Beyond the manosphere: Supporting boys and men in the real world
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Every episode of It's Been a Minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow It's Been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeisty topics that are filling your feed.
What crisis are boys and young men currently facing?
This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
You just don't know what you're going to find.
Challenge you.
We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show, what does it mean to be a man today? Returning now to an issue our next guest has been sounding the alarm on for years.
The current crisis facing boys and young men in this country.
Our boys are in a crisis. Yes, this debate has been raging for a while. But since the 2024 presidential election, it has intensified. you want men to be better or do you want phrases like toxic masculinity the manosphere or the male loneliness epidemic they pepper conversations used to blame some and to rally others it may start with simple ideas about being an alpha male or toxic masculinity doesn't even exist the only thing that is toxic across a man or a bear and the women like unanimously said i'd rather come across a bear and There are those who want to shout about these issues. But there are also people who would rather not talk about them at all.
Honestly, I'm just sick of hearing about it.
Why are men like this?
Why is this the reason for the male loneliness epidemic?
There is no male loneliness epidemic. It is a loser epidemic. Richard Reeves thinks there's a better way.
Keep it boring.
Ha ha ha.
And as my son said to me one day, he said, well, if that's your motto, Dad, you are definitely the man for that job.
Burn!
Exactly. But the point is actually by being quite dispassionate about it and just saying, look, these are facts and hopefully reasonably even-handed, I think what it did was create a space for a conversation that was already there. It just didn't quite know how to break into the open.
Richard is the founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He's also the author of the book, Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It. His interest in understanding what was happening to half the population started a decade ago. As a policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, he noticed some troubling trends. And a warning, we do discuss suicide.
I just kept running across these data points that showed me on lots of fronts now, boys and men are the ones who are behind. In education, for example, we see that by the end of high school, boys are a year behind girls in literacy. There's a bigger gender gap on college campuses today than there was in the 1970s, but it's the other way around. So men are a bit further behind women in college today than women were behind men when we passed Title IX. We've seen a big rise in suicide rates among young men especially. And what I came to realize was that there's this cultural moment we're going through. I think a lot of young men and young women actually, but young men are really struggling to kind of come to terms with what does it mean to be a man today?
What does it mean to succeed today? Who am I? Which are, of course, age old questions. But I found that even through listening to the conversations my sons were having, that this was just a question that they were asking in a way that previous generations of men didn't.
Yeah. So your book came out in 2022 and it really came out with a bang. This felt like a sort of fresh take to a lot of people, I think particularly maybe of moderate or left persuasion in politics, because everybody had been talking about women's rights for so long.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:24
2
What crisis are boys and young men currently facing?
0:24–4:55
3
How has the discussion around masculinity evolved recently?
4:55–13:11
4
What role does education play in the struggles of boys and men?
13:11–29:54
5
How do economic changes affect men's roles in society?
29:54–52:31