Beyond the manosphere: Supporting boys and men in the real world

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I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes! Do you feel that way? Ideas Worth Spreading from TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show, what does it mean to be a man today? Returning now to an issue our next guest has been sounding the alarm on for years.

The current crisis facing boys and young men in this country.

Our boys are in a crisis. Suicide. Yes, this debate has been raging for a while, but since the 2024 presidential election, it has intensified.

Out there, do you want men to be better or do you want phrases like toxic masculinity, the manosphere, or the male loneliness epidemic?

They pepper conversations used to blame some and to rally others. It may start with simple ideas about being an alpha male or—

Toxic masculinity doesn't even exist. The only thing that is toxic is that curse. —a man or a bear. And the women unanimously said, I'd rather come across a bear.

There are those who want to shout about these issues. But there are also people who would rather not talk about them at all.

Honestly, I'm just sick of hearing about it.

Why are men like this? Why is this the reason for the male loneliness epidemic?

There is no male loneliness epidemic.

It is a loser epidemic. Richard Reeves thinks there's a better way.

Keep it boring. And as my son said to me one day, he said, well, if that's your motto, Dad, you are definitely the man for that job. Burn! Exactly. I mean, but it's— but the point is actually by being quite dispassionate about it and just saying, look, these are facts and hopefully reasonably even-handed, I think what it did was create a space for a conversation that was already there. It just didn't quite know how to break into the open.

Richard is the founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He's also the author of the book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. His interest in understanding what was happening to half the population started a decade ago. As a policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, he noticed some troubling trends. And a warning, we do discuss suicide.

I just kept running across these data points that showed me on lots of fronts now, boys and men are the ones who are, who are behind. In education, for example, we see that by the end of high school, boys are a year behind girls in literacy. There's a bigger gender gap on college campuses today than there was in the 1970s, but it's the other way around. So men are a bit further behind women in college today than women were behind men when we passed Title IX. We've seen a big rise in suicide rates among young men especially. And what I came to realize was that there's this cultural moment we're going through. I think a lot of young men and young women actually, but young men are really struggling to kind of come to terms with what does it mean to be a man today? What does it mean to succeed? Who am I? Which are of course age-old questions, but I found that even through listening to the conversations my sons were having, that this was just a question that they were asking in a way that previous generations of men Didn't.

Yeah. So your book came out in 2022, and it really came out with a bang. This felt like a sort of fresh take to a lot of people, I think, particularly maybe of moderate or left persuasion in politics, because everybody had been talking about women's rights for so long. Tell us a little bit about the book, what you were trying to do, and why you think it had such a big influence on people.

Yeah, well, I will say it was quite difficult to land the book in the right way and also to find a publisher. There were a number of conversations with publishers who just just felt that it was too controversial. But it's— my sense of this is that when there's something that's true and there's something that people are feeling in their own lives, so watching their sons struggle at school maybe, or their brother struggle with mental health problems, or whatever it is, but they're also— and let's imagine this as a woman, you know, actually have struggled perhaps in the workplace and really committed to the idea of gender equality, and there's this dissonance. And I think what the book helped some people to do, at least, was to say, you know what, you're not alone, and it's okay to care about both. This is a time of considerable concern about gender equality and what some people fear is a backlash against the rise of women and so on. Just a very— it's been a very contested and difficult time in our culture. I don't think that's a controversial thing to say. And really a sort of pick-your-side sort of moment. And it's one of the reasons I was motivated to write the book is we actually see a lot of men being attracted to more authoritarian impulses. And that's not necessarily a right-left comment. So actually, now's the perfect time to do it. We have to engage with this because if sensible, authoritative institutions aren't dealing with and noticing We're not addressing these issues. What that does is it gives ammunition to the reactionaries who are saying, "You don't care about this stuff." I wanted to find a way to say, "You know what? We actually do have a lot of work still to do for women and girls, but we can't do that in a way that makes the boys and men feel like it's somehow at their expense or vice versa." And so ignoring a problem in the hopes it'll go away— it won't go away. All that will happen is it will turn into a grievance, and then that grievance will get exploited. Mm-hmm. And so this is a necessarily uncomfortable conversation, but it is also a necessary conversation.

Richard is wary of saying that boys and men are in crisis, but he agrees that over the past few years, the discourse over modern masculinity has reached a fever pitch. Do the fears and the data line up though? What is the best way to support them when men's roles in families and the economy have changed so much over the past generation? Today, a conversation with Richard Reeves that is pragmatic, thoughtful, and yes, at times even boring in a good way.

Thank you for calling me boring. I mean this sincerely. That is an incredibly important compliment to me.

Starting with what's happening in schools. Here he is on the TED stage.

On some measures, at least now, men are lagging, uh, quite a way behind. Not least on college campuses. That reflects the fact that boys are trailing girls throughout the education system. Two-thirds of the top academic performers in high school, measured by GPA, are girls. And two-thirds of those at the bottom are boys. It's not just in the US. If we look at the 20 most economically advanced countries in the world, there's on average a 13 percentage point gap in the share of young men and young women with a college degree, with young women much more likely to have a college degree. And just like in the US, these differences at the college level reflect what's happening earlier in the school system. It used to be that maybe boys were ahead in math and science, girls were ahead in reading and language, in roughly equal measure. That's not true today. Internationally, at the age of 15, There's a 5-point gap in favor of boys in math. There's essentially no gap in science. But boys are 30 points behind girls at the age of 15 in reading and language skills. But not all boys and men are struggling in the same way. The intersection of gender with class and race really matters here. So boys from poorer households and middle-class households, much less likely to attend college than girls from the same background. And the gender gaps are even more stark for Black Americans. So anybody who really cares about boys and men has to care about racial injustice and economic inequality. And anybody who really cares about racial injustice and economic inequality has to care about boys and men.

So what was it that you were calling on people to do if they were persuaded that, yes, boys and men are in trouble? What did you say that they needed?

There's a reframing to start with, which is it's not zero-sum. Keep doing the work for women and girls. But if we think there's an issue with boys in education, let's, let's ask ourselves whether it's okay that the share of male teachers has dropped by 10 percentage points. From 33% to 23%. Let's look at what the trouble the boys are having in literacy and start to interrogate that. Make sure you've got the data on gender gaps in your school. So, and also let's not pathologize what's happening with boys and men. I think that the rise of the term toxic masculinity in 2016, I didn't really realize it at the time, but come to believe that was a really, really unfortunate development because it sort of pathologized it. It meant that the whole conversation about boys and men was done in this deficit way. And so be curious, be open, and let's not start with this presumption that it's the problems the problems of boys and men are the problems with boys and men, right? If they just tried harder and picked up their socks and, you know, didn't complain and went to therapy, that they'd be fine, right? It's very odd to me sometimes that progressives are still quite happy to individualize the problems of boys and men in a way that they wouldn't for other groups. And then actually, let's look to some solutions like breaking down gender stereotypes around roles like education. We put huge effort into getting more women into male professions, and it's not mission accomplished yet, but women in STEM, women into law and medicine and so on, has been a huge push. It's been great. Where's equivalent push for men in education and healthcare. So the point simply is to get to that point in the conversation where we agree it's a problem, we're going to tackle it. It doesn't mean doing less for women and girls. We're going to try and find stuff that works. And if that sentence sounded boring to people, hallelujah, hallelujah, because I want the debate about gender to become much more boring. The people who are saying non-boring things about gender are either wrong or grifters.

All right, well, I'm going to say something not boring, I think, but I don't I don't think I mean to be a grifter in any way, but the very argument, your very argument from 2022, that addressing the needs of boys and men who were struggling, um, needed to be claimed by moderates, otherwise it would be claimed by reactionaries— that has come true, no? Like, between the manosphere and YouTube channels about how to be an alpha male that are anti-women, extreme self-improvement, male victimhood, the right extreme and, well, it's all sort of parties right now seems to be embracing this idea of hyper-masculinity in a way that was just sort of, it was there in 2022, but boy, is it here now.

Yeah, I think what's happened is that in the culture, and therefore to some extent in our politics, there has been a reaction. I mean, this is exactly the right word in this case to the perceived, and in some cases, real excesses perhaps the other way. And More broadly, this is the neglect of these issues. One of the most difficult things for me to argue to someone from the more reactionary side of the aisle on these issues until very recently was when they would say, well, they don't care about boys and men, right? The people in power. A boring example makes the point is that the CDC has a disparities in suicide page and it lists the various disparities for LGBTQ, rural, urban, veterans, etc. Race doesn't mention the gender gap. Even though that's the biggest disparity. And men's rightsy people, manosphere-type people, reactionaries, would very often point to that fact and say, look, it's not— they won't even admit the gender gap. And I would be engaging with people at CDC and saying, what are you doing? Just put it on your website. Just acknowledge that there's a gender gap. Why wouldn't you acknowledge that there's a fourfold gap in suicide rates? That's much bigger than any of the other gaps. And so it was frustrating to me that in some ways the mainstream institutions and the government were doing the work of the reactionaries because it allowed them to claim with some plausibility that we were just ignoring these issues of boys and men. That created a vacuum. That vacuum got filled. And the answer is not to necessarily blame the boys and young men who are looking for answers to these questions, looking frankly for someone who seems to care about them, or at least not dislike them. That's our fault. By us, I mean mainstream institutions, mainstream conversations, and families, because we didn't create enough space for this conversation. And as a result, the conversation went elsewhere.

When we come back, more from Richard Reeves on what we can do to support boys and men and define a new kind of masculinity. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. This message comes from CookUnity, the first chef-led meal delivery service where every meal is handcrafted in local micro kitchens, not mass-produced in large facilities. With hundreds of dishes to choose from and over 10 different dietary preferences like high protein, low sodium, GLP-1, and more, taste what happens when real award-winning chefs make fresh, small-batched meals just for you. Go to cookunity.com/radiohour or enter code RADIOHOUR before checkout to get 50% off your First Order.

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Hey, it's Manoush here. I have a fun announcement before we start today's episode. We're doing a special virtual event just for Plus supporters like you. It is happening on Zoom next week, Wednesday, June 10th at 3:00 PM Eastern, noon Pacific. We are gonna talk about how to live better with our technology, how to feel better in our bodies and think more clearly. It's going to be me. I've just written a book called Body Electric, which is a lot of it based on a project we did with NPR listeners. I will be joined by Columbia University Medical Center physiologist Keith D. Erickson. Yes, we are going to take your questions about movement, about being on screens all day, about how we can live better with our tech, about how we can be healthier. Keith is super fun. I think I'm kind of fun too. I think the whole thing's gonna be really fun. So bring your questions. It's just for supporters like you. So I really hope you'll join us. You'll be getting an invite in your email inbox soon with all the details. Look out for that. Thank you as always for your support, and I hope to see you next Wednesday. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, a conversation about boys and men with Richard Reeves. Richard is a writer and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. And based on what we see online, most people might think that the discourse over masculinity is loud and aggressive. But Richard says that in real life, things are actually playing out very differently.

On the one hand, you do see these cultural and political signs of reaction, especially among men, arguably. But at the same time, in real life, we're seeing the onward march on most fronts towards gender equality. So for example, my institute just published a paper on the amount of time that moms and dads spend. Doing childcare as opposed to paid work. We've just seen the fastest reduction in that gap, convergence between mums and dads that we've seen probably for half a century. Now, again, I'm not suggesting that we don't need to do much more on all those fronts, but there's this odd thing happening where online you have, you know, reactionaries, the manosphere, trad wives, no one wants kids, everyone hates each other, you know, no one's having sex, don't take it, whatever it is. And then you go into the real world and you say, well, but wait, the women are working more and earning more and the men are doing more parenting and actually the divorce rate's gone down. And it's sort of weird. I think that away from the smoke and fury of the online culture war, American men and women are slowly but surely figuring this out. And what we need to do is have their backs and try and help them figure it out rather than try and recruit them to a pointless zero-sum culture war.

Can we talk more about economics and jobs and where that fits in? The narrative, of course, has been that jobs went overseas. This started happening 20, 30 years ago, that they created a sort of permanent underclass of people who no longer could provide for their families, no longer had meaning in their life. Do you think that that's the right narrative that's been told? And how How do jobs fit into the equation now in this era of, well, low unemployment rate, but sky-high inflation and this constant conversation that AI is going to take jobs from everyone?

Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of things. One is that on the cultural level, over the last half century, we have just massively changed the economic relation between men and women. Most couples with kids, they both work now. 40% of women now earn more than the typical, the median man, where it's only like 1 in 10 in the '70s. And this has become an expectation now that both men and women will work, not in the same way. I'm not saying that we've solved the problems, but it's a very different world now. What that means is that the question of what does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a "breadwinner" when you're not going to be the sole breadwinner anymore? That's a question. And it's the result of the greatest economic liberation in human history. Which is the rise of women. And I think you'd have to be very odd indeed not to celebrate that fact. And pretty much everyone does really celebrate that fact, except again, some of these fringes online maybe. So it's great. But we shouldn't be naive and ignore the fact that that does raise questions. You know, I'm in my 50s. So even for my generation, it's like, okay, my dad was the breadwinner and had a great marriage and great relationship. I'm not the sole breadwinner. In fact, I was a stay-at-home dad for a while. And so it's a very different kind of negotiation that we're having in our relationships now. And if you just think it's naive naive to think that isn't going to cause some friction, that isn't going to be difficult. And then especially for the men with less economic power, like I'm doing it from a position of great privilege economically speaking. Working-class men, men without college degrees, their wages have been flat effectively for decades. And so it's not just a relative loss of position between men and women. It's in many cases a loss of absolute position. These men are actually no richer than their fathers were at the same age. That's a massive cultural shock. And so we've— we don't go back on the rise of women. In fact, we need to do more. But we also need to figure out what does that mean, how to be a father, etc. With fathers doing more and more in the home, we need institutions that support both mothers and fathers. And so we do need more generous paid leave. We need that leave to be paid at much higher levels if men are going to feel comfortable taking it. That's just a fact. The point about AI and the job markets now is a very interesting and timely one because What we're actually seeing right now is, and it's been true for the last few years, that there's been huge employment growth for women and much slower employment growth for men, job growth for men. And so in 2025, about 3 in 4 of the jobs created were in healthcare or social services, right? Overwhelmingly female professions. And so you'll see just this huge rise in employment for women and much less than if pretty flat for men, but it's because of this occupational separation, right? The jobs that men have traditionally done in manufacturing, as you point out, manufacturing, mining, etc., they have declined and they've declined under President Trump just as they did under President Biden. There is nothing that the tariffs or talking about this is going to do about that. And there was this very odd moment. I don't know if you remember this, but in one of President Trump's State of the Union addresses, he had this line where he said, we've created X number of jobs, whatever it was. No one has benefited more from our thriving economy than women. And this is the one where all Democrat women were in suffragette white. Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah, uh-huh, I do. And they were kind of jeering him. And oh, that makes— but then comes to this point where he says, we've created X number of jobs and most of them went to women who have filled 58% of the newly created jobs last year. And you could just see all the Democrat women in their suffragette white thinking, oh, uh, what do I do? Do I cheer? Do I cheer? Yeah, they did end up cheering. There was this kind of moment where they're like, uh, yes, that's great. You weren't supposed to do that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before. But it's also kind of weird for President Trump to be bragging about the fact that he was the president who was creating the female economy, right? Given how he'd run. And so it's just a good example of the oddity of this. But the broader point is that many of the AI-protected jobs in things like healthcare, more hands-on, they are much more female-dominated, at least for the moment. And so that does mean that, and no one can predict how this will go, that does mean that men are kind of losing out. And so for me, it means that the need to get more men into those professions, many of which are really desperate for workers. So if you think about nursing and teaching and social care and childcare and so on, they're desperate for workers. It's not just that there aren't very many men in healthcare and education, it's that the share is actually declining. And so as those are the jobs of the future, we've got to do a better job and learn from the lessons of the Women into STEM movement to get more men into what I call the HEAL professions— healthcare, education, administration, literacy. I think that means scholarships, that means outreach programs, that means particular institutions whose job it is to help boys think of those careers as ones for them, early apprenticeships, etc. Let's try and break down the stereotypes that these are somehow, quote, women's jobs. I long for the day when we don't say male nurse or male teacher in just the same way that we shouldn't anymore be saying lady lawyer or female doctor, because more than half of our law schools and medical schools are women now, and those professions are moving rapidly to equality. And so breaking down the gender stereotypes around occupations has now become a bit of an existential thing for the employment prospects of men and no longer just a sort of seminar nice to have.

How difficult is that going to be considering that Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who was in the White House at that time, have made masculinity, real masculinity, a political identity and one that like has no room for empathy at all, which is crucial to all those jobs that you're describing that will be available?

I think one of the really most unfortunate turns recently is somehow to feel that to to pay attention to men, to be, you know, have some empathy for the position that men are in, to actually allow men to, quote, be men in ways that are positive, not negative, but without expecting them to somehow become androgynous, right? Somehow the reaction to that has been to lean back into a more hyper-masculinity, as you say. It's just this sort of almost cartoonish adolescent view of masculinity. I mean, you know what I mean? I sometimes think about like, well, what's all of this reminding me of, right? And actually what it's reminding me of is not my 26-year-old son, to pick one of them, but my 16-year-old son. And so I actually don't find the toxic— non-toxic, as I said, toxic masculinity is a very unhelpful term. But I do think there's something to the idea of maturity. What does it mean to be a grown-up, to be mature? And I think for men, that is much more of a social construction in some ways. Um, so what does it mean to be grown-up rather than adolescent? And so there's a bit of a glorying sometimes in the transgressiveness and boorishness that is much more associated with a young man, an immature man, a man in his puberty. Like, I was not as boring when I was 14 as I am when I'm 56, because guess what? I grew up, and growing up is hard to do. And so, and again, I think that's a reaction to what was previously seen as a, like, a sort of squeezing out of any discussion of masculinity and sometimes a pathologization of any trait that seemed to be masculine. You did have a generation of young men who are probably a bit over it. So my view is that what happened here politically and culturally is that a lot of young men were just— they actually want their sisters and friends to have the same opportunities as them. They are doing more fathering, as I've said. Violent crime has fortunately gone down. But they also don't want to feel bad about themselves. And they don't want to be told that they're the problem. And so I think what happened, particularly perhaps in 2024, was that just a lot of these young men— and you really— it was very interesting that it was the younger of the young men who are most likely to have voted Republican. In the last election. So it was the 18-year-olds more than the 28-year-olds, which is again against trend. And I don't think that means for a moment that they're going to continue to do that. What I think happened was that— I'll make a political point without perhaps taking sides— is that I've noticed that when Democrats talk about what happened with young men in particular in the last election, they tend to say, why did young men move to the right? And I don't see any shift in their policy views or anything. And I would say to are you quite sure that they didn't move away from the left? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. I guess that's a much harder thing to think, right? It's in some ways very easy to think these young men spent too much time online. They listened to too many podcasts. They got beguiled by this hypermasculinity. And we've created an overnight generation of misogynists who suddenly voted the wrong way from their perspective. Or is it that they were just up for grabs? They weren't sure. They couldn't make up their mind. And they were just kind of a bit sick of the left. And sick of some of the language they were getting from the left and didn't really see anything for them on the left. They didn't see much from the Democrats. I mean, this is at this point a little bit of a fable, although it's true. So fable's the wrong metaphor, but the Democrats famously have a website that says who they stand for. If you go to their website now, you'll see it. It's like, who we stand for, and it lists various demographic groups that the party stands for. And you don't need me to tell you at this point in the conversation, which group do you think is missing from that? And so it's, I'm not suggesting that young men were going to the Democrat website, and seeing that it didn't mention men. You don't mention us. Yeah, where am I on the list of somebody? But it does indicate something about the way in which the progressive side of institutions and political life somehow or other managed to convince themselves that in order to be for lots of other groups, they had to leave out or sometimes even be against men. And that was a fatal political era, as well as, in my view, just a category error.

Anecdotally, I mean, I live in New York City, so take this with a grain of salt, but I can't tell you how many moms I know who, when Charlie Kirk was killed, said, "I had no idea who this man was, but my teenage son was the one who explained it to me." Because they all knew, because they said, "Oh, he comes up in my feed all the time, Mom." So how much does technology— I mean, it feels like everybody is talking about sports betting and pornography and gaming and day trading and crypto and, you know, AI companions that won't be able to teach young men what it's like to have a real relationship. There seems to be an onslaught of looking for young men's time and money and attention. Do you think that people— there's a lot of hand-wringing around that, or is this very troublesome?

It depends which bit of it we're talking about, honestly. I think, like, I mean, they live online, right? They live in an algorithmic online world, right? That's just the way it is. And they understand the algorithm in a way that, frankly, I still don't. You know, I needed my sons for a long time to say, Dad, that's the algorithm doing that. How does it work again? What's the algorithm? And they play with their algorithms, right? So the digital natives, is they live online. Now, that doesn't mean they only live online, but it means that they're kind of— their online and offline lives don't have this clear, bright line between them in a way that I think for those of us who are much older makes sense to us. You know, we actually— I have a Boys and Men Online program at my institute, and that makes a lot of sense to us. But when they play with their friends online and they see them later, and it's just— it's a much more blurry line for them. What do we— we have to be really clear. So in some ways, like, we can't just worry about the online world. That's just like worrying about the world. What are we worried about? Sports betting? Is a huge problem for young men. And it's a great example of a gendered problem because it's much more true for men. Because men, we could get into this, but they are more risk-taking, especially at that young age. And it's partly about frontal cortex development, but it's just true. One of the most reliably found sex differences in risk-taking. And so, ta-da, sports betting, casino in your pocket, disaster for young men, disaster. And we're doing a lot of work with policymakers on that. That's a huge problem. Some of the others, it's just a little bit less clear with gaming, pornography, etc. I think if I'm— as I think about this as a parent myself, and certainly when my kids are at home, when I talk to other parents about it, the way I think about it is for boys and young men, it's less that what they're doing online, with some of the exceptions we've just mentioned, is directly harmful, right? It's not much evidence that gaming is harmful in and of itself. It's more what are they not doing when they're doing that? What is it displacing, right? And so if it's displacing in real life activity and particularly, and I think this picks up your point about relationships, developing relational skills in the physical world. And the thing that I really worry about is the atrophying of those relational skills, right? Which are not just very important, but more important. And we talked about AI a minute ago. We also talked about how marriages and relationships now need a lot more negotiation. I think actually relational skills are getting more important by the day. And yet if you're spending all your time online, you're not developing those skills. And so it's really, for me, it's about how it displaces the in-real-life activities that are where you really learn how to be in the world. And that's the bigger problem for boys. I think it's more directly harmful to girls and young women in some ways because of the visual elements and the bullying elements you see online and the self-harm that will very often come from the body image problems. And so they're just playing out differently for boys and girls. But if I'm a parent, I'm just thinking, look, it's not that your boy being online is bad. And probably most of the content he's seeing, he's discerning and he's arguing about it. And you should be curious about that. Like I had one of my sons sit down, we watched Andrew Tate videos together. Andrew Tate's this online probably most people know who he is now. We sat and we watched some of the videos together, actually with one of their girlfriends. What do you like about this? What do you like about that? Well, that's pretty horrible. We don't agree with that. Right. And so just engage with the content because they're there. It's all coming at them. And the question is, how are they discerning it and how are they filtering it? And which bits do they believe and which bits do they not believe? And how is it shaping them? And the solution to it is not to sort of have a moral panic. We don't need the sound of slammed laptops. Jobs across the country. What we need is the sound of curious parents engaging with their kids about their content and having honest conversations about it and correcting them, which is what I did with my son, right? Like, yeah, but that's not true, is it? Let's look into that. Or do you really believe that? Or whatever. Just have that argument with them rather than just going, oh no, internet, manosphere, bad, slam shut. That lack of curiosity on the part of parents and the panic sometimes gets in the way of real engagement. So sometimes it takes a deep breath, but just ask your sons if If there's someone listening to this who can't quite believe that their son is saying the things they're saying or is interested, just take a deep breath and say, "Huh, why do you think that? Where did you get that from? Show me where you got that from. Let's look into that. You know, maybe I'm wrong about that, but let's look into it." If you panic and immediately go into judgmental mode, you've just done the work of the reactionaries, because that's exactly what they say you'll do.

So don't do it. In a moment, more from Richard Reeves on what people get wrong about the struggles of boys and men. Including the idea of male loneliness.

There are some surveys showing that loneliness rates are higher among men, but we've published work on this now looking at a much wider range of surveys, and we don't find much of a gender gap. We do find a big class gap. It's more of a class story than a gender story.

I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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Before we get back to the show, have you checked out the NPR app recently? From live radio and digital stories to videos and podcasts, the NPR app has everything you love about NPR in one place. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, we have been talking to Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. When Richard first started writing his book, Of Boys and Men, he says that publishers felt the topic was too political, too hot to touch, and that no one would want to read his research into why young men weren't doing as well academically, going to college less than women, and having more mental health crises. But when the book came out in 2022, it was a surprise hit. Philanthropists started offering to fund his new institute, and politicians including California Governor Gavin Newsom, Maryland's Wes Moore, and Utah Governor Spencer Cox have backed his policy proposals.

So what's happening, I think, is that slowly but surely, this sensibility about boys and men is being built into the policy conversation and into the policy architecture. And that's starting to lead to some really exciting developments. I hope that within the next few years, actually having programs to help men in higher education, for example, having similar programs to get men into teaching and nursing, as we've seen in STEM, would be great. I've just launched the Male Educator Network, which is specifically modeled on some of the organizations like the Society of Women in Engineering, to try and get more men into teaching and support the men who are in teaching. I hope that within 4 or 5 years, we will be like, yeah, of course we would do that, why wouldn't we do that? That. We'll keep doing the other stuff too. But so every year that goes past, it feels like the controversy quotient goes down a bit. And the more politicians and policymakers are talking about this in a positive way, then the more heat will come out of it. And also, I'll risk saying this, that if you've got these mainstream politicians, left and right, just engaging with this in a positive way, not in a culture war-y way, but just doing something about it, I think that takes the wind out of the sails of the reactionaries because they can no longer say that we're not doing anything. We can give them a whole long laundry list of things that we're doing. We're saying you're talking about boys and men. We're actually doing stuff for them. Where's your policy agenda? You're good on podcasts, but where's your policy list? We've actually done a bunch of stuff for boys and men. Sorry, what have you done? That's the winning combination, I think.

I mean, it's not as though culture, shifting culture doesn't matter. We see a lot of the most successful politicians who are really good at doing that, from Mayor Momdani here in New York City to the White House. How do you begin to get these ideas into the culture as well and make them, get them out of the statehouse, and they can't be obscure, right? It has to be a sense of masculinity that will actually be embraced by everyone.

I think that's right. I think we have to improve the cultural conversation about this. But I think we have to do it quite carefully and quite slowly. Let's not play that culture war game in quite the same way. I think what we need is healthier role models and conversations, etc. I think it matters when you have a governor like Gavin Newsom, who is no conservative, standing up and saying, I want 10,000 more men into service, right? The male service challenge. We need our men. And saying, we were wrong about this. We've got to do more on this. He then will go on to do excellent work on women and girls as well. And I could mention similar examples from the other governors, but that matters. And in some ways, just signaling that we've noticed and we care goes a long way. I think in the end, I don't think men generally want— they don't want a men's party. They don't want a manifesto, a policy manifesto that's just about boys and men in the end. They just want to know that they're included, right? And that it's not just about women and girls. It's that they're not asking, I think, for a huge shift in the culture. They want to feel like they're not the problem. They want to know that we've got it. We're listening to them. And Mandami is a good, interesting example. One of my— actually, one of my supporters texted me after his win and said, I've just been looking at the exits. It looks like he did quite really well among young men. But I thought Trump did really well among young— what's happening? And I'm saying, well, what's happening is that, as I have been trying to say, young men's votes are up for grabs. They haven't somehow shifted into this other fixed position. And maybe they liked his energy and they liked his specificity. And here's the thing, maybe they liked his courage. Maybe they just liked the fact that he seemed like his own man and actually didn't lean very hard into lots of the kind of culture tropes we've talked about before. And even if they didn't agree with him on policy in some cases, as they definitely didn't agree with Donald Trump on policy on many things. He seemed like a guy who was someone they could aspire to be. And so I think it's more important that we show what mature, positive masculinity looks like rather than telling people what it looks like.

Can I ask where, uh, sort of race and class figures into this conversation? Because the difference between a kid who maybe doesn't have access to really basic opportunities like getting out into the workforce or good teachers or supportive parents, that's gonna be very different than another kid who's going to get an undergraduate degree but maybe feels very lonely for other reasons and doesn't know why he's getting a degree because everybody says AI's gonna eat his job. And I'm just wondering, are you trying to break it out out in some way, depending on means and race?

I think some of these cultural questions about masculinity, my role, relational skills, those are not restricted to certain groups. I do think that at all levels of society, a lot of young men are struggling with those questions. It's just, if you've got the resources, you're much more likely to be able to answer them, or at least keep going while you're wrestling with them. But you're quite right that actually, if you intersect this with class and race, that's very, very different. The simple version of this is is that if you take any level of economic or social disadvantage, that will impact boys more than girls. It's not that it won't impact girls, right? But the education gaps, for example, this is a great, a great example of this. And Sean Riordan out of Stanford has very good work on this. You see that there is a gender gap on most educational outcomes across the class distribution, but it's much smaller at the top than it is at the bottom. So the poorer the neighborhood, the weaker the school, the less stable the family structure is, the worse the boys will do relative to the girls, right? So it's not that the girls aren't also going to suffer. So class compounds the gender gap in a big way. And for Black boys and men in particular, you see very significant challenges. And there are lots and lots of measures where Black boys and men are a long way behind Black women and girls. That's true for other groups of men, but it's particularly true for Black boys and men. So for example, there are already twice as many Black women going to and through colleges as there are Black Black men. HBCUs now have— historically Black colleges and universities— now have as many non-Black students at them as they have Black men at them because the decline in the share of male enrollment at HBCUs has been so significant. Obviously, there's issues around incarceration, education, etc. And so you've got to have that sensibility and basically go to where the data is, because honestly, not everything goes the way you're always going to expect it. So you can't decide in advance which intersections are going to generate which outcomes. And I think that's the problem with a scholars is that they've decided in advance what the rank ordering is, right? So women are always worse off than men and certain groups are always worse off than white, etc. But if you then add class to the mix and you add geography to the mix, that's just not true. So let's be led by the data.

Where does it fit into— there's a trope, whether it's true or not, that men have such a hard time making friends that the sort of civic institution where you know, the guys used to get together and play poker, or maybe they were in the Lions Club or whatever else there was. The sort of male gathering has stopped in some way. Are you finding that to be true? Is that part of the reason why there is also a lot of male loneliness and other mental health issues?

It's, it's partly true, but it's a great example of what we were just talking about, which is the difference between class and gender as well. And it is something I've had to change my mind on as the data has come in, honestly, because in my book and in the early parts of my work, I was very much talking about the male loneliness problem. Yeah. And through a very gendered lens. And there is, there are some surveys showing that loneliness rates are higher among men. But we've published work on this now looking at a much wider range of surveys. And we don't find much of a gender gap. We do find a big class gap. It's more of a class story than a gender story, with those without college degrees being much more likely to be lonely than those with college degrees. And so again, like, depend— like, who are we thinking about here? Who are we really worried about, right? Are we worried about our son who hasn't made friends in his dorm room at college? Sure, that's a worry that every parent might have, but the deep loneliness is actually among those with less economic power. There is There is somewhat more social isolation among men, which is a little bit different to loneliness because that's a subjective sense that you report on. And it does look to me as if male friendship, male socialization in the sense of connection does seem to require more institutional support than female, again, at the average. I mean, stereotypically, when I'm thinking about myself, my own friends, we have to do something together, right? Yeah, we can't just— like, I can't just say, hey, let's meet for a coffee. My friends would think, what are you talking about? What's wrong with you? Like, we have to go hiking or soccer or watch something or do something. We have to sort of— we have to pretend to be doing something else while we're just being friends. And men are a bit more comfortable shoulder to shoulder than face to face. It turns out that seems to be true on average. But what that means is that we do have to have a bit more intention and social structure around around male interaction. Women, on the average, women seem to be a little bit better at just making those social connections organically and naturally without the need for it to be because you're starting a pickleball league or whatever. And so what that means is that we need institutions for men, right? And so whether it's church or union or club or whatever, and I'm a bit worried, there's a suspicion about all-male groups and all-male spaces. And I get why from historically, right? Of course I get why.

Club.

That's what people are worried about, or the old boys club or whatever. Like, it's like, there's a sort of Pew survey on this showing that, like, Democrat and Democrat-leaning women are most likely to say that all female social groups are good for society, and the majority of them say that all male social groups are bad for society. Now, they could be thinking about fraternities. We don't know what they're thinking about in answer to that question. But, and there's some evidence that women are now more likely to travel with other women in a group and so on than men are. So the kind of girls weekend away is more common than the boys weekend, etc. And look, I don't in any I want to inhibit women from doing it, of course. Hopefully that's clear by now. But I do still have some female friends like, yeah, I'm not sure I want these guys all going off on their own together. Really? Because we kind of need to go off on our own together. We like hanging out with our mates sometimes. And the suspicion of that or the fear of that is maybe a problem now.

Well, you know, and maybe social media has to do with that as well, with male circles going and playing drums and beating of chest. Tests and extreme sports and pain inflicted in order to reclaim your manliness.

Yes, these weekends. There's a new— there's a thing called the new— I think I tried it— the New Warrior Weekend is one of them. I, I will say, in this spirit of doing the research for my book, I tried to do one, uh-huh, and I lasted an hour. Um, like, I'm out of here. Uh, I really— I mean, I thought I thought it was sissy. Uh, there were some issues right up front, let's just say that. I'm like, like, guys, Is this— you're just going to be mean, really unnecessarily mean and brutal? And they're like, yeah, that's part of the point of it. You know what? I'm out. I'm out. Don't need that. I've had enough. I don't need artificially inflicted pain. Thank you very much. But they're like, well, that's part of the point. I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm out. And then they had this very earnest conversation about why I was leaving. I said, I'm leaving because you guys are just a bunch of bullying each other. And there are good versions of things like that. Yeah, right. There are good versions of men being in community with each other. There are good versions even of sort of rites of passage and done in a good way and elevating each other and finding ways to progress through and help each other and mentor each other and maybe older men helping kind of younger men. And there are good, non-weird, non-bullying, non-creepy versions of those. And so let's not just categorize everything like that. Like when my friends and I go away for the weekend, it's like a quote, hiking weekend. We drink and we eat and hike and chat and we just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. You know, it's— I will share this story that once on one of these, we were actually on a night out and I accidentally butt-dialed my wife while I'm out with my male friends. And so she got this long voicemail from me out with my, you know, I think it was like 5 or 6 of us or whatever. And we're out having quite a rowdy night. So she gets a really long voicemail and she's like, I knew I shouldn't have listened, but like I just couldn't stop myself just listening to a little bit of it because you could hear the conversation, as she said. And then I got 10 minutes into the argument about whether Star Wars was better than Star Trek. Oh, wow. And decided it was safe to stop listening. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, that is kind of the stuff we talk about. I don't know what you're afraid. And it's not— of course, that's not all we talk about. We will talk about our wives and our relationships and, you know, stuff like maybe like is more personal to those spaces. So I'm glad she stopped listening at that point. I can't remember what we went on to. But, but look, that's part of the point, isn't it? And I suspect that women listening will say you might say the same thing thing too. Like, when you hang out with your female friends who are kind of similar situations to you, like, isn't part of the point of that to talk about your relationships and how you're doing and stuff that it's maybe harder to talk to your partner about, or stuff that's about your partner and your relationship and sex and things like that? Isn't that part of the point?

So where does all this lead? I mean, how do you define this new version of masculinity, and how do we get there?

I strongly believe that you you don't tell boys and young men how to be a man, you show them. And so that's about having more men in the lives of boys, whether that's teachers, mentors. There's a huge shortage of male volunteers. So anybody who's listening to this and wondering how they can help, well, one thing you could do is sign up to be a Big, because Big Brothers Big Sisters is a huge lack of male volunteers and therefore a massive waiting list for the boys. And other institutions where you're kind of just putting men in the lives of boys. And so there's this real concern about these negative male role models that boys are encountering either online or on screens one way or the other. And the best answer to that, I think, is less having more positive male role models online. They're there and we should encourage that, but it's more to have honest-to-God flesh-and-blood men in their lives. And so when I think about, like, the negative influences that many of the kids that my son teaches in 5th grade are getting, I think maybe the best answer to that is him at the front of the classroom and then coaching the girls' soccer team afterwards and not saying, here's how to be a man, but just showing them, right, that you can be a guy and get— be into your soccer and, you know, be into playful stuff that's maybe codes a bit more male, but you're also incredibly caring and a teacher and love kids. We can't script masculinity in this very narrow way any more than we should script femininity. If I try to write a script for what it means to be a mature and pro-social positive woman. I think I would get into all kinds of trouble, and not just because I'm doing it as a man, but because a lot of women would be like, no, that's not how I want to be a woman. I want to be a woman like this, and I want to be a woman like this, and I want to be a woman like this. Hmm. The great gift of the women's movement has been to expand the ways in which it's okay to be a woman, to expand the opportunities for identity that women can take. And I'm not saying that we finished that job yet, but we should do the same for men. So we shouldn't be trying to narrow what it means to be a man. We should be trying to expand what it means to be a man, but also not in any way pathologizing the things that tend to skew a little bit more male. So if men are a little bit more risk-taking, let's channel that in a positive direction. And so I worry a lot sometimes people say, what's your solution? What's your formula for masculinity? And you either end up just saying something that just sounds incredibly vague, or you end up with a prescription somehow, like A plus B minus is the modern masculine formula, and that's not the world we want to live in. I don't want to put my wife or my female friends in some sort of box as to what it means to be a good woman, and I don't want my sons— I don't want to put them in a box either.

That was Richard Reeves. He is the president of the Institute for Boys and Men and author of the book Of Boys and Men. You can hear his full talk at TEDx www.npr.org. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Thank you so much for listening to our episode. It was produced by Rachael Faulkner White and Avery Keatley. It was edited by Sana Zmeskin-Poor. And our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussaye, Katie Monteleone, Fiona Guerin, Matthew Cloutier, Harsha Nahada, and Phoebe Lett. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineer was Becky Brown. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Helen Walters, Roxane Hailash, and Daniela Bellorezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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