A Shocking Turn in the War on Men - Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves discusses how the conversation around boys and men has shifted dramatically since his 2022 book, moving from political neglect to genuine policy action — driven partly by Democrats’ realization after the 2024 election that they had lost young men by historic margins.

• When Reeves last spoke on the show, he described banging his head against a brick wall, especially on the center left, trying to get anyone to acknowledge that boys and men were struggling. He can no longer credibly say that.
  • Governors Gavin Newsom (California), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Wes Moore (Maryland), and Spencer Cox (Utah) have launched serious initiatives targeting boys and men in K-12 education, employment, and mental health.
  • Two bills have been introduced in Congress: one to create a men’s health strategy and office, another (the Men Matter Bill) to support men’s mental health after fatherhood.
  • Virginia is poised to create the first state commission on boys and men, sitting alongside its existing commission on women and girls — an institutional change that would persist beyond any political cycle.
• Reeves sees this as a significant first step but not sufficient. His institute’s role now is to hold these policymakers accountable — asking six months later whether they actually delivered.
  • He worries this could be a passing political moment rather than a lasting shift, and his goal is to make the issue “boring” and mainstream, institutionalized into government structures that outlast news cycles.

Some men’s rights activists and reactionary commentators dismiss these political efforts as cynical vote-chasing, but Reeves argues this misunderstands how democracies work.

• He references a rabbi’s observation that “activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed” — because if the problem is solved, the activist loses their identity and purpose.
  • This pattern appears across movements: climate activism, LGBTQ advocacy, racial justice. After major civil rights victories, some advocates immediately pivot to new grievances rather than acknowledging progress.
  • Reeves explicitly wants to avoid this trap. He wants to win, even if it means eventually putting himself out of a job — comparing it to a dating app designed to be deleted.

The cultural conversation has accelerated, but not always helpfully.

• Documentaries like Adolescence (Netflix) and Ross Kemp’s series on young men have brought attention, but Reeves argues they often lag behind where the culture already is by the time they air.
  • Adolescence was treated as a quasi-documentary by political leaders (Keir Starmer was criticized for not watching it), despite being a fictional drama deliberately left open to interpretation.
  • Reeves notes that the show functioned as an “ideological Rorschach test” — most mainstream viewers interpreted it through a lens of concern about toxic masculinity and online radicalization, which he thinks is somewhat out of date.
• The UK has simultaneously made real progress (first-ever men’s health strategy under Wes Streeting, a serious parliamentary debate on International Men’s Day) while also getting caught up in moral panics around shows like Adolescence.

Reeves argues that mainstream culture vacated the ground of positively defining masculinity, creating a vacuum filled by figures from Andrew Tate to Jordan Peterson.

• For years, the dominant cultural message to young men was a list of don’ts — don’t be toxic, don’t be aggressive, don’t be dominant — without offering a positive vision of what to move toward.
  • The word “masculinity” itself now codes as a pejorative to many young men, because they’ve only heard it used with the modifier “toxic” or in contexts criticizing them.
  • Reeves’s core message to young men is: “We need you.” Not despite being men, but because of it. Society, families, and children still need men in roles that draw on their distinct contributions.
• He draws on the early 20th-century “boy crisis” as a historical parallel, when civic organizations like the Boy Scouts and Big Brothers were created almost overnight to provide male role models for boys in cities. Today, youth-serving organizations are overwhelmingly staffed by women volunteers.

The “looksmaxxing” trend represents what Reeves calls a potential third wave of the manosphere.

• First wave: men’s rights activism and pick-up artistry. Second wave: MGTOW and the black pill. Third wave (emerging): looksmaxxing, which he sees as a sexier, more insular version focused on male-to-male competition rather than attracting women.
  • Extreme looksmaxxing involves facial restructuring, mewing (pushing the tongue against the roof of the mouth to sharpen the jawline), and in the most extreme cases, what Reeves describes as “male-to-male transsexual operations” — caricaturing masculine features.
  • The underlying motivation appears to be signaling formidability to other men (mogging) rather than attracting women — a genuine disregard for the mating market in favor of intra-sexual male competition.
• Reeves connects this to rising body dysmorphia among men, which is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia within the decade.

Reeves introduces the concept of “masculinity vertigo” — young men receiving contradictory signals about what they should be.

• On Monday they’re told to man up, work out, be more dominant. On Tuesday they’re told they’re too masculine, should cry more and find their feminine side. On Wednesday the cycle resets.
  • Into this confusion, various movements insert themselves — looksmaxxing, therapy culture, political radicalization — but underneath, most young men simply want to be good people, good fathers, good friends, and to matter.
• He references evolutionary psychologist Paul Eastwick’s argument that “mate value” as commonly understood is largely a myth for long-term relationships, and that revealed preferences over time flatten initial attraction hierarchies. Reeves pushes back, arguing that while the marketplace model is too shallow, denying any differences in mate preference is equally wrong.

On fertility and family formation, Reeves challenges the claim that women entering the workforce caused the fertility decline.

• From 1975 to 2005, women’s labor force participation rose 20 percentage points while the total fertility rate actually went slightly up (from 1.8 to 2.1). The fertility rate only began its sharp decline after 2007, when women’s labor force participation had already leveled off.
  • He argues the real driver is economic precariousness and the ratchet effect of delayed family formation — once the median age of first birth shifts later, it creates a self-reinforcing cycle where people feel they’re missing out if they have kids earlier than their peers.
  • Stephen’s “vitality curve” concept illustrates this: when everyone is looking to start families at the same time, coupling is easy. When the curve flattens and shifts right, finding a partner who’s ready at the same time becomes much harder.
• Reeves worries that the bar for parenthood has become impossibly high — people feel they need to own a house, have a career, and achieve financial security before having kids, and this feeling persists even when objective data might suggest they’re ready.

On fatherhood and paternity leave, Reeves takes a position between Scott Galloway and Derek Thompson.

• Galloway argued men shouldn’t take paternity leave or even attend births — they should be outside smoking cigars. Thompson argued men should take leave to reduce gender inequality in the workplace.
  • Reeves thinks both are wrong. He argues fathers should take leave not as a gender equality measure and not because they can replace mothers, but because fathers are awesome and children benefit from their presence. He wants a pro-dad argument, not a gender-equity argument, for fathering.
• On whether fathers should be in the delivery room, Reeves notes the evidence is genuinely mixed. Dads have only been in birthing rooms for about 30-40 years, and some mothers report mixed feelings, especially when births don’t go well. He thinks neither presence nor absence should be a source of shame.
• Data shows dads are doing more parenting than at any point in at least half a century. Primary childcare by fathers in the US is now at the level mothers were at in 1985. In some states, new parental leave policies are being taken by dads at nearly the same rate as moms.

Reeves challenges the widely repeated claim that full-time working mothers do 25-30% more housework and childcare than full-time working fathers.

• The stat is technically true but misleading. It defines “full-time” as 35+ hours. Full-time working dads actually work more hours than full-time working moms (averaging about 45 vs. 35). When you add paid and unpaid work together, both parents are putting in roughly 60-hour weeks — about 8 hours more paid work from dads, 8 hours more unpaid work from moms.
  • He attributes this to bad social science that gets repeated because the simple headline always wins, and he’s frustrated that women’s groups put out statistics that can be destroyed in minutes by anyone who examines them closely.

On the feminization of society, Reeves disagrees with Helen Andrews’s argument that society has been broadly feminized.

• He notes that fields like law have only just approached 50/50 and that AI will make gender differences in those professions increasingly irrelevant. His concern is the real feminization occurring in mental healthcare, psychology, social work, and K-12 education — fields that skew increasingly female over time.
  • The most recent jobs report showed three times as many women entering the labor force as men, driven by healthcare jobs. Reeves argues conservatives who want to push men into factories and mines are fighting the economy, and that men need to be recruited into growing female-dominated fields.

On feminism, Reeves sees a slow but real shift within the women’s movement toward acknowledging boys and men.

• At feminist conferences and meetings, leaders are increasingly saying they need to do better on boys and men. Many frame this as being good for women and girls — which Reeves finds strategically fine even though his own position is simpler: boys and men matter, period.
  • He contrasts this with reactionary critics who dismiss any feminist support for men’s issues as insincere. He argues that expecting a global feminist like Melinda French Gates to abandon her framework before supporting men’s work is puritanical and counterproductive.

Reeves is cautiously optimistic about the future, arguing that the pessimistic narrative is overstated and counterproductive.

• Away from the culture war, ordinary people are figuring things out. Dads are doing more parenting. Women’s labor force participation is at an all-time high. Violent crime is way down. Boys fighting at school has halved.
  • He’s sick of the “deficit frame” — the race to describe how everything is terrible — and thinks it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. He quotes John Stuart Mill: “Everybody who knows anything of the world is supposed to think ill of it.”
• A new Institute for Family Studies survey of 2,000 young men aged 18-29 challenges many narratives:
  • 68% of unmarried men want to get married (another 21% unsure). 62% of childless young men want to be fathers.
  • 79% say their mother is their number one role model; 69% say their father. Andrew Tate ranked last among prominent figures.
  • 89% say manhood requires willingness to sacrifice for others.
  • Young men who completed trade school are employed full-time at nearly identical rates to college graduates (77% vs. 80%), and half of college-educated young men say college wasn’t worth the time or money.
• Reeves believes the truth will ultimately win because people can tell the difference between truthful and manipulative content, and there’s a deep hunger — especially among young people — for good-faith, honest engagement on these issues.