America’s Young Men Are Falling Behind—and Shifting Right

Today: the state of men and what’s really happening in the gender divide in politics. Many young men are falling behind economically and socially at the same time that men and women are coming apart politically. What’s really happening here? Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, joins the show to talk about the state of men, young men, working class men, the gender divide in the electorate, why Democrats seem to have a guy problem, and why Republicans seem to have a message that is resonating, especially for young men who are falling behind.

 

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In the following excerpt, Richard Reeves explains to Derek how a lack of the feeling of “needed-ness” has fueled a crisis among young men.

Derek Thompson: So in September, The Wall Street Journal published an article that I read and immediately upon reading the article thought, “God, I wish I had Richard Reeves right here next to me to talk about this.” The article was called “America’s Young Men Are Falling Even Further Behind.” And the dek reads, “Men in their 20s and early 30s are much more likely than female peers to live with their parents, and many say they feel aimless and isolated.” And for those listeners who are skeptical of qualitative claims that don’t come with federal statistics, here is the relevant federal statistic: The share of men between 25 and 34 who live at their parental home has increased by about one-third in the last 20 years. It’s risen from about 13 percent to about 20 percent.

Now, Richard, you were quoted in this Journal article, and you said, “The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society.” What did you mean by that?

Richard Reeves: What I meant by that is that the most important glue that many of us have to community, to our own sense of ourselves is, I think, needed-ness—that’s a horrible word. But I’ve come to believe that feeling unneeded, feeling surplus to requirements is actually in some cases literally fatal. If you look at the words that men use to describe themselves before they take their own lives through suicide, the two most common words are “worthless” and “useless.” And of course, that’s a particularly tragically selected group. But I think even away from the most tragic frontiers of unneeded-ness, which is suicide, what you see among a lot of young men—and you see it in the friendship statistics that you’re interested in, you see it in some of the drug addiction, you see it in the lack of geographical mobility, you see it in a whole series of social and economic trends—is just this uncertainty that there are social institutions out there needing you to lock into them, right?

I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere. And if you don’t feel that, if you’re not really pretty sure that there’s a specific purpose for you in your community or family, then I think that leads to retreat. I think it leads to dislocation. I think it can lead to depths of despair. And so at a root cause, I’ve come to believe that that is what’s driving a lot of these more surface-level trends, which is a real question that a lot of young men have, like, “Do you need me? Am I needed? Or am I actually maybe a kind of nice-to-have rather than a must-have?”

Thompson: So just as you were speaking, I thought of three categories of needed-ness or social connection. One is social needed-ness. So to have a best friend that’s going through a hard time, to have a wife, to have a baby. My baby’s 13 months old. So what I feel when I wake up every morning is a sense of …

Reeves: … is exhausted.

Thompson: … profound, exhausted needed-ness. I have a 13-month-old who refuses to walk and prefers to be carried and adorably hugged wherever she goes. So that’s extraordinary needed-ness, right?

There’s institutions that can create needed-ness very separate from family or friends. So you can go to a church or you can belong to a club where you’re an incredibly important member of that club or where you feel like your presence there is an essential presence and that makes you feel institutionally or even maybe, let’s say, civically needed. So we have social needed-ness. We have civic needed-ness.

And then finally, I think we have to bring in economics. If we’re talking about young men living at home, it seems very likely to me that these men are not thriving on an economic basis. A lot of them probably are struggling. Maybe they’re unemployed or underemployed, cobbling together a few jobs. And maybe what you’re describing as needed-ness is a stand-in for or a kind of synonym for a sense of personal success that I am—I feel like I am economically worthy because I’m working in a job that I see as meaningful, and I’m earning money from that job that makes my life comfortable. And when I think about and narrativize my life, I say, “Oh, I am economically worthy.”

So are these the right buckets to look at—social needed-ness, civic needed-ness, and economic worthiness—or is there another way that you’d prefer to talk about this concept of need? Because I find it a really powerful concept.

Reeves: Yeah, I really like that way of constructing it. Of course, it’s like all of these things, there are different ways of constructing it. But I really like the fact that you’ve got the social, particularly the familial one, the community-based one, and then the labor market-based one. And I think that they, of course, will very often overlap, and they will reinforce each other to some extent.

But what’s interesting, if you look at the work of people like Kathryn Edin and others who’ve looked at particularly working-class men, the tenuous attachments they’ve got, is that you do see that it’s almost exactly as you say, it’s those different kind of dimensions of connection or needed-ness. And the reason I like needed-ness rather than just connection is I think connection’s a bit bloodless. I think that there’s something more visceral going on here, which is something a bit more tribal, something a bit more, “OK, my people, my tribe needs me to do something.”

And I think that’s somewhat more socially constructed and signaled for men than it is for women. And that could be a controversial thought, so let me say a bit more about that. But at least at some level, I think women have a pretty strong sense that they’re going to be needed at the very least by their children, to bring life into the world. I’m not in any way suggesting that you are not an amazingly important father. But to some extent, even fatherhood is a bit more of a social institution. It’s a bit newer; it’s a bit more constructed. And so I think that those institutional frameworks through which particularly male needed-ness is communicated and glued are even more important.

And then what you see is with lots of great changes we’ve seen, like the decline in the share of male breadwinners. So [as of 2013], 40 percent of breadwinners now are women. We’ve seen a huge rise in women’s economic independence. And we’ve discussed before, we loudly agree with each other about what an amazingly positive thing that is in case anyone misses that point. But it does then say, “OK, well, do we need you economically? Are you the breadwinner? Are you sure you’re bringing much to the party economically?”

And then in terms of community institutions, one of the things that’s happened is that, and again, these are for good reasons, but as we’ve said, actually some particularly male roles have now become much more coed. So I’ve talked a bit about I don’t like the fact that the Boy Scouts has disappeared and become Scouting America and that we’ve kept Girl Scouts. And that’s not actually just because I think that it’s good for boys to have some spaces that are single sex, but also because being a scout leader, and I’ve been one, and I actually am one again, if you have Boy Scouts, you need male leaders. And so what you’re saying is, “We need guys.” And so when I became a scout leader, they actually said, “We need some guys to be the scout leaders.” And so there was something specific about that. It’s like, “Oh, you need me.”

And then in terms of the family, connecting them to kids, connecting them to the sense of care and nurturing is hugely important. And I have this quote from the anthropologist Margaret Mead that I just ended up using it so much that I committed it to memory where she said, “Every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behavior of men. This behavior being learned is rather fragile and can disappear quickly in circumstances that no longer teach it effectively.”

And I love that, this idea of learned nurturing behavior because it gets at this sense of: Of course men are nurturing, of course men are generative, of course masculinity is about giving more than you get, etc. But it does have to become a little bit more learned and a bit more institutional and a bit more signaled. And I worry that we’re not signaling strongly enough to young men now we need you. We in very different spaces. We the families, we the mothers, we the labor market, we the community. Not just we need people, but we need you. And absent that sense of we need you, I think we see a lot of young men retreating.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Richard Reeves

Producer: Devon Baroldi