Am I masculine enough? Strong enough? Successful enough? Desired enough? The masculinity crisis is real and affecting male mental health.
Many men who feel this way start searching for answers online, wondering if something is wrong with them, their masculinity, or even their biology.
For some men, these questions sit quietly in the background. For others, this masculinity crisis becomes more insistent. And it can show up in the gym, in dating, in work, in sex, in comparison with other men, or when scrolling through social media. It becomes a kind of pressure that never quite resolves. It can become a mental health concern.
What I see as a men’s therapist is not a lack of masculinity.
It is men trying to perform a moving target.
The Manosphere and the Masculinity Crisis
If masculinity were something natural and fixed, it would not need to be taught, measured, or proven. Yet many men feel they missed something. They feel they didn’t have the right role model, or that they didn’t learn how to be a man properly.
This is part of what fuels the current rise of the Manosphere, which coverage such as Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere has brought into mainstream awareness. The Manosphere is a network of online communities that promote rigid ideas about masculinity, often built around hierarchy, dominance, and resentment.
These spaces offer answers to the masculinity crisis. They provide rules, hierarchies, and a sense of direction. But what they are responding to is something deeper. Shame.
Commentators often treat masculinity as if it is a binary truth, something you either are or are not. In practice, masculinity functions more like a standard we require men to meet. And that standard shifts depending on where you look. This is what keeps the masculinity crisis alive.
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Masculinity as Something to Get Right
Many men absorb the idea that there is a correct version of masculinity. This can come from cultural figures like Steve Biddulph or Jordan Peterson. It can come from fathers, peers, or increasingly from influencers like Andrew Tate.
Even when these models of masculinity are presented as balanced or healthy, they still imply that masculinity is something to achieve. Something to get right.
Once that happens, men begin to monitor themselves. They compare themselves to other men. They assess whether they measure up. Masculinity becomes less about how someone lives and more about whether they pass the test. This is where the masculinity crisis becomes internalised. So-called masculinity therapy and porn-addiction frameworks often reinforce the very toxic, competitive ideals of masculinity that contribute to shame, violence, and distressed mental health.
Different Arenas of the Masculinity Crisis
The pressure to prove masculinity doesn’t show up in just one way. The arena changes, but the underlying message stays the same: you are not enough yet.
In some spaces, masculinity is framed through dominance and hierarchy. This includes ‘alpha male’ thinking, incel communities, and red-pill ideology. These frameworks promise clarity, but often reduce relationships to competition and blame.
In other spaces, masculinity is expressed through the body. Discipline, endurance, and suffering become markers of worth. Figures like Nedd Brockmann are often held up as examples of toughness and resilience. There is nothing inherently wrong with challenge or effort, but when the message becomes that you need to break yourself to prove yourself, the masculinity crisis deepens. It can move into burnout, injury, or patterns linked to Overtraining Syndrome and Orthorexia.
For some men, the proving ground becomes moral. This can include purity culture, strict religious frameworks, or ideas like ‘nofap’ (the masturbation abstinence movement), which reframes normal sexual behaviour as a threat to masculinity. Control becomes proof. Desire becomes something to suppress. Failure becomes something to feel ashamed of.
Others turn to success as the measure. Productivity, status, and achieving ‘passive income’ become ways of establishing worth. This is often rewarded socially, but it can come at a cost. Some partners describe a kind of absence, where a man is physically present but psychologically elsewhere, focused on outcomes rather than relationships.
The more you try to prove your masculinity, the more it starts to feel like something you don’t have.
Across all of these, social media has shaped a newer layer. Masculinity is no longer just performed. It is broadcast. Trends like looksmaxxing turn the body into a project of optimisation and display.
Visibility becomes validation, and insecurity becomes something that influencers can monetise. This is how the Manosphere sustains the masculinity crisis at scale. The more you try to prove your masculinity, the more it starts to feel like something you don’t have.
The Appeal of the Masculinity Crisis
These systems persist because they offer something many men are looking for. They provide structure in place of confusion. They offer clear rules instead of ambiguity. They create a sense of belonging and a way to measure progress.
If you feel lost or behind, this can be very compelling.
But the relief tends to be temporary. The targets shift. The standards escalate. The sense of not being enough returns. This is the loop at the centre of the masculinity crisis.
The Deficiency Story
A more recent version of the masculinity crisis shows up through biological language. Men begin to wonder if their feelings of inadequacy are due to low testosterone, dopamine issues, or some internal deficiency.
Across social media, influencers promote products that promise more energy, stronger libido, harder erections, and greater focus.
In most cases, there is no clinical deficiency.
What is happening instead is that social media is turning normal human experiences, such as insecurity, comparison, and uncertainty, into medical problems that need fixing. This creates another loop. You look for a cause, find a diagnosis, and then search for a solution.
This is how shame becomes reinforced. Something feels off, and instead of understanding it, you treat it as a defect. The masculinity crisis becomes medicalised rather than understood.
What This Masculinity Crisis Does to Relationships
When masculinity becomes something to prove, other people can become competitors, an audience, or tools for validation. You can become less responsive to your partner, your environment, and your own internal state. This is a kind of disconnection.
It often shows up subtly. A man might be preoccupied with how he compares to others rather than how he actually feels. He might struggle to stay present because part of his attention is always measuring and evaluating.
In some cases, this can contribute to patterns like retroactive sexual jealousy, where a partner’s past becomes a source of comparison and insecurity.
Who This Masculinity Crisis Affects
This masculinity crisis is not limited to any one group of men, but some feel it more acutely. Many gay men, for example, grow up feeling outside of traditional masculinity and can carry a persistent sense of not measuring up.
Men who struggle with dating, men who compare themselves constantly to others, men who feel behind in life, men who push themselves physically or professionally to exhaustion, and men drawn into Manosphere content often share a similar underlying experience.
The feeling of not being enough is real. The frameworks offered to solve it often intensify the shame they claim to resolve. It’s no surprise that 50% of Australian men will experience a mental health crisis at some time in their lives.
A Different Starting Point
We don’t need to abandon masculinity. But it does need to lose its position as the primary measure of worth.
A different question becomes possible. Not, how do I become a better man?
But, how do I live and relate to others in a way I can stand by?
This shifts the focus away from performance and toward something more stable. It moves from proving something to practicing something.
Working Through a Masculinity Crisis
If you recognise yourself in this masculinity crisis, it does not mean something is wrong with you. It usually means you have been trying to live up to a system that cannot be satisfied.
This is something that you can work through.
In therapy, the focus is not on making you more masculine or correcting a deficiency. It is about understanding how these ideas have shaped your thinking, making sense of your internal experience, and finding a way of relating to yourself and others that feels more grounded and sustainable.
If you’re tired of feeling like you’re not enough, this is exactly the kind of work we can do together. If you would like support with this, contact me now.
I offer in-person sessions in Surry Hills, Sydney, and online sessions worldwide.
