottle-feed babies, change diapers, attend pediatric appointments and parent-teacher meetings, cook, do laundry, and fully share child-rearing and household duties with their partners. These are entirely reasonable expectations in a world where women pursue careers and contribute to the household economy. Many men are successfully adapting without compromising their sense of masculinity. But for others, it does not come naturally. No matter what they do, it never seems enough. They feel perpetually inadequate. And because they are not women, they will never do things quite the same way. Expecting them to do so is a path toward frustration—for both sexes.
Men and women are not the same. We have the same rights to self-realization, but we arrive at those goals in different ways, shaped by our biology, our upbringing, and our cultures.
It may be time to talk seriously about masculinism. Just as femalism mirrors machismo in its rigidity and intolerance, a thoughtful masculinism could serve as a companion to feminism—a reexamination and positive redefinition of male identity that allows men to embrace their masculinity without shame, guilt, or fear.
The boys who reject interaction with their female classmates may be sending us a message. They are the men of tomorrow, and they are telling us something is broken. This is just a preliminary reflection—one I hope will be enriched and expanded by other voices.
Machismo and femalism both subject, wound, and distort us—men and women, boys and girls alike. Feminism taught us, as women, that we too have a right to the world—that we are not confined to being queens of the home.
This new behavior among men—this desire to live without the weight of constant observation and criticism—may signal the birth of a much-needed masculinism. A movement that would benefit from its own conceptual framework and thought leaders. Where are the male equivalents of Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, or Virginia Woolf? The time has come to free masculinity from its current cage and allow men to explore and develop their emotional, familial, and social selves—so that being a man, in all its complexity, will not be a struggle and becomes again a source of joy.
Diana Wang, March 2025
(*) Neologism for female supremacism