Not a Radicalisation, an Absence

Thirty-one per cent of Gen Z men globally think a wife should obey her husband. A different cohort of the same generation is spending their Tuesday evenings at Hyrox heats and men-only Pilates classes. The media has noticed the first figure and panicked. It has barely registered the second.

King's College London published the polling last week. The press reached for the obvious frame: toxic manosphere, Andrew Tate, a generation radicalised by the internet. The Independent ran its piece on 8th March under the heading of boys "taking back control." The diagnosis was ideological. It was wrong.

The Manosphere Index, based on more than four thousand interviews across race and generation, found that economic pressure, algorithmic media and institutional decline are the primary forces shaping young men's attitudes. Forty-one per cent say it is hard to find a good-paying job; around half of Gen Z men rely on gig work. Their drift toward figures like Trump reads, in the data, as situational, a response to hardship rather than ideology.

Equimundo's State of the World's Men 2026 extends the picture: more than sixty per cent of men report feeling that no one cares whether they are all right, and those most invested in rigid masculine ideals show the highest rates of depression and violence.

This is not a generation being radicalised. It is a generation that is lonely, economically squeezed, and looking for a language to describe what is happening to it. The obedient-wife polling and the Hyrox heats are two dialects of the same language.

Misdiagnosis produces the wrong treatment. If the problem is ideology, the answer is counter-programming. If the problem is absence, the answer is presence. And the evidence points firmly toward absence.

Think about what has been removed from young men's lives in the past thirty years. Youth services were gutted in the austerity years and have not recovered. Apprenticeships shrank and then became bureaucratised beyond usefulness. Working men's clubs closed. Local sports clubs, once run by men who turned up every Saturday and quietly modelled what adult male life looked like, have given way to expensive academies and pay-to-play structures inaccessible to many working-class boys. The institutions that once provided structure, expectation and male company have either disappeared or priced themselves out of reach. The manosphere did not create the appetite these young men are bringing to it. It moved into a space that was left empty.

That space is now being partially filled. It is worth understanding how. Gen Z men are not simply retreating to their bedrooms. Men's Health UK's 2026 wellness trends show solo sessions giving way to community-based formats, with social connection becoming as important as the workout itself. Warrior Addict's fitness trends report for 2026 makes the shift explicit: men are moving from isolation to community, drawn to Hyrox events, calisthenics parks and men-only Pilates precisely because these spaces offer something the rest of their lives cannot provide. A standard to meet and a community that notices whether you showed up. Men further along the road who set the tone without being asked. This is what a proto-institution looks like when the real ones are gone.

It cannot carry the full weight. But it is evidence that young men are not passive consumers of whatever the internet offers. They are looking for formation. They will take it where they can find it.

Which brings the question back to you. If you are reading this on ForgeHub, you are already some distance along a road that many young men around you cannot yet see. The institutions failed. The question is what you are doing about the young men in your immediate orbit: the colleague who is drifting, the younger brother who is online too much and out of the house too little, the sixteen-year-old with no older man in his life who expects anything of him.

You do not need a programme or a platform. Invite someone to train with you. Turn up often enough that your presence becomes something another man can rely on. Stay long enough for it to mean something. That is what formation has always required. It still does.

ForgeHub (theforge-hub.com) serves as my writing platform for men seeking practical wisdom, developing authentic skills, and reflecting on how to live purposefully in a complex world. I write about family formation and cultural analysis at Happy Family Better World. My new family advisory site is at richardmorrissey.org. My political writing can be found at Medium.