The Best Way to Celebrate Women Is to Raise Better Young Men

This past weekend, my feed filled up with International Women’s Day posts — tributes, gratitude threads, inspirational quotes. It’s all well-intentioned. Women’s contributions to society are immeasurable, and yes, one day of recognition is the bare minimum. But better than nothing.

Still, I kept asking myself the same question: what does it actually mean to celebrate women? Not designating a date on the calendar. Not a repost. Not a 30% discount at the department store beauty counter. Not just holding events on women leadership.

After days of self-reflection and contemplation, I arrived the conclusion that to really celebrate women, we — men and women alike — must be more intentional about raising better young men.

I write this as someone who is single and childless — but I have been mothering in my own way for nearly twenty years. I am an aunt to two nephews, and that role has been one of the great privileges of my life. One of them heads to college this year. With both of them, I have had a front-row seat to how the men in their lives have shaped them — for better and for worse. I have also watched what a steady anchor looks like: a doting aunt who loves fiercely and holds them accountable in equal measure. The young men they are becoming? I would gladly introduce them to my best friends’ daughters.

Because the most powerful way to celebrate women — I repeat — is to raise a generation of better young men.

He Becomes What He Sees

Raising a good man was never meant to be a father’s job alone. It takes a village — and that village is made of men. Fathers, yes. But also grandfathers, uncles, godfathers, brothers, cousins, teachers, coaches, and mentors. Every man in a boy’s orbit is either modeling what manhood looks like, or leaving a vacuum that culture will rush in to fill.

And culture is not filling it well.

Boys are growing up in a world that sells them a script: wealth, status, dominance, invulnerability. NYU professor Scott Galloway has put hard numbers to the cost of that script — in the United States, four out of five people who die by suicide are male. Men are three times more likely to struggle with addiction or homelessness. These are not abstract statistics. They are the boys sitting in classrooms right now, becoming the partners, fathers, and colleagues we will all share a world with.

Jason Portnoy — PayPal Mafia veteran and author of Silicon Valley Porn Star — lived that script to its logical conclusion. He had the money, the career, the family. And he was miserable, destructive, and completely lost. What he’d been handed as a definition of manhood, he eventually realized, had never made him a better partner, father, or human being. It had simply kept him a boy in a man’s suit.

After years of rebuilding, he arrived at a different definition entirely:

“A mature man knows and trusts himself. He feels secure in his identity. He is comfortable being alone with himself. He exists to be in service to his family, his community, and the world. A man like this does not hurt people. He is not violent, aggressive, or abusive. He does not get lost in an addiction to numb his pain or distract him from feeling his emotions.”

— Jason Portnoy, Silicon Valley Porn Star

That is the man we need to be raising. And every adult male in a boy’s life has a role in building him.

The Competition You Don’t See Coming

Here’s the problem: while good men are being passive, the bad examples are not. They are out in full force — on screens, in algorithms, in comment sections and YouTube rabbit holes — aggressively recruiting the minds of young men. Andrew Tate and his imitators aren’t lurking in the shadows. They are running a sophisticated operation to mind-nap your sons — hijacking their sense of identity before you’ve had a chance to help them build one.

Mind-napping is exactly what it sounds like: a kidnapping of the mind. And it works precisely because nature abhors a vacuum. If the men in a boy’s life are absent, checked out, or too busy to engage — the manosphere will engage for them, with a seductive message: that strength means domination, that women are adversaries, and that vulnerability is for losers.

You cannot fight that with passivity. You have to show up first, show up louder, and show up better.

The Gift That Keeps Giving

Raising a generation of resilient, service-minded, and self-aware young men is not a one-time gesture. It is the gift that keeps giving for generations to come. A boy who learns to own his mistakes grows into a man who doesn’t make his partner carry them. A boy who learns to serve others grows into a father who shows up. A boy who learns that vulnerability is strength grows into a man who doesn’t go silent, go numb, or go looking for trouble.

This is not soft idealism. It is the most practical investment we can make in women’s lives.

So if you’re an uncle — show up. Take him somewhere. Teach him something with your hands. If you’re a grandfather — tell him about a time you failed and what it cost you. If you’re a teacher or a coach — hold him to a standard, and hold it with warmth. Let him see that the men he admires are not invincible. They’re just willing.

Stop being his spokesperson when the waiter asks what he’d like to order.
Let him wash his own dishes.
Let him try something bold and fail.
Let him own the consequences of his choices.
Let him get lost — and find his own way home.
Let him feel the deep satisfaction of doing something for someone else.
Let him learn that failure is not the opposite of success. It’s the first draft of it.

The Silent Crisis No One Talks About

Teenage boys carry more internal weight than we give them credit for. Their inner lives are every bit as turbulent as any teenage girl’s — the sadness, anger, disappointment, and confusion are all there. The difference is that boys have been handed far fewer tools to express any of it. So it builds. Quietly. Invisibly.

Some boys release the pressure through sport. Others retreat into gaming, into digital worlds where the stakes feel manageable. Some turn it outward — violent against themselves, against animals, against others. Some simply go quiet and stay that way. All of these are slow-burning crises. All of them eventually become someone else’s problem.

These are society’s ticking time bombs — and we keep acting surprised when they go off.

Women, We Are Not Off the Hook

Here is the part that is harder to say — and harder to hear.

Women, we are complicit too. We coddle. We make excuses. We absorb consequences that aren’t ours to absorb, and call it love. We do his laundry, fight his battles, smooth over his roughest edges, and then wonder why he never learned to do any of it himself. We have been so focused on what men are doing wrong that we have sometimes overlooked what we are enabling.

We are capable of extraordinary things as a gender. But our welfare is closely tied to the maturity of the men around us. Which means it is also our job — as mothers, aunts, teachers, mentors — to hold young men to a higher standard. Not to punish them, but to believe in what they’re capable of becoming. The most loving thing we can do for a boy is to refuse to do for him what he can do for himself.

So much of women’s exhaustion in relationships comes from years of playing emotional manager — regulating feelings, making decisions, holding the invisible infrastructure of family life together. This isn’t natural. It’s what happens when no one ever expected the men in our lives to develop these capacities. We filled the gap. Quietly, reliably, at great cost to ourselves.

This Is What Celebrating Women Looks Like

“The way the men in a boy’s life show up — or don’t — is the greatest gift or the heaviest burden they will ever give to the women of this world.”

International Women’s Month doesn’t need your donation or your ribbon. It needs every man reading this to decide, today, to be the kind of man a young boy will spend the rest of his life trying to become. Let him see you own a mistake. Let him watch you serve someone without being asked. Let him hear you speak about women with respect — not as a performance, but as a habit.

And it needs every woman reading this to stop smoothing the path so flat that boys never learn to walk on uneven ground.

Raising a generation of men who are strong, kind, service-oriented, resourceful, and resilient will do more for the women of this world than any awareness campaign ever could.

That is what celebrating women looks like.

About the author: Jenny is the co-founder and head creator of Day 2 Coaching.

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