Steven Roberts
Notes on Being a Man is a new book by the American marketing academic, podcaster and entrepreneur, Scott Galloway. It landed with a flurry of breathless media coverage and viral clips promising to explain what’s gone wrong with the modern male. Offering a now familiar cocktail of self-help and cultural panic, Galloway’s book presents as tonally different but belongs essentially to the long-running “woe-is-men” genre as Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power from 1993 or Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.
Now, there is undeniably value in drawing attention to boys and men’s distress: lagging educational participation, high suicide rates, the quiet desperation of many men. But the Galloway’s diagnosis mistakes a broad social malaise for a gender-specific pathology. By treating the ills of our time as primarily a male economic and identity disorder, he narrows the structural story into a familiar “boys-in-crisis” refrain.
A complicating factor here is that loneliness, disconnection and erosion of belonging are shared, structural conditions cut across gender, class and employment status. In Australia, loneliness itself is not a male preserve. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that in 2023, 15 per cent of men and 19 per cent of women aged 15 and over said they “often felt lonely”. Younger Australians are particularly affected: 26.6 per cent of those aged 15–24 reported frequent loneliness in 2020, up from 18.5 per cent two decades earlier.
Importantly, the evidence from Galloway’s own backyard tells a similar story. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2024 that loneliness in the United States was marginally more common among women than men (33.5 per cent versus 30.7 per cent), while men were slightly more likely to report a lack of social and emotional support (26.1 per cent versus 22.3 per cent). The gaps are small but revealing: loneliness is a broadly shared social condition, not a gendered epidemic. Men’s deficit more often lies in networks of emotional support while women’s tends to appear in the higher prevalence of reported loneliness.
Either way, the data shows that the malaise is collective, not a uniquely male affliction.
Moreover, employment alone does not inoculate people against disconnection. A 2024 BMC Public Health study of Australian men found that while job security matters, social connection, neighbourhood belonging and partner status were just as significant in predicting loneliness. Furthermore, international research shows that job quality (autonomy, respect, community) matters more for well-being than whether one simply has a job. Many men with jobs are just as lonely as those without. The sickness is civic and relational, not merely economic.
To his credit, Galloway acknowledges structural forces — such as automation, wage stagnation, de-industrialisation — that might contribute to men’s threatened sense of purpose. Yet his understanding of structure remains narrow. It reflects a sort of economic monism –—a conviction that if men can be re-integrated into the labour market, their despair will lift. Work becomes the therapy and productivity the measure of healing. This recycles an old masculine code in which worth is signalled by output. It also converts social pain into an economic idiom, making it legible within the logic of capitalism (“give men jobs, they’ll be okay”) rather than as evidence of wider civic collapse.
There’s also a sleight of hand in Galloway’s story, with men’s supposed decline constantly measured against women’s rise. The data on higher female university enrolments, shifting partner expectations and women’s earnings growth all become proxies for “male loss”. The suggestion, however subtle, is that women’s advancement has destabilised men, that the problem lies not in changing economies or social structures but in women’s refusal to play the supportive roles men once relied on.
This logic extends to how intimacy is framed. Galloway and other “men-in-crisis” commentators often treat women’s sexual and romantic choices as a kind of economic market: men’s loneliness is said to stem from women’s selectivity or independence, and the implied remedy is for men to “re-enter the game” through self-improvement and productivity. But this view mistakes dating for a zero-sum marketplace and women for a missing resource, turning social connection into something to be won back rather than mutually built.
Yet the same forces that unsettle men have also burdened women: longer work hours, persistent pay gaps and the expectation to shoulder most care and emotional labour. Moreover, the sympathy extended to men’s loneliness ensures public concern gathers around isolated men, not around the women who might be harmed by their isolation or rage. In a culture still defined by men’s entitlement to power and intimacy, the ongoing prevalence of violence against women sits in contradistinction to this elevated compassion for “male pain”.
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Meanwhile, the data Galloway cites as evidence of a sudden collapse are largely long-term patterns. Men have accounted for roughly three-quarters of suicides in Australia for decades — grim, but not new. Women have outnumbered men at universities since the early 1990s, yet men still earn more overall: the national gender pay gap was 12 per cent in 2024. What looks like decline is often the visibility of a re-balancing long in motion.
Largely left unsaid is who these men are. The crisis Galloway describes assumes a particular kind of male subject — notably a cisgender, heterosexual and socially normative. Trans men, gay and bisexual men, and others whose lives don’t fit the “provider-protector” template he invokes are absent from the story, though they often face sharper forms of exclusion and loneliness and elevated psychological distress and marginalisation.
Each time social change is re-cast as a male emergency, crisis rhetoric can become an alibi. If men’s violence and/or withdrawal are blamed on lost jobs or presumed sexual hierarchies, we risk excusing them as natural side-effects of structural change rather than confronting the deeper erosion of empathy, connection and shared meaning.
None of this diminishes the reality of men’s suffering. But to locate its cause primarily in lost economic roles is to misread the age. The real crisis is one of connection and the steady thinning of social infrastructure. Neighbourhood ties, collective institutions, civic associations and public trust have all waned. The atomisation of late modern life has left men, women and gender-diverse people untethered; no job title can substitute for community.
Galloway’s call for men to “get out of the house” and find purpose is not wrong, but re-integration cannot mean only re-entry into the economy — it must mean re-entry into society. The project ahead is not the restoration of manhood, but the reconstruction of belonging.
Steven Roberts is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University.
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Woe is men: Scott Galloway mistakes a broad social malaise for a gender-specific pathology – Australian Broadcasting Corporation
