This is the best article I’ve read all year.
(Or video. I didn’t watch the video.)
It is a very long article (worth it!) so I’ll pull out some points I thought were especially good.
It’s obviously true as we look around that many men and boys do feel somewhat lost. They don’t quite know their place in society. They don’t quite understand how they’re supposed to be. They very often know how they’re not supposed to be. So this sense of, “What’s my place in the world, why am I needed, what’s my role going to be going forward?” that’s a very real question that many men and boys are genuinely struggling with. That’s not a confected online idea.
So if you think about men without a college degree, for example, their wages are no higher today than they were in 1979. That’s almost half a century of stagnant wages for most men without a college degree… You’re seeing this disconnection from family life. You’re seeing stagnant wages. Men who are born into lower income families, they are worse off on most measures than men who were born just 15 years earlier into those families. So we’re seeing a declining economic social and family trajectory for men who are working class or towards the bottom of the economic distribution.
The author talks about the increased feminization of many professions that come into contact with boys and young men, including declining rates of male teachers, male mental health professionals, and others who may play a community or mentorship role in the lives of boys and men. He also decries the elimination of sex-segregated spaces such as the Boy Scouts, as these environments usually emphasize the development of alternate models of masculinity. In essence, he argues that we’re suffering a dearth of male role models to lead the next generation.
So if you’re a young man, say, and you’re struggling with a mental health problem, and you go to a website, and you only see images of women, you go to a counseling place at school or a college, and they’re mostly female providers, and just the whole vibe around it just feels like this is something that women are more comfortable talking about, and they’re more represented in. It’s already difficult to get many men to come forward and get help for mental health problems. They are much less likely to do so than women. So we should be redoubling our efforts to reach those men and make it easier for them to come through the door, easier for them to put their hands up and say that they’re struggling. One way we can do that is by at least reversing the decline in the share of men in those professions.
The author also discusses gender politics and how it hinders addressing the real root of the issue.
One of the things that really worries me is the way in which young men and young women have been increasingly persuaded that their problems are the fault of the other side… Weirdly, both sides have managed to politicize young men and young women almost against each other just at a moment in history where you’d want young people to be arm in arm against the structural problems that they’re facing in the economy… And so I think in different ways, the politics of gender have ended up becoming really way too personal and not structural enough. If we’re not careful, these conversations can shut the conversation down with boys and young men, rather than opening it up.
It’s a really difficult thing to think about or even to talk about, but how do we maintain this really wonderful idea of like the empowering and uplifting atmosphere that I think we’ve had around women and girls in schools, but do the same for boys and try and create this sense of it being uplifting for both. I didn’t think about this at all when I was younger myself. Like, “The future is female,” is probably something I would’ve gone along with, like as a good male feminist or whatever. But actually, that’s a terrible phrase. Like, the future can’t be female or male. It has to be for everybody.
(I’ve never liked that phrase.)
So first of all, horrible framing, non-toxic, but then you say, “Okay, so what does non-toxic masculinity look like?”
People will very often say things like, “Well, you know, that’s where you’re more emotionally vulnerable, you’re much more caring, nurturing.” Okay. Then you say, “And how is that different to stereotypical femininity, maybe positive femininity?” And then they’ll say, “Well, it isn’t really. It’s like, okay.” So the danger is that non-toxic masculinity is actually just an empty set in that two by two. And what you’re doing is you’re presenting boys and young men with a choice between being toxic and being female.
This is probably the most interesting point (to me): If we hold out toxic masculinity as the thing not to be, what is the alternative? How do we define it without making it just another version of being a woman? What is healthy masculinity? To some extent I think people have to decide that for themselves, but are there points we can agree on, are there guidelines? The author points out increased risk taking (such as heroism) and different ways of bonding with children. What else can we add to this?
What are men good for?
We’ve had to adjust and update our view about the role of men depending on the conditions of the society at the time. I don’t think we’re any different to that. We’ve got to update our model of manhood, masculinity, whatever language you prefer, for this new and much better world of gender equality, but we’ve also got to make sure that we continue to send the message to men, “We need you. We need you.” So, “We, the tribe, not just anyone needs you, and we need,” not it will be nice to have you, we’d like you but need and not just anybody but you.
We do not want barricades. We do not want marches. What we want is policies and solutions, and weirdly, I think if we get better at having actual solutions and actual policies, that will de-emphasize identity. I think if identities start to feel threatened or pathologized, they get stronger, and so I’m just all about saying, “Boys aren’t doing as well in school. Let’s tackle that. What’s happened to male mental health? Let’s tackle that.”
And in some ways, I think that a gender-sensitive approach to like policy and solutions is an antidote to an overemphasis on identity, rather than an extension of it. It should be obvious by now that a world of floundering men is not likely to be a world of flourishing women or vice versa.
This speaks to me because it’s the ideal I thrive for, more generally in society and in my own marriage. I’m married to a guy who is not, at first blush, an ultra-masculine dude. He’s a 5’7’’ bespectacled nerd. But he has all these attributes that do underpin what in my view is a healthy view of masculinity. He is extremely self-assured, consistent, reliable, protective, safe, and let’s be honest, he’s a provider. He’s predictable. These aren’t characteristics exclusive to men, but at what point can we say, these all sort of cluster together, more often than not, when it comes to good men? He gives my son a blueprint for how to be a man at a time when there aren’t a lot of great blueprints out there. He isn’t only these things, but these are things I find attractive about him, as a woman toward a man. Our relationship has always been a partnership where we sort of bring different things to the table. Not everything about me is stereotypically feminine, but I do have these qualities, of nurturing, and sensitivity. I’ve helped him make and keep friendships. As a mother and a wife, I put a lot of energy into making things easier and better for my husband and son.
This author speaks to something I wish we had more of, which was an appreciation for how these traits sort of cluster around sex and more emphasis on how we can partner that way. But it has to be an appreciation that allows for deviation, that allows people to define masculinity on their own terms, that doesn’t shove people into boxes. There’s like a nuance there, you know?
If we had more men volunteering, more men in our communities, obviously that would help women too. But also there’s a hunger, I think, now for a real partnership between men and women, one that acknowledges the huge gains that women have made but which also builds men into family and community life.
Someone on the boards recently asked, “Why do we need men?” And that’s a hard question to answer without defaulting to some kind of gender essentialist argument. How do you answer that question without diminishing men who don’t embody those qualities? I think my response was that they have a different energy and I feel safer around them, all true, but it kinda dodges the question. They are different and I like that difference. If I had to generalize about all the good men in my life, I would say: I love their candor, their tendency to see a concrete need and fill it, their protection, their reliability, their willingness to just figure shit out rather than wait for someone to do it for them, the things they notice that I don’t, and well, I could go on. And no, not all men. But if we can’t say “this is healthy masculinity” then what is healthy masculinity?
Anyway I thought this was a really important article. Curious to hear what you all think.