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toxic masculinity
Suicide Rates Among Young Men Are On the Rise; Toxic Masculinity May Be To Blame
Masculine representations rooted in ideals that reward toughness, emotional suppression, and dominance are quietly accelerating a mental health crisis among young men.
Sep 02, 2025
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is now the second leading cause of death among males aged 15-29, and suicide rates among young men in the US have risen by roughly a third since 2010. Across much of Africa, where I work as a public health and gender equality practitioner, men make up the vast majority of suicide deaths, and in Lesotho, the country with the highest suicide rate globally, men are dying at three times the rate of women.
Rigid gender roles may be to blame. Masculine representations rooted in ideals that reward toughness, emotional suppression, and dominance are quietly accelerating a mental health crisis among young men. These rigid norms don’t simply discourage boys from seeking help; they actively shame vulnerability, equate emotional expression with weakness, and isolate those who are struggling. In cultures where being “a real man” means staying silent, mental distress festers in the dark. Unless we confront and transform these harmful ideals, any global response to youth mental health will be incomplete—and too late for many.
In many parts of Africa, young men grow up under intense pressure to become providers, protectors, and problem-solvers. These roles and expectations are deeply tied to their perceived worth. But when systemic barriers like poverty, unemployment, or lack of education make these ideals unreachable, the emotional toll can be devastating. With mental health services scarce and stigma-free spaces almost nonexistent, many suffer in silence.
Instead of seeking support through therapy or confiding in someone they trust, many young men cope with inner distress by turning to alcohol, aggression, or silent withdrawal. These internalized ideals of “staying strong” act like slow-burning fuses. Left unaddressed, emotional strain builds until it erupts often into breakdowns, which spiral into isolation, and eventually, into tragedy. Many of these young men appear perfectly “fine” on the surface, attending school, church, or work, making it easy for their pain to go unnoticed, even by those closest to them. While many girls and young women are increasingly accessing mental health resources even in under-resourced settings, young men remain notably absent from these services. In Rwanda, a study revealed that girls are more likely to utilize youth health friendly services than their counterpart boys. This disparity is not unique to Rwanda; similar trends are observed in west African regions, where mental health services for adolescents are limited, and boys often do not seek help due to societal expectations and stigma.
To be sure, women and girls continue to face serious mental health challenges, often exacerbated by gender-based violence and limited access to care. Recognizing their struggles does not diminish the urgent need to address the silent crisis among young men. Both require focused attention if we are to improve youth mental health across societies. Yet ignoring the silent struggles specific to young men is costing lives worldwide.
To effectively tackle this issue, we must address the needs of all adolescents, with attention to those most at risk. This means introducing gender-transformative education that teaches emotional literacy and normalizes help seeking as strength. We need male-friendly, culturally grounded safe spaces in schools, sports clubs, faith groups, and online where boys can be vulnerable without judgment. Mental health professionals must adopt gender transformative approaches that understand masculinity’s impact on behavior.
Above all, media and storytelling must shift the narrative so boys grow up knowing that feeling is not failure. Imagine a generation of boys brave enough to ask for help, a future where strength includes compassion, and manhood means connection, not isolation. This is the future we owe boys and men. No young man should have to choose between silence and survival.
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How Does Copaganda Work and Why Is It Harmful?
Copaganda contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
May 17, 2025
Copaganda is a specific type of propaganda in which the punishment bureaucracy and the powerful interests behind it influence how we think about crime and safety. I use the term “punishment bureaucracy” instead of “criminal justice system” in this book because it is a more accurate and less deceptive way to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law. The government determines what things are considered a “crime” subject to punishment versus what things are permitted or tolerated even if they hurt people. Then, the government determines what kinds of punishments are appropriate for the conduct it prohibits. Across history and different societies, the definition of crime and how it should be punished has varied depending on who has power and what serves their interests, not an objective evaluation of what causes harm.
The powerful define crime to suit their interests, making some things legal and others punishable. They also decide how what is criminalized gets punished. Should the government execute or cage or whip people who break a law? Should the government mandate a public apology, permit survivors to initiate restorative processes, seize assets, require volunteer work, revoke a business or driver’s license, confine someone to their home, banish them? Should society show them love and give them help? Should society instead invest more in preventing certain harms from happening in the first place?
Having defined crime and punishment, the government also determines which crimes to enforce against which people. “Law enforcement” rarely responds to most violations of the law. It only enforces some criminal laws against some people some of the time.
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities.
These decisions, too, follow patterns of power, not safety. That is why U.S. police chose for many years to arrest more people for marijuana possession than for all “violent crime” combined. That is why police prioritize budgets for SWAT teams to search for drugs in poor communities over testing rape kits. That is why the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office responded to proposed county budget cuts by threatening to cut the divisions that handle white-collar crimes and sexual abuse. That is why about 90 percent of people prosecuted for crimes are very poor. That is why no senior figures were prosecuted for the 2008 financial crisis or the U.S. torture program after 9/11. That is why police tolerate widespread drug use in dorms at Ivy League universities. That is why most of the undercover police operations in hundreds of U.S. cities target disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrant people instead of other police officers, prosecutors, real estate developers, fraternities with histories of drug distribution and rape, or corporate board rooms with histories of tax evasion, fraud, and insider trading. That is why a playground fight at a low-income school results in a child being taken away from their parents and jailed with a criminal record, while the same fight at a prep school may result in a call to parents for an early pickup that afternoon.
In an unequal society where a few have more money and power than the many, the punishment bureaucracy is a tool for preserving inequalities. It maintains the social order by using government violence to manage the unrest that comes from unfairness, desperation, and alienation, and it crushes organized opposition against the political system. These functions explain why the punishment bureaucracy expands during times of growing inequality and social agitation. Throughout history, those who are comfortable with how society looks tend to preserve and expand the punishment bureaucracy, even though—and largely because—it operates as an anti-democratic force. Those who have wanted to change certain aspects of our society—such as movements for workers, racial justice, women’s suffrage, economic equality, peace, ecological sustainability, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on—have tended throughout history to combat the size, power, and discretion of the punishment bureaucracy. Why? Because it is almost always wielded against them.
So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles.
Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat
The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined—such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies—costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That’s over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time, most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure “safety” as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or robbery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn’t pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclu- sively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money.
Job #2: Manufacturing Fear
The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of “crime waves” concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near-historic fifty-year lows the entire time. As a result of continual news-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling.
Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.) This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear.
Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution
The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people’s lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as “disorder” solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option.
If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, as I discuss later, greater investment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police-recorded crime. Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as “crime.”
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
As you read the examples collected in this book with the above three themes in mind, ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years, and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance.
Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission and please note that it is not available for re-posting elsewhere.
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It's Time for Young Men to Be Allies in the Fight Against Online Misogyny
The fight against misogyny requires active engagement from all corners of society, including those who have the privilege and responsibility to challenge these harmful ideologies.
May 16, 2025
Earlier this year, the University of York released a sobering report: 90% of secondary school teachers in the U.K. said their male students are being heavily influenced by online misogynistic figures—often quoting or defending toxic masculine personalities in classes. Girls, meanwhile, are withdrawing from discussions, leaving classrooms quietly divided along gender lines.
This is not just a school issue; it's a society-wide crisis forming in real time, and it's happening worldwide. Boys are learning that dominance is power and empathy is weakness, lessons they carry with them far beyond the walls of a classroom. Online misogyny thrives not only because of those who perpetrate it but also due to the silence of many men who choose not to confront it. This passive complicity allows harmful narratives to flourish, shaping a digital culture where toxic masculinity is normalized and women's voices are marginalized.
There is a better way forward. As a human rights advocate with extensive experience in promoting positive masculinity at RWAMREC, Rwanda Men's Resource Center, I have witnessed firsthand how transformative male engagement approaches can challenge gender-based violence and reshape harmful cultural narratives, both online and in the real world. But, despite their demonstrated successes, these programs are vastly underutilized. Many campaigns focus exclusively on empowering women to protect themselves, rather than mobilizing men to take collective responsibility for change. To truly create lasting change and address online misogyny, we must invest in programs that equip men with the tools and confidence to act as allies.
Without the active involvement of tech companies in combating online misogyny, even the most well-intentioned male allies will face an uphill battle.
Content creators promoting hypermasculine personas characterized by control, dominance, and anti-woman rhetoric have amassed audiences in the tens of millions across platforms like X, TikTok, and YouTube. Such creators often blend self-improvement themes with misogynistic and conspiratorial messaging, making their content more appealing and harder to critique. A U.K.-based survey of secondary school teachers revealed that 90% observed male students mimicking or defending online personalities who espouse these hypermasculine ideologies, demonstrating their real-world influence in shaping gender attitudes among youth. Too many boys view this kind of hateful content with complacency, fostering environments where such attitudes are normalized. But a recent study presented compelling evidence supporting the effectiveness of male bystander intervention in reducing sexist behavior. The research found that when male bystanders actively confronted instances of gender prejudice, female victims experienced increased feelings of empowerment and a greater willingness to confront the perpetrator themselves.
By encouraging men to reflect on their behaviors and understand the impact of their words, the toxic patterns that often go unchecked in digital spaces can be dismantled. Educational campaigns that include men in honest conversations about gender equality have led to more respectful engagement on social media, gaming platforms, and online forums. Participants are more likely to recognize misogynistic content, challenge harmful narratives, and avoid contributing to hostile online environments. These efforts not only reduce the prevalence of online abuse but also shift cultural norms around masculinity, making empathy and accountability part of the standard.
Of course not all boys and men endorse or participate in misogynistic behavior online, and many already stand as strong allies in promoting gender equality. However, the pervasive nature of online misogyny calls for a collective response. While male engagement is essential, it is not enough on its own. Tech companies also play a critical role, as their platforms often become spaces where misogynistic content thrives. These companies must take responsibility by implementing robust policies, monitoring harmful behavior, and holding users accountable. Without the active involvement of tech companies in combating online misogyny, even the most well-intentioned male allies will face an uphill battle.
The fight against misogyny requires active engagement from all corners of society, including those who have the privilege and responsibility to challenge these harmful ideologies. By standing up and speaking out, men can help disrupt the cycle and create a safer, more inclusive online environment for everyone. We need increased funding for initiatives that engage men in preventing online misogyny. We also need media literacy education in schools that arm young people with tools to recognize and challenge harmful online behaviors. Men's active involvement in challenging misogyny is more than supportive, it's revolutionary. When boys and men confront sexist remarks, push back against harmful gender stereotypes, or simply opt out of disrespectful conversations, they break the cycle that normalizes misogyny in everyday life.
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