Richard Reeves: The Trouble with Boys

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is Friday, something I've been trying to do this week, pulling back a little bit from the politics of the day, not talking endlessly about Joe Biden and Donald Trump and trying to figure out some of the underlying factors for the world that we're living in. What's driving many of the stories? What's driving this shift in our culture? The other day, we talked about the Phoenix economy with Felix Salmon.
Today, I want to talk about something that I think is, and I have to say that having read this book, I find myself thinking about it over and over and over again. The book is Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It.
It is written by Richard Reeves, who's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where his research focuses on boys and men,

inequality and social mobility. And Richard Reeves joins us.
Thank you so much, Richard, for joining us today. Well, thanks for having me on, Charlie.
Really looking forward to this. Well, you've said a number of times that a lot of people warned you against writing a book about boys and men because it is such a fraught subject, particularly in politics right now.
So let's talk about that.

Given the scope of the problem, given how many stories have to do with toxic masculinity or men who are feeling displaced or the collapse of the educational attainment of boys, why would people tell you not to write a book about boys and men and their problems? I honestly think it came from a place of empathy and concern. It was friends and colleagues saying that because… Empathy and concern for you.
Yeah. I mean, their assessment of the debate about men, boys, masculinity was that really you had to choose sides.
You either had to come down on the side of that men are toxic, there's a problem with men. If we are worried about men, it's just how do we kind of stop them from standing at the top of the patriarchy and oppressing women on the one hand, or on the other hand, to say that there's a war on men, that feminism's taken over, and a kind of reactionary response to it.
And I think what's happened is that the mere fact of raising the problems of boys and men which are real makes people fear that somehow will distract from ongoing efforts to help women and girls so it's it's like like many of the issues you talk about a lot in this podcast charlie it's framed as zero sum right it's either a or b you're not allowed to care about it's like it's like telling a parent of a son and a daughter which one are you going to care about right you're only allowed to care about one but so much of our politics is framed in zero sum and this in particular was that and so people thought well if you write about this you'll be dismissed as a kind of frothing at the mouth reactionary and you bring the receipts you know you have these statistics showing this this transformed landscape because you know on almost every measure at every age, and almost every advanced economy in the world, girls are leaving boys behind and women are leaving men behind. Now, some people can look at that and say, what's the problem with that? Why should we be concerned that women are doing so well, that women are getting, you know, more college degrees, that they are thriving? Isn't that a good thing? Is it inherently bad for boys and men that they are now in a competition? Or does the problem run deeper than that? Right.
I think the idea of a competition is, of course, a great one. I mean, if we think about higher education as an example, so did we need to do more in the 1970s to lower the barriers to get women into higher education? You bet.
And back then, there was a 16 percentage point gap in favour of men in college degree awards. That's in 1972, when Title IX was passed.
And then the women just blew right past the men. So now there's an 18 percentage point gap in the other direction in favour of women.
So there's actually a slightly bigger gap on college campuses today than there was 50 years ago when Title IX was passed. It's the other way around.

So the question is like, well, did it matter then? Yes, it did. Does it matter now? Well,

it might. And my view is that if there is a really significant inequality between two different groups on whatever the measure is, that should at the very least make us worry that there's

something about the system in question, whether it's the labour market and the gender pay gap or education and the huge gender gaps the other way, which make us think, maybe this system isn't serving that group as well as that other group. And so if you just frame it that way, then there's no reason why we shouldn't at the very least be concerned by inequality, whichever direction it goes in.
And people sometimes say, well, you know, we didn't care about it when women were behind. And I think that's wrong.
I think we did. I think we cared a lot, which is why we passed Title IX and why a lot of political and economic capital was spent on lowering the barriers for women in education.
It seems to me inconsistent to then say, but we shouldn't care about it if it runs the other way. We've got to be consistent about gender equality.
Either we care about gender equality or we just care about women and girls or boys and men. I care about gender equality.
And so if I see any gaps that are large and growing in which either of them are disfavored, then I'm going to worry about that. I'm struck by one passage where you wrote, what nobody expected was that girls and women would not just catch up to boys and men in education, but would blow right past them and keep going.
Nobody expected this great overtaking by women and girls. Everyone was very focused, quite rightly, on getting to gender equality, getting to gender parity.
And that has happened. But what really is also striking, reading your research, though, is that it's not just the competition.
It's that in almost every area that we're looking at, that boys and men are struggling in the workplace, at home, with friendships, with themselves, that there's something broken. And so we're getting into this culture debate where there are people on the right who have decided to seize upon this, seize upon the issue that boys and men are being emasculated, the feminization of society.
So, talk to me about the dysfunction. Like, it's not just that boys are not keeping up with women, it's that there's something wrong, that they are falling off in so many different ways.
What has gone wrong? Yeah, I think you're right to point to the fact that there's something beneath the surface, right? So, there are these surface-level statistics that we can talk about, some of which I've just mentioned in education. We can talk about what's happening in marriage rates.
You can talk about employment. But beneath the surface of those statistics...
Drug use, crime, suicide. Deaths of despair, much higher among men, like opioid deaths, much higher among men.
And you can take all of those individually, or you can do what I think you've just done, which is to say, you know what, there's something deeper going on here. And that is a cultural question.
And that is, for my mind, that is that the rapid changes in recent years, economically, socially, educationally, and so on, and they have been astonishingly rapid, have really left a number of men wondering what their role is, what they're needed for, what the question mark next to their very identity and existence, I think is real now. I don't think that's a confection of, you know, just men complaining about equality.
I think it's genuine. I think when you're in a world where 40% of women earn more than the typical man, when it was only 13% in 1979, when 40% of breadwinners are women, this is, of course, a glorious thing.
It's a huge success. But the idea that that doesn't then come with some consequences in terms of like, well, what does it mean then? What does it mean to be a good man? What's my role? What's my identity? How do I secure respect? And I think absent a good answer to that question, what we're seeing is a retreat, isolation, purposelessness, drift, passivity among many men, because we are just not providing a very good answer to the question of how should I be in the world today? And that's a much deeper question.
It's really hard to get data points for that. I can't put that on a chart on a Brookings PowerPoint slide.
But I do nonetheless think you're right that there are deeper forces at work here that actually I think I say somewhere in the book that we need anthropologists more than we need economists. Because I do think there's a cultural challenge here.
I heard you talking about this recently, as you know, and you made a very interesting point about the way in

which people like, say, Jordan Peterson are talking to young people. Now, obviously, you know,

you disagree with the politics and the approach, but they do something. I'm trying to remember how

you put it. The one thing that young boys and men really want to hear, they want to hear someone

telling them, giving them some affirmation, telling them that they are all right, that there's nothing wrong with being a boy, there's nothing wrong with being a man. Can you talk to me about that a little bit? Yeah, I think Jordan Peterson's great gift, actually, is to make a lot of men feel seen, or feel heard, if you prefer, and not to feel blamed and judged.
And that shouldn't be a precious thing, you know, but I think it has become a precious thing for too many of our boys and men. I think that that's almost like a superpower for him, which is just to say, yeah, I hear you.
I got you. Yeah, this is hard.
Yeah, you're really struggling. I get that.
Let's try and work just some basic empathy is, I think, the key here. And the question then is, like, why has that become lacking in our society? And my view is that particularly on the center-left, perhaps in more liberal circles, there's such a continued emphasis on the needs of women and girls and the ways in which boys and men can be bad actors, which of course they can, that the consequence of the asymmetry in that debate is to end up with boys and men feeling like there's a long list of don'ts for them.
Don't do this. Don't say that.
Don't look at this. Don't write that.
But not very many do's. So, there isn't a very positive script.
And what I think Jordan Peterson and others are providing, and we can agree or disagree with the details of the script that they're providing and how men should be, but at least they're answering the question. And I think for too many of our boys and young men, they just feel as if they are essentially being educated in what they should not be.
And very few people are taking up the task of saying, okay, but here's what you should be in a way that's positive and also distinctly masculine in the sense that it kind of appeals to those traits and preferences that everything else equal tend to be found more among boys and men.

I can already hear the voices of people listening to this saying, well, wait, you know, we're talking about, you know, boys and men being victims or not seen,

but we are still in a society in which most of the power is held by men, older men.

You look at corporate boards, you look at political power, you see a nation dominated, actually a world, you know, economically, culturally dominated by men. And so, does this make it hard to make the case that, wait, we need to pay more attention to the problems of boys and men? Explain the sort of the dissociation there because there are going to be a lot of, you know, women listening to this going, you know, this is still a man's world.
This is very much a man's world and we have not fixed these problems. Yeah, and I think this is a really important point.
I mean, one thing to do is to make the distinction between different places, right? So, my work is focused mostly on the US, although most of the trends can be found in most of the advanced economies, right? So, most OECD countries, but it's obviously very, very different in other parts of the world. So, first of all, we have to say, be quite clear that this is not something that would, my argument would not have the same weight in other places.
But the second thing to say is that there's always a challenge here between looking at the apex of society, right? Is it true that we still have significant underrepresentation of women in those senior positions, like in politics, in boardrooms? Yes. There's been huge progress, by the way, in recent decades, but are we anywhere near where we need to be in terms of women in those very kind of senior positions? Obviously not.
And we need to do much more, and I've done quite a bit of work on that myself. But at the same time, it can also be true that that's not true for most men, right? That's not true for the median guy.
And so there's a danger that if we only focus on the top of society, we only focus on those really kind of very relatively

small number of apex positions that we miss these much broader social changes right so so you can point to the fact there are lots of you know most billionaires are men okay that's true it's also true that the median man is poorer today than the median man was 40 years ago right and that guys entering the workforce today are going to get are going to do worse and there's been a huge stagn wages, right? So can both those things be true at once? Of course. And a big part of my message around this subject is we have to be able to think two thoughts at once.
And they continue to support efforts to get more women into those senior roles. And ask why.
Why is there that underrepresentation? Why is there a gap? Why is it so difficult for women in politics? That's something you probably have better answers than I Charlie. But like, that's a really good question.
But at the same time, why are men four times more than 82 kill themselves? Why is male college enrollment dropping so fast? Why do black men earn so much less than not only white men, but white women now? What's going on with that? And so it's really, I just think, a straightforward point, which is more than one thing can be true at once but the trouble is in our current polarized debate is each side will choose to only look at one part of the problem so that you won't get very many conservatives really speaking strongly about why aren't there more women in politics why don't we have more women ceos why isn't there more venture capital money going to women but that's typically all you'll hear from the left and again, it's just this massive vacuum that's created in our culture when actually ordinary people are recognizing that all of these things can be true at once. Hey folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast.
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You talk about one-way inequality, and we're going to get to some of the political fallout from this, because obviously this is having tremendous impact on, I think, American politics and culture. You write, in 2021, President Biden created a White House Gender Policy Council, a successor to the previous Council on Women, which had been abolished by Donald Trump.
And the charge for the new council was to guide and coordinate government policy that impacts women and girls. And they came up with this national strategy on gender equity.
But as you point out, the strategy was entirely asymmetric. No gender inequalities related to boys or men are addressed.
The fact that women now outnumbernumber men in college is noted but only in order to highlight the fact that women hold more student debt than men so as an example sort of of the asymmetry and why men might not feel seen this is a problem isn't it it's just like i think it is and why rename it why rename it that's the real thing. Like, at least before, when it was the Council on Women and Girls, you knew that it just did stuff on women and girls, but they renamed it.
But that makes it even more infuriating for many men, many of whom I engage with, and they just say, well, look, this administration doesn't really care about men. And I say, well, why do you say that? And then they point to the gender policy strategy, which, as you quite rightly say, doesn't point to a single gender inequality that runs the other way.
It's entirely asymmetric. In a situation where we do have more and more gender inequalities running the other way, that just starts to sound implausible.
And more importantly, it just sounds tone deaf, you know, to parents raising kids whose son is struggling or whose brother is struggling with mental health problems or whose dad couldn't get a job. then to hear that the only gender issue in town is the one that runs the other way, I think is just leaving so much capital on the table and really doing a great disservice to the debate.
And by the way, then that creates a massive opening to the reactionary forces. I was going to say, they leave this capital on the table and people like Tucker Carlson have scooped it up.
And this has become a huge theme on the right. You're familiar, of course, with the way this has become entrenched in the culture war.
And part of the problem of the culture war is if the other side thinks something is a problem, there is this reflexive denial that if Fox News is talking about something, we can't be concerned about it. So if Tucker Carlson is talking about manhood, if troglodytes like Matt Walsh are talking about this, if Jordan Peterson is out there with his sort of crackpot ideas, turning back the clock, trying to go back to the 1950s, then we can't acknowledge that at all.
That is part of the problem, isn't it? That they have seized this issue, and it makes it harder for guys like you to say, well, wait, without adopting their agenda, we ought to be concerned about the underlying problems. Yes.
I mean, that's perfectly put. That's the danger.
So, first of all, it's framed in a very, very entrenched way. And if we give those guys an inch, you know, they'll take a mile.
So, we can't concede anything, right? We can't say that Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson, yeah, they kind of have a point about that. Yeah, okay, I don't agree with a lot of what you said but yeah that's that's kind of true maybe we should deal with that no no you can't do that and that's actually one of the issues i had around the come back to kind of the book is that i was actually very careful that i did get some discussion going on the center left before really engaging on the center right precisely because i knew that if people just saw oh yeah wasn't that the guy on fox news oh yeah? Oh yeah, wasn't that the guy reviewed in the Wall Street Journal? Yeah, we can safely ignore him, because that is the prism through which so much politics is now consumed, which is, well, if they're worried about it, if they're in favour of it, I must be against it, and vice versa.
And what that's done is it has created this huge opportunity. And the problem I have when I'm arguing with my friends on the centre-left about this is they think that even if they just admit that there are problems, that that somehow fuels the fire, the reactionary fire.
I think precisely the opposite. I think that by failing to acknowledge what are obvious facts and lived experience for many people, that creates the fire.
It actually means that a lot of the people who should sound crazy don't sound crazy when they say society doesn't care about men, the government doesn't care about men. Actually, I'll give you a specific example of that, which is that I had a men's rights activist on the phone with me.
And he said, look, they don't even care about male suicide. And I said, what are you talking about? He said, look, look at the CDC page on suicide disparities.
And sure enough, there's not a mention of the fact that the biggest risk factor for suicide is being male. The fourfold difference.
There's discussion of LGBTQ, Native Americans, rural, urban veterans, etc. But the CDC almost goes out of its way to make sure that the fact that men are four times more likely to take their lives from suicide than women is not on their website.
I'm cursing the CDC because I'm saying you're making this guy sound plausible, right? When he says you don't care and sends me that link to that page, you actually make him sound plausible. And then he goes on Reddit or he goes on YouTube, he will find an audience.
And if his facts are right and those facts are not being acknowledged and addressed by responsible organizations and people, then he sounds very far from crazy. And so, one of my messages here is like, we're doing the crazies work for them by ignoring these issues and therefore allowing them to say, quite rightly in some cases, why are mainstream organizations ignoring these issues? So, I think quite the opposite.
I think actually we are fueling the reactionary fire by our reluctance to just straightforwardly engage with these problems. Well, this is what I really sat up when you made that point.
And as I mentioned to you when we spoke briefly, this explains so much. This explains so much of what's happening in the economy.
It is explaining so much as what is happening in education, but also in our politics, you know, as working class men particularly, you know, are, you know, fleeing, you know, going off into MAGA world because, as you point out, they don't feel seen. They don't feel respected.
And I think at some point we need to ask the question, well, why is this happening? Why do they feel this? Is there some basis to this? And in their lives, they know that they are falling behind educationally. They know that they are falling behind in the labor market.
And yet, they don't feel anyone is talking to them. And they often feel blamed or accused of toxic masculinity, which I want to get to in a moment.
So why should we be surprised that this is having such dramatic demographic impact, right? I mean, if people feel disrespected, if they feel you expect everything of me, you put all the responsibility on me, but you give me no credit and you load it up with blame and finger wagging, why should we be surprised if that's alienating for this huge portion of the population? Yeah, and I think that that's a really deep problem, particularly from the, if you like, the center or the center left, which is to somehow individualize the problem, and very often to say, look, if it's true that boys and men are struggling, so let's say they'll go that far and can see that there is some evidence for that. They'll say, well, that's because of them.
If they're struggling in education, it's because they're lazy. If they're dying from COVID, it's because they refuse to wear a mask.
If they're struggling in the labor market, it's because they're just more interested in watching porn and smoking weed or whatever. And so it's very quickly individualized, which is interesting because typically on the center left, the opposite is true.
The usual approach is to point to structural barriers, right? I mean, you could imagine if some of those arguments were used against other groups who had low labour force participation or were dying in high rates from COVID. And so, it's unusual in the sense that even on the left, there's an individualisation of this problem, which does have the effect you've just described, which is to leave a lot of men, you know, these are ordinary guys trying to go about their lives, struggling in some ways, that boys might be struggling, etc.
If what they hear, or at least what they feel is, A, you're the problem, and or B, if you're struggling, it's your fault, then again, to reiterate what you've just said, Charlie, is that no wonder some of them are actually going to turn to people who say, no, no, I see you. You're right.
You are struggling. And by the way, it's because all that lot over there hate you.
That's a very powerful message, but it's only powerful because of our neglect of the issues. And it's very frustrating to me that just, I think that straightforwardly addressing them, acknowledging these problems, saying, yes, we're going to do more on this front.
Why couldn't the Biden administration, for example, say that the infrastructure bill was particularly good for working class men?

Two-thirds of the jobs are going to go to working class men, especially working class men of colour, actually. That's good.
But they couldn't say that. No one would say that.
Why not? Because they were afraid that if they said that, that that would somehow fuel the right, it would anger the women's groups, etc. And I've got to tell you, based on my straw poll of liberal, progressive women who I know,

all of whom are very committed to women's rights none of them said that they would be upset if the biden administration actually just made rather than it being a bug in the infrastructure bill to make it a feature and just say if joe biden stood up and said you know what there's a lot of people struggling in our society but one group who's really really having getting the short end of the stick recently is working class men

and i want to tell you one of the reasons i'm really proud of this infrastructure bill is

because it particularly helps working class men and working class men of color especially so

because you know what those guys they are absolutely central to america and i want to

thank them for their work thank you guys right and then you can say some stuff about women and

so would that be so terrible could he really not say that well could he not why

I don't know. I want to thank them for their work.
Thank you, guys. Right? And then he can say some stuff about women and so on.
But would that be so terrible? Could he really not say that? Well, could he not? Why didn't they say it? I mean... For the reasons that I've said.
Because, I mean, I talked to some people about it. They self-deterred themselves.
Yeah, there was just this sense of, like, we need to get women's votes in order to win. And anything that distracts from our agenda around kind of turning out women's votes like saying working-class men are going to benefit from this the fear was that would somehow put women off by the way i think that's completely wrong i think it's incredibly patronizing to women because it suggests they can't think two thoughts at once right they can't simultaneously care about what's happening to women and worry about working-class men and anybody that's looking at the polls, just from a pure political strategy point of view, and I'm completely nonpartisan, but if you're a Democrat strategist, don't you look at which votes you're losing? Like, where are working class men going right now, including working class men of colour? Where are they going? And a lot of them are moving right.
And so just from a self-interested point of view, it seems to me to be self-harming to literally refuse to acknowledge any of your policies are actually helping men. Even when the policies do help men, they won't say that they are.
What about the reality of toxic masculinity? You actually talk about this under the rubric like inventing toxic masculinity. So talk to me about that, whether it's real and how it is being now used in this debate, this whole idea that we need to confront the problem that men in fact are toxic and need to be apparently then detoxified, right? Yeah, well, the interesting thing about this debate is that most of the women who are working in feminist circles, and certainly those who are working kind of hands-on, don't like the term toxic masculinity.
They actually think it is deterring men from a productive debate, right? Now, that's not true in the media or in politics so far, but you will struggle now to find, you know, very many feminists who still think it's a useful term. And the reason for that is because they just see how it actually drives most boys and young men away from a productive conversation.
So the term itself used to be buried away in the marginalia of obscure academic journals. It was specific to very violent offenders whose psychology had essentially become warped by an association of masculinity with violence.
And, you know, it's getting like seven mentions a year in the Journal of Criminal Studies or whatever. And then with the arrival of Donald Trump and the Me Too movement, it suddenly exploded.
And it became a term that now is unavoidable over the last few years. And it's now used very indiscriminately.
You know, I've found evidence that it's been used to explain climate change, the recession, the spread of COVID, etc. And so, it's become close to just a generic catch-all term for things that men may or may not be more like to do than women that the author or the user of the term doesn't like.
The problem with it is that it's just a very unhelpful framing. Because what you're basically saying is the interesting question about men is which bits of them are toxic and which bits are not toxic.
Well, that's not very inspiring. I mean, talk about a non-motivational speech.
It's like, okay, boys, we're here today to try and figure out which bits of you are toxic, literally poisonous, and how can we extract it from you? Or given that we probably can't extract it from you, how can we at least neuter it it reminds me a little bit sometimes of the christian idea of original sin it's a kind of passed on it's kind of in you and there's nothing you can do about it except hope for redemption and i don't think it's helpful to send a message to boys and men that there is something intrinsic to them and of course the advocates of the term would say well look there are lots of things that men do that the men are much more likely to do, which are horrible. And I agree with that.
And we should deal with those. And there are usually very good names for those things, right? Criminal, rape, harasser, assault, etc.
So I think coming up this umbrella term is really unhelpful. And the last thing I'll say about this is, when you ask people to define non-toxic masculinity, they really struggle.
Because as soon as they start identifying some characteristics, which they say, oh, these are positive aspects of masculinity, and people say, well, what are you saying? Women can't be like that? Let's say leadership, courage, entrepreneurship, exploration. What it means to be a man, yes.
Yeah. And you're saying women can't do that? Say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, women can do that as well.
So say, okay, so how is it masculinity then? And so the trouble is that non-toxic masculinity ends up being an empty set. And if non-toxic masculinity is an empty set, then all you're left with is masculinity that's toxic.
And that's a profoundly destructive message. Well, and to your previous point, then, if you cannot define non-toxic masculinity, if you are uncomfortable in talking about what it means to be a man, then you're basically ceding the definition to other folks.
So, you know, I'm thinking of Matt Walsh sitting behind his microphone saying, you know, to be manly, you must, you know, make women subservient to you,

or, you know, you can't be manly on ice skates, you can't do all these things. Because there is a desire, I think, of young men to grow up and think, you know, who should I be? What are my

role models? You know, generations of men have been inspired by, you know, the values that you

talked about, you know, loyalty, sportsmanship, you know, honor, and none of those being things

that women don't have, but things that would make people think, I want to be manly in a positive way. Right.
I think the difficulty here is that those might be attributes that, on average, are more likely to be associated with men, but not exclusively so, right? I think so many of our problems in these debates comes from an inability or an unwillingness to accept the idea of the overlapping distribution, right? That you can have differences on average between groups, but that doesn't necessarily tell you what an individual is going to be like. So it may be true, for example, that men are more risk-taking than women on average.
And that's true. That's one of the bigger differences actually between men and women.
Does that mean that every woman has a lower risk appetite than every man? Of course not. That would be like saying, because men are taller on average, that there are no women who are taller than any of the men, right? Obviously, the distributions overlap.
But there's such a reluctance, I think, to just admit that you can have differences on average between groups, that that means the very idea of a masculine or a feminine trait or preference is frowned upon. It's seen as somehow suspect.
And it'll somehow mean that the people who don't conform with those binaries, with those stereotypes, are going to get oppressed or discriminated against. And I don't think that's true, and it certainly should not be true.
But if what we're asking people to do is just dispense altogether with the idea of masculinity and femininity, then I don't think that's a very useful prescription, given that there are some real differences. But more importantly, well, in that case, for God's sake, let's at least stop talking about toxic masculinity, because when you talk about toxic masculinity, you certainly seem to think that's about men.
And so we can't have it both ways. We either think that masculinity and femininity are real, and that we should be trying to find ways to make the best of them, or we have to deny that they exist altogether.
But in the real world, most people know there are differences on average, but they also know that those averages shouldn't be used to discriminate. So I'll give you one specific example.
My son works in earlier's education. My sister-in-law is an engineer.
On average, you might have fewer men in earlier's education and fewer women in engineering just because of those differences. But there wouldn't be huge differences.
And by the way, if you discriminated against my son, because he was a man who wanted to be an educator, or my sister-in-law because she was a woman who wanted to be an engineer, I'd be pretty angry about that. And I think most people would too.
So again, two thoughts at once. What was the impact of the pandemic on this problem? I certainly don't recall 10 years ago hearing about the incel community.
And of course, you know, we're seeing some of the acting out of these young men who go down bizarre, twisted, you know, alt-right rabbit holes and everything. So, what impact has that had on the isolation and the sense of self of these young men who are, you know, troubled to begin with? I think that this speaks to the conversation we're having a few minutes ago about these kind of cultural forces and this sense of agency and purpose.
And what I think the internet has done, and in particular, some of these communities in the so-called manosphere, which includes the incel community, but also pickup artists. And there's even this group called Men Going Their Own Way, which is sort of a sort of separatist movement for men who are just trying to sort of ignore women altogether.
Good luck with that.

Yeah, and it's a small group, I've got to tell you. But what's interesting about this is the internet has provided a place for kind of men to go and sometimes to feel like a sense of community.
Again, back to how are we failing so badly that that is where they have to go for it. So, this was happening before the pandemic.
We did see some of these trends around more isolation and more men moving into this kind of in-cell type space.

But the pandemic, we did see some of these trends around more isolation and more men moving

into this kind of in-cell type space. But the pandemic clearly accelerated it.
And you are

seeing now this kind of growth in isolation among kind of many men. I will say it's still a minority.

And I think a lot of boys and men are going to be intrigued by this stuff. They're going to look at

some of this stuff. They're going to be interested in it.
Like it's just unavoidable, right? The

algorithm is feeding it to them. But not many are actually going into those spaces.
And it's quite

I'm probably going to look at some of this stuff. They're going to be interested in it.
Like it's just unavoidable, right? The algorithm is feeding it to them. But not many are actually going into those spaces.
And it's quite important that we don't overstate it. And also it's very important we don't overstate the ones who are acting out.
Actually, I think a lot more men are checking out than are acting out. I think the bigger problem with men today is not that there aren't some who are acting out, sometimes in quite troubling and sometimes violent ways, of course, but it's actually the ones who are retreating that concern me the most.
It's, you know, for every guy who's doing something kind of antisocial, there are many, many, many more who are retreating. And take something like gun violence, for example, and Valerie Jarrett, the head of the Obama Foundation, even said this last week, she made the point publicly that we should never forget when we're talking about gun violence, that most of the victims of gun violence have used a gun on themselves.
And that's almost all men. And actually, rates of violence generally have declined, thank goodness.
And so we've just got to put all this in context and be careful not to tar all men with one brush. You do talk in the book about the structural problems in education and the economy.
And this will lead to some of the suggestions for reform that, you know, for example, brain development is a key factor in the educational context, isn't it? I mean, girl brains develop more quickly than boys. I mean, we kind of know that, right? And the biggest difference occurs in adolescents.
Anybody's adolescent kind of knows that because that's when you develop that prefrontal cortex, you know, the bit of the brain that tells you to do your chemistry homework, etc. So, how does that work against boys? The way I'm reading this is that they're always like just a step behind and that that has been now accentuated by some of the initiatives that we've created to create more inequity, that more inequity create inequity because of these structural problems? Yeah.
So, the first thing to say is that you're basically right in the way you've described it, which is that on average, boys' brains develop about a year later. Some people say it's more like two, but let's be conservative and say about a year later than girls.
adolescence really is the important period for that and it's important for two reasons one because that's when the prefrontal cortex which is the bit of your brain that helps you turn in your homework is the organizational bit of your brain it's like the planning organization for having some sort of future orientation bit of your brain that just develops earlier in girls largely because puberty is what triggers it and girls enter puberty at least a year earlier than boys. And so, that's just biological facts.
And actually, when I described all that in that chapter of my book, one of my most progressive feminist colleagues wrote, well, duh, on the side, because she has sons and daughters. And she's like, well, duh, like every parent, every educator knows this fact.
So, yeah, okay, so it's a blindingly obvious fact, but we ignore it in the education system. We actually treat 15-year-old boys and 15-year-old girls as if they're the same, even though we know for a biological fact that they're not.
And we couldn't tell that before because we were in a sexist society, girls weren't encouraged to succeed academically or go on to college. It was only when we removed those sexist barriers that this structural advantage that girls have in high school, especially in high school, of just being more mature.
They just have a maturity advantage, that's all. They're not smarter, and they're not more mature in that kind of eye-rolling, oh, you're so immature sense, but just literally, it's a matter, it's a neuroscientific fact.
So, let's talk about how it's playing out in, you know, family and personal life. You write, there's a dad deficit.
One in four fathers do not live with their children. What impact does that have? It's a lot of fathers not living with their children.
That's because 40% of kids are now born outside marriage. And we've seen obviously a dramatic change in family structure in recent years, and recent decades, especially.
But I think the thing that troubles me even more, and this is one of those stats that kind of jumps off the page at you, was that within six years of their parents separating, a third of American children don't see their father again. A third? A third.
Yeah, don't see their father again. What we haven't done is to update and recalibrate our ideas of fatherhood, especially, for a world of much greater gender equality, much more economic independence for women, and a world where the kind of presumed attachment between fathers and children was going to be through their role as a breadwinner, right? There was a kind of almost an indirect relationship from fathers to children, like a dotted line on an org chart, you know, straight line between mum and kids, a dotted line from dads and kids.
And I honestly think we're in this very difficult transition period now. And the result of that fatherlessness, which I think is the right term here, is very clear in terms of the outcomes, especially for boys, but for girls too, in terms of education, their chances of getting into trouble, their own flourishing in the labor market.
I mean, there was one study which found that the mental health of women at the age of 33 could be quite strongly predicted by the quality of her relationship with her father at the age of 16. And that's totally intuitive if you think about it, right? Like if you're a young woman and you've got a great relationship with your dad and he's helping you kind of, you know, figure out how to grow up and be in the world, et cetera, then that's going to set you up probably to do better in life.
And so it's not just boys, it's especially boys, but it's also girls. So the father gap, the fatherhood deficit is having profound impact on economic mobility and intergenerational inequality.
And because there's such a big class gap and is predominantly the boys and the girls in lower income households that are most likely to have this dad deficit. So that's like a double disadvantage for them.
Well, and as you mentioned, you know, this benching of dads eliminates one of the purpose. I mean, it used to be, you know, one of my roles, I am the breadwinner.
And so, there is that sense of being sidelined, of being made redundant. In terms of men and women in marriage, now, I'm trying to remember whether this was you who made this point or whether it was somebody else on the panel that when, you know, men and women are asked what they most want out of marriage, you know, women will often say love, but men say respect.
And this comes back to being seen, right, and being valued and having a sense of purpose that men need respect. And one of the structural problems is that that's leaking away.
Yeah, it's actually David French has written about this. And he argues that actually just men need purpose, that actually everyone needs respect, but the men need purpose.
So, he used that as a jumping off point to talk more about purpose. What do you think of that? Yeah, I think that's probably right.
I mean, I don't really like this idea that respect is gendered, right? I think that's not the right terminology. I do think, however, that the idea of male purpose is an important one.
And I'll go out on a bit of a limb here and say that male purpose has always been more socially constructed than female purpose, right? Because of this historic connection around reproduction that has been for women, to some extent, the male role has always had to be somewhat more socially constructed. And I think that we've had a deconstruction job on that in recent decades for lots of really great reasons, including the rise of women's economic independence.
What we haven't done is reconstruct male purpose. And I agree with you that this idea of fatherhood is absolutely central, but we're stuck, I think, in the sense that fatherhood only expressed through being the breadwinner, and especially through being the primary or sole breadwinner, that's just an old model.
And if you really think that's how to be a good dad, that's the only way to be a good dad, then you're in real trouble. I'm not suggesting that that was ever true.
I'm obviously a stereotype. My own dad was the main breadwinner, but he was also my swimming coach, my academic tutor.
I would wake him up early to help me with my math homework and stuff. So I'm not saying that's all they did.
But nonetheless, the clear central purpose was breadwinner. That's gone now.
And for very good reason, we get shared that role now. And so if you want a distinct role

for dads, what is it? And I think it's dad, father, fathers bring something different to

the parenting party. And it's okay to say that and lean into that.
Because if we don't say that, the danger is we say to the dads who maybe can't be a breadwinner for one reason or another, maybe aren't living with the mother of their children, you're benched, don't need you anymore, bye-bye. And I really fear that that's the kind of cultural messaging that we're getting wrong right now, whereas dads matter, period.
So again, you put all of this together and, you know, the challenges in education, the the workforce and the family, and we are statistically seeing more suicides, deaths of despair, opioid addictions, sense of malaise and worthlessness.

And also you reported on, I guess this really jumped out at me, the decline of friendship and the increase in loneliness among men.

The Survey Center on American Life found that 15% of men said they had no close friends at all, up from 3% in 1990. We see so many places where men are effectively being left on the sidelines for the lives of their children.
You put all these things together, and what you create is something like a vicious cycle. How do we get out of it? How do we get out of this? I think that's exactly what's happening, by the way.
I think that it is this vicious cycle where it's a sense of like, it's not clear what your role is in the family, maybe not in the labor market either. You're struggling educationally.
There are alternatives online, etc. You become more isolated.
If you're more isolated, you don't have friends to help kind of get you going. Maybe if you don't feel connected to your kids, or you don't feel you've got a role in the family, that isn't a motivation.
I mean, one of the biggest reasons, by the way, that there is still a gender pay gap isn't just that mothers earn less when they have kids, it's that fathers earn much more. Becoming a dad really raises earnings because those dads work harder, right? Now, we can argue about there is a good or a bad thing that dads work harder, but it is true.
And one thing's clear is that just that sense of being connected to others, serving others. Here I am channeling a bit of David French, at least, and maybe others.
That sense of being of service to others. There's this great story that Arthur Brooks used to run AI now at Harvard told, where he was with a guy who'd been incarcerated and homeless.
And while he's chatting to this guy, this guy just got this job, and he got a text message. His eyes welled up with tears as he read this text message and arthur said is everything all right what does the message say and he said he just showed it to him and it's from his boss and it's saying hey bob can you get over here as soon as you can i really need you and this guy was crying because he said i've never heard anyone use that sentence to me before i've never heard anyone say to me, I need you.
And I think that sense of not being needed is absolutely fatal. I think one of the things we share as human beings is a need to be needed by our children, by our colleagues, by our community, by our church, by whoever it is.
And so if we create men who feel like they're not sure at all that they're necessary, they're not sure they're necessary for the labor market, they're not sure they're necessary in the family, they're not sure they're necessary in their community. If they feel unneeded, then they are in really grave danger.
The book is Of Boys and Men, Where the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves. Richard, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast this weekend.
Thank you, Charlie. Really enjoyed that conversation.

And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
We will be back on Monday. We'll do this all over again.
The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper