Tucker Carlson debuted a new series on his Fox News program Wednesday night: “American men are in crisis.”
Carlson, a Daily Caller co-founder, will feature a new segment in the series every Wednesday in March, and the first featured Canadian professor Dr. Jordan Peterson.
Carlson opened by highlighting society’s attempts to demonize and ostracize masculinity before pointing out the serious problems prevalent among American males.
“This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening,” he stated. “Ignoring the decline of men does not help anyone. Men and women need each other. One cannot exist without the other. That is elemental biology, but it’s also the reality each one of us has lived, with our parents and siblings and friends. When men fail, all of us suffer.”
You can read Carlson’s monologue in its entirety and watch his interview with Peterson below.
The signs are everywhere. If you’re a middle aged man, you probably know a peer who has killed himself in recent years. At least one. If you’re a parent, you may have noticed that your daughter’s friends seem a little more on the ball than your son’s. They get better grades. They smoke much less marijuana. They go to more prestigious colleges. If you’re an employer, you may have noticed that your female employees show up on time, the young men don’t. And of course if you live in this country, you’ve just seen a horrifying series of mass shootings, far more than we’ve ever had. Women didn’t do that. In every case, the shooter was a man.
Something ominous is happening to men in America. Everyone who pays attention knows that. What’s odd is how rarely you hear it publicly acknowledged. Our leaders pledge to create more opportunities for women and girls, whom they imply are failing. Men don’t need help. They’re the patriarchy. They’re fine. More than fine.
But are they fine? Here are the numbers:
Start with the most basic, life and death. The average American man will die five years before the average American woman. One of the reasons for this is addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics. They’re also twice as likely to die of a drug OD. In New Hampshire, one of the states hit hardest by the opioid crisis, 73 percent of overdose deaths were men.
But the saddest reason for shortened life spans is suicide. Seventy-seven percent of all suicides in America are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic pace. Between 1997 and 2014, there was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths among middle-aged American men. The rates are highest among American Indian and white men, who kill themselves at about ten times the rate of Hispanic and black women.
You often hear of America’s incarceration crisis. Well that’s almost exclusively a male problem too. Over 90 percent of inmates are men.
Now these problems are complex, and we know they start young. Relative to girls, boys are failing in school. More girls than boys graduate high school. Considerably more go to and graduate from college. In schools at every level boys account for the overwhelming majority of school discipline cases. One study found that fully one in five high school boys had been diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder, that’s compared with just one in 11 girls. Many of them were medicated for it. The long term health effects of those medications, not fully understood, but they do appear to include depression in later life.
Women now decisively outnumber men in graduate school. They earn the majority of doctoral degrees. They are now the majority of new enrollees in both law and medical schools.
For men, the consequences of failing in school are longterm and profound. Between 1979-2010, working age men with only high school degrees saw their real hourly wages drop about 20 percent. Over the same period, high school educated women saw their wages rise. The decline of the industrial economy disproportionately hurt men.
There are now seven million working age American men who are no longer in the labor force. They’ve dropped out. Nearly half of them take pain medication on any given day. That’s by far highest rate in the world.
Far fewer young men get married than did just a few decades ago, and fewer stay married. About one in five American children live with only their mothers. That’s double the rate in 1970. Millions more boys are growing up without fathers. Young adult men are now more likely to live with a parent than with a spouse or partner. That is not the case for young women. Single women buy their own homes at more than twice the rate of single men. More women than men now have drivers licenses.
Whenever gender differences come up in public debate, the so-called wage gap dominates the conversation. A woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s the statistic you’ll hear. It’s repeated everywhere. But that number compares all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate social scientist would consider that a valid measure. The number is both meaningless and intentionally misleading. It’s a talking point.
Once you compare men and women with similar experience working the same hours in similar jobs for the same period of time — and that’s the only way you can measure it — the gap all but disappears. In fact it may invert. One study using census data found that single women in their 20s living in metropolitan areas now earn eight percent more on average than their male counterparts. By the way, the majority of managers in the workplace are now women. Women on average are now scoring higher on IQ tests than men are.
Men are even falling behind physically. A recent study found that almost half of young men failed the Army’s entry-level physical fitness test during basic training. Fully seventy percent of American men are now overweight or obese. That’s compared to 59 percent of American women.
Perhaps most bafflingly or terrifyingly, men seem to be becoming less male. Sperm counts across the west have plummeted, they’re down almost 60 percent since the early 1970s. Scientists don’t know why this is. Testosterone levels in men have also fallen precipitously. One study found that the average levels of male testosterone dropped by one percent every year after 1987. And it’s not unrelated to age. The average 40-year-old-man in 2017 would have testosterone levels 30 percent lower than the average 40-year-old man in 1987.
There is no upside to this. Lower testosterone levels in men are associated with depression, lethargy, weight gain and decreased cognitive ability. Nothing like this has ever happened to a population this big. You’d think we’d want to know why and how to fix it. But the media ignore the story. It’s considered a fringe topic.
Nor is it a priority in the scientific research establishment. We checked and couldn’t find a single NIH-funded study on why testosterone levels are falling. We did find a study on, ‘Pubic Hair Grooming Prevalence and Motivation Among Women in the US.’
This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women far outpace men in higher education for example, virtually every college campus supports a women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. Men are privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.
Now that would be fine if it were true. But it’s not true. At best, it’s an outdated view of an America that no longer exists. At worst, it’s a pernicious lie.
Either way, ignoring the decline of men does not help anyone. Men and women need each other. One cannot exist without the other. That is elemental biology, but it’s also the reality each one of us has lived, with our parents and siblings and friends. When men fail, all of us suffer. How did this happen? How can we fix it? We hope this series answers those questions.
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The daily caller
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