Commentary
Talking Is for Women? How Phil Labonte Deepens the Very Male Crisis He Decries
Phil Labonte has spotted a real problem. And then he offers the one answer guaranteed to make it worse.
In a podcast interview reported by the online magazine Metaladdicts, the 51-year-old All That Remains frontman declared that therapy isn’t for men. “Therapy is for women. Men don’t solve their problems by talking”, he reportedly said. The idea that a man could work through his problems in therapy he called “ridiculous”. Men, in his telling, find their way through action rather than words, through wrenching on cars, building things, getting their hands dirty together. The talking he leaves to the women.
The striking part isn’t the provocation. It’s the contradiction Labonte ties himself into. Since 2024, he has made the male crisis his second job. His op-ed “The Silent Crisis: Why Society Is Failing Men And Boys” ran in Fox News in September 2024 and earned him meetings on Capitol Hill; congressmen like Nathaniel Moran of Texas and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin picked up the theme. The strongest argument in Labonte’s piece was the high suicide rate among men.
That very figure refutes his advice. Tell men that talking is a woman’s thing, and you take from their hands the one tool proven to save lives. Silence isn’t a way out. Silence is the symptom. A man who warns about men dying and in the same breath forbids them from speaking about their pain hasn’t understood the crisis he claims to fight.
What Labonte takes for male nature is, in truth, upbringing. Boys learn early that a man doesn’t cry, that he pulls himself together, that weakness is something you breathe away. Nobody teaches them the words for what goes on inside. When those boys grow up and stay silent, it looks like disposition. It’s the result of twenty years of training. Labonte doesn’t describe that conditioning. He sharpens it. What boys absorb as a quiet rule, he now calls down from the stage, with a reach a childhood lesson never had.
That this sleight of hand lands at all comes down to the pattern it fits. Over the years Labonte has built a sideline career as a provocateur. He’s a regular on Tim Pool’s “Timcast IRL”, he publicly defended the use of racial slurs back in 2015, and after the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump he called on X to “destroy the left”. Calculated transgression has become his brand, as reliable as a breakdown dropped at the right moment. None of that touches his standing as a musician; “Antifragile”, the tenth All That Remains album, came out on 31 January 2025 on the band’s own steam and proves the group still works. But music isn’t what’s at stake here.
What’s at stake is reach, and what you do with it. Metal and hardcore have spent years building exactly the structures Labonte’s message cuts against: mental-health initiatives, suicide-prevention hotlines, bands that break the silence because they know how many fans it has broken. Labonte uses his platform to talk them down. The line he draws between “action” and “talking” is invented. Reaching out for help is action. It is often the hardest action of all.
Men don’t die because they talk too much. They die because they don’t. Whoever sours them on the one thing that helps isn’t a herald of the male crisis. He’s part of it.
Note: If you’re in crisis or having suicidal thoughts, talk to someone. In Germany, the Telefonseelsorge is free and anonymous around the clock at 0800 111 0 111 and 0800 111 0 222, and online at telefonseelsorge.de. Readers elsewhere can reach a local crisis line through their national health service.
