.Boys and men are struggling in the U.S. and across the globe. Part 2.1 of this series described the first six problems and conditions for boys and men identified by Richard Reeves in his book, Of Boys and Men – Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About it. This post describes problems 7-11.

7. Demoralization of men – an aspiration gap and a fading ideal

Something in modern culture is producing an aspiration gap between men and women. Many men just seem less ambitious. College women are roughly twice as likely to enroll in study abroad programs as college men. In 2020, amid Covid, the decline in college enrollment for male students was seven times that of female students. As Reeves puts it: “It is not that men have fewer opportunities. It is that they are not taking them.”

Many men seek a fading or obsolete ideal: being a man means being the primary breadwinner for their family (see problems #9 and #10 below). Columnist and author David Brooks: “I come away with the impression that many men are like what Dean Acheson said about Britain after World War II. They have lost an empire but have not yet found a role. They can’t meet the ideal, so demoralization follows.”

Still Searching for a Modern Masculine Ideal

Ambition doesn’t just happen; it must be ignited. The culture is searching for a new, modern masculine ideal, but it is not instilling in many boys the nurturing and emotional skills that may be needed for that search – or needed to thrive as a human being. A system that labels more than a fifth of all boys as developmentally disabled is not giving them a sense of confidence and competence.

8. More men are leading haphazard and lonely lives.

• Roughly 15 percent of men say they have no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990.
• One in five fathers doesn’t live with his children.
• In 2014, more young men lived with their parents than their wives or partners.
• Wives are twice as likely to initiate divorces as husbands.
• “A large and growing cohort of bored, lonely, poorly educated men is a malevolent force in any society, but it is truly terrifying one in a society addicted to social media and awash in coarseness and guns.” (Scott Galloway, 2022) Radical right-wing politicians “speak” to men who have lost income and dignity.

Hikikomori – Men with Severe Social Withdrawal

An extreme situation of “lonely men” are young men who retreat from society altogether. In Japan, there is a rising number of hikikomori (male shut-ins) – some of whom have been living in one room for years. These men have “severe social withdrawal.” Japanese authorities estimate there are over a half million of these modern-day hermits. Japan is not alone. An organization to work with Italian hikikomori has been established.

Researcher Alan Teo (Oregon Health and Science University) believes many men are on the hikikomori spectrum in this country. “We have a large number of people [men] in the U.S. in their early 20s living in a basement bedroom,” he says. “They are struggling with work, struggling to launch, and may be stuck in an earlier developmental stage.”

Manhood is Fragile

Manhood is defined more by social construction than womanhood, which is why manhood tends to be more fragile than femininity. Womanhood is defined more by biology (reproduction). When was the last “crisis of femininity?” Never. In his book On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (2001), Anthony Clare said, “I learned very early on that what a man does is more important than who he is.”

Manhood Must Be Continuously Won

Manhood is a continuous achievement rather than a single milestone. In many cultures, rites of initiation, often involving physical duress or risk – have marked the transition from a boy to a man. American poet Leonard Kriegel: “In every age, not just our own, manhood was something that had to be won.”

9. Men are unmarriageable

With the rise in female earning power, men need to clear a higher bar to be seen as husband material. Women are more likely to go it alone than partner with a man who is in a weak economic position. In a 2017 survey, 71% of American women said it’s “very important” for a man to support his family financially, and only 25% of men said the same about a woman.

Marriage Rates in Decline

Marriage rates have been on the decline for decades, as reported by Scott Galloway in “A Few(er) Good Men,” October 1, 2021. The sharpest decline has been among poor men. Between 1970 and 2011, the marriage rate for the lowest-earning quartile of men fell by nearly 35%, while the highest quartile fell by less than 15%.

College, Earnings, and Being Acceptable to Women

With fewer men in college, fewer men are acceptable to women as potential mates.

According to David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, the falling earnings power of noncollege males is one reason for their falling marriage rates.

The marriage rate of men aged 40-44 with a high school education or less dropped by more than 20% over the past 40 years, compared to 6% for those with a college education.

Wife Earning More than Husband Explains Marriage Decline

Researcher Marianne Bertrand and her team found that “the aversion to having the wife earn more than the husband explains 29% of the decline of the marriage rate over the last thirty years” (Bertrand et al., “Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households, Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2015).

But Marriage Rates Are More Stable for the Affluent

Marriage data show that women who have achieved the most significant degree of economic independence, with high levels of education and earning potential, are the most likely to get married and stay married. Reeves says that is because they select and marry high-achieving men “who clear the bar” of acceptability.

Women with the highest-earning husbands were most likely to take time off the labor market. These women often choose to stay home with children because their husbands provide the resources, thus revealing their instinctual preferences (and necessity) for caretaking.

Men Are Not Chosen for their Willingness to Stay Home

“With high and rising earnings, college-educated men have remained attractive marital prospects, even for women flourishing in the labor market. These men have not, by and large, become stay-at-home dads,” Reeves observes. These men were not chosen for their capacity or willingness to stay at home. Women who are flourishing in the market choose men who are succeeding just as much, or preferably more.

How Many Women Will Choose This Kind of Man?

How many women will freely choose

• a man who makes less money than them or no money at all, or
• a man who prefers to stay at home with the children?

How many women are choosing that kind of man over a powerful breadwinner at the upper end of the socioeconomic hierarchy? It is irrefutable: high-mate-value women will choose high-mate-value men.

The Erotic-Economic Bargain Throughout History

Gaining sexual access in exchange for the provision of resources is the erotic-economic bargain that has been the infrastructure of mate selection between men and women for thousands of years. With the rise of women’s financial independence and men’s loss of resources, the bargain has become strained under new terms by women; it is seen as an increasingly worse bargain for them. Fewer resources from men equate to less sexual access to women and less marriage.

In sum, women mate (socioeconomically) horizontally and up, and men mate horizontally and down. ~ Richard Reeves

Has Marriage “Worked?”

Reeves asserts that conservatives believe the dependent relationship between husbands and wives is precisely what makes a marriage work as an institution – that marriage is a mechanism for harnessing male energy for positive social ends.

While Reeves acknowledges that marriage has “worked” (more or less) as an institution, he understands how feminists see marriage as an oppressive institution that curtails women’s autonomy. A “dependent” marriage is not a viable future.

High-investment Parenting Marriages (HIP)

Reeves observes that educated Americans have transformed marriage from an institution of economic dependency into a joint venture for the purpose of parenting. Marriage serves primarily as a commitment device for shared investments of time and money in children. He calls these high-investment parenting marriages (HIP). (Richard Reeves, “How to Save Marriage in America,” Atlantic, February 2014).

Are HIP marriages a viable future? What if you do not have or want children? And ultimately, what do we do with the great number of unmarriageable men?

10. Breadwinning and providing have been severely damaged.

The idea of the provider is a major element in the construction of a masculine identity. It is a moral as well as an economic category. ~ David Morgan, Sociologist

Traditional Role Is Dismantled – What’s Next?

Male “breadwinning” and marriageability are directly connected, as described above. But the damage to “man-as-provider” is severe, especially psychologically; it deserves a separate problem category inside the boys and men crisis.

The male role has long been culturally defined as that of provider and based on the economic dependence of mothers on men. This traditional role has been dismantled by the securing of financial independence by women. Men are increasingly unable to fulfill the traditional breadwinner role and do not have a new role to embrace (the “demoralization”).

Husband-as-Breadwinner Expectation Still Persists

Husbands without jobs are at much higher risk of seeing the end of their marriage today than in the past. According to work from Alexandra Killewald, as reported in American Sociological Review:

Expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded, but the husband-as-breadwinner norm persists.

To Be a Good Husband, He Must Provide

A study by the Pew Research Center found that 84% of Blacks said that to be a good husband, it is “very important” for a man to be able to provide for his family. Sixty-seven (67%) percent of white respondents agreed.

According to research by David Morgan, four out of five American adults (81%) with a high school education or less still believe that “for a man to be a good husband or partner, being able to support a family financially is very important,” compared to 62% of those with a bachelor’s degree. But what do the women of that 62% believe, and how do they act in the mating market?

Psychological Damage: No Romance, No Sex, No purpose

You cannot unpack the influence of men as providers from the dynamics of mate selection. When men can no longer fulfill the provider role, they are left on the sidelines of romance and sex. General malaise, opioid abuse, suicide, and violence – “deaths of despair” become a plague on the “land of men.” Economically-disadvantaged men do worse in all aspects of life. Their identity, existential purpose, and sexuality are at stake. This is not true for girls and women.

Critical Difference Between Men and Women Left Unsaid

Reeves does not sufficiently emphasize this difference in psychological consequences between men and women. He does not explicitly connect the dots about mate selection, even though it stares him in the face from all the studies he cites. This “undiscussable” was a bridge too far for him; he already was combating flak from the political Left for even writing this book.

11. Professional and academic bias against men

In 2021, President Biden created the White House Gender Policy Council, a successor to the previous Council on Women and Girls, which Donald Trump had abolished. The charge of the new Council is “to guide and coordinate government policy that impacts women and girls.”

But Gender Policy Council Ignored Impact on Boys and Men

In October 2021, the Council published a National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, but no gender inequalities related to boys or men were addressed.

• There was no mention of how women outnumber men in college, except regarding female student debt.
• There was no mention of the sizable gender gaps in favor of girls in K-12 education.
• There was no mention of the specific challenges of Black boys, even though they are twice as likely as Black girls to be suspended or expelled.

White House Covid Policy Was No Better

White House Covid policy (and most international think tanks) emphasized the pandemic’s negative implications for women and ignored those for men. “The main gender story has been the catastrophic effect on women’s progress,” observes Reeves. Yet, men die at much higher rates than women, even after co-morbidities are accounted for. (See Why More Men Than Women Die of Covid-19.)

More Professional Bias Reported by Reeves

Reeves also reports and explains how the World Economic Forum described gender inequality in only one direction based on their methodology.

But more egregious:

APA Guidelines Do Not Reference any Positive Aspects of Masculinity

The American Psychological Association (APA) in 2018 said: “traditional masculinity was marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression; and is on the whole harmful.”

The APA came under attack from conservative critics, and the APA tweeted that “the guidelines support encouraging positive aspects of traditional masculinity such as courage and leadership.” According to Reeves, this was false. The APA guidelines did not contain a single reference to these positive aspects of masculinity.

APA Guidelines Did Not Recognize Biological Basis for Male Psychology

The guidelines also failed to recognize any biological basis for male psychology.

• Testosterone is not mentioned. As far as the APA is concerned, says Reeves, masculinity is entirely socially constructed. By the time a man reaches adulthood, the report says, “a man will tend to demonstrate behaviors prescribed by his ethnicity, culture, and different constructions of masculinity.”*
• The APA’s complete absence of biology in this report contrasts with the association’s equivalent report on girls and women, which discussed the potential psychological implications of puberty, childbirth, and menopause.

MacArthur Foundation is Another Example of Bias

Reeves says the MacArthur Foundation has a “science aversion” regarding sex and biology. They issued a 47-page report on the latest science of adolescent development for juvenile justice. Despite the enormous differences between teenage girls and boys related to risk-taking and aggression, the report did not make a single reference to sex or gender. Reeves laments: “the fear of sex determinism seems to have led to an unwillingness to engage with, or even acknowledge, the evidence for natural influences on behavior.”

*There is near complete adherence to social constructivist theory asserted by many on the political and academic Left. Manhood may be more defined and “earned” as a social construction, but masculinity is also a biological fact; it just does not rise to the level of female reproduction as a source of purpose and meaning.