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mburnamfink 's review for:
Of Boys and Men is a meticulously sourced and argued case that the guys are not alright, and that there are clear social, legal, political, and moral grounds for doing something about it. This book is truly centrist, in that it has something to annoy everybody, while also making a case for a series of eminently reasonable policy experiments to improve matters.
The Offspring - The Kids Aren't Alright
I knew, in a vague way from Liz Plank's For the Love of Men and Seligo's Who Gets in and Why, that my fellow men were having trouble, but I didn't know how bad it was. Men are overwhelmingly more likely to drop out of school, to suffer in economic transformations, be victims and perpetrators of violent crime, or to die deaths of despair or stupidity. The extensively footnoted sources hit like hammer blows. Black men in particular are doing extremely poorly, suffering from systematic racism and police brutality. They've seen almost no rise in income since 1970. Worse, every typical policy intervention: education, training, scholarships, basic income stipends and so on, benefit women but have no effect on men.
Reeves makes three major points in the introduction. The first is that policy and social science has become systematically biased towards women. While there are active efforts to track where women are falling short and various governmental panels and non-profits to remediate those gaps, there's no similar effort for men. Even the existence of poorer outcomes for men has to be reconstructed from various social science studies, because gender is frequently not a tracked variable. As an aside, Reeves is careful to note that he does not intend an attack on women or feminism, and that motherhood still places an exceptional burden on women which is not shared with men. He just wants more symmetry in gender-based policy. Second, while there are not explicit barriers to male success, in outcomes the situation for men is about as bad as it was for women in the 1960s, before the legal triumphs of second wave feminism. And finally, if men could be removed from the statistics, America might well be an actual utopia, along the lines of Herland or Whileaway from Russ's The Female Man.
As Reeves discusses, both progressives and conservatives have failed men, under the broad rubric that progressives think boys should be more like their sisters, and that conservatives think that boys should be more like their fathers. In a departure from typical searching for systematic causes, progressives tend to see male failures through the lens of individual weakness and toxic masculinity. Without harming women, progressives should use their traditional techniques to understand uniquely male challenges. Conservatives have been more attuned to male anxieties, but have abandoned any move towards better conditions in a cynical pursuit of grievance politics. The manosphere, from Donald Trump on down to Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, suggests an every escalating attitude of anger and social disconnection which just leads men to ever darker placers, finishing in an incel mass shooting.
What is most valuable about this book is that Reeves offers what seem to me eminently sensible policy prescriptions. The first one is focusing on education, since failures in education seem to lead into a lot of later problems. Reeves argues that biologically and neurologically, boys develop slower than girls, and the simplest policy prescription is to redshirt boys, delaying their entry into school by one year by having them do an additional year of pre-K. Redshirting is most common among upper middle class white boys who need the least assistance, and making this policy universal, along with more support for early childcare. Reeves is careful to note that biological differences between genders conceal a much greater overlap, but given how much of your life can be defined by the worst day, climbing a water tower, getting in a fist fight, being arrested for drugs, being attentive to the lowest extremes in behavior is important. This matches my own experiences. As an August birth, my parents had the option of having me be the youngest kid in the class or the oldest, and being the oldest definitely benefitted me. There was also that very weird couple of years around 6th grade where the girls had gone through puberty and were distinctly young women and the boys were mostly still little kids. And across the board, young women are more emotionally mature, more attentive, and more motivated to succeed. A second change in education is better vocational training in secondary schools and more opportunities to 'think with your hands'.
A second policy thrust is a focused policy effort to get more men into HEAL careers (Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy), similar to successful efforts to get more women into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in recent decades. HEAL careers are both some of the fastest growing and most stable sectors of the economy, and there are vanishingly few men in entire fields like nursing and early childhood education for reasons which are entirely based on false cultural stereotypes. In particular, Black boys appear to benefit greatly from English classrooms with Black male teachers, and there are almost none. There should be focused efforts to recruit, train, hire, and retain men in HEAL jobs similar to how there are focused efforts for women in STEM.
And the third area is rethinking fatherhood. Both parents should get a full six months of paid parental leave. While mothers will perforce have more to with babies (I did none of the gestation or breastfeeding of my own son), fathers can take more of the lead with older children and may have an important role in teaching healthy approaches to new experiences, risk, and boundaries. Finally, while family courts have made massive strides in recognizing the rights of divorced fathers in the past few decades, unmarried fathers are still in a 1950s legal limbo of many obligations and few rights. Black men get one of their few accolades in this book, as Reeves notes that unmarried Black fathers are notably more involved than their n0n-Black unmarried counterparts.
I added this book to my list thanks to a provocative article in The Atlantic. Having read the full book, I am strongly persuaded by Reeves' arguments and evidence. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, the clear need for a better, evidence-driven discussion on masculinity and its discontents is a urgent scholarly, social and political issue.
The Offspring - The Kids Aren't Alright
I knew, in a vague way from Liz Plank's For the Love of Men and Seligo's Who Gets in and Why, that my fellow men were having trouble, but I didn't know how bad it was. Men are overwhelmingly more likely to drop out of school, to suffer in economic transformations, be victims and perpetrators of violent crime, or to die deaths of despair or stupidity. The extensively footnoted sources hit like hammer blows. Black men in particular are doing extremely poorly, suffering from systematic racism and police brutality. They've seen almost no rise in income since 1970. Worse, every typical policy intervention: education, training, scholarships, basic income stipends and so on, benefit women but have no effect on men.
Reeves makes three major points in the introduction. The first is that policy and social science has become systematically biased towards women. While there are active efforts to track where women are falling short and various governmental panels and non-profits to remediate those gaps, there's no similar effort for men. Even the existence of poorer outcomes for men has to be reconstructed from various social science studies, because gender is frequently not a tracked variable. As an aside, Reeves is careful to note that he does not intend an attack on women or feminism, and that motherhood still places an exceptional burden on women which is not shared with men. He just wants more symmetry in gender-based policy. Second, while there are not explicit barriers to male success, in outcomes the situation for men is about as bad as it was for women in the 1960s, before the legal triumphs of second wave feminism. And finally, if men could be removed from the statistics, America might well be an actual utopia, along the lines of Herland or Whileaway from Russ's The Female Man.
As Reeves discusses, both progressives and conservatives have failed men, under the broad rubric that progressives think boys should be more like their sisters, and that conservatives think that boys should be more like their fathers. In a departure from typical searching for systematic causes, progressives tend to see male failures through the lens of individual weakness and toxic masculinity. Without harming women, progressives should use their traditional techniques to understand uniquely male challenges. Conservatives have been more attuned to male anxieties, but have abandoned any move towards better conditions in a cynical pursuit of grievance politics. The manosphere, from Donald Trump on down to Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, suggests an every escalating attitude of anger and social disconnection which just leads men to ever darker placers, finishing in an incel mass shooting.
What is most valuable about this book is that Reeves offers what seem to me eminently sensible policy prescriptions. The first one is focusing on education, since failures in education seem to lead into a lot of later problems. Reeves argues that biologically and neurologically, boys develop slower than girls, and the simplest policy prescription is to redshirt boys, delaying their entry into school by one year by having them do an additional year of pre-K. Redshirting is most common among upper middle class white boys who need the least assistance, and making this policy universal, along with more support for early childcare. Reeves is careful to note that biological differences between genders conceal a much greater overlap, but given how much of your life can be defined by the worst day, climbing a water tower, getting in a fist fight, being arrested for drugs, being attentive to the lowest extremes in behavior is important. This matches my own experiences. As an August birth, my parents had the option of having me be the youngest kid in the class or the oldest, and being the oldest definitely benefitted me. There was also that very weird couple of years around 6th grade where the girls had gone through puberty and were distinctly young women and the boys were mostly still little kids. And across the board, young women are more emotionally mature, more attentive, and more motivated to succeed. A second change in education is better vocational training in secondary schools and more opportunities to 'think with your hands'.
A second policy thrust is a focused policy effort to get more men into HEAL careers (Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy), similar to successful efforts to get more women into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in recent decades. HEAL careers are both some of the fastest growing and most stable sectors of the economy, and there are vanishingly few men in entire fields like nursing and early childhood education for reasons which are entirely based on false cultural stereotypes. In particular, Black boys appear to benefit greatly from English classrooms with Black male teachers, and there are almost none. There should be focused efforts to recruit, train, hire, and retain men in HEAL jobs similar to how there are focused efforts for women in STEM.
And the third area is rethinking fatherhood. Both parents should get a full six months of paid parental leave. While mothers will perforce have more to with babies (I did none of the gestation or breastfeeding of my own son), fathers can take more of the lead with older children and may have an important role in teaching healthy approaches to new experiences, risk, and boundaries. Finally, while family courts have made massive strides in recognizing the rights of divorced fathers in the past few decades, unmarried fathers are still in a 1950s legal limbo of many obligations and few rights. Black men get one of their few accolades in this book, as Reeves notes that unmarried Black fathers are notably more involved than their n0n-Black unmarried counterparts.
I added this book to my list thanks to a provocative article in The Atlantic. Having read the full book, I am strongly persuaded by Reeves' arguments and evidence. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, the clear need for a better, evidence-driven discussion on masculinity and its discontents is a urgent scholarly, social and political issue.