Beyond the manosphere: Supporting boys and men in the real world

26:20So my view is that what happened here politically and culturally is that a lot of young men were just, they actually want their sisters and friends to have the same opportunities as them. They are doing more fathering, as I've said. Violent crime has fortunately gone down. But they also don't want to feel bad about themselves. And they don't want to be told that they're the problem. And so I think what happened, particularly perhaps in 2024, was just a lot of these young men. And it really was very interesting that it was the younger of the young men who are most likely to have voted Republican in the last election.

26:48So it was the 18-year-olds more than the 28-year-olds, which is, again, against trend. And I don't think that means for a moment that they're going to continue to do that. What I think happened was that – I'll make a political point without perhaps taking sides – is that I've noticed that when Democrats talk about what happened with young men, in particular in the last election, they tend to say, why did young men move to the right? And I don't see any shift in their policy views or anything. And I would say to them, are you quite sure that they didn't move away from the left? I guess that's a much harder thing to think.

27:21It's in some ways very easy to think these young men spent too much time online. They listened to too many podcasts. They got beguiled by this hyper-masculinity. And we've created an overnight generation of misogynists who suddenly voted the wrong way from their perspective. Or is it that they were just up for grabs? They weren't sure. They couldn't make up their mind. And they were just kind of a bit sick of the left and sick of some of the language they were getting from the left and didn't really see anything for them on the left. They didn't see much from the Democrats. I mean, this is at this point a little bit of a fable, although it's true.

27:53So fable is the wrong metaphor. But the Democrats famously have a website that says who they stand for. If you go to their website now, you'll see it. It's like who we stand for. And it lists various demographic groups that the party stands for. And you don't need to tell you at this point in the conversation, which group do you think is missing from that? And so I'm not suggesting that young men were going to the Democrat website and seeing that it didn't mention men. You don't mention us. Yeah, where am I on the list? But it does indicate something about the way in which the progressive side of institutions and political life somehow or other managed to convince themselves that in order to be for lots of other groups, they had to leave out or sometimes even be against men.

28:37And that was a fatal political error as well as, in my view, just a category error. Anecdotally, I mean, I live in New York City, so take this with a grain of salt, but I can't tell you how many moms I know who, when Charlie Kirk was killed, said, I had no idea who this man was, but my teenage son was the one who explained it to me. Because they all knew. Because they said, oh, he comes up in my feed all the time, Mom. So how much does technology – I mean it feels like everybody is talking about sports betting and pornography and gaming and day trading and crypto and AI companions that won't be able to teach young men what it's like to have a real relationship.

29:30There seems to be an onslaught of looking for young men's time and money and attention. Do you think that people – there's a lot of hand wringing around that or is this very troublesome? It depends which bit of it we're talking about, honestly. I think like – I mean they live online, right? They live in an algorithmic online world, right? That's just the way it is. And they understand the algorithm in a way that frankly I still don't. And, you know, I needed my sons for a long time to say, Dad, that's the algorithm doing that. How does it work again? What's the algorithm? And they play with their algorithms, right?

30:06So the digital natives, they live online. Now, that doesn't mean they only live online, but it means that their online and offline lives don't have this clear, bright line between them in a way that I think, for those of us who are much older, makes sense to us. You know, we actually, I have a boys and men online program at my institute, and that makes a lot of sense to us. But when they play with their friends online and they see them later, it's a much more blurry line for them. We have to be really clear. So it's somebody who's like, we can't just worry about the online world. That's just like worrying about the world.

30:37What are we worried about? Sports betting is a huge problem for young men. And it's a great example of a gendered problem because it's much more true for men. Because men, we could get into this, but they are more risk-taking, especially at that young age. And it's partly about frontal cortex development. But it's just true. One of the most reliably found sex differences in risk taking. And so, sports betting, casino in your pocket, disaster for young men, disaster. And we're doing a lot of work with policymakers on that. That's a huge problem. Some of the others, it's just a little bit less clear with gaming, pornography, et cetera.

31:12I think if I'm, as I think about this as a parent myself, and certainly when my kids are at home, when I talk to other parents about it, the way I think about it is for boys and young men, It's less that what they're doing online, with some of the exceptions we've just mentioned, is directly harmful. It's not much evidence that gaming is harmful in and of itself. It's more, what are they not doing when they're doing that? What is it displacing? And so if it's displacing in real life activity and particularly, and I think this picks up your point about relationships, developing relational skills in the physical world.

31:46and the thing that i really worry about is the atrophying of those relational skills right which are not just very important but more important we talked about ai a minute ago we also talked about how marriages and relationships now need a lot more negotiation i think actually relational skills are getting more important by the day and yet if you're spending all your time online you're not developing those skills and so it's really for me it's about how it displaces the in real life activities a way you really learn how to be in the world and that's the bigger problem for boys I think it's more directly harmful to girls and young women in some ways because of the visual elements and the bullying elements you see online and the self-harm that will very often come from the body image problems and so they're just playing out differently for boys and girls but if I'm a parent I'm thinking look it's not that your boy being online is bad and probably most of the content he's seeing he's discerning and he's arguing about it and you should be curious about that like I had one of my sons sit down and we watched Andrew Tate videos together.

32:41Andrew Tate's this online. Probably most people know who he is now. We sat and we watched some of the videos together, actually with one of their girlfriends. What do you like about this? What do you like about that? Well, that's pretty horrible. We don't agree with that, right? And so just engage with the content because it's all coming at them. And the question is, how are they discerning it? And how are they filtering it? And which bits do they believe? And which bits do they not believe? And how is it shaping them? And the solution to it is not to sort of have a moral panic. We don't need the sound of slammed laptops across the country.

33:10What we need is the sound of curious parents engaging with their kids about their content and having honest conversations about it and correcting them, which is what I did with my son, right? But that's not true, is it? Let's look into that. Or do you really believe that? Or just have that argument with them rather than just going, oh, no, internet, manosphere, bad, slam shut. That lack of curiosity on the part of parents and the panic sometimes gets in the way of real engagement. So sometimes it takes a deep breath, but just ask your sons if there's someone listening to this who can't quite believe their son is saying the things they're saying or is interested.

33:42Just take a deep breath and say, huh, why do you think that? Where did you get that from? Show me where you got that from. Let's look into that. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but let's look into it. If you panic and immediately go into judgmental mode, you've just done the work of the reactionaries because that's exactly what they say you'll do. So don't do it. In a moment, more from Richard Reeves on what people get wrong about the struggles of boys and men, including the idea of male loneliness. There are some surveys showing that loneliness rates are higher among men. But we've published work on this now looking at a much wider range of surveys, and we don't find much of a gender gap.

34:23We do find a big class gap. It's more of a class story than a gender story. I'm Anoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

34:53This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Save on all your summer favorites at Whole Foods Market with yellow sales signs throughout the store. Hosting a cookout? Look for sales on chicken drumsticks, thighs, and legs. All no antibiotics ever. Save on halibut fillets, a firm fish that holds up great on the grill. Stay cool and save on cut watermelon and organic strawberries for fruit salads. Plus explore savings on snacks from Annie's and more. Save on summer flavors at Whole Foods Market. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you.

35:32Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Before we get back to the show, have you checked out the NPR app recently? From live radio and digital stories to videos and podcasts, the NPR app has everything you love about NPR in one place. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, we have been talking to Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. When Richard first started writing his book, Of Boys and Men, he says the publishers felt the topic was too political, too hot to touch, and that no one would want to read his research into why young men weren't doing as well academically, going to college less than women and having more mental health crises.

36:26But when the book came out in 2022, it was a surprise hit. Philanthropists started offering to fund his new institute, and politicians, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, Maryland's Wes Moore, and Utah Governor Spencer Cox, have backed his policy proposals. So what's happening, I think, is that slowly but surely, this sensibility about boys and men is being built into the policy conversation and into the policy architecture. And that's starting to lead to some really exciting developments. I hope that within the next few years, actually having programs to help men in higher education, for example, having similar programs to get men into teaching and nursing, as we've seen in STEM, would be great.

37:08I've just launched the Male Educator Network, which is specifically modeled on some of the organizations like the Society of Women in Engineering to try and get more men into teaching and support the men who are in teaching. I hope that within four or five years, people were like, yeah, of course we would do that. Why wouldn't we do that? We'll keep doing the other stuff too. So every year that goes past, it feels like the controversy quotient goes down a bit. And the more politicians and policymakers are talking about this in a positive way, then the more heat will come out of it. And also, I'll risk saying this, that if you've got these mainstream politicians, left and right, just engaging with this in a positive way, not in a culture war-y way, but just doing something about it.

37:45I think that takes the wind out of the sails of the reactionaries because they can no longer say that we're not doing anything. We can give them a whole long laundry list of things that we're doing. We're saying, you're talking about boys and men. We're actually doing stuff for them. Where's your policy agenda? You're good on podcasts, but where's your policy list? We've actually done a bunch of stuff for boys and men. Sorry, what have you done? That's the winning combination, I think. I mean, it's not as though culture, shifting culture doesn't matter. We see a lot of the most successful politicians who are really good at doing that from Mayor Momdani here in New York City to the White House.

38:21How do you begin to get these ideas into the culture as well and make them get them out of the statehouse? And they can't be obscure, right? It has to be a sense of masculinity that will actually be embraced by everyone. I think that's right. I think we have to improve the cultural conversation about this. But I think we have to do it quite carefully and quite slowly. Let's not play that cultural game in quite the same way. I think what we need is a, we need healthier role models and conversations, et cetera. I think it matters when you have a governor like Gavin Newsom, who is no conservative, standing up and saying, I want 10 ,000 more men into service, right?

39:01The male service challenge. We need our men. And saying, we were wrong about this. We've got to do more on this. He then will go on to do excellent work on women and girls as well. And I could mention similar examples from the other governors. But that matters. And in some ways, just signaling that we've noticed and we care goes a long way. I think in the end, I don't think men generally want – they don't want a men's party. They don't want a manifesto, a policy manifesto that's just about boys and men in the end. They just want to know that they're included, right? And that it's not just about women and girls.

39:33They're not asking, I think, for a huge shift in the culture. They want to feel like they're not the problem. They want to know that we've got it. We're listening to them. And Mamdami is a good interesting example. Actually, one of my supporters texted me after his win and said, And I've just been looking at the exits. It looks like he did quite really well among young men. But I thought Trump did really well among young men. What's happening? And I'm saying, well, what's happening is that, as I have been trying to say, young men's votes are up for grabs. They haven't somehow shifted into this other fixed position.

40:02And maybe they liked his energy and they liked his specificity. And here's the thing. Maybe they liked his courage. Maybe they just liked the fact that he seemed like his own man. And actually didn't lean very hard into lots of the kind of culture tropes we've talked about before. And even if they didn't agree with him on policy in some cases, as they definitely didn't agree with Donald Trump on policy on many things, he seemed like a guy who was someone they could aspire to be. And so I think it's more important that we show what mature positive masculinity looks like rather than telling people what it looks like.

40:36Can I ask where sort of race and class figures into this conversation? because the difference between a kid who maybe doesn't have access to really basic opportunities like getting out into the workforce or good teachers or supportive parents, that's going to be very different than another kid who's going to get an undergraduate degree but maybe feels very lonely for other reasons and doesn't know why he's getting a degree because everybody says AI is going to eat his job. And I'm just wondering, are you trying to break it out in some way, depending on means and race? I think some of these cultural questions about masculinity, my role, relational skills, those are not restricted to certain groups.

41:27I do think that at all levels of society, a lot of young men are struggling with those questions. It's just if you've got the resources, you're much more likely to be able to answer them or at least keep going while you're wrestling with them. But you're quite right that actually if you intersect this with class and race, that's very, very different. The simple version of this is that if you take any level of economic or social disadvantage, that will impact boys more than girls. It's not that it won't impact girls, right? But the education gaps, for example, this is a great example of this. And Sean Reardon out of Stanford has very good work on this.

42:00You see that there is a gender gap on most educational outcomes across the class distribution. But it's much smaller at the top than it is at the bottom. So the poorer the neighborhood, the weaker the school, the less stable the family structure is, the worse the boys will do relative to the girls. So it's not that the girls aren't also going to suffer. So class compounds the gender gap in a big way. And for black boys and men in particular, you see very significant challenges. And there are lots and lots of measures where black boys and men are a long way behind black women and girls. That's true for other groups of men, but it's particularly true for black boys and men.

42:35So, for example, there are already twice as many black women going to and through colleges that are all black men. HBCUs now have historically black colleges and universities now have as many non-black students at them as they have black men at them. Because the decline in the share of male enrollment at HBCUs has been so significant. Obviously, there's issues around incarceration, education, etc. And so you've got to have that sensibility and basically go to where the data is. Because honestly, not everything goes the way you're always going to expect it. So you can't decide in advance which intersections are going to generate which outcomes.

43:10And I think that's the problem with a lot of scholars is that they've decided in advance what the rank ordering is. So women are always worse off than men and certain groups are always worse off than white, etc. But if you then add class to the mix and you add geography to the mix, that's just not true. So let's be led by the data. Where does it fit into, you know, there's a trope, whether it's true or not, that men have such a hard time making friends, that the sort of civic institution where, you know, the guys used to get together and play poker or maybe they were in the Lions Club or whatever else there was, the sort of male gathering has stopped in some way.

43:51Are you finding that to be true? Is that part of the reason why there is also a lot of male loneliness and other mental health issues? It's partly true, but it's a great example of what we were just talking about, which is the difference between class and gender as well. And it is something that I've had to change my mind on as the data has come in, honestly. Because in my book and in the early parts of my work, I was very much talking about the male loneliness problem. And through a very gendered lens. And there are some surveys showing that loneliness rates are higher among men. But we've published work on this now looking at a much wider range of surveys.

44:28And we don't find much of a gender gap. We do find a big class gap. It's more of a class story than a gender story with those without college degrees being much more likely to be lonely than those with college degrees. And so, again, who are we thinking about here? Who are we really worried about? Are we worried about our son who hasn't made friends in his dorm room at college? Sure, that's a worry that every parent might have. But the deep loneliness is actually among those with less economic power. There is somewhat more social isolation among men, which is a little bit different to loneliness because that's a subjective sense that you report on.

45:06And it does look to me as if male friendship, male socialization in the sense of kind of connection does seem to require more institutional support than female, again, at the average, right? It's like, I mean, stereotypically, like when I'm thinking about myself, my own friends, like we have to do something together, right? Yeah. We can't just, like, I can't just say, hey, let's meet for a coffee. My friends will think, what are you talking about? What's wrong with you? Like we have to go hiking or soccer or watch something or do something. We have to pretend to be doing something else while we're just having been friends.

45:39And men are a bit more comfortable shoulder to shoulder than face to face, it turns out. That seems to be true on average. But what that means is that we do have to have a bit more intention and social structure around male interaction. Women, on the average, women seem to be a little bit better at just making those social connections organically and naturally without the need for it to be because you're starting a pickleball league or whatever. And so what that means is that we need institutions for men, right? And so whether it's church or union or club or whatever. And I'm a bit worried. There's a suspicion about all-male groups and all-male spaces.

46:15And I get why from historically, right? Of course I get why. Fight club. That's what people are worried about, or the old boys club or whatever. It's like there's a Pew survey on this showing that like Democrat and Democrat-leaning women are most likely to say that all female social groups are good for society. And the majority of them say that all male social groups are bad for society. Now, they could be thinking about fraternities. We don't know what they're thinking about in answer to that question. And there's some evidence that women are now more likely to travel with other women in a group and so on than men are.

46:47So the kind of girls weekend away is more common than the boys weekend, etc. Look, I don't in any way want to inhibit women from doing it, of course. Hopefully that's clear by now. But I do still have some female friends that are like, yeah, I'm not sure I want these guys all going off on their own together. You go, really? Because we kind of need to go off on our own together. We like hanging out with our mates sometimes. And the suspicion of that or the fear of that is maybe a problem now. Well, you know, and maybe social media has to do with that as well, with male circles going and playing drums and, you know, beating of chests and extreme sports and pain inflicted in order to reclaim your manliness.

47:28Yes, these weekends. There's a thing called the New Warrior Weekend is one of the mixers. I'll say in the spirit of doing the research for my book, I tried to do one. Uh-huh. And I lasted an hour. I'm like, I'm out of here. I really, I mean, I thought I've got to do this. Did they call you a sissy? There were some issues right up front. Let's just say that. I'm like, like, guys, is this, you're just going to be mean, really unnecessarily mean and brutal? And I'm like, yeah, that's part of the point. I'm like, you know what? I'm out, I'm out. Don't need that. I've had enough. I don't need artificially inflicted pain.

47:59Thank you very much. But they're like, well, that's part of the point. I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm out. And then they had this very earnest conversation about why I was leaving. I said, I'm leaving because you guys are just a bunch of bullying each other. And there are good versions of things like that. There are good versions of men being in community with each other. There are good versions even of sort of rites of passage done in a good way and elevating each other and finding ways to progress through and help each other and mentor each other and maybe older men helping kind of younger men. And there are good, non-weird, non-bullying, non-creepy versions of those.

48:33And so let's not just categorize everything like that. Like when my friends and I go away for the weekend, it's like a, quote, hiking weekend. We drink and we eat and hike and chat and we just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. You know, it's... I'll share this story at once on one of these, where she's on a night out, and I accidentally butt-dialed my wife while I'm out with my male friends. And so she got this long voicemail from me out with my, you know, I think it was like five or six of us or whatever, and we're out having quite a rowdy night. So she gets a really long voicemail, and she says, I knew I shouldn't have listened, but, like, I just couldn't stop myself just listening to a little bit of it because she could hear the conversation that she said.

49:13And then I got ten minutes into the argument about whether Star Wars was better than Star Trek. Oh, wow. And decided it was safe to stop listening. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, that is kind of the stuff we talk about. I don't know what you're referring to. And it's not, of course, that's not all we talk about. We will talk about our wives and our relationships and, you know, stuff that maybe, like, is more personal to those spaces. So I'm glad she stopped listening at that point. I can't remember what we went on to. But look, that's part of the point, isn't it? And I suspect that women listening, you might say the same thing too.

49:38Like, when you hang out with your female friends who are kind of similar situations to you, like, isn't part of the point of that to talk about your relationships and how you're doing and stuff that it's maybe harder to talk to your partner about or stuff that's about your partner and your relationship and sex and things like that. Isn't that part of the point? So where does all this lead? I mean, how do you define this new version of masculinity? And how do we get there? I strongly believe that you don't tell boys and young men how to be a man. You show them. And so that's about having more men in the lives of boys, whether that's teachers, mentors.

50:14There's a huge shortage of male volunteers. So anybody who's listening to this and wondering how they can help, well, one thing you could do is sign up to be a big because Big Brothers Big Sisters is a huge lack of male volunteers and therefore a massive waiting list for the boys and other institutions where you're kind of just putting men in the lives of boys. And so there's this real concern about these negative male role models that boys are encountering either online or on screens one way or the other. And the best answer to that, I think, is less having more positive male role models online.

50:43They're there and we should encourage that. But it's more to have honest to God flesh and blood men in their lives. And so when I think about the negative influences that many of the kids that my son teaches in fifth grade are getting, I think maybe the best answer to that is him at the front of the classroom and then coaching the girls' soccer team afterwards. And not saying, here's how to be a man, but just showing them, right, that you can be a guy and be into your soccer and be into playful stuff that maybe codes a bit more male. but you're also incredibly caring and a teacher and love kids.

51:14We can't script masculinity in this very narrow way any more than we should script femininity. If I try to write a script for what it means to be a mature and pro-social, positive woman, I think I would get into all kinds of trouble, and not just because I'm doing it as a man, but because a lot of women would be like, no, that's not how I want to be a woman. I want to be a woman like this, and I want to be a woman like this, and I want to be a woman like this. The great gift of the women's movement has been to expand the ways in which it's okay to be a woman, to expand the opportunities for identity that women can take.

51:46And I'm not saying that we've finished that job yet, but we should do the same for men. So we shouldn't be trying to narrow what it means to be a man. We should be trying to expand what it means to be a man, but also not in any way pathologizing the things that tend to skew a little bit more male. So if men are a little bit more risk-taking, let's channel that in a positive direction. And so I worry a lot sometimes. People say, what's your solution? What's your formula for masculinity? And you either end up just saying something that just sounds incredibly vague, or you end up with a prescription, somehow like A plus B minus C is the modern masculine formula.

52:23And that's not the world we want to live in. I don't want to put my wife or my female friends in some sort of box as to what it means to be a good woman. And I don't want my sons. I don't want to put them in a box either. That was Richard Reeves. He is the president of the Institute for Boys and Men and author of the book of Boys and Men. You can hear his full talk at TED.com. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Thank you so much for listening to our episode. It was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and Avery Keatley.

53:07It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. And our production staff at NPR also includes James De La Housie, Katie Monteleone, Fiona Guerin, Matthew Cloutier, Harsha Nahada, and Phoebe Lett. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineer was Becky Brown. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablui. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Helen Walters, Roxanne Hylash, and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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