Masculinity Crisis: Why Men Are Struggling and What History Reveals

When we talk about the masculinity crisis, a widespread cultural and psychological struggle among men to redefine identity in a changing world. Also known as male identity crisis, it’s not about men losing power—it’s about losing the script they were told to follow. For generations, being a man meant being stoic, providers, unemotional, and dominant. But those rules never accounted for pain, confusion, or the need to connect. Now, as those old roles crumble, many men are left wondering who they’re supposed to be.

This isn’t new. The Victorian separate spheres ideology, a 19th-century belief that men belonged in public life and women in the private home. Also known as public man/private woman, it locked men into roles as breadwinners and enforcers of order. That model didn’t just shape families—it shaped how men saw themselves. If you weren’t working, providing, or controlling, you weren’t a man. And when jobs disappeared, relationships changed, and emotions became taboo, there was no backup plan. Meanwhile, the toxic masculinity, a set of harmful beliefs that equate manhood with dominance, suppression of emotion, and aggression. Also known as harmful male norms, it’s not about being male—it’s about what society told men they had to prove made asking for help feel like weakness. Mental health issues? Hidden. Therapy? Unmanly. Loneliness? Just part of the deal.

History doesn’t give us easy answers, but it shows us this: masculinity has never been fixed. From Etruscan tomb paintings that celebrated male-female intimacy as sacred, to Victorian doctors pathologizing male desire as dangerous, the idea of what a man should be has always been rewritten. The men's mental health, the growing recognition that men face higher rates of suicide, isolation, and untreated depression due to social conditioning. Also known as male emotional suppression, it’s the quiet cost of keeping up appearances is just the latest symptom. What’s changing now is that more men are starting to question the rules—not because they want to reject manhood, but because they want to survive it.

Below, you’ll find articles that dig into the roots of these pressures—how gender roles were built, how silence became a weapon, and how men have always found ways to resist, adapt, or break free. These aren’t just stories about the past. They’re maps for the present.