Barack Obama put Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It on his 2024 Summer Reading List. The book had already been named Best Book of 2022 by both The Economist and The New Yorker.
When a former president adds a book about men’s struggles to his reading list, something has shifted in the mainstream recognition of this issue. This is not fringe. This is not a backlash to gender equality. This is serious people looking seriously at data that has been accumulating for decades and saying: something is wrong, and it matters, and we need to talk about it.
Reeves’ argument is specific: men are falling behind in educational attainment, mental health outcomes, social connection, and sense of purpose — across racial and economic groups, in most Western countries — and the cultural conversation has been slow to acknowledge this because the framing of men’s issues as inherently in tension with women’s empowerment has made the subject politically difficult. His book, and Obama’s endorsement of it, pushes back on that framing. You can recognize that women continue to face structural disadvantages and also recognize that men are struggling. These observations do not cancel each other.
Angelica Ferrara at Stanford, whose research on male loneliness I’ve cited across several posts, approaches this from the feminist direction — concluding that men’s wellbeing is a feminist concern because isolated men impose disproportionate emotional labor on the women in their lives. Bréné Brown’s research on vulnerability reaches the same territory from the psychology direction: men who cannot access vulnerability cannot form genuine connection, which costs them and everyone around them.
The cultural moment is real. The question is what to do with it. For me, the answer has always been local — not policy, not social movement, but the specific daily practice of one person deciding to be genuinely known by one other person. The systemic recognition matters. What changes lives is the individual choice to stop performing fine.
