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With America's 250th anniversary on the horizon, these Europeans remind us how lucky we are to be here.With America's 250th anniversary on the horizon, these Europeans remind us how lucky we are to be here.Every Ring Girl’s Costume For UFC Freedom 250, On A Scale Of Sexy Martha Washington To 10
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Longtime gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan is now confessing that the slope is greasier and nastier than he’s comfortable with.'Why don't men go to therapy?' It all comes down to one very good reason
On both sides of the Atlantic, men, especially young men, are dying by suicide at rates that should freeze governments in their tracks. But the powers that be don’t seem to notice.
The U.K. watches males of all ages go under — boys dropping out of school, men in their 20s drifting between short-term jobs and long nights alone, 30s lost to drink, dread, or sheer exhaustion. The U.S. watches its men go under, too. Their suicide rates dwarf those of women, and overdose deaths skew heavily male.
When a young man limps into therapy, he’s met with soft voices, polite nods, and vague talk about letting his guard down.
Whenever this comes up, we hear the same insufferable chorus: Why won’t these men just go to therapy?
As if it’s that simple. As if men are ignoring a perfectly functioning safety net. As if they’re being stubborn for sport.
Girl talk
Most men aren’t avoiding therapy because they fear healing, but because the entire system is built with someone else in mind.
Walk into the average psychology department, clinic, or counseling office and look around. The landscape is overwhelmingly female — in training, in staffing, in leadership, in tone. In both the U.K. and the U.S., the majority of therapists are women.
While that isn’t inherently bad — many of these therapists are excellent — it does mean the system has been shaped by female norms, female communication styles, and female emotional instincts.
This is not a conspiracy theory but just an honest acknowledgment of reality. Men and women don’t experience mental suffering the same way. They don’t express it the same way. They don’t process it the same way. A woman in distress tends to talk her way outward. A man tends to go inward until the pressure builds, then either falls silent or implodes. Women spiral verbally; men quietly.
So when a young man limps into therapy — desperate, numb, maybe half a step away from ending it all — he enters a world where the emotional rules weren’t written for him. He’s told to “open up,” “talk through it,” “share feelings,” “name the emotion.” He’s met with soft voices, polite nods, and vague talk about letting his guard down. What he’s not met with is someone who speaks his language.
It’s a mismatch from the very first minute.
Manning up
And because therapy culture is so thoroughly feminized, a man struggling with anger, confusion, despair, or loss often feels like a stranger adrift in a foreign country — grappling with an unfamiliar language and baffling customs.
That’s not the therapist’s fault. But it is the system’s fault.
And this is the part no one wants to say out loud: Men respond better to men. Not because women are incompetent, but because no matter how skilled a female practitioner is, she will never fully understand what it means to move through the world as a man. Just as no man will ever fully understand the interior life of a woman.
A man who has lost his job, lost his marriage, or lost his sense of purpose doesn’t want to explain the weight of male shame to someone who has never carried it. A man who feels emasculated doesn’t want to define the word emasculated from scratch. A man drowning in a culture that treats masculinity as a pathology doesn’t want to walk into a room where he suspects that belief might subtly be shared.
And yes, he may be wrong. But suffering doesn’t make people clear-headed. If anything, it makes them cautious.
This is why men light up when paired with a male therapist — someone who knows the codes: the long pauses, the tight jaw, the clipped sentences, the jokes that aren’t jokes, the sudden confession buried in small talk. Someone who knows what it feels like to fail publicly and hurt privately. Someone who knows that “I’m fine” is never fine. Someone who understands that for men, emotional honesty often comes disguised as humor, deflection, or irritation.
But right now, the system expects men to adapt to it, not the other way around.
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Pundit patriarchy
And so the suicide numbers climb. Young men continue to vanish. Fathers fade. Sons and brothers never return home. Journalists write “What’s Wrong with Men?” think pieces. And the cycle rolls on, as pathetic as it is predictable.
If this were happening to young women, the entire culture would pivot. Funding would pour in. Campaigns would explode. Universities would redesign programs overnight. Therapy models would be reimagined to match the needs of the group in crisis.
But because it’s men — the group everyone assumes will always be fine, always be strong, always survive — nothing moves.
Maybe the darkest irony is that the very qualities that make men decline therapy — the sense of being misunderstood, mismatched, and misplaced — are the same qualities pushing them to the edge in the first place.
And unless the mental health world learns to meet men where they are, with approaches shaped by men who understand men, the funerals will continue, and everyone will keep acting surprised.
Against plastic surgery: Why I never trust an old person without wrinkles
“Our earth in 1969 / Is not the planet I call mine,” W.H. Auden declares at the outset of his late poem "Doggerel by a Senior Citizen." While acutely aware of the youth revolt then transforming the culture around him, Auden makes it clear that he is perfectly happy being stuck in the past:
Then Speech was mannerly, an Art,
Like learning not to belch or fart:
I cannot settle which is worse,
The Anti-Novel or Free Verse.
Nor are those Ph.D’s my kith,
Who dig the symbol and the myth:
I count myself a man of letters
Who writes, or hopes to, for his betters.
Dare any call Permissiveness
An educational success?
Saner those class-rooms which I sat in,
Compelled to study Greek and Latin.
Though I suspect the term is crap,
There is a Generation Gap,
Who is to blame? Those, old or young,
Who will not learn their Mother-Tongue.
These verses display a quality seldom found among today’s aging cultural figures: a complete lack of interest in courting the approval of the young. Auden was 62 when he wrote the poem; how many sexagenarians in 2026 would willingly describe themselves as "senior citizens"?
Even as counterfeit youthfulness fails to convince actual young people, it can offer them a useful warning signal.
Nor did the legendary poet make much effort to conceal the fact of his age. By then his face had become famously craggy and weathered, prompting him to quip that it resembled "a wedding cake left out in the rain."
Perpetual maidenhood
As it happens, it was a wedding cake that helped launch pop star Madonna to worldwide fame. At the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, the then-relatively unknown 26-year-old emerged from a 17-foot-tall, three-tiered prop cake in bridal white to perform "Like a Virgin."
Today, Madonna is five years older than Auden was when he wrote "Doggerel." It goes without saying that as a celebrity of a certain age, she has availed herself of the surgical remedies available to those with sufficient means. And she has achieved the familiar effect: She does not look old, exactly, though neither would anyone mistake her for young. Nor does she look particularly like Madonna.
In keeping with this perpetually "youthful" image, Madge continues to perform in the same kind of skimpy stage lingerie she wore in her 20s. Perhaps aware that the effect of such outfits is now more nostalgic than erotic, she has increasingly devoted herself to courting her sizeable gay male fan base. Yet even here she appears reluctant to surrender her claim on youth culture, recently "taking over" the gay hookup app Grindr to promote her latest album.
Withered wisdom
Whatever one thinks of her music, Madonna long ago secured her place in the cultural pantheon. She has nothing left to prove. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that she doesn’t have something to teach. You don't survive five decades in the public eye — weathering shifts in fashion, technology, and taste that bring lesser stars crashing back to earth — without learning a few things. But imparting the wisdom that comes with age and accomplishment would require shedding the past-its-sell-by-date "boy toy" packaging.
Many of us who aren’t famous must contend with this dilemma too. Even as a child, I cringed at the efforts of some adults to be “relatable” to me, abdicating their natural authority as if it would gain them back a few lost years.
Now, as a teacher slowly approaching my own Auden/Madonna crossroads, I hate to admit that I’ve at times found myself tempted to play the “cool” adult. Experience has taught me, however, that this pose has diminishing returns — especially in the classroom.
It also indicates a deeper moral and spiritual rot, as the late historian Christopher Lasch reminds us in his 1979 book “The Culture of Narcissism.”
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Cult of youth
Lasch’s thesis — which remains all too relevant almost half a century later — is that our modern “cult of youth” is emblematic of the nihilism and anxious obsession with the present that has overtaken so many. As he writes:
In a society that dreads old age and death, aging holds a special terror for those who fear dependence and whose self-esteem requires the admiration usually reserved for youth, beauty, celebrity, or charm. The usual defenses against the ravages of age — identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one’s immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past — can do nothing for the narcissist.
It's not that fillers and facelifts can’t be used with subtlety and restraint — although this rarely seems to be the case. It’s that even the most imperceptible plastic surgery suggests surrender to this nihilistic worldview. The passage of time doesn’t lead us to some greater meaning; it can only offer us decay. Where these fragile vessels take us is either unknowable or irrelevant; the important thing is to keep the paint fresh.
God's design
This approach to physical decline may be dominant, but there remains another way. For every Madonna, we have the counter example of women like Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, and Meryl Streep, who embrace their age with elegance. The cliché rings true: Real physical attractiveness begins with inner confidence and manifests outwardly from within.
Even as counterfeit youthfulness fails to convince actual young people, it can offer them a useful warning signal. “Don’t look to me for guidance,” it seems to say. “I’m as clueless as you are.” When I need advice, when I need someone to help me view the everyday grind from a broader perspective, wrinkles and gray hair offer a certain guarantee.
They also offer me hope, especially as my own glances in the mirror become more fraught — hope that I, too, will find the serenity to resist the course of nature and the grace to accept God’s design.
Secular bias, fake faith — beware the new chatbot 'Christianity'
More Americans are turning to chatbots with their hardest questions, often before they turn to anyone else. Grief, guilt, whether to leave a marriage, whether God is real — the questions people once carried to church now go into the text box.
So it matters a great deal what the text box says back. New work from researchers at Brigham Young University, gathered under a group called the Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI, suggests the answer should trouble anyone who takes faith seriously.
Lies of omission
They built a test called the AllFaith Benchmark, which included hundreds of real moral questions drawn from religious communities, and ran it through the major models: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The pattern held across all of them. Asked about death, forgiveness, or the meaning of a life, the machines reached for secular, generic answers and left faith out of the equation. The omission was systematic. It showed up steadily, measurably, and every time the test ran.
A third of American adults already rate spiritual advice from AI as trustworthy as a pastor's.
Why does an absence matter this much? Because these tools do more than recite facts. They frame what counts as a reasonable answer. When a model treats the believer's answer as clutter to clear away, it teaches a lesson, never stated outright, about which replies belong in serious conversation and which can be skipped.
Iterate that process at scale, and entire generations get a reshaped sense of what a thoughtful person, or even a soulful person, sounds like.
That deep-seated formation was once the province of the Christian wisdom that built the West. The conviction that every person carries equal worth, and that even kings answer to a law above their own, entered Western civilization through the Church and outlasted the doctrinal quarrels that produced it. Among the great civilizational faiths, none shaped this part of the world the way Christianity did.
Spiritual appropriation
A second finding goes deeper, and it’s considerably stranger. A researcher named Tim Hwang recently took a model and did something close to an MRI on it, watching its inner workings while it ran. He gave it a simple prompt, "As a Christian," and watched what changed. What changed was a single switch. Begin a prompt with those words, and one specific, dormant part of the model wakes up and fires the same way, no matter what follows.
Ask it whether lying is wrong, ask it to describe a sofa, and the response shifts in the same direction both times. The switch does two things. It pushes religious words to the front, such as God, Jesus, and prayer. It also pushes absolute words like always, never, and not to the front. That’s the entire performance. When this model acts Christian, it grabs holy vocabulary and a hard, certain tone, whether you ask about salvation or seating. The model believes nothing. It speaks with fluent reverence and flawless conviction, but possesses neither.
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The machine has decided that Christian identity comes down to holy phrases delivered with real conviction. Absent from that picture is everything a believer would claim as the substance of it: grace, mercy, humility, patience — and the slow, unglamorous labor of moral reasoning.
This would be a harmless oddity if these systems stayed in a lab. But they don't. They pulse in the pocket of nearly every teenager in America, fielding questions about sex and suffering and forgiveness long before a parent or pastor hears a word of it. And they’re not asking ironically. A recent survey found that a third of American adults already rate spiritual advice from AI as trustworthy as a pastor's, a number that climbs to two in five among Gen Z and Millennials. When someone types "what does Christianity say about this," the machine answers.
Simulating salvation
They get the surface and miss the center, and they never notice the gap, because the answer is convincing. A pastor who got the faith this wrong would be corrected, possibly even banished, by Sunday. The chatbot answers 10,000 times an hour, and no one corrects it at all. That's the trouble with a good fake. It doesn’t look fake. And people want to believe.
Christians have argued for centuries upon centuries that faith lives in the heart, that a man can say every right word and mean none of them. The machine has now built, by accident or by design (I’ll let you decide), a virtual likeness of exactly that man, who can preach but cannot believe. So the worry is simple. People are learning Christianity from a system that has mastered the motions and missed the whole point.
Smashing the machine is a fantasy, so put the fantasy away. The work that remains is teaching the people forming their faith how to tell the difference between a voice that lives the faith and one that has only read about it.
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