In a recent Wall Street Journal review, University of Virginia sociology professor Scott Galloway’s book Notes of Being a Man confronts a crisis that has become impossible to ignore. He writes that his female students—bright, capable, and ambitious—express growing concern about the state of young men. They describe brothers living in parents’ basements, boyfriends addicted to online pornography, and male peers who fail to contribute equally in group projects. Most strikingly, many of these women say they’ve never been asked on a date. Their voices, Galloway observes, form “a rising chorus expressing concern about the state of manhood.”
Galloway’s diagnosis is correct, but his remedy stops short. As a scholar who teaches “The Sociology of the Family,” he misses the deeper truth that this singular institution has, for millennia, served as the foundation of stability and moral formation in every great society. The modern reduction of the family to a voluntary social contract rather than the seedbed of virtue has left both men and women unmoored. Since the early 20th century, progressive feminism has deconstructed the idea that men and women have complementary roles within families and communities—roles that are not hierarchical, but cooperative and interdependent.
Western and biblical philosophy have shaped the moral architecture of civilization for over four thousand years. Yet the contemporary obsession with “equality” has often displaced older concepts of symbiotic difference—the notion that men and women flourish through cooperation rather than competition. The great women of American history—Anne Hutchinson, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, and Eleanor Roosevelt—embodied a feminism rooted in moral seriousness, service, and family strength, not resentment or self-idolatry. Contrast that with the secular and materialist vision advanced by figures like Margaret Sanger, whose social Darwinism and eugenic philosophy, distorted human dignity in the name of progress.
True manhood, in the older sense, has always been about moral steadiness, not dominance. Stoicism—so often caricatured as emotional hardness—actually prizes the disciplined practice of virtue. It teaches that wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance form the essence of the good life. These are not “male” virtues; they are human virtues, equally required of women and men aspiring to moral maturity.
Marcus Aurelius linked manliness not to aggression but to kindness, patience, and mastery of the passions. The more humane a man becomes, the more truly manly he is. Real strength lies not in imposing one’s will but in ruling one’s impulses for the sake of reason and the common good. In this sense, manhood and womanhood both represent particular expressions of universally binding moral laws.
Scripture offers an even deeper foundation. The opening chapters of Genesis insist that male and female alike bear the image of God. Biblical manhood and womanhood begin with this shared dignity. Within Christianity, the distinctive roles of men and women in family, church, and society exist not as hierarchies of worth but as callings ordered toward cooperation and love. The Virgin Mary stands as the highest human example of obedience to the divine will—her assent, her “yes,” made possible the world’s salvation. Without Mary, no Jesus. Her example reminds us that sanctity, not self-assertion, measures the soul.
The distortions of manhood—abdication on one hand, domination on the other—are products of sin. Christ’s own model of leadership corrects both. His use of power—gentle, protective, and sacrificial—sets the enduring standard by which masculine ideals and feminist critiques alike must be judged.
Professor Galloway describes the sociological pillars of manhood as provider, protector, and procreator. These are indeed vital, but each is a noun describing action without moral direction. Without virtue—without a governing philosophy of responsibility and humility—such actions descend into chaos. The cultural disintegration we see today, with movements unmoored from enduring moral logic, precisely reflects this loss of an ethical predicate.
Perhaps it is time, as Galloway’s title suggests, to take new “notes on being a man.” But the old sources remain our best teachers. The Stoics remind us that virtue is the center of human excellence. Scripture reveals that man and woman alike are made in the divine image, called to serve, not rule, one another.
To rediscover moral seriousness is to rediscover manhood—and womanhood—as God and reason intended: cooperative, virtuous, and ordered to the good.
