Manufacturing a Boy Crisis

Show me the Data.

Educators, journalists, and researchers say boys are becoming more aggressive. But when you look for the trend data, the evidence quietly disappears.

Show me the data.

When “Concern” Replaces Evidence: A Look at Claims About Rising Aggressive Masculinity

Recently I read an article titled “Reading how to be male: Boys’ literature reflects the rise of aggressive masculinity.” The title alone makes a strong empirical claim: that aggressive masculinity is rising. Not perceived as rising. Not debated. Rising.

That’s a measurable claim. Which means it should be supported by measurable data.

Because I take these questions seriously — especially when they concern boys — I wrote to the author, who happened to be a Gender Studies professor, and asked a straightforward question:

What is the empirical evidence that masculine aggressiveness is increasing?

He kindly replied and sent two links — one a media report about educator concerns, and the other an article about a qualitative research project describing how some teachers perceive changes in boys’ attitudes and behavior.

But neither source provided what the title of the article clearly implies:
trend data showing that male aggressiveness is increasing over time.

In fact, the qualitative study he referenced was one my colleagues Janice Fiamengo, Hannah Spier, and I had previously examined in detail in a video discussion. We found it relied largely on interviews, interpretations, and ideological framing rather than measurable behavioral trends. The other link was simply journalism — anecdotes, opinions, and stories about educator worries.

Neither constitutes longitudinal evidence of an actual increase.

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Concern Is Not Trend Data

We are living in an era of heightened cultural anxiety about boys and men. Teachers report concern. Journalists report concern. Researchers report concern. Administrators report concern.

But concern is not the same as longitudinal behavioral evidence.

If we are going to say aggression is rising, we should expect to see:

• multi-year behavioral datasets

• crime trend comparisons

• school violence trend data

• disciplinary pattern shifts

• cross-regional replication

Instead, what we often see are:

• perception reports

• educator interviews

• interpretive frameworks

• ideological lenses applied to selected cases

Those can be useful — but they are not trend measurement.

When perception is presented as trajectory, readers are misled.

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The Framing Problem

Notice how the framing works in pieces like this:

Step 1 — Start with a cultural fear
Step 2 — Gather qualitative impressions consistent with that fear
Step 3 — Interpret those impressions through a gender-ideological lens
Step 4 — Present the conclusion as a social pattern

No explicit falsification test appears anywhere in the process.

It’s not that the researchers are fabricating observations. It’s that the interpretive frame is doing most of the work.

When boys are already positioned culturally as a risk category, almost any troubling behavior becomes evidence of a broader male pattern — while contradictory evidence gets treated as an exception.

That’s not science. That’s narrative selection.

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What Would Real Evidence Look Like?

If aggressive masculinity were truly rising, we would expect at least some of the following indicators to be trending upward:

• male youth violent crime rates

• school assault rates by sex

• disciplinary removals for violent behavior

• male-perpetrated injury incidents

• cross-decade behavioral comparisons

But in many regions, long-term violent crime trends among youth have actually declined from historical peaks — not risen.

So if the claim is increase, the burden of proof belongs with the claimant.

Not with the skeptic.

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Why This Matters for Boys

When cultural institutions repeatedly publish claims that boys are becoming more dangerous, more misogynistic, more aggressive — without strong trend evidence — boys absorb that message.

Teachers absorb it.
Parents absorb it.
Clinicians absorb it.
Policy absorbs it.

And boys are treated accordingly.

Suspicion becomes the baseline.
Interpretation becomes gendered.
Normal roughness becomes pathology.
Developmental conflict becomes ideology.

I have worked with boys and men for decades. They are not becoming monsters. They are becoming confused — and often very discouraged — under a steady stream of moral suspicion.

That distinction is critical.

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My Exchange With the Author

To his credit, the author responded politely to my inquiry and shared his sources. I wrote back and clarified that my question was specifically about measured increase over time, since the article’s title clearly implies that trajectory.

I never heard back after that follow-up.

That silence doesn’t prove bad faith — but it does highlight something important:
The evidentiary foundation under these claims is often thinner than the confidence of the headlines.

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A Better Standard

If we care about boys — truly care — we should insist on a higher evidentiary standard before declaring them socially dangerous.

We should:

• separate perception from measurement

• separate ideology from data

• separate anxiety from trend

• separate narrative from proof

And most importantly:

Assess harm by power and leverage, not gender.

Because when gender becomes the shortcut explanation, truth is usually the casualty.

And this is exactly where conversations like this often go wrong. Part of the disconnect may simply be methodological. The author comes from Gender Studies, a discipline that leans heavily on narrative interpretation, interviews, and thematic impressions rather than longitudinal behavioral measurement. Those tools can tell us how people feel about boys. They cannot tell us whether boys are actually becoming more aggressive over time. That requires hard trend data.

When interpretive methods are presented as empirical proof, perception quietly substitutes for evidence and ideology slips in wearing the costume of science. We’ve seen this pattern before — in inflated domestic violence narratives and other feminist boondoggles where worst-case anecdotes are treated as trends and fear is treated as fact. At that point, we’re no longer measuring reality; we’re constructing a story.

And once that story takes hold, boys aren’t studied — they’re blamed, regulated, and pathologized to solve a crisis the numbers never actually showed.

Men Are Good.