The Fight Over Men Is Shaping Our Political Future
Not to mention the present — and the way we think about the past.
Thomas B. Edsall
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.
Jan. 17, 2019
How you see the role of men and women at work and at home has become an integral element of contemporary political conflict.
Until recently, most of the attention has been focused on partisan evaluations of problems confronting women. A 2017 Pew Research report found, for example, that by nearly 3 to 1 (73-25 percent), Democrats believe women face “significant obstacles that make it harder for them to get ahead than men,” while Republicans believe those obstacles are largely gone (63-34).
Last week, however, the American Psychological Association entered the fray with the release of its long-planned “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.”
The A.P.A. guidelines argue that the socialization of males to adhere to components of “traditional masculinity such as emotional stoicism, homophobia, not showing vulnerability, self-reliance and competitiveness” leads to the disproportion of males involved in “aggression and violence as a means to resolve interpersonal conflict” as well as “substance abuse, incarceration, and early mortality.”
The premise underlying the guidelines is summarized in a descriptive essay on the A.P.A.’s website: “Traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.” According to the A.P.A., the persistent commitment of many boys and men to the norms of traditional masculinity helps explain why
Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school — especially boys of color.
There is widespread support for many of the recommendations in the guidelines — encouraging increased paternal involvement with children, for example, and developing better approaches to reduce bullying — and these are not in dispute.
But the report’s critics claim that other sections derogate various masculine attributes and take as given the view that gender is “socially constructed” rather than underpinned by or reflective of biological differences between the sexes.
“Understanding the socially constructed nature of masculinity and how it affects boys and men,” according to the guidelines, “is an important cultural competency.” Psychologists should “strive to recognize that masculinities are constructed based on social, cultural, and contextual norms.”
The guidelines define “traditional masculine ideology” as a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.
The report notes that “in the aggregate, males experience a greater degree of social and economic power than girls and women in a patriarchal society.” This, according to the guidelines, is detrimental to men because
Men who benefit from their social power are also confined by system-level policies and practices as well as individual-level psychological resources necessary to maintain male privilege. Thus, male privilege often comes with a cost in the form of adherence to sexist ideologies designed to maintain male power that also restrict men’s ability to function adaptively.
Republicans and Democrats have sharply polarized views on such findings.
According to an October 2017 Pew Research report, a quarter of Republicans said the country has not done enough to insure equal rights for women, while 54 percent said the country has done enough and 18 percent said the country has gone too far. Among Democrats, 69 percent said the country has not done enough, 26 percent said the country has done enough and 4 percent said the country has gone too far.
Along parallel lines, a far lower percentage of Republicans than Democrats believe that changing gender roles have made it easier for marriages to be successful (26 percent of Republicans compared with 47 percent of Democrats). Similarly, 36 percent of Republicans compared with 58 percent of Democrats believe changing gender roles have made it easier for women to lead satisfying lives. Fewer Republicans than Democrats (30 to 48 percent) believe changing gender roles have made it easier for men to lead satisfying lives.
The reaction to the A.P.A. guidelines — largely but not exclusively from the political center and right and much of it critical — was swift. Even Gillette has joined the debate with its new television commercial, “We Believe: The Best Man Can Be,” a critique of toxic masculinity:
“It’s been going on far too long,” the narrator declares. “We can’t laugh it off.”
In a Jan. 7 National Review article, “Grown Men Are the Solution, Not the Problem,” David French, one of the most outspoken critics of the A.P.A. guidelines, wrote “We are in the middle of an intense culture war focused around men.”
French went on to ask:
As we survey a culture that is rapidly attempting to enforce norms hostile to traditional masculinity, are men flourishing? And if men are struggling more the farther we move from those traditional norms, is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy’s essential nature?
His answer is no:
Male children are falling behind in school not because schools indulge their risk-taking and adventurousness but often because they relentlessly suppress boys and sometimes punish boys’ essential nature, from the opening bell to the close of the day.
He concludes:
We do our sons no favors when we tell them that they don’t have to answer that voice inside them that tells them to be strong, to be brave, and to lead. We do them no favors when we let them abandon the quest to become a grown man when that quest gets hard. Yes, we do them no favors when we’re not sensitive to those boys who don’t conform to traditional masculinity, but when it comes to the crisis besetting our young men, traditional masculinity isn’t the problem; it can be part of the cure.
From a more academic vantage point, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, replied to my inquiry with a detailed critique of the A.P.A. guidelines.
“The report is blinkered by two dogmas. One is the doctrine of the blank slate” that rejects biological and genetic factors, Pinker wrote, adding that
The word “testosterone” appears nowhere in the report, and the possibility that men and women’s personalities differ for biological reasons is unsayable and unthinkable.
The other dogma, Pinker argued,
is that repressing emotions is bad and expressing them is good — a folk theory with roots in romanticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hollywood, but which is contradicted by a large literature showing that people with greater self-control, particularly those who repress anger rather than “venting,” lead healthier lives: they get better grades, have fewer eating disorders, drink less, have fewer psychosomatic aches and pains, are less depressed, anxious, phobic, and paranoid, have higher self-esteem, are more conscientious, have better relationships with their families, have more stable friendships, are less likely to have sex they regretted, are less likely to imagine themselves cheating in a monogamous relationship.
In Pinker’s view, the A.P.A. guidelines fail to recognize that
a huge and centuries-long change in Western history, starting from the Middle Ages, was a “Civilizing Process” in which the ideal of manhood changed from a macho willingness to retaliate violently to an insult to the ability to exert self-control, dignity, reserve, and duty. It’s the culture of the gentleman, the man of dignity and quiet strength, the mensch. The romantic 1960s ethic of self-expression and escape from inhibitions weakened that ethic, and the A.P.A. report seems to be trying to administer the coup de grâce.
Pinker suggested rather that
One could argue that what today’s men need is more encouragement to enhance one side of the masculine virtues — the dignity, responsibility, self-control, and self-reliance — while inhibiting others, such as machismo, violence, and drive for dominance.
There is a major difference between the two parties regarding the basic nature versus nurture issue that plays such a prominent role in the debate about men. As my Times colleague Claire Cain Miller reported in December, data from Pew shows a partisan divide over whether gender differences were the result of biology (and thus unlikely to change) or societal norms. More than half of Republicans said biology determined differences in how men and women parented, expressed feelings or spent their free time. About two-thirds of Democrats described society as the primary driver of these differences.
I asked some of those involved in preparing the A.P.A. guidelines for their response to criticisms of the report, including Pinker’s.
Ryan A. McKelley, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, who participated in some of the research but not in issuing the guidelines, wrote that there was no intent to reject “biological determinants.” Instead, “it was just beyond the scope of those particular guidelines.”
McKelley noted that he keeps “seeing ‘testosterone is missing’ show up in critiques of the guidelines, but psychologists don’t measure or manipulate testosterone levels in patients.”
Similarly, he continued,
If I treat someone for major depressive disorder, it doesn’t matter to me as a clinician what percentage of their depression might have genetic determinants. I can’t change their genes.
McKelley rejected
the implication that the goal is to eliminate male characteristics. The real implication is that rigid adherence to extreme expression of a few select masculine norms is related to poorer health outcomes.
In fact, he argued, the guidelines specifically encourage a kind of competitiveness, citing a section that reads,
Active play between fathers and children has a functional element correlated with several positive child outcomes, such as competitiveness without aggression, cooperation that buffers anxiety, healthy experimentation, social competence, peer acceptance and popularity, and a sense of autonomy.
McKelley said he would love to have someone argue that “competitiveness without aggression” is somehow undesirable. That sounds exactly like redirecting traits toward more productive activity and behavior.
Edward M. Adams, past president of Division 51 on Men and Masculinities of the American Psychological Association, emailed that the guidelines espouse positive manhood to include living in cooperation, respect, appreciation, courage, and fearlessness about being fully human. We do not see negativity, shame, unwarranted violence and aggression, gender domination, or hate and prejudice as ways to promote a better quality of life for any one of us.
Adams noted that the guidelines are a living document and will undoubtedly evolve over time. What is important is that we are grappling with the impact of destructive expectations that may thwart positive development and diminish the physical and emotional health of men and boys.
There is a strikingly different approach to the debate over masculinity in a different branch of academic inquiry. As David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., wrote in response to my inquiry:
The greatest adverse shock to the psychosocial welfare of U.S. men has not stemmed from dysfunctional notions of masculinity (not that these are above reproach) nor from #MeToo (which was long overdue) but from deep secular labor market forces — both technological and trade-induced — that have over nearly four decades reduced the demand for skilled blue collar work.
The effects of these economic changes, Autor wrote, have been devastating:
These forces have dramatically eroded the earnings power, employment stability, social stature, and marriage market value of non-college men. The ensuing dysfunction touches not just in earnings and employment but also male idleness, dysfunctional and destructive behavior (e.g., drug and alcohol abuse), and the erosion of two-parent families, which, research suggests, facilitate children in becoming successful adults.
In a December 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Men,” Autor, David Dorn, an economist at the University of Zurich, and Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California-San Diego, argue that adverse trade shocks, like a surge of imports from China, “differentially reduce employment and earnings of young adult males” “reduce marriage and fertility,” “heighten male idleness and premature mortality, and raise the share of mothers who are unwed and the share of children living in below-poverty, single-headed households.”
John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, wrote to me that for those “with strong muscles and backs” the changes described by Autor and others have been “wrenching.”
Hibbing agreed that the fault is not with the MeToo Movement; it is with the nature of a labor market that has been visited by rapidly evolving technologies. No conspiracy to devalue manhood is afoot.
Hibbing continued:
What some men traditionally brought to the table is no longer required so they must change. That is not easy but so it goes.
The men most negatively affected by changing economics, according to Hibbing, are also those most often inclined to reject the fact that “government is the best source for providing assistance and retraining in the face of these changes.” Instead, these men “resist such assistance and feel they are entitled to the arrangements of the past.”
In this heated debate, Judith Butler, a prominent feminist and a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, provided a strong case for the progressive argument in behalf of expanding gender norms. Butler argues “that feminism has opened up possibilities for boys to play football or to pursue the arts, or even to do both.”
The larger point, she wrote, is to let boys find their way toward activities and passions that more fully express who they are and let them flourish apart from any social judgments about what is appropriate for their gender. Indeed, the only prescription that most feminist positions make is to treat people with dignity, to honor the equality of the sexes, to accept gender diversity, and to oppose all forms of violence against people, whether young or old, on the basis of their gender or sexuality.
Many Republicans believe gender roles to be distinct and that categorical denial of hormonal or biological underpinnings to sex differences is erroneous — while simultaneously voicing doubts about the legitimacy of the science of evolution. Many Democrats defend the basic theory of evolution but remain wary of, if not hostile to, biological explanations of human behavior, in part because of their belief in the efficacy of government or other societal intervention to change behavior.
What is patently clear to those on one side of the debate is patently false to those on the other. The pressures to conform to conservative orthodoxy on the right and to liberal orthodoxy on the left sometimes seem to preclude reasonable compromise — that nature and nurture interact endlessly. Fundamental disagreements about sex and gender have become so polarized that oversimplification is inevitable, and the obvious truth that both social and biological forces are at play is cast aside.
The current era has been marked by a continuous series of challenges to once indisputable truths about sex and gender. Ubiquitous contraception, for one thing, has altered the fundamentals of reproductive roles. The alteration of these fundamentals has been followed by a series of transformations and dislocations — women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, transgender rights, new forms of family formation and dissolution, and vastly altered patterns of fertility. Challenges to core understandings of masculinity — and femininity — are inescapable.
The immensity of these upheavals should not be underestimated. That people are seeking political solutions to rapid societal changes is no surprise. That these solutions erupt in political conflict is also inevitable. For some, new horizons in matters of sexuality and sexual identity offer opportunity; for others, discomfort and fear predominate. These responses are increasingly sorting themselves into partisan affiliation, sometimes uncomfortably. And as I said at the outset, they have become an integral element of contemporary political conflict, which means that an ultimate resolution is light years away.
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Thursday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall
