How the Paternal Brain Is Wired by Pregnancy

Fatherhood matters.

That’s the message at the heart of Tucker Carlson’s documentary Fathers Wanted—and it’s a message worth hearing.

A man who gives his time, his energy, and his life to his children is doing something deeply meaningful. There’s no controversy there.

But as I watched the film, I kept noticing something else.

Not what it said.

But what it didn’t.

Because by the end, the story felt strangely incomplete—like watching a documentary about lung cancer that never once mentions smoking.

The framing begins immediately.

Within the first moments, we are told that young men are choosing pornography, video games, and drugs over marriage and family. The implication is clear: the problem is not just that fatherhood is declining, but that men are turning away from it—opting for comfort, distraction, and indulgence instead.

That may be true in some cases.

But starting the story this way does something important. It establishes, from the outset, that the primary driver of fatherlessness is male behavior.

Everything that follows is filtered through that lens.

The film goes on to frame fatherlessness largely as a cultural and moral failure.

Men, we’re told, are retreating. Avoiding responsibility. Choosing comfort over commitment. Losing faith. Losing purpose.

By the end, the message is unmistakable: good men step up, bad men walk away.
And if a father abandons his children, Carlson makes it clear—he deserves contempt.

That’s a powerful claim.

But it rests on a narrow frame.

Because what the film barely examines—if at all—is the system in which modern fatherhood actually exists.

There is no serious discussion of:

• family courts

• custody outcomes

• child support structures

• no-fault divorce

• or how fathers often lose daily access to their children

These are not minor details.

They are central to understanding what happens to fathers in the real world.

In many cases, fathers do not simply walk away.

They are separated—from their children, from their role, from their identity as fathers—by processes largely outside their control. A man can go from being an everyday presence in his child’s life to being a visitor—or, in some cases, a paycheck. And yet, culturally, the outcome is often interpreted the same way:

He left.

But that is not always what happened.

There is another layer here the film only partially acknowledges. For decades, men have been broadly portrayed as:

• oppressive

• emotionally deficient

• disposable

• dangerous

• ​toxic

These ideas have been reinforced across media, education, and public discourse—under the influence of feminist frameworks that carry a deep skepticism and contempt toward men.

At the same time, we have seen something very different happen on the other side.

Single motherhood has increasingly been framed not as a difficult circumstance to be supported and stabilized, but as something to be celebrated—even idealized. Cultural messaging often elevates the strength and independence of mothers raising children alone, while saying very little about the cost of a father’s absence.

The contrast is striking. Fathers are questioned. Their role is diminished. Their presence is treated as optional. While single motherhood is often presented as sufficient—sometimes even preferable. The result is a contradiction we rarely confront: We tell men they are not needed. We question their value. We undermine their role.

And then we ask why they hesitate to step into it.

​When structural forces are ignored, a complex social problem ​can get reduced to a simple moral failure. And when that happens, the burden of explanation—and blame—falls almost entirely on individuals.

In this case, on men.

Carlson is right about something important:

Fatherhood matters.

But if we want more fathers present in their children’s lives, we need to do more than praise the ideal We need to examine the systems that shape the reality. Because until we do, we will keep asking the same question—

Why aren’t men stepping up?

—without fully understanding what they are stepping into.

Men Are Good, as are you.

In a recent piece for The Globe and Mail, Debra Soh takes on a topic that is long overdue for honest discussion: the growing hostility between young men and women, and the role online spaces play in fueling it.

To her credit, she does something that many commentators still avoid. She acknowledges that the problem is not confined to the so-called “manosphere.” She names the existence of a “femosphere” and recognizes that it, too, can promote distrust, manipulation, and even outright hostility toward the opposite sex.

That matters.

For years, the dominant narrative has been that toxicity flows in one direction—that men are the primary source of gender-based hostility, and women are largely reacting to it. Soh challenges that assumption. She points to polling data showing that young women, in some cases, hold more negative views of men than men do of women. She highlights the cultural double standards that allow anti-male messaging to pass with far less scrutiny than anti-female messaging.

All of this is important. And it takes a certain degree of intellectual independence to say it out loud.

But this is where her analysis stops just short of something deeper.

Soh ultimately frames the problem as a kind of mutual escalation—two sides locked in a feedback loop of resentment, each needing to step back, see the other more clearly, and abandon the worst impulses of their respective online cultures.

It’s a reasonable conclusion. It’s also incomplete.

Because it assumes that these two forces exist on roughly equal footing.

They don’t.

The hostility toward men that Soh describes is not simply emerging from fringe online communities. It is reinforced—often subtly, sometimes explicitly—by the broader culture itself. Media narratives regularly cast men as dangerous, deficient, or morally suspect. Academic frameworks frequently position men as privileged agents and women as vulnerable recipients. Institutional policies are often built on these same assumptions.

Over time, this does something powerful: it transforms a perspective into a kind of cultural default.

It begins to feel less like an opinion and more like reality.

By contrast, the hostility that emerges from the manosphere exists in a very different environment. It is not institutionally reinforced. It is challenged, criticized, and often condemned outright. Again, that does not make it accurate or healthy—but it does mean it operates under constraints that the opposing narrative largely does not.

This creates a playing field that is far from level.

One set of ideas is amplified and legitimized. The other is policed and marginalized.

And that asymmetry matters more than we often acknowledge.

Because when one narrative is embedded in institutions, it shapes not just opinions, but outcomes. It influences how boys are educated, how men are treated in courts, how male suffering is perceived—or overlooked. It becomes part of the background assumptions people carry without even realizing it.

Meanwhile, the reactive spaces that emerge in response—however flawed—are then judged as if they exist in isolation, rather than as downstream responses to an already tilted system.

This is the piece that Soh only partially touches.

She sees the hostility. She sees the polarization. She even sees that anti-male sentiment is more widespread than many are willing to admit.

But she does not fully account for the cultural forces that sustain and legitimize that sentiment.

And without that, the solution she offers—mutual correction—risks placing equal responsibility on two sides that are not equally empowered.

To be clear, none of this is an argument for excusing hostility—whether it comes from men or from women. We need to resist the pull of the worst elements on either side. Dehumanization, wherever it appears, damages everyone involved.

But understanding requires clarity.

And clarity requires us to ask not just what is happening, but where the weight of the culture rests.

Until we do that, we will continue to describe the conflict between men and women as a symmetrical breakdown in understanding—when in many ways, it is something much more lopsided than that.

Men are good, as are you.

For decades, we’ve been told a simple story: when women fall behind, it’s injustice. When men fall behind, it’s failure.

That may sound exaggerated. But new experimental research suggests it isn’t.

A recent large-scale study involving more than 35,000 Americans found something striking. When participants were presented with a situation in which a worker had fallen behind—earned less, performed worse, or ended up with nothing—people responded differently depending on whether that worker was male or female.

When the low performer was a man, significantly more participants chose to give him nothing. When the low performer was a woman, more participants redistributed support. Even more revealing, participants were more likely to believe that the man had fallen behind because he didn’t try hard enough.

The researchers call this “statistical fairness discrimination.” That is, people infer that disadvantaged men are less deserving because they assume their disadvantage reflects low effort.

The Effort Story

In the study, participants were asked to redistribute earnings between two workers. In some conditions, earnings were based on productivity. In others, earnings were assigned randomly.

Here’s the important part: even when outcomes were random—when effort had nothing to do with it—participants were still more likely to believe that the male who ended up behind had exerted less effort than the female who ended up behind. In other words, even in the absence of evidence, assumptions about effort were not neutral.

In plain language: when men fall behind, people are more likely to assume they did not try hard enough.

That is not data-driven reasoning. It reflects a prior belief. And prior beliefs shape compassion.

The Compassion Gap

The study didn’t just look at small redistribution decisions. It also asked participants about public policy: should the government provide support to people falling behind in education and the labor market?

Support dropped noticeably when the group described as falling behind was male rather than female.

In other words, sympathy is gendered. The willingness to intervene is gendered. The attribution of responsibility is gendered. Importantly, this was not confined to one political or demographic group. The pattern appeared broadly, suggesting that it reflects a shared cultural assumption rather than a narrow ideological position.

When women fall behind, we instinctively look for barriers. When men fall behind, we instinctively look for flaws.

What This Means

This pattern shows up in places many of us already sense it.

When boys fall behind in school, we talk about motivation and behavior. When girls fall behind, we talk about resources and environment. When men leave the workforce, we question work ethic. When women leave the workforce, we look for systemic obstacles. When fathers struggle financially after divorce, we assume irresponsibility. When mothers struggle, we assume hardship.

The study does not use the word gynocentrism, or make the obvious reference to moral typecasting. It stays within the language of behavioral economics and calls the phenomenon “fairness discrimination.” But the mechanism is clear: disadvantage is interpreted through a moral lens—and that lens is not symmetrical.

Women are more readily cast as vulnerable. Men are more readily cast as responsible. And responsibility without context easily becomes blame.

The Quiet Cost

This matters because perception drives policy.

If society believes that male disadvantage is primarily self-inflicted, there will be less urgency to address it. If people assume boys who fall behind simply didn’t try hard enough, we will design fewer interventions. If struggling men are viewed as less deserving, institutions will reflect that belief—often without conscious intent.

No one has to be malicious. All that is required is a background assumption that male failure signals character weakness. Once that belief takes hold, compassion narrows. And when compassion narrows, so does support.

A Hard Question

Here is the uncomfortable question: why are effort assumptions gendered in the first place?

Why do we instinctively read female disadvantage as circumstantial and male disadvantage as dispositional?

The study does not answer that. It simply shows that the pattern exists. But patterns rarely emerge from nowhere. They reflect cultural narratives about men as agents, providers, and actors—people who are expected to overcome adversity. When they do not, disappointment can harden into judgment.

Women, by contrast, are more often framed as relational beings whose setbacks invite protection. Protection invites support.
Men are more often expected to handle adversity on their own. And when they do not, expectation invites scrutiny.

When Men Fall Behind

We are living in a time when boys lag in reading proficiency, when young men withdraw from education, when male labor-force participation declines, and when male suicide rates far exceed those of women.

Yet when men fall behind, the cultural reflex is not alarm. It is evaluation. Did he try hard enough? Did he make better choices? Did he apply himself?

Sometimes those questions are valid. But when they are asked of only one sex, they reveal something deeper than fairness.

They reveal a compassion gap.

And that gap shapes everything—from classrooms to courtrooms to public policy.

When men fall behind, we don’t just measure their outcomes. We measure their worth.

Men Are Good, as are you.

https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article/23/6/2212/8112864
Cappelen, A. W., Falch, R., & Tungodden, B. (2025). Experimental evidence on the acceptance of males falling behind. Journal of the European Economic Association, 23(6), 2212–2240.