Too Many Boys & Men Failing to Launch

February 19, 2025 By David Griesing 2 Comments

These days, it seems almost fool-hardy to flag another identity-based group—namely American boys & men—that needs our affirmative action.

Initiatives to help other disadvantaged groups are being purged in Washington these days, and if the MAGA Movement has foot soldiers, many are American boys & men who say they admire the same “toughness, strength and financial success” that Donald Trump (and his recent avatar, Elon Musk) represent. No “wokeness” or government handouts for them.

But considering where many of them find themselves today, boys & men also made Trump and Musk their aspirational role-models because of the “toughness, strength and financial success” that have eluded them. In the run up to November’s election, the Republicans recognized these deficits, even played to them—acknowledging a pocket of the electorate that the Democrats ignored because it could never shake the impression that it favored EVERYBODY BUT these boys & men.

It’s a voting block’s grievance that Arlie Hochschild confirmed for me in “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (2016), a book that preoccupied me around the 2020 election. In this social scientist’s attempt to better understand Red State Americans, it became clear in conversation after conversation that most of them resented how much identity-group minorities “were enabled by the government” to get in front of them in the long line that ends in the American Dream. After all, they were struggling as hard (if not harder) to realize its promises too. Some felt forgotten, others victimized. Many of those that Hochschild interviewed were boys & men.

My pre-election post a few months ago, “Bro-Magnet Elon Musk is This Election’s October Surprise,”elaborated on the resentments that caused many boys & men to buy Trump’s pitch to them this time around. Many in the cohort already felt that “their masculinity was under siege.” Over the past 30 years, as American manufacturing jobs were gutted in swing states like mine, fewer have gone to college or found sustaining work after high school. Because of dim economic prospects, fewer have married than in the past, and many endure high rates of depression and suicide. (In the meantime, increasing numbers of women entered the workforce, becoming more independent financially.) The Republican Party did a masterful job emphasizing the “hyper-masculine-financially-successful” qualities of their candidate to a voting block that felt vulnerable in each of these ways. By the time the campaign reached October, Musk’s billionaire brand of defiant rebel made him a kind of pied-piper for boys & men who were starting to conclude that their country had turned against them.

It was in November that I heard Richard Reeves interviewed about Trump’s re-election in the light of his 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It?” After hearing his remarks, I went to my local library and took out his book.

Reeves is a scholar at the Brookings Institution who makes recommendations about social policy for a living. He is also the father of three boys, at least one of whom has struggled mightily along the way. It means that in addition to the ambitious new policies that he proposes in “Of Boys and Men,” Reeves’ 20-odd years as a dad also illuminates this excellent book.

Unlike some of the politicians ascendant today, Reeves does not brand the quest for gender equality as either woke or unnecessary. Instead, his appeal addresses the real inequities facing boys & men in addition to those that persist for women & girls. Setting his table early on, he notes:

What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality. As a conscientious objector in the culture wars, I hope to have provided an assessment of the condition of boys and men that can attract broad support….We must help men adapt to the dramatic changes of recent decades without asking them to stop being men. We need a prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world. And we need it soon.

Where the grievances and resentments of too many boys & men have root causes, we should address them for the sake of our politics (surely), but also because every American deserves the chance to thrive into adulthood.

Reeves “Of Boys and Men,” identifies three central challenges facing nearly every American boy & man today. As they grow into adulthood, there are developmental differences between boys and girls that have always existed in our classrooms but never been addressed by our education systems. At the same time, the poor job prospects for boys & men and confusion about their roles in society reflect economic changes in America that are so recent we have yet to absorb (let alone address) them. So while boys & men aren’t to blame for the sorry state in which they find themselves, Reeves believes there are effective steps that can and should be taken now to give them the boosts that they need.

1. Proven developmental differences between boys and girls as they grow up argue for ALL boys starting school one year later than girls of the same age so they don’t find themselves behind (and unable to catch up) by the time they reach the crucial high school years.

The science here is not in dispute, and I refer you to his extensive citations for the research behind boys’ developmental differences, their impacts by the time they reach secondary school, and the other findings that support Reeves’ policy recommendations.

The cerebellum in our brains reaches full size by age 11 for girls, but not until 15 for boys, Differences like this in the speed of brain development produce cascading effects over time. It also means that “[t]he gender gap in the development of skills and traits most important for academic success is widest at precisely the time when students need to be worrying about their GPA, getting ready for tests, and staying out of trouble” —in other words, the high school years. Moreover, since reading and verbal skills strongly predict college-going rates, boys as a group are even farther behind the girls in each of these areas by the time they leave high school.

It’s why male students are at higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group (including poor students). At the same time, there’s been too little investment in vocational education as an alternate path to qualify boys for sustaining work.

In light of these shortfalls, Reeves would give boys “the gift of time,” because “treating people the same (ie. equally) is not the same as treating them equitably.” That means giving boys—all boys, as a matter of education policy—an extra year of pre-K before starting them in school.

The main reason for starting boys later is no so that they will be a year older in kindergarten. It is so they will be a year older when they get to middle and high school.

In addition, he advocates for the recruitment of more male teachers to strengthen boys’ engagement in the classroom (“[t]here is solid evidence that male teachers boost academic outcomes for boys, especially in certain subject areas like English”) and to raise expectations (“[f]emale teachers are more likely than male teachers to see boys in their class as disruptive, while male teachers tend to have a more positive view of boys and their capabilities.’) And because boys, on average, tend to benefit from a more “hands-on” or practical approach to learning, Reeves argues for significantly more career and technical education (CTE) opportunities at a time when there has been “a precipitous decline” in those investments given the lingering “bias” in favor of the college-bound and a fear of stigmatizing students who choose the “lesser” vocational track.

2. At the same time that more women are entering the labor market, men have been losing significant ground in it from “the one-two punch” of automation and free trade.

America’s manufacturing heartland (including the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan) were gutted in terms of well-paying jobs when they were out-sourced to places with lower labor costs. The manufacturers that remained further reduced employment opportunities by automating. Among other things, fathers who made things in America’s factories were no longer able to pass those jobs down to their sons.

At the same time, “women make up most of the workforce in relatively automation-safe occupations, such as health care, personal services, and education.” Reeves calls these HEAL jobs (for health, education, administration and literacy), and it’s where the American labor market is growing fastest. As a result, he proposes building “a pipeline” for boys in the education system to prepare them for HEAL jobs, provide financial incentives that encourage more men to take them after graduation, and reduce “the social stigma” that men who end up working in these fields often face.

Overall, women now account for 27% of STEM workers, up from 13% in 1980….But the trend has been the other way in terms of male representation in HEAL-jobs. In 2019, 26% were held by men, down from 35% in 1980.

These trends are meaningful because “for every new STEM job created by 2030, there will be more than three new HEAL jobs.” And while HEAL jobs also tend to pay less, they offer higher degrees of job security (“we still need nurses and teachers in a recession”). And as we discovered during the pandemic’s “essential worker” debate, we are slowly coming to pay more for “essential work.”

To provide more plentiful job opportunities for boys & men, Reeves proposes “at least a $1 billion national investment” in the academic pipeline “for future male HEAL workers” in schools and colleges, for financial support for male students and workers in HEAL jobs, and for “social marketing” to make these kinds of career choices more appealing. For example:

I suggest that among candidates for teaching posts in health and education, a 2:1 preference should be given to male applicants. Before you report me to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, you should know that I didn’t pluck that number out of thin air. It is in fact the same preference that is currently given to female tenure-track professors in STEM fields…. [M]y argument is not that we should be doing less to attract women into STEM; it is that we should be doing as much to encourage men into HEAL. Two thoughts at once.

He also makes a strong case for increasing pay levels “in critical occupations” and for countering stereotypes (like male nurses being effeminate, or simply failed doctors) by more actively portraying these professions as “male appropriate” too. A national investment in better pipelines, higher pay, and reduced stigma needs to do far more of our talking here says Reeves, if we’re to improve the job prospects for boys & men.

3. With more moms in the workforce, more dads have lost their traditional roles as provider. For their well-being and self-esteem, these men need expanded roles within families that provide them with a re-newed sense of purpose in their relationships with their partners and children.

Reeves correctly notes that the mass migration of women into the labor market is a recent phenomenon, so while our society has absorbed these new workers, it has yet to focus adequately on what this new pecking order has meant for men. Or as Reeves observes: “The economic reliance of women on men held women down, but it also propped men up. Now the props have gone, and many men are falling.”

Reeves is more psychologist than economist in presenting today’s views about male identity and what should be done to improve them, arguing that married and marriage-age men today increasingly feel like “ships without sails.” Moreover, the impact on feelings of self-worth are even more profound for men with poor employment prospects in today’s economy.

[T]he very men who are least able to be traditional breadwinners are the most likely to be judged by their breadwinning potential. What this means is that men who fare poorly in the labor market are also likely to suffer in the marriage market, especially in the working class.

Reeves proposes several solutions, but his key proposal is “to establish a new basis for fatherhood, one that embraces the huge progress we have made toward gender equality.” With women bearing more breadwinning responsibilities, men could be undertaking more care-giving responsibilities, giving them a larger stake in the family’s success and the promise of greater satisfaction individually.

From a policy perspective, that means both mandatory and paid 6-month-long parental leave for moms (when the kids are youngest and need them most) and for dads (when the kids are adolescents and would benefit most from learning “life skills” from their fathers). Reeves argues that “[s]ix months of leave is necessary to allow parents to spend meaningful time with their children without losing all connection to the labor market.”

I came away from “Of Boys and Men” thinking that the policies Reeves proposes would go a long way towards calming parents today who are “generally more worried about their sons ‘growing up to be successful adults’ than they are about their daughters.”

Enhancing the self-worth of vulnerable boys & men might also reduce the amount of influence that role-models like Trump and Musk exerted over so many of them in the last election.

Reading Reeves’ book brought me back to his November 11, 2024 interview on Amanpour & Company (linked above) which focused almost entirely on “The Male Vote.”

Adding his voice to the election post-mortem, Reeves wasn’t at all surprised that the boys & men who voted preferred the Republicans. To the extent that the Democrats reached out to them as a voting block at all, it was derivatively.

There was not really an alternative [to the Trump-Musk view of masculinity] put in front of them….In the final stages of the campaign, young men were being urged to vote for the Democrats if they love the women in their lives [which was essentially a pro-Choice argument], and that’s not good enough.

It’s not to say that we don’t care about the other people in our lives, but you are essentially asking men to vote for Democrats because the Democrats stand for women. Well, that’s a flawed political strategy.

This failure surprised Reeves even more because, with Tim Walz on the ticket, the Democrats had the poster boy for some powerful counter-messaging.

In particular [Walz’s] biography. He was the first career public school teacher to run for higher office. Not only that, [he was] a coach. You had his students [football players at the Democratic National Convention] lauding the masculinity he had demonstrated.

If there was any candidate who could have plausibly set out a [more] positive vision for the role of men in society today…it’s hard to think of a better example than Tim Walz. It was easy to imagine him giving powerful speeches, running strong advertising campaigns, directly targeted at young men with an empathetic, respectful policy-based message.

None of that happened.

Reeves doesn’t claim to be giving the Democrats a better chance at a winning formula going forward. In fact, he’s felt the urgent need to come up with solutions that can attract bi-partisan support.

Many boys & men in the past election were swing voters, feeling economic and even deeper levels of anxiety about their futures through no particular fault of their own.

They voted for the only candidate who reached out to them directly, even though much of that outreach played to their insecurities.

But there’s a different way forward for American boys & men than grievance-based appeals. It’s one that acknowledges the most basic problems they face today while proposing a plan to address them.

Our local, state and federal leaders on both sides of the aisle could get behind policies and investments that will improve the lot of boys & men before any more of their opportunities are lost.

They could start with this timely gift from Richard Reeves.

This post was adapted from my February 2, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Embodied Knowledge That’s Grounded in the Places Where We Live & Work

February 22, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

“Embodied knowledge” is a kind of understanding where the body knows what is happening, and sometimes even how to react to it, without really thinking about it. There is no need to verbalize or connect a string of thoughts. You just know or “feel it in your bones.” It happens via the neurotransmitters in our brains, as depicted in the striking image above by Arran Lewis.

Here are some examples of embodied knowledge:

– I’ve already learned how to distribute my weight on the seat of a bike, put my feet on the pedals, lean forward, so I no longer have to think about how to do it, I just know how get on my bike and ride.

– I know that when I get a certain kind of headache, a high-pressure weather front is moving in and I need a pain reliever. My head is like a barometer “automatically” telling me what to do.

– A farmer nearby might know from the way his chickens are acting or his kids are behaving that the run-off from a nearby plant has been getting into their water, whatever the township or elected officials are saying about it.

It’s the kind of knowledge that internalizes complicated experiences without the need for an elaborate thought process.

This last example of embodied knowledge—where a deep understanding of the land and the people and fauna that live there differ from what the authorities are telling you about it—has been Kate Brown’s preoccupation for much of the past twenty years.

Brown is a professor at MIT, interested in “where history, science, technology and bio-politics converge to create large-scale disasters and modernist wastelands.” She is a storyteller who has put herself into her stories so she can interview and experience the lives of people with “embodied knowledge” in places like Chernobyl and the Nevada dessert after terrible nuclear accidents. From their first person accounts and her reactions to them, she identifies discrepancies from the expert “investigations,” challenges the official narrative once politicians get involved, and shows how the embodied knowledge of those affected by disasters resonates beyond the borders that we usually place around them.

This week, I heard Brown speak about her work as part of a interview series sponsored by Duke University. That continuing series explores ethical responses to The Anthropocene, or the time in Earth’s evolution where human forces have matched (or overtaken) natural forces in determining the fate of the planet. The Series question to Kate Brown and others has been: What can we, what should we be doing about it?

Brown’s most straightforward answer would be: listen to the people with embodied knowledge. The people who are “closest to the ground of disaster” can tell us much that we need to know about how to deepen our own sense of place in order to survive in a world that has already entered a kind of death spiral. Their world of disaster is increasingly our world too. The ways that embodied knowledge have been gained in Earth’s disaster zones can become a kind of template in our own quests to survive in environments that have been degrading more rapidly than most of us would like to admit.

Kate Brown’s books have won a cascade of awards for history writing and non-fiction. They include: A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004); Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013); Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015); and her acclaimed Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019).

I found three things about Kate Brown’s life and research to be particularly noteworthy. First, why has she focused her work on the embodied knowledge of people in disaster zones? (My real question: how do people find their work priorities?) Secondly, as I’ve been thinking about deepening my own “sense of place,” I was fascinated by the role that specific environments and peoples’ deep-seated knowledge of their places play in Brown’s history-writing and storytelling. And lastly, because Brown has traveled to and reported from Earth’s calamitous edges—she calls herself “a professional disaster tourist”—I wondered some more about the message that she’s been carrying back for the rest of us.

What can or should we be doing in order to survive?

Why any of us gravitates towards the work we end up doing may itself be explained by a kind of “embodied knowledge.”

For Kate Brown, I wondered what it was in her experience that made her seek out people who were burdened by the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl or the plutonium incidents in Nevada where (according to her) the fallout of “radioactive iodine from atmospheric detonations of nuclear bombs dwarfed Chernobyl emissions three times over”? Clearly, it was not the origin story of someone who would automatically believe that Soviet propaganda is more misleading than the American variety.

Brown’s formative years were spent in a small Midwestern town that was gutted after its economy collapsed. She literally grew up among its ruins. As Brown recounts:

The year I was born, 1965, the Elgin watch factory [in Elgin, Illinois] shuttered, and they blew up the watch tower. It was a company town, and that was the main business. I grew up watching the supporting businesses close, and then regular clothing stores and grocery stores went bankrupt.
It was nothing near what I describe in wartime Ukraine, or Chernobyl, or one of [the] plutonium plants, but I finally realized I was so interested in modernist wastelands because of my own background.

Before she was born, Brown’s mother had already moved four times because of “deindustrialized landscapes,” and her parents “moved to Elgin thinking it was healthy, small-town America. So how many times do they have to jump?…What if you care about your family and [your] community” and didn’t want to abandon them? So she gravitated towards groups of people who stuck it out in the much the same way that her family did.

The drive behind Brown’s work made me think about naturalist and writer Barry Lopez, who has also chronicled our impending environmental disaster. Only in 2013, towards the end of his long career, was he able to describe how he’d been repeatedly victimized as a child in a Harpers magazine article. He told us that the “sliver of sky” in its title was what he was reaching for in his own work from “the edges of our throttled Earth,” an unwaivering attempt “to find a way to turn the darkness [he’d experienced himself] inside out.”

In her stories about other places that have been grievously injured, I was also reminded of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. Not only do the Americans who live there deserve our understanding during this politically divisive time, but Hochschild’s approach as a sociologist to those who live in the most damaged parts of Louisiana, is startlingly similar to Lopez’s as a naturalist and Brown’s as an historian. Each of them put themselves in the stories they are telling, frankly acknowledging their personal perspectives as interviewers and interpreters, while (in the process) giving their audiences narratives that are intimate and involving precisely because of the personal roles they have chosen to play in them.

Brown, Lopez and Hochschild have been continuing to write their own stories as they invite the rest of us into them.

Many of you know that I’ve been thinking a great deal about “sense of place” recently. (Last week, I gave my reactions to the movie “The Dig” and its meditations on what any of us might want to preserve in the face of disaster, like these Englishmen and women were doing before the bombing of Britain in World War II. In mid-December, I ruminated about how the places where we live and work become more meaningful as we learn how to capture and retain their most vivid memories.)

Something about “sense of place” for Brown can be understood from the images in her book titles: No Place, Borderland, Dystopia. The places she’s explored have been the toxic waste dumps of industrial civilization. The area around Chernobyl is called Polesia, swamplands populated by a mix of Poles, Germans, Jews and Ukrainians that was either forgotten or dismissed by the urban centers of Kiev and Moscow, with few outsiders expressing any interest in what its people had to say for themselves. Brown did listen, recognizing their “embodied knowledge” when they described what was happening to them, introduced her to their “radiant children” (or those who’d been stunted by radiation), and told her how they continued to survive in a contaminated landscape that the “outside world” wanted everyone to believe had fully recovered.

In one poignantly conflicted moment, Brown describes the tremendous generosity of a local family as they offered to share their homegrown feast with her and her reluctance to eat it and appear ungracious because she knew how contaminated by radiation the region’s entire food chain had become. With images like this, Brown argues that “what it means to be human” in places like this is different than anything we have ever seen before, and that as the climate and Earth begin to change in equally profound ways, what it means for the rest of us to be human is already changing too.

(For example, while Brown doesn’t recount them, think about how many weeks earlier the Spring will be coming this year than it did only a few years ago. Think about how much less snow there is on the ground or ice on the ponds in Northern states than we remember as kids during this time of year. Think about birds and animals you no longer see in your backyards. Think about how many more 100+ degree days there will be in Arizona this summer than there were only 10 or 15 years ago, or how many more deadly wildfires in California.)

How we experience the degrading nature of the “places” where we live and work profoundly affects us in ways that have much in common with the residents of Brown’s Polesia. But unlike many of us, Brown’s Polesians had gained an embodied kind of knowledge about what they’ve been experiencing. They’ve had to in order to survive. Farm animals became their Geiger counters (as in, “the cows have been acting funny”). Brown is astonished by how women at a local textile plant have learned how to attribute various aches and pains that they experience to particular isotopes lodged in specific organs of their bodies.

We will be gaining that kind of experienced knowledge too—knowledge that’s tied to the ground of our particular “places” as global warming affects them. We’ll need to deepen our sense of place in an embodied way too.

*_{Babushkas who are living near Chernobyl}*

So what does Brown recommend, what else does she think we should be taking away from (and perhaps applying) after her deep, long look into the hinterlands of disaster?

I believe she’d say that it’s the practical guidance we can take from people who have learned how to cope in profoundly compromised environments. It’s more of their kind of “embodied knowledge”–and maybe less of what the experts and politicians have to say about what’s happening around us– that needs to be our guide.

In the way she has approached her history-writing, Brown also offers a counterweight to the obliviating impact of “contested knowledge.” About the farmers and factory workers around Chernobyl she notes:

These people got cancer, these kids have cancer, but we don’t know for sure what caused it.’ I saw how those statements of scientific uncertainty drilled down, undermining the claims of people whose families were riddled with illnesses. Rather than report two sides of a controversy (there are always far more than two sides), I wanted to leave the reader with an informed judgment. As I write in the first person, it’s clear that this is my studied opinion.

Brown’s role in determining the credibility of those she interviews and telling us why she believes them, effectively validates the “embodied knowledge” gained by these victims instead of leaving them in a further hinterland of sorts—one that’s in the shadows beyond credibility—because scientists or government officials lack the time, the money or the commitment “to connect and prove” each toxic cause they claim to each damaging effect. In other words, experts and politicians don’t need to confirm what your experience at surviving tells you to rely upon; they don’t necessarily “know any better” than the folks who are aready doing the hard work of surviving on the ground.

An essay comparing various Chernobyl accounts to HBOs 2019 dramatization also discussed how Brown’s “putting herself in the story” allows her to involve readers and listeners in what she’s saying by provoking us to formulate our own perspectives on the events she describes. She tells us her opinion about what farm and factory workers are claiming as well as why she believes them by (for example) referring to records she’s uncovered, and by doing so, invites us to have our own opinions about their testimony.

Crucially, Brown’s interjections of first-person narration are not merely ruminative or speculative. Rather, they are constructed to prompt the critical capacities of a reader who is invited to think with the author through a literal and metaphoric journey that begins with and eventually goes beyond the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

By choosing this almost interactive approach, Brown’s storytelling method not only “prompts” our critical capacities involving Chernobyl, it also invites us to bring the same faculties to places far closer to home (like the Nevada contamination sites that are far less known but even more toxic) or to the negative impacts of impending climate disaster that we’re experiencing in our own backyards. We can become more like actors in (and less like the passive victims of) the place-driven stories that we’re in.

Barry Lopez–who also put himself in his stories–seemed less hopeful than Kate Brown that all of us can be mobilized in time to confront the unfolding climate crisis. Writing about his final book called Horizon, I described the smaller group of actors that he hoped to enlist, but it was never in doubt that he also believed (along with Brown) in the power of hard-won, localized wisdom to help us through the difficult days ahead.

Lopez seems less certain that he can reach the tourists in their lounge chairs around the pool and more reliant on networks of wisdom that still include his ‘family, friends, mentors and professional colleagues’ but now depends at least as much on the wisdom of traditional cultures that have found ways to survive in the face of war, environmental destruction and natural disaster. Unlike citizens of the developed world who act like children looking for heroes to save them, for thousands of years adults who know how to make decisions to care for everyone and ensure that no one gets left behind have guided [what he calls] ‘heroic communities’ of indigenous people across the world. Today, Lopez tries to counter his doubts by imagining networks comprised of all the different communities that depend on adults with the knowledge to survive so that we can claim our uncertain future together.

In the hinterlands of our civilization—where we’ve dumped our refuse and conducted the industrial experiments that help us support our consumer-driven economies and comfortable lifestyles—there are people who have learned and are continuing to learn how to survive in places that many of us would rather forget. As a contrary voice, Brown says loudly and clearly (along with Lopez and Hochschild): Come with us, use your imaginations to become involved in these frontline stories, and perhaps you can also figure out what you need “to know now” and “do now” in order to survive.

This post was adapted from my February 14, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Too Many Boys & Men Failing to Launch

Embodied Knowledge That’s Grounded in the Places Where We Live & Work

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