The question is quite subtle. I heartily reject tangible requirements such as you are a man when you make your first million, go over the Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel, have sex or lose your foreskin etc. The real change is something that resides deep within the self: the source of motivation.

A baby is completely dependent on the help of others. In the early years of life, one is incapable of survival without adult protection. The need for approbation is built into the psyche genetically and by the early experience of dependence.

However there comes a time when a boy needs to become his own source of agency, acting from his own moral compass and in accord with his own values. Beyond the age at which this change should occur (about 13), too much dependence on the values of others is a seriously harmful matter. And it is this re-direction of psychic energy which has underlain the need for rites of passage, particularly male rites of passage, in almost every society up until the Industrial Revolution, when industrialists suddenly found the need for fully grown children to do their drudgery for them.

The school system was drawn in to make the preparations for the non-passage into adulthood of the majority of people. (Read John Taylor Gatto’s An Underground History of American Education for information on how this was done.)

Because the change of spiritual direction is so subtle, there will be many who dispute its existence at all. If I were to say that two British prime ministers, Tony Blair and Edward Heath never reached true adulthood, many would say that was an absurdity, because of their achievements. And yet the former demonstrated, and still demonstrates, an evident excessive and infantile need for approbation, a need which clearly influenced his behaviour as PM and the latter spent his entire life trying to demonstrate how cultured he was, presumably trying to fulfill some parental obligation. One’s position and achievements in the object world do not necessarily indicate the crossing of the threshold into manhood.

However, as far as men’s rights are concerned, there are tangible and serious consequences stemming from the widespread failure of boys to become men in the way I have suggested. One is the large number of white knights who, pathetically dependent on the approbation of society (or their imaginary mothers), pander to political correctness and feminism.

Another is the degree to which “education” has taken over from real life. Qualifications are not achievements: they are certificates to show you have followed a particular training scheme. And yet modern society regards these certificates as if they represented something more than a purchased training service. Real achievement takes place in the real world and is not subject to whether academic arbiters regard it has having met the standards necessary for the certificate to be awarded.

I believe we need to re-introduce rites of passage for our sons so that there is a clean break between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood. Making this break will take a good deal of the wind out of the feminist/PC/white knight movement.