I work with tens of thousands of men in live seminars each year and I am always fascinated by the deep question about what exactly it is that makes many men ‘blow up’ so spectacularly. It is, of course, important to keep a sense of balance. For each Mark McInnes, Mel Gibson or Tiger Woods there are plenty of fine men doing great things in their marriages, fathering, careers or public service. However, I think it fair to say that we find ourselves at a moment in history when manhood has become uprooted from much of the ‘rich substratum’, the soil in which it was once embedded and we see are seeing many men living the ‘lives of quiet desperation’ that Thoreau highlighted when he wrote Walden. And a crucial point I always raise in every seminar is that when men get things wrong, when men get sexuality and masculinity pointed in the wrong direction…women and children are the first to pay. This has to stop.

Two theories are often given as to what is driving the outcomes. Firstly, the extreme shift in cultural norms driven by the oral contraceptive pill, militant feminism and the sexual revolution of 1968 have seen manhood jolted in one generation from thousands of years of relative predictability, in terms of roles and expectations, to a situation of retrosexuals, metrosexuals, serial monogamy and cohabitation, avoidance of fatherhood and the pursuit of endless novelty or adrenaline based on a misunderstanding of what human freedom actually means. As soon as you take freedom to be your right to do whatever you please rather than the capacity or ability to do what you should, then we can’t be that surprised if a whole generation of younger men head down that shimmering road never to be seen in any effective sense again.

The second theory, probably less frequently explored is the almost complete breakdown of mentoring or guidance for boys as they transition through their teens. If I was to state it very simply, for most young men, when it comes to issues like understanding their sexual selves and how to interact in healthy ways with young women, as a culture we essentially leave them on their own and the Internet does the rest. There is simply no ‘community of men’, of fathers and especially of older men who take an active and deliberate interest in ensuring that boys emerge into their late teens and early adulthood ready to live fully and make a significant contribution to other people and the wider culture.

This is essentially the cultural change we need to start effecting. More men need to reflect upon exactly what contribution they are making to the younger men they know. If you are a man with a son you have no excuse.

In the weeks ahead I will lay out a range of strategies and ideas about how we can all move forward together. There are definitely things we can do.

In the interim I hope to hear from many of you in the comments sections below. And I would especially value hearing from women. What is your experience of men like? What do you think are the big issues? And from the men, “What’s it like being you?” “What do you wish was different?’ “Were you mentored or left to your own devices?”

Let’s get this conversation started for all our sakes!