Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do about it, by Richard V. Reeves

I read this book in the fall, when it came out. I didn’t write it up, because I immediately loaned my copy to the leader of the church Men’s Fellowship thinking it would make a good subject for a discussion at one of our meetings and then he never gave the book back to me and I forgot about it. The subject came up again at our latest meeting so I bought a new copy so I could prepare a presentation in a few months.

The outline for the book is clearly summarized on the Contents page in the chapter subtitles:

1. Girls Rule: Boys are Behind in Education
2. Working Man Blues: Men are Losing Ground in the Labor Market
3. Dislocated Dads: Fathers Have Lost Their Traditional Role in the Family
4. Dwight’s Glasses: Black Boys and Men Face Acute Challenges
5. Glass Ceiling: Poor Boys and Men Are Suffering
6. Non–Responders: Politics Aren’t Helping Boys and Men
7. Making Men: Nature and Nurture Both Matter
8. Progressive Blindness: The Political Left Is in Denial
9. Seeing Red: The Political Right Wants to Turn Back the Clock
10. Redshirt the Boys: Boys Need an Extra Year in the Classroom
11. Men Can Heal: Getting Men into the Jobs of the Future
12. New Dads: Fatherhood as an Independent Social Institution

Reeves begins with three chapters outlying the scope of the problem (Part I, The Male Malaise). Girls are succeeding in school far above boys. The gap in higher education is becoming particularly significant. While women are moving steadily into higher-paid, professional jobs (though still behind men at the very highest levels), the need for non-college educated, manufacturing and physical labor, where men traditionally dominated, is shrinking. With women increasingly able to financially support themselves, the role for men as family providers has become less important. Thus men are disconnected from a sense of purpose and usefulness, leading to dissatisfaction, isolation, despair.

Next Reeves points out particular challenges facing black boys and poor boys (Part II, Double Disadvantage). And then he explains how girls are better positioned to take advantage of public policies designed to help black and poor children of both sexes. Meanwhile, decades-old policies designed to lift girls at a time when girls most needed help are now hindering the boys who need the most help now.

In Chapter Seven (Part III, Biology and Culture) Reeves reminds us that males and females are different and our public policies need to take those differences into account as both advantages and challenges. He points out particularly the way that psychology fails to account for the biological sex differences between males and females (males are more aggressive and greater risk-takers on average) and, as 80% of psychologists are women, some men aren’t comfortable accessing the mental health assistance they need.

Chapters Eight and Nine (Part IV, Political Stalemate) point out how both sides of our political spectrum fail boys and men. The left denies the problem. Or, to the extent it sees a problem it’s a problem of men. For the complaint about the behavior labeled, “toxic masculinity” Reeves hopes to substitute the phrase “immature men”. It’s not a problem of overdeveloped masculinity, it’s underdeveloped adults. Or the left individualizes the problem as a problem for individual men who can’t or won’t adapt to a new world, rather than acknowledge the larger social forces. The right, on the other hand, fantasizes a return to the 1950s model of male/female sex roles, imagining that we can unwind the women’s rights movement, and remake a pre-information age, and pre-global, economy.

The final three chapters (Part V, What to Do) are where Reeves proposes his solutions. First, he proposes holding boys back a year before starting kindergarten. Some parents already make this decision for girls and boys depending on a child’s birthday so that their child won’t be the youngest in their class. Apparently this is called “red-shirting” though I had never heard the term before. (I, actually, could have been a candidate for red-shirting. I was born in August and started kindergarten just after my fifth birthday so some of the other boys and girls were nearly a year older than me. I suffered no ill effects.) Reeves suggests we delay kindergarten for all boys so that the boys will generally be a year older than the girls in their same grade. This will help to even out the maturation rate, as girls tend to mature earlier than boys, and will help boys keep up with the girls physically and intellectually so as to be more successful throughout their school years and not lose the confidence that will launch them into higher education.

HEAL is Reeves’ acronym for jobs in Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy. He means this to balance our current focus on STEM jobs (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), where we create programs to move girls, especially, into traditional male fields. Reeves’ argument is that as we shift to a more service-oriented economy, HEAL jobs are the jobs of the future and boys need encouragement to enter traditionally female dominated fields.

Reeves’ third solution is to honor the particular importance of fathers in parenting. While economically self-supporting women reduced the need for men as providers, children still benefit from fathers as protectors and teachers, especially as children enter adolescence and need guidance to avoid risky behaviors and explore an independent identity.

Readers of both the political left and right will find much of Reeves’ analysis provocative. But the book is well argued and thoroughly researched (there are nearly 50 pages of notes following the less than 200 pages of text) so it’s hard to fault even if you disagree. Interestingly, there are places where finding the statistics Reeves’ was curious about were difficult for him because government policies designed to help girls don’t require the agencies to keep data on the boys. Reeves had to get very creative to find what he needed. Because of the abundance of research the book can be a little trying to read, lots of statistics, percentages, studies, and graphs. The narrative of the argument gets lost occasionally behind the science. But it wasn’t so hard to follow that I couldn’t get to the end. It’s rather a thin book. And I found the somewhat counter-intuitive presentation of the problem thought-provoking and ultimately convincing, and the solutions he proposes thoroughly intriguing.