Office Hours Special: Algebra of Masculinity Part 3

0:00Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. Said you hear about Dave. Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Welcome back to the third and final episode of our special three-part series covering all things masculinity. As a reminder, in episode one, we spoke to Christine Emba about where masculinity stands today and how women can help define positive masculinity, and answered your questions on topics including pornography and monogamy.

0:49And last week, we spoke to Dr. Robert Sapolsky about the common misconceptions surrounding testosterone and estrogen, specifically how these hormones relate to aggressive behavior. To round out this series, we knew we had to speak to sort of our Yoda on the topic, Richard Reeves, as he's someone we consider to be really the kind of the have done the seminal work, really has written the landmark book on this of boys and young men. Anyways, I just absolutely love how measured Richard is. I also think he's the right face for this conversation because he's just so obviously a thoughtful, kind of gentle person who clearly has a lot of empathy for the struggles that non-whites and women have faced.

1:33And I think that's key to be taken seriously here, such that you don't come across as just like some manosphere guy who's angry and, you know, I don't know, like Andrew Tate working at a think tank. That doesn't work. It has to be somebody who clearly brings data, credibility, and a sense of empathy such that these ideas get traction. We discussed with Richard the concept of relational masculinity, the decline of male connection, and the concentric circles of masculinity. That's something I'm thinking about as a construct for my book, and you'll hear more about that. I know you're very excited.

2:06We also get into the topics of parenting and the impact of porn on young men, specifically how it's become a place that young men retreat to. So with that, here's our conversation with Richard Reeves. Richard, where does this podcast find you? I am tucked away in the mountains of East Tennessee, which is where I try and get to when I'm not running around talking about men and boys and masculinity. Oh, that's right. And isn't one of your kids a volunteer? Yeah. My youngest is at the University of Tennessee. And so we occasionally get over there to watch the football, which I pretend to know what's happening.

2:39Real football. And how do you enjoy living in Tennessee? Or do you? When I'm here, so we've only been here a few years, we're in Southern Appalachia. So for those, have you read Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Demon Copperhead yet? A new one. I have not. It's set here, essentially set in Southern Appalachia. And it is an area that's been ravaged in many ways by some of the stuff you talk about a lot that we've talked around around the what's the role of men, the opioid crisis. I live right in the top northeast corner and I found some figures the other day, the male labor force participation in my zip code here in Tennessee is 45%.

3:17I mean, that's just a different world to the world that many people probably live in, And there's a lot of issues around drugs and so on, very high rates of poverty. And so this is deep Appalachia. And it's nice for me. I lived in Bethesda before. And so Bethesda, Maryland, for those who don't know it, it's one of those super zips, high education, high income, very, very progressive. And the place we live in when we're here is the other way around. It's on the other end of most spectrum. So it's fascinating for me to get to know some of the people around here. Well, as a means of bridging into a discussion around men and boys, I would imagine that a lot of the issues and the structural shifts in Appalachia specifically impact young men.

4:01Is it the decline in the manufacturing industrial base? Is it a lack of mating opportunities? What ails that zip code and how do you relate it to some of the challenges facing young men? yeah so it is it is the loss of some of those traditionally male jobs that you pointed to but it but it also brings in lots of other themes too like this is an area hit hard by opioids and there's a big meth problem here too so once you start to despair you lose connection that can make you very vulnerable to addiction and of course once you're once you're in the trap of addiction that makes it harder for you to hold down work if you're not holding down work it's harder to form a family if you're not forming a family the incentives to work and stay sober get less.

4:44And interestingly too, when you get into these really, really low income white areas of the US, huge differences in the educational gaps. It's not that the girls are doing as well as the girls in the rich areas, but the girls are doing much better than the boys. And interestingly, more likely to move away. So you know this idea that like, you know, the men would be the ones who would have to go up and go somewhere else, maybe get a job and the family would fly. Yeah, now it's the other way around, actually. You see that. But I saw some data on East Germany recently showing that a lot more women had left East Germany to move to new opportunities in West Germany.

5:22And so there are now towns in East Germany where there's like, you know, 75 women for every 100 men. And it predicts support for reactionary politics. You see higher crime rates. and something not as dramatic but is happening in U.S. rural areas where the girls are a bit more likely to do well at school and then maybe get some sort of professional qualification, but then they move to the city and the guys stay behind, which is maybe a reversal of what you traditionally think. And so you get these areas where the sex ratio is tipping a little bit male and that doesn't turn out to be good for anybody to have surplus men.

5:58You know, Joe Henrik writes those books about, you know, weird and stuff. He talks about the math problem of surplus men. And this idea of surplus men, I think it underpins a lot of our shared interests around this, which is what do you do with guys who've become economically or culturally surplus to requirements in some ways? And that's been, historically, that's been very bad for societies to have too many men who don't have a clear role in society, aren't needed in a very clear way. And historically, what we've done is sent them off to war or some other risky endeavor, right? But that doesn't happen now.

6:39Yeah, I thought of you of all places or all times. My 13-year-old and I bond over South Park. When mom and a 16-year-old aren't in the house, we sneak in and we binge watch South Park. and season 26 episode six at exactly minute 20 because i clipped it for one of my presentations this father is alone with his son for the weekend and he decides to you know there's too many forces trying to starch out the masculinity of his of his boy and so he's i get strippers and starts parting and tries to get the boy to drink beer and the boy just wants to play kind of Dungeons and Dragons. And the dad engages in all the solicit activity.

7:19And by the end of the weekend, he's desperately calling his wife and saying, I'm a mess without you. You got to get home. And I thought of this notion of guardrails. You know, I think about two things and you've taught me this. I often refer to you as my Yoda on the topic. One is the singular point of failure is when they lose a male role model. But the other thing I think about is just that young men, more than young women are desperate for guardrails, whether it's a good friend group, the prospect of a romantic relationship, parental or male involvement, a job, whatever it might be, that they literally come off the tracks without guardrails and that girls do a better job of creating their own guardrails.

7:58They're more attuned to society, they mature earlier, they're better at creating a friend network that they can lean on for advice. how do we begin to move to solutions and construct more and more guardrails for young men? Well, first of all, I agree with you about the guardrail question. I sometimes say this, this might be the most socially conservative I ever sound. And I don't care if that's true, because I believe what I'm about to say is true, is that masculinity and the male role has always been and will likely always be more socially constructed, more guided, more created, more curated than the female role because the female role and femininity will always have that more solid anchor in reproductive life and the obvious markers that that gives you, the obvious community that it brings you, etc.

8:54And so if it's true that masculinity is more socially constructed than femininity. That means, as you just said, that those guardrails are part of the construction. Those guardrails are part of like, okay, this is where you go. The question then is, how do you get it? And this is where the Vistar circle comes in, because as you just identified, like a male role model. And I've been talking a lot with Melissa Carney, who is a friend of mine, who has this book out on marriage. And I've also talked to a lot of educators, and I wrote for you this piece about the lack of male teachers. So as fewer boys have had a good strong male role model in the house or in the immediate family, also fewer of them have had one as a teacher or a coach.

9:34And so rather than thinking about fatherlessness, we should just think more broadly about manlessness. And so I do believe that finding ways to connect boys to men and men to each other is hugely important, right? There's a reason why, like the churches are out, live in East Tennessee, as we've discussed. And so there's a Baptist church every mile, it feels like. It's extraordinary to me that the market sustains as many Baptist churches as it does. You walk into any one of those, there'll be a lot more women than men. And that's borne out by the statistics. Every single denomination in the church has more women than men.

10:07And even controlling for age, it's not just because women live longer, controlling for age. The guys are not in those churches. They're not in the churches. They're not in some workplaces. They're less started to be in colleges. And so the great irony here is that the gender that most needs institutional support to figure out who to be, i.e. men and boys, are the ones who are not in the institutions. It's actually women who are in the institutions. So in that sense, the problem compounds on itself as we see the deinstitutionalization of male connection. Yeah, I was thinking about church when we were talking about it, and I was thinking all the sports teams.

10:45There's not only fewer after-school sports programs because of budget cuts, but a lot of boys now, because of obesity, aren't physically fit enough to engage in sports. I think about national service or a compulsory service. All these things that dual-parent households, whatever it might be, where boys get exposure to other boys or men. I saw some stats, I'm curious if you've seen this, that Israel actually doesn't suffer from the same levels of teen depression as many other Western nations. And I wondered if it was because of compulsory national service or a sense of identity through national purpose.

11:28But what institutions do you think realistically we could fund that would move the needle here in America? Yeah. One of the things that Bell Sawhill, a colleague of mine at Brookings and I have talked about is how about saying, look, you can go to college for free, but in exchange for doing national service. So a scholarships for service program. So you might say, look, let's make higher education a public good. But at the same time, you've got to give something to the public, right? And so you do your service. And so it's not absolutely mandatory, but it would be an exchange and make that something that people do.

12:05The really interesting idea is, of course, Israel has national service for both, but the Scandinavians have national service for the men. And that's much more common. And I guess if you forced me to choose between no national service and national service for men, I might be persuaded that it's probably more important to get men international service for the physical reasons you've talked about, but just because of these institutional reasons. And it also gives them a bit more time to mature, learn some discipline, all that stuff that just makes you sound like, you know, an old lieutenant colonel or whatever, but you're running the risk of saying that.

12:44So national service for sure. And I think we should be things like the Boy Scouts. The scouting movement has a long history of helping to institutionalize male connection. We shouldn't be cavalier about the loss of them. And last but not least, the coaching gap in many of our schools. We need something like a Coach for America program where we help these middle schools that can't get a coach for their soccer team. And meanwhile, you have these men wondering what to do with themselves. So there's clearly something there. It's unconscionable that in low-income schools, they can't run after school clubs because they don't have anyone to coach them or mentor them.

13:25And then we have this vast army of men looking for purpose. So that's the sort of policy area we need to be looking hard at and pushing for. Any parent with boys, and I guess some girls, but it feels like more boys, ultimately faces this discussion around drugs that address or purport to address ADHD. And I'm one of those people that initially was, no, we're over-medicated, and all they're trying to do is feminize our boys such that they study to the test of academia, which is biased towards girls. girls. But at the same time, I know a lot of success stories. I know a lot of people who said that their kid, bottom line, is just happier and doing better.

14:11What are your thoughts on what is a pretty substantial increase in the prescription of ADHD drugs for boys? It's so interesting you're asking about this when I am literally hours out of a conversation with one of my own kids about the, he's really, really struggling. And it's partly because he really doesn't want to take the medication, but he, but it works. And no question that that's, you know, we're clear about the fact that in his case, it's appropriate. And as long as it's managed correctly, he does have quite significant ADHD and the meds help period. Right. So the difficult question here, and I don't have a good answer to this, but it's reasonably clear to me that there is some over medication going on.

14:59Reasonably clear. It's also reasonably clear to me that there was a lot of underdiagnosis going on previously, and there was undermedication before. I don't know what the middle ground here is. I can't look at the rise in the medication and think that all of it is the result of appropriate, carefully thought through and effective medication. And I have enough stories as well of inappropriate use of the medication to basically pacify. And that's the difficult one. And I just don't know how to think about that except case by case. I hear the success stories. And what I realize is that the people who immediately assign it or dismiss it as over medication, it's like you can almost tell, OK, they don't have kids.

15:42It's just I wish there was some sort of like a PSA test that you're above this level of PSA or cholesterol. This is when we push on drugs. And there's no kind of test for it. But so it's I think it's something a lot of a lot of people are struggling with. So the last time we spoke, you said something that struck me. And that is, you know, I've always thought that now we're talking about younger men or boys or older boys, that porn was the largest unsupervised experiment on young boys. And I haven't seen a ton or young men. I haven't seen a ton of research here. And you said that you weren't as worried about it as some people, that a disproportionate amount of it was consumed by, you know, it's kind of the 80-20 rule.

16:27Have you done any more research or encountered any more research on the impact of porn on young men? I haven't. And I think that the problem is there isn't much good research. And it's difficult to do good research because you don't have a control group because it's ubiquitous. um i have had conversations with people like christine ember who has it's done quite a bit of work on this more recently she has a fab a landmark essay in the post on on boys and young men and so young women they're just reporting like from you know from the front lines of the dating world if you like the ways in which porn has changed men's views about sexual relations and and so i take that serious more seriously perhaps than i did when we we last spoke because i'm just so out of this right i just like i'm not entirely sure i just i'm just reading this this book by this um i said i've just been in scandinavia i got as a gift this book from this norwegian it's um by a pretty famous norwegian i think his name's per peterson it's the book is called men in my situation and it's a very sad book about a guy that his wife leaves him and and his daughters don't want to see him and he's despairing.

17:44And there's this line in there, he's trying to date. And the line is, he was caught in the twilight space of so many men, caught between pornography on the one hand and bashfulness. And so what he's saying is actually just his ability to have agency and confidence in an actual interaction was terrible. And he has had porn to retreat to. And so I guess I would revise my view to say, look, I want to hear more about what's happening in the dating market specifically. But I would also, I probably hardened my view since we last spoke about the fact that it's just this place to retreat to. You're exploring the notion or developing the notion of relational masculinity.

18:25What do you mean by that? There's this lovely, lovely term in anthropology from Gilmore when he'd studied men across societies and across history. And he talks about this idea of a boy becomes a man when generates a surplus for the group. This idea that you generate more than you need for your own survival. And I love that idea. And it embeds this idea of masculinity in the idea of relationships. It's the opposite of what I call lone ranger masculinity is like, I just stand on my own. I build a cabin in the woods. I eat what I kill. I don't need anybody. You even see it online in this kind of men going their own way movement, the mug towel movement, like men who sort of boast about the fact that they just don't need anybody else and that no one's going to rely on them or vice versa.

19:13And I think that's just completely wrong. Anthropologically, that's not how masculinity is being defined in human cultures and also very dangerous psychologically because isolation is so, you know, you've had, you've had a lot of people on recently talking about this. I think you had Senator Murphy on, talking about that. You've had Surgeon General Vivek Murphy. And so this idea, like we know isolation is a killer, but relational masculinity, by contrast, is judged by how much you're providing for other people. And as soon as you say provider, the dangerous people think, oh, you're calling for men to just be the economic provider again.

19:47And sure, actually, that is important, but there are so many other things that men can provide. Love, time, energy, strength play joy you should be producing more of that you should be providing for the community for the for the family and i actually wrote this article about it for comment magazine and i i started i started the piece with my father and i ended with my son and i talked about how my my own father who did fulfill many of the traditional roles too but he was on he was in the community he helped people, as my mother did too. He judged himself by the relationships that he was providing into.

20:27And I finished the piece with my son, who went to university very near where my parents live in Cardiff in Wales. And my son told me, and he's really struggled through the education system, and he said that when he walks to his classes at university, he could look north and two miles to the north, there's a tower, an old Victorian hospital tower. And that hospital is right next to where my parents live. And he says, I look up there and I know that's where grandpa is. And I know that if I need him, he's there for me. And it helps me get through my day, just knowing that a couple of miles away, his grandfather's there.

20:59So even now, my father, to my son, to his grandson, is just providing security, joy, love, support, et cetera. And so this idea that masculinity is not defined in isolation from others, but quite the opposite. it. Yeah. I, I, first of all, I always try to stop in every podcast and I see something that I think, or hear something that I think is especially insightful or moving. And, you know, when I was younger, I wanted to be wealthy, wealthy slash awesome. That was my goal. And then as I've gotten older, I thought my ultimate goal is to have a positive influence. And what you just described, I think it's kind of really, if there's anything I really want over the course of the rest of my life that feels, quite frankly, a little bit elusive, I don't know if it's going to happen, is that I'm that grandfather you're talking about.

21:56Is that my sons, and if I'm fortunate enough to live long enough, my grandkids think of me as someone as a source of comfort because they can come to me and they want to come to me for advice. I think that's, I mean, literally you just described what is my, you know, my end goal right now. I've been thinking a lot about masculinity and I'm actually thinking about writing a book on it. And I'm curious, I want to bounce this construct off of you and have you respond to it because you just sort of articulated it. and that is concentric circles, if you will, of masculinity. And at the very center is taking care of yourself and being self-sufficient.

22:32You know, Rambo can go into the forest and kill things and make an arrow and bow an arrow out of sticks and survive and take care of himself. He's that strong. Is that resourceful? But at the end of the day, that's the first stage of masculinity, being able to take care of yourself, to fix your own oxygen mask. And then you go one circle out, take care of the people in your family, right? Be a good dad, be a good partner, provide for them. And then sort of the ultimate expression of masculinity is you get to the point where you can go so many circles out because you're so good at what you do. You're so thoughtful.

23:07You're so kind. You're so resourceful that you can take care of people who are never even going to know your name. And that that's kind of the ultimate expression of masculinity. And then even taking it one step further, I know a lot of people, and I think of it as almost like hollow masculinity, that are very good at the outer ring. They give millions of dollars away. They're leaders in the community, but they lose sight of the inner circle. Their families are struggling. And they're so focused on the affirmation from that outer circle of masculinity, being a leader in the community, that their home, quite frankly, as a shit show.

23:44Anyways, what do you think of this idea of kind of concentric circles of masculinity? I really like it. I've just been sketching it out. But I also think it's important that you start from the middle, as you say. I mean, if you're basing it in this idea, and I love what you shared about your own story, if you move from this idea of like, what can I get to what can I give, then it exposes the hollowness of that external because even if these guys are giving away all this money and apparently doing all this great stuff for the world, if they're doing it because of what they get, social affirmation, oh, you're so generous, have a seat on the air, it doesn't fucking matter how much money they're giving away.

24:31Right? It is hollow. I love your description of it. It's kind of hollow because it's still what they get rather than what they give. But if you do start from the reason why you take care of yourself is not selfishness, it's selflessness. It's so that you can do the stuff in the next ring and the next ring and the next ring. And they all kind of flow and kind of blur into each other. And I certainly grew up in, I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where those lines were being blurred all the time. And people knew, people knew that our home was a place you could come. We had teachers coming to our house after traumatic events, kind of in tears, because they knew that our home and my mom and my dad would be a safe place to go.

25:09And then we were always forbidden from telling, breathing a word of it, which we never did. And so I grew up with the sense of like, my mom can't drive past someone in the pouring rain and not offer them a ride. She can't. That can only happen if it's flowing out, if it's this surplus. And because compassion and love aren't finite the more you're generating it in the kind of furnace of the family then the more there is to go like it just spills it goes and goes and you generate so much joy and play now i'm sounding sappy but but i i agree with it and the trouble is that a lot of the debate right now is between like if you think about some of these man fluences to use christine ember's term right there's sort of a combination of the first ring and the outer ring it's like yeah take care yourself, go to the gym, kind of work it out and then provide, you know, have all this show that you're doing.

26:09But actually it's really about the thick of everyday life to use a term from the philosopher Jerry Cohen. It's like real justice and real joy are found in the thick of everyday life. The other thing I've been thinking about and I want to get your reaction to is that, so a lot of times men from a media standpoint or an assessment, you know, all the stats, right? 92 % family court, kids being awarded to the father. You know, the stats go on and on that by virtue of being born a male, sometimes in certain instances or a lot of instances, you start from less than zero. I also wonder if there's a bias or a lack of recognition for how powerful the household combination is of someone who is born as a man and someone who is born as a woman or brings the attributes that are more common to those two groups.

26:59And that is having a household and an approach to the family and life and career that includes someone who is aggressive and more of a risk taker and more impulsive and someone who's more practical and more thoughtful. And usually those are values that are disproportionately assigned and reflected in people born as a specific gender. And that there is evidence showing that in terms of happiness, economic productivity, raising healthy, prosperous children, that that combination of attributes, and I'm not saying those attributes can be reflected in two women raising kids or two men raising kids, but it's that combination of those types of attributes that typically are associated with one gender or another.

27:45But there is a chocolate and peanut butter here. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I'm actually encouraged by the way in which social science has really come to its senses around this issue of the distinct roles of mothers and fathers, distinct but overlapping. So there's no debate now really in sensible social science circles that dads matter and they matter in some ways that are different and complementary to moms. 15 years ago, that wasn't the case. 15 years ago, there was still a discussion of it. And I will say that you still face it. I gave a talk at a pretty liberal college recently and I did my spiel about why dads matter distinctly.