The Gender Expert: Men Are Emotionally Dependent On Women & We're Treating Them Like Malfunctioning Women! Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves (0:00)

It is pretty clear, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well. In fact, they do terribly. And in modern society, that's a problem.

Steven Bartlett (0:09)

Richard Reeves is the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

SPEAKER_3 (0:13)

An organization dedicated to researching and tackling the challenges faced by boys and men in modern society.

Richard Reeves (0:18)

We're in the early stages of a cultural revolution, so that women are not economically reliant on men, which is great. But one consequence of that is that it's put a big question mark next to the role of men, which used to be filled with a whole script of ways to be a man, ways to be ahead of household, etc. Because of that, they're struggling. They're behind in education, wages have stagnated, you're seeing a massive rise of young men who are single, and now the suicide rate is four times higher and rising. They looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before taking their own lives. And the two most commonly used words were useless and worthless.

And the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded.

Steven Bartlett (1:00)

You said the hardest thing you've ever done as a man is couples therapy. Why?

Richard Reeves (1:04)

I was talking about what I'd done at home and how it supported her career. My wife said that you seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough. The problem is that you're not masculine enough. What I came to realize is that men feel like that in order for women to become bigger, we had to make ourselves smaller. That is not the answer.

Steven Bartlett (1:22)

So what would you do at a social level to fix things?

Richard Reeves (1:25)

The most important move would be to...

Steven Bartlett (1:34)

Richard, you wrote a book called Of Boys and Men, Why The Modern Male Is Struggling, and Why It Matters, and What To Do About It. Of all the things you could have done, why? Why did you do this?

Richard Reeves (1:49)

Partly because I was warned so strongly against it, by my colleagues, by friends, by professionally, just saying this is such a difficult subject to write about, particularly right now in this moment we're in culturally. The reason I say I did it despite being warned or because I was warned, isn't because I'm like a sucker for punishment. I'm actually very thin-skinned. Interestingly, my wife said that in some ways, I was in the worst of all worlds because I'm a thin-skinned polemicist. In other words, someone who goes out of their way to make provocative points. I'm provocative, so I provoke responses but then I'm upset at the responses.

Actually, this work around boys and men is not intended at all to be provocative. Ironically, I'm trying to make it less provocative. I'm trying to make it more database, more mainstream, more boring in a way. But it was very interesting to me and it was very hard to get a publisher in the US for the book. So it was interesting to me that this whole debate was one that was just seen as too risky to enter. And I honestly thought, well, hang on, if I as a fairly boring guy with charts and research, I'm being warned against this, who is going to talk about it? And are we sure that it's better that those other people are talking about it and that we're not talking about it? We're basically benching ourselves from the conversation. Because of our fear about what's going to happen to us professionally or reputationally, we're basically benching ourselves and that just leaves the ground open. And if you think there's a real issue around boys and men, real questions around boys and men, it's not like it's not going to be talked about. That's not the question. The question is, who's talking about it? And I actually thought, we need more people like me talking about it, i.e. boring, research based, policy oriented, non-fiction type people, Brookings type people. And not just some of the people who are currently talking about it online. There are lots of great people talking about this online. Don't mistake me. But it's almost like it wasn't a topic that you were supposed to approach unless you were willing to risk something. And that just seems crazy to me.

Steven Bartlett (4:03)

When you say you come from this, from a place of stats, graphs, figures, etc. What is your background? Where does that come from?

Richard Reeves (4:11)

I bounced around essentially between academia, think tanks, politics, journalism. So when I was over here, I was in the UK until 2012 And I'd served in the coalition government working as a director of strategy for Nick Clegg. Before that, I'd run Demos, the think tank. I'd worked, I'd written for The Guardian and The Observer. I'd worked at IPPR. I'd worked at the Institute of Psychiatry. Did a PhD in philosophy at Warwick. And so I basically found myself in this space where either I'm trying to make policy or I'm writing about policy or I'm trying to think about policy in that sort of semi-academic space. And so I'm a kind of social scientist by experience, I guess, rather than by training. And that led me to the Brookings institution in DC where I was for 10 years working on race inequality, class inequality. And Brookings is like a big blue chip policy think tank place. It's regularly ranked as the most important think tank in the world. Whatever that means today, I don't know.