Conversations about what to do with a generation of disaffected, hyper-online young men are rampant these days. A wide range of digital content creators — in particular YouTubers and podcasters — have created a movement of aggrieved men who feel fierce resentment about the focus on women and feminist causes in recent years.
Now, a growing community of scholars are trying to build a philosophical framework to push back against the influence of this “men’s rights” movement.
One of the most prominent thinkers in that pushback is Richard Reeves, a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Reeves rejects the premise of the men’s rights argument — that there’s some sort of vast conspiracy against men — but says there should be more acknowledgement of the ways that young men’s struggles aren’t being looked at as closely as they could be.
Eamon Whalen profiled Reeves and his ideas for the Nation earlier this year. The Show spoke with him about Reeves and the ways he thinks the country could be doing a better job of meeting the moment.
Full conversation
EAMON WHALEN: You know, one like the CDC not acknowledging male suicide disparities. That’s something that Reeves brings up often.
It can seem trivial stuff, but I think to a lot of aggrieved men build up over time, it can seem like there is something that is not being acknowledged. And so Reeves is saying, I want to start this American Institute of Boys and Men and write about this, And as a social scientist, have the best, most up to-date data.
And I need to be what he calls a “boring institution” advocating for men so that when an Andrew Tate or a Jordan Peterson or one of these figures says that men are a persecuted class and the mainstream is being silent about it, that Reeves can say, “Hey, we’re not being silent about it. I am actually recognizing the ways which men are struggling, and I am actually giving you the best data.”
His trying to be a bulwark against this sort of backlash was a compelling part of his work.
SAM DINGMAN: What is your sense of how Reeves resonates with men? Because hearing you talk about it and reading your piece, he comes across as a much more reasoned, institutionally minded, practical, measured sort of voice on a subject, and I think you could argue that one of the reasons that voices like Tate’s or Jordan Peterson’s are very compelling for men is that they’re making much more of an emotional appeal.
Do you get the sense that men online are interested in the approach that somebody like Reeves takes?
WHALEN: I think that’s a really great point, and I think the best way to answer that is that Reeves is, I mean, yeah, writing for men in some ways, but as I open my piece, that Reeves target audience is the parents of a boy who might be drawn into this sort of culture to sort of give them a little bit more context for why they might be pulled into this.
And I’ve asked Reeves if he, if he had ever thought about going down the more guru, prescriptive, kind of self-help, because that, that’s a lot of ways to think about these, these figures is that it is a form of kind of distinctly masculine self-help.
I don’t think Reeves is, is trying to appeal exactly to that audience. I think he’s sort of trying to build consensus. What I see him currently doing is building consensus amongst the sort of intellectual and political elite in the U.S. to sort of acknowledge that this is a problem. And it’s a hot-button issue, and he’s doing his best not to try to offend anyone.
DINGMAN: But it also seems like another challenge here is the perceived imperative to address whether or not there is something essentially biologically true about men that makes them feel aggrieved or makes them want certain things, want to be at the top of the hierarchy.
How much does the perceived need to address the quote “essential biology” of men figure into all this?
WHALEN: That is a great and very thorny question, and that is partly where Reeves runs into some of his kind of criticism amongst the left and amongst feminists, of sort of placing too much of an emphasis on biology.
And someone that I interviewed for my story, Niobe Way, who’s a developmental psychologist at NYU and has written several books about young men’s socialization, criticized Reeves with qualified criticism.
Everyone in my story as a critic is pretty measured in their criticism, but essentially he doesn’t place enough emphasis on the socialization of boys as they become men that a lot of the socialization then — like you have to dominate, you have to be stoic, you can’t show your emotions — that that is a social construction.
And also that the type of masculinity that we are socialized to perform actually ends up being very unhealthy and unhelpful for men as they go through their life. It damages their relationships, their self-image. They feel like they can’t perform to this ideal.
DINGMAN: Do you think there needs to be somebody who has a similar energy to a Tate or a Peterson but is approaching this from the opposite perspective?
WHALEN: Yeah, I think Reeves, I think his work kind of provides an opening for people and a sort of a conversation starter for people. I do think you need to meet men culturally on the internet in a certain way.
When I talked to young men in my story for Mother Jones that were on, I found them on this Reddit forum called r/exredpill. So they, they had been “red pilled,” and then they had gotten out. They had kind of been indoctrinated into this worldview that their problems were all to blame on women. And like I said, they have this very, very rigid kind of evolutionary view of gender roles and behavior that ended up just not being very good for them.
They thought, like I remember one of the kids I interviewed, it broke my heart. He said that he didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore because basically he was taught to think women were so low intelligence and so sort of dictated by — not like animalistic instincts, but he basically said that “I thought so low of women that I didn’t even think being in a relationship was worth anything.”
Like he was almost then like moving away, not like moving away from heterosexuality, but he didn’t even want to pursue women anymore because he had grown such resentment towards them. And he was sort of like, “What is the point of this anymore? I thought I was going online to become a man.” He had literally typed into YouTube “male advice,” and that had taken him on his journey where he ended up a Tate fan.
So I do think a lot of this would be better if it would happen offline. You know, actual logging off and touching grass, as they say. It’s not that simple, but that’s, I think, a good way to sort of start at it.
