The Attack on Masculinity — Part I: The Roots

This is Part I of a three-part series on the attack on masculinity. Part II examines the APA Guidelines themselves. Part III examines the consequences.

The phrase “attack on masculinity” is not rhetoric. It describes a documented, decades-long institutional and cultural project to redefine, pathologize, and ultimately dismantle traditional masculinity as a psychological and social norm.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a matter of public record. The American Psychological Association (APA) officially declared “traditional masculinity” — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and self-reliance — to be “psychologically harmful” in its 2018 Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.

This was the first time in the APA’s 126-year history that it issued practice guidelines for men and boys — and the guidelines were framed not around healing, but around correction. The accompanying APA Monitor article stated that the guidelines “draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage.”

The New York Times amplified the message: “Traditional masculinity can hurt boys, says new APA Guidelines.”

What followed was a firestorm. Critics argued the APA had “chosen to disparage men with traditional values and endorsed a far-left worldview that was ideological rather than clinically helpful.” Some psychologists warned that the guidelines could amount to “clinical malpractice.” But the damage was already done. An entire class of natural male behavior had been reclassified as a pathology.

This article traces the roots of that reclassification — where it came from, who shaped it, what they believed, and what they did. It is not a rejection of women’s legitimate concerns. It is an examination of what happens when one sex’s struggles are treated as a moral failing rather than a human problem.

The attack on masculinity did not begin in 2018. It has roots stretching back more than a century — to the Progressive Era, when American education was first reimagined.

Historians David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, in Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (1992), documented how early Progressive educators were consciously concerned that schools had become “feminized” — dominated by female teachers and perceived as hostile to masculine energy. Some historians suggest the reforms advanced by male Progressive educators “can be understood as an attempt to masculinize the schools.”

The Boy Scouts of America, founded in 1910, was in part a “Boys Liberation Movement” — an effort to allow boys to “regain that hardy boyishness of the frontier” that industrial-age schooling seemed designed to suppress.

The “boy problem” was visible then. What is new is its universalization — and the ideological framework that made it invisible.

The modern era of the assault on masculinity began with a series of legal and institutional victories in the early 1970s. These were not accidents. They were deliberate policy choices with profound consequences.

The shift was not organic. It was driven by specific individuals and organizations with specific ideological commitments.

The APA guidelines were developed largely by the Boys and Men Guidelines Group of Division 51 (Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities). Prominent involvements have been credited to Fred Rabinowitz, Matt Englar-Carlson, Mark Kiselica, and Ronald Levant.

The guidelines were written by psychologists who were “increasingly women or men who identify with feminist theory,” according to a 2026 Current Opinion in Psychology article. Concerns were raised that “good intentions to address women’s issues have transmogrified into open anti-male bias even as men’s functioning has declined.”

The WEEA was proposed by Congresswoman Patsy Mink and enacted with federal funding. The NOW resolution was passed by an organization that had become a dominant force in American cultural and educational policy.

Why Did They Do It?

The stated justification was that traditional masculinity harms men and boys — that stoicism, competitiveness, and emotional suppression lead to mental health problems. But critics argue the real motivation was ideological: to dismantle traditional gender roles as part of a broader progressive project.

As the journal New Ideas in Psychology concluded: “The guidelines failed to acknowledge significant evidence for biological influences on gender… were unintentionally disparaging of traditional men and families, and were too closely wedded to specific sociocultural narratives and incurious of data not supporting those narratives.”

The authors of the guidelines, in their defense, argued that “criticisms of the Guidelines Tend to Reflect Anti-Feminist and Gender Essentialist Perspectives” and that the guidelines “Followed All Rules and Regulations Set Forth by the APA.”

But the question remains: Why did an organization dedicated to psychological health choose to pathologize the very traits that have built civilizations?

The APA defined traditional masculinity as “marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression [which] is, on the whole, harmful.”

Traditional masculine ideology refers to “a set of conventional standards and expectations for men” that “essentially define what it means to be ‘masculine’ within a particular society.” These include themes of “achievement, emotional control,” independence, and self-sufficiency.

In other words, the very traits that have historically enabled men to build nations, defend families, and provide for communities — stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, self-reliance — were officially designated as pathological.

The guidelines did acknowledge that “traditional masculinity is ‘the most historically privileged’ among ways of enacting masculinity.” But critics noted that this framing conflates men with masculinity — a logical error that leads to treating all men as inherently problematic.

The term “toxic masculinity” itself has a surprising origin. It was coined in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and ’90s — a movement that was, in part, a reaction to second-wave feminism. Through male-only workshops, poets and therapists sought to help men reclaim what they saw as a lost “deep masculine” essence.

The irony is profound: a term coined by men seeking to heal masculinity was later weaponized to condemn it.