Male social withdrawal is often labelled a ‘crisis of masculinity’. But for some men it may be a rational response to the erosion of work, status, relationships and other social structures through which masculinity has traditionally been performed, argues sociologist Dr Stephen Whitehead

What is often called a ‘crisis of masculinity’ is a very different phenomenon from the one my family knew. My grandfathers volunteered in 1914 and my father and his brother in 1939. That was a true crisis of masculinity, and it emptied a continent. 

This current one, by contrast, harms no one at all. It’s defined by men withdrawing from work, relationships and other social structures through which masculinity has traditionally been performed.

But what lies behind this modern pattern of male withdrawal, and what does it tell us about masculinity today?

Consider a typical case: our male subject is 52, and he has not left his room in 11 years. His mother, who is 81, leaves a tray on the landing and collects the plate when empty. That exchange is the whole of his social world. When she dies, and she will die soon, the Japanese authorities will find him in a condition for which the state has no useful category and no plan worth the name.

Japan calls prolonged and extreme social withdrawal hikikomori. For two decades the West treated the term as something peculiarly Japanese – evidence of what a rigid, shaming and conformist culture could do to its young men, and reassurance that our own societies could never produce the same.

That reading, however, was always self-flattering, and the evidence has now closed it off. The largest study to date of hikikomori, a systematic review and meta-analysis of 19 studies involving 58,229 participants, found a global prevalence of 8 per cent, with no significant difference between East Asian and Western populations. Researchers have therefore begun describing hikikomori as a society-bound rather than culture-bound syndrome: a condition of modernity, not of Japan.

Two honest qualifications, since I would rather make them than have them made for me. That headline prevalence figure is highly sensitive to methodology: studies using probability sampling produce a figure of around 3.1 per cent rather than 8. And the same analysis found no significant difference in prevalence between the sexes.

Withdrawal itself is not a male condition. What is male is the thing being withdrawn from, and that’s the whole of my argument. Work, status, provision, competition, sex, fatherhood and male social belonging have historically been central to the performance of masculinity. When those structures disappear or become inaccessible, withdrawal can become an understandable response.

Both my grandfathers volunteered in 1914. Nobody conscripted them; they walked to the recruiting office because they’d absorbed a powerful story about what a man was supposed to do, and refusing that role was almost unthinkable. Across Europe, millions of men did the same. The machine guns were waiting, and villages lost every male of a particular age in a single morning.

That was masculinity working exactly as designed, at full power, in a direction that annihilated populations and shaped a continent for a century. The success of the narrative was the real catastrophe.

Now set beside it the socially withdrawn man experiencing hikikomori. He commits no violence, coerces no one, fathers no children he will abandon and asks almost nothing of the state until his mother dies. He is the quietest thing men have ever done. Whatever the word ‘crisis’ is measuring when it is applied to him, it describes a fundamentally different kind of harm.

Much of our discomfort comes from seeing men stop participating in forms of life we had assumed were compulsory.

The clinical literature is quietly arriving at the same place by another route. A 2025 study of withdrawal and social media found that, among the people in its sample who met criteria for hikikomori, 63 per cent were classified as non-pathological: they were at home most days without reporting significant distress or impairment.

That finding does not make extreme withdrawal harmless in every case, but it does show that social withdrawal and subjective suffering don’t always coincide. People can meet behavioural definitions of withdrawal without experiencing themselves as ill.

Across 35 years of research I’ve come to identify five forms of masculinity: traditional, fundamentalist, progressive, collapsed and what I call ‘the last masculinity’, which I am researching now and which emerges with age, when time rather than economics begins to remove a man’s social props.

They are different narratives available to men under different social conditions, rather than stages in a hierarchy or developmental sequence. Of the five, collapsed masculinity is the relevant form here because it describes what happens when the social apparatus required to perform masculinity falls away. I set the term out at length in my book The End of Sex (Acorn, 2025).

The mechanism behind collapsed masculinity lies in how masculinity is performed. Masculinity isn’t something a man possesses but something he does, and like any performance it needs a stage, an audience and props. For much of the last century those props were remarkably stable: paid work; an income on which other people depended; a body capable of physical work or endurance; sport played rather than merely watched; sex; children; and regular contact with other men in places such as the shop floor, the football terrace, the regiment or the bar.

Many of those supports have, however, since thinned or disappeared.

The share of American adults under 65 having sex weekly fell from 55 per cent in 1990 to 37 per cent in 2024, while the proportion of 18-to-29-year-olds reporting no sex in the previous year doubled between 2010 and 2024. The proportion of men reporting six or more close friends fell from 55 per cent in 1990 to 27 per cent in 2021, while those reporting none rose from 3 per cent to 15.

Britain recorded more than 1 million 16-to-24-year-olds not in education, employment or training in the first quarter of 2026. Of those, 553,000 were young men.

Alongside that sit wider economic and social changes: industrial jobs automated or made precarious; stagnating earnings at the lower end weakening the material basis of the traditional provider role; sport consumed as spectacle rather than performed as membership; and fatherhood delayed, avoided or made more precarious after separation.

A man can improvise when one prop disappears and compensate when another follows. Remove employment, status, physical community, intimate relationships and family formation together, though, and eventually there may be no performance left to give.

This is where I part company with almost everything written on the subject. From the withdrawn man’s point of view, staying in his room can be a rational response to what the outside world offers him.

Consider what the outside now offers such a man: insecure low-paid work conferring no status, a dating market in which low income disqualifies him before he opens his mouth, a social life priced beyond him and a continuous stream of information about how far short of other men he falls.

Against that, set the room. No rejection, no audit and no scoreboard he loses on. Hierarchy, mastery, visible progression and a team supplied reliably by a game. Sexual experience without another person’s judgement. The texture of friendship, delivered by a stream, without any of its obligations.

Clinical accounts describe some of the psychological features associated with this withdrawal. Research by Mami Suwa and Koichi Suzuki on primary hikikomori identifies avoidance of competitive situations, an ideal self constructed from other people’s expectations and difficulty beginning again after falling short of that ideal. More recent work discusses perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belonging in association with hikikomori – the belief that one is a burden to others and the feeling that one no longer has a meaningful place among other people.

Clinical language generally locates these difficulties within the individual. My interpretation is that they can also describe someone who has understood that he is under permanent assessment against a standard he cannot meet and has stopped presenting himself for assessment.

He has effectively opted out of a meritocratic system whose standards he believes he cannot meet. In his own terms, the man who withdraws has solved the problem. We may find his solution unacceptable but our rejection of it doesn’t make the calculation irrational. Our discomfort says something about our expectation of men rather than establishing anything about their wellbeing.

That distinction also explains why moral exhortation – get a job, get a grip, get to the gym – has no purchase. You cannot shame a man out of a position he reached by sound arithmetic.

The West built the infrastructure for withdrawal and called it ‘progress’. Remote work, home delivery and digital-first socialising now make it possible for many people to conduct large parts of everyday life without physical presence. For someone already moving towards withdrawal, those conveniences can normalise retreat. Nobody knocks because nothing looks wrong.

Researchers now distinguish semi-withdrawal and digital forms of hikikomori, in which the sensation of connection can mask physical absence. A withdrawn man may still be active on Discord, be known there – even liked – yet at the same time he may rarely leave the house.

Synthetic intimacy provides another accelerant. In the Global AI Intimacy Study, which I lead, we are tracking the normalisation of artificial companions that are responsive, attentive, available at 4 in the morning, incapable of leaving and constitutionally unable to find their user wanting.

Until now, even the most withdrawn man still depended on some form of human intimacy. Synthetic companions now remove that final point of dependence. The room in which the hikikomori resides is now sealed.

The same 2025 social-media study found that full hikikomori used fewer social-media platforms than early and pre-hikikomori participants. The audience can shrink as withdrawal deepens, and a machine offering intimacy without witnesses is built precisely for a man at that point.

Japan’s national surveys show withdrawal persisting into middle age. The 2022 Cabinet Office survey put prevalence at 2.05 per cent among people aged 15 to 39 and 2.02 per cent among those aged 40 to 64 – essentially identical proportions. Those figures show withdrawal persisting into middle age rather than remaining confined to the young.

Many of those men entered adulthood during the employment crisis of the 1990s, when the established progression from education into secure work, marriage and home ownership became much less reliable, and never got back on.

Reintegration is not straightforward. An OECD case study of Japanese support emphasises gradual, low-pressure progression from online support towards in-person activities, job training and work, rather than simply placing withdrawn people directly into employment.

Treating the room itself as the problem simply returns a man to the same conditions that led him to withdraw in the first place. If those conditions have not changed, there is little reason to expect a different outcome. So collapsed masculinity will grow, and it will not reverse.

My grandfathers’ masculinity cost Europe a generation of its young men. This one costs us their presence.

Given the choice, I know which century’s crisis I would rather be managing. But managing it is not the same as ignoring it, and ignoring it is precisely what we’re doing right now.

Dr Stephen Whitehead is a gender sociologist and author recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. Formerly at Keele University, he has lived in Asia since 2009 and has written 20 books translated into 17 languages. He is based in Thailand and is co-founder of Cerafyna Technologies. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Constanza Fernández Arce, is Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

READ MORE: What the rise of synthetic companionship reveals about men and women. As AI-powered technology offers increasingly sophisticated substitutes for human intimacy, gender sociologist Dr Stephen Whitehead argues that the growing popularity of synthetic companions exposes a deeper crisis in relationships between men and women.

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