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What we've lost (1): Masculinity

The Stoics saw the ideal man as brave and fearless, guided by reason, accepting what he could and could not control, compassionate, but not naïve about suffering

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The last 10 or 15 years have not been kind to Canada. Along with a decline in prosperity has come an erosion of the things that made our society great, a decline of what held us together and made us the envy of the world: things like resilience, friendship and service. In this series, National Post writers consider What We’ve Lost.

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If you didn’t know any better, you’d think men — especially young men — were the problem. Plenty of commentators claim the manosphere is luring boys into monstrous ideas, threatening to turn them into misogynistic trolls who hate women. Online incel communities supposedly lurk behind every 16-year-old boy’s Discord password, videogames like Grand Theft Auto will diminish empathy toward female victims offline, and podcasts like Joe Rogan’s pose “significant dangers” to how young men view gender, power, and equality.

What we've lost (1): Masculinity Back to video

The funny thing for a historian to notice in this contemporary man-fear, this modern andro-anxiety complex, is how much of a rehash it all is. There’s nothing new about being worried about our boys.

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