Mr. Newsom isn’t alone in his concern about the exploding popularity of online influencers among young men—or in failing to see important distinctions. Some, like Mr. Peterson, offer relatively wholesome life advice on podcasts revolving around health, fitness, personal discipline and career development. Others, like Mr. Tate—who has been charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking and being part of an organized crime ring—peddle a misogynistic brand of pickup artistry. (Mr. Tate has denied the criminal charges and described himself as the victim of a ”witch hunt.”)

What they have in common is that they’re finding a receptive audience among teenage boys and young men with a genuine desire for direction that isn’t being served by the hollowed-out institutions of traditional society. Mainstream institutions and authorities—churches, schools, academia, the media—could learn a few things from the online gurus about how to speak to young men effectively.

Young men today often feel as if their needs are secondary to those of their female peers. Society tends to speak about the well-being of men and boys as a means to an end. There’s a lot of hand-wringing about how a decline in the number of marriageable men makes it harder for women to find husbands. Some argue that male struggles cause a litany of social ills like crime and child neglect. Church leaders justify outreach to men as a way to reach women and children.

By contrast, online men’s influencers seek to help men themselves, to show them how to improve as people and achieve their own goals. To be sure, some of those goals are immoral, such as taking sexual advantage of women. But many are worthy, like health or career success. Online influencers treat men’s hopes and dreams as important in their own right.

Many offer teenage boys an aspirational vision of manhood. Some, like Mr. Peterson, say men are important for the sake of others, but present it as part of a heroic vision of masculinity in which men flourish as well. “You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world,” he writes in “12 Rules for Life,” his 2018 bestseller. “You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.” Traditional authorities, especially in Protestant churches, talk about men being “servant leaders” but reduce that primarily to self-sacrifice and serving others. Pastors preach sermons wondering why men have so much energy left at the end of the day, or saying men shouldn’t have time for hobbies. No wonder young men tune them out.

Online influencers challenge men to work harder and get better. Former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink encourages his followers to get up at 4:30 a.m. to work out. But they also give practical advice and true if sometimes politically incorrect facts, such as those about the opposite sex. Men’s relationships with women are primal. Nothing enhances these influencers’ credibility like helping young men succeed with women. Teenage boys are hungry for information on what women find attractive. The gurus tell them it’s status, confidence, charisma, appearance and style. That’s the opposite of what they’re used to hearing, which is that women want men who emotionally affirm them and are ready to commit for the long term. Guys who go the sensitive nice-guy route only to be rejected can end up frustrated and bitter.

“Godliness is sexy to godly people,” says Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Matt Chandler. Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, says, “Girls are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.” Which rings truer to you?

Most of these influencers have built online communities that serve as mutual support and encouragement networks for their followers. In an era of growing loneliness and social isolation, teenage boys can bond over furtively watching Andrew Tate videos that their parents and teachers deem dangerous. Because the traditional authorities typically don’t have much of an organic following among young men, they don’t generate the same kind of community. Where they do have a male audience, such as in churches, attempts at creating community are often hokey and weird. Most young men aren’t drawn to groups that ask them to “hold each other accountable” for watching porn.

An obvious if overlooked component of these influencers’ success is that they’re all men. It’s common, especially in mainstream media, for women to be the ones sounding off about men’s issues and shortcomings. In July, Politico published a “Masculinity Issue,” featuring four articles on the theme—every one of them written by a woman.

The good news is mainstream figures and traditional institutions that want to reach men can easily re-create the online influencers’ success. They can have men talking to and about men. They can acknowledge that men are important in themselves, not only as servants to women and children. They can craft an aspirational vision of manhood that includes elements of sacrifice and service. They can build men up with practical insights and advice, even when the truth is unpopular. And they can crystallize community around them. None of these things are objectively hard to do.

Perhaps respectable society won’t be able to reach those young men who are only looking to hustle women into sexual relationships. But as the range of online men’s influencers shows, plenty of boys and young men are looking for healthy and productive leadership.

Renn added on his own blog:

Even much of the rhetoric in our society that is aimed at building a case for why men are important tends to focus on some other goal as the justification. For example, if you are religious, you have almost certainly heard something like this:

A 1994 Swiss study gives insight to the trends among church-goers, regardless of religion. The study provided a wide-range of family scenarios; providing data for a variety of family situations. What happens if the mother is practicing and the father is non-practicing? What happens if only the father is practicing? The results seem to suggest that children follow the example of dad.

If both mom and dad go to church faithfully, 33% of their children will grow up to be regular attending patrons of the church.

If only mom is taking the kids to church, only 2% of children will become lifelong church-goers, while 37% will attend occasionally. An excess of 60% of her children will end up leaving the church.

What happens if dad is active, but mom is not? Curiously, the numbers seem to go up. As previously stated, 33% of children remain when they witness both mom and dad going to church regularly. The number grows to 38% with an active dad and an occasionally active mom. It continues to go up to 44% when it’s just dad taking the kids to church.

To sum up the data: if dad does not attend regularly, only 1 in 50 of his children will remain in the church.

While it’s not the case in this particular article, this rationale is typically used to justify or encourage outreach to men.

What’s truly important in this type of argument? Is it that dad go to church? Or is it that his children go to church? All of these basically imply that the real goal is to get mom and the kids to church. Dad is primarily an instrument to accomplish that end.

By the way, all of these claims seem to trace back to that one study in Switzerland from 30 years ago, which makes me skeptical that these findings would hold up in modern day America.

Another very common approach in secular society is to describe the problems facing men in terms of the negative consequences that has for women. For example, the conservative New York Post ran a piece saying that broke men are hurting American women’s marriage prospects.

There’s a devastating shortage of men who have their act together, according to a new study that may not be so surprising to all the single ladies out there.

Research now suggests that the reason for recent years’ decline in the marriage rate could have something to do with the lack of “economically attractive” male spouses who can bring home the bacon, according to the paper published Wednesday in the Journal of Family and Marriage.

“Most American women hope to marry, but current shortages of marriageable men — men with a stable job and a good income — make this increasingly difficult.”

And a recent article in the Atlantic essentially blames a shortage of good men for why women are freezing their eggs.

Her generation of women (Inhorn is in her 60s) were the first to enter higher-educational institutions en masse. She writes about how many women in her cohort of female doctoral students, faced with men intimidated by their achievements, remained single or “‘settled’ for suboptimal relationships that subsequently ended.” And the plight of educated women such as Inhorn and her interlocutors is one that has long been confronted by women in communities where economic challenges, such as the loss of factory jobs, led to widespread male unemployment—surely a factor in their hesitation to commit to a partner or start a family.

For the most part society is only interested in severe life challenges faced by men insomuch as they are affecting women. Men here again are a purely instrumental good that exist to enable women to fulfill their life ambitions.

A related version of this is when male dysfunction is blamed for right wing politics or other things some people don’t like.

I think many of these kinds of arguments, particularly the religious ones, are well-intentioned. Their goal seems to be convincing a perhaps skeptical audience of why it is important to reach men. One natural and completely reasonable way to go about this is to try to frame the argument in terms of the concerns the listener already has. This is done every day in a wide range of domains and is completely legitimate.

It’s when this form of argumentation becomes dominant that we run into problems. Men are hearing loud and clear from this that they don’t matter until they become a problem for somebody else that society actually cares about.

Former Brookings scholar Richard Reeves seems to do a better job of public argumentation. If you look at the summary of his talk to the UN feminist initiative #HeForShe, he does mention that men’s problems can translate into grievance politics, but he correctly relegates this to a subordinate role. He primarily emphasizes the problems men are facing themselves.

I think this is a good way to balance it. It’s of course appropriate to talk about the downstream consequences of troubled men. I do it myself. But that can’t be the primary emphasis.

The online influencers put men themselves front and center. Maybe they do this to an excessive degree, ignoring the elements of service to others and civilization that are part of the healthy masculine package. But at least they do care for men as people who are important in their own right. So should we.