Sometimes, a book manages to impress simply by exceeding low expectations. Senator Josh Hawley’s Manhood was, for me, such a book. As the title suggests, it’s a “man book,” and in my experience, these tend to fall into two categories. Some consider the needs and struggles of modern males in a careful, circumspect way. Others rant and fuel male resentment. I expected Hawley to embrace the second category, since those books seem to enjoy stronger sales and more attention from the sorts of people he would have reason to impress. Accordingly, I flipped the front cover bracing myself for tendentious diatribes against feminism and bitter rants about dissolute “elites” who sit in their pleasure palaces, sneering at the “great American middle.” 

To my surprise, the word “feminism” did not even appear in the index. Hawley said nothing about it. There were a few rants about “Epicurean elites,” but they were relatively restrained, and represented only a small portion of the book. Manhood is clearly a politician’s book, not a book book, and it’s hard to think of a circumstance in which I would actually recommend it to anyone. There are, to be sure, much better treatments of this same subject. But I confess that I was struggling to work up much indignation about this cozy little serving of chicken soup for the masculine soul. Despite a few blemishes, it successfully rises to the level of coffee-table inspirational literature. This book could have been so much worse.

My friend Elizabeth Matthew had a more negative impression. She did discern in Hawley’s book an unseemly amount of victim-mongering, and a strong dose of male resentment. I’m warmly sympathetic to her concerns because I think she is unquestionably right to see self-pity and reactionary resentment as significant obstacles to males thriving in our time. Even at his most restrained, Hawley still unambiguously endorses a traditional (or is it reactionary?) view of masculinity, with no acknowledgment that it may sometimes be necessary to adapt our norms and expectations for men. Good men prioritize the real needs of their families over blind obedience to “The Way”; this is not a capitulation to the dastardly “Epicureans.” But many men today struggle to grasp this truth, and it’s reasonable to worry that Hawley is exacerbating this problem with his odes to traditional manhood.

I still hesitate to condemn his position outright. A view like Hawley’s does contain some important truths, which are often missed by less-traditional man-writers, such as Warren Farrell, or Richard Reeves, a social scientist at the Brookings Institute whose work I will discuss presently. As a mother of five sons, I feel a certain solidarity with all of these writers: Hawley, Matthew, and Reeves, all parents to multiple sons. Masculinity is a fraught topic nowadays, on both left and right, but when one is actually raising boys the theorizing is much more than an abstract exercise. I’d like to think that all participants in this conversation have potentially valuable insights, and in what follows, I will use Hawley and Reeves as exemplars of two different paradigms, each with certain strengths, and also some deficiencies. Hawley, a traditionalist, gestures towards a framework that easily recognizes manhood as something good, meaningful, and ennobling. Unfortunately, he shows no interest in adaptation, which is a significant challenge for modern men. Reeves, a lifelong liberal, forthrightly acknowledges that challenge and comes to the table ready to help, bearing valuable data-driven insights. His ideas are interesting, and his sincerity in advocating for boys and men is genuinely impressive. But he is deeply reluctant to embrace any normative vision of what men ought to be. This is a real deficiency, for reasons I will explain.

How Like a God

“What makes a man?” asks the inside jacket of Manhood. The question is certainly pressing, so it’s disappointing that Hawley never answers it. His book is full of claims about men, many of which would be hard to dispute. They should have self-discipline and set worthwhile life goals. They should be willing to make serious commitments. They should work hard, and prove themselves as contributing citizens, husbands, and fathers. They should be defenders of liberty, justice, and truth. 

All of that sounds excellent, but it prompts a further question. Wouldn’t this be sound advice for any rational being? Where is the vir in this account of virtue?

It isn’t necessarily wrong, of course, to pitch solid life advice in gendered language. Jordan Peterson has been doing this for years, and none of my mom friends seem to mind when he presents “make your bed” or “wear a tie to the interview” to their sons as though these were magical initiation rituals for The Brotherhood. For anyone who regards Peterson as a detestable chauvinist, I would just observe that I once briefly had a subscription to Men’s Health, and they seemed to employ the same strategy. There were lots of pictures of bodybuilders drinking kale shakes, and movie stars putting peppers and asparagus on enormous, manly-looking grills. If that messaging really persuades men to eat their vegetables, I’m all for it.

Hawley’s effort seems less benign, though, when considered in the context of his larger dialectic. Though he does urge men to man up and be responsible citizens, he also implies that misguided ideology (which for him is a kind of mash-up of gender theory, Marxism, nihilism, hedonism, and other bad ideas from the Left) is mainly to blame for the decline of men. Older, more traditional ways of thinking are always presented as good, while modern perspectives are consistently taken to be misguided and toxic for men. When a book on “the masculine virtues America needs” combines that kind of declinism with a list of virtues that both sexes need, it’s reasonable to worry that Hawley really is stoking masculine resentment, even without explicit diatribes against feminism. It probably isn’t necessary to tell unhappy men that their social status has been undermined by women’s educational and professional accomplishments. He needn’t point out that cognitive ability and “soft skills” command more earning power today than physical strength. They know. They’ll draw predictable conclusions.

It’s hard to say whether this effect was fully intentional. Maybe Hawley was trying to stoke grievance, or maybe he just didn’t spend enough time thinking his argument through. Either way, if he wanted to write a better book, he might start by answering his own opening question: What is a man? It’s rather irritating how certain traditionalists love to raise these definitional questions with a flourish, without bothering to furnish serious answers. If he did answer the question, he could go on to reflect more helpfully on sex-specific excellences, and what men can uniquely offer to the world. That, in turn, might yield some more helpful insights into the struggles of modern men.

Still, even without that, Hawley does effectively communicate some important truths about manhood. He knows that manly virtue is difficult. He knows that healthy societies need norms for masculine behavior, and that young men need to be accepted and affirmed in certain ways, while also being encouraged to transcend the baser aspects of their nature. This, as we will soon see, is more of a stumbling block for Reeves, who mostly just wants a tolerant world in which everyone is free to self-actualize. Hawley’s ideals of manhood are thicker, and he wants them to be presented to boys as both good and aspirational. Across years of raising boys, I have come to see this as a critical component of their moral development. Boys yearn for nobility. They thrill to the epic adventure, the lofty calling, the honorable fight. It isn’t always necessary for the fulfillment of that desire to be intensely gendered, but boys do have a yearning to see manhood as something intrinsically meaningful. This much, at least, Hawley does understand.

Just the Way You Are

“As a policy wonk,” says Reeves in the introduction to his book, On Boys and Men, “I feel equipped to offer some ideas to tackle these problems, rather than simply lamenting them. There has been enough handwringing.” He fulfills the promise. Over the course of the book, he calls attention to some of the unique challenges of boys and men while also encouraging them (and society at large) to relinquish certain masculine ideals that he considers maladaptive in our time. Reeves’ policy recommendations track many of the suggestions that man-advocates like Warren Farrell has made over the years. Stress the importance of fatherhood, as a personal relationship and not just a source of income. Encourage men to consider teaching or nursing as eligible career paths. “Redshirt” boys in grade school, to give their prefrontal cortexes extra time to develop. Both Reeves and Farrell are very interested in recruiting mature men into professions (such as elementary education and counseling) where they might serve as helpful mentors to growing boys. 

Reeves tries hard to refrain from either scolding or exhorting men. He has raised three sons, so I expect he does have some experience with sermonizing, but he is of the opinion that it’s time for society to stop scolding men, and start making a more serious effort to understand their problems. True to that goal, the book details many grim statistics that have gone largely unnoticed by society at large. Why, he wonders, did policymakers obsess over the negative effects of the Covid pandemic on women’s career tracks, while barely bothering to note that men were actually dying in larger numbers? Why has no one noticed that social and educational programs designed to help poor or disadvantaged citizens, have been spectacularly ineffective at helping men? Why has so little been done to help boys excel in school, when it has long been recognized that they are falling behind? Behind all of this analysis, there is an uncomfortable question: Why don’t we care about this? Have we just decided that it doesn’t matter whether men thrive, because they are by nature the privileged sex?

It is wonderful to see a man in Reeves’ position raising these questions. To his further credit, he is willing to acknowledge that some differences between men and women are natural and rooted in biology. Men, he believes, are naturally more aggressive than women, and more prone to risk-taking. They are, as a group, more interested in sex. They are likelier to be fascinated by STEM subjects. Also, far more than women, they rely on culture and community to teach them what goods and activities are proper to their sex. Women are less needy in this regard because their biology gives them plenty of responsibility to manage. Masculinity, Reeves says, is more “fragile.” 

The honesty is admirable, but at this point, one almost wishes for a Hawley-like figure to break into the conversation. If it’s true that boys need culture to infuse manhood with meaningful content, then what should that content be? How can we help our sons overcome that “male fragility”? Reeves has already made clear that he is not in the business of establishing norms. And that wish seems quite sincere: he makes clear that he is comfortable with transgenderism and thinks that video games are fine for boys. He isn’t bothered by moderate enjoyment of pornography and even wants schools to teach boys about healthy and normal porn habits so that they can consume it comfortably without becoming addicted. This all makes a certain kind of sense for a non-judgmental, non-traditional social scientist. I’d still like to ask him how much he knows about the pornography industry, and whether he really thinks that boys take no harm from media that so explicitly presents women as sexual objects for their pleasure. And has he not seen the way that video games can satiate a boy’s desire for achievement, undercutting his drive to work for more meaningful goals? We shouldn’t make boys feel like derelicts for having normal appetites and impulses. Sometimes they do need to be challenged to rise above, however. Don’t boys want, on some deep level, to be ordered to man up and do hard things?

In the end then, Reeves’ analysis also feels incomplete, though in a very different way. He is refreshingly honest on many points, but his social-scientific approach doesn’t leave much room for virtue. Traditionalists like Hawley, with their timeless sources of wisdom, might actually be better equipped to give boys inspirational, or aspirational, views of the men they might one day become.

Hawley and Reeves have dramatically different perspectives, and unsurprisingly, they have written very different sorts of books. But there are significant points of overlap between them, and they share many common goals. Is it possible that we can find a healthy masculinity somewhere between the church pews and the data analysis? Might we move beyond the pointless posturing of the manosphere, and the callous indifference of mainstream society? I often wonder, but these books gave me a bit of hope. Hawley’s was better than I expected, while Reeves wrote the most powerful defense of men that I have ever read from a left-leaning thinker. Maybe there’s a chance that the concerned parents’ club (of which Hawley, Reeves, Matthew, and myself are all members) can ultimately triumph over prejudice and partisan rancor. I hope so, for our boys’ sakes. They grow up before you know it, and I’d like them to grow into men.