I have been reading and thinking about male loneliness a lot lately. This is partly because I am the mother to two sons and partly because I recognize the slow-moving crisis unfolding around us. Boys and men are in trouble. I wrote about this in On Our Best Behavior in the chapter on Sadness and how the long-tail effects of cutting boys off from their feelings shows up in cultural havoc. To quote therapist Terry Real (podcast episode on male depression here), “wounded boys become wounding men.”
I recently read Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It by Richard Reeves, a book that has received a lot of media attention—far more than the book I’m going to write about today. I nodded along to parts of it, while other sections troubled me—not because Reeves is wrong, per se, but because he presents symptoms without addressing the root cause. To quote professor Niobe Way (podcast episode here), Reeves offers a “thin story,” and not a thick one. We need thick stories. Here’s Professor Way: “One of the best known of these types of stories is that bad behavior among boys and men is inevitable, as ‘boys will be boys,’ suggesting that their actions reflect their biology rather than a culture that promotes violence or at least doesn’t do much to prevent it. The danger of this thin story is that if we think it’s biology, we can’t change it, and thus we don’t try.”
While Reeves presents oodles of data about how many boys are falling behind academically (a trend that’s been happening for a century, BTW), many men are failing economically, and men are the subject of too many deaths of despair, he skates over the question of why. He lands somewhere in the space of “it’s biology,” and that absent the need to protect and provide out on the plains for us ladies, boys and men don’t feel like they have a role to play in society anymore. (I wrote about this in On Our Best Behavior, but the mythologized version of our early history puts way too much emphasis on this function for boys and men, too—Sarah Blaffey Hrdy(!!!) is coming up on the podcast to talk about this more.) Back to Reeves: He offers some practical solutions like redshirting boys in school for a year and incenting men to go into HEAL career trajectories (health, education, administration, literacy), but doesn’t address why boys and men are loathe to pick up this thread in the first place. (Hint: It has to do with a collective aversion toward the “feminine.”)
In Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture, Niobe Way does go there—plus she has devoted her entire academic career to being in direct conversation with boys—and studying them over time. (She studied under Carol Gilligan—our podcast conversation here—before turning her focus to boys.) If you want to understand what’s happening to boys, and you want to hear it directly from them, this is the book for you.
Case in point, while Reeves points to the slower maturation of boys as a reason to hold them all back a year (fair enough), Way actually talks to boys—and suggests that one of the significant impediments keeping boys from pursuing academics more seriously is not so much that their brains aren’t developed enough, it is that they think academics are “girlie and gay.” Yep, that’s right.
Professor Way writes:
“The semi-structured research interviews my team and I conducted with approximately 140 boys starting when they were freshmen in high school (although some were younger) and following them longitudinally for three to four years suggested four overarching patterns: (1) Boys want male friends with whom they can share their ‘deep secrets’ and are particularly likely to express such a desire during early and middle adolescence. (2) Boys know that emotionally intimate friendships are critical for their mental health and speak directly about the potential mental health problems that would result from not having such friendships. (3) As they reach middle to late adolescence, boys struggle to find and maintain such close male friendships and thus experience a crisis of connection. (4) Boys suggest that the cultural pressures to ‘act like a man’—that is to say, not behave in a manner others would consider ‘girlie and gay’—and to ‘mature’ by becoming more stoic and less emotional, or in other words ‘boy’ culture, are the culprit behind their struggles to find and maintain male friendships during middle and late adolescence.”
Later, Way asks one of the boys what it would be like to be a girl. “One sixteen-year-old boy said, ‘It might be nice to be a girl, because then I wouldn't have to be emotionless,’ suggesting that having emotions, which is essential for having ‘deep secrets’ friendships, is a girlie thing, not a straight guy thing. Boys knew that becoming a man meant giving up on their desires for emotionally intimate male friendships and stifling the emotions that were so easily expressed in their interviews only a year or two earlier.”
As a mother to two sons, this break my heart.
While there is so much to say about this book—Niobe is coming back for round two on the podcast this fall—I want to come back to this idea of education. I don’t disagree with Reeves that redshirting might not be a bad thing for boys to level the academic playing field in terms of general maturity, but that misses the larger point, this point about education being “girlie and gay,” which points to the culture as the deterrent to their academic ability and not their biology. Because while Reeves doesn’t explore differences in gay and straight men from a data perspective in Of Boys and Men, Niobe Way does. And hold your breath for this nugget, which suggests that academic aptitude and excellence might not have all that much to do with biology at all—and a whole lot more to do with culture and mindset.
Here’s Way:
“According to boys and young men, however, the fault lies entirely with a culture that has gendered and sexualized human capacities, interests, and careers and thus made academic achievement, including going to college, a ‘girlie and gay’ thing. We now think in our modern version of ‘boy’ culture that wanting to follow a career in which one takes care of others or teaches people, are part of a pink-collar economy (i.e., girlie and gay). ‘Be a man and get a real job,’ one that is blue-collar, is the message directed at many young men, especially those on the bottom of the hierarchy socioeconomically. For these young men, going to college will likely not help them get food on the table or a home to live in, especially if it means incurring more debt.
The relevant data that supports what boys and young men teach us about the insidious nature of ‘boy’ culture is found in the statistics on gay men, who are bucking the male drift trend. In his analysis of U.S, household surveys, Joel Mittleman finds that while 36 percent of adults in the United States have bachelor's degrees, 52 percent of gay men do: ‘If America's gay men formed their own country, it would be the world's most highly educated by far.’”
Further on, Way writes: “In his analysis of 7000 student survey items, Mittleman finds that the attributes most associated with ‘being a boy’ across his entire sample include playing video games and being an athlete and do not include doing well in school. However, gay boys consistently described ‘being a boy’ as being academically successfully.”
We need to fix our culture—and more specifically, our deep and abiding aversion for the feminine. Our boys and men are dying because we insist on this disavowal—we must keep them connected to their feelings.
Here’s Jungian therapist James Hollis, who I wrote about in last week newsletter “A Crisis of Male Loneliness”: “The more macho the man, or the culture, the greater the fear of the inner life, allied with an extreme sensitivity to shaming. This is why the deep secret of macho men is their utter terror of things ‘feminine.’ So great is that fear, they must even keep it from themselves.” May we help them bring it into their conscious awareness. If you missed Hollis’s stunning episode on Pulling the Thread, the episode is here.
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
9/19: Why white people are called Caucasian with Sarah Lewis, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
9/12: On finding our soul’s vocation with James Hollis
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
9/5: Why cynicism is not smart with Jamil Zaki, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
8/29: Contending with the Inner Critic with Tara Mohr
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
8/22: Navigating the Upper Limit Problem with Katie Hendricks, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
8/15: Magical overthinking with Amanda Montell
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
8/8: Qualities of good leaders with Jerry Colonna
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
8/1: Staying with discomfort in Part 2 with Thomas Hübl
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
7/29: My long-awaited conversation with the singular Carol Gilligan
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
7/25: Finding shadow in the body with Thomas Hübl
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
THE LATEST POSTS:
A Crisis of Male Loneliness: How Can We Help?
Is Salary Negotiation B.S.?: Why Does Our Livelihood Depend on this Ability?
Feeling Matriotic: What Might Be Around the Corner?
Loving Mid-Life: Why Was I Convinced my 40s Would Usher in Energetic Decay?
Practicing Rejection: A Muscle We Can All Build
What Is It About Cats, Exactly? Cat Lady Reporting for Duty
A Politics of Expulsion: “The Best Criticism of the Bad is the Practice of the Better”
What “Valley Girls” Tell Us: The Subtle Ways We Encourage Women to STFU
Do You Overfunction or Underfunction? Different Ways to Contend with Anxiety
The 12 Types of Intelligence (and Counting): We Know There’s Far More than IQ
The Codes of Anger: Using the Chakras in an Unexpected Way
A Community or a Club? How Do You Find Belonging?
What’s Your Zone of Genius? Hint: It Probably Doesn’t Feel Like Work
Do You Have an Upper Limit Problem? I Think I Do.
Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
Thank you for covering this - it's so important! I've been writing about boys a lot in my Teen Health Today newsletter. Here's an interview I did with Vox about how I look at this as a teacher and parent: https://www.vox.com/even-better/24097641/andrew-tate-masculinity-teens-boys-men-talk-conversations.
FWIW I think Richard Reeves has evolved his thinking quite a bit since he wrote his book and now focuses a lot on school connection and emotions, along with the structural solutions.
I was briefly a school teacher and I could see the way that boys learned to disown their feelings. It happened in a pretty marked way around ages 11-12. That’s when they all start policing each other pretty aggressively to not show feelings other than anger. A light goes off in their eyes, it’s devastating to see. What frustrated me was how at my school in particular, the solution to misbehavior from boys—much of it violent or physically destructive—was to coddle them. Making the teachers apologize for “betraying trust” by sending the boy to the office because he had destroyed school property and that kind of thing. I think there’s still a marked double standard in school when it comes to discipline.
I think education needs to be radically different. What I experienced in public schools—how the systematized, homogenous approach of public school only honors certain kinds of intelligence while denigrating others—left me with a profound sense of moral injury as an educator. So many kids, boys and girls alike, believe they are stupid because their greatest gifts never get developed in school. The way that we’ve gendered the subjects (boys=math and science, girls=literature) doesn’t help.