Boy Problems

Men and boys are in crisis. Yes, feminists should care.

Photo by Fermin Rodriguez Penelas on Unsplash

The various crises facing men and boys can be challenging ones for feminists to navigate. After all, ever since women began fighting for even the most basic of rights for women and girls, (mostly) conservatives have asserted that men and boys have bigger problems. This is very plainly not true. Men still run just about everything. For more than 200 years, the United States has seen an unbroken line of male rule. Men hold the overwhelming majority of the top jobs in business, finance, tech, and law. Most of the richest people in the world are men. Most world leaders are men. Men own the lion’s share of the world’s money and hold the overwhelming majority of the political and financial power. Men make more money than women even for doing the same work, and when jobs are coded “male” versus female, they enjoy both higher status and higher pay. Men face far lower rates of sexual abuse and intimate partner violence, and while they face more violence generally, most of that violence comes at the hands of other men. Men remain among the biggest physical risks women face.

But.

None of this means that men and boys aren’t suffering in other capacities. And just because women and girls are, by most measures, globally worse off than men and boys doesn’t mean that men and boys should be beyond our regard. Even if you are entirely concerned with the well-being of women and girls, women’s and girls’ lives are intertwined with men and boys. We love them, marry them, raise them, are raised by them. If we want to be entirely self-interested about it, when men and boys suffer, they take it out on women and girls and we suffer in turn. Fundamentally, men and women are interconnected; feminists should take the suffering of men and boys seriously because women the world over care about their sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, and friends. Feminists should take the suffering of men and boys seriously because more liberated men means more liberated women.