Boys, boys, boys. This year has been the year of the Crisis of Masculinity, or maybe the year of the Male Loneliness Epidemic, or maybe, if we’re getting spicy with it, the year of the Great Feminization. A fascination with the problems of boys and young men is nothing new. Men, as diagnosed in Richard Reeves’s 2022 bestseller, Of Boys and Men, are struggling, isolated and adrift, bereft of strong role models or a supportive culture. And the same period has seen the rise of figures like Jordan Peterson peddling a vision of masculinity based partly in self-discipline (with exhortations to clean one’s room and stand up straight) and partly in resentment and perceived threat.

But this year marked a turning point, not unrelated to the broader rightward lurch of pop culture covered by journalists like Ana Marie Cox and trumpeted by center-right public intellectuals like Ross Douthat. 2025 saw the rollout of Graham Platner’s beefcake leftism, Scott Galloway and the rise of the “centrist manosphere,” and bottomless encomia to Charlie Kirk’s debate stage masculinity. Just a few weeks ago, Rachel Cohen Booth published a deep dive on men’s feelings about their increasing share of domestic labor with the subtitle, “Men’s search for meaning is everyone’s problem.” And yeah, it really feels that way.

It’s certainly true on TV. The Chair Company, The Rehearsal, Long Story Short, Task, The Pitt—all of these shows are in my top 10 series of the year, and all of them are profitably understood as shows that peer inquisitively and perceptively into the minds of the aforementioned Men in Crisis. One of the best TV essays I read this year was Israel Daramola’s “Tim Robinson Understands What the Boys Are Going Through,” about The Chair Company. “It’s the neediness of it all,” he writes. “Robinson’s characters tend to be devoid of purpose and value in a world that increasingly needs less from them.” This insight alone outstrips any ideas proffered by Adolescence, the extremely loud and incredibly clunky melodrama that presented itself this spring as the show about What’s Going On with boys and men right now. Trying to methodically peel back the personal, social, cultural, and even technological layers of the masculinity crisis, Adolescence just ends up a big Bloomin’ Onion of troubled blokes.

So, honestly, enough about them. In the midst of this era of Lost Boys, the characters and the series I’ve been most grateful for are the ones that have found women grappling with otherwise unnoticed crises of their own. In a year defined by the newly lurid visibility of men’s problems, I was most moved by two series—FX’s Dying for Sex and Disney ’s Andor—that offered glimpses into the invisible pain of women. Invisible because discreetly hidden, because crudely ignored, because too tiresome or traumatic or seemingly trivial to attend to.

One must imagine Mon Mothma dancing.

When Andor debuted, one of the most frequent observations about it was its relative........

© New Republic