NYU professor Scott Galloway deserves credit for saying something too many cultural leaders still avoid: Boys and young men are not OK. They are falling behind in school, withdrawing from work, retreating from relationships and disappearing into digital worlds that offer stimulation without meaning. Galloway’s writing on “healthy masculinity” resonates because it names realities parents, teachers and researchers confront daily. In a culture that increasingly treats masculinity itself as suspect, simply affirming that boys matter is no small thing.
But the crisis facing American boys — and the deeper danger facing American society — cannot be solved by health alone. What we are witnessing is not merely a breakdown in confidence or emotional regulation. It is a collapse of moral formation. Boys are not just struggling; they are unanchored. They are growing up in a culture that has emptied manhood of purpose, stripped masculine strength of meaning and replaced inherited moral expectations with vague warnings about what men must not become.
For years, boys have absorbed a steady message: Masculine traits are liabilities. Physical courage is framed as aggression. Competitiveness is treated as pathology. Risk-taking is something to be managed away. The drive to build, protect or lead is often met with suspicion. When boys misbehave, the culture has a rich vocabulary of condemnation. When boys ask what they are for, the culture offers little more than silence.
The result is not gentler men. It is drifting ones.
“Healthy masculinity,” as Galloway presents it, encourages responsibility, empathy, ambition, emotional openness and self-control. These are real virtues. But the framework remains fundamentally therapeutic. It treats masculinity as a personal wellness project — habits to cultivate, impulses to manage, behaviors to moderate. It teaches boys how to cope in a confusing world, but not why they should rise to meet it. It offers guidance, not a calling.
Boys need more than coping skills. They need a horizon.
What I call sacred masculinity begins with a simple but unfashionable premise: Masculinity is morally consequential. It is a form of power — physical, emotional, social — that demands direction. Every civilization understood this until very recently. The question has never been whether male strength will shape society, but whether it will be disciplined toward protection, provision, sacrifice and service — or left to curdle into aimlessness and resentment.
Sacred masculinity does not romanticize men or excuse abuse. It binds strength to obligation. It treats courage as something owed, not displayed. It understands masculinity as a calling ordered toward others rather than an identity optimized for self-expression. Where healthy masculinity asks how a man manages himself, sacred masculinity asks what — and whom — his strength is meant to serve.
The clearest illustration of this is lived, not theoretical. On Oct. 7, 2023, during the Hamas attacks in Israel, a father named Gil Ta’asa died shielding his children. His final act was not ideological or performative. It was covenantal. He placed his body between his children and danger and absorbed the cost himself. In that moment, masculinity was neither toxic nor ornamental. It was sacred. Strength existed for love. Power existed for protection.
No boy raised with that image will ever wonder why manhood matters.
For much of American history, boys were formed within civic and moral structures that made this vision concrete. Faith communities taught boys that their strength carried responsibility. Fraternal organizations, work and mentorship modeled discipline and service. Youth sports and scouting offered rites of passage — signals that boyhood was preparation for adult responsibility.
Much of that architecture has collapsed. Religious participation among young men has fallen sharply. Work has become more isolated and less formative. Schools increasingly deny meaningful sex differences, leaving boys to navigate development without guidance. In place of formation, boys receive content. In place of initiation, they get algorithms.
This helps explain why loneliness among young men has surged, why male college enrollment has declined and why men account for most deaths of despair. These are not isolated failures of motivation. They are predictable outcomes of a society that has stopped inviting men into shared moral projects.
Galloway rightly calls for mentorship. Sacred masculinity insists we must rebuild the institutions that actually produce mentors. Galloway urges emotional openness. Sacred masculinity asks whether boys have anything worthy of that emotional investment. Galloway wants men to be healthier. Sacred masculinity wants them to be needed.
This distinction matters for civic life itself. A society that does not form its men becomes brittle — less capable of sustaining families and more vulnerable to appeals that offer belonging without responsibility.
Sacred masculinity offers a harder but more hopeful path. It tells boys that one day others will depend on them. That self-control and endurance are not about feelings but responsibility. It teaches that freedom is not the absence of obligation but the capacity to carry it well.
This vision appears in fathers who remain present when disengagement would be easier; in coaches and teachers who demand discipline to prepare boys; and in men who commit to work, marriage and community rather than drifting in permanent adolescence.
Crucially, sacred masculinity also places responsibility on adult men. Boys do not drift because no one lectures them. They drift because too few men invite them into a shared life of duty.
The tragedy of our current discourse is that it collapses masculine failure into the language of “toxicity,” teaching boys to distrust their own capacity before they know what it is for. That overcorrection then produces its opposite: caricatures that validate grievance without demanding virtue.
The answer is neither nostalgia nor androgyny. It is formation — rebuilding schools, civic groups, faith communities and fraternal institutions willing to speak plainly about what we expect from men and why.
Scott Galloway has helped reopen a necessary conversation. But if we stop at healthy masculinity, we will leave the deepest problem untouched. Men do not only need to feel better. They need to be better.
Healthy masculinity teaches men how to cope. Sacred masculinity teaches them what they are for.
If we want stronger families and a more resilient civic culture, we must stop treating masculinity as an embarrassment and start treating it again as a charge. Boys will rise to expectations — if we are brave enough to place any at all.