Herald columnist and Radio Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath is taking on a new role as Happiness Editor for our Great Minds mental health project. He will share his own insights in his search for wellbeing as well as interviews with international experts in the field.
Boys and men are having a hard time. Richard V. Reeves is a social scientist at the Brookings Institution, working on issues of economic inequality. In his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, Reeves argues that both political sides are fighting an ideological war which fails to provide thoughtful solutions to the social and mental health problems facing males.
I Zoom Richard at his Washington home. He looks exactly like Christian Bale in his Christopher Nolan Batman era. Richard's important, scholarly, and exhaustively researched message gains even more weight with me thanks to his strong Bruce Wayne vibes.
Q: Richard, in what ways are males struggling in modern Western society?
Boys and men are further behind girls and women in education than they were ahead in the 1970s. There's been a reversal of the gender gap here in the US, New Zealand, Australia and the UK, and it's growing. We've also seen a decline in traditionally male jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry and haven't seen much of a move into new jobs in areas like health and education. Men are being benched by changes in the labour market, particularly globalisation and automation. We are also seeing a rise in the number of kids being raised without fathers. I think that's because we've changed the economic basis for the family in ways that are positive, because we've seen women become much more economically independent, but we haven't recast fatherhood for this new world. These changes leave a lot of young men dislocated, disoriented and lacking a script to follow. We have problems around isolation, mental health and medication, and of course, high suicide rates among men.
Q: You talk in your book about how controversial it is to discuss the ways in which men are failing. Why is that? Surely we should look to help people whoever they are, whereever it's needed. If the figures aren't good for males, why would it be controversial to raise those issues?
For a very long time, women have been in second place in almost every dimension. Men have held the positions of power for as long as we've recorded history. For a long time, to support gender equality meant helping girls and women. That was a reasonable summary of the situation, but now to be in favour of gender equality, we have to look both ways at once. The changes have happened so recently that reframing the idea of gender equality as something that matters for men and boys also sounds odd, but it's also true, and we should get our heads around that.
Q: Are men failing themselves, or is society failing men?
One of the problems with the debate about boys and men is a tendency to say it's a problem of men. That if men could just fix themselves, then we'd all be fine. I think it understates the structural challenges that a lot of boys and men are facing. It's not to say that we men don't have a responsibility. That's always true in these circumstances. But there's a tendency to blame men in a way that I don't think we would find appropriate to say about very many other groups.
Q: Does this come from the idea that men created our society, so it's our fault?
Yeah, how can males suffer in a patriarchy, right? Yet that's the situation we're in now. We haven't caught up with the facts on the ground. We've done really well in terms of female gender equality, in ways both you and I support. But now's the time to take seriously the ways in which boys and men are struggling. To treat equality both ways. Telling a 16-year-old that's struggling at school that it's a man's world when he sees the girls heading off to college while he can barely graduate high school is not a message that resonates. There's a disconnect between this framing and their experience.
Q: Are we men simply evolved for a different time?
It's nuanced and situational. There are some traits and attributes that are more commonly associated with being male that are less adaptive today. Physical strength, for example. Increased potential for aggression. You can see how those would be more adaptive, even in relatively recent history. I do think there's something to be said for that, but I don't wanna overstate it because I think that, by and large, they are switches that you can flip. In some areas, like social skills, women may have an advantage, but it's not huge. I think that it's too fatalistic to assume that men can't adapt. Women have adapted. It wasn't that long ago people said women can't run companies or fly fighter jets. I think we can update some of our ideas of masculinity and femininity, without ignoring biological differences but also not overweighing them, because, by and large, I think we can find ways for both men and women to flourish in the modern world.
Q: In what general ways are the political right and left getting it wrong?
A simple way to put it is that the right are basically saying to men, 'You need to be more like your dad', and the left is saying, 'You need to be more like your sister'. The right's solution to the problems of men is to turn back the clock. They want to go back to a world before the success of the women's movement, where the role of men was more clearly defined as breadwinner, father and husband. It's a rear-view way of approaching the problem. You can see the appeal because their own fathers probably occupied that world. But I think it's immoral to turn back the clock on gender equality, and also completely fantastical to imagine that you could. The left, on the other hand, are in danger of saying that there is something intrinsically wrong with masculinity. That men would be fine if they stop being so male. If they exorcise that original sin. They would be fine if they could basically become girls and women. That masculinity is a relic of a former area that should be removed. That's an equally negative message, because we are different in some ways from women, and we only have to be a man or raise boys or be in the world to know that's true. The left is sort of turning its back on boys and men. Telling them to stop being male is not much of a solution. Sitting between those two polls are the vast majority of people, who are just trying to struggle their way through what has been a really significant and necessary cultural change with some serious side effects that we should responsibly deal with without pointing fingers at each other.
In part two of this two-part interview, Richard Reeves outlines his solutions to the problems facing boys and men, including boys starting school later, reimagining fatherhood as an independent social institution valuable in and of itself, and helping more men into educational roles.
So, see you next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel.*
*This is a 1960s Batman reference, which is not relevant here because Richard looks like Christian Bale and not at all like Adam West. Also, this is a newspaper and not a TV network.
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