I have spent a good chunk of my career reading the results sections of studies on men and masculinity, and after a while you can predict them before you turn the page. Pick a harmful outcome; depression, substance use, a reluctance to see a doctor, and somewhere in the data, adherence to “traditional masculine norms” will be linked to it. Higher score, worse outcome. Like clockwork.
That’s not because the researchers were wrong. It’s because of how the yardstick was built.
My colleagues and I at the Movember Institute of Men’s Health just finished the most complete audit of that yardstick that’s ever been done: a review of 65 masculinity scales, the tools researchers have used to study men and health since 1974. We found that 78% of them are built to detect deficits only. A man rates how much he agrees with a statement like “a real man never shows emotion,” and researchers check whether higher agreement predicts something going wrong. Only 22% leave any room for the idea that masculinity might also be a source of something worth keeping: service, providing, showing up for the people around you.
Fifty years in the making, and we’ve built an extraordinarily precise instrument for measuring what’s broken, and almost nothing for measuring what’s working.
I don’t think that’s a conspiracy. It reflects a well-founded and, for the most part, correct instinct: rigid masculine norms really are linked to worse mental health, worse help seeking, more risk taking. That work matters and isn’t going anywhere. But when 78% of a field’s toolkit only looks one direction, you have to ask who’s filling the silence on the other side. Men of all ages ask themselves some version of “how do I become the best man I can be”. If research and public health can’t answer that, somebody more confident will. Attention is profitable, and certainty sells better than caution, a lesson the algorithm learned long before academia did.
We wanted to see exactly how, so my team pulled the actual TikTok viewing histories of young men aged 16 to 25 and coded more than 2,000 of the videos landing in their feeds. What we found is what I’ve started calling the ‘Inverted Iceberg’. On the surface, the content they’re watching is completely benign: gym routines, discipline, self-improvement, “how to get your life together”, the exact stuff every men’s health campaign, including ours at Movember, has told young men to seek out for years.
But underneath that surface layer sits something else, content that quietly escalates from fitness tips toward dominance, toward rigid rules about what a “real man” provides, earns and controls, toward outright misogyny. Young men rarely go looking for the bottom of that iceberg. The algorithm takes them there, a few recommended videos at a time, because the same search terms: gym, grind, discipline, sit at the entry point of both a healthy habit and a radicalisation pipeline.
These young men aren’t looking for hate, they’re looking for direction. An answer to “who am I supposed to be” that doesn’t come wrapped in a warning label. And for fifty years, academia’s loudest, best-funded answer has been a list of everything they’re doing wrong.
You can’t outcompete an algorithm that offers certainty with a research field that only offers caution. If the only well-developed vocabulary we’ve given men is about what to avoid, we shouldn’t be surprised when they go looking elsewhere for something to move toward, even if what they find is worse.
This is why our team is building something we call the Healthy Manhood Index: a measure grounded in what men themselves say thriving looks like, not what academics assume it should look like. It won’t hand anyone a script for the “correct” way to be a man, there isn’t one, and pretending otherwise is exactly the mistake the manosphere makes. Instead, it will quantify the real, everyday pressures men navigate as they work out what kind of man to be, and point them toward support when those pressures become overwhelming. It’s a genuine, evidence-based language for the other half of the story, one researchers, clinicians and platforms like this one have never really had: purpose, connection, responsibility, the version of masculinity that doesn’t require anyone to lose themselves to prove it.
We’ve spent fifty years cataloguing the cost of rigid masculinity. It’s time we got just as serious about measuring what a man moving toward thriving actually looks like.
