Masculinity at the End of History: A Reply to Matthew Gasda

Why we can't talk about masculine decline without talking about testosterone

John Martin, “The Last Man” (1849)

It was with great interest that I read Matthew Gasda’s latest essay, on the state of men in 2025, “Masculinity at the End of History.” Gasda has a lot of things to say that are germane to my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity (out December 16th), not least of all whether there is something that could be called a “crisis of masculinity” taking place in America, and indeed across the Western world. There are plenty of writers—social scientists, journalists, politicians, celebrity psychologists—who think so. Gasda disagrees. In fact, he believes the absence of a crisis is precisely what’s ailing America’s young men. Men need crises in order to be men. Without crises, their mettle isn’t tested, they have no higher aspirations to direct themselves towards, and so they fall into a listless state, an aimless state, a kind of suspended adolescence.

Porn. Pot. Video games. Social media. Processed food. Logging on and dropping out. We all know what it looks like.

“Masculinity is desperate for a crisis,” Gasda writes in the opening paragraphs of his essay.

“It is docile, unsure, and formless. At most, it is at the germinal phase of crisis, lacking a catalytic agent to propel it to its full-blown state, which at least can be registered and reckoned with. After all, crisis implies that something is happening, that something is at stake. The uncatalyzed proto-crisis, or the noncrisis, of American masculinity is repressed, unexpressed, yet omnipresent.”

It’s a typical literary switcheroo—Gasda is a playwright, after all—but he’s not wrong. Nor is he the first to say that what men really need is a crisis—read: something extraordinary—to give full form to their potential. Back in 1910, the pragmatist philosopher William James, brother of the novelist Henry, wrote an essay called, “The Moral Equivalent of War.” A committed socialist and pacifist, James nevertheless regretted the march of Progress and with it the (apparent) decline of war, because he recognised war’s power to form young men and inculcate in them the highest possible virtues. War teaches men to subordinate themselves and their needs to those of the collective, to pursue a higher goal and, if need be, to give their lives for it. War teaches men courage, service, self-sacrifice, stoicism, patriotism, and all of these things are necessary for a properly functioning nation in peace.

But war is also a terrible, terrible thing—and it was rapidly becoming much worse; though just how much worse, James could not have foreseen. What we need, James argues, is a “moral equivalent” of war, a substitute that could teach men the same lessons, without the enormous destructive cost. James’s proposal is quite clever: Rather than a war against each other, we need a war with nature. Young men should be enlisted into a national struggle to conquer and tame nature and to revolutionise the means of production. Send boys off to build railroads and skyscrapers and ships and they’ll return as men, ready to lead families and the nation.

This isn’t too different, actually, from what Gasda advocates in his new essay, when he says a national project in which all or many men could participate might be a great spur to masculine revival.

“If the objective of America in the years ahead is to reclaim global leadership in industrial production, that is, in the making of things in the real-world economy, as opposed to just in the realm of bits and pixels, then new avenues for masculine exertion, discipline, creativity, and camaraderie may arise from such a project.”

There’s much to like in Gasda’s essay and much to agree with. He’s right about how the breakdown of communities and the loss of tradition have hindered the transmission of masculine ideals across the generations. He’s right about the need for rites of passage to confer status on men. Countless anthropological studies have shown the crucial role, in virtually every kind of society except our own, of tests of courage and fortitude at key moments in life, and psychologists have demonstrated how pain and trauma bond people together and provide a sense of shared identity. He’s also right to argue that Americans must “historicise” masculinity, that is, must understand American masculinity in its particular historical context: the peculiar focus on strenuous exertion, self-making and the constant need for a frontier—first a physical frontier, out west, then social frontiers and internal moral frontiers—for American men to develop themselves in conflict with. And he’s right, obviously, that we live in an age that’s fundamentally hostile to expressions of masculinity, and that we can’t simply return to the past and past ideals, as so many simple-minded critics of the modern world, especially on social media, seem to believe.

That’s all to the good. But there are also serious problems.

For one thing, it’s not clear just how much American men really could get behind a drive to “reclaim global leadership in industrial production.” If America does return to industrial preeminence, a significant proportion, maybe most, of the manufacturing is going to be high-tech and automated. We’re not talking about a gigantic Soviet five-year plan that could simply swallow up millions of men and give them jobs in factories—or even give them jobs at all. Manufacturing has changed tremendously in recent decades and is on the cusp of a revolution that will make human labour largely a thing of the past. And not just manufacturing, but whole swathes of industry and even white-collar jobs. Librarians and lawyers and proofreaders and doctors will be replaced by AI and large language models too.

A far graver problem, from my perspective, is that like the vast majority of the so-called “crisis of masculinity” literature that he derides, Gasda fails to take seriously, or even acknowledge, the biological changes that are throwing men’s masculinity into doubt. In particular, a headlong decline in testosterone, the master male hormone that’s responsible for making men men and not women.

Testosterone is not just responsible for sexual differentiation—for the physical characteristics that define boys, beginning in the womb and proceeding through infancy, the teenage years and into adulthood—but it also governs male mood, motivation, libido and even things like political attitudes; although we should be careful not to say testosterone determines political views. As social psychology experiments reveal, a testosterone boost will make a man more likely to defend his position even when he’s outnumbered by people who disagree with him; it will make him more likely to continue fighting against a much stronger opponent; it will make him more accepting of hierarchy and inequality; it will make him more generous to his in-group—his own people—and more aggressive towards his out-group—potential enemies. In short, testosterone and its effects are complex, but they work in ways that obviously tend towards behaviour we associate with traditional masculinity. The less of it men have, the less masculine, they become, as a basic rule.

Open a best-selling book like Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men, head to the index and look for “testosterone,” and you’ll find a poverty of references. Reeves talks about testosterone for just a few pages, but only to dispel the notion that boys “are their hormones,” meaning boys aren’t doomed to be aggressive because they have more testosterone (pop science’s “aggression hormone”) than girls. That’s it. Apparently, biology just isn’t important when we’re talking about the serious problems with men today.

It’s a strange oversight. We have reams of data showing what can only be described as a civilisational decline in testosterone levels, a decline that may have no parallel in history. We know what this decline entails, and if we don’t, we really should try to find out.