Let’s examine the claims in the title of this post. The first claim seems hard to deny in a world of continuing discrimination against women. Women continue to suffer violence all over the world, they remain at greater risk from partner violence, face sexual harassment and workplace discrimination all on account of their gender. It is, from this perspective a world of toxic masculinity and women want to smash the patriarchy.

One small personal and very recent example – my wife while working in the allotment recounted the mental process she went through when trying to work out whether to accept an invitation of a man in his sixties to see his allotment and shed. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it because I’m a bloke. My wife considered the height of the hedges, the age of the man, the look of the shed, the number of people around and other considerations. It was all fine and there were no problems but that’s the sort of mental daily calculation women have to make that men do not.

I don’t even really think I need to go into any great detail about whether the first claim is true or not because the evidence of the problem (if not the solutions) seems to be inescapably true. But what of the other claim, that the world as it is being reshaped will not and is not going to be one that works for men and boys? Is it the case as Roger Olsen says that, ‘unintentionally the rise of women is resulting in the decline of men’? How can that possibly be true? Because while the men at the top are still flourishing, men in general across the West are languishing.

A new book (which I have not read as yet) is gaining quite a lot of attention because it gathers and presents the evidence for this side of the case. Richard Reeves in Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It has gained coverage from Tyler Cowen who said it was ‘one of the most important [books] of this year, perhaps the most important’; from David Brooks in the New York Times who also said it was, ‘one of the most important books of the year, not only because it is a comprehensive look at the male crisis, but also because it searches for the roots of that crisis and offers solutions.’ And Reeves, who is a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution has had plenty of opportunity to have essays from his book published, some of which I’ll quote from here.

Reeves argues that both left & right are failing men. Here is list of complaints against the left:

[The first of] four major failings of the political Left on issues related to boys and men, which is a tendency to pathologize naturally occurring aspects of masculine identity, usually under the banner of toxic masculinity. The second progressive flaw is individualism; male problems are seen as the result of individual failings of one kind or another, rather than of structural challenges. Third is an unwillingness to acknowledge any biological basis for sex differences. Fourth is a fixed conviction that gender inequality can only run one way, that is, to the disadvantage of women.

Toxic masculinity is a harmful myth. Society is in denial about the problems of boys and men.

Reeves argues that we cannot speak about issues that affect men significantly more than women because of the fear of sexism. For example, what do you think the media response or your own would have been if the COVID-19 pandemic was talked about in gendered terms? Well, it was talked about in gendered terms but mainly in the ways that it negatively impacted women.

The main gender story has been the catastrophic impact on women’s progress. “One of the most striking effects of the coronavirus will be to send many couples back to the 1950s,” wrote Helen Lewis, in The Atlantic in March 2020, adding, “Across the world, women’s independence will be a silent victim of the pandemic.”

Yet it is arguable that the story should have been gendered the other way because ‘Men are considerably more vulnerable to COVID-19. Globally, men were around 50% more likely than women to die after contracting the virus.’ 50% is not a small statistical insignificance! And before you point to pre-existing conditions or the likelihood of poor male lifestyle habits consider that, ‘The gap in mortality is not explained by sex differences in rates of infection, or in preexisting conditions. The difference is biological.’ And while we’re on the subject of biological differences the message seems to be, ‘yes men are naturally different than women, but only in ways that are bad.’

Yet depending on which echo chamber we live in we can certainly find plenty of examples where the opposite may very well be true.

What about the idea that gender inequality is a problem that cuts both ways? Reeves looks at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report that is published every two years. According to Reeves,

It is the most influential international study of progress toward gender equality, but…is distorted by asymmetric thinking. To compile the report, a gender equality score is calculated for each nation, between 0 (complete inequality) and 1 (complete equality). The score is based on fourteen variables across four domains—economics, education, health, and politics. (Each variable in the index is also calculated on a 0–1 range.) In 2021, the U.S. scored 0.76 on the scale and placed thirtieth in the world. Iceland, in first place, scored 0.89. But crucially, no account is taken of domains where women are doing better than men.

In other words a country loses marks when women are behind men but not when it is the other way around. And when the problem isn’t seen it isn’t dealt with as feminists from long fought experience could readily tell you.

What is the evidence that boys and men are struggling? It can be easy to paint the picture of working class men struggling to find jobs in an era of deindustrialization in a service economy jobs which tendsto favour women but the evidence starts in school. In a different book, this time Francis Wardle’s Oh Boy! Strategies for Teaching Boys in Early Childhood he says in the US,

Statistically speaking, the child who most needs to be fixed is also most likely to be a boy. Boys, says Wardle, while comprising 54 percent of the US preschool population, “represented 79 percent of the children suspended once, and 82 percent of children suspended multiple times.” Furthermore, across racial and ethnic groups, boys constitute the majority of children held back in kindergarten, the majority of children referred for special-education services, the majority of children “reported simply to struggle in programs.”

Boys Aren’t the Problem

That would seem to indicate the possibility that boys are being punished for, well, behaving like boys. A problem that starts in pre-school continues throughout the education system. In higher education even Christian colleges are noticing the difference – men are struggling or simply not there.

Women in the US currently earn six out of every 10 degrees, and the gender gap has widened with the pandemic. Male undergraduate enrollment dropped by 5 percent in fall of 2020, compared to a less than 1 percent decrease among women. And for men who do enroll in college, only about 40 percent earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, compared to half of women.

Christian Colleges Look for ‘Missing Men’

Everyone seems to agree that all of this has led to a cultural identity problem, a crisis of masculinity. David Brooks says,

I come away with the impression that many men are like what Dean Acheson said about Britain after World War II. They have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Many men have an obsolete ideal: Being a man means being the main breadwinner for your family. Then they can’t meet that ideal. Demoralization follows.

The Crisis of Men and Boys

The problem is the inadequacy of the response to this. The left continues to blame the old patriarchal model & just whines that if men just ditched it they and everybody else would be a lot happier. In a Guardian article about a men’s group the author & member of the group writes, “a previous member who has moved away, told us that the traditional, working-class version of masculinity he grew up with was working against his own best interests.” But replace it with what? To many men the answer is nothing or nothing very appealing. So into that vacuum comes the right with a 21st century version of the macho male and that is a distinctly limited vision.

It would hardly be accurate to say the pendulum has swung the other way in every aspect, place or regard – clearly that is not true. But in certain places, in certain environments, in certain ways the world is being reshaped by women (I think western education would seem to be a prime example of that) and the consequences (most likely unintended) it seems are starting to tell on boys.