Out today in Politico by Richard Reeves, the author of “Of Boys and Men” discussed earlier in the thread.
I read that piece. It's got some interesting ideas, but also I have many questions.
1. First, I just don't see the connection between these concerns and my son's male friends, all of whom are at prestigious colleges studying engineering or science but some of whom hold antediluvian views on gender. One of my friends -- a PhD from Princeton -- has a son who got into Andrew Tate. Obviously these are anecdotes but they aren't limited. There's sexist and misogynist behavior in law schools. There are professors who have these views. I just can't see "economic opportunity" as a complete theory because it just doesn't describe what I see. Maybe my diagnosis of sexual and social insecurity isn't quite right, but it at least tries to explain some of this behavior.
2. But anyway, let's take the article at face value. Reeves says to expand vocational and trades offering in schools, and to have more apprenticeships. Fine. Why is this a solution to help men? Can't there be women plumbers? There can be, but I've never seen one. It's a male dominated field. That strikes me as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Making it easier for men to have low-status jobs doesn't seem like a recipe for improving male happiness. I think you'd have to do something to raise the status of those jobs -- and now we're in the realm of culture, which the article wants to avoid. If we have some magic power to make people give greater respect to plumbers or sanitation workers, why not just use it to make me respect women?
3. Increase the share of male mental health professionals, says Reeves. Fine. How do you do that? He says policy makers should encourage men to enter these fields with loan forgiveness and scholarships -- which I suppose might be a solution if it weren't patently illegal. You can't have a government policy to forgive men's loans if they become psychiatrists. [This is generally a problem with his whole piece. A lot of his solutions are not constitutional].
But anyway, why are mental health professionals mostly women? There are a number of reasons. First, there are considerably more female patients. Eating disorders, low self-esteem, self-harm, personality disorders -- these are more common among women, and women are more likely to get help for them because they sort of have to. If you self-harm and have to go to the hospital, you're coming home with a psychiatric appointment and probably some meds. And a lot of therapists choose their careers because of positive experiences in therapy.
Second, mental health patients are often exceedingly difficult to work with. Dealing with hard-to-deal-with people is a task that our society codes as female, which is so many women work in customer service, customer service automated voices are usually female, etc. It's probably because infants are also hard to deal with, and moms usually get stuck with that job more often than men (and not always for bad reasons; for instance, often the whiny infants wants something that only comes from mom's breasts).
The techniques of the job are also coded female. Therapists and psychiatrists have to use empathy; that's a female coded skill in our society. They have to listen, which codes the same way. They have to be used to people explaining to them the same things over and over again.
So what are we even talking about here? And the same goes for elementary school teachers. Sure, it would be great to have more of them. But I would argue we can't get there until we reform gender norms, and if we're assuming we can do that, why not just reform gender norms to eliminate toxic masculinity instead of going about it in a circuitous fashion.
4. I guess my main objection is that the author is accepting the division of the world into men's and women's distinct spheres. That's the gist of all of the policy proposals. And I can respect that choice from a policy maker, given that policy makers --wanting to make a real difference in the world -- usually have to accept the world as it presents to them, at least to some extent. So I'm not slamming on Richard Reeves here.
At the same time, isn't that division causing a lot of the problems? When we accept that men do shop and women are better at socializing, we create what I've seen described as the "male influencer problem" -- namely, that there are few men who make money from social media in the "influencer" game (unless you count gaming streams as influencing, which it kind of is but not in the same way). And that's in part because the main quality people look for in an influencer is optimism and physical attractiveness. It's why most models are women, and indeed why the word model connotes femininity (men who model are typically called 'male models,' in an inversion of 'lady doctor' rhetoric). Well, guess what? Influencing sure seems like easy money. I have no idea how hard people have to work to go viral, but the finished product seems like it's super easy and fun. And it's a girl thing mostly.
So if we divide up the world into plumbers on one hand and influencers on the other -- and remember, for young people, influencers are a part of life in a way they aren't for us old folks, the same way that long-haired musicians were a part of life for the Boomers but not their parents -- that just doesn't seem like a good deal for men. And I would argue that it's especially noxious because it focuses male resentment on feminine traits and thus gender dynamics. Men complain -- gee I wish I could be a model or a cheerleader instead of a grunt in the trenches or standing knee deep in sewage, but alas I don't have boobs and blonde hair, and worse, those same women who depend on me to fix their pipes, homes, cars, etc look down on me, would never date me, and generally don't even see me. The next step, "they are all bitches," is not a big leap.
