Why Men Need Bad-Boy Literature

In so many ways, the “crisis of masculinity” is a crisis of imagination. We have a vivid, if generalised, image of its victim: the lost boy of modernity surrounded with his clichés of video games, online porn and Jordan Petersons. We take him seriously, cataloguing him nobly as one of society’s most pressing failures — as well as one of its chief villains. But the figure above is little more than a shadowy caricature, and our distance from him is inhibiting our discussion of the problem. A culture that has forgotten to think honestly about what a young man can be like cannot understand what afflicts him, let alone how to fix him.