Boys will – hopefully – be better men

The men of today are struggling. Can we help?

On Thursday there was a crew of four men working in my apartment, and four more who came to check the gas pipes, and determine the positioning of a new air conditioning unit.

To me, it always feels days like this are a refresher on Eastern European manhood.

The greeting should be the military-like “Să trăiți!” (“May you live!”), which in theory expresses obedience, but in practice must be delivered as a testosterone check. The movement: jerky, as if you’re at a bank heist and the getaway car is revved outside. The verdicts: immediate, ideally before inspecting the problem area, to signal authority and knowledge. The tone: loud, brash, to cover the space. The attitude: generally annoyed that I made this trip to deliver a service you paid for.

I have never been able to shift into this character, which is what you should do to get the job done, or so many say. If you don’t assert dominance, you get poor results. Especially when doing work on your home. And you don’t want to be a sucker (“un fraier”).

I don’t want to be taken advantage of. But I also don’t want to “play a man” according to our stereotype. And therein lies the problem.

*

Many years ago I lived in a studio in Militari, a largely working class neighborhood in Bucharest. My radiators were old, and I wanted to upgrade them, so I found a duo of workers to get this done. They were sarcastic from the moment they walked in, and I wasn’t going to play the game with them. They measured and asked where the closest shop was from where they could buy the parts they needed.

No idea, I said.

They started laughing and asked me what kind of a loser didn’t know about so and so market that was not far away.

After they left, I felt both humiliated and annoyed I didn’t match their assholery. But I was also committed not to do so, so I called and asked them to not come back.

Over the years, this idea of what a man is supposed to be in Romania and how he’s supposed to act – both with other men, and in society at large – has haunted me. I never felt I got it right. I tried taking after the older boys I grew up with, but their transgressions – from drinking, to smoking, to stealing from construction sites –, didn’t interest me. I tried to bond with my high school peers over our fragile sexualities, which we’d try to manifest by peacocking in front of the girls in school by saying and doing things that were borderline abusive and cruel. This coat of a rule-breaking loud-mouth who gets what they want just never quite fit.

I don’t mean to say I emerged as a different type of man, one confident and luminous. On the contrary: I felt more or less alone, and emerged as a scared male, convinced he’ll always be the certain prey of those stronger and louder than him.

The best I could do, I often said to myself, was to pass-by unnoticed.

*

The shock was how much of this disappeared when I moved to the US for my master’s. Sure, there was plenty of doubtful male behavior – especially in the fraternities on campus –, but for some reason I rarely felt that interacting with a man was a competition (or the prelude to a fight). I also rarely felt that an expert in a specific field expected me to pretend I knew his business. Negotiations were more diplomatic. Disagreements involved less shouting. Influencing was more subtle. The wielding of power less brutal.

For me, uninterested as I was in out-machoing my peers, this was a relief.

It helped me accept myself as myself, and it helped me understand how nature and nurture interact: while genetics and biology matter (men have more testosterone, they are more prone to risk taking and aggression etc.), they can be harnessed in pro-social ways by how we develop our roles and identities, and by deciding what society values (care over conflict, for example). I better understood the baggage I carried as a man from this part of the world, and that I wasn’t interested in the stereotype.

I would be lying to say this helped when I returned home: there was the radiator incident; there was a cringe moment a few years later when a local journalist walked up to me at a DoR launch party and told me, very earnestly, “I will defeat you”; there was a funny story when a woman (who was around 27) came to my studio (I was in my early-thirties) and told me: “You’re a man without much ambition. You live in a studio in a poor neighborhood, you’re not married, and you don’t even have a car”.

*

This week I read Richard Reeve’s book Of Boys and Men. Reeves, a scholar and researcher known for his work on inequality, has dug into the data (mostly US data) to show how boys and men are struggling in school, at work, and in the family. They fall behind in education, fail to graduate, or just don’t make it as far as women. They also suffer in the workforce, earning less than they used to, and, in some cases, they are being replaced. They die faster, and they commit suicide more often. They’ve lost the clichéd “provider” role in families as the women have closed the gap. For some, this leads to withdrawal from society. For others, this means war.

As Reeves admits, this was not an easy book to write. Men have been running our societies, making the rules, and deciding the stakes for centuries. They are still the main culprit for terrible violence – especially within the home and in relationships – and pain. (Oana has been writing about domestic violence in Romania for a decade now). This world order has thankfully been slowly coming apart over the past decades, and there remains plenty to do for women and girls (especially in even more patriarchal societies).

But, as Reeves says, we can hold two thoughts in our head at once: women are still discriminated upon, and men are seriously struggling. “The Left tells men, ’Be more like your sister.’”, Reeves writes. “The Right says, ’Be more like your father.’ Neither invocation is helpful. What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.”

One thing to point out is that we’re not talking about the men at the top – those with the most power, those making the most money. Those guys are doing better than ever.

It’s the rest that feel they can’t find their place.

*

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a wonderfully curious high school student. He told me finding male role models has been difficult, and that it was only thanks to his peers at the youth magazine Gen, știri that he was exposed to different views of the world, more empathic, more pro-social. Otherwise, he told me, he might have become just another reactionary internet shit poster.

And there are many. These are mostly the kids of a generation of men that lost status. They might never have had positional power, or they might even have been in a hierarchy which demanded obedience to the boss, but they still had the traditional power of “the head of the household”, the provider. That’s been changing not only in more developed societies, but in the East as well. People marry later, get divorced more easily, have fewer children. The labor market is changing. More women – even in Romania – pass their Baccalaureate than men. Higher education also sees larger female attendance and graduation rates. The social space is slowly changing norms: misogyny or abuse of power, which until recently wasn’t even questioned, is exposed by younger generations as the hurtful behavior it is.

Some men complain “they can’t even speak anymore”, but that kind of speech was part of why our society was lagging behind. Desperate to stay relevant, many men – most of whom are my age –, find solace in reactionary positions, where they take on shadow enemies such as “political correctness” or “cancel culture”, and proudly proclaim to have been red pilled to seeing the world “as it really is”: a conspiracy to make them obsolete.

The irony that they say this on platforms broadcasting them to large audiences doesn’t seem to register. Neither does the fact that they usually say all this by victim blaming (in the case of sexual abuse accusations), by further insulting other vulnerable groups (when a man is called out for untoward behavior), or by turning oneself into the grieving party.

These are not markers of “free thinking”, as many say. It’s just being an asshole, albeit a confused one.

A few years ago, a female student I helped make a magazine told me she and her peers were convinced I was gay. Something about how I crossed my legs, she said, but mostly the fact that I listened, was supportive, and didn’t hit on teenage girls. That’s a low bar to clear to be considered a decent man in this country.

*

“The success of the women’s movement has not caused the precariousness of male social identity”, Reeves writes. “But it has exposed it. The question is where we go from here.”

Over the past few years I’ve asked my students who they follow online. It’s usually the men who name people I had never heard of, and when I look them up, it’s usually other men, who teach their followers “how to make it in the world”: how to get rich, how to eat right, how to work out, how to talk to women. The so-called internet manosphere has expanded in the past decade and it encompasses everything from the get-rich-quick-crypto-bros, to Jordan Peterson followers, to Andrew Tate loyalists. There are a ton of local versions, many of them hucksters that seek to exploit the problem: men are lost, so I’ll take their money to restore their self-confidence through classes, manly camps, or online webinars. (PressOne wrote about one who advises men, among many other things, to stop paying their mortgages and their taxes).

In the worst cases – such as Tate – this perpetuates a retrograde view of gender roles and norms, and spreads misogyny (women must serve men). And it works for so many for two reasons: (especially) teenage boys love subversive anti-establishment figures, and they are also desperate to find their way in a modern world that’s scary and confusing.

*

The ones exploiting this confusion are the Tates and Trumps of the world. Conservative reactionaries want to turn back the clock on gender equity, and their cynicism knows no bounds. They will tell men they are under attack. They target LGBTQ+ communities as a proxy in this “war to reclaim identity”. They encourage a refusal to participate in society, and create fringe movements to take back power and make whatever great again.

Some men have been moving to the political right in the past decade as a result: we’ve seen this in case of Trump (whose recent indictment might win him even more fans), in Brexit, but also in elections in Sweden and Germany.

Romania’s far right party AUR mostly appeals to 18-35 year old men. In the 2020 parliamentary elections AUR had the largest gender imbalance among voters – almost 60 percent of them were men. (And they currently work really hard to court the young, as my former colleague Ina Constantin has shown).

This is not going to get better anytime soon. There is a dearth of male role models that can frame today’s masculinity differently, and I’m not talking about influencers, footballers or other celebrities. Those would help, but mainstream culture remains caught in a traditional paradigm (that goes even for the supposed subversivness of Romanian trap, made almost entirely by under-30 men in Romania). I’m talking about the men kids or teens meet in school or in their life: educators, coaches, and other guides. A recent report on gender in Romania shows that teaching positions in pre-university education are mainly held by women – 82.4% in the 2021-2022 school year.

More male teachers, more involved fathers are some of Reeves’ solutions. He also adds several policy proposals, including changes to parental leave for fathers, and even a bold ideas to start boys in school a year later so their brains could catch up with the girls’, because it does develop a tad slower at exactly crucial points: when entering school, and when hitting puberty.

*

Here’s two more construction anecdotes – and I’m sharing them to show the little moments when we’re negotiating how we show up as men, and how there might be alternatives to the norm.

One of my neighbors also runs a construction company. He called me a couple of days ago, angry that some isolating foam from my apartment got onto his clothes a few floors down. “Talk to the workers, please”, he said. “I know this happens in construction, but they should be more careful. I mean, I can talk to them, too, but you know, I’ll yell and curse at them. I’ll hit them. You can say things differently.”

A few weeks ago, the guy running the construction crew in my apartment called to apologize one night for some math he did wrong. He’d need more cash for supplies, he said. We could count the number of cements bags he used if I didn’t believe him. I believe you, I said. I trust that you’ll do what you promised, and that you’re fair.

He paused. I sensed this is not how it usually went for him; I sometimes would hear other men yelling into his phone for one job or another. He was ready for war. I didn’t want one, and I still hold out hope there is a form of local manliness where biology is harnessed for good trough care-oriented social structures and personal agency.

*

At DoR we posted a team photo once with more than a dozen women and just two men, me and Vlad. A local troll posted about us, called us “two soy milking drinking pussies”, and I was proud. That was the gender ratio we had for a long time, and even though we did put a thumb on the scale to favor men in recruiting, we had trouble finding ones interested in looking at the world through a lens of empathy, listening and finding solutions together. One came to an interview saying he didn’t need to answer questions; he knew he was the best. Plus men never submitted what our applications required; women always did. Interesting to note was that our readership was also around 70-75% women (the video investigations platform Recorder has the inverse ratio, for example), which I also took as a good sign: 30% men is a good start.

“One of the primary functions of human culture is to help young people to become responsible, self-aware adults”, Reeves writes, arguing we need to help boys get there – in school, in the workplace, in relationships. Maybe they do need more help to shape a healthy pro-social identity. “To be a grown-up means learning how to temper our own natures. We learn to go to the bathroom. We learn not to hit each other when we are upset. We learn not to act on impulse. We learn empathy, restraint, reflection. (…) It takes boys a little longer than girls. But most of us manage it in the end. Boys become men, even gentlemen. The boy is still with us, he is just not in charge anymore.”

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SIDE DISHES:

1. You can get through most ideas in Reeves’ book in this conversation he has with Ezra Klein. They conclude by saying there is work to be done on ideology, policy, but also in the day-to-day advice; we can’t let reactionaries and misogynists dominate that space.

2. Speaking of reactionaries: many alt-right movements (also mostly male) are Nietzsche fans. And to be fair, the philosopher was a reactionary anti-egalitarian with some dark views. But he’s also misread in many ways, and this episode of The Gray Area illuminates that.

3. For a lighter take on the struggles of modern masculinity, this Spanish Netflix show does the trick.

4. Loneliness is sky rocketing, and men have trouble making friends; here’s some tips.

5. One of my favorite This American Life episodes is about testosterone. The whole staff actually goes and measures their levels. And for more on “the mysterious world of human reproduction” check out this cool series from Radiolab.