On a hot morning in central Virginia, nine men in black clothing were ordered out of a van. They’d been blindfolded for the drive. Each had paid $3,000 to spend three days crawling through mud, hauling rock-filled rucksacks, and submitting to what the program called a “beatdown.” The program was called RISE — Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution — and its marketing promised to help men “CHANGE YOUR STORY & UNF**K YOUR LIFE.”
What actually happened, once the crawling was done, looked considerably different from the advertising. A military veteran broke down sobbing while describing erectile dysfunction and the shame of feeling like he’d failed his marriage. A martial artist, chest-deep in a mud pit, suddenly started talking about watching his mother stab his father as a child. A man who’d lost an infant daughter at two months old stood on a mountaintop at dawn and said he couldn’t carry the guilt anymore. His kids deserved better.
That’s the story Charles Bethea reported in a recent New Yorker piece — and the part that deserves more attention than the mud.
Toughness as the Ticket Price
The past several years have produced a significant industry built around “alpha male” transformation: weekend programs with names like Warrior Week, Men of War Crucible, and Rise Up Kings, charging anywhere from $900 to $18,000, promising to forge “modern-day warriors,” restore the “masculine warrior spirit,” and turn participants into what one program calls “savage servants.” The marketing is thick with military imagery, Jordan Peterson audio clips, and language about weakness, betas, and reclaiming dominance.
But the actual content of many of these programs, once you’re past the obstacle courses, tells a different story. The physical suffering functions less as an end in itself and more as a permission structure. Men who would never walk into a therapist’s office will pay to bear-crawl through rivers — and then, exhausted and stripped of their usual defenses, find themselves saying things they’ve never said to another person.
The founder of RISE, a former marine who spent years running a similar program before launching his own, put it plainly: “I thought that becoming alpha — that tough, badass guy — was going to be the thing. I ruined my first marriage because of it. In my second marriage, I realized the man that my wife wants to see is not that man. She wants the man that can sit there and hold space.”
What the Data Actually Shows
The “male loneliness epidemic” has become a charged cultural phrase — cited by manosphere influencers as evidence that feminism has failed men, and dismissed by critics as a gendered distortion of a universal problem. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that men and women report nearly identical rates of loneliness — 16% of men and 15% of women say they feel lonely or isolated all or most of the time. The crisis, researchers note, is not specifically male. It is broadly human.
What does differ is the infrastructure for connection. Women tend to build and maintain friendships that accommodate emotional disclosure. Men, for reasons that are cultural more than biological, have largely been conditioned since childhood to define closeness through shared activity — watching a game, going to the gym, doing something — rather than through conversation. The number of men under 30 who report having no close friends has risen from 3% in 1990 to 15% today, according to survey data cited by sociologist Richard Reeves. Among single men, it’s 20%.
The Long History of Men Needing Permission
This is not a new dynamic. Historians of masculinity trace the current pattern back to the late 19th century, when cultural anxieties about men working alongside women in offices — rather than in factories or on farms — produced a flurry of remedies. Theodore Roosevelt was literally prescribed the “West cure”: go be a cowboy. The Boy Scouts were founded partly to get boys away from female teachers. The mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1990s, which sent men into the woods to beat drums and reconnect with “deep masculinity,” was doing essentially the same thing these $3,000 programs are doing today.
“The alpha male keeps returning as a heroic trope,” Michael Kimmel, author of Manhood in America, told The New Yorker. The word “alpha” itself was popularized by a 1982 book about chimpanzees whose actual argument — that the most effective alpha chimps were coalition-builders and consolers, not bullies — got almost entirely lost in translation.
What Men Are Actually Buying
The programs range from the earnest to the exploitative. One program founder was sued after a participant died during a trail run, with no emergency medic present. Teen-aged boys are now being enrolled in junior versions of these programs, learning from instructors who recommend curriculum drawn from a book by an author later identified as a white supremacist.
But some programs appear to be doing something genuine, if inefficiently. At RISE, the veteran who spent the weekend hauling rocks representing his anger, guilt, and shame arrived home and — according to his own account six months later — was still texting with the other men from his cohort daily. His wife told him he was more present. “She says I’m getting softer,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing.”
That observation sits at the center of what these programs are actually selling, beneath the alpha branding: not dominance, but access to the kind of emotional connection most men have been systematically taught to do without.