When Men Aren't Ok
And why it's hard to feel sorry for them
I recently read an article in The Nation entitled Are Men Ok? It was a profile of Richard V. Reeves, the author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. In it, Reeves tries to fill a gap in the liberal discourse by talking about the unique challenges that men are facing. The Right has done a marvelous job making men feel seen, despite the fact that they offer few policy recommendations that would actually address their woes. Reeves believes that the Left’s inability to speak directly to the problems of men, particularly young and lower SES men, has resulted in a massive rightward shift in male political affiliations.
Much of what is in the article (and I’m guessing, Reeves’ book, though I haven’t read it because why read books when there are great writers who write book reviews?) is clearly just empirically true. The last election showed a 15 point swing for young men from voting democrat to voting republican, and Reeves’ argues that this is in large part because young men are doing worse in many ways than young women, and the Right is talking about it while the Left is not. Men’s outcomes in terms of grades, high school and college graduation rates, job prospects, mental health, and life expectancies are all going down for the first time in many generations. And young women are doing better on these data points than young men, though it’s important to note that it’s also getting worse for everyone overall, so much of women’s gains (particularly in closing the wage gap, which still isn’t closed, by the way) is really more due to real wages remaining stagnant than to women’s wages going significantly up.
Reeves founded the American Institute for Boys and Men, which does research and makes policy recommendations aimed at helping men and boys. They exist because they believe the problems men face are “structural” according to their website, which is an interesting word because it carries an implication that there have been policies that have directly or indirectly targeted men and boys which has led to these outcomes. It’s an issue that many of Reeves’s critics have with the way he talks about what to do about these issues.
My biggest initial objection to Reeves’ analysis was best articulated by another author quoted in the article, Jessica Calarco, who wrote Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net (which I might actually read) in this excerpt:
“So much of this manosphere culture is tapping into that desire to find a way to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,” Calarco added. While men may feel a specific sense of precarity, Calarco sees Reeves’s vision of male-focused policies as taking us farther away from the kinds of universal programs that could help address the precarity that people of all gender identities experience. Focusing on men, Calarco said, “actually leads to more skepticism of those kinds of universal policies, and discourages men from seeing themselves as represented in those kinds of universal policies.”
When I asked Reeves why his focus wasn’t on those policies, at first he replied flatly, “Because we’re not going to get them.”
In other words, Reeves acknowledges that a radical reorganization of our policies (i.e. free college tuition, a massive investment in domestic manufacturing and trade jobs programs, free healthcare, free childcare, etc…) might just erase all of these gendered differences, but because that seems outlandish, he’d rather advocate for public policies that specifically target men, because that would be an easier sell. That feels pretty cowardly to me.
In addition to diagnosing the rightward shift of men, Reeves also diagnoses the Left’s inability to talk about “men’s issues.” He blames it simply on being politically inconvenient, unpopular, etc… “What we had was performative masculinity from the right and deafening silence from the left: Democrats couldn’t expose the lack of substance on the Republican side, because they wouldn’t even acknowledge that there were problems that needed solving.”
And this is where I had to think for a while. What is it that keeps lefties and liberals from talking about the problems that men are facing? Is it just that it’s not PC? I don’t think so. For one thing, as I’ve already mentioned, it does seem like all of the structural problems that men are facing are the same problems that everyone is facing, and we could improve outcomes for men by changing our policies in ways that would help everyone, but that’s not the thing that explains why it’s hard to even name that men are having a hard time, as a group.
I think it’s hard to talk about because of what happens to men when they’re not ok. The ways they deal with it. When women aren’t doing well, and they organize as a voting bloc, they don’t vote for policies that hurt men, but when men get organized, they do. When teenage girls are feeling alienated and mentally ill, they don’t shoot up their schools, but boys have. (About 4% of shooters in mass shooting incidents are female). When women feel slighted by individual men, they don’t (on average) sexually and physically assault those individual men, but that is a disturbing pattern among men. When men become parents they don’t suddenly increase their risk of being murdered by their domestic partner, but for women, murder is the leading cause of death once you become pregnant. The closest equivalent to the “manosphere” that women have created are snide feminist jokes like mugs that read “Men’s Tears” and, perhaps, overgeneralizing-to-the-point-of-unfair comedy songs like Even When Men Seem Cool They’re Not. Women are not creating content instructing other women on how to control, manipulate or stalk men. There are (essentially) no blogs that specialize in generating defenses of sexual assault and physical harm toward men. And women are not arguing for men to be siloed into specific industries or pushed out of the workforce in general or have their rights taken away.
I’m someone who believes that hurt people hurt people. Anyone who behaves in a toxic, violent, or disturbingly anti-social way is the victim of something or other along the way that has gone horribly wrong. I believe that people who were loved and raised in a healthy way with access to things they needed to flourish and thrive, in communities full of people who had access to the same, generally don’t turn into people like Andrew Tate or Donald Trump. I surprised my family at a dinner table conversation recently when I shared that I actually have no problem whatsoever feeling compassion for Trump. Now, I don’t want him anywhere near me or to have any power, and I’m angry that he’s president, but it’s obvious to me that this is someone who suffered abuse and neglect and has pain and scars so deep down that the experience of being him must be excruciating in ways I’d be unable to tolerate, and for that I feel enormous pity towards him.
I feel that way about the men I see in the manosphere as well. Something’s gone wrong. But maybe it’s not always “structural” as Reeves has stated. Maybe it’s not about policies that have harmed them as a demographic (i.e. policies that have given women and girls a leg up in various ways). Maybe it’s cultural messages about sex and male entitlement, and the shame that’s inflicted on young boys for showing fear, vulnerability or empathy. If this is the culprit, then it’s very much in line with what feminists have been saying for years, which is that the gender binary hurts everyone, and it’s likely feminist policies and education that would address this harm most directly.
What feels odd about talking about Men Not Being Ok is that the result of their not ok-ness is a huge amount of harm towards women. It’s a hard sell to get women, as a group, to talk more about helping men, when these not-ok men are trying to murder and rape them. Don’t get me wrong, it is a problem. Men aren’t ok. And the way they’re not ok is specific, because of the ways they’ve been socialized to cope when they’re not ok. Those coping mechanisms are bad for everybody, including themselves, but they’re often deadly for the women around them.
To me, the failure that this points to is not on the policy level. It’s on the level of feminist messaging. It’s like every feminist joke about men being garbage needs this asterisk that is totally unnecessary for everyone who already has a little feminist analysis under their belts, but I now realize is just not at all obvious to lots of men out there. The asterisk is…
*In fact, all people of all genders are emotionally harmed by the inherently oppressive gender binary that not only teaches that girls are supposed to be subservient and sexually objectified but also that boys are expected to treat girls as sexual objects and stifle the kinds of empathy, helpfulness and sweetness that might not just be nice for girls to experience, but also for boys people to FEEL, and it’s downright tragic how hard it is for men to cry, how little men confide in their friends, how tied up men’s egos are with their sexual exploits, how little room there is for men to feel beautiful rather than powerful, how little men experience non-sexual touch, and how feeling weak is so socially prohibited in men that when they’re upset they have no other outlet but aggression, and this SYSTEM is, in fact, the butt of this particular joke, everyone, not men’s inherent inferiority, but the bafflingly unhelpful system of gender indoctrination that creates the situation where we, women, are routinely confronted with frustrating and harmful behavior from men, and what we’re doing with this joke right now is pointing out the humor of the situation as a means of chipping away at the solidity and unquestioned wisdom of these gender instructions and norms so that we, all of us, yes even YOU, Sir, can experience a freer, more expressive, more authentic and less toxic reality than the one we’re currently being subjected to.
But like, it’s hard to squeeze that into a comedy set, you know?
There are some important lessons here, particularly for understanding what’s happened to men in the last few decades. Despite the increased awareness of feminist issues, consent education, the #MeToo movement, etc… men’s behavior is shifting more toxic. And I think for those of us who want to spread feminist messages, we need to accept that if we want men to hear us, we need to get a little clearer about the above. But it’s annoying to me that people as learned as this Reeves guy are essentially reducing the feminist project to “bettering outcomes for women” when it’s so much more than that. Better education for boys about the messaging they’re getting and tools to counteract the toxic manosphere crap they’re consuming would help men and boys seek common purpose with women rather than see them as this oppositional demographic.
Patriarchy got us into this mess. Feminism’s gotta get us out.
In debaucherous camaraderie,
🪶Rachel Lark
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Great analysis!
This is exceptional ✨