I read every word of this piece that delves into the disparities that many of us are observing between men and women in U.S. society. Author, Idrees Kahloon, notes that
"[M]any social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes."
Kahloon cites interesting research that focuses on males, while also considering academic achievement and pay differentials between women and men, as well as physiological differences in maturational development that translate into increased chances of getting diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), higher rates of school suspension and dropping out relative to girls.
The answer to this malaise, Kahloon suggests, is not resorting to the kind of "vintage masculinity" that fosters an entitled sense of dominance and power over others. He cites a British scholar and sociologist, Richard V. Reeves who has studied this phenomenon who concludes "It's not that men have fewer opportunities. It is that they are not taking them."
"Prosocial masculinity" as a remedy derives from Kahloon's readings on the matter. He delves into race a bit, but insufficiently. He also doesn't provide any specific insights into our younger, Generation Z youth for whom observed significant differences on a range of political attitudes that serve as indicators of progressivism that markedly distinguish females and males (Twenge, 2023). I "see" Gen Z in his analysis but he pivots simplistically between younger and older males. In all fairness to Kahloon, his is a synopsis of the literature that is, by definition, abbreviated. Reeves (2023) is who people are reading right now. If you keyword him in Google you'll see that he's ignited the press and the blogosphere.
I still wonder of Kahloon's insufficient attention to the impact of the culture wars in reifying notions of traditional masculinity that tend to be at odds with more complex, fluid and non-binary notions of gender. A related factor is that this malaise is occurring simultaneously with a generation of youth that researchers maintain is the most queer generation in U.S. history (Twenge, 2023). What a combination!
Societally, what this means, among other things, is that many of us Baby Boomers did not pass on the stigmas held by our earlier generations and that's a good thing.
In my parents'—and their parents' generation, they used such terms as "out-of-wedlock" to describe children born outside of the bounds of marriage. When was the last time you heard that expression? It used to be a matter of tremendous shame to get a divorce. And how shameful to be someone's "second husband" or "second wife." Forget being lesbian, gay, or transgendered. "Coming out of the closet" was a common expression in my younger years.
All of these stigmas—atop existing ones like race and class—were socially, emotionally, and psychologically costly, if not brutal, for earlier generations. The social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s were impactful and a clear departure from the past—to which today's culture wars tortuously, if impossibly, seek to reverse.
I completely agree that we have to be intentional in our caring for our young men and boys. We need to also remain focused on our girls, too, who to their credit, tend to be more prosocial than boys. Still mental health is a huge issue for Gen Z so we cannot be over-attentive to such matters. Much to consider and ponder.
-Angela Valenzuela
What’s the Matter with Men?
First, there was Adam, whose creation takes center stage on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Then, fashioned out of Adam’s spare rib, there was Eve, relegated to a smaller panel. In Michelangelo’s rendition, as in the Bible’s, the first man sleeps through the miraculous creation of his soul mate, the first woman and the eventual mother of humanity. Many of our foundational myths are, in this way, stories about men, related by men to other men. The notion of female equality is, historically, an innovation. “Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex,” published in 1949. “And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.” Nearly three-quarters of a century later, that change has continued. By a variety of metrics, men are falling behind parity. Is the second sex becoming the better half?
Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “incels” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide. And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics, premised on a return to better times, when America was great—and, unsubtly, when men could really be men. The question is what to make of the paroxysm. For the revanchist right, the plight of American men is existential. It is an affront to biological (and perhaps Biblical) determinism, a threat to an entire social order. Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.
Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, and a self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” would like to skip past the moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them: beset by bewildering changes that they cannot adapt to. His latest book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It” (Brookings), argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what the sociologist David Morgan calls “ontological security.” They now confront the prospect of “cultural redundancy,” Reeves writes. He sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations. All this, he says, has landed hardest on Black men, whose life prospects have been decimated by decades of mass incarceration, and on men without college degrees, whose wages have fallen in real terms, whose life expectancies have dropped markedly, and whose families are fracturing at astonishing rates. Things have become so bad, so quickly, that emergency social repairs are needed. “It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity,” Reeves writes. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.”
