Transcript: The Crisis of Masculinity - Christine Emba and Richard Reeves talk boys and men on a Washington Post podcast

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MR. CAPEHART: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post and host of the “Capehart” podcast. Well, concerns about masculinity and the American male has increasingly become an interesting and fraught part of societal and political discourse. We’ve got two great voices coming at this conversation from different vantage points but coming to similar conclusions. Christine Emba is the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation” and a Washington Post opinion writer who penned the recent essay, “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.” And you see below her, Richard Reeves. He’s the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of the book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.”

Christine, Richard, welcome to Washington Post Live.

Get the full experience. Choose your plan DR. REEVES: Thank you.

MS. EMBA: Thank you so much for having us.

MR. CAPEHART: I’m really looking forward to this conversation with both of you, because, as I said, you’re both coming at this really interesting conversation from different vantage points.

Christine, let me start with you. In your Opinions Essay, you took a closer look at the changing narrative around masculinity as revealed through your research. What does the modern man look like, and what does society expect of him?

MS. EMBA: So that’s the real question. The modern man looks confused. In my research, I talked to young men around the country, really, and sort of asked them what they thought it meant to be a man in this day and age and whether being a man had become harder over time. And so many of them said that, yes, it had become harder because they no longer knew exactly what their place was in the world. In a really personal sense, you know, they’ve been brought up with at least some masculine ideals of being the provider, perhaps being a man in the house, taking the lead in some ways, and yet they saw their female friends and classmates surging ahead, you know. When it comes to college education, for example, there are only 74 men getting college degrees for every 100 women. When they used to rely on sort of strength and physical prowess and be able to depend on that in the workforce, they’re realizing that soft skills are sort of what is looked for in the new economy. There’s no longer really the possibility of sort of getting a male factory job and providing for a whole family for the rest of your life.

And then they were missing role models, really missing role models, and this was the thing that I found most alarming. Many of them said that they didn’t necessarily have father figures in their lives or men that they really looked up to or that the adults in their lives felt nervous about prescribing any particular model of masculinity and just said, “Well, go be a good person,” which wasn’t enough instruction for them. So they were turning to these influencers like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, who were providing, if not a good path, at least a very clear one.

MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. And to your point about lacking role models, I think one of the first people you talked to was like a postdoctoral student or professor in a tweed jacket who had younger folks coming to him looking for advice, and he was like, “Why?” He was confused, like “Why me?”

But, Richard, you have three boys of your own. You dedicate your book to them. One of the opening lines in your book is that you are worried about the boys. Two questions. Why? And have the conversations you’ve had with your own sons fed that worry?

DR. REEVES: Yes. Christine has already set out some of the statistics that I think are also covered very well in her essay, I want to say. I think her essay is an incredibly important moment in this debate. It could be seen as something of a landmark, frankly, given kind of who and where it’s coming from.

And what was happening to me was that in my day job as a public policy wonk, I was seeing these stats, including in education but also the decline in male earnings, the surge in youth male suicide, the much higher death rates of men from covid, et cetera, et cetera. And what I felt was–and then I’m talking to my sons about their own experience in education and the dating market and so on and realizing there was a real disconnect between their experience of what it was like to try to figure out how to be male today and the narratives around them and, as Christine said, in both directions. On the one hand, there is a narrative which is, well, don’t worry about being masculine, or gender doesn’t matter anymore, or just get rid of the toxic bit, if you wouldn’t mind, could you just like–like an appendicectomy almost, just like take that bit out and you’ll be good. But on the other hand, they were all, in one way or another, intrigued by this other group of men, who Christine calls the “manfluencers,” who were just saying, “Yeah, here’s how to be a man,” and it’s how we’ve always been men.

And so they felt trapped between a world where one side–and this would be more typically a progressive side–was almost turning its back on or ignoring the problems of boys and men or dismissing them. On the other hand, a bunch of guys who came along with a prescription that effectively amounts to turning back the clock and not least turning back the clock on women, most young men aren’t satisfied with either of those answers.

And so the starting point is, is there a question here based in data that is worth answering? And the clear answer to that is yes, and then the question becomes who’s answering it, and what are the answers.

MR. CAPEHART: I have so many questions that I want to ask as my next question. I don’t know which one to start with. So what I want to do is to get each of you to respond to what the other has written. So, Christine, let me get you to react to something that is in Richard’s book. He writes, “What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality. We must help men adapt to the dramatic changes of recent decades without asking them to stop being men. We need a pro-social masculinity for a post-feminist world, and we need it soon.”

MS. EMBA: I think that’s exactly right. I think he’s totally on point, and in fact, that’s why I ended up talking directly to Richard for my own piece.

DR. REEVES: Right.

MS. EMBA: I think this is the conflict that we see in these sort of models–and I’m using quotes because they’re not really very good models–that are being offered by the men who are offering something today. When you see someone like Andrew Tate, say, who was just interviewed by Tucker Carlson, and then Elon Musk, who’s quite publicly struggling with his masculinity right now, retweeted it just this morning–you think maybe they’re watching this live–you see a model for masculinity, but it is totally amoral. It is, in fact, antisocial.

Andrew Tate talks about, you know, slapping women around, only getting money for himself and his friends. He has a famous line where he says that if he saw a man, you know, falling to the ground because he’s had a heart attack, he wouldn’t give him CPR because he only gives CPR to hot females. It’s like a totally self-centered, selfish version of masculinity that, yeah, it’s the opposite of pro-social, and this is what young men are getting today.

But unfortunately, that is what’s on offer, and what I write about in my piece is the problem that instead of offering an alternative, here’s another version of masculinity, a better model that you could use that also happens to be for society that seem unwilling to even acknowledge that masculinity is a thing. And so they’re not offering anything at all. There’s just kind of an empty space, and, of course, who surges into the void?

MR. CAPEHART: Right, right. And the way you described Andrew Tate, the instant phrase that popped into my head is “toxic masculinity,” and I want to get into why that is problematic, that phrase.

But, Richard, let me get you to react to something that’s in Christine’s essay, where she–a college student she interviewed for the essay told her this: “I feel like there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, but there’s not, in my opinion, the same room to be proudly masculine.” Do you agree with that statement?

DR. REEVES: I do, and–[audio break].

MR. CAPEHART: Oh, looks like Richard is frozen. Hopefully, we–there. Richard?

DR. REEVES: And that’s problem if you happen to be male.

MR. CAPEHART: Richard, we missed your entire answer because you were frozen. So repeat what you were saying.

DR. REEVES: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

I think that for a lot of young men, they feel as if the term “masculinity” is framed in an entirely negative way, and that’s bad if you happen to be a male. And so finding positive ways to talk about, acknowledge, and model masculinity is, I think, a real issue. And so, again, to kind of echo back what Christine said, I think that the conversations she had with young men are capturing something real. There is nothing good about a society where femininity is seen as positive and masculinity is seen as negative or–[audio break].

MR. CAPEHART: That’s a great way to be frozen.

Richard? Do we have Richard back?

Finish the last part of what you were saying.

DR. REEVES: Sorry.

MR. CAPEHART: It’s okay.

DR. REEVES: Yeah. I’m sorry about this. I seem to be losing my connection here.

But we don’t want a world in which either femininity or masculinity are seen as bad or good or better than the other. We have to find a way to make them both compatible and positive and right now the only, quote, “positive models” of masculinity are the ones that Christine writes about. And they’re not actually very positive because they’re individualistic.

MR. CAPEHART: Right. So let’s talk more about this phrase “toxic masculinity,” because I think it’s become salient, because a lot of the–a lot of the people who are occupying the space that young men are gravitating towards are–as Christine pointed out, Andrew Tate–I’m sorry–is to my mind not a good masculine role model. He’s not someone I would want to emulate or I would want any of my male relatives or friends to emulate. But you both have a problem with that phrase, “toxic masculinity.”

So, Richard, let me go to you first on this, because you think it’s problematic as it’s being discussed coming from the left.

DR. REEVES: I do. First of all, putting those two words next to each other just inevitably creates a sense there’s something toxic about masculinity, and so that’s just a very negative message to start the conversation. It’s not a good way to call men into the conversation, and most feminists, actually, that I’ve spoken to agree with that now.

But at a deeper level, the problem is that there’s a failure to articulate a non-toxic masculinity, even if that’s really how low we’re setting the bar. Very often, those people who are using that term fail to come up with attributes of masculinity that are distinct, on average, from, say, feminine traits and yet are good. So if there’s no non-toxic masculinity, then that means there’s only toxic masculinity, and that’s just a really bad place to end up in.

I’m struck by some polling that “masculinity” is now used in almost an entirely negative way, and that’s, I think, a real cul-de-sac culturally. And so instead, as Christine’s essay says and as I say in my book, we’ve got to start, A, addressing the actual problems of boys and men more seriously, just more prosaically, more straightforwardly. Look at the education problem. Look at the surge in suicide among young men. Just like you wouldn’t ignore it if it was your son, son’s problem or your brother’s problem. So let’s just not ignore those problems. That’s number one. And then number two, start to make sure there are role models for young boys and men that are not online and are in their classroom or on the playing field.

MR. CAPEHART: Christine?

MS. EMBA: Yeah. I totally agree with what Richard is saying here in that just using the phrase “toxic” constantly, you know, when we talk about masculinity especially in progressive spaces, it almost always seems like “toxic” is either the word before it or the word after it.

To young men, especially the young men who I talk to, they feel kind of stigmatized by that. You know, they sort of say, “It’s not my fault that I’m a man. Is just being a man a bad thing? Are men in general bad?” And that’s unfortunately added onto by what has become kind of a common way of joking, especially in feminist spaces where we talk about, you know, men are trash, you know, we should ban all men. That first, I mean, it causes a feeling of, I think, actually deserved hurt and then also causes a feeling of resentment. You know, “Well, if you think men are trash, if you think men are bad, if you think I’m toxic, I’m not going to listen to your advice. I guess I’m just going to keep being me. Sorry if I’m toxic. Maybe I’ll even be a little bit more toxic,” which is literally a line that Andrew Tate has used.

So I think that we–if we want to talk about solutions for men, we also have to make them feel invited into the conversation, not just stigmatized for existing, frankly.

MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. And also, as you were speaking, Christine, some men might decide to be, well, I’ll be a little more toxic, or as we’re seeing, men just withdraw, and they withdraw to these online spaces where they don’t have to come into contact with anybody who will make them feel toxic.

I want to go to this audience question from a man named Ronald Levant from Ohio, who just happens to be the former president of the American Psychological Association, but we found that on our own through our own sleuthing. But here’s what he asked: “To what extent do you think boys’ and men’s problems today are the result of adherence to outmoded and restrictive masculine norms?”

Richard, what do you think?

DR. REEVES: I think to some extent but not completely, and the question actually gets to this whole issue of the extent to which we’re blaming masculinity for the problems of boys and men; in this case, the outmoded version. And that’s if there’s a good part of this story, which is, look, if old-fashioned masculinity men, you know, not being able to be emotionally available, not seeking help for your health care, the stoicism that the APA actually talked about in its own guidance, can that be a problem for men’s health and men’s social connection? For sure.

But on the other hand, there are aspects of masculinity which are distinctly male on average, which are around more physicality, more competitiveness, et cetera, and those need to be channeled in a kind of positive direction rather than framing it in such a way as if we could just get rid of this old masculinity would be great, unless we replace it with something much more positive.

So I think there’s some truth to the fact that these old models of masculinity have hurt men as well, but that doesn’t mean we should just abandon them and not replace them. That creates a dangerous vacuum.

MR. CAPEHART: Christine, I would love your thoughts.

MS. EMBA: Yeah. No, I think that’s a really interesting question and really well put. You know, I’ve been entering the danger zone and reading the comments on this piece. There are more than–

MR. CAPEHART: Oh, my gosh, Christine, why would you do that? [Laughs]

MS. EMBA: Because I think this question is really interesting, you know, and I’m clearly not a man. And so also just hearing men respond to this is fascinating to me.

And one of the things that I keep seeing coming up in a response to this piece is, okay, you’re trying to put forward these modes and models for masculinity, but as our questioner says, having this one strict model of masculinity has hurt men in the past, has left a number of men feeling left out, like they don’t live up to whatever they’re supposed to be. And it’s especially troubling, I think, for men who identify as queer or LGBT or anywhere else on the spectrum that wouldn’t fit into the traditional John Wayne model.

And so I actually think that the solution is not to totally throw out old modes or sort of old forms of masculinity because, as Richard says, some of them do have qualities that are helpful, that actually do acknowledge something about sort of the physical embodiment of being male and what to do about it.

What actually I think we’re looking for in this moment is new, better, and extended models of masculinity. There might be norms, but you can sort of branch out anywhere from those norms. You can be any kind of man. You just have to figure out how to be a good one.

DR. REEVES: Yeah.

MS. EMBA: And there is a character of character, not just biology, a character of duty and responsibility that comes with being a good man or, in fact, a good person, and we need to have clear models for how to do that, not just say either men are bad, don’t be a man, or just be nice, which doesn’t really convey very much information, especially for a young person who’s searching for a clear path.

MR. CAPEHART: Right. I would like–

DR. REEVES: Yeah. Or sometimes be more like your sister. Be more like your sister is sometimes what men hear, is why can’t you be more like that? But as the question gets at, the big divide here, I think, is actually, do we need to abandon or adapt masculinity? And there is a view that we’ve got to abandon it, which I think to some extent comes through in that question. Or do we adapt it to the modern world? And then, of course, there are the manfluencers who just say, “No, we don’t need to adapt it. We need to go back.”

But the truth is that very few men actually want to go back, right? Most men glory in the world where there’s more equality, but nor also do they want to be told that they need to stop being masculine in order to be equal.

I think Christine and I both use a similar line, which is that you don’t have to have androgyny to have equality, and if that’s what’s on offer, we shouldn’t be surprised that many men are running away.

MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that was an excellent line.

And, Christine, in your response, I really loved it because one of the reasons why the masculinity conversation always just sort of gets my shoulders hunched, it’s because, look, I’m an out gay married man, and the conversation doesn’t–I feel like it doesn’t include me, and that a lot of the folks having this conversation would not consider me to be masculine, however they’re going to define it. And so I agree with both of you that masculinity needs to be adapted to our modern world.

Richard, in your book–and you also talk about this as well in your essay, Christine–about how schools and some programs are geared towards girls, and I think you both mentioned former President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative as a program specifically designed for Black men and boys that got a lot–received a lot of controversy. And I wrote about it from its inception through all the years, and at one point–and this is going to be a little name dropping for a minute, but bear with me–the late opera singer, Jessye Norman, there was a little birthday dinner for her in New York, and some of her close friends were there, including Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon. Gloria Steinem and I got into a heated argument about My Brother’s Keeper and about how unfair it was to women and girls, and we had this pitched battle where I was like but no one’s paying attention to Black men and boys, and the president is a Black man. And so it would–I think it’s great. But she thought it was problematic because maybe he was too close to it.

So talk about how programs being geared more to girls in schools is leading to the alienation that boys, who then become men, are feeling.

DR. REEVES: Yeah. So I’ll jump in here. First of all, your exchange with Gloria, I think, illustrates a real problem with this debate, which is that if it’s framed as zero sum, if this is framed as–okay, but by paying more attention to boys and men, in this case, a specific group of boys and men, Black boys and men, that will distract attention from the ongoing need to do more for women and girls, and that’s just not true. That’s like saying to a parent who has a son and a daughter, you’re only allowed to care about one of them. That’s just not how societies work, and so I think that zero-sum framing is false, and I think it’s been very damaging, because it’s actually made it much harder for people to talk about this issue without being seen as in some way anti-women. If you can’t be worried about men without being cast as somehow anti-women, then we’re in real trouble. And I think that’s why I’m hopeful this is moving on, because it is true that just educationally, we see huge gender gaps, which are much wider for boys of color and especially Black boys and men.

But just to give you one data point, there’s a bigger gender gap on college campuses today in the U.S. than there was when Title IX was passed in 1972, and of course, Gloria had quite a lot to do with that. There’s a bigger gap, but it’s the other way around. So women are further ahead of men today in higher education than men were ahead of women when we passed Title IX. Now, that’s a non-trivial reversal of that gender gap, and it seems to me that both are worthy of attention, have different causes, and the education system as a whole is somewhat more female friendly than male friendly, not always and not for everybody. That’s a policy issue that we should take seriously, and certainly, we shouldn’t be relaxed about the fact that there are fewer and fewer male teachers in our classrooms every passing year without anybody seeming to want to do anything about that. There’s 23 percent of our teachers now are male. That’s 33 percent only a couple of decades ago.

So if we’re really worried about boys, then why are we just emptying our classrooms of male teachers and not apparently doing anything about that? That’s a very practical issue, I know, but it seems to me that’s where we need to move this debate.

MR. CAPEHART: Christine, love your thoughts on this as well, of course.

MS. EMBA: Yeah. No, it is an interesting question, because I also actually–I feel Gloria’s tension, and I sort of talk about it in my essay. There is, I think, a real fear among progressives, among feminists, who have worked so hard for the women’s movement, so hard to garner some attention for women’s issues that you know we aren’t done yet.

As we saw in the covid-19 pandemic when women were beginning to drop out of the workforce en masse, the gains for women have been fragile, and there’s a fear that, okay, if we turn away from that question and just start focusing on men now, we’re going to forget about women again. And then there’s a sort of resentment I think too, you know. Men have been in charge, in some sense, for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Are we really going to totally shift our focus and get upset because men are sad that their, you know, female–[audio break]–finally, really that we need to focus on?

But, you know, I say in my piece that men and women depend on each other. The sexes rise and fall together. If men are, as one woman put it, in their flop era, then women are going to be upset too.

And again, reading the comments, also reading emails, I’ve gotten a number, like a surprising number, actually, of emails from men who–or professors are or were teachers or volunteered in classrooms who’ve said, you know, I do think it’s important to have all male spaces in some ways for young men to be able to come together and sort of talk about their issues without being worried about what the girls are thinking, and every time I try to do that, say, have kind of like a–there’s a play, and, you know, women get together for sort of a women’s hour and exchange stories before the first–you know, the first performance, and men have gotten together separately. But I get in trouble because we’re not supposed to do that anymore. It’s seen as not inclusive to have separate places for men to get together.

And even in our politics, I think there’s this fear of not being inclusive if you speak specifically to men or specifically to men’s problems, and so there’s this broader ethos of, well, we’ll just talk to everybody at once.

MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm.

MS. EMBA: But when you’re talking to everybody, the message gets really muddled. It doesn’t seem like it’s directed towards anyone, and so it’s simply less effective.

MR. CAPEHART: You know, as you were speaking, Christine, your signal glitched there for a second, and folks caught me looking over here, because I’m scrolling through your piece trying to find something where you point out in your piece about Richard how–and I think, Richard, you’re quoted as saying you don’t exactly go there in terms of putting out a road map or a plan for how to get to where we need to get to have boys and men have a better or a different vision of masculinity. Why?

DR. REEVES: One reason, Jonathan, is the reason that you alluded to earlier, which is that there are many different ways of being a man, and we shouldn’t lose, in this discussion, about the fact that there are real problems for lots of boys and men. We shouldn’t sort of revert to any kind of idea that there’s a sort of single model of masculinity. So to me, I want to leave as much space as possible.

But frankly, because there are lots of practical problems facing boys and men–and Christine is focused to some extent on the cultural aspect of this issue, but I’m very worried about the fact that only 60 percent of Black boys in Michigan graduated high school on time. I’m really worried that there’s a massive rise in the number of young men committing suicide between 2020 and 2021. I’m really worried about declining wages for men. And so there’s a bit of a danger that we lose the opportunity to just talk about practical issues that are actually facing men.

And actually, Christine in her essay has this really nice example of a missed opportunity. Pete Buttigieg was challenged by Joy Reid on MSNBC. She called the infrastructure bill, a kind of White man’s bill or something, and he just denied that was true and talked about people of color and men and women both benefiting from transport and so on. What I’d like him to have done is actually to know, because he would know if he looked at the numbers, that, yes, it goes to working class men, by and large, the infrastructure spending. Two-thirds of the jobs will be to working class men, but just as much to Black and Hispanic working class men as White working class men. And then he could have said, “And is that such a terrible thing, given the trends in the economy? Is it so bad that we have a bill that’s going to help working class men of all color?” We’re doing lots of things over here to help women and girls in education. We should continue to do those. Not a zero-sum game. So instead, he just had to deny that this was actually a pro-male bill, and I think that’s a missed opportunity, especially for the left, and it creates a real opening for the right to be able to claim, with too much legitimacy, that the left don’t care about men.

MR. CAPEHART: And, Christine, we have zero time left, but I want to give you the last word here, especially since you’ve sloshed through what to my mind is usually the sewer that is the comment section on all our pieces usually. But given that you’ve done it, what’s the one thing you’ve learned from the comments that was the most unexpected in response to your essay?

MS. EMBA: Ooh, that is a hard question. I don’t know if it’s–if it was unexpected. It was a surprise to me. I think the reason why there are so many comments, actually, and why this essay seems to have spread so far is that people were waiting to talk about this. There are so many people who are concerned, whether it’s moms concerned about their sons, fathers concerned about their sons, women concerned about their boyfriends and the men that they know who they see changing in weird ways. And that was my impetus for writing this piece.

But there’s almost a fear of talking about it, as if by talking about men specifically, you are a bad progressive or a bad model or a bad–[audio break]. And so people have just kept to themselves. Having a space to have this conversation seems really, really key.

And actually, one more thing, I would say.

MR. CAPEHART: Yep.

MS. EMBA: There is some, again, pushback for–towards the old ideal of masculinity that says men have responsibilities, men are called to do something. There’s this idea that like, well, we shouldn’t force anyone to do anything actually. People should just do what they want.

But in the comments, in the responses I’ve been getting, so many men are actually saying, “No. I want you to tell me what to do. I want you to give me a job. I want to be called to something. I want something to aspire towards.” It’s not that men want to retreat or want to do less or even feel oppressed by some of the expectations that they’ve been given. It’s that it seems that they don’t feel like they have the space to fulfill them in a way, that they don’t actually feel called to something higher than themselves. And I think all of us want that. All of us want to be called to be better than who we are, to have something that we’re moving towards, and that feels like something that’s been lost but is really important.

MR. CAPEHART: Christine, I agree with Richard. Your essay entitled “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness” in The Washington Post, it is an important moment. It is so well done. Congratulations on that piece.

Richard Reeves, your book of “Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It” is also an important read.

Thank you both very much for your work and for coming to Washington Post Live.

MS. EMBA: Thank you so much, Jonathan.

DR. REEVES: Thank you.

MR. CAPEHART: And thank you for joining us and staying a little bit over time. To check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com.

Once again, I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. Thank you for watching Washington Post Live.

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