Just when you thought the unrelenting attacks on men from academia could not get any worse, they have.
In the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities, the concept “mankeeping” was recently introduced by Angelica Ferrara and Dylan Vergara of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. The title of their paper was, “Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality.”
“Mankeeping” adds to the litany of words and concepts that academics have created to ridicule the male sex. Other examples include “toxic masculinity,” “male privilege,” “mansplaining,” “manels,” and “manferences.”
Ferrara and Vergara defined “mankeeping” as “the labor that women take on to shore up losses in men’s social networks and reduce the burden of men’s isolation on families, the heterosexual bond, and on men.” And, they added:“[m]ankeeping is best conceived as a mechanism through which women support and bolster men’s levels of social support.”
According to Ferrara and Vergara, “mankeeping” is a form of women’s unpaid and unequal emotional care work. Some examples of this “invisibilized labor” provided by the authors included the following:
A woman suggesting that her husband reconnect with old friends
A girlfriend facilitating a group outing to help her boyfriend bond with other men
A wife sending a husband on a “man date” with other men
A mother suggesting to her son that he contact his friends
A woman reminding a man to join a men’s group
A woman “checking in on her husband’s emotional state after learning he has had a stressful day at work”
A wife helping her husband “articulate his own feelings through a process of deciphering limited social and emotional cues”
And what are the fundamental causes and final consequences of “mankeeping”? According to the authors, “mankeeping” is “a component of patriarchy’s persistence within the heterosexual bond, asserting that an unequal distribution of social support is part and parcel of the everyday social reproduction of gender inequality.”
To summarize, the flow of ideas underlying Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” goes as follows:
Increased numbers of men are lonely or social disconnected;
Women have to pick up the slack in men’s lack of social relationships;
Women perform unpaid labor when serving as social and emotional facilitators for men;
Women’s social and emotional labor is unpaid and unequal and therefore it reinforces the patriarchy and exacerbates gender inequality.
Here, my purpose is to highlight various flaws with Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping.”
Lack of Empathy for Men
The first issue with Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” is that it lacks empathy for men. To the extent that men are lacking healthy social relationships, the focus of a paper in a “men and masculinities” journal ought to be the causes and solutions of men’s mental and emotional health issues. Yet, in predictable gynocentric fashion, the authors made the story about women.
“Men and masculinities scholars must interrogate how the effects of these trends, while troubling for men themselves, may cascade beyond men.”
In other words, men’s health is merely a launching pad for discussing additional ways that society can accommodate women.
To further illustrate the degree to which the authors had no interest in discussing men’s health, one need only look at the incoherent sentence where the authors placed the phrase “male issue” in quotes. This was done, presumably, to mock or minimize the notion that men’s health, not gender inequality, be the main point of discussion.
“To conceptualize men’s thinner social networks as a mere symptom of gender inequality, or a “male issue,” rather than a structural component of how patriarchy is upheld and reproduced, is to miss a critical avenue for social change. Our concept of mankeeping presents one mechanism through which men’s social isolation could reproduce existing inequalities…”
Women as Social Beings and Carers
Another issue with Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” is that it seems to assume that men and women would, if unchained from the restrictive patriarchy, exhibit near-identical social behaviors and indicators and that women would not be more inclined than men to want be emotional carers. But on what grounds are such assumptions made, given the substantial research literature on sex differences in preferences, interests, and behaviours?
Sex differences in vocational interests is one example. Women are more likely than men to prefer working with people than things, whereas men are more likely than women to prefer working with things than people. This is why more women than men study and work in fields like psychology and social work. In fact, psychology and social work are also fields that involve providing emotional care to others (i.e., “mankeeping” or “womankeeping”) and thus also illustrate the greater female than male inclination for wanting to provide emotional care to both men and women.
Other lines of evidence also point to women being naturally more social than men. The American Time Use Survey consistently shows that women spend more time than men “socializing and communicating,” including in face-to-face interactions, hosting or attending social events, and communicating with others via the telephone and internet. A recent Pew poll of over 6,000 American residents also found that women were more likely than men to keep in touch with friends by phone, text, and social media.
Thus, women appear to acquire much value and meaning out of life from frequent social interactions. Many of these interactions will involve emotional care for others. These sex differences are likely biologically driven. Results from a study in hamsters suggest that the average female and male brain respond differently to social interactions, with oxytocin playing a key role in the heightened female response.
Relationship Trade-Offs
Ferrara and Vergara’s failure to reference the biological basis of sex differences then leads to lack of acknowledgement of trade-offs in relationships. Their presentation of male-female relationships was one-sided: the woman does the vast majority of the care work and apparently the man offers very little in return.
A man and a woman both bring unique attributes to a partnership. The man could be any number of things: funny, caring, rich, intelligent, a hard worker, physically attractive, friendly, reliable, the father of their children, good at fixing things around the house, good at making the woman feel safe and protected, etc. These characteristics would all be reasons why his female partner would want to care for him. It is in her self-interest to do so. Without him, she loses her greatest value.
Yet, instead of discussing trade-offs in partnerships, and the unique currency that men bring to the relationship exchange, Ferrara and Vergara presented a story in which women’s emotional care work is presented independent of the larger context of the natural given and take of romantic partnerships. For example, whereas a wife might take on more of the unpaid household work, her husband might take on more of the paid work outside the home (often at risk to his health), such that when hours of all work are summed, men and women contribute roughly equally to the partnership. Thus, to the extent that women might be providing a disproportionate amount of emotional care, men are likely providing their own unique type of care at a disproportionate level. In fact, the husband’s job might be paying for all of his wife’s healthcare!
Women’s Perceptions of Emotional Care
Ferrara and Vergara also do not account for women’s perception of how much “mankeeping” that they think they need to perform versus how much care a man actually needs or desires. A wife who is constantly worrying about some aspect of her husband’s life might be doing so unnecessarily. She might think that she needs to repeatedly call or text him, but the man might find this excessive. Compared to men, women worry more, experience greater levels of anxiety, and exhibit a greater overall neurotic profile. Thus, by seemingly taking women’s word for it, Ferrara and Vergara, have assumed that all female emotional labor is necessary. It may be; it may not be.
Lesbians and Men Who Carry the Emotional Load
Another issue with the concept of “mankeeping” is that “womankeeping” also exists. Ferrara and Vergara eventually admitted this when they said: “there are many relationships in which men carry out an outsized portion of emotion work on behalf of women and other genders.”
Nevertheless, the authors did not explore the topic of “womankeeping” in any detail. One example that is familiar to me, based on previous research that I helped conduct, is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a physically, mentally, and emotionally debilitating condition. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is more prevalent in women than men. In the United States, approximately 1.7% of women and 0.9% of men have received a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Consequently, who serves as the primary physical and emotional carer for heterosexual women who live with this condition? Husbands.
Ferrara and Vergara also conveniently ignored lesbian relationships. They did not explain if “mankeeping” exists in these relationships, and assuming that an imbalance of emotional care does exist between lesbians, the authors did not explain if this somehow also reinforces the patriarchy and gender inequality.
Men’s Social Networks Must be Feminist-Approved or Else…
According to Ferrara and Vergara, a root cause of “mankeeping” is men’s declining social networks. Therefore, a solution to “mankeeping” is men engaging in more social activities. However, men finding genuine fraternal connection through increased engagement with their own social networks is often viewed by feminists as a threat to feminism. Thus, Ferrara and Vergara’s support for the solution to “mankeeping” is highly conditional. The authors qualified their statement about increased funding for programs that “allow men to meet their social and emotional needs without creating new forms or emotion work for women” by stating that men’s programs must be feminist-approved:
“This effort must be careful not to create male spaces that reproduce men’s social dominance in ways that university fraternities and other men’s social clubs have long helped facilitate.”
Remarkably, Ferrara and Vergara even expressed hesitation regarding the largely successful Men’s Shed program, because the program brings men together through “the expectation of an explicit masculine activity.”
Sadly, such disapproval of men’s spaces is not specific to Ferrara and Vergara’s paper. For example, UN Women, a feminist organization funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year by the world’s taxpayers, recently condemned the “manosphere” for its supposedly dangerous influence on boys and men, though many boys and men find solace in reasonable discussions that occur within this male space.
The message from all of this is clear: men are allowed to socialize only where, when, and with whom feminists permit. And if this guarantee cannot be met, women will simply demand access to male spaces. This has already occurred with Men’s Sheds in Australia and the United Kingdom, and one woman’s sense of entitlement to this space served as the headline to a recent BBC article on the topic: 'We put the pressure on to join Men in Sheds'. Other similar examples include girls demanding access to the Boy Scouts, (now called Scouting America) and women playing on men’s sports teams and entering male locker rooms.
Feminist Contradiction Between Men’s Leisure and the Solution to “Mankeeping”
Beyond women demanding control over, or access to male spaces, there is yet a greater irony in the solution to “mankeeping” being men expanding their social networks.
Men spending time with other men is social leisure. This leisure can take many forms. It might involve a man playing on a recreational sports team, a man attending a sports event with work colleagues, or a man attending a concert with close mates. Yet, men participating in increased leisure is contradictory to other feminist demands. Historically, feminists have lambasted men for spending too much time participating leisure activities and not enough time at home helping with the dishes, the laundry, and the kids.
Thus, Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” is internally inconsistent. On one hand, it proposes that the solution to “mankeeping” is for men to become more socially engaged – that is, participate in more leisure activities. On the other hand, increased time in leisure activities means less time at home – that is, men contributing less to unpaid domestic labour. Thus, if men socialize with the boys, they are blamed for not doing enough work at home. If men stay at home to help around the house, then they are blamed for their lack of an independent social life.
Blokes just can’t catch a break!
Conclusion
In closing, Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” has many flaws. It lacks empathy for men; it misunderstands the male and female experiences; it ignores sex differences in interests and behaviours; it overlooks relationship trade-offs; it desires to control men’s social connections; and it suffers from multiple internal inconsistencies. Consequently, Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” should be rejected.
However, Ferrara and Vergara’s paper should not be taken lightly. It is not a one-off. The authors allocated a significant chunk of their paper to describing a future research agenda. Moreover, their paper was published in a special journal issue that was described by the American Psychological Association as “Unchartered territory: the future of men and masculinities.”
This future research agenda, which will consist of projects conducted largely at taxpayer expense, is likely to involve the development of a “mankeeping” questionnaire. This research is then likely to be supplemented with interview and focus group studies. All of this research will be rigged from the start. Items on a “mankeeping” questionnaire will be written in a way that forces respondents to confirm the researcher’s ideology, and interview and focus group responses will be shoved into the researcher’s pre-existing feminist framework rather than being contemplated and integrated inductively. Men will likely not be invited to participate in such research, and if they are, any comments that they make that run counter to feminist narrative are likely to be turned against them. Why do I suggest this? For one, we already have evidence that this is occurring in this area of “research.” And secondly, Ferrara and Vergara’s closing statement displays a high level of confidence that their conceptualization of “mankeeping” is indeed already correct, and thus, future research will merely fill in the gaps of knowledge pertaining to female disadvantage and gender inequality.
“We look to a future where boys and men can create and sustain connection in ways that are unencumbered by rigid masculine norms, and where the meeting of men’s social and emotional needs does not depend on women’s unpaid and unequal care work.”
For many of us, our vision of the world and for the future is much different than Ferrara’s, Vergara’s, and all their feminist allies’. In contrast to their position, many of us look forward to a future where boys and men create and sustain connection in ways that are unencumbered by rigid feminist theory, and where discussions of men’s social and emotional needs do not depend on ridicule and treating boys and men unfairly, and instead, involve empathy, understanding, and a rigorous examination of the facts of human nature.
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