2023 Pontification Book Club: Of Boys and Men
An Exploration of the Trajectory of Men in America
Now for the moment, you have all been waiting for! The 2023 pontification book club!
Some of you are new here, so it is worth explaining a little backstory: my day job involves working for a faith-based non-profit that asks me to do my part in fundraising for my salary. Years ago, I started an annual tradition of giving everyone who gives a significant gift a book as a thank-you for their donation over the calendar year. Beginning in 2021, I formalized this tradition into a proper book club with the book Golden Gates by Conor Doughtery and followed up last year with Ghettoside by Jill Levoy.
This year’s book is one I recently finished, Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Insitute who is charting the increasingly depressing state of men in America.
As someone who has spent a good deal of time coaching and mentoring young men, the book crystallizes something that I have had a growing recognition of but have not been able to articulate fully. Many of our biggest social crises today are rooted in the issues of men, especially young men, and even more specifically, young men who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. These issues are most pronounced around extreme negative phenomena in society: the racial disparities of the US criminal justice and incarceration systems rightly get a lot of attention: what is given a lot less attention is that 90% of those in US jails and prisons are men. COVID deaths for men were disproportionately high, while vaccination rates for men were disproportionately low. Spree Killing is almost exclusively men, while deaths downstream of opioid addiction are majority male, and men are nearly four times as likely to die by suicide.
Other books and authors have detailed the less dramatic ways this is happening: “The End of Men” by Hannah Rosin and the “War Against Boys” by Christina Sommers detail how women were increasingly lapping men in their educational attainment. Nick Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute has written about the issues raised by increasingly large numbers of men not working. Anthony Bradley, and Christian academic, has written extensively about the struggles of young men. Boomlets around gurus like Jordan Peterson led to reporting around the disenchanted young men who hung on his every word.
I think Reeves' book stands out for a couple of reasons. First of all, Reeves is a scholar whose beat is economic mobility: his previous book, Dream Hoarders, is an excellent read on how highly educated elite status is increasingly self-replicating in America. Much of the writing on gender is written by writers who focus on social and cultural commentary. Given that there is increasingly fraught polarization on social issues in 21st-century America, I suspect many previous books failed to appeal to a broad audience. By focusing the book on economic mobility, Reeves does a pretty good (though not perfect) job of avoiding the most charged topics of gender in our culture and generally taking an even hand when they are discussed.
Second, Reeves is a left-of-center academic who doesn’t try to hide his perspective in the book. Given that the majority of the previous work on “the problems of men” has been written by right-of-center authors, some of whom explicitly blame women or the “cultural left” for the problems men are facing. I generally think painting with broad brushes is not helpful, so I hope that Reeves's approach will be read more sympathetically by those on the left who might be skeptical of his premise. And I suspect many will find many points where they think he has erred in his diagnosis or prescription about what to do!
Anecdotal, I have seen increasing recognition from people working with young people in 1-on-1 contexts that this is a growing issue. That said, I generally do not think leaders of powerful institutions universally recognize the problem in our society, and I am very skeptical that it is on the radar of policymakers. I hope that Reeves's book (along with all the previous work) will change that over time.
As always, all are welcome to join the book club and discussion! If you are someone who has given in 2022, you will receive a copy of the book from me as a gift; if you want to give, you can do so below:
(Just make sure to put my name, “Thomas Irwin,” in the Staff box)
I look forward to discussing the book with you all!