According to the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, testosterone levels in American men are declining at an alarming rate of 1 percent per year. but why? That’s what Casey Neistat and Oscar Boyson wanted to reveal in their film, “The Truth About Castration.”
Ultimately, the short film goes beyond this question and advances the current conversation about how to define masculinity in the face of changing gender roles. Boyesen, the film’s producer and camera host, draws some very personal conclusions about being a man today by turning the camera on himself and asking, “What does it mean to be a man?” Man means something.
“Masculinity is something that people don’t think about too much,” Boysen said. “Our goal was to interview people from different walks of life and ask them what it means to you to be a man? It’s a question that doesn’t have much of a middle ground, and we wanted to find out why.”
The facts speak for themselves. Last year, men suffered more than their fair share of layoffs (80% to be exact), so much so that women now outnumber men in the workforce for the first time in history. Women are also outnumbered in tertiary education at undergraduate and graduate levels, with nearly 60 percent of graduate enrollments being women.
Boys—our future men—fail high school at an alarming rate, 4.9 percent versus 3.8 percent of girls, and are three times more likely than women to be diagnosed with ADHD. In short, masculinity is in jeopardy…or at least is undergoing a pretty major shift on the road to a new future state.
