A new book from Richard V. Reeves is winning widespread applause for offering hope to men in a post-feminist world.

Released in September, ‘Of Boys and Men: Why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it, the father, author, and British-American expat argues for a fundamental shift in the societal attitude towards masculinity.

The Guardian highlighted two of Reeves’ major points, first congratulating the author for how he ‘delicately handled’ his subject matter, without bending a knee to the culture wars.

Society-Wide Fissures

For Reeves, ‘masculinity is first and foremost a product of biology rather than culture… the greater propensity for risk and aggression in men is not a social construct. How men channel risk and aggression are,’ The Guardian explained.

Addressing the growing sense of ‘male obsolescence, failure and alienation’, Reeves wrote,

“The problem with men is typically framed as a problem of men, it is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time. This individualist approach is wrong.”

The father of three boys ‘maintains there are structural problems, societal issues, that need to be addressed if men are not to become ever more lost, defeated and angry,’ The Guardian said.

They added,

“The big takeaway is Reeve’s original acronym: HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy).”

Picking up on Reeves’ HEAL proposals, The Washington Free Beacon wrote, ‘HEAL occupations will shift men away from “traditional” male professions into sectors with a growing demand for labour, filling occupational and financial needs.’

Unpacking this further, Reeves told OPB (Oregan Public Broadcasting),

“We haven’t given a new positive vision for men in this new world of gender equality, and that failure to adjust and adapt masculinity — it doesn’t happen on its own.”

He added,

“I think our collective cultural failure to do that is one of the root causes of some of the problems that we now see men and boys having.” (transcript)

True Equality

Discussing HEAL, The Beacon said Reeves’ solution to save men from society-induced self-annihilation is to raise men up into non-traditional male (HEAL) professions, the way women have been raised into STEM professions.

‘Raising men up does not mean holding women down, or ‘displacing’ them. It means rising together,” Reeves wrote.

The removal of the “breadwinning” role for men, which traditionally gave men a purpose and a sense of wholeness, Reeves surmised, might ‘explain why men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women.’

He then declared:

“Men are not suffering from a lack of labour force participation, but cultural redundancy.”

Both welcoming his points and criticising them, The Beacon said that the ‘most radical’ part of his proposal is Reeves’ rejection of ‘marriage as the vehicle for which fathers should exist.’

Reeves instead advocates for the liberation of ‘fatherhood from marriage, giving men the same social freedom awarded to women.’

Contesting this, by implying that the rejection of marriage, and the man for woman, woman for man, family unit was a mistake, The Beacon concluded,

‘Solving the “male malaise” requires correction, not catch-up. Reeves doesn’t give men a framework of what it means to be a man — and subjectively molding masculinity to feminist thought isn’t good enough.’

If the reviews are right, Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men: Why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it, appears to awaken a misandrist world to its need for fathers, men, and masculinity in general — regardless of how flawed some of his proposals might be.

I’ve often said, and have yet to have it proven wrong: those who yell, kick, and scream about “toxic masculinity” tend to have a toxic view of masculinity.

As Reeves states, “We need a pro-social vision of masculinity for a post-feminist world.”

His book shows promise as an antidote to toxic assumptions brought about by the social conditioning of society’s toxic war on men.

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Photo by Alena Darmel.