“Man Park,” cooed the Saturday Night Live narrator, “it’s like a dog park, but for guys … so they can make friends and have an outlet besides their girlfriends and wives.” The sketch, from about a year ago, points to an unfortunate reality. Men are in crisis, struggling with a loss of purpose, of relationship, and of usefulness.
A January 2021 report from the Institute for Family Studies noted that “Girls are outperforming boys at every level, from elementary school through graduate school.” However, this isn’t primarily because girls are succeeding. It’s because, as Andrew Yang with The Washington Post wrote, “Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years.”