The missing piece of modern masculinity

Men are flailing. Family can help.

Credit: Marvel and Disney

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Everyone seems to be talking about masculinity lately. In just the last few days, Slate has run a piece on male friendship, BuzzFeed explored toxic masculinity by way of Andrew Tate, and the New York Times has run two different opinion pieces on the struggles facing men and boys. The topic is also popular on Substack, where it was recently covered by Patrimony, Matthew Yglesias’ Slow Boring and David French’s French Press.

That’s a lot of chatter about men!

A lot of this coverage is happening because there’s a new book out on the topic from Brookings senior fellow Richard V. Reeves (who also has a Substack). But the idea is that men are falling behind in school, in work, and lack adequate support networks or friendships, among other things¹. And that’s leading to a variety of social problems that affect everyone.

It’s also worth mentioning that this discussion has been happening at the same time the Centers for Disease Control reported that suicide rates for men in multiple age groups “increased significantly” in 2021 compared to 2020. For males 15-24, suicide was up 8 percent last year, the most of any age group. By comparison, women also experienced an increased suicide rate, but according to the CDC the increase was not “statistically significant”².

Michelle Goldberg made a straightforward case in the New York Times for why everyone should care about this issue:

Even if you’re not inclined to care much about men’s welfare, their growing anomie and resentment is everyone’s problem, fueling right-wing populist movements around the world. People who feel unmoored and demeaned are going to be receptive to the idea that the natural order of things has been upended, the core claim of reactionary politics.

So let’s assume for a moment that men and boys becoming more alienated, less economically stable, and more prone to destructive behaviors such as suicide is a problem that we all care about, and that’s worth fixing. What’s the solution?

Reeves himself offers some suggestions, which other commentators have since been riffing on. There is a dizzying array of political and policy options.

I’ll also reiterate a point that I made last week, which is that we could use more positive forms of masculinity for men to model themselves on. My suspicion is that this is why we have “wife guys”; it’s one of the few (arche)types of men who don’t seem toxic³. In other words, it'd be useful to have something of a cultural change.

Which brings me back to David French's take on this subject.

French is writing specifically about male relationships and he's dissatisfied with the way both the left and the right treat masculinity. So he offers his own solution, arguing that we should increase “our cultural emphasis on the male roles of husbands, fathers, and friends.” French also suggests that such relationships are “far more critical to a man’s ultimate identity and purpose” than work.

Those relationships are both challenging and attainable. Not everyone can or should get married or have children, of course, but virtually everyone can form friendships. Telling men that true masculinity is found in heroism or adventure or physical strength, by contrast, can lead to a profound sense of loss or emptiness when real life turns out to be far more mundane, and it can trivialize and minimize the immense purpose and value of diligent work and steadfast love. 

This is a good idea, and more akin to the way people see themselves in a number of non-western cultures. Whereas I might respond to someone asking “who are you?” by saying “a journalist,” someone in South Korea, for instance, might answer “a father.”⁴ This mindset change doesn't mean that things like work or civic engagement don't matter. But it implies that relationships are life's main gig. Ergo the best men would be the best fathers, husbands and friends, not the men who slept with the most women or who bought the most rare fish.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

But this also raises a question: In a time when fewer and fewer people are participating in religion, where more people are working from home, where public institutions are not what they once were, how exactly are men (or, anyone) supposed to find the relationships that allow them to be friends, husbands and fathers? I suspect many men would actually be receptive to French’s concept of masculine identity, but would counter that it’s really, really hard to build any real social circle.

French offers one answer, detailing a group of men who get together to workout and pray together.

But I think we’re sleeping on the main way people built social circles historically: through family.

It probably makes intuitive sense that long ago people primarily associated with their families. But we may not appreciate how much “family” and “community” actually overlapped. A useful illustration comes from Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World. The book details how the Catholic Church gradually restricted marriage practices in Europe, and how that eventually made the West psychologically distinct — and in Henrich’s view “particularly prosperous” — compared to other parts of the world.

The project of restricting who could marry whom began all the way back in the 300s. The 500s saw prohibitions on marriage extend to first and second cousins, and by the 900s the ban had grown to include “all kin as far back as memory goes.” In the 1000s, the definition of incest was expanded to include marriage to sixth cousins — a prohibition that is considerably more strict than anything we have today (most Americans have no idea who their sixth cousins are).

But then there was a twist: At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the church rolled back these draconian marriage rules and decided that incest only included marriage to people who were third cousins or closer. And the reason they did this is the reason I’m bringing it up here: It was becoming difficult for anyone to find marriage partners because literally everyone in their communities was at least a sixth cousin or closer⁵.

This tells us that communities and families were basically the same thing. In medieval Europe, your friends and even marriage partners came from members of the extended clan.

Obviously we can't turn back the clock to the medieval period. But for most people, the first “community” of which they’re a part is a family⁶. And I think that’s a key part of making French’s idea about relationship-based masculine identity a reality. Family, when it works, offers a built-in social circle, both in the form of the family members themselves as well as via their extended network of associates. Put another way, if you want to be a husband or a friend or a father (or a wife or a mother etc. of course) you have to find people who want relationships with you.

Alternatively, if everyone has to find and build their own community, with each generation starting anew, many people aren't going to succeed. I mean, that's basically the problem we're having now, with a lot of people wanting more social interaction while lacking the means or know-how to find it.

Using the family as a solution is low hanging fruit. It’s a generational project, because of course most of us didn’t inherit large social networks that served as the foundation of all our relationships. But if masculinity is indeed in crisis, and reframing men’s roles around their relationships rather than their tasks (i.e. work) is part of the solution, the first step is building a system to provide those relationships. Family can do that. It’s done it before. And the alternative is setting the next generation adrift in a sea of loneliness and toxicity.

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1. This is definitely affecting men in certain demographics more than others. Men without college degrees, for example, and those living in certain parts of the country.

2. For instance, “the suicide rate for females aged 10–14 increased 15% from 2020 to 2021, the largest increase of any age group. However, the change did not reach statistical significance because it was based on relatively few cases: 204 deaths in 2020 and 237 in 2021.”

3. Though of course the reason “wife guys” have been in the news is because they’ve been acting badly. So I emphasize that they typically don’t seem toxic, but in the end sometimes are.

4. I chose South Korea here because it’s mentioned in The WEIRDest People in the World as one of the less WEIRD countries, and the authors specifically use this example of relational language to highlight the way people in non-WEIRD countries see themselves.

5. There’s a useful timeline in The WEIRDest People in the World on pages 168-171. However, that entire section of the book is a detailed explanation of how marriage restrictions rolled out, and what their implications were.

6. Obviously some people are born into dysfunctional families, or via tragedy lose their families early in life. There’s no universal rule, here. What I’ve learned from friends in such situations is that it’s possible to be the first generation that starts, or tries to start, something better.