Man of the 2020s, but man not really serene: this is the observation made by Richard Reeves. An original expert on the middle classes, the Anglo-American researcher focuses on males. While the fashionable themes focus on toxic masculinity, problematic virility and, in France, “Rousseauist” deconstruction (Sandrine, not Jean-Jacques), Reeves deals rigorously with his contemporaries. At school and university, the gender gap has been reversed and reinforced. Girls are now more likely than boys to attend higher education. In most disciplines, their results are better. Male dominance still largely prevails in the top flight.
On the other hand, for the most disadvantaged categories, and particularly in the United States for poor blacks, men have seen their situation deteriorate. Compared to women, but also over time. Reeves points out that the incomes of poor men on the other side of the Atlantic have fallen compared to the 1970s. In other words, for the poorest men, the dynamic is one of relative gender, and an absolute decline in living standards.
On the ideological level, a war of the sexes is at work. Anti-patriarchy progressives promote women regardless of men. The Conservatives want to go back to the past. For Reeves, it is important to achieve the desirable goal of equality between men and women, with neither party forgotten. Concretely, in the field of education, it would be beneficial to see the return of male teachers.
When the army is gradually feminized, education is largely demasculinized. On the paternity side, it is essential to strengthen the presence of fathers with their children, especially the youngest. Above all, on the subject of single-parent families – a problem even more pronounced in the United States than in France – the absence of a father figure is a real scourge. Reeves doesn’t do psychology cheaply. As a meticulous economist, he relies on the realities assessed through the data. The whole does not result in a virilistic lamentation of the decline of the masculine, but in a concrete picture of the current difficulties of men, from the little boy to the middle-aged gentleman. This is not masculinism’s answer to feminism, but a legitimate and substantiated addition to the debate.
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about Itby Richard Reeves.
Brookings Institution Press, 2022, 256 p., €24.
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