The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

If anything is well established in American social science, it is that men are falling behind women in higher education, suffer disproportionately from drug overdoses and are far more likely to commit suicide.  Furthermore, boys in the United States are less prepared than young girls when they begin school and less likely to graduate from high school or finish college.  Young men are falling out of the labor force. So-called deaths of despair—by suicide and drug overdose—are nearly three times as common among men as women. One out of every five fathers does not live with his children. In 1990, 3 percent of men reported having no close friends; now, 15 percent do.  And as David French reports, the very definition of “masculinity” betrays a crisis.  “In 2019, the American Psychological Association published guidelines that took direct aim at ‘traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression’—declaring it to be ‘on the whole, harmful.’”  French correctly observes that “Competitiveness, aggression and stoicism surely have their abuses, but they can be indispensable in the right contexts when used for virtuous purposes.”  As Richard V. Reeves, senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institute, notes in his indispensable book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, the phrase “toxic masculinity” is counterproductive. It teaches men there is something toxic inside them that needs to be exorcised.  “The problem with men is typically framed as a problem of men,” Reeves writes. “It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time. This individualist approach is wrong.”  The major theme of his book is “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.”  Christians should take note.  Here are several of the salient observations Reeves makes in his notable study about men and boys:

• They are struggling in the classroom. American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be “school ready” than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics. “Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading and science.”  By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class, ranked by G.P.A., are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys. In 2020, at the 16 top American law schools, not a single one of the flagship law reviews had a man as editor in chief.
• Men are struggling in the workplace. One in three American men with only a high school diploma — 10 million men — is now out of the labor force. The biggest drop in employment is among young men aged 25 to 34. Men who entered the work force in 1983 will earn about 10 percent less in real terms in their lifetimes than those who started a generation earlier. Over the same period, women’s lifetime earnings have increased 33 percent. Pretty much all of the income gains that middle-class American families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women’s earnings.
• Men are also struggling physically. Men account for close to three out of every four “deaths of despair” — suicide and drug overdoses. For every 100 middle-aged women who died of COVID up to mid-September 2021, there were 184 middle-aged men who died.
• David Brooks shares that “learned a lot I didn’t know. First, boys are much more hindered by challenging environments than girls. Girls in poor neighborhoods and unstable families may be able to climb their way out. Boys are less likely to do so. In Canada, boys born into the poorest households are twice as likely to remain poor as their female counterparts. In American schools, boys’ academic performance is more influenced by family background than girls’ performance. Boys raised by single parents have lower rates of college enrollment than girls raised by single parents.”
• “Second, policies and programs designed to promote social mobility often work for women, but not men. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, visited Kalamazoo, Mich., where, thanks to a donor, high school graduates get to go to many colleges in the state free. The program increased the number of women getting college degrees by 45 percent. The men’s graduation rates remained flat. Reeves lists a whole series of programs, from early childhood education to college support efforts, that produced impressive gains for women, but did not boost men.”
• “There are many reasons men are struggling — for example, the decline in manufacturing jobs that put a high value on physical strength, and the rise of service sector jobs. But I was struck by the theme of demoralization that wafts through the book. Reeves talked to men in Kalamazoo about why women were leaping ahead. The men said that women are just more motivated, work harder, plan ahead better. Yet this is not a matter of individual responsibility. There is something in modern culture that is producing an aspiration gap.”

Carlos Lozada observes that “[As] a scholar of class and inequality, Reeves instead sees men encumbered by structural problems in our society, and he has various policy fixes in mind. He wants to delay boys’ entry into kindergarten by one year, in part because their brains develop more slowly than those of girls. He wants to see more male teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade, because they serve as role models for boys and help improve their academic performance. (Men make up 24 percent of U.S. teachers, down from 33 percent in the early 1980s.) And at a time when automation and freer trade have transformed job markets, Reeves wants to create more opportunities for men in what he calls HEAL jobs—health, education, administration, literacy—which are typically dominated by women.”

Josh Hawley, the senior U.S. senator from Missouri, recently published Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.   He draws on the biblical stories of Adam, Abraham, David and Solomon to combat the malaise of American men, so addled by video games and pornography and troubled by depression and drug abuse that they cannot discern their calling. “They have no template,” Hawley worries, “no vision for what it is to be a man.”  As Lozada summarizes, “Men are called to cultivate and protect and expand the Eden that is Earth, Hawley writes, to confront evil, embrace servanthood, privilege duty over pleasure, discipline their bodies and order their souls. They must ‘start families and build homes and leave legacies of character that will span generations.’ The senator is unapologetic about finding solace in the past. ‘American men, it is time to wake up,’ he writes in his final chapter. ‘It is time to become free men, as your fathers and grandfathers were.’”

Consider these additional observations about American culture.  For the first time in American history, married couples have dropped below 50% of all American households.  Married couples represent just 48% of American households, far below the 78% in 1950.  [There are 37 states, plus the District of Columbia, in which married couples make up fewer than 50% of all households.]  According to a recent report by the Brookings Institution, “as women moved into the work force, cohabitation lost its taboo label and as society grew more secular, marriage lost some of its central authority.”  Throughout most of American history, marriage defined gender roles, family life and a person’s place in society.  That truth no longer applies.  Women with college degrees are now more likely to marry than those with just high school diplomas, the reverse of several decades ago.  The new pattern for college-educated women seems to be marrying later in life.  By contrast, women with only a high school diploma are increasingly opting not to marry the fathers of their children, whose fortunes have declined along with the nation’s economic opportunities.  In addition, demographics are affecting the state of marriage.  Americans are living longer than ever, so households now include a growing number of elderly singles.  Finally, other changes in the state of marriage include 41 states that showed declines in traditional households of married couples with children.  In 2000, married couples with children were fewer than 20% of all households in just one state, plus the District of Columbia.  Now they are less than 1/5th in 31 states.  Overall, the largest change for the decade was the jump in households headed by women without husbands—up 18% in the decade.

Finally, marketing and promotional specialists understand that 85% of the buying decisions in the US are made by women.  Apparently, the purse strings of the American economy are held by women.  For that reason, some are now calling America the “Sheconomy.”  Women today are not only the chief purchasing officers of the culture, they now make up about half of the workforce:  49.9% of all nonfarm labor jobs are female and 51.5% of high-paying management and professional positions are female.  In addition, college graduation rates indicate that these percentages will only grow—for every two men who graduate from college, three women do.  As Belinda Luscombe argues in an important study published by Time, “Wives’ education and earning power have changed the relationship they have with their family finances as well as their families.  It’s not his money she’s spending; it’s their money—or hers.  Similarly, the one-way relationship between consumers and the mainstream media has been overturned by social networking.  Women—and men too—don’t have to wait for Big Media’s attention; they’re taking their stories straight to the public, and the media are following them.  Midas and Best Buy, after discovering that steering their business toward women is less like changing the oil and more like reinventing the lightbulb, transformed their relationships with their customers, letting them see more of the guts of the operation and weigh in on changes.  If women can’t get a place in the corporate inner sanctum, then they’re just going to start running companies from the outside—where the money is.”

What does all this mean for the health of American men?  It certainly is not evil that women are attaining higher levels of education, better paying jobs and making 85% of all buying decisions.  The challenge is the effect all this has on men.  God has designed the role relationships between men and women rather clearly.  As men fail in their roles, women naturally pick up the slack.  Men today are more confused and more disoriented than ever.  Women are re-defining their roles as a result.  Richard Reeves has documented the results of this confusion on American men.

See David French in the New York Times (29 May 2023); Carlos Lozada in the New York Times (4 June 2023); David Brooks, “The Crisis of Men and Boys” in the New York Times (29 September 2022); Belinda Luscombe in Time (22 November 2010); Cheryl Wetzstein in the Washington Times (25 May 2011); and Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times (26 May 2011).