Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (2022)

This is a superb and important book. Boys are not doing well in school. Men, especially those without college degrees, are not doing well in the labor market. These facts were known to me. What I hadn’t clearly seen was that the latter fact, in conjunction with the increased economic independence of women, has deprived many men of the sense that they have an important role to play in society. To them, it may indeed appear that “the future is female.” Reeves has a knack for presenting compelling quantitative evidence and for offering nuanced, but still clear, interpretations. His tone is sober, his judgment fair. Like Joseph Henrich (author of The WEIRDEST People in the World – about what makes Europe different), Reeves also knows how to present potentially controversial ideas in disarming ways. Thus, he makes the case that women, due to their role in bearing and nursing children, have an established role in society and even in the world. Men, on the other hand, without a necessary biological role beyond impregnating females, are more “fragile” – they have to construct their role in society. In a sense, Reeves’s argument here reminded me of the traditional view that Simone de Beauvoir skewered in her 1949 book The Second Sex. However, Reeves is no traditionalist; his claim here draws on standard evolutionary theories of differential parental investments in offspring; and – what I’m emphasizing here - his decision to cast males as “fragile” (like Henrichs to refer to Europeans as WEIRD) is rhetorically adroit. Reeves skillfully shows how this important issue of male struggles is being poorly served – like so much else – by our polarized politics. Democrats are generally unwilling to concede that gender disparities can run in both directions; Republicans are rhetorically more sympathetic to men, but offer few real solutions, instead harking back to traditional gender roles. Reeves offers concrete suggestions, such as delaying boys’ start of school by a year, getting more men into HEAL (Health, Education, Administration, Literacy) professions, and, most ambitiously, taking steps to foster a new male identity – one which ties men to their families as both equal breadwinners to their wives and as equal caretakers of their children.