What's up with men, boys, and masculinity?

This is a crisis. It's perennial, but also a crisis.

I’ve been trying to write about this even before the election, but it’s hard. It feels more essential than ever, so even if it’s inadequate, I feel the need to put it out there:

A few months ago, I found myself adjacent to a bunch of young men with the opportunity to just be there, listen eavesdrop, while they chatted about whatever friends chat about. It felt like a rather unguarded conversation. It was a multiethnic group with a progressive/leftist vibe, my guess was ages 18 to early 20s. I got the impression that they were smart guys who think about the world, appreciate complexity, and seemed to have vaguely the same worries that I imagine I recall I had 30 years ago.

You know what silently broke my heart, as I was listening in? All of their discussion was unavoidably suffused with the weight of the manosphere. (I felt very weird using this word, but hey it has its own wikipedia page, so I suppose it’s now a thing.) They were being normal and real with one another, but it was clear that an underlying part of their existence in our social realm means that they end up being exposed to the media swirl involving contemptuous folks like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, the very concept of incels, and all that muck. To be clear: these guys didn’t seem to be under the spell of the toxic masculinity¹, but nonetheless, that it was obviously permeating the air. The air that we all breathe. Even if we are fortunate enough to be sheltered from directly from this realm, the people we interact and work with, who we teach, who we mentor, and who we love, are getting direct or indirect exposure.

It’s a crisis that we need to address. I’d like imagine that at some point in the history of humankind, there were cultures or subculture with men who were well adjusted, and even in in the context of gendered roles, people were treated with the equity and respect that they felt they deserved. That’s what we’re aiming for, right? It feels like we are going the wrong way, looking at how young (non-Black) men voted in our most recent election. The very idea that men feel the liberty to publicly say, “your body, my choice.” Last year, the loss of reproductive freedom in this country was catastrophic, and yet here we are fighting against things getting even worse.

I don’t know if it is oversimplifying to interpret the current reactionary flavor of misogyny as a backlash to the substantial progress that we’ve seen. More than any other time in the history of the US, women have more access to opportunity. We still have a long long way to go, but at the macro level, it looks like things are getting better. We only just had the 50th anniversary of women being able to have their own credit cards or take own loans without a male co-signer, but now it appears that women are not uniformly excluded from any profession (except, of course, the highest office of the land). More women are going to college than men. If I were to squint at a distance with my glasses off and with earplugs in, I can understand how it’s possible to gain the impression that STEM has something resembling gender parity.

If harmful bro-ness is a backlash, it’s not like it’s a pendulum swing from parity. Women are still doing a ton more domestic labor than men, even though a single income can’t support a family anymore. Childcare can cost as much as a person’s salary, and school schedules are still assembled as if there is a ‘50s mom always there for the kids and preparing a martini and slippers for the breadwinner to come home from work. In the academic workplace, we are see a systematic devaluation of the roles where women are effective and a systematic overvaluation of roles dominated by men. Even though women were pioneers of the computer sciences in the early days when the role was under supported, as the field grew to be male-dominated the compensation and status flipped the other way. While leadership in universities historically was considered to be a positive that resulted in increased income and accolades, now that women are more often filling these roles, the status and compensation for these roles has dropped. Entire fields of study that have grown to be led by women experience a relative drop in pay and status. I mean, has it ever occurred to you that the reason that K-12 teachers are so woefully underpaid is because three quarters of all K-12 teachers are women? And that techbros are getting paid so much is three quarters of jobs in this industry are filled by men?

On the individual level, it’s impossible to not see the rotten fruits of misogyny wherever you go in the academic workplace, in the form of uncompensated gendered labor, sexual harassment, pay inequities, double standards for performance, and so on. And the elevated harm against women of color is on a whole other level, as you must know. I’m not sure how many men realize the scope of this challenge. For example, how shocking is this figure about NSF grant submission rates to you?

Figure 1 from Rissler et al. (2020). The relative percentages of women (triangles) and men (circles) in different professorial positions (career stages) including assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor. Each data point represents the mean value, with standard error bars, (over years 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2015; data S1). The NSF directorates include social, behavioral and economic sciences (SBE); biological sciences (BIO); geosciences (GEO); computer and information science and engineering (CISE); engineering (ENG); and mathematical and physical sciences (MPS).

Women are more likely to be undergraduates, but less likely to be grad students, less likely to be assistant professors, less likely to be associate professors, less likely to be promoted to full, less like to become chair, or dean or provost or president. At each stage, women are being selected against, filtered out. This is the air that we are breathing in. And yet the manosphere is selling to our boys that men are somehow are at a structural disadvantage? As Joan Donovan put it, “You might have heard of terms like ‘toxic masculinity,’ but it’s also deeper than that. It’s not just… ‘boys being boys.’ It’s men believing that women control sex and love and marriage. It’s men believing that they don’t stand a chance in the job market because of DEI policies.”

What do we do about this crisis of masculinity and gender equity? Well, if you do an internet search for what to do about the masculinity crisis, you’ll see that lots of folks have ideas. (Here’s one from The New Yorker, for example. But I think every media outlet seems to have one.) But that won’t apparently stop me from having my own ideas, specifically targeting those of us STEM and higher ed.

I can’t tell you what to do, but here’s what I’m trying to do.

For starters: grocery shopping, cooking, dishes, laundry. This crisis happens inside and outside our families. This isn’t about “helping out at home,” it’s about taking responsibility. It’s not about doing tasks assigned to you by one’s spouse, but doing the emotional labor to be in charge of domestic stuff, too. It turns out that when guys think they’re doing 50% of the domestic labor, they aren’t doing 50%. It just feels like 50%.

At work, I might take notes at the meeting. I go to the bystander intervention training and use it when necessary. What else? Can we recognize our gender and associated privilege in the workplace? Do the women around you know that you know how they experience all kinds of challenges and BS that you don’t have to? In the context of the classroom, do you bring your whole self to the classroom, or do you set your gender aside as irrelevant? We still live with the reality that when a woman is the professor, it’s a woman professor, but when a guy is the professor, he’s just some professor. If you don’t move in this space with recognition of your own gender, and how it impacts how others perceive and interact with you, then you’re missing an opportunity to create a more equitable space.

While women and non-conforming folks ave the luxury of not being neutral with respect to gender, cis men have the luxury of pretending that gender doesn’t have to do with their daily lives. I don’t walk around all the time trying to perform many stuff and I don’t talk about gender nonstop, but I don’t pretend it’s not in the room, and when situations come up involving gendered norms or inequities, then I feel like it’s my job to bring this up to address them. Because the labor of addressing these inequities too infrequently falls on the tenured white guy, and that itself is messed up.

You know how if women don’t dress ‘like a professor’ at work, that they aren’t taken as seriously by their students? Regardless of how women may or may not conform to the heteronormative norms of femininity at work, they are being evaluated more heavily on how they perform or transgress the expectations of their gender. I try to dress business casual when teaching because that’s what students are expecting of women, even if they’re not expecting it of men.

In spaces where I have authority (classroom, research lab, field research trips), it’s important to establish behavioral norms and codes of conduct to head off messed up gendered dynamics before they have an opportunity to emerge. And also to provide with a means to respond effectively in the case that bad actors end up doing harm. I mean, if NSF expects us to develop plans for Safe and Inclusive Fieldwork, then shouldn’t that be the minimum expectation for all of us?

One of the recurring themes in think pieces about the toxic manosphere is that these dudes are capitalizing on a void in the social media environment. The idea is that in the absence of positive representations and discussion of masculinity, that we have left space for this retrograde version of masculinity to take hold. I’m not sure I buy that, but I do think we need to talk more about what being a normal and well adjusted man looks like nowadays. I think that’s a conversation we need to be having, in the open, where men and boys can participate.

I don’t have a singular vision of what healthy masculinity looks like but I know that it’s more than just one thing, that is not threatened by the independence and success of women, it accepts trans men and trans women for who they are, it’s about loving and respecting oneself, it involves parenting that is responsible and responsive, the ability to listen, and the capacity for vulnerability. I’d like to think that masculinity means not being afraid of books, supporting education and personal growth for everybody, and making sure that there is space for everybody.

We’ve seen how that fear and hate having a very solid run lately, and how do we build up a masculinity that is pretty much the opposite of that? Aside from doing the work on an individual level and attempting to be a role model, how do we show boys and men what it’s like to have a positive masculine identity in our families, communities, workplace, and government? Help me out here, folks, what should we do?

1. Yes, I said, “toxic masculinity,” which is a thing. Anybody who has a genuine problem with that idea is someone who simply doesn’t understand how adjectives works. Is using the phrase “toxic masculinity” bad marketing because it might annoy folks who think it’s a judgment of masculinity itself? I dunno, maybe? But I’m tired of the authoritarian push to remove perfectly normal words from our language by branding them as bad, such as woke, diversity, equity, inclusion, feminism, and so on. If we’ve got as vision for positive masculinity, then having misgivings over what to call a toxic variant of masculinity other than toxic masculinity isn’t helping anybody.