Book review: Of Boys and Men

Important gender inequalities run in both directions

When, back in 2015, the Conservative MP Philip Davies proposed a Commons debate for International Men’s Day, the Labour MP Jess Phillips laughed in his face.

“Men are celebrated, elevated and awarded every day of the week on every day of the year. Being a man is its own reward. You hit the jackpot when you are born a boy child,” she wrote in a follow-up article for the Independent.

This is the kind of ‘zero-sum’ feminism that the academic Richard V. Reeves takes aim at in his latest book Of Boys and Men. Its advocates, ubiquitous in the media and progressive politics, possess a “fixed conviction that gender inequality can only run one way, that is, to the disadvantage of women”.

This simply isn’t true, as Reeves points out early on in the book:

“The gender gap in college degrees awarded is wider today than it was in the early 1970s, but in the opposite direction. The wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while women’s wages have risen across the board. One in five fathers are not living with their children. Men account for almost three out of four ‘deaths of despair’,’ either from a suicide or an overdose.”

Reeves is writing here about the United States, but our own elected representatives, especially those who believe that men have ‘hit the jackpot’ simply for being born, would be wise to take note. There are now more women than men with a bachelor’s degree in every country in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)¹.

A former Downing Street chief of staff to Nick Clegg, Reeves, in documenting the male malaise, is following in the footsteps of, among others, Hanna Rosin (The End of Men), Warren Farrell and John Gray (The Boy Crisis), and Kay Hymowitz (Manning Up). Reeves decided another book on the subject was needed because “things are worse than I thought”.

Reeves is an expat Brit who lives and works in the US. Like his former boss, he is a political centrist who would like to skirt a path between left and right. Unlike his former boss, he largely succeeds in the endeavour.

According to Reeves, while progressives have a hard time recognising “that important gender inequalities can run in both directions”, conservatives are only scouring the data in order to justify “turning back the clock and restoring traditional gender roles”. Reeves acknowledges that there are people on both left and right with a more nuanced understanding of gender inequalities; but he argues (and I agree) that these voices are frequently drowned out in the media by shrill cultural war partisans.

The central thrust of Reeves’ book is that just because a few men at the top of society are wealthy and flourishing, this does not mean that men in general are doing well. (I remember the Canadian professor Jordan Peterson making a similar point back in 2018 in British television studios, only to be shouted down and labelled a misogynist for it.) Black boys in particular are struggling in the US, as are white working-class boys here in Britain.

This is partly down to biological developmental differences, which are not catered to by western education systems. In order to fix the latter, we have to acknowledge the former. But this is where we encounter the first ideological ramparts.

“At any given moment,” George Orwell once wrote, “there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.” Despite the hard sciences amassing a mountain of evidence that human beings are not ‘blank slates’ and that, as Reeves puts it, “sex differences in biology shape not only our bodies, including our brains, but also our psychology”, blank slate-ism remains highly influential, with public debates around sex and gender frequently taking as their starting point the idea that evolution occurred strictly from the neck down.

Though sceptical of Marxist economics, liberals have by and large imbibed the blank slate dogmatism of radical feminism, an ideology that borrows heavily from Marxist categories. Under this taxonomy, men are an ‘oppressor class’ and women are the ‘oppressed class’; the latter possess the ‘means of reproduction’; gender is a ‘social construct’; and if women conform to gender stereotypes it is strictly a result of ‘internalised patriarchy’ (false consciousness).

And yet we must be willing to face unpleasant facts. This is especially true of those who formulate policy. Across cultures, boys are found on average to be more aggressive, take more risks, and have a higher sex drive than girls and women, Reeves points out. It bears repeating: we are not blank slates. There is no grand feminist conspiracy to disadvantage boys and usher in a ‘gynocentric society’, but nor are evolutionary psychologists manipulating the data to shore up The Patriarchy.

Girls’ brains develop at a faster rate than boys - the prefrontal cortex matures about two years later in boys than in girls. Reeves argues that this leaves boys falling behind in school early on - and subsequently underperforming as they progress through the education system. In 1972 in the United States (where Reeves takes most of his data from), there was a gap of 13 percentage points in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees going to men compared to women. However, by 2019 the gender gap was 15 points - but in the opposite direction. Reeves argues that boys should begin school later than girls, to reflect different rates of physical development. But policymakers have yet to respond: “this emerging science on sex differences in brain development, especially during adolescence, has so far had no impact on policy,” writes Reeves.

To be sure, there are good reasons why progressives might be wary of arguments premised on ‘just so’ stories of male and female psychological differences. Such arguments have been (and still are) used to justify the subordination of women. Whereas progressives have wedded themselves to biological denialism, conservatives “overweight the importance of biological sex differences for gender roles” and seek a “restoration of traditional economic relations between male providers and female carers”.

This is dangerous for several reasons. Sex differences “can be magnified or muted by culture”, as Reeves puts it. “The real debate is not about whether biology matters, but how much it does, and when it does.”

This is where Peterson and his fellow conservatives come unstuck. “Should we expect to get to 50/50 gender parity in all [STEM - science, technology, engineering and maths] jobs?” asks Reeves. “Probably not. Even under conditions of perfect gender equality, more men than women will likely choose these career paths. Not because of sexism or socialisation but because of real differences in preferences.”

But what usually goes unmentioned by the Petersons of the world is that, given a choice, many more women would like to go into STEM subjects. As Reeves points out, around 30 per cent of engineers should be female if interests alone are driving occupational choice. As it stands, the actual number of women engineers in the US is half that.

There are other, more consequential, reasons to be wary of those who seek to downplay women’s desire to pursue careers outside the home. Women’s economic independence is one of the most effective bulwarks against male control and coercion. As the American evolutionary psychologist David Buss argues in his most recent book Bad Men, reducing income inequality will help [reduce male violence] by ensuring that women are empowered to leave relationships with abusive men. Buss cites Norway as an example: it is one of the most egalitarian countries in the world and has some of the lowest rates of domestic violence. Having a career and money means women no longer have to shackle themselves to violent or abusive ‘providers’; they can walk out the door without warning. Many men may resent this development, but we forget it at our peril. (Sorry lads, but you’re going to have to offer women more than just a pay check.)

“What is needed,” Reeves writes, “is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality”; elsewhere in the book he calls this a “prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world”.

If this sounds slightly wishy washy, that’s because masculinity is constructed in a way that womanhood is not. “Manhood is fragile. Womanhood is more robust because it is more determined by women’s specific role in reproduction.”

The role of the traditional male breadwinner has been diluted by women entering the labour force and by the decline of heavy industry. These are not developments that we can or should try to reverse. However, we can channel male proclivities into more constructive outlets (although apart from a more engaged fatherhood and progressive policy changes: equal paid leave, a reformed child support system, and more father-friendly jobs) suggestions from Reeves as to how we do this are relatively thin.

What we mustn’t do is “pathologise naturally occurring aspects of masculine identity” under the banner of ‘toxic masculinity’, a label that has “acquired such a broad definition that it can be applied to almost any anti-social behaviour on the part of boys or men”. Reeves cites the example of the school his son attends, which was accused of having “a culture of toxic masculinity” after a boy at the school created a website ranking his female classmates in terms of their attractiveness. The boy who created the list was reprimanded by the school and given a detention; he also apologised personally to the girls in question. However the media, ever keen to fan the flames of culture war, jumped on the story to “indiscriminately” slap the label of “toxic masculinity” on the behaviour instead of “drawing boys into a dialogue about what can be learned”.

Reeves argues that by pathologising boys in this way we are driving them into the online manosphere, “where they will be reassured that they did nothing wrong”. Though Reeves doesn’t mention Andrew Tate, the latter’s recent popularity among teenage boys might be offered up as a supporting example.

One of the most egregious recent examples of the pathologisation of masculinity came curtesy of the American Psychological Association (APA), whose mission is ostensibly to “benefit society and improve lives”. In its 2018 guidelines on working with boys and men, the APA stated that “traditional masculinity - marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression - is, on the whole, harmful”. The guidelines contained not a single reference to the positive aspects of masculinity. They also failed to recognise any biological basis at all for male psychology, such as the influence of testosterone.

“As far as the APA is concerned, it seems, masculinity is entirely socially constructed,” writes Reeves.

The APA’s pathologisation of boys and men stood in stark contrast to the association’s conceptualisation of women and girls, who were treated as biological entities influenced by puberty, childbirth and menopause.

Worryingly, the APA provides guidance to psychologists in the US, 80 per cent of whom are women. Is it any wonder more men do not go to therapy?

There is lots to grapple with in Reeves’ book and there is immense value for policymakers in some of the data, which, as the author puts it, reveals how gender inequalities can run in both directions. The book will hopefully spur a more nuanced public conversation about these inequalities: a conversation that isn’t dominated by shrill culture warriors whose zero-sum notions of gender inequality obscure meaningful solutions.

1. (You would also expect Phillips, an MP whose brief for the past three years has been domestic violence, to be familiar with the literature surrounding step father domestic abuse; but apparently not.)