When David Szalay won the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, the celebration was not merely literary. It felt cultural, almost civilisational. Szalay’s novel, with its morally uncertain and emotionally inarticulate male protagonist, arrived at a moment when masculinity itself is under interrogation. As Booker judge Chris Power observed, the crisis of masculinity, visible in rising suicide rates and the seductive appeal of figures like Andrew Tate, seems to be colliding with literature.
This collision is not accidental. It is symptomatic.
Across societies, the question of what it means to be a man has become fraught. Influencers preaching dominance and grievance attract millions. Popular culture, from podcasts to Netflix dramas (like Adolescence), dissects incel rage and male alienation. Flesh has become a lightning rod precisely because it refuses easy answers. It forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: masculinity is neither villain nor victim, but something far more complex than our public debates allow.
We often speak as though men are the problem. Yet we rarely acknowledge that men, too, have problems, and that ignoring them carries consequences. Richard Reeves makes this case in Of Boys and Men. He argues that boys and men are losing ground in education, work, and family life, not because women are advancing, but because institutions have failed to adapt to changing realities. While women’s lives have transformed dramatically over recent decades, many men’s lives have stagnated or deteriorated. Reeves insists that helping boys and men is not a betrayal of feminism but its logical extension. Society cannot flourish if half its population is quietly unraveling.
Scott Galloway, the NYU professor and cultural commentator, has sounded a similar alarm. In Notes on Being a Man, he speaks of discipline, kindness, purpose, and resiliencenot as macho virtues, but as human necessities. Beneath his practical advice lies a deeper insight: masculinity is not performance, but a practice, a daily effort to become useful, grounded, and connected.
Yet perhaps the most radical voice in this conversation comes from bell hooks. In The Will to Change, she dismantles the myth that patriarchy benefits men. Patriarchy, she argues, teaches men emotional illiteracy. It rewards power but punishes tenderness. It grants privilege while denying intimacy. Feminist writing, hooks suggest, has often failed to capture the deep inner misery of men – the loneliness, the fear of vulnerability, the terror of losing status.
Szalay, Reeves, Galloway, and hooks remind us that the crisis of masculinity is not a culture-war slogan; it is a lived reality. Economic shifts have eroded traditional male roles, but no new narrative has replaced them. Into this vacuum rush demagogues and influencers, offering certainty where society offers silence.
Among contemporary writers, Karl Ove Knausgaard offers perhaps the most intimate exploration of this condition. In My Struggle and in his essays, he treats masculinity as an existential condition – something inherited, resisted, and painfully lived. He dismantles the idea that masculinity equals control or stoicism. Instead, he writes about shame and inadequacy, the fear of failure as a father and husband, emotional fragility, and the longing for tenderness. Knausgaard exposes moments most men are trained to hide: crying, jealousy, humiliation, dependence. He portrays masculinity not in battlefields or boardrooms, but in kitchens and living rooms.
The challenge, therefore, is not to defend masculinity or to dismantle it, but to reimagine it. Literature can help us do that, not by moralising but by revealing. Flesh does not tell us what masculinity should be. It shows us what happens when we refuse to ask the question.
Perhaps the task of our time is to create a language where strength includes tenderness, where equality includes empathy, and where men are not reduced to caricatures of either villain or victim.
If we fail to build that language, others will build it for us. And we may not like the stories they tell.