What About the Boys? What About the Men?

Over lunch at the trendy Zut! on Fourth restaurant in Berkeley last summer, a young friend filled me in on the ambitious non-profit she runs locally.

My friend’s goal is to empower girls, to teach them, through mentorships and enrichment programs, to hold their own against — among other perils — the pressures of consumer capitalism and exploitive online algorithms.

I’m a feminist from way back. I marched and shouted in the sixties and seventies against the sexism that had shaped and limited me when I was growing up in mid-century America.

I railed against job discrimination. I ranted about the politics of housework.

And today I’m still a feminist. I’m for women. I’m for girls. I’m for women in the workplace. I’m for women in politics. I’m for equal rights for women.

And that’s what we’ve got now — women in the workplace, women in politics, women putting on conferences to empower women.

But wait! What about the boys? What about the men?

Who’s putting on conferences that address the needs and fears of men in our fast-changing society?

Committing to Long-Term Relationships

When I was a feature writer at the Oakland Tribune back in the 1980s, I was assigned a story on what was perceived to be a shortage of young men willing to commit to long-term relationships.

I interviewed several women — there were plenty willing to talk. They complained about the men they were encountering on the dating scene. Men who dabbled in short-term romantic relationships, but stopped short of proposing — or accepting a proposal of — marriage.

As my deadline approached, it dawned on me that, oops, I hadn’t talked to any men. To balance out my story, I’d need to hear what local men had to say on the subject of marriage and romantic commitment.

I Forgot to Ask the Men

I’d left myself time to interview only one man on the subject. And what he had to say stunned me.

This was a lovely man, a Dartmouth graduate around 30, good-looking, well spoken, kind. He was marriage material, no doubt about that.

So why wasn’t this sensitive young man ready to commit?

Because he didn’t have the money.

He was under employed, he said, and not secure enough financially to take on the responsibility of a wife and family.

I was nonplussed. Like so many feminists then and now, I thought and acted as if the men I knew had all the power. We women had only to wrest the power from them — and everything would be fine.

Toxic Masculinity?

I didn’t think about how feminist anger and charges of toxic masculinity were landing on the men I knew.

I didn’t think about how men felt about women beginning to equal or outnumber them on college campuses and in the work place — and taking places that once might have been theres?

I didn’t think about how men felt about their loss of the status as the main family breadwinner.

How to Be a Man in 2025

As I sat there over lunch with my friend on that summer day in Berkeley, I wondered, who was looking after the young men in my friend’s town? Who was tending to their needs, their self-esteem? Who was helping them to discern what it is to be a man in the 21st century?

A group called the Speaking with American Men project, SAM, has put $20 million into answering those questions — and helping the beleaguered Democratic Party recapture young male voters.

Using focus groups, SAM studied young American men, asking what they were thinking and feeling. It found many men were ashamed and confused about how to be a man in the 21st century.

With milestones like owning a home further and further out of reach, young men were feeling increasing economic insecurity and the sense that they could not live up to society’s traditional — and their own — expectations.

What About the Boys? What About the Men?

So I’m asking — what about the boys and men? Have we liberated women gotten so caught up in saying what we want to say that we aren’t listening to what our men are trying to tell us?

Thoughts on the life-work balance at “Women — Can They Have It All?”  And on “Jon Krakauer — A Macho Writer Who Hooks Me In Every Time.”