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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.

Filed Under: *All Posts Tagged With: 2024 US election, Arlie Hochschild, boys & men, failing to launch, HEAL jobs, masculinity, new role for fathers, Of Men and Boys, red-shirting, Richard Reeves, Richard V. Reeves, Strangers in Our Own Land, Tim Walz

How Toxic Is Masculinity for Men?

March 28, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Social isolation has reduced the space between us and where we fall short, providing some particularly uncomfortable close-ups. That includes the part of masculinity that’s depressing and harmful to men before it’s toxic to anybody else.

Elderbrook is the stage name of the English musician, songwriter, producer and singer behind a remarkable 4-minute music video that has, over the past year, invited millions of us to consider the emotional isolation of men who show up for a group therapy session because they know they have a problem (but not what to do about it) until somebody in the group finds the courage to break their isolation. 

Elderbrook wrote the mesmerizing music and vocalizes the lyrics, which are about the absence of companionship when something bad is happening to you, that is, when someone who’s not there when you need them might have helped “in keeping me sober.”  For the flow and rhythm of the interactions between the ensemble of characters, Elderbrook’s voice is accompanied by an electronic music collective called Rudimental, which is a big deal in Britain but mostly under the radar here. 

The gifted director who visualized the narrative is Luke Davies, the choreography (that fits this assortment of clueless blokes to a tee) is by Jacob Holme, and the lead actor is Michael Socha, who is pictured above and plays his part throughout with a non-comprehending beauty. All of these elements come together in a mix of throb, gut-punch and whimsy that speak with terrific economy to how utterly alone men can be and what needs to happen before we do something about it.

I found it jaw-dropping.

+ + + 

Here’s how the video opens:

You’re about to enter some kind of group dynamic where you’re expected to contribute—a meeting, a book group, a seminar room with limited students—and a big part of you “would just rather not today.” 

They’ll want me to open up, show who I am, know what I’m talking about, have something to say, share.

Call it performance anxiety, because all things considered, on most days I’d rather not.

And because it’s a group therapy room for just men, it’s even harder.

You come to deal with whatever’s been going on with drugs, alcohol, depression or just being messed-up, and it can get pretty personal. 

I don’t want to look at the stain in my drawers let alone his drawers!

Maybe they’ll want me to make some gesture at taking care of one of my fellow losers. Or maybe, one of them will want to start doing that [shi~ver] to me.

They always said, “you’re not good with emotions,” that you keep what’s hurting you at bay or push it down.

Yeah, it is pretty thin ice. I might fall through and keep falling, so I hold on to the brittle however angry or irritable I get when it’s tested, or beat myself up with only a beer for sympathy, so I suppose they’re right. 

What good is anybody in here for that?

And besides, they’ll be holding a pretty sad safety net. 

So the first thing I’ve got to do is get it up to walk in the room with the rest of ’em instead of bolting for the stairs. 

Today, it’s a long hesitation but I decide to step in anyway, and suddenly I find myself in a silence of furtive eyes, waiting for the so-called therapy to start and the first shoes to drop.

The boss starts canvassing for volunteers. “Who wants to go first? Do you Kevin? Michael?”

Then I hear some background music and, against all odds, it’s my feet that want to start talking.

I stand up like the prototype man, like Popeye—making arm muscles with both hands next to my shoulders to show how strong I either am or not, while shuffling a bit tentatively.

And then I’m off.

+ + +

Here’s your link to the “Something About You” music video. Watch it now if you can. Then think about it for a minute or two and maybe watch it again. 

I can’t get over it, and maybe you’ll feel the same—particularly that part when two men make cautious eye contact and start to approach one another, and maybe you’re feeling some of the anxiety our culture has taught us that something “forbidden” or at least “not quite right” is about to happen. 

Call it Taboo. Call it an acknowledgement of vulnerability. Call it one of many insights in a startling stream of them.

After he wrote and recorded “Something About You,” Elderbrook sent it out to film directors to get bids on content for the video. The request mentioned the summery nature of the track, but Luke Davies (who went on to win the bid) also heard a melancholy sadness, and “after listening to the song for an hour and a half” came up with the inspiration for a men’s self-help group (as he recounted in an interview after the music video went viral).  Never really imagining that Elberbrook and his team would go for any of it, Davies had always wanted to make a short film that included line dancing “as a kind of metaphor for something else,” so he built dancing into his bid as well. And then there was this final association: 

I always think of cowboys and for me, cowboys are an archetypal symbol for men. I think of Clint Eastwood and all these Hollywood archetypal superheroes before there were superheroes.

True creativity is always a leap into the dark, and Elderbrook ended up loving where Davies wanted to take his song. 
 
Interestingly, after the performers were hired and the “cowboy” rehearsals had begun, Davies dropped on the actors that there would not only be line dancing but also “slow dancing,” and, for all the obvious reasons, he was worried about their reactions. This is how he describes what happened next, and (given the theme) the reality in that room was pretty magical in its own right. 

The whole day, without a doubt, was one of the most satisfying and enjoyable shoots of my life. I gotta admit, all the dancing was so much fun to do, especially the slow dancing on rehearsal day, because the actors had no idea it was going to be a part of the music video.

They knew there was going to be line dancing but I hadn’t told them they were going to be slow dancing. And these guys had only met each other a couple hours ago. I was like ‘right, ok so everyone stand in the middle of the room, here are your partners, now I just want you to sort of hug each other’. They hugged each other for about a minute. And once we had done that and got the awkwardness out of the way, we just started slow dancing for a bit.

And what was weird is that I thought that people might be funky or not take it seriously and be embarrassed but straight away, people were just so emotional leaning into each other and it was quite romantic and funny seeing a bunch of blokes slow dancing.

You can see how well it turned out, but in some ways the story behind this little film was just beginning. The choreographers posted a how-to-do-the-line-dance instructional video on You Tube shortly after  “Someone Like You” began to attract attention, and it beautifully reinforced the overall simplicity of the message: This isn’t so hard to do. And then, all of a sudden, there were young men dancing to it in a “Together is Stronger” challenge on TikTok. 
 
Because men who let their guards down together really do become stronger.

Negative emotions eat away at you when they don’t get out, and men often have a harder time than women getting them out. No one denies it. It’s society’s, your parent’s, your own advice to “just suck it up,” to put your negative feelings behind you or bury them deep inside instead of working (even dancing) your way through them.  
 
For example, depression is a self-aggression of trapped emotions that tends to reinforce its isolation at every turn—with booze, drugs and even deeper withdrawals. Ultimately, the answer is putting the pain into words. (If you’re interested in the deep scholarship behind this, I’d recommend Dr. Judith Herman’s landmark Trauma and Recovery.) Unfortunately, there haven’t been many translators–between the medical community and the rest of us–who have talked about men’s particularly constricted side of it, at least in vivid voices that make both the problem and its possible solutions come alive.
 
Davies, the director, was aware of all that because he saw the problem in men from his own family and suspected that it had to exist everywhere.

There is basically a group of people that needs our help and support [but isn’t getting it]. The bigger idea that we’re exploring is masculinity and within that, the unrealistic standards I think society sets for men. You only need to look at mental illness, depression and suicide numbers among young men to see how much of an issue it is and I think part of that has to do with the fact that men find it difficult on the whole to talk feelings. 

Some people have seen [the video] as like an attack on toxic masculinity, which for me it’s never been about. I know toxic masculinity exists and I do think it needs to be discouraged but at the same time, I think people who are most guilty of it are also kind of the victims of this idea of not being able to talk about emotions and being vulnerable.

In other words, men can be as toxic to themselves as they can be to others, and maybe that’s the root of the problem.

Elderbrook and Davies have told at least part of this story about men and their feelings brilliantly, economically and interactively. They’ve shone a light.  And who would have thought that they’d do so by inviting us to slow dance.

This post was adapted from my March 21, 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.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Heroes & Other Role Models, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: dance therapy, depression, Elderbrook, how toxic is masculinity for men, Jacob Holme, Luke Davies, masculinity, men processing emotions, men processing feelings, men's therapy, Michael Socha, Rudimental, Something About You, Something About You music video, trauma and recovery

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