This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Christopher Dummitt, March 3, 2026
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.
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.
Many Canadians probably stroll into their YMCA on a weekday to hit the gym without realizing that it was born in just such a moment, when moralists in the late 19th century worried about the plight of young men in the city. What would happen to the boys when they were shorn from their family homes, without mothers around to get them to church on Sundays and instill the moral lessons that were thought so desperately needed? The answer was to create something called the Young Men’s Christian Association, to give young lads somewhere to stay in the industrial city, get exercise, and be guided toward their Lord and saviour.
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