Reimagining Masculinity
The following is my notes that I wrote down before a podcast interview with prominent Jungian writer and podcast host Jon Wilson in July 2026.
…
We live in times of abundance—and confusion. Perhaps the two are not as unrelated as they first appear.
Never before have young men inherited a world of such freedom. There are more educational opportunities, more material comfort, and more possible ways of living than any previous generation could have imagined. Yet many young men seem profoundly disoriented.
As a psychologist, I repeatedly encounter young men who are not primarily suffering from poverty or oppression. They are suffering from something more difficult to name. They have the peculiar experience of sensing that there is more in them than they are currently able to live.
They can hear the engine. They simply cannot get the car into gear.
Many of these young men feel drawn towards competence, strength, adventure, responsibility, and significance. They want to become capable. They want to matter. They want to be respected by other men, desired by women, useful to their communities, and proud of themselves.
The longing is there. The energy is there. The potential is there. But the pathway is not.
They struggle to translate these impulses into action. They possess ambition but cannot find a proper direction. They hunger for challenge and responsibility, yet encounter remarkably few structures that initiate, mentor, discipline, and demand these things from them.
The result is a peculiar form of suffering: not the absence of masculine potential, but the inability to embody it.
This uncertainty is not trivial. Human beings organise themselves psychologically around ideals and identities. We require images that orient us towards adulthood. We need heroes, exemplars, and forms of life that appear meaningful and worth emulating.
For much of history, boys did not simply invent themselves. They inherited stories of what it meant to become a man. They were surrounded by images—of the protector, the adventurer, the craftsman, the provider, the leader, the soldier, the father. One may criticise aspects of these ideals, but they possessed one immense psychological advantage:
They gave boys a direction in which to grow.
Today, many young men feel that those images have either disappeared, become morally suspect, or have been deconstructed without being replaced by equally compelling alternatives.
And human beings cannot live by critique alone. The psyche requires images.
Arguments educate the intellect. Images educate the personality.
One of the great misunderstandings of our age is the assumption that masculine archetypes have somehow disappeared. They have not.
The call towards adventure and desire for competence still lives in boys.
The longing for strength, brotherhood, mastery, and meaningful struggle still lives in boys.
Nature whispers and culture no longer speaks or speaks, and when it does it does so in a thousand tongues.
And when latent masculine energies are neither recognised, encouraged, challenged, mentored, nor given meaningful expression, they do not simply vanish. They retreat into fantasy, gaming, endless entertainment, online status hierarchies, compulsive self-improvement, resentment, or prolonged adolescence.
It is masculinity that was never initiated.
The question before us, then, is not whether masculinity should survive. It will.
The question is whether our culture still knows how to invite boys and young men into a form of masculinity that is disciplined, embodied, psychologically integrated, and worthy of admiration.
The crisis of many young men is therefore not the disappearance of masculine potential.
The potential remains.
The longing to become capable and necessary still lives.
What has weakened are the cultural images, social rituals and expectations that once helped transform these latent possibilities into embodied adulthood.
The tragedy of many young men is not the lack of ambition but the lack of direction, mentoring and follow through.
Losing Territory
Within only a few decades, the social landscape has changed dramatically.
Women have, in many respects, conquered the educational realm. Girls generally outperform boys academically, women increasingly dominate university enrolment and graduation rates, and educational attainment—once one of the principal routes through which men achieved social, cultural and economic status—has changed character.
This is not merely a story about women succeeding.
It is also a story about a masculine pathway losing its contours.
For generations, educational and professional success represented one of the culturally admired routes into manhood. Very few men reached the top, but the image itself carried symbolic power. It offered direction. It suggested that competence, effort and achievement could grant a man status, identity and purpose.
That image has become less clear.
This does not mean that boys and men can no longer succeed. Of course they can.
But many young men no longer experience educational institutions as environments in which masculine striving appears particularly recognised, mirrored or culturally embodied. The old map has faded, and no equally compelling replacement has emerged.
The Fragile Father
Family life has undergone a similarly profound transformation.
More men than women never experience parenthood at all. And many of the men who become fathers inhabit a role that differs substantially from that of their fathers and grandfathers.
The traditional provider role has diminished. Economic necessity no longer grants men the same obvious place within family life. Their role must increasingly be negotiated rather than assumed.
At the same time, many men live with an underlying fear that their place in the family is somehow more conditional than that of mothers.
This fear often becomes painfully visible during separation and divorce. Many fathers describe profound anxiety at the prospect of losing daily contact with their children. For some, the fear is not simply losing a marriage.
It is losing fatherhood itself.
Whether this fear always reflects institutional reality is almost secondary. Psychologically, it is deeply real.
A role that once felt relatively secure increasingly feels contingent and, for some men, precarious.
Modern society’s bias towards the women’s cause
While this is happening there is a tremendous amount of funding for NGOs, governmental projects etc aimed at bettering the life of women. Whereas men – who as a gender arguably is worse off (higher rates of yout deaths, suicide, drug abuse, prison, family courts biased towards protecting the mother-child dyad) receive perhaps only a few percent of the financing. Men are being told to fend for themselves, girls and women are being portrayed as the victims that need to pushed in front of the line. This bias is a fact across the globe at all levels of analysis.
The Deconstruction of the Hero
Culture does not merely entertain. Culture initiates.
The heroes we encounter in stories become images of possibility. They call forth latent potentials that are already present within us. For generations, boys grew up with modern myths that embodied courage, competence, adventure, sacrifice and the willingness to shoulder responsibility.
Indiana Jones.
Terminator.
Mad Max.
Achilles.
These figures were not simply movie characters. They were symbolic templates of becoming. They were avatars calling to be filled out or grown into as the boy matures into becoming a man.
Over the past decade, many of these myths have been reinterpreted, gender-swapped or otherwise reconstructed in ways that frequently counter traditional masculine heroism itself.
If myths matter, these changes matter.
Because boys need images that speak to the longings already alive within them—the longing to become capable, to master themselves, to protect, to endure hardship and to participate in meaningful adventure.
The issue is not whether women can be heroic. Of course they can. The issue is that many of these stories no longer merely add female heroes. They increasingly seem intent on revising, displacing or inverting traditional masculine ones.
Consider Achilles, perhaps the greatest warrior of antiquity and one of the defining heroic figures of Western civilisation. Inspiring equally to courage and mastery and the ability to contain one’s rage. To radically reinterpret such a figure through the image of a physically slight, gender-nonconforming female character is not simply a casting decision. It is a symbolic inversion of one of our oldest masculine archetypes.
Likewise, in the latest Mad Max film, the young girl who will become the heroine is kidnapped. Who rides after the abductors?
The women.
The men remain behind.
The scene feels jarring because it reverses one of the most persistent patterns in human history and storytelling: the expectation that a man is the one who “will expose himself to danger in defence of women and children”.
This particular ancient motif of men trying to save a kidnapped child teaches boys that physical strength is not a licence for domination but a call to responsibility. The stronger are expected to run towards danger when others cannot.
The point is not that women cannot be brave. The point is that men are portrayed as unnecessary – and cowardly.
And when one of the last widely recognised domains of masculine competence—physical protection and the willingness to confront danger—is repeatedly reassigned, inverted or rendered morally ambiguous, boys are left with an increasingly difficult question:
What exactly is left for me to become?
This is why these stories matter.
Because heroes are not merely entertainment.
They are initiatory images.
They invite boys into particular forms of being.
And a culture that repeatedly deconstructs its masculine myths should not be surprised if many boys struggle to imagine what kind of men they are meant to become.
Human beings cannot live by critique alone.
The psyche requires images.
And boys, no less than girls, require images that call forth their latent possibilities rather than continuously destabilising them.
“Progressive masculinity”?
In recent years, we have increasingly been invited to embrace the notion of progressive masculinity. The very phrase is revealing. It often carries the implicit assumption that masculinity, at least in its traditional forms, is somehow deficient and in need of moral renovation.
Contemporary cultural discourse increasingly treats traditionally masculine traits with moral suspicion: One of Hollywoods all time greatest movie directors James Cameron literally called testosterone toxic.
The ideal man is increasingly portrayed as one who has freed himself from competitiveness, status-seeking, performance motivations and the desire for distinction. Instead, he is encouraged to cultivate qualities such as vulnerability, emotional openness, humility and relational sensitivity.
None of these qualities are inherently problematic.
The question is why they are so frequently presented as alternatives to masculinity rather than additions to it.
The underlying message often appears to be that many traditionally masculine motivations are suspect in themselves. Ambition becomes unhealthy striving. Competitiveness becomes insecurity. Stoicism becomes emotional repression. The desire to protect becomes paternalism. Hierarchy becomes domination.
Masculinity increasingly appears as something that must be corrected.
The irony is that many of the boys and men who are struggling today are not suffering from an excess of stoicism, competence or ambition.
They are already uncertain.
Already anxious.
Already lonely.
Already emotionally exposed.
Their problem is often not that they are insufficiently vulnerable. It is that they lack direction, initiation, admired images of adulthood and experiences of becoming capable and necessary.
From this perspective, the attempt to solve male suffering by further softening masculinity risks misunderstanding the problem entirely.
The crisis of many young men is not that they are too masculine.
It is that they struggle to become masculine in any coherent, embodied and socially valued sense of the word.
At times, one gets the impression that contemporary culture imagines men as suffering because they do not function sufficiently like women. The proposed solution is therefore to move them psychologically closer to traditionally feminine modes of being.
But this may be another instance of doing the arithmetic without consulting human nature.
To begin with a certain amount of healthy aggression in boys and girls for that matter is anxiety antagonistic: Young men who embrace the feminine principle experience more mental health problems, than boys who embrace masculine virtues.
Young people with a liberal bend (connected to traditional feminine virtues) are significantly more prone to depression the young men with a conservative bend (connected to masculine virtues). The overall scores on mental health shows that liberal boys have twice the amount of mental health issues compared to conservative youth. It seems as if masculinity is literally a protective factor against mental health issues! Source: Jon Haidt
The task is not to ask adolescent boys to embody the psychological posture of mature adulthood before they have first developed agency, competence and identity. A more rudimentary identity which as I have already argued is deeply important not only for accomplishments but also for psychological health.
The task must be to cultivate the masculine virtues wisely. Also psychologically mature masculinity is not masculinity that has ceased to be masculine.
It is masculinity that has become integrated, disciplined and directed towards something larger than itself. A process that may last years-
When did the deconstruction of masculinity begin and why?
This is an enormous question.
Some would trace the origins back to Kant and the elevation of subjectivity. That any and all categories could only be comprehended subjectively. Others would locate them in the cultural trauma of the First World War. Artistic movements such as Dada and, later, Surrealism can be understood as reactions against the Enlightenment confidence that reason, science and civilization naturally produce moral progress. Rather than celebrating rational order, they sought to fracture it, exposing the absurdity and unconscious forces that the war had laid bare. The old ideals of duty, sacrifice and fighting for King and Country suddenly looked less noble and more horrifying.
Others again would point towards Marxism and its revolutionary desire to dismantle inherited hierarchies and replace them with entirely new social arrangements.
The heroic image of masculine adulthood has historically been deeply intertwined with ideals of autonomy, agency and individual responsibility.
A conception of personhood that increasingly came under criticism in intellectual traditions that emphasized social class, historical forces and ideology over individual agency.
This tension lay at the heart of the famous falling out between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Camus remained deeply committed to the moral agency of the individual. His central concern was always the question of how one human being ought to live, choose and assume responsibility in an absurd world. Sartre, by contrast, increasingly sought to reconcile existentialism with Marxism, placing far greater emphasis on history, ideology and collective political struggle than he had in his earlier work.
During the second half of the twentieth century, many influential currents in the humanities shifted the explanatory centre of gravity away from the autonomous individual and towards social structures, historical forces, ideology, language and power. Whether through Marxism, structuralism or later post-structuralism, the individual increasingly came to be understood less as an independent agent than as someone profoundly shaped by larger systems.
From a Jungian perspective, this development may have had unintended psychological consequences. Across many cultures, the image of the autonomous individual—the person who leaves home, confronts fate, accepts responsibility and shapes his own character—has been one of the central symbolic pathways through which boys imagine becoming men. This is not because individuality belongs exclusively to men; individuation is a universal human task. Rather, masculine development has traditionally been represented through images of agency, autonomy and responsibility. To the extent that twentieth-century thought became increasingly suspicious of the autonomous individual, one could argue that it also weakened one of the principal symbolic images of mature masculinity.
But I suspect the explanation of the deconstruction may actually be found in a Jungian perspective.
The return of the feminine Principle – with a vengeance
Through a Jungian lens, one could argue that the modern West has witnessed something resembling the return of the feminine principle.
(Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that the first successful communist revolution occurred in feudal Russia, a society in which women occupied a markedly more subordinate position than in much of contemporary Europe. This is not to suggest that the feminine principle is inherently destructive. Jung’s psychology would predict no such thing. Rather, it suggests that whatever is neglected, subordinated or persistently excluded eventually returns with compensatory force. And compensation frequently overshoots. It seeks not merely participation, but reversal.)
For centuries, Western civilisation was characterised by extraordinary outward expansion. Exploration, empire, industrialisation, large-scale institutions, bureaucratic government and the Enlightenment’s celebration of reason transformed society. The centre of gravity shifted away from the homestead, local community and domestic life and towards factories, offices, markets and nation states.
Much of this civilisational project bore recognisably masculine characteristics: expansion, abstraction, conquest, rationalisation, productivity and mastery.
It was, in many respects, a world created largely by men and governed according to values that were culturally associated with masculinity.
In the process, the feminine principle became increasingly marginalised.
And “she” does not disappear quietly.
From a Jungian perspective, much of the last century can be understood as a compensatory movement.
The excluded returns. The neglected demands recognition. The world psyche seeks equilibrium.
Therein lies, perhaps, the clue to the contemporary suspicion directed towards so many of the institutions and narratives associated with the modern West. Patriarchy, hierarchy, capitalism, objectivity and technological mastery increasingly came to be viewed not merely as historical arrangements, but as expressions of an excessively masculine civilisation.
The critique was not entirely without merit.
Wars. Nuclear weapons. Environmental degradation. The destruction of local communities. The reduction of human beings to economic units. The list goes on.
But something else happened.
Critique gradually became a mentality.
All conventions became suspect.
All structures concealed oppression.
All hierarchies became domination.
All definitions appeared exclusionary.
And masculinity itself increasingly came to be understood less as a potential source of virtue and meaning than as a problem requiring correction.
Postmodern thought proved extraordinarily adept at dismantling inherited narratives and institutions.
It proved much less successful at articulating compelling replacements.
And critique alone cannot initiate young men into adulthood.
The psyche requires not merely the destruction of old images, but the presence of admired and aspirational ones.
I love Nietzsches poetic vision of iconoclasm – that you may destroy the church, but from the protective ruins nature will grow. That you shouldn’t disentegrate the tablets of religious dogma but break them. He did not it seems intend on turning everything into ashes but rather was intent on reinvigorating the spirit to create anew.
“And only when the clear sky looks again through ruined roofs, and down upon grass and red poppies on ruined walls – will I again turn my heart to the seats of this God.” – Nietzsche / Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Paradoxically, I increasingly wonder whether the deconstructive spirit of postmodernism was fundamentally Hermetic or hermeneutical at all.
I once thought so.
Hermes delights in ambiguity, playfulness and boundary crossing. He is eclectic, surprising and often deeply funny.
But postmodern philosophy often possesses little of Hermes’ lightness.
It feels relentless.
Suspicious.
Dark.
Perpetually oppositional.
Entirely bereft of humor and beauty.
From an archetypal perspective, this begins to resemble something else entirely.
Ares – the archetype of war.
Not Ares in his noble expression of courage and protection, but Ares as pure war-making energy.
Conflict detached from purpose.
The impulse to attack without possessing a vision of what ought to replace the ruins.
A hundred-year war against masculinity itself.
This is perhaps the great irony of the modern West.
A civilisation attempting to soften masculinity may itself have been driven by one of the most archetypically masculine forces imaginable: a relentless, agonistic and destructive spirit that cannot cease fighting.
And perhaps this is why so many young men now find themselves spiritually disoriented.
The old images have been dismantled.
The old stories have been deconstructed.
The old ideals have been rendered suspect.
But few compelling alternatives have emerged.
The result is not liberation.
It is initiation interrupted.
What is striking is that many people who abhor figures such as Jordan Peterson, or Elon Musk often struggle to explain the sheer intensity of their reactions. These days China is aiding and abetting Putin’s senseless war against Ukraine, and yet many of my compatriots would sooner avoid buying a Tesla than hesitate to purchase products made in China. The asymmetries of outrage are psychologically interesting.
These hyper popular masculine men appear to function as symbolic containers for something larger: hierarchy, assertion, ambition, confrontation, masculine certainty, paternal authority, technological mastery, refusal to apologise and the will to shape the world rather than merely adapt to it.
In other words, they are not merely public figures.
They have become archetypal provocations.
The hostility directed towards them is therefore not only political. It is also psychological. It reveals that the question of masculinity remains profoundly unresolved in the modern West.
Masculinity, by default, is increasingly regarded with suspicion. Assertiveness readily becomes domination. Hierarchy becomes oppression. Competitiveness becomes pathology. Ambition becomes narcissism. Masculine traits are often considered morally legitimate only insofar as they are placed in the service of the zeitgeist’s inclusive and woke causes.
Men need initiation
Traditional societies often had rites that transformed boys into men.
Modern society often says:
“Be yourself.”
But this offers very little symbolic guidance.
A James Hillman-inspired question might be:
What images initiate young men today? The entrepreneur? The warrior? The activist? The victim? The influencer? The perpetual adolescent?
Because if culture doesn’t provide initiatory images, social media certainly will.
Reimagining masculinity should include the shadow
Hillman distrusted moralising.
Aggression, competition, hierarchy and ambition are not simply pathologies.
The question becomes:
- How do we relate to these energies?
- How do we cultivate them without being possessed by them?
Ares can become brutality.
Apollo can become rigidity.
Hermes can become irresponsibility.
Dionysus can become chaos.
Psychological maturity is less about eliminating these gods and more about entering into conscious relationship with them.
But how do we go about reimagining masculinity?
Masculinity as plurality, not a single ideal
A very Hillmanian (James Hilmann was director of Jungian studies at the CG Jung Institute in Zurich in the years 1959-1969) move is to reject the idea that there is one mature, healthy masculinity.
Instead of asking, “What should men be?”, ask:
- Which masculine archetypes have been neglected?
- Which have become inflated?
- Which gods are absent from modern men’s lives?
For example:
- Ares – healthy aggression, courage, vitality.
- Hermes – playfulness, curiosity, movement, friendship.
- Apollo – order, competence, rationality.
- Dionysus – emotion, ecstasy, embodied aliveness.
- Hades – introspection, depth, solitude.
One could argue that many men today are encouraged to develop Hermes – the eternal youth and the hedonic tendencies connected to Dionysus while simultaneously being suspicious of Apollo and Ares.
That can leave them psychologically one-sided. Or worse they embody Ares in computer games living out false adventures – and suffer alone in the morose Hades archetype – an archetype which played right is man’s bridge to his own emotions and to women and lasting relationships.
The interplay between the archetypes in a man’s psychogical development is at the heart of the following discussion:
Views: 16
