Does Anyone Care About Men’s Struggles? - Richard Reeves

Nobody predicted that once girls and women caught up with boys and men, that they would keep going, and that we would now have a bigger gender gap in higher education than we did 50 years ago, just the other way around. So we've flipped the inequality now and it's actually wider now than it was when I was born. (laughs) That's an extraordinary fact that no one predicted. (wind blows)

What do you think about the term toxic masculinity?

Uh, I think it's a toxic term. Uh, it escaped from the, the margins of academia in the, in abou- in 2016, not, not coincidentally, um, a- and just became a, a term that was used to apply essentially to any behavior by boys and men that the user disapproved of. Uh, it's rarely defined, uh, without any specificity at all. And so it's a, it in a sense is a completely vacuous term, but it's worse than that because by putting those two words right next to each other, it actually repels a lot of boys and men from a conversation about what it means to be a man, what it, what it means to be particularly mature. I think to talk about mature masculinity and immature masculinity is quite useful. But the idea of toxic, it's like puritan. It's like a, this idea, it's, it's reminds me of the idea of original sin in Christian theologies, right? And, and, and you need these exorcisms, you need someone to come and exorcise it. "If you just weren't so male, you'd be okay." And having raised three boys to adulthood, I gotta tell you, that idea that there's something toxic in them that has to be expunged is not a helpful way to raise them. And so, uh, I, if we could, if we could just consign that particular term back to the obscurity of academic journals, that would be great.

Where did it come from?

It was originally, uh, from, uh, cr- from work that was being done with incar- very violent, incarcerated prisoners. Uh, and so there were a couple of academics that were using it to talk about ways in which a very violent man, who was serving long prison sentences, how their views of masculinity had become intertwined with ideas of expressed violence and dominance and so on too. And, uh, and so it was, uh, it was a concept that was being used by a few psychologists. But, but I think it had sort of a, it was mentioned five times a year in academic journals until 2016, and then overnight, it was on the front page of every newspaper. And so it escaped. So, you know, I think it did have some value in the sense that there may be a, a, a group, very small group of men for whom actually their sense of what it means to be male has in some ways become toxic. But it was always this tiny minority of men for whom it was ever useful to apply it. And then suddenly Donald Trump got elected, MeToo, et cetera, and you know, there you go.