One of the most important voices on men’s issues right now is Richard Reeves, the former Brookings scholar and current president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Reeves’s latest, Of Boys and Men, is, in my view, the most comprehensive review of how men declined so rapidly following the feminist waves.
Reeves published an essay yesterday on challenges plaguing the modern male. Men don’t have a solid definition of “masculinity,” and regardless of how it’s defined, masculinity is usually perceived negatively, anyway, Reeves argues. His own understanding of manhood seems to be a good model:
When I was thirteen, my father lost his job. He was hardly alone: this was in the early 1980s in the UK, and he worked in manufacturing. It took months for him to find work. Each morning he would appear at the breakfast table, freshly showered, in a shirt and tie. Then he would go to his desk to check for new job postings and send out résumés.
One day I asked him, “Why do you still dress so smartly when you don’t have a job to go to?” He looked at me and said, “I do still have a job. My job is to get another job so I can take care of all of you.” I’ll never forget that moment. I saw, for the first time, that Dad’s job wasn’t just that mysterious thing he went off to do every morning. It was a manifestation of the relationship of care between him and the rest of the family.
Three years later, he had to find a job again. This time he found work halfway across the country. But I was flourishing in my school and had friends I loved. My parents were reluctant to move me. So for two years, Dad left home at dawn every Monday morning, returning sometime on Friday afternoon. When I asked him about it years later, he said, “It’s just what you do, isn’t it?”
Relational masculinity, Reeves writes, creates in men a sense of self not grounded in “isolation and introspection,” but in “relationships and service.” That’s contrasted by the lauded “Lone Ranger” archetype. However, manhood, like womanhood, can’t survive on independence alone.
If men were Lone Rangers at heart, feminism should have freed them. As women became independent, men could simply head to the hills and be their true selves, unburdened by paycheques and parent-teacher nights. But, in fact, the Lone Ranger is just lonely. Today 15 percent of young men say they have no close friends, up from just 3 percent in 1990. Single men have worse health, lower employment rates, and weaker social networks than married men. Drug-related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a single decade, from 2010 to 2020. Divorce, now twice as likely to be initiated by wives as husbands, is psychologically harder on men than women.
Men may like movies about cowboys and astronauts. Back in the day they might have jokingly referred to their wife as “the ball and chain.” But most seem smart enough to discern myth from reality. In a 2016 poll, more men than women ranked being married, either now or in the future, as “very important to me” (58 percent vs. 47 percent).
Men without women are not living out a dream of Marlboro Man freedom. They are taking drugs and, too often, taking their own lives. Men are at a three times higher risk for “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcohol, or drugs. Australian researcher Fiona Shand and her colleagues looked at the words that men who have attempted suicide most often use to describe themselves. At the top of the list: “useless” and “worthless.”
These men are not free. They are lost.
I like to talk about these issues, in relation to women. Mainly, our apprehension toward commitment is fueled by a feminist movement that convinced women to pursue financial independence and careers over family life. But the “work-life,” “career-family” debate isn’t exclusive to women. Men deserve louder voices in the discourse, especially because while feminists forged ahead during the sexual revolution, men were left behind where they still remain today. Both masculinity and femininity need a revival — and one mustn’t come at the expense of the other.
Many men are left feeling dislocated. Their fathers and grandfathers had a pretty clear path to follow: work, wife, kids. What now? What is a bicycle for, in a world of fish? . . .
The construction of masculinity is a cultural task faced by every human society. It must be taught, and learned, and above all shown: boys believe their eyes more than their ears. When the job is done well, men know they are needed, and for what. They feel seen and heard. If we don’t like some of the versions of masculinity currently on offer, it’s up to us to fix that, rather than to pathologize the idea of masculinity itself.
Four out of five people think that “masculine” is a negative quality when applied to men, according to a 2018 Pew study. That’s not too shocking a number, considering the status male identity has occupied for decades. Men, it’s clear, need better examples of masculinity to remind them that they are not redundant — and to end the war on masculinity, for good.