Creating a Permission Space for Men's Issues

How Richard Reeves is making it acceptable for the center-left to address the challenges facing today's boys and men

Richard Reeves, author of the must-read book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, and founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, is the subject of a great profile in the Nation. It’s the cover story for their April issue.

The Nation is an old school left wing publication, but they are sympathetic to Reeves’ agenda that seeks to address the problems facing young men and the gender inequalities that disfavor men.

Reeves is an avowed feminist, clearly states that he doesn’t want to roll any part of feminism back, and says that there are still areas like the C-suite where there’s still work to do on achieving equality for women. But still, plenty of feminists are skeptical or even outright hostile to his agenda as you’ll read.

Here are some excerpts from the piece.

At one point, Reeves himself would have been skeptical of his book’s premise. He’s described feminism as perhaps “the greatest economic liberation in human history.” But in his work studying economic inequality at the Brookings Institution, where he was formerly a senior fellow, he had run into what he has called the “side effects” of feminism’s “glorious achievements.” The starkest data was in education, particularly in college. Since Title IX was passed in 1972, the gender gap in bachelor’s degrees has widened, but in the opposite direction. The biggest risk factor for dropping out of college, controlling for everything else, is being a man. Those struggles have extended to the labor market. When adjusted for inflation, most American men today earn around $3,000 less than men did in 1979, which leads to a grim realization: Much of the narrowing of the persistent wage gap between men and women can be explained by the stagnating wages for men.

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When Reeves set out to write a book on these findings, friends and colleagues advised him to drop it as a matter of career preservation. “What you’re saying is true,” Reeves remembers hearing. “But for God’s sake, don’t say it.” They warned that he’d end up sounding like Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri whose 2023 book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs advances the issue from the right. Hawley represents the post-Trump, post–Me Too Republican Party’s awkward attempt to synthesize its church-based brand of social conservatism with the “manosphere,” a collection of online subcultures unified by anti-feminism. Another product of this collaboration is Vice President JD Vance, whose choice phrases like “childless cat ladies” were ripped from the manosphere podcasts he’d appeared on as he was burnishing his credentials within the extremely online New Right….So Reeves set to work, assembling a manuscript bursting with data on how men and boys were falling behind. He lambasted denialism from the left and atavism from the right. Then it was rejected by every publisher he sent it to.

Reeves recalibrated. He’d need to be less polemical, lest he come off as a watered-down men’s rights activist. He also didn’t think his message would travel if he branded himself as an ally of feminism promoting healthy masculinity, even though that wouldn’t necessarily be an incorrect way to describe him. He struck the right balance, and in 2022 Brookings published Of Boys and Men on its own press. Almost three years later, the project Reeves was told would ruin his career has done the opposite: It launched the mild-mannered British policy wonk into public intellectual stardom. If you’ve read a magazine article, watched a TV news segment, or listened to a podcast on the “crisis of masculinity” lately, you’ve encountered an interview with or at least a reference to Reeves. His book was on Barack Obama’s summer reading list, and the philanthropist Melinda French Gates awarded Reeves a $20 million grant—$5 million for AIBM and $15 million in a donor-advised fund to give away. In the spirit of his vision of gender equality, Reeves named the fund Rise Together.

Reeves’s critics, however, remain skeptical. They argue that his focus on men reproduces the very zero-sum thinking on gender equality he seeks to transcend, and that despite noble intentions, by elevating the idea that men are falling behind women—an idea that most women, who on average earn nearly 20 percent less than men, would certainly find dubious—he will further inflame the backlash he wants to contain.

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“It takes a village—I agree. Families come in all shapes and sizes—I agree. But some of the villagers should be men,” Reeves said. He explained that dads used to matter mostly because they were the breadwinners, and that’s changed, for a good reason. But “dads still matter, and we need to find policies and a culture and a way of talking about this that doesn’t somehow see them as second-class parents who are somehow less important,” he continued. “We have to have a conversation about masculinity in a positive way. I understand it’s a difficult time to make that argument. But honestly, you cannot ignore these issues. You cannot ignore these questions and then wonder why the people who are not ignoring them are getting all the attention.”

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Reeves’s role during the early days of AIBM, which he envisions becoming a DC policy shop, has been that of communicator. He or his writings have appeared in just about every outlet you’ve heard of and many you haven’t. The idea behind the media blitz, Reeves told me, is to create a “permission space” in the mainstream and among liberals to talk about men’s struggles in a way that’s consistent with women’s equality. “It didn’t really seem like anyone had the stomach to take it on and champion it as an issue,” said Christine Emba, a staff writer at The Atlantic who wrote a viral article on the state of American men in 2023, when she was a columnist at The Washington Post. Emba interviewed Reeves for her story, and he later asked her to join the board at AIBM. Emba herself felt the need for that permission space in liberal newsrooms. “There’d be a groan,” she recalled, “and people would say, ‘So you hate feminism? So you hate women?’”

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As the election results brought young men’s drift away from the Democrats into mainstream view, the media needed someone to explain why. Reeves, who is a member of neither major party, became an in-demand source, and his diagnosis has been blunt. “What we had was performative masculinity from the right and deafening silence from the left: Democrats couldn’t expose the lack of substance on the Republican side, because they wouldn’t even acknowledge that there were problems that needed solving,” he told The Washingtonian in a postelection interview.

In an interview with The Guardian, Reeves said that since men delivered for Trump, “Trump now needs to deliver for men.” I asked him what that would look like and how he’d engage with the White House. The worst scenario, he said, would be “if the Republicans pick up some of this pro-male policy and support it, but in a very anti-feminist, anti-woman way. That they use it to poke women in the eye.” But if the Republicans are interested in an Office of Men’s Health, or investments in apprenticeships and technical schools, or a plan to increase the number of male school teachers, Reeves says he will be there with his white papers.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I think it’s important to have people on the center-left talking about men’s issues. If we care about actually improving the lives of men, then we don’t want the goal of helping men flourish to become partisan coded, because if it does then Democrats will reflexively oppose it and it will become yet another victim of gridlock.

Obviously, they are not going to talk about men the same way someone on the right would. That’s ok. This is the price of building a more mainstream consensus around a problem (if not all of the solutions). And frankly, some of Reeves’ complaints about the way some conservatives valorize retro gender roles such as the “trad wife” are right.

I know it can be frustrating to some on the right to see Reeves repeat some of the points that various conservatives have made for some time, then end up getting all the press and glory for it. In a sense, that’s unfair. But it’s also reality. The major institutions of society, like the major media, are on the left. So naturally they are going to prefer their own. The Brookings Institution, where Reeves worked when writing his book, confers social legitimacy in the way conservative organizations apart from perhaps AEI don’t yet do so. That’s unfortunate perhaps, but we have to live in the real world.

I would suggest thinking of it as Reeves helping to validate, legitimate, and move into the mainstream some of what people on the right have been saying.

It’s also notable that Reeves is a man. You’ll notice that many of the people who comment on men’s issues, even in a pro-male way, are women. That includes Christine Emba, mentioned above, who wrote a superb longform piece on the subject for the Washington Post. Even most of the people in movement conservatism who focus on men’s/gender issues are women.

You have to be willing to advocate for yourself. Men can’t outsource self-advocacy to women. So it’s critically important to have an actual man like Reeves to run an organization like AIBM and be a visible public figure on these issues.

One concern I’ve heard about Reeves from the right is that he will be deemed the official spokesman about men’s issues in ways that’s designed to marginalize and delegitimize politically right perspectives on the topic.

This is a legitimate concern. It’s frequently the case that when a problem or issue gets too big to ignore, inorganic leaders get elevated by the media and algorithms to direct public discontent in ways that don’t threaten establishment interests. The “intellectual dark web” is somewhat an example of that. A relatively small group of people on the “anti-woke left” who mostly didn’t represent much of a constituency became algorithm-favored, go-to figures as quasi-official voices of dissent on a range of topics in ways that marginalized genuine dissident thinkers.

That can’t be helped. But I don’t think there’s a zero sum outcome here. Reeves success doesn’t have to limit what others can achieve. Even if the mainstream media prefers to quote Reeves rather than a conservative voice, today’s world provides unlimited opportunity for men to get their message out. In fact, the men’s influencers have done an incredible job of building huge audiences. I don’t feel Reeves getting a profile in the Nation limits, for example, what I can achieve.

Reeves’ position is also limiting to him in key ways. As you can see from the profile, a lot of people are skeptical or even unfriendly to his message. He’s going into the lion’s den when he speaks at some of these events. Doing that, and even taking on men’s issues in general from a center-left perspective, requires courage. He could easily have avoided a lot of pain by just doubling down on Dream Hoarders.

But there are limits to what he can get away with. Reeves basically can’t challenge any aspect of feminism. I’m not saying he wants to. I assume he’s genuine in what he says about it. But he’d never get a hearing if he challenged it at all.

So in essence Reeves has to affirm unlimited female choice, and say that women do not have to give anything up in order for men to achieve gender equality in areas where they are behind.

That’s not realistic in terms of producing results. The feminist movement’s success depended on telling men they had to change, that there were certain choices and behaviors they could no longer engage in. It also explicitly reallocated resources and positions from men to women.

While I don’t think the situation with men is symmetrical, it strikes me as dubious that nothing needs to change with regards to women. For example, as economist Melissa Kearney, also a Brookings affiliated scholar, documented in her superb book The Two-Parent Privilege - I summarized some key findings - the benefits of growing up in an intact family vs. a single parent home are overwhelming. The United States has the highest share of its children living in single parent homes of any country in the entire world. That’s American exceptionalism we could live without.

If we aren’t going to do something to reduce the number of kids growing up in single parent homes, we might as well all go home. We’re not serious.

I’d be the first to say plenty of kids are growing up without a father because he failed to live up to his responsibility, abandoned the family, was abusive, a deadbeat, etc.

But certainly at least some of this has to be because of women blowing up their families without due cause. I just wrote yesterday about Miranda July’s All Fours and the way women dumping their husbands for purely selfish reasons is now valorized in our society.

When Selfishness Becomes Celebrated

Even if such things are legally allowed, our major culture shaping institutions should not be validating, encouraging, celebrating, and glamorizing this sort of behavior. They should be frowning on it and discouraging it. I reject things like pickup artistry, but it’s hard to make a credible case that men shouldn’t simply seek to get lots of random women to sleep with them when society applauds women who do the equivalent.

The benefit of not being Reeves is the freedom to take a broader range of stances, including ones that more directly challenge the mainstream consensus. It takes multiple people playing different roles in different places on the playing field.

I mentioned this particular point around divorce because it’s one area where Reeves has advocated for change that turns the dial to shift the balance towards men and away from women. In his book and writings, he has called for reform of divorce and family law that more recognize the importance of fathers. For example, in most states, unmarried fathers basically don’t have any rights by default. They have to petition for them. He wants to change that. He celebrated, for example, the Arizona Supreme Court making it harder for an unmarried mother to give a child up for adoption against the will of the father.

We’re not getting rid of no-fault divorce. But there are many reforms that can and should be made to the system. Most conservatives don’t want to touch that though. They are too busy rampaging against “deadbeat dads.” In fact, nobody functionally hates dads quite as much as religious conservatives do. If he were getting divorced, a father would probably be better off in front of a court run by Judge Reeves than one run by an evangelical pastor.

Again, this is a great profile of Reeves and his work, and I highly recommend reading it. Beyond Reeves himself, you’ll get a good sense of the state of the market for men’s issues in center left institutions.

Reeves was previously a guest on my podcast talking about his book and work

I also had Christine Emba on to discuss her article, which went nuclear viral when it was published.