From Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), more and more Democrats are beginning to realize how little their party has to offer men. Entering this conversation earlier this week is Christine Emba, author of the book Rethinking Sex.
She revisits much of the same data Reeves and Murphy have covered, noting that “growing numbers of working-age men have detached from the labor market, with the biggest drop in employment among men ages 25 to 34. For those in a job, wages have stagnated everywhere except the top.”
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Sure, men still make up most of our political and economic leaders, Emba notes, “but millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success … Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious, and directionless.”
The Democratic Party, Emba explains, is reluctant to even talk about, let alone offer these men anything. She relates a conversation with a “Democratic strategist” who told her that “specific references to men in political speeches are often stripped out for fear of offense or to signal broader inclusivity.
“What ends up happening is that if women are still seen as needing tools to overcome disadvantage, men are often expected to just shape up by themselves,” Emba writes. “The strategist described his party as having almost an allergy to admitting that some men might, in fact, be struggling in a unique way and could benefit from their own tailored attention and aid.”
With Democrats offering struggling men nothing, conservatives are left to fill the void. Here Emba goes a little off the rails, failing to make distinctions between online provocateurs like Andrew Tate and the “Bronze Age Pervert” on the one hand, and more thoughtful voices like Jordan Peterson and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) on the other.
Emba admits that Peterson and Hawley offer some “highly positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability,” but she then lumps them in with Tate who, in her words, advocates “a return to a strict hierarchy in which a particular kind of man deserves to rule over everyone else.” This is true of Tate and BAP, but it is not true of Hawley.
Hawley’s sin, Emba complains, is to offer “the impossible suggestion that [men] reenact the lives their grandfathers led, followed by encouragement to blame society when that inevitably fails.”
But what is so impossible about using your grandfather as a model for masculinity?
In fact, if you read Emba’s article closely enough, that seems to be exactly what she wants to happen.
Early on, Emba recalls one therapist who told her she had found Peterson’s writings useful with a client who grew up “without a strong father figure.” Later, Emba quotes anthropologist David Gilmore, who told her that “boys generally had to be ushered into manhood and masculinity by other men. And that seems to be the missing link today.”
She then talks to Reeves, who tells her, “If you’re growing up in a single-parent household, and you go to a typical public school and typical medical system, there’s a decent chance that you will not encounter a male figure of authority until middle school or later.”
Boys not having positive male role models around seems bad. Especially when you consider research from Harvard economist Raj Chetty which that shows “boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present, even if not their own, had significantly higher chances of upward mobility.”
What men need, Emba concludes, are “ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist, risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating … and we can attempt to make them pro-social, to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.”
Hmmm … What institution that already exists takes men's natural distinctive traits, including strength, self-mastery, and the drive to procreate, and then channels those traits into pro-social behaviors that help men, women, and the common good? This institution also makes it far more likely that boys will have men in the same house they are growing up in that can also serve as role models for proper masculine behavior
Marriage maybe?
Emba mentions marriage just once in her article, negatively, in passing. “No longer dependent on marriage as a means to financial security or even motherhood (a growing number of women are choosing to create families by themselves, with the help of reproductive technology), women are 'increasingly selective,' leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner.”
This pretty much sums up most Democrats’ view of marriage: An antiquated institution that encouraged female dependence and is therefore being rightfully abandoned by more and more women.
But what if marriage was always about co-dependence between the sexes and not dominance by one sex? As Emba later concludes, “In the end, the sexes rise and fall together. The truth is that most women still want to have intimate relationships with good men.”
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Most women do still want intimate relationships with good men. And vice-versa. And there is only one institution on the planet that has a proven track record of providing a stable framework for such intimate male-female relationships: Marriage.
Until Democrats realize that monogamous marriage is actually the greatest positive force for female well-being on the planet, and not just some tool of the patriarchy, they will continue to bleed men at the ballot box.