Richard Reeves is not a reactionary. He spent most of his career at left-leaning think tanks—Demos, Brookings—working on issues like social mobility and racialized income gaps. But a few years ago, unsettling statistics kept crossing his desk: data that pointed to boys and men struggling, in some cases much more than girls and women. Boys weren’t succeeding in school, men were flailing in the labor market. Male suicides were up, male deaths from Covid weirdly high. It’s right-wing catnip, women outpacing men—and Reeves, an avowed feminist and lefty in good standing, wasn’t eager to provoke. But he followed the data, and it led him to a cause: improving the lives of boys and men. Last year, Reeves founded a DC-based think tank, the American Institute for Boys and Men. Its work, he insists, is to advocate for men without blaming or kneecapping women. He believes that gender equality is not zero-sum, that the liberation of women is a crucial and ongoing project, but that men are facing real systemic issues that we as a society should address. His 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, was on Barack Obama’s summer reading list this August. In May, philanthropist Melinda French Gates gave Reeves a $20 million grant to help men and boys. Reeves spoke with us about the risks and rewards of this controversial work. If you’re talking to a skeptic, what’s the best evidence that there’s a crisis among men and boys? I often start with mental health. The suicide rate is four times higher among men than women, and we’re losing 40,000 men a year to suicide. I think that’s a problem. This doesn’t mean it’s not also a female issue, but anything else that’s skewed four to one, you’d think, oh, that’s primarily an issue for that group. How did you decide to make this your cause? When the pandemic hit, the college enrollment rate dropped seven times more for men than for women in that first year. And there was very little coverage of it. It struck me that this would get coverage if it was the other way around. That’s a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. It’s the job of the Office on Women’s Health, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research—it’s the job of those people to say, “How is this affecting women and girls?” But there was nobody doing that for men. It was nobody’s job to draw attention to trends that were disproportionately affecting men or boys, except perhaps some men’s-rights activists online who were definitely not driven by evidence or policy. So the asymmetry in the public debate suddenly became glaringly obvious to me, and I felt there was no choice but to try and fix it. Men are struggling in the labor market, particularly if they’re working-­class. You write about the psychological malaise that’s resulted from upending the traditional male role of family breadwinner. It’s incredibly important not to make the mistake, which a lot of the reactionaries do, of thinking that the fall of men is the result of the rise of women—which has been arguably the greatest economic liberation in human history. What I would say, though, is the economic rise of women has changed the terms of trade between men and women, and it has put a question mark next to the role of men, which is not one that previous generations of men have really had to answer. This has been massively destabilizing for male identity. I think the result has been to leave many men feeling pretty uncertain about their place, struggling to find their footing, because we’ve torn up the old script for how to be a man—which is that you’re going to be the head of the household, you’re going to have to be a breadwinner—and good riddance, to the extent that this was about men having economic power over women. But it hasn’t been replaced. The old script for women, which was about being a housewife and mother, has been replaced with a very empowering script about economic independence and autonomy. And we didn’t replace the old male script, which has created a huge vacuum. You write about men having fewer sources of meaning and identity, which can make them more fragile. Yeah, women seem to have a more balanced portfolio when it comes to their sense of self. In their identity portfolio, there may be career and work, but also mom, romantic partner, friend, daughter, or some kind of community activity they’re involved in, because women are more likely to do that. “I have a very strong belief that it’s hard to create a world of flourishing women with a world of floundering men.” One of the big insights of the women’s movement was that women’s identity was too narrowly confined to that of wife and mother, and we needed to expand that. So women have expanded. And that gives you a little bit more psychological resilience, at least in principle, because it means that if you have a bad day at work, you can make up for it by being a better mom or a better friend or daughter or something. For men, though, it’s still more narrowly defined around work and career. But if more of our identity could rest on our role, say, as a father, then that would help to counterbalance difficulties we might be having in the workplace—especially if you’re struggling to find employment. And that’s one of the reasons why unemployment hits men much harder than women psychologically. It’s not that it doesn’t hurt women, it’s just that women’s sense of themselves is not quite so tightly wrapped up with that job. You were a stay-at-home dad for years. How did that happen in your family? I’m the father of three sons, all in their twenties now, and years ago my wife and I decided that we wanted to raise our kids ourselves and we didn’t want to self-­destruct in stress. That meant we couldn’t have two big jobs at once—we needed one of us to be the point person for the home. When I worked in government, she was point person on the home front. But we were determined that it wouldn’t just be one of us, because that would create a massive imbalance in the relationship. Basically, we did tag-team parenting, and it was my turn—for four or five years in the 2000s—while she was a partner at a management-consulting firm. During that period, you’ve said that you were still a provider–but one of household and emotional labor. Is that a blueprint for a new male script? When I was a stay-at-home dad, I felt like as much of a provider as I did in periods when I’ve been the main breadwinner. I was just providing something different. I switched the idea of provider away from purely money to providing support and time and energy and love. There’s something resonant about the idea of provider for many men—it makes you feel incredibly needed. Man to man: Reeves speaking to a class at Wabash College in Indiana. Turning to the political side of this, there is a huge partisan gender gap. Why do you think a lot of men are feeling left behind by Democrats? The gender gap among young people is real and it’s new. It’s important to note that it is just as much driven by young women moving to the left as young men moving to the right. I actually don’t think there’s an enthusiastic lurch to the right among men—there’s no evidence that young men have changed their mind on policy, and they’re just as supportive of gender equality as they ever were. I think for a lot of men, they just don’t see much for them on the left side of the political aisle. There’s an absence of attention to the issues that affect them. When I talk to Democrats about this, they say, well, we’re going to win the election off the votes of women, and we think that if we start talking about the issues of men, that will turn off women. But I think that’s wrong—and I think it’s actually a bit insulting to women. They seem to be suggesting that women can’t say, “I want you to do stuff for me, but by the way, if you can do stuff to help out my struggling brother, that would be awesome.” I think most women want to do that. Yeah, there are lots of reasons women would want to fix these crises afflicting men. If men are struggling to step up into various roles, who’s going to pick up the slack? Women, typically. I find it really interesting that young women don’t take much persuading that young men are struggling, because these are the men they’re trying to date, the people who they’re looking to form families with. So if we think it’s good for women to be able to have good, shared, equal relationships with men, then we do need men to do better. I have a very strong belief that it’s hard to create a world of flourishing women with a world of floundering men. Most people talking about this are proposing more reactionary solutions–women going back to the kitchen, that sort of thing. What are the risks in choosing this as your project? A friend and colleague told me, look, it doesn’t matter how carefully you do this or how many caveats you put around it: You’ll get written off as having gone over to the dark side. But if the mere act of raising these issues paints you as a reactionary, then it’s also almost the definition of a vicious circle: When the only people allowed to talk about this are the ones who are happy to wear the label of reactionary, then the only ones talking about it will be reactionaries. At some point, if you want this to be a mainstream conversation, the normal, boring people like me have to start talking about it. Have you gotten the amount of blowback you’ve expected? No, I’ve gotten less. People want to talk about this—they just need permission. Everybody wants to have this conversation about their sons, their brothers, their husbands, their fathers, the boys in their schools, the young men they’re trying to date. This is getting more mainstream, more normal, safer to talk about. A lot of parents I talk to feel like if their boy is struggling, maybe it’s them. It’s almost like they see it as a private issue. I was trying to say, actually, this is a public-policy issue. These are public-health issues, public-­education issues. You’re not alone. But my internal motto is “Keep it boring.” What I mean is to keep it mainstream—just deal with the issues. I don’t want to talk about culture wars, I don’t want to talk about fringe issues. I want to talk about suicide and high-school graduation and college graduation and wages and families. That’s my mission. I want to bring this issue away from the fringes and into the mainstream. So far, I’ve been really pleased with the response. RelatedThe Post’s Classical Critic Talks About Big Muscles and the Struggles of Modern Men This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Washingtonian.The post It’s Not Just Conservatives Who Think Men Are in Crisis first appeared on Washingtonian.