Author Rollo Tomassi talked to Dr. Phil on Friday about how an entire generation of young men or "lost boys" are neglected and demonized for being males.
Dr. Phil's recent episode titled "The Demise of Guys" discussed how young men in America are facing an existential crisis of what it means to be a man, with many seeking masculine self-help gurus online. Debate raged over what constitutes "toxic masculinity" and what qualifies as demonizing masculinity itself.
Dr. Phil asked Tomassi about past statements, "What do you mean when you say media celebrates masculinity as equally acting feminine?"
"That’s the only time that the mainstream media will ever celebrate masculinity is when you see The Rock in a tutu," Tomassi responded. "Whenever you see men behaving conventionally feminine, that’s when the media decides to celebrate them. But yet when a guy is acting in a conventionally masculine way, we do not celebrate that, they find some way to demonize that."
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Dr. Phil introduced Tomassi as the "godfather of the Manosphere," the Manosphere being a decentralized online community of men over two decades who, as Tomassi described, "compare notes" about how to improve in physical training, financial success and social skills.
Tomassi noted, "We have a generation of what we call ‘lost boys’ right now who don’t have a father figure, they don’t have any guidance-whether its masculinity or much else for that matter."
The author added further that men are "sedated" by society via escapism through alcohol, pornography, and video games because their lives are so miserable.
Dr. Phil asked about the suicide rate of men compared to women being 3.5-5 times larger.
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Tomassi responded that "deaths of despair" have become more common because society has so few mechanisms or institutions that are looking out for the welfare of men as a distinct group.
"We constantly harp on the fact that men don’t have friends, don’t have close friends, don’t have the same networks that women do, and then we put the blame for their mental health back on them by saying ‘its toxic masculinity and if you guys were just more like women, then you would reach out for therapy of some sort,'" he said.
He illustrated how society would be radically different if women were encountering these issues.
"If women were killing themselves at 4 times the rate that men are, you would have a dedicated month and the NFL would change their uniforms to pink or something else so that we would have some sort of female suicide prevention month, but we don’t see that right now, because we blame it on toxic masculinity," he said.
