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An Emasculating Truth

According to the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, testosterone is declining in American men at the alarming rate of one percent a year. But why? That’s what Casey Neistat and Oscar Boyson sought to uncover in their film An Emasculating Truth.

Ultimately, the short film goes beyond this question to further the current dialogue about today’s definition of masculinity in light of changing gender roles. Boyson, the film’s producer and on camera emcee, came to some very personal conclusions about what it means to be a man today, turning the camera on himself and asking the question ‘what does it mean to be a man?’

“Masculinity isn’t something people think about often,” said Boyson. “Our goal was to find a cross-section of people and ask them, what does being a man mean to you? This is an issue where there isn’t much middle ground and we wanted to find out why.”

The facts speak for themselves. Men suffered more than their fair share of lay-offs in the past year (80 percent to be exact), so much so that women now outnumber men in the work force for the first time in history. Women also outnumber men in higher education at the undergraduate and graduate levels, with nearly 60 percent of grad school enrollees being women.

Boys – our future men – are failing out of high school at alarming rates, 4.9 percent versus 3.8 percent of girls, and are being diagnosed with ADHD at rates three times higher than that of their female counterparts. In short, manhood is in peril … or at least going through a pretty significant transformation on its way to the new future state.

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  1. Maybe women are statistically more present because statistically there are more women.

  2. less testosterone less violence it think… less wars less aggression less “solving” of problems with fists… evolution is causing the male of our species to become irrelevant… just saying….

  3. You know…there are studies that point out that testosterone does decrease when men marry and even more so when he has kids… testosterone and aggression aren’t needed to raise kids. In fact aggression can halter and be damaging in raising kids properly. Got to love how positive male role model and great father figures are bashed by this documentary. Agre4ssion isn’t needed anymore in the domestic sphere THAT IS why testosterone is decreasing…. it’s not needed in the high, over-exaggerated levels that these idiots want it to be. Testosterone is only needed at a level so that men could mate…. not that high aggressive level with is damaging to relationships (cause men to be horny savage beasts) and damaging to being good fathers (by being savage beasts they’re not able to care for young). There is a great documentary on this topic that talk about the importance of fathers in child development. 🙂

  4. “so much so that women now outnumber men in the work force for the first time in history”
    This is an outrage! Someone should do something!

  5. No man ever had to wrestle a mammoth to find a mate.  Communities, groups of men and women, tracked and killed the mammoth, with the physical abilities of the young guided by the wisdom of the old.

    These same men had to play, dance, sing, carve, and paint to impress a mate.

  6. No man ever had to wrestle a mammoth to find a mate.  Communities, groups of men and women, tracked and killed the mammoth, with the physical abilities of the young guided by the wisdom of the old.

    These same men had to play, dance, sing, carve, and paint to impress a mate.

  7. If the stated facts are true, one obvious explanation is that less masculine men are reproducing more freely today than in the past.

    You no longer need to be able to wrestle a mammoth to find a mate.