The Fake Boys Crisis
The Manufactured Boys' Crisis and the Collapse of Liberal Courage
The dominant political narrative of the past decade has insisted that boys in Western societies are undergoing a profound crisis of identity and belonging. According to this story, boys have been overwhelmed by the demands of feminism, multiculturalism, and the broader social movement toward equality, leaving them disoriented, resentful, and vulnerable to extremist ideologies. This narrative has been repeated so often — by conservatives, centrists, and even some liberal commentators — that it now passes as a matter of common sense. Yet it is false. Boys are not becoming fascists because too much was asked of them; they are becoming fascists because society, particularly its liberal institutions, refused to demand enough. When confronted with the first signs of entitlement, cruelty, and resentment, society failed to impose moral consequences. Instead, it tolerated, accommodated, and even legitimized hatred, allowing reactionary grievance to take root under the pretense of free speech and pluralistic dialogue. The crisis is not in boys; it is in liberal society’s catastrophic abdication of its responsibility to enforce the minimal moral standards necessary for freedom itself.
The betrayal was not accidental, nor was it isolated to individual failures. It was systemic and structural. Schools, fearful of alienating male students, hesitated to discipline them when they mocked or attacked others. Media outlets, addicted to a shallow vision of "both sides" journalism, treated rising currents of misogyny, racism, and queerphobia as legitimate perspectives rather than immediate threats to the social fabric. Politicians, desperate to preserve fragile coalitions, downplayed bigotry as merely economic frustration or cultural displacement. Centrists, clinging to an imagined civility, insisted on hearing out grievances that were already fully formed expressions of domination and cruelty. In the name of fairness, they allowed hate to grow. In the name of free debate, they normalized fantasies of violence. In the name of tolerance, they created the conditions for its annihilation.
This failure was not an absence of structure, but the function of a structure already at work. The supposed neutrality of liberal institutions was — and remains — a camouflage for their true role: the quiet, continuous enabling of domination under the aesthetic of tolerance. To treat hatred as a legitimate view rather than a rupture of the social contract is not neutrality; it is collaboration with cruelty. When someone speaks in defense of dehumanization, talking over them is not incivility — it is the correct structural act of preserving the conditions under which dialogue is even possible. Refusing to allow hate a platform is not a violation of freedom; it is the minimal duty owed to it.
It must be clearly understood that shutting down hate does not mean hysterical shaming or performative outrage. The force required is not emotional but structural. Shutting down hate means setting explicit, non-negotiable boundaries: participation in civic life is contingent upon the recognition of others' full humanity. Those who violate this condition should be excluded from schools, public platforms, institutions, and communities — not as a punishment for thoughtcrime, but as the only way to preserve the possibility of a pluralistic society. Freedom of speech, properly understood, protects individuals from government censorship; it does not guarantee a right to audience, institutional legitimacy, or social inclusion. When reactionaries claim that exclusion from platforms or institutions violates their free speech, they are deploying a fundamentally dishonest strategy — one designed not to defend dialogue, but to paralyze society's ability to defend itself. This tactic, perfected by fascists throughout history, must be exposed and rejected without apology. A community that cannot expel those who reject equality is not a community that values freedom; it is a community already in decay.
The refusal to enforce basic moral standards has been accompanied by another, equally devastating failure: the systematic suppression of true freedom of identity and expression, particularly around gender. Although conservatives and liberals alike pay lip service to the ideal of personal freedom, they react with terror at the notion that children might play with gender, experiment with identities, or exist outside traditional social categories. The panic over "gender ideology" is not about protecting children; it is about protecting hierarchy. True freedom — the freedom to play, to experiment, to fail, to return to traditional roles by choice rather than by coercion — reveals that social roles are not natural inevitabilities but contingent structures subject to change.
A deceptively simple scene from the pilot episode of Futurama helps illuminate this fear. In the episode, Fry, a delivery boy from the 20th century, awakens in the distant future and is assigned the same occupation by an impersonal career chip. Fry’s horror is not at the job itself, but at the loss of agency; he can no longer imagine that his place in the world is freely chosen. This moment captures the psychic terror underpinning reactions to gender play. What threatens both conservatives and liberals is not the content of new identities, but the exposure of the arbitrariness of the old ones. If roles can be chosen, they can also be rejected. If gender is open, then so is race, nation, class, and every other ordering fiction of the social order. This is the unspoken terror that animates the war against freedom: the fear that hierarchy itself is not necessary, but imposed and sustained only by repression.
Against this background, it becomes clear that the left’s failure is not merely theoretical but existential. In a deep structural sense, we do agree with conservatives that there must be baseline moral standards for participation in society. The difference is that the left actually believes in the principles it espouses — equality, dignity, freedom — whereas the right invokes morality only as a weapon to preserve domination. The right is willing to enforce standards ruthlessly, but only in service of cruelty and exclusion. Their actions betray that they do not believe their own morals. The left, by contrast, clings sincerely to universalist ideals but recoils from the necessity of enforcing them, paralyzed by the fear that exclusion itself is illiberal. This fear is fatal. Without the unapologetic enforcement of its foundational values, a society is defenseless against those who would destroy it. A truly egalitarian order must be uncompromising in its commitment to equality, willing to draw hard lines, and prepared to exclude those who violate them. This is not a betrayal of freedom; it is its condition.
From a Lacanian perspective, the existence of an external Law is inevitable; the subject always enters into a symbolic structure governed by prohibitions and permissions. The question is not whether law will exist, but what it will serve. A hauntological reading demands that we recognize the ghost of a true universalism, one that was always promised but never realized, and which now demands a brutal, uncompromising fidelity if it is to have any future at all. The Law must no longer serve the defense of hierarchy; it must serve the defense of equality. Liberals and centrists must abandon the fantasy that the space of freedom can survive without the exercise of structural force. They must recognize that intolerance of hatred is not a violation of liberalism, but its fulfillment.
In the final analysis, there is no "boys' crisis." There is only a society that abandoned the defense of its own ideals, and in so doing, manufactured the very conditions of fascist resurgence it now impotently laments. The time for dialogue with hatred is over. The time for mourning lost privileges is over. What remains is the hard task of drawing lines — unapologetically, forcefully, and without shame — in defense of a freedom that must be willed into existence every day, against enemies both open and hidden. Anything less is not tolerance. It is surrender.