Penny Adrian's Reviews > Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

Poor & working class men (especially black men) are suffering horrifically from a lack of support and direction when it comes to "being a man" without being their family's primary breadwinner.
This is not a crisis effecting high earning men (or their sons). This is a crisis affecting poor and working class men and boys.
This is a CLASS issue among men and boys, NOT an issue among men and boys in general.
Among women and girls, prostitution is a CLASS issue as well. But Reeves is blind to this fact.
As a trafficking survivor, Reeves' support for decriminalized sex buying was familiar, predictable,and disgusting.
Despite his claim to be a "wonk" he managed to be ignorant of the fact that decriminalized sex buying leads to increased demand (a demand which willing "supply" has never been able to meet). The gap between supply and demand leads to the increased sex trafficking of poor women & girls (not middle class girls - poor women and girls).
The London School of Economics did an extensive study establishing this fact, although common sense would have made it fairly obvious as well.
Reeves tried really really hard not to come across as a misogynist, but he failed when he supported the legal right of men to rent women's bodies as if they were appliances. (He probably supports commercial surrogacy as well).
Reeves also compared carvings and drawings of naked ladies to pornography. He managed to forget that actual porn can involve unwilling participants, often underage and coerced. Actual living feeling human beings.
Reeves' hapless misogyny is disappointing, because poor and working class man are uniquely victimized by a lack of living wage jobs that don't require a college education.
These men are in pain, and we need to do whatever we can to help them.
But if men & boys were outperforming women & girls in school the way women & girls are outperforming men & boys, evolutionary psychologists would claim that men are just a bit more intelligent than women and leave it at that. They would claim that women were just better suited for homemaking than for practicing law or medicine, etc (there is a great deal of historical precedent for this).
Reeves seems outraged by the fact that women appear to be much more booksmart than men, and that an extraordinary amount of help should be poured into helping male students to keep up with their female peers.
But why do we overvalue booksmarts in the first place?
EMT's, firemen, policemen, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, maintenance crews, roofers, garbage men, repairmen, truck drivers, delivery men, etc are MUCH more important to the functioning of society than stock brokers and software engineers.
Perhaps we should start putting our money where our mouths are when it comes to "essential workers" and start to PAY THEM breadwinner wages.
Most women still want to marry a man they can look up to, and most women won't look up to a man who is financially dependent upon them.
If men suck at school, then we need to PAY HIGHER WAGES for vitally important jobs that don't require a college degree.
Most women still want to be the primary caregivers for their children, and most men would prefer to be the primary breadwinner for their families. Yes, men and women can meet in the middle on these roles and be flexible, but these basic preferences continue to persist. It's for THIS reason that poor and working class men feel so hopeless and depressed. They see most paths to becoming a breadwinner closed off to them. This may also explain why poor and working class women are more ambitious when it comes to jobs and education: most women want children, and if they are poor or working class, they know that their male peers will not be able to provide for those children.
Men and boys don't need to perform better in school; men need to be PAID breadwinner wages for essential work that does not require a college degree.
Being booksmart is not the most important form of intelligence, and it should not be valued more than other forms of intelligence that do not require a college degree.