Men Gone Wild

the crisis of modern masculinity and the forgotten wisdom of relational intelligence

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Over the past two months, more of my male clients have disclosed experiencing a feeling of murderous rage than I’ve encountered in three decades of psychotherapy practice. To be clear, none of them intend to act on it - these are generally empathetic, self-aware men with solid internal containment. Yet, this intense masculine response to perceived injustice seems to be rising. From the anxious young man in my office to the faces we see on the news, one thing is clear: something primal is stirring beneath the surface of our culture.

One man in his early 30s, visibly shaken by the chaos unfolding in the world, looked at me and asked a question I haven’t been able to shake: “We have to come up with other words than ‘masculine’ to describe these feelings. They don’t mean much to my generation, or the ones coming after us.”

He’s not wrong. Language that once offered guidance now feels like fog. The categories we inherited are no longer fit for the crises we face. We’ve been tossed from a plane, so to speak, without a parachute - and we’re arguing about whose job it was to pack it instead of figuring out how to land.

What are we going to do?

We often ask what needs to change - policy, technology, the system - but maybe this is less a what problem and more a how problem. How we respond to this moment will determine whether we crash hard or find a way to descend gently, together.

The US Congress could act, but it’s not - not in the ways we need. The latest reports of gridlock are just the political version of what we’re all feeling - isolated, reactive, and out of sync. We are, in a very real sense, on our own - lost in a foreign land without a compass.

We need a new orientation. Or rather, a re-orientation.

We’ve drifted far from our embodied knowledge - the kind of wisdom that arises from deep within the body, from relational attunement, from generations of evolution. If we slow down and listen, we might remember: we, men and women are far more alike than we are different. But where we differ, we differ profoundly. And meaningfully.

On average, men tend to focus on parts - on protecting boundaries, on justice between individuals. On average, women tend to focus on how the people relate - on relational coherence, on the fabric of togetherness.¹ These distinctions are not stereotypes; they are biological tendencies shaped by the roles we’ve adapted to over millennia.

Women, responsible for the survival of vulnerable infants, evolved to detect subtle cues - facial expressions, vocal tone, interpersonal dynamics. Men, historically charged with guarding the perimeter, evolved to detect threat, to orient toward action under pressure.

Modern data reflects these tendencies. In the U.S., over 86% of homicide offenders are male, and men are nearly four times more likely to die by suicide than women.² Meanwhile, studies show women are more likely to report relational aggression - social exclusion, backchannel communication, or what we colloquially call gossip.³ Our nervous systems have been shaped by different pressures, but we now live in a world where those pressures no longer correspond to clearly defined roles and the confusion is taking a toll on us all.

The masculine impulse to protect and act has nowhere to go. The feminine impulse to attune and relate is overwhelmed. When direction is lost, power can become violence, and empathy can collapse into exhaustion.

And yet, in this storm of collapse and confusion, there is an opportunity: To re-humanize our differences rather than polarize them. To see masculine and feminine not as rigid roles or outdated stereotypes, but as complementary capacities within us all needing integration, not rejection.

I hear from many men that they’re desperate for a way to face fear with courage, not bravado, but true courage - the kind that doesn’t need to dominate, just stand firm. And I hear women longing to not carry all emotional labor alone - to be met, held, protected sometimes too.

This kind of re-orientation doesn’t start in governing structures or institutions, but at home and on the schoolyard. In how we raise our boys to meet fear, not by outsourcing their courage to violence, but by cultivating presence and self-possession. In how we raise our girls, not to always accommodate others, but to trust their embodied experiences and hold boundaries with confidence and care.

The young man in my office was right: our current words don’t work anymore. But maybe the real problem is that the meanings behind the words have gotten buried under decades of distortion. The masculine isn’t toxic; it’s uninitiated. The feminine isn’t weak; it’s been dismissed.

We need a relational reboot - one rooted in embodied wisdom, rather than ideology. In shared responsibility, not blame.

Because if we’re all hurtling toward impact, maybe it’s time to hold hands, rather than point fingers.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll find a way to land well together.

1. Repurtable and replicable studies indicate gender differences in attention. For example, Ryali, Srikanth, et al. "Deep Learning Models Reveal Replicable, Generalizable, and Behaviorally Relevant Sex Differences in Human Functional Brain Organization." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 121, no. 9, 2024, e2310012121. Evidence suggests differences in the wiring of female and male brains, particularly in structures associated with the default mode network (self-reflection), striatum (motor planning), and limbic system (emotional regulation). These results seem to map onto the research by Su, R., Rounds, J., & Armstrong, P. I. (2009). Men and things, women and people: A meta-analysis of sex differences in interests. Psychological Bulletin, 135(6), 859–884.

2. National Institute of Mental Health. (2023). Suicide Statistics.

3. Crick, N. R., & Grotpeter, J. K. (1995). Relational aggression, gender, and social-psychological adjustment. Child Development, 66(3), 710–722.