No, not that male crisis at college, where women are now the majority of most incoming classes. Rather, something I’d never thought about.

When Aman Kidwai arrived at the University of Connecticut, he was scared, nervous and anxious like most young men. And, like most young men, he didn’t talk about it.

He had played football and run track in high school, and while he might have played sports at a Division 3 school, he wasn’t going to play at UConn. He was used to the highly structured life of high school, with every moment spoken for, ever-vigilant parents and teachers and a team full of friends.

The university felt cold and impersonal and he had a hard time connecting with people, much less discussing his uncomfortable feelings.

“Those are tough feelings to emote,” said Kidwai, now a senior, “tough feelings to tell anyone about.” He found himself skipping classes just because he could.

While most kids — young men and young women — have a mix of anxiety and excitement when they head off for college, experts on men and masculinity say that young men handle those feelings differently from young women and therefore often experience different problems and sometimes greater difficulties in the transition.

The article then goes on to discuss the ways in which colleges might help those who find this transition difficult. For example, we’re used to the idea that there should be a women’s center on campus. Should we now have a mens’ center as well? Or those student counsellors that already exist: can we make sure that they’re not entirely female focused and are willing and able to deal with the different ways that men deal with and express their emotions?

This is all very well but there’s a part of me that wants to deride all of this.

Jason Zelesky, wellness outreach coordinator at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said that “the whole formation or the social construction of masculinity sends young men these lofty and unfair messages about what it means to be a young man,” and that it’s “a narrative of violence, confrontation, fierce independence, of a sort of emotional apathy or non-communication of emotion with the exception of anger.”

“Our dashboard indicators are pretty convincing that for the most part it is men who are the predominant judicial load (at the university); men acting out in residence halls, men transported to the hospital for drinking too much,” Zelesky said. “The numbers bear that out.”

The real question is whether this is indeed part of the social construction of masculinity or whether it’s something innate about masculinity? Of course, not every man drinks too much, or has a propensity for violence, but on average men are more likely to do both than women are. Is this innate or learned behavior?

We’re not going to solve that nature/nurture argument here in a blog post but it’s difficult to think that none of it is innate…the argument is how much is nature and how much nurture, surely?

So I find myself a little conflicted about all of this. Aiding people through one of the great transitions of life, from child to adult, is of course a great and valid thing to do. But to wrap it all up in therapy speak just doesn’t work for me, sorry.