I heard a fascinating podcast on my drive to Philly: Ezra Klein talking to Richard Reeves who wrote Of Boys and Men in 2022. It’s perhaps the most detailed / data focused book on the problems of men. I have not read it yet but now will do so soon.
The main outlines of the “male malaise” are probably well known to you: boys do worse in school than girls, are less likely to go to college, and less likely to graduate. They are less likely to hold full-time jobs in their 20s or be on career tracks. As Reeves say, they tend to zig-zag more than women. And then there are the psychological issues: Men are less happy, lonelier, more likely to become substance abusers, more likely to commit suicide, and even more likely to die of COVID women.
What is not clear to me is the causes of these issues. Perhaps Reeves proposes some in the book but Klein did not seek explanations and Reeves did not give them in the podcast.
It is clear that part of the problem is simply the economic malaise of working people about which I’ve been writing. For the problems of men are far more likely to be found among working class than upper middle class men. Yet the economic challenges for working people is not the whole story since working class women are far better off in so many respects than working class men.
These problems pretty obviously have political consequences. Working class men are far more likely to be Trump supporters than working class women.
One thing I started wondering about is how much of these difference between men and women are due to (welcome to me at least) advances in the prospects of women. And, also how much are they due to the phenomenon of toxic masculinity or, to paraphrase what a woman friend of mine said a week or so ago: “You realize, don’t you, that aside from my husband and you and a few others, men are all assholes.”
I don’t actually think men are more likely to be assholes now than 50 years ago. Rather, women are far less likely willing to put up with them. But that might be a clue to the problems men have.
It’s well known that men who are unmarried are far less well off than men who are married. One reason of course is that married men are supported by their wives in many ways, both materially and emotionally. Men, on average, tend to get more self-esteem from work than from family and emotional relationships (women are more balanced in this way.) But being married and loved by a woman certainly helps, especially since part of the emotional labor women do is in sustaining connections to friends and family. In addition, married men may well be more focused on and more successful in their careers because they feel the need to provide support to their family.
So the fact that men are less likely to be married may partly explain their distress both directly, in that they get emotional sustenance and indirectly, in that do better at work.
There may be other factors as well that those who have read Dorothy Dinnerstein well know. Men in general tend to chafe against social restrictions–such as those demanded by school as well as injunction not to become intoxicated or engage in violence. they Part of the psycho-sexual explanation of that—as well the explanation of misogyny—is that all children chafe at those restriction but that because women do most of the child care, which involves setting those restrictions, boys see them as an external imposition and they resent and resist them, and become angry at women as a result. But because girls identify with their mothers as well, they identify with and internalize the restrictions that come with growing up.
So what are the solutions? Well I agree with Dinnerstein and Ike Balbus (whose book Emotional Rescue you should read, not least because I’m mentioned in it) argue that men and women need to be coparents in order to avoid male resentment against women.
Changing child rearing arrangements is certainly necessary and that, of course, means making deep changes in work arrangements.
But that is a very long term solution. Are their things we can do in the short term? How do we change the behavior of young men that leads them to do less well than women at work and also to be toxic in their relationships with women?
Obviously improving economic conditions of working people would make a huge difference if it raises income and improves career prospects for men. But since some of the problem for men is that they resist the kinds of work habits and diligence that comes easier to women, that’s not the whole solution. (There is a bit of blaming the victim in this argument. It’s easier to have good work habits if you have clear prospects for success. But there are those stark difference between the success of working class men and women so it’s not just prospects that make a difference.)
One that would help is to have more men who are teachers especially in lower grades, counselors, psychologists and so forth. But the percentage of men in those positions have been dropping.
Reeducation camps for men might help but are not permissible in a free society. I do, however, know more than a few women who think that they spend a lot (too much) of their time reeducating their men.
JD Vance offers two solutions. One is to return women to economic dependence on men so that they have to put up with toxic masculinity to survive. Clearly we aren’t going back to that. Nor should we.
The other is the religious / cultural solution: a revival of religion that will train men to be work hard and be decent to women. But that’s not a solution either, and for two reasons. The first is that given the phenomenon describe above, most young working class men are not going accept it. And second, the religion Vance offers doesn’t teach men to accept independent women with mind and lives of their own. So women are not going to accept it either (nor should they).
Much more to be said about this and I think I now have one more chapter to write for my book.