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American boyhood used to come with company. For most of the past century, a boy could count on rooms full of men who were not his father — scoutmasters, coaches, religious leaders, the fathers of his friends — that were supplied almost automatically by programs such as Y-Indian Guides and the Boy Scouts. Those programs rested on a premise so ordinary that nobody thought to defend it: Boys need sustained, voluntary, intergenerational time with men who are trying. The aesthetics of some of them did not age well. But the premise was never the embarrassing part. The premise is now an empirical question, and the data have an uncomfortable answer.