What Makes A Man? Richard Reeves on Addressing the Struggles Facing Boys and Men

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Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

In recent weeks, I've had a number of conversations about how young people are navigating the world with smartphones, social media, and now artificial intelligence.

I'm going to continue along those lines with my guest today, Richard Reeves, the man my pivot co-host Scott Galloway calls his sensei and Jedi Master.

Okay, that's weird, but Reeves probably deserves some of that credit.

He is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and he's the author of several books, including his seminal work, Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.

The book highlights some disturbing statistics about the crisis they're facing, which we'll get into in our conversation.

Reeves says they are all signs of a, quote, male malaise that is having life and death impacts.

This issue has become a major talking point since the last election when more than half of men under 30 voted for Donald Trump.

Reeves has criticized Democrats for not adequately addressing these issues and effectively ceding the floor to right-wing social media influencers.

I don't know Reeves as well as Scott does, but I met him two two years ago, three years ago, and I've thought a lot about his theories.

There's a lot of what's wrong with men stuff around, and I think he's one of the more interesting voices in the sector.

And there are more to come and a lot more.

And in fact, Scott has a book on this coming out in the fall.

I'm looking forward to talking to Richard about the identity crisis boys and men are facing and the solutions he's proposing.

I also want to hear what he thinks about smartphones and social media and whether AI will exacerbate the situation.

Our expert question today comes from Lauren Greenfeld, award-winning artist and documentary filmmaker of the Emmy-nominated FX series Social Studies, whom I had on the show last week.

If you have boys in your life, like I do, I have three sons and one daughter, this is a must-listen.

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Hi, Richard.

Thanks for coming on on.

Hey, thank you for having me.

I think the last time we ran each other, we were in Aspen in a cab, right?

Something like that.

Sounds right.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you had just gotten this huge amount of money from Melinda French Gates.

Yeah, it's the it's it's definitely the most surprising email I've ever received in my career, which was an email from Pivotal Ventures, Melinda French Gates offering me $20 million

to spend on supporting boys and men.

I was one of 12 people to receive that.

There was one other man, Gary Barker, who runs Equamundo.

And it's part of Melinda, but also Pivotal Ventures' view that there is nothing incompatible between focusing on the remaining challenges of women and girls but also doing more for boys and men and so i saw that it was obviously it's massively important just in itself but it's also very important as a signal and as a symbol of the ability to move past that zero sum frame that i think we've been stuck in for too long and you had not expected this right it wasn't an application or anything it was just it was it was out of the blue i think it was more out of the blue for me and honestly more surprising probably for me than for some of the others who there are some just amazing women doing all kinds of work around the world uh included in that group and i've gotten to know some of them uh and i think everybody was pleasantly surprised but i think i was shocked and honestly didn't quite believe it to start with but what i'm seeing is a a number of women's groups and women's leaders are actually in some ways now at the forefront of saying we've also got to do stuff for boys and men as long as we do it in the right way.

Which we're going to talk about.

I'm glad to finally interview the man my pivot co-host Scott Gallery calls Yoda.

I've heard him say that, yes.

Yeah, and you've been the leading voice on struggles facing boys and men, which is an issue Scott talks about a lot.

He has an upcoming book about the issue, Notes on Being a Man.

So as his, I guess, Jedi Master, I guess, if that's if we're going to put him in the Luke Skywalker role, which we won't, tell me about

how it works for boys and men in the U.S.

right now.

In Star Wars, obviously, there's a light side and a dark side, and there's a lot about that, the light and dark side of men, particularly in the force.

So talk to me about how it works right now for real boys and men here in the U.S.

Yeah, I think particularly for boys and young men, they're in this quite difficult cultural moment now where on the one hand,

for I would say for the last 10 years or so on, quite a strong narrative more from the progressive left, I'm using these terms very broadly, has been to

point to the ways, not in which men have problems, but the ways that they are a problem.

So that would be consistent with terms like toxic masculinity and mansplaining and the incredibly positive work of something like the Me Too movement, which was nonetheless quite deficit-based.

It was based about like

all the things that are wrong with men.

As actually, President Obama said recently on Michelle's podcast, he said that like, we've done a really good job of saying what's wrong with men.

we haven't really done a good job of saying what's right but on the other side there's this kind of reactionary right side which is saying yeah young men and boys are struggling and that's but the fault of all these feminists and the women's movement who've kind of overrun everything and think masculinity is the problem and what we need to do is go back and so i i feel like a lot of young men are in this space now where they feel like the left has turned its back on them or are chastising them or pathologizing them and saying what's wrong with them.

But the right is then saying, yeah, we can save you, but only by turning back the clock on women.

Right.

Let's go back to the days when men were men and women were women.

And actually, neither of those prescriptions land with the vast majority of boys and young men today who are struggling in school, struggling in the labor market, struggling to find their place in the world.

And so I do think here this is an area where just having a better conversation about it that is not zero sum, rooted in facts and solutions focused is key.

And I'm pleased to see that it's starting to happen now.

As you know, like Scott, I have sons.

One, I have three, one little one who's three years old, and two in their 20s.

So I think a lot about this.

It's been a few years since your book of Boys and Men first came out.

But since I passed election, masculinity seems to become a huge talking point.

It continues to be, actually, even after the election, because there's this continuing struggle going on.

For those who haven't heard of your book yet, briefly walk us through your central concerns and what changes you've seen, if any.

And for the sake of conversation, I'm going to assume we're talking about cisgender heterosexual men.

Yes.

Yes.

And I make that clarification at the beginning of the book, which upset some of my conservative reviewers who sort of rolled their eyes at that.

I think they rolled their eyes at the use of the term cisgender.

Oh, for goodness sake.

But gay men are different, but go ahead.

Not always.

But it was important for me to say, look, I realize there are these issues for this kind of minority of men, but like, let's not ignore what's happening to most men.

And really the kind of the reason I got into this in the first place was I was studying education and the economy at Brookings.

I was at Brookings for 10 years doing this.

And I just keep these data points.

And I saw when the pandemic hit, for example, that the male college enrollment rate dropped seven times more than it did for women.

I didn't see that getting very much attention.

I also saw, obviously, the death rates were much higher for men and so on.

And by this point, I'd started to realize there were just a lot of data points that suggested there are some gender gaps that are really strongly going the other way now.

So take higher education, which I know you have some interest in, where the gender gap on college campuses now is a little bit wider than it was in the 1970s, but it's the other way around.

Wages, this is something that you and Scott talk a lot about.

Wages for working class men, especially have basically been stagnant for decades.

The male suicide rate.

is risen, especially most recently among young men.

One of the stats that's really been troubling me recently is the fact that the suicide rate among men under 30 has risen by almost a third just since 2010.

We're losing 40,000 men a year.

The risk of a death from suicide is four times higher among men than women at every age group.

And that is not in any way to take away from some of the issues that we're seeing among particularly teen girls and young women in terms of mental health.

It is just to say that there is a different mental health crisis unfolding among kind of boys and men.

And you kept seeing these statistics.

And then, candidly, what I thought was happening was either these hard facts, I think they are hard and important facts,

weren't getting attention or they were getting the wrong kind of attention.

They were being used as evidence of a war against men, a conspiracy against boys.

Right.

We're making them kill themselves by telling them they suck.

Yes, it's because of feminism and misandery, right?

Which is the opposite of misogyny.

It's because these people hate men and boys and don't care about them is why they're killing themselves and doing badly in school.

And unfortunately, without a really good answer to that question, that actually became quite a believable story.

And frankly, too often, mainstream institutions were too silent on this issue.

And not because they hated men, but because they thought, actually, we're still focused on women and girls.

You know,

hold on a second.

We've had 10,000 years of patriarchy.

You know, a couple of minutes of stuff going the other way.

You're all panicking.

And so it felt like it was going to distract from the work of women and girls.

And I think that was a fatal mistake.

So, talk about

what's changed from your book from a couple of years ago.

Is that it?

It's the continued decline, but it's been a few years since that.

It has.

And we have seen some things getting worse, like the mental health stuff more generally, but the suicide rates, especially among young men.

And obviously, the pandemic effect was huge in different ways for men and women.

We've seen the gaps in education continuing to grow.

But what I would say is that the response is now coming.

So we're seeing seeing a lot of higher education institutions, including historically black colleges, really acting now.

We did some work showing that there are now the decline in men at HBCUs, these historically black colleges, has been so sharp that there are now as many non-black students at HBCUs as there are black men.

HBCUs, right?

We have a thing, a higher education male achievement collaborative with a bunch of, we're up to 35 institutions working on this now.

And then we've just seen it really since the election, a number of leaders on the Democrat side, starting with Governor Wes Moore, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who I think Scott had on quite recently, and then just very recently, Governor Gavin Newsom in California signing executive order to actually do some really kind of serious work around some of these crises in mental health, education, and service for boys and men.

And so what we're seeing now is a sort of thoughtful response from policymakers.

So you've argued a lot of this gets set in motion early on when boys start at school.

And the big issue, obviously, is biology, which continues to factor all the way through their education.

Talk to me about your arguments now and solutions.

And I'll just very briefly tell you, I spent a lot of time discussing this when my sons, my older sons, were younger because the movement and the physicality was, especially with my older son, was really profound comparatively.

And it was completely biological.

I don't know what it was.

He couldn't sit still for a while, for a little while.

That changed.

And the solution we had was,

I said, why don't you just let him run around the playground three times and then he can come and sit in, which worked on some level.

Now, that's just one mother's story, but talk a little bit about what gets set in motion early on for boys.

Yeah, well, of course, what happens when you start talking about this is you have one mother's story, which turns out to be the story of millions of mothers and parents.

So you put data.

to something that people are living is a truth.

And so what we see is that boys are behind girls throughout the K-12 education system.

For sure.

That's why we see this gap in college.

And they're particularly behind in sort of verbal skills, literacy skills.

Some of these behavioral challenges, which we just mentioned, just skew much more a male.

Boys just grow up a little bit slower.

Can I just interject?

I didn't see it as a behavioral problem.

It's just that's the way he was.

And the way school is taught is control, right?

Yes.

Yes.

I've just done exactly what I'm going to criticize educational institutions do is to sort of turn this into a problem, right?

And I think

at some level, what's happened is that in the education system,

inadvertently, we've ended up treating boys like malfunctioning girls.

Yes, that's exactly right.

We have an implied female default about how long you can sit still, what your attention span is, you know, what your verbal skills are, et cetera.

And then we judge boys against that.

And of course, they're found wanting.

So that's why they're excluded and suspended and diagnosed with add at much higher rates etc and so that's a problem in that the education system has become inadvertently much less boy friendly because it just has this default assumption it's like well the default student is a girl and that's one of the reasons why i've suggested that actually boys should have at least the option to start school later just because they are especially when you hit adolescence they are about a year or even more behind in the development of these critical skills, which are about organization and executive functioning.

And so it's very interesting to me that there is a massive gender gap in GPA in high school.

Massive.

Like two-thirds of the top 10% are girls, vice versa at the bottom.

But there isn't really a gender gap on SAT or ACT or most of the standardized tests.

And the way I interpret that is that the boys aren't like dumber than the girls.

There isn't an intelligence gap between girls and boys.

But GPA measures, did you do your homework and turn it in?

It measures these different skills.

And so it's intuitive to me that you'd see that it's much bigger gap in GPA because that does require these kind of life skills, soft skills, whatever you want to call them.

And that just puts boys at a disadvantage all the way through.

And then I'll just add two more things.

One is the lack of male teachers, which has gone from 33% men in K-12 to 23% men and falling.

And so there are like fewer men in

in teaching than there are women in STEM, which is not to say we don't need to do more for women in STEM and especially especially tech where you've done so much good work.

But nonetheless, I think it is just as much of a crisis that we're just emptying the men out of our classrooms, partly because these behavioral issues that you just talked about, which is just, we know male teachers just react a little bit differently because they can sort of put themselves in the shoes of that boy in a way that it is just harder for female teachers to do.

And I'm not blaming in any way female teachers.

Also, the other thing about male teachers is not only that they react a little bit differently in the classroom, it also helps to break gender stereotypes about education.

Like, I do, I worry a lot that education starts to code female when the girls do better, all the teachers are female, the girls go to college.

At a certain point, you can't really blame boys for looking around and saying, This looks, this feels like a very female endeavor.

In just the same way that if all the engineers are men and all the professors are men and whatever, then as a young woman, you'd be like, This whole engineering thing seems

to be coded quite male.

But it also, I think it just helps us to break gender stereotypes about the roles of men and women, um, and to kind of send the message to the next generation that this is perfectly appropriate and to set really good role models.

So, it's interesting that men in K-12 are much more likely to be coaches after school, right?

About a third of them are coaches, which is about four times as many as the women.

Now, that could be because the women have got childcare responsibilities that the men don't have.

So, I just want to add that caveat, but it is nonetheless true that when you get male teachers, you get male coaches.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you get male role models.

And when I think about these online figures and what the best antidote to some of the more reactionary online figures are for the boys, you know who I think about my son,

who is a fifth grade teacher in Baltimore City.

Six foot four.

He coaches the girls' middle school soccer team as well after school.

He loves his soccer.

A lot of his kids are Hispanic and he has a lot of Real Madrid supporters in his student body.

He's an Arsenal fan.

So when they played, obviously they had to watch the game in class.

And I just sort sort of think about the message that those kids are getting in his class.

Of course, most of their other teachers are female, but I'm like, this is a thing that dudes care about.

Dudes care about learning, dudes care about books.

He's a role model.

And when I, if I go online later and see some other guy telling me how to be a man, I hope instead they'll think about my son.

Right.

My son is thinking of becoming a teacher too, which is funny.

Oh, amazing.

I hope he does.

I know.

I'm wishing him that way.

I think he'd be a wonderful teacher.

We'll be back in a a minute.

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Speaking of these gender roles, according to a recent survey by the Young Men Research Initiative, when young men are asked what it means to be a man, the top answer was providing for your family.

You've argued this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but that is since it's becoming harder to do, like now it's harder to buy a house than it was 20 20 years ago, it's creating an identity crisis for boys and men.

And Scott talks about this a lot.

If you can't keep up, you feel shamed, and then with shame comes rage, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, I think that's a really good example of

the challenge that both young men and young women have, like in the modern labor market, in the housing market.

Actually, just as we're recording this, Rah Emmanuel has a piece in the Washington Post where he's arguing about young men, but also about, he said, it's a housing issue.

Yeah, I call, I wrote him, I said, oh, so homes and hugs will save us.

Well, if only he'd come up with such a good summary.

But yeah, I mean, actually, Gretchen Whitmer pointed out that like young men are least likely to buy new homes now.

And so I do think it's connected to these structural factors.

And that actually...

It allows me to make a separate point, and then I'll come back to the main one, which is that one of the things that disturbs me about how much political energy is going on into young women blaming young men and young men blaming young women for their problems is that that energy could be much better better spent on issues around economic justice, around the housing market, around the education system.

So, like, imagine a world where young men and young women, instead of being taught by each side to blame each other, were actually linking arms to demand a fairer housing market, to demand a better education system, to demand more opportunity together.

But the point about providing is really interesting.

I've come to think that the answer here is to sort of lean into that instinct, but modernize it.

I was a stay-at-home dad for a while and I really felt like a provider.

What I do, I just kind of reconceptualized it around, well, my wife's working,

but I'm going to get the kids to school.

I'm going to organize and I'm going to allow the family.

I was providing for my family in a different way.

And I do think that men feeling a responsibility to be providing not only money, although that remains important, but other things, time, energy, love, you know, discipline, whatever.

Well, that's a big societal shift because most people, when they see that, they don't think that.

They don't think providers.

They don't think it for women either, by the way, if women stay at home.

No, they don't.

I think that's right.

But so at least for now, rather than saying, okay, male provider, male breadwinner, dustbin of history, bye-bye.

Don't need you anymore, right?

Rather than that, I think what we should be saying is your desire to provide for your family is a noble one.

And that should mean, by the way, that you are a good prospect in the labor market because it could well be that, as has happened to me too, there are certain points where the the family needs you to be the breadwinner, right?

And so, having that potential, yes.

But it also then allows us to expand through that and say, but yeah, how about a world where actually the best thing for your family is for you to be providing more care?

Right.

So that your wife.

So expand it.

But there are the societal things that push against, still to this day, push against it, even though men are much more participating with their children.

It's still not the same.

But interestingly, in your book, you write, the true cause of male malaise, I believe, is not lack of labor force participation, but the cultural redundancy.

So men feel they're no longer needed, right?

In the workplace and the home.

I want to hone in on this a little bit.

It seems like a lot of women want to share the workplace and share household chores and child care responsibilities with men.

But how do you change things so it doesn't feel redundant?

I have to tell you, gay and lesbian couples don't have this problem to the same degree at all, I've noticed, among my friends, and I have very different friends.

Talk a little bit about this idea of cultural redundancy that you were talking about.

Yeah, so the worry I have is that if men start to feel as if they're not economically needed in the same way that their fathers were or their grandfathers were.

Right, because women work and women have prospects.

Because women work and do that.

And also, they're not culturally needed because we don't actually think there's anything special about the way that, you know, men, men, father, for example.

And, you know, you can think of examples of same-sex couples where they're saying, oh, well, it's a very, that's a very heteronormative idea that we need dads.

And so we don't need dads.

So we don't need male breadwinners.

We don't need dads.

Maybe we don't need men to volunteer in the YMCA or Big Brothers, Big Sisters, or boys' clubs because they're all co-ed.

Most of the volunteers are women.

So we don't need you for that either.

And to get to a certain point, where it's like, okay, so why do we need men?

More endowed had a men necessarily.

I say that all the time.

No, I'm kidding.

She said, she asked her mum, and her mum said, well, we need them for procreation and to lift heavy furniture.

And again, very fun, very funny.

That sounds like a Joan Rivers joke.

Sounds like a more endowed joke.

Yeah.

And so

that's my fear is that we end up sending these messages that because of these shifts in the economy and society, we're sort of saying to the guys, okay, we got it from here.

We kind of don't need you.

And I really feel very strongly that being needed is just incredibly important to human flourishing.

Right.

So you feel irrelevant.

You feel irrelevant or pushed to the side in ways that you never had to think of.

You were naturally the provider.

Yeah, because it came naturally before.

The script was there for you.

Like, my dad didn't have to think about this.

And when he became unemployed, he had to get another job, right?

It wasn't like he didn't have to think about this in a way that we've had to, and certainly our sons are having to.

The kind of need for men was sort of clear.

And so, how do we sustain this idea of needing men as men?

Is needed and essential the same thing?

Uh,

essential gets harder, um, because there are obviously going to be circumstances where

you know you don't have men around but I

it's it's it's hard to articulate this because

you run the risk of and perhaps I'm feeling particularly self-conscious about this because of your situation right when so I'm now writing a lot about fathers for example the importance of fathers and father figures right and of male role models and of kind of men in boys lives but but as soon as you do that you're criticized for being a gender essentialist no and saying that there are some i think about that all the time.

My brother is very critical to my kids, 100%.

Or Scott.

Scott, oddly enough,

one of my sons really reveres Scott.

I don't know why, but he does.

He's a wonderful, he's given him wonderful advice.

I have to say that.

And it's interesting.

I don't know what you think about this, but I actually find quite often that same-sex couples with children, who are mostly women, actually don't need all that much persuading that having good male role models around is a good idea.

Actually, weirdly,

they're kind of others.

No, I think it's critical.

It's absolutely critical.

There's no question about it.

But I think we're a bit reluctant to say that.

I think we're a bit reluctant to say, like, we need men and we need male role models.

And

because of some of the challenges we've faced around getting to gender equality and the remaining challenges that we still have, I think there's been just this reluctance to articulate this positive vision for men for fear that it will somehow distract.

I also think it's important for my daughter to have positive male role models, too.

I don't think it's just like guys and like learn to be in the backyard.

That's not it.

It's a positive role model of men for my daughter, which I think is critical because, you know, as many people, I assume she's going to be straight, right?

So she has to have good relationships with men.

So one of the solutions you talked about is steering men towards careers you call HEAL.

Health, education, administration, literacy, which are...

teaching and nursing have traditionally been women's jobs and pay less.

That's changing a bit.

Healthcare is one of the few bright spots in this month's dismal jobs report, for example.

So how do you get men to see heel jobs or even being stay-at-home dad, mainly if they have to decouple the idea of being a provider from being a breadwinner, as you mentioned?

It's interesting you talk about the jobs report.

I think that's it's fascinating that you're seeing this

real gap emerging, particularly among graduates, but more generally in male employment and female employment right now.

And that does seem to be because of this growth in healthcare and social services.

And they skew very female.

So what that means is that like men are missing out on some job opportunities there.

So, there is just a straightforward labor market argument here.

There's also, I think, an argument which we touched on earlier about it's good for patients and students to have a representative workforce.

I don't think it's a good idea if all the nurses are female, all the nurses are male, right?

Because they're going to be serving male and female patients, same with teachers.

And some of these areas have shortages.

It's interesting that nursing is the only one to have seen a slight increase in the share of men and also the best paid of all of those professors.

So pay is clearly a factor here.

But I think the solution is to some extent is to decode these professions.

So it's interesting like early years education has always been seen as quite female, right?

And it's incredibly female.

Like we have twice as many women flying fighter jets than men teaching kindergarten as a share of the occupation.

Right.

And that hasn't really...

changed.

That's not a new thing.

But high school, high school teachers used to be very equal.

But that's where all all of the drop is now.

You're down to one in three in high school now.

And that's where the drop is happening.

So you hit these tipping points with occupations.

You might have seen some of this in your own work around STEM and tech and so on.

That there is some very interesting economic work showing that at a certain point, around 30%,

an occupation just codes as more male or female.

It does.

Once you get past that point, you start to see, this is, I mean, I think this is consistent with what you find in other areas too, right?

When you get the female share up to a certain point, it seems to then get much easier to attract certain women because it's no longer seen as a male profession that they're going against the grain.

Well, the same's the other way around, which is why 23% of teachers being men, problem.

20% of social workers are men, 20% of psychologists are men.

And so, what's happening is they are becoming more female professions.

And you're at tipping points now where you're going to have to have scholarships and outreach programs, just as we have for women in STEM.

We need them for men in heal.

How do you shift that?

Well,

I look at organizations that have done effective work for women into STEM professions.

So take something like the Society of Women Engineers.

They've done a fantastic job of advocacy.

There are scholarships for women into engineering.

There are convenings.

There are clubs in schools.

There are campaigns.

Same in science, like a picture of scientists, changing the images of scientists, etc.

This hasn't happened by accident.

There's federal money to support these initiatives.

Well, no longer, but yes.

Yes.

Okay.

There has been.

And a lot of philanthropy.

I mean, we mentioned Melinda French Gates earlier, but she's also put a huge amount of money into scholarships, convenings, and advocacy for women into STEM and in particular into tech.

Hallelujah.

Now, show me the equivalent efforts.

to get men into early education, into education, into healthcare, into social work, into social services.

And they just don't exist, but they will, because it is just as much of a problem that we have a massively gendered care workforce and education workforce as it is that we we have a gendered tech and engineering workforce.

They are both problems and we can deal with both.

So if you could start over from scratch today, what would be your ideal definition of what it means to be a man?

I really like this

distinction between immature and mature masculinity, right?

So that's what I'm talking about here when I say being a man, right?

I don't like toxic.

and non-toxic.

No one really sensibly likes those terms at all.

Because I see a lot of the problems that we see in kind of men, they're really problems of immaturity.

They're really problems of just like kind of not growing into that role.

And boys don't become men just with the passage of time.

It does take work.

It takes cultural work.

It takes rites of passage more strongly for men than it does for women just because of their reproductive role.

And so what I see, I see mature masculinity, i.e.

being a man, is the point where you are contributing more.

to the tribe, to the group, than you are taking.

That you can give more than you get.

There's a certain point point where, whether that's energy or food or money or whatever, it's like where actually you're a generator of a surplus, right?

You're generating more of whatever the thing is that is needed than you need for yourself.

And it could be security.

I mean, it could be like right now, it could be that you're taking a lot of risks on the Ukrainian border, right?

But what we know is that you're giving more than you get.

I think that's the best definition.

So mature.

Yeah, we say grown.

When you say he's a grown-ass man, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but one of the things you use is, so we should distinguish between the manosphere and the brosphere.

Explain those differences as you see it.

And who are the poster men for each?

Would you say like Andrew Chate versus Theo Vaughan, Jordan Peter?

I don't know.

Where does Scott fall?

Elon Musk.

Yeah, Scott's.

Okay, well, I put Scott in the brosphere for sure.

Okay.

Along with people like Chris Williams, and I would put Theo Vaughn in there.

Explain them first so we know how you're putting people in.

Yeah, okay.

Well, I mean, I'm doing this kind of a little bit off the top of my head.

So

I think the manosphere should be restricted to the kind of misogynists, right?

To the Andrew Tates, to the folks who are peddling and profiting from

misogyny.

Partly because the term manosphere.

a bit like toxic masculinity if we're not careful just gets broadened uh i actually had a conversation with gavin newsom for his podcast and i called him out a little bit i sort of said at one point governor newsom you said all these guys online like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, and Joe Rogan.

And you just can't do that.

You can't lump people like that together and be taken seriously by anybody under the age of 30.

For a start, Jordan Peterson is one of the fiercest critics of Andrew Tate.

I have my own differences with Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan is a whole different thing.

So I think that the bro sphere is my attempt to describe men who are online talking about issues around men and masculinity in a good faith way and not in a misogynist way.

It doesn't mean that they're all going to pass every progressive test, right?

Scott wouldn't pass every progressive test, right?

Although he's obviously very left on many issues, but Chris Williamson, Theo Vaughan, Joe Rogan, et cetera, who I just think to just lump them together is to do an injustice to them and to the people that follow them.

We should be encouraging those conversations.

Because that's what we do now.

We reduce everything, don't we?

Not in just that area, it's everything.

And people are much more nuanced than that.

So every episode, we get a question from an outside expert.

Let's listen to yours.

Hi, my name is Lauren Greenfield, and I'm the filmmaker of Social Studies.

My question for Richard Reeves is, what should boys do about the aggressive targeting?

of body image pressures to them on social media.

It used to be more difficult for girls with the body image pressures and the idealized images, but now social media seems to be targeting male body issues so strongly, whether it's the Caucasian body image or having big muscles or working out all the time.

So how do you think this is affecting modern masculinity and what should boys do about it?

It's a really interesting question.

I interviewed her recently and she talked about that and I hadn't thought about it.

But of course, there's enormous amounts of pressures around male, how they look.

now than ever before.

And girls are used to it, right?

Thoughts about this?

Yeah, so there's this term online looks maxing.

And it's a serious issue.

There's incredibly fast rise in body dysmorphia issues among boys and men.

It's actually one of the issues that my institute is really digging into.

We're commissioning research on it right now to understand it better because it's growing very fast.

That is not to say that it's at the same level or it's the same extent of problem that we already have for girls, but it is trending that way.

And it does seem to be related to the conversation we're just having, which is this visual online world and this sort of the myths of perfectionism that are propagated by the manosphere types and here i'm using the term my way which is that they will say look unless you're six foot and ripped and also by the way you have to make great money etc then you are not going to get a girlfriend right women the 2080 thing yeah the 2080 thing it's just it's so pernicious and it's anti-male they say they're about empowering men they actually end up disempowering men and making these men feel shit about themselves right just as women have historically been made to feel that way by these same, these same images.

So, the honest answer is: I don't have a good answer at this point, other than to raise the awareness of it among parents and public health officials, et cetera, to say this is a real and growing problem.

And to boys, I suppose, just to try and break this myth, which is the truth is that, of course, it's important to take care of yourself.

Of course, it's important to try and be healthy.

But the idea that you won't get a loving partner, assume you're straight for the purposes of this argument, you won't get a loving girlfriend or partner unless you've got these biceps is a myth.

It is an absolute anti-women myth.

Don't fall for it.

Other than saying that at this point, I'm not quite sure the best way to go.

And I think it's Lisa DeMore is doing good work on this, the adolescent psychologist who's an advisor to us.

And so we need to learn a bit more, but main message for our parents is like, don't fall for this crap that you have to have a perfect body to find a wonderful woman.

That is just misogynist bullshit.

Yeah, it is very anti-male, actually.

Very.

So I just had Lauren on the show last week together with Jack Thorne, the co-creator of Netflix Adolescence and New York Times writer Matt Richtel talking about the effects of social media on young people of all genders.

I'm curious, did you see adolescence or social studies?

And if so, what did you think?

Adolescence, obviously, it specifically looks at a young teen man who thinks about this 80-20 rule, et cetera, and ends up devastating results.

Yeah.

So, I mean, a couple of things.

One is what I i think adolescents does a good job of is just exposing people to this world that they might not otherwise be aware of that their sons and others will be aware of and some of the myths that are being propagated it also speaks to a difference this technological shock that we've had is actually i think the way i think about this is that it's the the very relational nature of social media has actually had certain impacts for girls around body image

as we mentioned, but also now for boys, but also bullying, online bullying.

Whereas for boys, it's more about isolation.

It actually kind of displaces other activity and so it makes them more isolated.

Because, of course, he's actually bullied online very badly by the girl kind of in question.

That's good.

What's bad is if people take it, what is obviously a work of fiction and overstate how much those things are actually happening in kind of real life.

It's generated a little bit of a moral panic.

There was even this moment where the UK government was talking about showing adolescents in every school, which is a terrible idea, which I think thankfully has died.

Yes, it's a terrible idea.

The kids will laugh at us.

Terrible idea because the boys will see that coming.

I mean, violent crime rates are generally down.

And so what you don't want to do is to say to every boy.

You incel.

Yeah, that there's a monster being formed in every bedroom where a boy is looking at the screen.

That will just drive more of these boys away from the conversation.

Is there a difference between boys and girls?

You said boys are more isolated, girls are more bullied.

Yeah, that's my sense of it.

I mean, actually, Scott and John Haidt and I just had a conversation about this on his other show.

And John Haidt has a chapter on boys in his book, The Anxious Generation.

And the way I think this is, he would agree with this is that with girls, the harm is more direct

because you're getting this bullying, you're getting this relationality, these body image issues.

For boys, I think it's a bit more indirect in the sense that it's displacing other things, right?

So you can spend so much time on porn or gaming or scrolling or YouTubing, and that that's not.

as directly harmful to boys, but what it is doing is it's taking away from the other activities.

So the in-real life stuff.

And so it's more of a displacement effect for boys.

So in other words, if I'm the parent of girls, I'm really, really anxious about what she's looking at.

When I'm a parent of boys, of course, I'm also partly worried about that, but I'm more worried about how long he's doing it and what else he could be doing instead.

And so, I think it's as what I mean is actually weirdly more isolating for boys.

It's the very relationality of social media that makes it so damaging for girls.

But in some ways, for boys, it quite often goes the other way.

And it pulls them away from relationality, which is damaging in a different way.

We'll be back in a minute.

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Let's move on to politics.

Boys and men have become a political issue.

It's the political issue.

You and Scott have both criticized Democrats for not speaking out about the issue, including Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walls, who seemed to be the epitome of the kind of man you want to see more of, a former teacher and coach, a family man, public servant.

Why did that not win young men over where Trump did?

Who was, I mean, I don't, again, I also don't like to use the word toxic masculinity, but he's like the dictionary version of a toxic man.

Well, I think it also speaks into this immaturity point as well.

There is a certain teenage energy around some of these kind of reactions that you see on the right.

Some of it just feels like immature to me.

But as far as the left is concerned, I think the Democrats had an opportunity.

to talk about this issue in a really solutions-focused way.

And in, and I actually wrote this, I said, look, if you're going to have someone come out and say, we need a campaign for more male teachers, we need a Coach for America program to get more men, we need men to step up in terms of service, we need a mental health service that really reaches our young men because this crisis of suicide among our young men cannot happen.

And by the way, we're going to do all this stuff for women as well.

Walsh would have been a good person to talk about that,

but he didn't.

He didn't.

He didn't.

He didn't say anything like what I just said.

That was the problem.

Not who he was, but what he didn't say, what they didn't say throughout the entire campaign.

And then, of course, now...

Because of the gender gap we saw among young voters, they just lost young men in the last election.

Now, of course, I think the kind of pennies dropped on the Democrat side, and you're seeing serious people take it seriously.

But up until the election, candidly, it was like banging your head against a brick wall.

Everything I've just said about male teachers, male suicide, et cetera, you couldn't get a mention of that from the party.

Yes, anywhere in the Democratic Party.

So that said, there were Bernie bros, and there really are Bernie Bros.

There are some up-and-coming leaders in the Democratic Party who are doing well with the young voters and men, like Zoran Mandani.

My sons adore him.

Like, there's something he's doing that is very attractive to them.

And it's not because they're particularly left-wing or right.

You know what I mean?

Like it's just his messaging is really hitting with all young people and young men.

Who else are you seeing in the Democratic Party that could bring young men back to the fold?

You mentioned Governor Newsom's executive order, Wesmore.

And does it have to be a man necessarily?

I don't think it has to be a man.

In fact, I was very impressed with the way that Governor Whitmer used her own long-standing support for women as a way to insulate herself against the criticism that by focusing on men, she was somehow going over to the dark side and to become an overnight misogynist.

She's like, I'm increasingly worried about men.

And she's instructed her own administration to work on that.

So women have that advantage.

They're harder to immediately paint as a potential misogynist.

But I also think that there is something about men being a kind of the kind of guy that men can look up to.

And it's interesting around Mamdani is like even men who don't agree with him politically, young men, are like, they admire his authenticity.

They admire his courage.

He very much seems his own man, to use that very old-fashioned phrase.

And they like that.

It's one of the things they like about some of the people on the right, including people like Trump, is that agree or disagree, and there's no real shift in policy views, he seems like his own man.

And there's something about that.

That's one of the reasons I think Bernie has been so consistently popular among young men.

But you are seeing politicians like Wesmore really doing the Young Men's Research Initiative that you mentioned earlier.

They've polled on this and they have found him doing really pretty well among young men too.

And I think that's probably partly because of what he says, but also, I think as a former paratrooper, a father,

et cetera, he occupies an imaginative space too that's probably important for the Democrats.

The Democrats need to talk about it.

Is there anybody else you mentioned?

Newsom's trying, trying his best, but are there others?

Newsom's just put out the most comprehensive executive order on boys and men.

And what I like so far about what all these Democrats are doing is that they're not really performing around it.

They're not challenging J.D.

Vance to a debate about what real masculinity is.

They're not doing culture war stuff.

What they're doing is they're governing around it.

And in the long run, I actually think if they can credibly say to young men, look, we've noticed we care about you.

And here are all the things we are doing.

Here are all the campaigns that we're running.

And they win on substance then.

Because the problem that the right has had is even if they have managed to make young men feel seen and heard and liked, they haven't done a lot for them.

They haven't done anything.

I think that's how you win is by saying,

either side could do this.

It's just to say, we see you, we like you, we're worried, we're concerned about you, we need you, and here's all the stuff we're doing for you.

It's just that that's an open goal, I think.

Or we're going to do for you.

In Mandani's case, like even $8 halal is like, oh, I'd like that.

Or, you know, I'm going to get you better housing.

I'm going to get you all the things.

It's substance.

Yeah.

So I think, look,

if we can agree that the problems of boys and men are real, that tackling them doesn't mean not also doing work for women and girls, that we rise together, together.

Then the next step is do something about it.

And very interesting how many governors now are saying we are actually going to do more to try and attract more male teachers.

Right.

And if it works and they start to publicize them, I think a lot of families, boys, men, mothers and fathers will be saying, hallelujah, thank you.

Because that's not a partisan thing.

That's just, oh, you've noticed and you're doing something about it.

I'm going to shift over to artificial intelligence, including bots and sort of impact on jobs.

Could it level the playing field in your mind, for example, in the job market?

Or will it exacerbate job losses?

Because these are all the jobs that men tend to dominate.

A lot of the jobs are being targeted in that regard.

Yeah, I think

anybody looking at this has to just say they don't know.

And there are many people who've looked much harder at it.

than me.

I'm struck right now, as we discussed earlier, that we're seeing that actually healthcare and social care of these areas are actually still growing.

And at least to some extent, they are not going to be as easy to AI, but we'll see long run.

I feel like a lot of the jobs that are most vulnerable to AI right now could be things like paralegals, administrators, health finance, healthcare finance administrators type things.

And they scoot quite female.

And so actually, I think it's quite possible that at least in this kind of more immediate term, that it could affect women.

I think we just don't know what the effects are going to be generally, and we certainly don't know what the gender effects are going to be.

But I think one thing we can be reasonably sure of is that care is going to require humans.

And so for me, what that does, it makes it even more important that we try to break down the gender stereotypes about caring professions.

Absolutely.

So

one of the things I just mentioned was the AI companions.

You know, the first time it got a lot of attention was in the sci-fi film Her, when Joaquin Femix falls in love with his AI operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Do you see this as a way to fill the friendship void for men, which you've written about?

Or does that lead to more, as you said, isolation and maybe more suicide?

And I have interviewed the mother of the young man who committed suicide who was using character AI and got too close to his bot and was suggesting suicidal ideation to this young man,

allegedly.

Do you see that as a good thing?

Because men, the friendship men thing is real, right?

And this idea of mankeeping, you saw that New York Times thing, women feel they have to do mankeeping.

There's got to be a way for men to have more friends, right?

Because women,

from every statistic, have more friends, have more emotional connections, have less of a need for an AI friend.

Right, that's right.

Yeah, I mean, the joke is that the men are going to fall for AI girlfriends, but the women are going to want AI husbands

who listen better and are more empathetic.

And I have one friend who's already trying to get away from it.

No more man keeping.

Yep.

Yeah, exactly.

So, like, it's very interesting to me how gendered even that discussion is.

But

I worry that it will be an apparent solution to a real problem.

So the problem of lack of male connection is real.

The problem that it's actually still that male spaces are not necessarily celebrated.

And so, there's this suspicion, skepticism, which we've got to get past because actually finding ways for men to spend time, not least with each other, doing something, because men usually have to do something to spend time together is incredibly important.

And with AI, what I worry is that it'll be just good enough to feel like it's filling the vacuum, but never good enough to actually fill the vacuum.

And so in that sense, one of the problems is the better the technology gets at blunting our feelings of loneliness and making us feel less lonely, the worse the isolation gets because we then don't feel motivated to get up and get out and go and make real friends.

Because it gives us enough, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so in a sense, it's like just good enough to be really bad.

Right.

So that you don't make those connections, which are critical critical because men without connections are much more dangerous than women without connections,

historically, and everything else.

That's correct.

Two last questions.

Of all the data you've seen recently, what has intrigued you the most?

You now have all this money to study different things.

What do you think is the most important thing to study right now?

We've mentioned one, which is body image issues.

An obvious one is what's happening to men around education and especially higher education.

We don't still quite understand what's happening around the male enrollment problems in higher education, quite understand why men aren't going to college.

We have theories, we don't really understand that.

So digging much more deeply into that, because that's a huge issue.

Understanding how more vocational forms of learning would be important.

I think understanding and researching the narratives around fatherhood, that's something I'm already investing in, which is, I just think it's very important that the stories that we tell about fathers and their roles is hugely, hugely, hugely important.

And what's happening with male teachers?

Like, what's the bottleneck?

What's the pipeline what works to get more men into our teaching and caring professions I think that's an incredibly important research frontier and the last thing I'll say is that this whole area of service which a lot of the democrat governors we've talked about have mentioned but like what's happening with the decline in the number of men stepping up to be volunteers in big brothers big sisters ymca etc i think this issue about like men feeling like they're needed is important.

There's this famous phrase that you know.

I think Hillary Clinton made it famous, which is that it takes a village to raise a child.

I think that's true, but we need to be important to add that some of the villages do have to be men.

And work shows that kind of when there are communities with men involved, the boys do better.

And so there's something about service.

Don't you think probably all the panic around pedophiles is part of that?

That the right?

That is part of it.

And I understand that.

Safety is paramount in those organizations.

I totally get that.

It's a bit like the fear of abduction, stopping people from letting their kids play outside.

I get it.

It's important.

But like all of these things, we have to hold it in tension with the costs of not doing it.

It is a problem.

It's one of the reasons why men don't do it.

Agreed.

I just think the right has stoked their pedophile QAnon thing in a way that's infected everyone.

Yeah, that is.

I mean, I just, I mentioned that my son is, you know, my son's a teacher, and I was, he's only done his a year.

And I asked other male teachers for advice to give him going in, especially as a male teacher, in his case, fifth grade.

And the most common advice was, well, make sure that the classroom door has a window in it.

Yeah.

incredible.

It does and that's important.

But it was very interesting to me that that was the most consistent theme.

Well, the assumption is every man is a rapist, right?

Which is not the case.

It's really, really worrying.

Yeah, it's, I can see it.

I can see it.

And even as a parent, you do it, and I'm always like slapping myself to stop it.

And I know it's because it's the infection that comes.

And I'm not to belittle the problem of pedophilia, which I think is probably more prevalent in lots of ways or child abuse.

But I think it does affect men in a lot of ways more than we realize.

So based on everything we talked about, if you were giving one piece of advice to my Gen Z sons who are just about to enter the job market, the marriage market, the housing market, what would it be?

And what advice do you have for me as a parent of boys?

I think I'm pretty good at it, but I don't know.

What do you think?

Sure you are.

The thing that...

That's most important

is to have the, feel the wind in your own sails.

My mother's Welsh, and there's a word in Welsh which is hoil,

H-Y-W-L, huil.

And what it means is literally that, like having the wind in your sails, having agency.

And I actually know some of my own sons, they're kind of making distinctions between like the people who have agency and the people who don't.

And in a sense, like what you're doing, as long as it's positive, it's kind of less important than that you're doing it and you're under your own steam.

And so I think that's the thing I've always thought about my own sons is like they're doing their own thing.

And I think what both young men and young women are looking for, and I think young women are looking for and young men, assuming they're straight, is

this guy's doing stuff.

This guy's about stuff.

And what the stuff is is kind of less important.

And what we want these young men to kind of feel is our joy in them,

our appreciation of them, not despite being men, but because they're men, right?

And the unique gifts that that brings to them.

And to celebrate their maleness, if you like, without in any way saying that's somehow better than or dominant than.

I use this line, which is that, and again, this assumes that uh the my sons are straight which is and so i said like i wanted them to have the the courage to ask a girl out the grace to always accept no for an answer and then the responsibility to make sure that either way she got home safely

and i'm i'm i think that's okay like i'm aware that there's stuff we could argue about and they're like okay it was like your agency

You totally recognize that you have no sense of entitlement or rights over women or anything like that, but also a sense of like being protective of people who are more vulnerable than you.

Like, that's not horrible.

That's not a horrible model model of masculinity.

And I think I want I want all of our young kind of boys and men to kind of feel like

we love them for that.

We don't pathologize them for that.

Yeah, I remembering one

first time my son got drunk, you know, the ninth grade drunk thing,

the only way I made him feel bad was like there was a girl there.

And I said, did you protect your friend who was there also drunk?

Because girls are much more.

And he felt so bad.

So bad.

No, I'm actually, Obama was good on this recently too, this protective instinct thing.

Again, you have to modernize it, but we should be modernizing these masculine instincts.

Right, I said you're there to protect your friend.

Yeah, protection's good, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And what advice for me is one of the things I've learned as a parent of boys is how vulnerable men are, really, when I think about it.

Like, they're much more so, honestly, much more so than my daughter in a lot of ways.

And that was a real revelation.

Yeah, Ruth Whitman's book, Boy Mom, is very good on this too.

The boys are a little bit more fragile developmentally and so on, too.

And I use that word advisedly because I don't want them to hear that the wrong way.

But that actually, if anything, boys need a bit more attention and love, not less

to grow.

And I think that's right.

And we've not kind of realized that very often enough.

And we have to do it in the right way.

But to make,

again, it's come back with a point we've had earlier, which is that in order to sort of succeed.

in getting closer to gender equality, we've got to make our sons and daughters feel like we've got our arms around both of them and that we've got both of their backs.

And I think that we haven't quite done a good enough enough job of that with our boys and young men recently.

And

parents, I think, are really like you.

Absolutely, you know, we're doing the best we can.

And we're helping our boys feel great, not only about being humans, but feel great about being a boy or a girl.

It's amazing.

Yeah, absolutely.

Anyway, Richard, thank you so much.

The work you're doing is really important, I think.

And I really appreciate you talking to me.

On with Cara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Megan Burney, Lysis Soap, and Kaitlyn Lynch.

Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

Special thanks to Rosemarie Ho.

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