The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Why Are Some Gen Z Men Embracing Traditional Gender Roles?

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Research is challenging the assumption that younger generations are becoming more progressive, suggesting some Gen Z men are adopting more conservative views on gender and masculinity. Heejung Chung of King's College London and University of Toronto Scarborough psychologist Leif Anderson, explain what may be driving that shift. Then, Dalhousie University sociologist Michael Halpin examines the rise of "looksmaxxing," an online subculture centred on physical perfection and social dominance.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If women are in pain, it's hysteria, it's an emotional issue. And this is what we see consistently. Women's health is not taken seriously. How did we get here? Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to check out the video version of the show on the TVO Today YouTube channel. I hope to see you then. Maxed baddies attempting to mock clavicular in front of a crap. All right, if you're like me, you understood a few of those words. But jester maxed, mog, and who or what is clavicular? Clavicular is a person, and he has been getting a lot of attention recently.

That's because of an online community he's popularized. It's dedicated to something called looks maxing. It's all about maximizing your personal appearance to achieve, quote, high status, basically through whatever means necessary. If you're going to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of loans, you might as well invest it into surgery rather than going to school. We look at what's fueling this subculture and how it's affecting young men. But first, we dig into what new research has to say about Gen Z men

and why their views on gender roles are becoming more traditional. Welcome to the rundown. People often assume that younger generations will be more progressive. So why are Gen Zed guys' views on gender getting more conservative? He-Jung Chung is a professor of work and employment at King's College London. And Leif Anderson is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Leif, great to have you in our studios. He-Jung, great to have you on the line.

I want to start off with you, He-Jung, you conducted a 29th. country survey, which included Canada on gender equality. One of the most, I would say, surprising findings from your report tells us that Gen Z men hold the most traditional views of gender roles in society out of all the other groups. Why? Well, okay, so our StarVick conducted a huge range of different survey questions, and one of the most surprising ones we found was, it's a very simple question. Should women always obey their husbands? Now, you would think that Gen Z men, the younger of men will be the most progressive of this. But surprisingly, it was actually they were the most, let's say, regressive, if not conservative,

to the point they were twice as more likely to say that women should always obey their husband, up to a third of them agreeing to the statement. Leif, you're a student that fits right into this demographic by age. You are 20. Yeah, I'm 25. 25. All right. Before we get into things, tell us a little bit about yourself.

You're a student, right? Yeah. So I'm a PhD student at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, as you heard. I am originally from Minnesota, so I moved here four years ago. And, yeah, I've been studying empathy at U of T with my supervisor. And, yeah, I grew up in a very small rural community in Minnesota, and I've migrated to a couple of bigger cities in Minneapolis and Toronto. Now, I am quite observant.

I do see a wedding ring there. Yes. You are a married man at 25. I am married at 25. A little unusual these days. Yes, I've been married for four years now in March. I do have to ask then with what Hejung has had to say in terms of the question that survey was asked. What are your thoughts on sort of what men had to say in terms of obedience and sort of paying it to, like listening to your wives?

Yeah, just like Hejung, I am a little surprised with how kind of split this is for Gen Z men. Because I am personally a little more, I lean left. So my wife and I, we very much are collaborative in our relationship. We both split household duties. We both work. My wife makes twice as much as I do. I'm a grad student. But, yeah, we don't really fit cleanly into the really traditional gender roles.

Though I've observed this a lot in my social media feed and some of the folks that I grew up with. Well, let's talk about it. With your peer group, are you noticing that shift towards traditional beliefs? What does that look like? Yeah, so I notice a bit of a mix, as the data would suggest. So even in the rural community that I grew up in, I mean, lots of folks already married, some folks already have kids. And I really haven't talked to them in a while because we disagreed a lot in high school.

We would, like, I'm very left-leaning, as I said, so we would disagree on fundamental religious things or in how we actually believe in gender equality. But a lot of the folks that I interact with now in grad school and the students that I interact with at U of T, there's this real mix of folks. Like, particularly in bigger urban environments, it's really dominated by folks who really believe in gender equality,

at least the folks that I interact with. And so this is my perspective and that can vary based on who you're talking to. All right. He, Zhang, 50% of Canadian men believe we have gone so far in promoting women's equality that we are now discriminating against men. When the data is broken down even further, that number rises to 57% of Gen Z met. Why are young men especially feeling this way? Well, okay, first of all, I want to

say that although that number seems very shocking, Canada is actually not one of the worst countries. So we have seen other countries where this number is much, much higher and has, well, especially the alarming thing is that these numbers have grown over the past kind of seven years that we've conducted this survey. So in countries like Korea, we're talking about a rise of like in the teens, 14, 15 percent rise with like a big significant, and I think we're about three quarters of men agreeing to the statement that it has gone too far. And the reason why Gen Zee men feel this way is that I think there's a huge amount of grievances. amongst younger generation, that the younger generations feel like they don't have the same job

opportunities. They don't have the same opportunities in terms of being able to afford a house, being able to live a good life, that hard work doesn't necessarily pay off anymore, which was something that was promised and perhaps to a certain degree achieved by their parents' generation, maybe their fathers or grandparents. And I think for women, a way of kind of addressing those issues was feminism to feminism as a way of a mechanism to address some of these grievances or problems of society to address these issues. For men, unfortunately, because of a lot of the voices that came out, including maybe Trump, but also a lot of other politician, including Yun-Sung-Yar of South Korea, et cetera, et cetera. There's been a lot of voices that's telling young men,

especially in social media, that, oh, your current situation isn't really great and it has deteriorated, and perhaps it's because women are taking all those opportunities. So if you go to these itemized issues, people, they also understand that we have not achieved gender equality. However, the rhetoric around feminism having gone too far, DEI policies having gone too far, is very, very prevalent in the psyche of the population. All right, Leif, throughout that, seen you nodding your head. I'm imagining some of this sounds relatable, whether it is rhetoric, or some of it is reality when we talk about the affordability crisis, we talk about housing, sort of the situations from probably what your parents face

to what you are. Talk to me a little bit about that. Any of that? Yeah, so primarily, like, as I'm not in my head, he's young, like I see this a lot with a lot of my peers. Like this really resonates with a lot of young men who are feeling like, oh yeah, I'm not having as many job opportunities. I mean, I come from higher education. I'm very educated.

did my undergrad. But my rural community did a pretty good job of trying to curb this by pushing some folks to vocational school or having these careers where it's very clearly going to manufacturing. But there is this confusion and this frustration that a lot of men feel and that politicians and social media influencers have really latched onto this fear and confusion and are essentially, validating this confusion and emotions that young men are feeling. I haven't been pulled into that as much because I come from a family who can fund my education. They've been able to help me move to different cities and now I'm doing a grad degree.

But SES can come into this. What do you mean by SES? So, yes, socioeconomic status. Thank you. But, yeah, I come from a little bit of a wealthier family. I don't feel that economic strain as much. But when we're looking at the rhetoric that's in these social media posts of, like, so I personally see lots of fitness influencers on my Instagram feed.

And as we see from things like the manosphere and stuff like that. It's not just fitness. It's not just fitness. So it can easily, if you get involved in fitness social media, you see that on your feed, it can easily get into conspiracy theories and validating that frustration that you have, but then those social media influencers have some ulterior motives to make money and keep you engaged through the anger that you're experiencing. So that's why I was nodding my head as Hegeung was talking, because I can resonate

for a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think we need to be very careful here because I don't think it is just people who are in the lower social economic strata that are experiencing this, I think what we find is that a lot of, especially men,

or young men coming from, income or even higher income classes, may also have these very kind of traditional conservative, or if you may have misogynistic ideas that have been spread again by social media, politicians, etc., which the algorithm is feeding off of, because as I latent said,

like anger is one of the biggest ways in which algorithms can get you keep coming back and stay longer in the social media platforms. Well, on that note, this is a very overwhelming trend. Well, Hegejong, on that note, I want to change gears on what we can do. So I'll start with you, Hejong, what can we do to support young men, whether it is that specific group, the latter group that you mentioned, or just young men in general? Yeah, I think we just have to first listen, because one of the reasons why,

if that rhetoric was in social media or it must be in politics, there was grievances to begin with. Those kind of messaging would not have been attractive if there was no grievances. But we have to really understand what are some of these fears and issues that are, you know, that young people are facing right now. So we really need to go and understand that. But also I think we need a real kind of just as much as like we had our first, second, third, fourth waves of feminism, young men now or men in general need to really come into kind of grips

of like, okay, what can we do in terms of a collective identity that could really fit into modern day world with the changing nature of, with the rise of AI, technology, and, etc., and social inequalities, and to really be able to almost like learn from the previous feminists to find a collective voice in terms of bringing out these immense of beautiful masculinities that could really replace these kind of misogynistic hegemonic masculinitys that we see. Life, what can we do to sport, young men? Yeah, I very much resonate with what Hizhong is saying in terms of making sure that Gen Z men, like younger men particularly feel heard and listen to.

Perhaps not validated in the intolerant views that they're espousing from social media. But, yeah, having a conversation about these things. Like this, even though this reality that some men are living in where, oh, yeah, this inequality is taking away from me, taking opportunities away from me, I feel like I should be the sole provider and the dictator of my relationship, those are things that we shouldn't be supporting, but we need to make sure that their fear and confusion is heard and fostering this collective identity.

And also being intolerant of all these voices that are preying on all of the emotions that young men are feeling. And like, we need to be intolerant of intolerance is something that I often say, because we need to give young men these other options. Like there are other options besides being intolerance of inequality. We can't just morally derogate young men just because they're young men. We have to really listen and engage in conversation

to foster really productive conversations and move forward as a society and as a collective. I just add one more thing. It's just that I realize one of the things that we haven't talked about is that the role of, well, obviously social media influencer or politicians who are really capitalizing, monetizing, in gaining a lot from, you know, the spread of these kind of ideologies or ideas. But we also have to think about, I think we're now at a point in society, we're in coming to terms in terms of what tech companies and social media companies are actually doing to our society. And I think this rise of these kind of manospheres are actually a way of,

when this is kind of technology has manifested in terms of shaping society with a huge amount of social costs because we haven't spoken about the social cost of these ideologies. There has been a rise of misogynistic behaviors of young men in schools. There has been a rise of kind of partner abuse, domestic abuse amongst teen and early 20-year-old kind of couples as well. You know, there's a huge amount of problems that these kind of ideas are kind of. causing direct harms to women, girls, but also young men themselves. So we really need to come into terms that, oh, maybe we do need some guard railing.

We need to kind of look into who is benefiting from this, who's making money out of it, and then also saying maybe we need to then try to have some sort of regulation so that we don't keep continuing these kind of phenomenons. Unfortunately, we are going to have to leave it there. I know this is a big, big conversation. He-Jong, Leif, really appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Looks maxing isn't just about diet and exercise or choosing the right outfit. Guys who want to mog, which is showing other guys up because they're better looking, are willing to go to extreme lengths to achieve what they see as physical perfection. Michael Halpin is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhapel. Howsey University, who's conducted research on an online looks maxing community that receives six million unique visitors per month. He and his co-authors analyze more than 8,000 discussion board comments, and he joins me on the line. Michael, great to have you on the program. Great to be here. Thank you very much for having me. Help us understand how does looks maxing

fit into the quote-unquote manosphere. Yeah, well, two ways, really. So looks maxing is a Manosphere community, like other manasphere communities for white nationalists, red pillars, men rights activists, in cells. So it is an online community where men meet. They exchange tips. Those tips primarily are on improving their physical appearance. And while they're doing that, they're also talking about women in society in many ways. So arguing that women only pursue men based on their sexuality and that they only pursue the most physically attractive men, which is very similar to several other Manosphere communities. And like other Manusphere communities, believing that women, feminist, progressives are waging a systematic war against men and boys. Men have been

losing their civil rights and women have too much rights, too much agency. Besides that, Luke's Maxine is also a practice and it's a practice done in many Manisphere communities. So white nationalist communities, in-cell communities, red-pail communities. And it's this idea that we reap gains from being physically attractive. And so it's in every man's interest to be as physically attractive as possible to receive the advantages that you get from being physically attractive. So kind of the easiest way to think about it is that it's a manosphere community. There are practices that have left that community and gone into other manosphere communities. And then there's looks maxing practices that have gotten very popular and have extended well outside the

Manosphere and they're on TikTok, YouTube, people who may not even be very familiar with the Manosphere are familiar with some of these looks maxing practices like mewing and bone smashing. All right. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but help us understand. Obviously, one thing's clear. These are men who are participating in group. Help us understand a little bit more about the demographics. What's the age group?

Is it different ethnicities as well? Yeah. So we don't have exact, exact data on this because there's some anonymity with all these online communities. And the data that I've looked at, the age ranges that we're seeing is boys who are as young is like 13, 14, so they're just, you know, in the midst of puberty, really. Very popular amongst men who are 18 to 22, so your university age students. So something from junior high to university is a very popular age group. And then all the way up to men who are in their 30s, men who are getting close to their 40s.

So some of these men have, say, gone through a divorce. looking to looks max as they're thinking to get back on the dating market. Racially and ethnically, it is also surprisingly diverse. So I think a lot of people have this mischaracterization of these communities as being predominantly young white men. And that's not the case. We see a lot of black men participating in these communities, Asian men, South Asian men. They are quite ethnically and racially diverse.

Talk about 13-year-olds. One has to ask, how does a 13-year-old get pulled into something like this? Yeah, great question. Great question. So as I mentioned earlier, one of the things about looks maxing is looks maxing is not just a community. It's a set of practices. So things like, you know, this surgery works for you or press your tongue against the roof of your mouth in this way. You'll be more attractive. And those practices have gone viral in many social media environments. So you can be a 13 year old on TikTok and see a video about bone smashing or a video about mewing and that brings you to this community. Similarly, someone might get exposure to another Lux Maxine or another Manosphere community, like say a men's rights community or they might look at a white nationalist community because they think it's edgy and like a forbidden thing to do when you're 13 and find exposure to these communities through that way. The other thing is that, you know, kids who are in young men, boys who are in junior high

are absolutely talking about these communities. So these are things that, you know, they were popular in junior high, It looks Maxine was popular in junior highs before professors and media personalities were talking about it. So it's something that's been a part of their culture for a while, unfortunately. You talked about, you know, how young these men are. You mentioned puberty. Adolescence is a time when, you know, there's a time for identity to be created, you know,

when we're trying to learn about ourselves. I am curious, are these groups giving men sort of a path to sort of figure out who they are? Yeah, they're giving them a path to figure out who they are. And that path, I think, is, you know, we'll talk about this, I'm sure in a moment. That path is not a good path. And it's not a good path in terms of how they see women, how they see race and racism. And it's not a good path in terms of how they see their own body and self-worth. I think one of the things that these looksmax in communities are doing is they're providing some guidance, some instructions for men and boys who maybe feel like they're not getting that information from other resources.

they're providing answers for problems that young men and boys feel like they face that maybe they're not hearing answers, better answers from other sources. And they take this issue of lookism very seriously. And lookism is like a really very real form of bias and discrimination. It's been studied by psychologists, by sociologists. We do unfairly judge people based on if they're physically attractive or not. And they take that seriously. And I think they're one in a few forms in society where you see a discourse around that.

we could probably all be better about engaging with this idea of lookism to provide some kind of counter responses to what the Manosphere is giving these young boys. You talk about, you know, the in-cell groups, the white nationalists, there is a lot of noise. There's also a lot of conflicting messages within these groups as well in terms of the bigger picture of the Manosphere. Help us understand what connects them all together. Yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, what connects all these groups in the Manosphere? They do have some contradictory views, as you know, You know, some groups is all about being white.

Some groups, they reject sex and sex, sex and sexuality. Some groups, it's about obtaining social status, you know, looking like you're wealthy, and then looks maxing as about physical appearance. So they seem contradictory or diverse at first glance. The thing that's the thread that unites them all, is I would argue, is misogyny. So the thing that coheres all these communities together is that they think that women are sexual objects. They think that women are animalistic, that they make decisions about who they date based on biology. Women do not have the same cognitive potential or abilities as men do, and that women have been given too many rights.

They've been given too much agency, and we need to heavily restrict women's rights and agency. So no more women going to university, women not working in employment, particularly in fields where men want to dominate, and women not being able to seek any sort of resources through divorce or divorce laws. So the thing that keeps them together is this idea of constricting women's rights and the idea that women are not agents the same way that men are. Just to be clear, these are not experts in any of these industries. This is people who've either tried it out and kind of are just kind of laying it out there. Yeah, I would say that they're like the antithesis of experts.

So there's no medical professionals, health professionals that are engaging in these communities when health professionals and medical professionals find out about them, like the orthodontic community found out about looks maxing a few years ago. They were very concerned and critical of it. Instead what you have is guys who were 18, 22, 14, 27 doing things like buying hormones from international black market websites, injecting themselves with those hormones. and then letting other guys know if they worked or not. So in a sense, their expertise comes from treating their body like a petri dish

and reporting those results back to the community. And because they, like many of these other communities, think that science is against them, that science is propaganda, they treat this data is more trustworthy than they treat data from studies in academic journals. So they're big consumers of self-experimentation, and that's, of course, one of the harms of these communities is that people are putting products into their body with little knowledge of how it's impacting them,

little knowledge of what's actually in that product, and with no medical advice or oversight, providing them any guidance or to look out for any warning signs. The physical harm or the risk there is quite obvious. I can't imagine the physiological harms as well, but one has to ask, how is this different, what we're seeing in these forms on the Internet, that's specifically targeting men,

different from sort of the societal pressures that women have had to face for hundreds of years? Yeah, I think in many ways it's really similar to what women have had to face. And I think that we've, you know, we've arguably normalized a lot of the pressures that young women and girls have to go through. I think, I don't think that we've done a good job

on dealing with the kind of popular cultural, issues or images about women's bodies, young women's bodies, how women should look, how they're judged on their appearance. I don't think that we've done a good job of that. I think that we have to do a much bigger, better job of that. That said, people are probably aware that that's a problem for young women and girls. They're probably, I have a young daughter, like, I'm aware of these issues as a father. I know the conversations that I'm going to have to have with my daughter. You know, moms and dads out there, they know about things like body image, body issues, self-esteem, eating disorders, the excessive use of makeup has become tremendously popular over the last few years

and how women are engaged and evaluated over social media. So I think one thing is that we do know it is an issue for women and girls. I think the thing is, is it become an issue for young men and boys, and many people are unaware of that. The young men and boys are, are getting similar messages that they're not attractive enough, that they're getting judged based on their bodies, the only thing matters is how good you are and that you should take, you should do whatever intervention to your body you can do to make yourself more attractive. So they're getting that negative self-worth message that many women get. And on top of that, they're getting it in really misogynistic racist communities at the same time.

Michael, very quickly, I want to be clear that, you know, this is a very, very small percentage of men when we talk specifically about looks maxing and so we don't want to come across as alarmist. But what does this cultural movement reveal about young men right now? Yeah, I think it reveals a few. And I totally agree. Don't be alarmist. It is we're always dealing with subpopulations and that's a great thing to think about. I think it reveals a few things.

One thing is that I think people are not appreciating that many young men and boys are getting information about manhood, development, what it is to me a man in very extremist communities, misogynistic communities and racist communities. And those communities are providing information and education. And they are met with relatively little resistance or counter response, I think, because people are not aware how popular these communities are. I think the other thing is that it's revealing that young men and boys are having a lot of body image and self-esteem issues that we haven't been taking seriously and we need to take more seriously.

And on a broader level, I think people, you know, I think younger people are really aware of this. They've grown up in the age of social media. They've been judged on their appearance for long periods of time. But is, you know, it's a wake-up call that we need to take lookism as a form of prejudice and discrimination seriously. And we need to talk about it seriously. Like we talk about other forms of prejudice bias and discrimination. Because we might not be talking about it very much in universities and maybe in the media, but these online communities are certainly talking about it.

And if that's the only place that's giving people answers, then that's the only answer they're going to get to these problems. Michael, we're going to have to leave it there, but really appreciate your insights on this. Thank you so much. No problem. Thank you very much for having it. I'm Jay-N. Thanks for watching The Rundown. What do you like or not like about what we're doing so far? Send us your feedback at tvO.org slash rundown feedback

or leave us a comment on YouTube. Until then, it will see you tomorrow. Thank you.