Men’s Flourishing + Media

Concern about men’s media behavior is widespread. There’s worry about online influencers peddling misogyny and retrograde masculinities, a so-called manosphere. See Louis Theroux’s documentary Into the Manosphere. There’s worry about problematic porn usage, and how it associates with depression and anxiety and sexual and relationship dysfunction. There’s gamer culture, with its welldocumented misogynies, and, more generally, social media and its affect on men’s mental health, body image, body modification, eating behavior, and more.

Underlying this concern is a feeling that men are not OK. There’s also a fear that, when men are not OK, they may choose to work it out with dominance, control, and violence: violence against women, violence against other men. This threatens everyone’s flourishing. Peace, harmony, and prosperity retreat, on the scale of individual relationships and households, and on the scale of nations. And the slow, steady progress toward gender equality enjoyed in many places in the world flags.

There is truth in these concerns, feelings, and fears. Flourishing is out of reach for too many men today, and this can lead to a sense of grievance. But it’s also out of reach for too many women.

What stands out to us from our research is just how similar men and women are, overall, in how they perceive flourishing and their capacity to realize it. It’s not that one gender or the other is doing emotion, connection, or some other thing wrong, which requires fixing. Rather, each gender is experiencing gaps in their flourishing, which they respond to and seek support for in different ways, including through media and online engagement.

In the report that follows, we focus on men in the U.S., contextualized in relationship to women, in order to understand how they perceive and experience their own flourishing, their own identities, relationships, and responsibilities; how they engage with media that represents, complicates, and contributes to their flourishing; and what this means for people and organizations wanting to support men in their journey toward a more loving, equal future.