CORRECTED_Crisis of masculinity: Young men looking to TV, film and internet for role models

It's hard to hate the tough guy

Go ahead, make my day. Or at least that used to be the case

Who are you? The worst nightmare. Legends like Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone dominated the box office for years

and left their impact on a generation of young men. But as the media has evolved, so has the role of role models

Young men have been increasingly turning to fictional characters, public figures and celebrities instead of the men in their lives

In our coverage of the crisis of masculinity, we're following Will Adolfi, who says his search

for a place in society led him to a Manosphere influencer who became like a father figure to him

Influencers are people as well. And having a large voice, you know, becoming famous

tapping into a zeitgeist without even knowing it. All of a sudden they found themselves with

you know, like massive audiences, because there was a whole generation of young people

such as myself, who were searching for guidance. A recent study found 47% of young men between the

ages of 13 and 30 say they are looking for people in pop culture for masculine role models

whether it's fictional characters, public figures or celebrities. It's the same report that found

43% of young men do not know what it means to be a man today. We've seen over the last few years

an increasing acknowledgement within our cultural discourse, within the media, within the media

industry, around this notion of a crisis of masculinity, this sense of young men, boys in

today's world are really struggling to understand what it means to be a man in 2025. My name is

Fergus Navaratne-Blaire. I'm the Vice President for Trends and Futures at National Research Group

or NRG. We work a lot with clients in the film and TV industry. We've heard a lot from them that

they are really struggling right now to capture and to hold on to the attention of younger male

audiences, especially given that they're competing for that attention against so many other sources

of entertainment, from gaming to social video and social media, to international genres like anime

and so on. One of the big questions in the study was, who did you look up to as male role models

growing up? More than half of young men, 52%, say most of their role models are the real people in

their lives. But 26% said they look to fictional characters. And 21% said public figures and

celebrities were role models in their lives. Fergus explains the way Hollywood has portrayed

masculinity has transitioned from the Golden Age to contemporary cinema. So if you go back to the 1960s for example you can see the way in which a lot of the depictions of masculinity of that era were very much informed by the countercultural energy of the time You know films like Easy Rider and Taxi Driver

You talking to me? You talking to me? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, you know, all grappling with these questions of, you know, how you can sort of defy the shackles of traditional social norms and traditional sources of authority

in the 1980s, you see the pendulum shift very dramatically towards a more unapologetically

macho vision of masculinity. You know, and you think about the cultural context of the time

you have the Cold War reaching its apex, you have Ronald Reagan in the White House

you have the conservative movement really in the ascendant within American culture

That reflects itself in the media of the time. And you see stories like the Terminator franchise

I'll be back. As you see stories like Rambo and these titles that are about very unapologetically macho men, often in military roles or law enforcement roles, who really have a really sort of physical sense of masculinity about them

Back in the 1990s, we start to see more of a preoccupation around how do you reconcile masculinity and modernity

And there's a lot of movies from that era of the 90s, movies like Office Face and American Beauty and Fight Club, another great example

Is that what a man looks like? Really about what does masculinity look like in the context of the modern information age, in the context of modern office culture

When probably you and I were growing up, 70s, 80s, 90s, what you saw was a very narrow band of masculinity

It was primarily kind of white. There were very few Asian and Latino ever, you know

And if they were, they were stereotyped. And so particularly men of color, very negative images most of the time

Matt Engler Carlson is a professor at Cal State Fullerton, focusing on the psychology of metamasculinities

And most of the men kind of fit into like one or two different categories, right

Like the action hero, the bumbling dad or whatnot. And now we see a lot more variety in terms of kind of men in different kind of roles

As television and eventually streaming became a major vehicle for storytelling, Fergus says male characters transformed again

You had shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men and Breaking Bad

Now, say my name. Heisenberg. They're all about these characters who live outside of the law

these characters who defy social conventions, these characters who wear this kind of very rigid mask of masculinity

But he says with nearly endless options for entertainment some of the most popular characters in film and TV have lost that hard edge You had shows like Modern Family and This Is Us and so on you know exploring or Ted Lasso another great example

exploring visions of masculinity that weren't quite so rooted in these ideas of physical strength and in these ideas of ambition and success and dominance

Are you kidding me? I think concerts are rad. Hello, I was a hall raiser

A what? I followed Hall and Oates around the country one summer

Rich girl just spoke to me. I think Hollywood's getting better at it because they're being policed more, if that makes sense

And I think there's some genuine efforts to kind of portray men in more adaptive roles

And I think that's the main piece. And you don't see the same expressive kind of violence, homophobia and things like that anymore

And so Hollywood can be a beacon. So that stuff doesn't always sell

and Hollywood at the end of the day is going to be about the bottom line

But with all the options today, it's harder to put your finger on what masculinity looks like in film and TV

You don't see necessarily one concrete vision of this is what masculinity is in Hollywood in 2025

You see different actors, different entertainment brands playing with that concept in different ways

and pushing it in different directions. And I think Timothee Chalamet is a great example of that

you know, trying to create this, like, newer version of masculinity that you know in something like Dune he sort of balances the kind

of the action hero element with the sort of philosopher king element almost a little bit

it's a very interesting narrative from that perspective but you know he's also someone

who's proven he's willing to explore visions of masculinity sort of outside of traditional

heteronormative paradigms films like Call Me By Your Name for example. While Chalamet might

illustrate a unique version of modern masculinity, NRG found that when it came to fictional role

models in media today, no characters from movies and TV sets in the real world made the top 20

The top five were Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, Harry Potter, and Iron Man. The authors of the

study point out all of this matters because it means that young men are gravitating toward a

vision of masculinity that is by definition never going to be fully obtainable. There are very few

characters that young men are looking up to right now that are really rooted in the real world

And I think as we move forward as a culture, we need to think about what that's saying to young

men. When it comes to real world figures young men are looking up to, it shifts between generations

Researchers found the top five for Gen Z and millennials were LeBron James, Martin Luther

King Jr., Dwayne The Rock Johnson, followed by Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama

For Gen Alpha Mr Beast tops the list followed by The Rock LeBron Steph Curry and Cristiano Ronaldo Particularly younger men when we look at boys 8 to 13 boys in their teenage years

a lot of that is driven by the world of sports. LeBron, a huge influence

People like Patrick Mahomes, for example, as well. People like Travis Kelcey of the world

the Mr. Beast of the world, but also people like Kai Senat, Theo Vaughn

the Paul brothers, Aisho Speed, all these sorts of content creators and playing a really, really significant role

in shaping what masculinity looks like to younger audiences these days. That trend is even more pronounced

as you look at what jobs boys and gen alpha aspire to. Video game streamers is number one

followed by online video creator, and then social media influencer comes in at number six

ahead of firefighter, police officer, and doctor. For parents worried about their kids' obsession with online creators

as Fergus points out, this is not a new problem. The 60s, parents worrying about the impact of rock and roll and popular music

whether it's 90s and 2000s, parents worrying about video games, you know, always have this kind of intergenerational conflict

of trying to understand the messages that are being portrayed. Instead, Fergus likes to focus on the positive forms of masculinity

presented by some influencers. A lot of these creators put a real emphasis on male camaraderie, male friendship

They make these videos with their crews of male friends that they're bantering around with and building these relationships with, this rapport with

They stand by these friends publicly. They incorporate them into their videos

I think that's an element that really appeals to a lot of young men. But not all online influencers are the same

Adolfi's search for answers led him to an influencer. so and i started to watch stuff online and i started to feel like oh the world hates men

right that idea started to come in to my head so i started listening to a lot of podcasts that were

like oriented around how you can improve yourself and then alongside that i started hearing kind of

intellectuals talk about the left and it all started off very reasonable you know the left's

going a bit too far, right? A lot of the influencers I were watching, they were very, very resentful

towards the left, right? Woke culture, political correctness, feminism, and that really lit a fire

in me. As Will became more and more into his influencer, he says it didn't offer the support

he had been searching for. We'll delve into his content addiction and how he dug himself out to

help other young men searching for answers in the next piece on the crisis of masculinity

I'm Craig DeGrawley