How Have We Failed Our Boys? Scott Galloway Lays Out the Stats

How have we failed our boys? To what degree have we failed our boys? And who has failed? Who failed our boys? Well, I think it's multi-dimensional. So start with some stats. If you walk into a morgue and there's five people who died by suicide, four men, three times as likely to be addicted, three times likely to be homeless, 12 times likely to be incarcerated, more single women own homes than single men now, two to one female to male college graduates probably within five years. And by the way, we should do nothing to get in the way of the ascent of our sisters and our mothers. That's a wonderful thing. And I'd like to think that men can be the afterburner on that ascent. Some of it is biological. A boy's prefrontal cortex is 18 months behind a girl's, two seniors, a boy and a girl. The seniors are basically competing against a 10th grader and doesn't catch up at the executive function until he is 25. I think we have an education system that is biased against boys. A boy for the exact same behavior is twice as likely to be suspended as a girl, a black boy five times as likely. Think about the behaviors we encourage in primary school. Sit still, be organized, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You just described a girl. We seem to have reduced the on-ramps into a middle class life for a young man. Remember wood, metal, and auto shop? They've gone away. There are 3% of LinkedIn titles in America say apprentice. It's 11% in the UK and Germany. They do a better job finding jobs for the two-thirds of kids who are not going to end up in college. And then we talked about big tech. In the letter you referenced, you have the most talented companies in the world are trying to convince young men they're going to have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen. Why go through the pecking order of having friends when you have Discord and Reddit? Why try and navigate the corporate world when you can trade stocks or crypto on Robinhood or Coinbase? And why would you go through the effort, the expense, the humiliation, the rejection of trying to find a romantic partner when you have lifelike synthetic porn? And the result is men aged 20 to 30 are now spending less time outdoors than prison inmates. And I think we're going to end up with a group of highly DOPA sensitive or DOPA craving young men who are increasingly sequestered from society. And unfortunately, that 40% of the S&P represented by those 10 companies right now are sort of in the business of evolving a new species of asocial, asexual males.