Article 13

Article 13 Episode 2: For Mankind

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Article 13 Episode 2: For Mankind

Zachary Davis

May 21, 2025

Transcript

American boys and men are facing growing challenges in school, in the labor force, and in our culture. Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, documents those challenges and the steps it will take to solve them — which include a new cultural script for masculinity.

Many of our cultural spaces are suspicious of masculinity itself; others celebrate only that masculinity which conforms to the traditional model of strength and dominance. This episode proposes that a powerful new script would be one that celebrates the desire for strength as it is used in service to others.

Featured voices:

Introduction

Arthur Brooks: I have three kids, 25, 23, and 20, and my middle son is named Carlos. And Carlos was having a good old time in high school, and [] had substantial grade problems and academic issues. But the problem was he wasn't really having fun, and I think it was a meaning problem.

This is Harvard professor and social scientist Arthur Brooks, speaking with podcaster Tim Ferriss in 2023. In response to Carlos’s meaning problem, Brooks asked him to come up with a business plan for his life. The plan, in Brooks’ words, was “appropriately unorthodox.” Carlos got a job on an 8,000-acre working wheat farm in Idaho. He dug rocks out of the soil, chopped down dead trees, and ran a combine 16 hours a day.

Tim Ferriss: Why did he choose this? How would he explain that?

Arthur Brooks: Because he needed to see what he could do. He needed to find out what it meant to be Carlos Brooks, away from his family, away from everybody. Why? Because he was looking for the answers to the questions. They were inchoate. They were like, “Why am I alive? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find it in the cab of a combine. Maybe I’ll find it when I dig rocks out of the soil. Maybe I’ll find it by doing something hard with my hands.” Then he joined the military. He was 19 years old. He joined the Marine Corps. Today, he’s Corporal Carlos Brooks, Marines Three-Five Scout Sniper Platoon. And he’s got answers … I’ll tell you his answers. “Carlos, why are you alive?” “Because God made me.” “For what are you willing to die?” “For my faith and for my family and for my friends, and for the United States of America.” Boom. These are not the answers that a lot of people watching us would give, but these are super solid answers. I’m super proud of my son because he earned the answers to his meaning questions that everybody watching us has got to earn it.

Carlos Brooks isn’t the only young man to have wrestled with questions of meaning. In 2017, the Pew Research Center asked survey respondents where they found meaning in their lives: “What keeps you going, and why?” One analyst said, quote, “One of [Pew’s] most striking discoveries was that women find more meaning in their lives, and from more sources, than men … Right now, men have a narrower range of sources of meaning and identity, which makes them particularly vulnerable if one of those sources is damaged.”

That analyst was Richard Reeves, Founder and President of the American Institute for Boys and Men. As a father of three boys, he would hear about their worries and challenges around the dinner table. As a policy analyst, once he started looking into the data, he became more and more worried about the unique problems that boys and men nationwide were facing – especially since not many people were talking about those problems. So Reeves decided to jumpstart the conversation himself.

Richard Reeves: So my most recent book is called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling and What to Do about It

This story of these struggles hasn’t been widely told. But it’s a story we need to hear.

Welcome to Article 13– a podcast that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to offer blueprints for a better world. I’m your host, Zachary Davis. Today we’ll look at the particular challenges facing men and boys today and why telling new kinds of stories might offer some new solutions.

What are the problems and what’s causing them?

In 2022, Richard Reeves’ published a book called Of Boys and Men. It looks chiefly at how men are performing in education, the workforce, and family life. Data in all three areas indicates that men today are struggling:

Richard Reeves: 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.

In America today, women are 15 points more likely than men to hold a bachelor’s degree. Women’s wages have increased more than 30% since 1983, while men who entered the workforce at that time earn about 10% less in their lifetimes than men who started a generation earlier. One-third of men who hold only a high school diploma are out of the labor force. And these economic struggles impact family struggles, as Reeves described in a conversation with podcast host Coleman Hughes:

Richard Reeves: But it's also true that if men are out of work or struggling to earn a decent wage, that makes them much less attractive as marriage prospects or as mate prospects, and so they're less likely to form a family.

Men are struggling to complete degrees, to land jobs, and to form stable partnerships. And these challenges, Reeves says, are linked to some other sobering data.

Richard Reeves: Men account for almost three out of four deaths of despair from a suicide or an overdose. I mean, these are pretty shocking pieces of information, shocking data points.

The data make it clear that boys and men are facing significant problems. So what’s causing the problems? There’s been no shortage of people offering answers. But, Reeves says, these people often claim that men’s problems are problems with men.

Richard Reeves: So, from a conservative critic, for example, it might well be, “Well, they're just not masculine enough. They need to be more masculine, more of a breadwinner. They need to man up. They need to be more like their father.” But it's about them. It's about their individual responsibility.

Here’s Senator Josh Hawley, for example, speaking with Megyn Kelly.

Josh Hawley: My message to men is, “C’mon, this is the time for you to step up, to go out in the adventure of your life ,which is really an adventure of serving, giving, and providing.”

Alternatively, some conservatives identify the problem as the culture not letting men man up – as carrying out a “war on masculinity.” This is Tucker Carlson speaking with Laura Ingram on Fox News in 2018.

Tucker Carlson: And he’s absolutely right, I mean the Democratic party is anti-masculinity and anti-father, they have to be, that’s their base – and that’s just true.

In the U.S. Reeves writes, a third of men of all political persuasions believe that they are discriminated against, and among Republicans, the number is even higher. And there is some truth to that perception. Just think how common the phrase “toxic masculinity” has become.

Doug Emhoff: There’s too much toxicity, masculine toxicity, out there.

This is Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice-president Kamala Harris, speaking to MSNBC in 2023.

Doug Emhoff: We’ve got this trope out there that you’ve gotta be tough and angry and lash out to be strong. I think it’s a problem, and I’m going to use every chance I get to speak out against this toxic masculinity.

Richard Reeves: From the left, the problem was that they were too masculine, perhaps they were toxic, and if we could just somehow exercise out that nasty masculinity from them, they'd be okay.

Exit polls from the 2024 US presidential election showed that “55 percent of men voted for Trump in 2024, compared to 45 percent of women.” Among Black and Latino voters, the gender gap grew compared to 2020, with more men choosing the Republican candidate. To attribute the gender gap to pure misogyny would be a mistake, Reeves warns: “There is no strong evidence that young men are turning against gender equality. But they have turned away from the left because the left has turned away from them.” Prior to the election, Reeves strove to remind voters that the challenges facing men – especially men of color and working-class men – aren’t reactionary inventions. They are real, and they aren’t being addressed. As Reeves wrote, “The Democrats and progressive institutions have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues, and this was exposed in the election. At worst, men are seen not as having problems but as being the problem.”

Following the election, Reeves called on Democrats to look deeply at the way they speak to men, and called on Republicans to enact policies that will actually help their male voters. Extremists on the right and left often speak as though male problems come down to the choices of individual men. But the reason policy solutions are needed is that these problems aren’t individual; they’re structural.

They're about the structure of the education system, the economy and family life. A big reason why boys are falling behind in school is that the current educational system isn’t designed to support boys’ learning styles. Men are struggling in the labor market because large-scale structural changes, like free trade and automation, have vastly reduced the number of blue-collar, traditionally male jobs. And if men are struggling to bring in income, they’re also struggling to fill the role that men have traditionally filled: the primary breadwinner and provider for a family.

Richard Reeves: So among all U. S. households, now 40 percent of them have a sole or female or primary breadwinner, female []. These are profound social changes. The central goal of the women's movement in the 1970s was to secure economic independence for women, thereby making marriage a choice. And I think that has been spectacularly achieved in recent decades. And I think it is one of the most wonderful liberations in our history. But it has come with profound consequences. And I think to just either imagine that these trends don't have profound implications for what it means to be a father, to be a man in modern society, when we've defined it so clearly previously, is naive in the extreme.

Reeves offers a lot of ideas about policies that could help address these structural challenges. For example, traditionally male jobs in manufacturing are declining, but jobs in health, education, and administration—jobs traditionally perceived as more feminine—are rising fast. Reeves recommends massive investments in recruitment, subsidies, scholarships, hiring bonuses, and other incentives to get men into those professions – to benefit the workers themselves, and the people they would work with.

Richard Reeves: We desperately need more men in our classrooms but also in our hospitals and as care workers and as social workers and as counselors.

But beyond these policy proposals, we need changes at the level of our culture. Because the problems might start with external factors, like a globalizing economy, but they don’t stay there. They come to impact individuals at the deepest inner level, in terms of how they feel about themselves and their place in the world. And our cultural narratives don’t always offer men a place.

In some stories, the very premise of Reeves’ book – that men have problems worth addressing – is mocked. In HBO’s satirical TV show White Lotus, a businesswoman lectures her daughter for not being nice enough to her brother: “He is a straight, white young man, and nobody has any sympathy for them right now. And I just feel like we should. In a way, they’re the underdogs now.” The statement is the signal for her daughter to reply, “Mom, cringe.”

The ‘dumb dad’ trope is a decades-old cliche—just think of Homer Simpson— but it was still being deployed even at the end of 2023’s blockbuster film Barbie, as Barbie is driven to an appointment by a family of new real-world friends - a mom, a daughter, and a dad.

From Barbie: “You got this! I’m really proud of you.”
“Estoy muy orguoso de ti”
“Ogulloso.”
“Orgulloso … orgulloso de ti.”
“There you go. Close enough”
“Si se puede.”
“That’s a political statement.”
“That’s appropriation, Dad.”

Yes, the trope is meant to be funny. But it’s not all that funny for actual dads.

CNN: Those are funny, but it’s every show, and I want to get your take on this, and what concerns me is my sons, what do they watch on television? Whether it’s Disney channel, Nickelodeon, or all shows, what they’re seeing - and media’s powerful - the dad is an idiot!

This was CNN with Josh Levs in 2012. Family counselor and social philosopher Michael Gurian noted the impact that this kind of portrayal can have. When dads in the media are depicted as being stupid and unnecessary, men and women can absorb the dangerous message that men or fathers aren’t needed.

And that message –that you are not needed – is perhaps the most destructive one we could send.

Richard Reeves: A fundamental human need is to be needed. And if our men and our young boys don't feel needed, then it's no wonder that so many of them are going off the rails. A study of men who commit suicide looked at the last words they used to describe themselves before they did so, and the two words most commonly used by those men were “useless” and “worthless.” It is a fundamental human need to be needed. If we make our men feel that they're not still needed by our society, by our culture, it is small wonder that so many of them are suffering so much.

So it is crucial, says Reeves, that we start telling new stories in our culture about what it means to be a man – one that doesn’t label men by default as either “dangerous” or “useless.”

Richard Reeves: The cultural task before us is a new script for masculinity. And that new script will contain the best of the old script, which is about self-mastery and autonomy, etc., and interest in forming stable families and mating and having children, etc. But that script won't write itself.

We need to write this new script – one that respects what is new and vital in our 21st century society and recovers and renews what was valuable in centuries past.

One way to do this is by sharing exemplary stories.

A new script

Some of these will be real-world stories. Reeves discusses the Carnegie Hero Fund, which issues medals to civilians for courageous acts, specifically risking their life to save a stranger. In 2021, he notes, 66 of the 71 medals awarded were given to men – men like 19-year-old Lucas Mendoza, who was killed while trying to help a 3-year-old out of a burning building.” Men in general have a greater appetite and tolerance for this kind of risk.

One way to write a positive script for masculinity, says writer David French, is by embracing and harnessing some of these characteristically male traits. As he wrote in National Review,

“Turning boys into grown men means taking many of their inherent characteristics — such as their aggression, their sense of adventure, and their default physical strength — and shaping them toward virtuous ends. A strong, aggressive risk-taker can be a criminal or a cop, for example.”

Caitlin Flanagan, writing in the Atlantic, also starts from those inherent, generally masculine traits, and the choice all men face about how to use them:

“Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?”

When we help boys and men direct their strength towards virtuous ends – towards the protection and service of others – we get what Flanagan calls “heroic masculinity.” French and Flanagan see heroic masculinity as a goal and desire in many young men, just waiting to be cultivated and called forth, if we as a culture will give them permission to embrace it.

[French] “It’s quite safe to say that millions of young boys desire to become a grown man — a person who is physically and mentally tough, a person who can rise to a physical challenge and show leadership under stress … 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.”

[Flanagan] “Let them be who they are, including those boys who are very interested in what it means to be heroic, in the sense of defending and protecting the weak.”

We can model and celebrate this kind of positive masculinity through the cultural myths and stories we share. Stories that depict men using their strength and skills to serve the people around them – stories like Ted Lasso, Just Mercy, or The Lord of the Rings.

Ted Lasso: “Every choice is a chance, fellas. And I didn’t give myself the chance to build further trust with y’all. To quote the great UCLA college basketball coach John Obi-Wan Gandalf,

‘It is our choices, gentlemen, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’ Now I hope y’all can forgive me for what I’ve done.”

Just Mercy: “The charges against them have proven to be a false construction of desperate people fueled by bigotry and bias who ignored the truth in exchange for easy solutions, and that's not the law, that's not justice.”

The Lord of the Rings: “If by my life or death I can protect you, I will. You have my sword.”

The Lord of the Rings, a fantasy epic about a small group of friends banding together to save their land, is beloved by women and by men. The UK journalist Kaleigh Dray observes that

“The well-written men of the Lord Of The Rings have given us a beautiful example of healthy masculinity; one that allows men to cry without shame, to experience deep love and affection.”

Aragorn, for example, is ready to die for the quest, but also weeps and shows tenderness at the death of his friend Boromir.

The Lord of the Rings: “Be at peace, son of Gondor.”

The characters don’t show their strength by brutalizing others or dominating over women. But they do show strength – in how they help others.

The Lord of the Rings: “We will not abandon Merry and Pippin to torment and death. Not while we have strength left.”

We all depend for our sustenance and safety on people who dedicate their strength to the service of others. Strength is a virtue in men and women – but today, in many places, it’s women who are celebrated for it. We need to permit and celebrate men’s desire to be strong as well. And we need to remind them of all the forms strength can take. Not all men will be Carnegie Heroes, or the police chiefs and firefighters that Flanagan cites for heroic masculinity. For many men, the closer model will be another character from The Lord of the Rings – Samwise Gamgee, the gardener, the future husband and father, and friend.

The Lord of the Rings: “I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. A promise! ‘Don’t you leave him, Samwise Gamgee.’ And I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to.” “Oh Sam.”

Sam is an exemplar of strength called into service. He dedicates himself to the humble, ordinary work of walking alongside the person he is responsible for and caring for his everyday physical and emotional needs. As Reeves notes, we cannot do without men like these:

Richard Reeves: Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said, “Every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behavior of men.”

Caring for another in any sustained way takes great strength – physical, mental, and emotional. But strength isn’t always what we call it, and it isn’t always what we celebrate – not when we’re talking about men. We can change that. We can let men know that their strength is needed and valued. We can encourage boys and men in their desire to be strong. And we can tell stories that show them how to harness that strength in the service of others. After all, that’s what we call heroism. And we are in desperate need of it.

In general, men and boys have a greater appetite for risk. Researcher Ellen Sandseter explains that children love risky play – anything involving great heights, high speeds, dangerous tools, and disappearing from adult supervision – but this is especially true for boys. That’s what gives us stories like the one comedian John Mulaney tells from his childhood:

John Mulaney: “Sometimes people would say, ‘What do you think you're doing?’, but that just meant ‘Stop.’ They didn't actually want to know my thought process. They didn't want me to be like, ‘Well, I was gonna put this bottle rocket into this carton of eggs so that when I lit off the bottle rocket, the eggs would esplode everywhere.’ ‘Oh well, that's very interesting, and what brought you to this experiment?’ ‘Oh well, thank you for asking.’”

Sure, most normal adults would just immediately take away the bottle rocket. But see if you can resist that temptation just a little while to let boys have that experience of risky, rough and tumble play. According to psychologists, it’s an essential learning process – just have some Band-aids handy.

As boys get older, they will need greater challenges. Annie Holmquist, writing about The Lord of the Rings on Substack noted, “Just as the team of males in the quest to destroy the ring had a mission, so men today need responsibility. They need space … to take risks.” Or as one man wrote on Twitter, “Men rarely want to be empathised with. We want to fix a problem.” If that problem is finding his source of meaning or the direction of this life, he might need some struggle to solve it – just like Carlos Brooks did. Support his taking on that struggle.

Arthur Brooks: You need to live and to try things and to go through a process of discernment. And the way to do that is to do hard things, is to challenge yourself and to say to yourself, “I will not stop until I have answers to these questions, to my own satisfaction.”

Maybe you’re a man who’s also looking for more meaning and direction in his life. Maybe, like Carlos, you’re longing to find out just what you can do and who you can serve – but you haven’t found those answers yet. If so, remember that your work and your presence are needed right now – especially by young people. In some ways, says Reeves, boys need male role models even more than girls need female role models. And right now, we don’t have nearly all the male leaders and teachers and mentors that we need.

Richard Reeves: And male teachers are more likely to be coaches, so if we have fewer male teachers, we also have fewer coaches, but also we need more male scout leaders. We need more male, we need more men in just those other male spaces.

In this century, a smaller proportion of men are the sole breadwinners for a family. But being a provider doesn’t just mean being a provider of money. Men have many gifts to offer – especially when it comes to bringing up the younger men in their communities.

Richard Reeves: My English teacher in high school taught us metaphysical poetry from John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and some amazing Romantic poetry. He was a Korean War veteran who also was a bus driver. And he would have us in tears reading metaphysical poetry. I don't think that would have happened if it wasn't the man, for me. Just for me. I think the fact of a man teaching me to love and write and read poetry was hugely important. I think the fact that he was who he was helped me to read. He's [] a bunch of working class, unruly, 16-year-old boys. You're gonna get them to read John Donne and Andrew Marvell? By God, he did.

We are all called, men and women, to serve others with our gifts, our love, and our strength. But today, what some men hear is that their service isn’t wanted or needed. We can’t let that be the message we send. None of this is to diminish the tremendous struggles and challenges faced by women past and present. It’s simply a refusal to ignore any of the human struggles unfolding around us – like the deathly despair provoked by feeling “useless.”

Richard Reeves: And you talked about compassion earlier – that's the heart of the project here. We all want human flourishing for everybody. And if you see a group of people, whoever they are, who are struggling or suffering in some way or another, surely we're called to help that group of people. And the fact that we wouldn’t because they don't fall into these neat binary categories of our current political life is not only, in my view, shortsighted, because those problems will fester and come out in different ways, it's actually immoral. So there's a moral force to this argument here too.

Novelist Charles Dickens wrote, “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for any one else.” What else is healthy masculinity but a readiness to help bear others’ burdens? With this in mind, encourage the boys you know in their desire for virtuous strength. And celebrate the quiet but vital ways that men use their strength to help carry the burdens of others.