Of Boys and Men

Kinda like Sapiens. A book that BLASTED my brain for the first quarter, enraged me for the middle bits, and then kinda fizzled in the end. Overall, very decent though. (And better than Sapiens!)

On the stuff I liked:
- The first 25%-33% of the book is like a giant blast of gender revolution and I AM HERE FOR IT. Namely: it highlights the ways in which Men Are Struggling - specifically: cratering academic achievement, degrading job prospects, and a bunch of social policy programs that seem to have no effect.
- The author, Reeves, makes his first excellent point, not necessarily original to him, that the patriarchy sucks for both men, women, all genders! Namely: with the modern women's lib movement in the 1970s-now, women's roles have expanded - now women have jobs! Careers! In STEM! Good for them. Now we have hand-wringing about women “having it all”: family AND career?! Preposterous. Can it be done. Etc. Meanwhile, men's roles have NOT similarly expanded: they WERE the breadwinners but now... not so much. (Some huge % of households are dual earners where the female partner earns more.) There has NOT been a similar push to get men into childcare (both amateurly - as dads - and professionally).
- This has particularly impacted low-skilled male workers, whose (manual labor-heavy) jobs were outsourced during globalization - and whose skills risk being automated away anyway.
- Reeves also interestingly talks about the intersectionality of racism + sexism for Black men - who need to jump through all sorts of ridiculous hoops (wearing fake glasses, whistling Vivaldi) to de-stress anxious white people, the police, etc.
- Reeves makes an excellent point about how we need a progressive, post-feminism re-imagining of gender roles for men AND women - but all the attention and money is on the latter. He mentions how the push to get girls into STEM (oooh and don't you get me started on math anxiety in girls, etc etc) needs to have a parallel push to get boys into “HEAL” jobs (healthcare, education, admin, literacy).
- Another interesting data point: all the trends for girls/women are improving since the 70s, while all the trends for boys/men are getting worse.
- Oh yeah, and we should redshirt boys (i.e. delay school for them until they're ~6-7), because male brains develop more slowly? Something something prefrontal cortex? Boys definitely do under-perform girls in school (worse grades, lower graduation rates, lower college enrollment), and apparently this is a global phenom.

So that was all great. My brain was buzzing. I was like, YES REDSHIRT THEM ALL. It opened my (feminist) eyes to the Plight of Men.

But then he annoyed me, specifically:
- There's a loooong middle tract about the “biological differences between men and women”. And he literally cites a bunch of cognitive studies finding lots of correlations, noting once that “oh yeah, correlation does not equal causation”. Dude, your entire remaining arguments rest on the assumption that these studies ARE causal. Yes, you can't randomize gender (YET!). But I still think, until we get a better causal identification strategy (and e.g. Claude Steele's work on randomizing gender prompts in math tests approaches this!), I remain to be convinced about how much is socialization vs. hormones and genitalia. I refer to Cordelia Fine's book as well - scientists are human! And, for a lot of our literature, they were men! So they might be finding what they're looking for, you know what I mean.
- The other kinda annoying bit was the two chapters on “what's wrong with the political [left/right] re: boys/men”. This can be boiled down to: the left don't respect men's suffering (seeing it as a threat to the women's movement) and they either ridicule or ignore it (fair) vs. the right exploit men's suffering while offering no solutions (or bad solutions: “let's all go back to the 1950s”). I agree with both of these points, but I found his portrayal of the left's use of “toxic masculinity” to be a caricature - an incorrect caricature, even! Namely, he criticizes the term “toxic masculinity” as an overloaded catch-all term that individualizes a man's failings. I agree it's probably an overloaded term, but I've always interpreted it as exactly NOT individualizing - but rather situating a specific man's behavior in the larger (sometimes toxic!) gender roles that the patriarchy puts on us all. E.g. Men struggling to find friendship and make meaningful intimate connections because of a (socialized!) caution around being vulnerable/soft and squishy goobers.

So, midway through the book, I was like “oh no - he keeps saying he's NOT a Men's Rights Activist but oh God”.

By the end of the book, I was reassured. Even though Reeves holds onto “biological sex is an important thing!!!” with both hands, and I really do still disagree here (as a Basic Leftist, I guess), he has so many other great insights and really got me thinking. And his heart is also definitely in the right place (aka the progressive place, HA HA).

Oh, also - I gotta say: the scope of his research was impressive. He touched on a number of authors and economists I looooove (Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Autour, Claudia Goldin), but even managed to mention the awful red-pill incel world AND that hilarious and sad SNL skit about “man parks” (to help your boyfriend make friends).

So, overall, definitely recommend.