Bizarrely, my work is having a moment in Germany. Over the last several weeks, I was able to speak to Die Welt and Die Ziet, two of the nation’s largest conservative and liberal papers, about the status of men and masculinity, along with men’s desire for deeper emotional relationships and the skills that go along with them. If you’re not a German reader, neither of those articles will be of much interest to you, but this English translation might. I explored a different facet of my thinking with Die Welt that hasn’t been covered in the mainstream press on my research on how women often facilitate men’s emotional and social worlds. That idea is about whether masculinity is “in crisis,” as we’ve apparently been told, and what this framing achieves and leaves behind. I wanted to make sure a record of the conversation existed in English.

When Sarah Pines, a reporter at Die Welt, contacted me to ask me what I think about the masculinity crisis, and I told her I wouldn’t be much help for her angle as I reject that framing entirely. We ended up speaking anyway. The conversation was far ranging and deep, and I hope you enjoy it.

Sarah: Masculinity, that which defines a man biologically and socially, is, according to the prevailing opinion, “in crisis.” You reject this framing of “crisis.” Why? Could we say that “masculinity” has never been a static construct to begin with, but is very nuanced and embraces many different aspects/types?

Angelica: Let’s start by defining masculinity, which is at its core essence the meaning that culture attaches to manhood. In my forthcoming book Men Without Men, which will be published by Hanserblau in Germany, I talk about how the meaning assigned to manhood has changed significantly across history in the Global North. While it is a common belief that men have ‘natural,’ immutable traits when it comes to their close relationships or lack of them, the historical record upends a view of static male traits entirely. When we speak about masculinity, we’re speaking about a shapeshifting social norm: what a culture finds politically, socially, and economically expedient for men to express at a given time becomes the dominant “masculinity” of the day. For example, in the post-war United States when a booming economy required a devoted workforce and the re-stabilization of men’s value on the domestic front, men were rewarded for becoming stoic providers whose emotional life was subordinated to his function within the economy and nuclear family. In Renaissance France, such as for men like Michel de Montaigne, elite men were rewarded for the cultivation of an examined inner life through philosophical reflection and intimate male friendships where men endeavoured to know each other’s souls without suspicion. Between those two eras and in others, writers have lamented various ‘crises’ of masculinity. Articles panicking over men becoming too “soft” and becoming “like women” — lamenting that men are in a state of vertigo— are not new in any sense. In the years 1893, 1909, 1936, as well as after WWII, writers expressed concern about men becoming unmoored and “less manly” as society advanced. The researcher Paul Fairie at The University of Calgary has posted some excellent threads showing the evidence of this sentiment appearing in newspapers over time. I’m linking one here.

There are continuities across time and place in what society asks from men, but there is no static definition of what traits make a man ‘masculine.’ What is consistent, though, is masculinity’s existence as a precarious, highly unstable status that can be gained, lost, regained, or re-lost. It’s a status, not a static state, that can be bestowed typically from men to other men with certain acts, but that can fall apart at a moment’s notice if one crosses a line sometimes as fragile as crossing your legs the wrong way. These lines change within and across lifetimes: they are historically flexible. At some times those boundaries have held close, expressive male friendships within them, for example. Ultimately, an unstable and earnable masculinity is why the concept feels perpetually in crisis. It will continue to be until men’s value in society is de-coupled from how they do or don’t perform manhood.

Today, the things men have shared with me that call their masculinity into question can be as small as liking pottery, ordering a ‘girly’ drink, or crying at a film. It can stretch to much larger perceived ‘failures’ like not making enough money, or needing to rely on another person for help. The list of things apparently capable of emasculation is infinite and inane. Needing to go to the school nurse, being overwhelmed by the cuteness of a puppy, screaming in too high a pitch on a rollercoaster, having a friend who is seen as emotionally too close…all these things can renegotiate a boy or man’s status in the presence of other boys and men today.

Womanhood as a concept is a far more stable identity rooted in the idea that anyone with a womb, and who appears feminine, is a de facto woman. While men find that the status of ‘real man’ can be proved or disproved, our society has made womanhood a permanent status rooted in an anatomical, not behavioural, reality. Anyone interested in this should read Ann Fausto-Sterling’s “Sexing the Body.” The issues with an anatomically rooted framing are a separate conversation.

Sarah: And where does the feeling in our societies – that masculinity is in crisis – come from? What is real and what is imaginary about this feeling of masculinity in crisis?

Angelica: A version of an “Are men lost” article has been published by nearly every mainstream press source within the last five years. I reject the crisis framing, but not because I believe masculinity isn’t in a status of crisis or that many men aren’t lost—more on this later.

Because the historical perspective is rarely engaged with, and because most of us haven’t lived long enough to see this conversation appear and reappear in the media, we forget the more effective framing is ‘when was masculinity not in crisis?’ Men’s plight is editorialised with a sense of panic at predictable moments. A few sociocultural events precede it: “(1) shifts in the relative positions of women and men in social, cultural, and economic life, (2) shifts in patterns of work and the labor market, and (3) transformations in intimacy, family formation practices, and family life more generally,” writes the sociologist Tristan Bridges. All of these conditions have been met today, meaning the crisis dialogue is right on time.

The crisis is that many men feel constrained by these historically shapeshifting rules of masculinity and that these rules typically set them up for an uphill battle in their health, happiness, and relationships. Men’s following of those rules has profound negative effects on women, too. We know without a shred of empirical doubt that men who are more invested in today’s vision of masculinity—one encouraging hyper independence, toughness, and objectification of women—are the most vulnerable to enduring struggles in relationships, mental wellbeing, and physical health. That we ask men to deny such essential parts of their personhood, like their care and tenderness and weakness, is indeed a crisis, and one that is worsening as the algorithmic radicalization of boys and men becomes more prevalent through “masculinity influencers” of the manosphere. When has an ideology that has in nearly all of its historical iterations been based on domination not been a crisis for humankind?

Sarah: Your work (from what I understand) focuses on men and friendship in globalized economies. Your finding: To a far greater degree than women, men struggle with deep same gender bonds (which causes ruptures in their emotional development) to which they mostly react in two ways: They emotionally rely on their female partners or they turn to the so-called “manosphere” of online communities that celebrate certain kind of masculinity. What kind of “masculinity”? Is it valid for men of any social background, or is it more a working class or an upper middle class “problem”? Why have men become so lonely and since when?

Angelica: There’s a lot here and I’ll do my best to break it down. Let’s start with the last question. We know from large survey-based research that men in many large western economies are struggling with forming and maintaining close friendships, but that loneliness is something that has increased for all genders. However, the rate at which men report having fewer close friendships appears to be growing faster for men than women in surveys covering the last 30 years. On top of this, men report at significantly higher rates than women that they can’t or would not go to a friend for a problem—47% of men in the US and UK, according to some estimates from my colleagues at the Movember Institute for Men’s Health. While some studies indicate that loneliness isn’t very different between genders (this may be due to under-reporting in men), we know that the quality of social support experienced in friendships is often very different than the closeness men describe wanting and needing with others. When it comes to psychological safety with disclosure, the ability to show affection verbally and physically, being listened to and knowing how to listen to friends, these are all areas where men describe struggling more in comparison to women. I see the question less as ‘when did men become so lonely’ and more as ‘how do we better support men in cultivating and sustaining deeper bonds?’

In this question you mention that men respond in two ways to difficulties in developing close relationships outside of romance. I can speak to the first way extensively, but for the second on the ‘manosphere,’ I recommend speaking to my colleagues Emily Kiyoko Carian or Cécile Simmons; both are leading experts on online misogyny. In my research and those of others, men’s social support systems tend to be more centrally focused on their romantic partners than we see in women. For example, many of the men in my research have one or two women they disclose all deeply personal issues to, such as a wife or girlfriend, whereas that same wife or girlfriend is often disclosing and receiving support from many people. Public health research shows that two factors most profoundly shape our emotional health when it comes to our social lives: the diversity of our networks and the ability to disclose our problems within them. Men tend to struggle more with developing a network that contains multiple “nodes” of support where they can enjoy both companionship and disclosure. In my work, these patterns were most emphasized in men who did not have access to models of masculinity that allowed for emotional tenderness and expressiveness. That sometimes differed by race and class, but the primary issue was demonstrated across class and race groups. However, the majority of men I work with are from the roughly similar cultural contexts of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe.

Sarah: Male isolation and their turning to their partners for emotional disclosure has consequences for women and for female autonomy as well: in being there for their partners they carry the burden of emotional work – a work which is not acknowledged or rewarded by society. Is what you call “mankeeping” a sign of patriarchy?

Angelica: In our first paper on the concept, my collaborator Dylan Vergara and I argued that mankeeping is part of how patriarchy persists in people’s private lives. What we’ve been discovering is that an imbalanced reliance on women for social support puts a burden on women’s time and wellbeing. This finding wasn’t entirely different from what the sociologist Carolyn Rosenthal called ‘kinkeeping,’ or the invisible work that women undertake to bring harmony to their families. Because the phenomenon we were seeing—women taking on a lot of work to compensate for men’s lack of close friendships and its effect on women—we adapted Rosenthal’s term to mankeeping. We’ve learned that mankeeping appears to have three main components: there’s social facilitation—when women act as behind-the-scenes managers of men’s friendships. An example could be a girlfriend telling her boyfriend “You should call your friend back,” or “Let’s invite your old roommate over for dinner.” Second is emotional outsourcing: men receiving disproportionate emotional support from women because they’re not getting it from their friends. The third is emotional education: women teaching men the skills of relational intelligence like empathy and question asking—all of which are core competencies of human development that are typically learnt and refined in close friendships. These components often blur together, but they all speak to an imbalance in how care circulates across gendered lines. We think it’s a part of patriarchy’s structure—like how women’s greater domestic labor and exposure to gendered violence and harassment is baked into the very system that ensures women’s lesser power in society.

Sarah: Were you surprised to see that the term you coined took off online? The concept seems to have taken a life of its own, with some claiming it has changed dating etc.

Angelica: Feminist scholars have talked a lot about the burden of women’s greater ‘emotion work’ in relationships of all kinds, but there hasn’t been enough work investigating women’s experiences that result from men’s struggles with close friendship formation. I see the construct as a very low hanging fruit: something that was very much in plain sight but not yet named, yet it was no surprise to a lot of women and mental health professionals. Because mankeeping sadly doesn’t seem uncommon in relationships (though we’re testing that empirically right now!), we weren’t surprised to see that it resonated for a lot of people, specifically women. We couldn’t have predicted the scale of that resonance, though. We’ve spoken specifically about how the term has been misinterpreted, or stretched entirely too far, in this article for Scientific American. People seem eager to speak about how the phenomenon is changing dating and marriage. Weighing in on that isn’t how I see my role in the field. I slip sometimes, but at the end of the day I’m here to be a reliable translator of people’s experiences through a psychological lens. I listen for a living and tell the story that listening closely reveals. The mankeeping phenomenon is exactly what women and men described to us interview after interview — we simply conveyed it.

Sarah: What differences in conceptions of masculinity do you see between generations, when you compare, say, Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z and Alpha?

Angelica: One of the most concerning things we’re seeing in my field is early indications that attitudes about masculinity are trending more extreme in younger generations. A new report at the King’s College Global Institute for Women’s Leadership showed 24% of Gen Z men supported the idea that women shouldn’t appear too self-sufficient of independent, in comparison to 12% of Baby Boomer men. A paper I recently reviewed for a major Australian psychological journal showed that teenage boys’ ideas about men’s emotional expression and women’s role in society were more conservative than their father’s and their grandfather’s views. This isn’t the first report of this I’ve come across, marking a possible reversal of longstanding generation trends towards more progressive values that most thought was irreversible. It’s a rapidly developing part of the field, and although we might be able to tie this to the enormous proliferation of masculinity influencers online, such as Andrew Tate, it’s a developing story and one we’re tracking closely. In terms of friendships, we see varying results by generational cohorts. To speak very generally with a few granularities missing, it’s older and younger men who appear to struggle the most with deep and satisfying friendship bonds. In a longer conversation we could speak more about why that might be.

Sarah: The term “mankeeping” seems to highlight the need for men to invest emotionally in friendships. Why is it so difficult for men to be more open and vulnerable?

Angelica: It’s difficult because the values that most boys and men are asked to embody are directly at odds with the skills that create satisfying relationships. The behaviours involved in close friendships, like listening, empathizing, interpersonal curiosity, and the giving of attentiveness and care, are fundamentally human and have no gender. It’s important for men to cultivate skills like vulnerability and supportive listening with each other because doing so is a human need—it’s one of the primary ways our species gets social support. When all of men’s deepest emotional needs are met through women without the reverse being true, this is unlikely to serve either party in the long term. Like I’ve said above, though: society has made it an uphill battle for men to meet these needs with other men due to notions that “real men” don’t share their inner worlds, specifically among other men.

Sarah: And what makes masculinity – in the eyes of those who criticise it – “toxic”? What does it mean to be a “good”, non-toxic man; what is considered a “positive” masculinity?

Angelica: I think what people who use this term are speaking to is that the qualities men have been taught to embody often do themselves and others a profound disservice when it comes to long term happiness and fulfilment. The traits commonly listed as toxic involve a hyper investment in qualities like dominance, aggression, risk taking, stoicism, and individualism. An imbalanced embodiment of these traits is antithetical to the skills that intimacy requires, and which men ultimately want and need to live as self-actualized adults with close relationships. We all benefit from the skills of close listening, caretaking, affection, and the ability to show and be shown weakness. Unfortunately, masculine norms are constructed in almost perfect, contrasting opposition to norms of human development that lead to thriving. What people are referring to when they use that term are performances of manhood that are rooted in domination and the avoidance of soft or tender emotions. The working definition of masculinity set at the outset of this interview is the meaning assigned to manhood. Those who support the development of “positive masculinities” are advocating for a linking between manhood and traits that are empirically supported to facilitate human thriving: interpersonal curiosity, kindness, interdependence, among many other traits which have historically been associated with either womanhood or a general idea of positive personhood, broadly defined. And yet, I still believe this linking is mistaken.

Sarah: Do we even still need “masculinity” as a concept?

Angelica: This is where I differ from my colleagues the most. I do not believe boys and men need a code of conduct that is rooted in manhood, but rather one in personhood. I understand the weight of this statement and I do not mean to say that boys and men don’t need a proliferation of healthy models for how to live their lives. I just don’t believe those models need to be attached to gender. A colleague of mine, Jindy Mann, says there are 4 billion ways to be a man. I agree with him.

Any aspirational masculinity, even if those aspirational traits promote wellbeing, is still a way of saying one can be “more” or “less” masculine. The house of cards of the masculinity paradigm is revealed when we say that masculinity is any set of defined traits, because if a man rejects them, is he not masculine? Is he no longer a “real” man?

Even if we define masculinity positively, some boys and men will always fall short of that definition. This brings us right back to asking males to prove their manhood. The failure of this strategy is most transparent with women as a result of the feminist movement: defining femininity for women, even if it is done in a way that allows women to escape their narrowly defined roles, is still defining it for them and measuring them against a type of ruler. It’s the ruler that isn’t helpful. Judith Butler wrote “feminism asks the question of ‘what is a woman’ and refuses to answer it.” The same is not true for men: we are always in desperate search of an answer.

Men have yet to have a movement that lays bare the plain ridiculousness of asking them to perform gender in a particular way. As organizations, schools, and self-help books try to say that re-defining masculinity is the answer, I try to emphasize that this has been done many times to no avail, leading us right back to the drawing board when the events of history re-arrange what society “needs” men to be.

While it may appear that I’m relatively alone in my view on this, it might be that I’m among those who are early. In ten years, I believe seeing any pre-determined set of masculine norms as harmful will be the prevailing opinion and “best practice” line of advice from other psychologists.

The legendary feminist thinker bell hooks put this most lucidly, and most beautifully, over two decades ago: She said “to create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different from simply being. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an anti-patriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.”

Creating new or better versions of masculinity is a version of loving men only if they perform—of loving men only if they do maleness right. Until we get there, masculinity will continue its historical legacy of being “in crisis.”

Sarah: Do we need to raise sons differently?

Angelica: In many parts of the world, boys are still raised—especially by the media—with the idea of the archetypal man as a hyper-independent, emotionally stoic winner-take-all risk-taker who seeks to amass capital in the form of homes, cars, women, businesses, etc. This archetype invests little in his own inner world or the inner world of others. Ironically, few men ever reach the archetype our society has defined as aspirational, but many end up working for—quite literally submitting to—the companies and military regimes run by men who have amassed great amounts of power and capital. We know empirically across a broad and diverse body of literature stretching from public health to child development studies that boys and men who value and try to embody these archetypes are at greater risk for mental health problems, relationship problems, domestic violence, and early death especially in the form of taking their own lives. Yet we also know so clearly, from a separate body of evidence, what circumvents these harms: human happiness and longevity are most profoundly shaped by the quality of our close relationships.

Boys deserve to be set up for social and emotional thriving, which means raising them to be who they are in the absence of harmful and constraining stereotypes about the limits of manhood. In developmental research, in schools, on the playground, and at home, boys show us—just as girls do—that they are caring, attuned, emotionally articulate, interdependent, silly, and fundamentally relationship oriented; anything that gets in the way of this natural human development process is an affront to boys’ wellness. We could have a long conversation about exactly how boys should be raised differently, but one thing stands above the rest. The biggest gift that parents, teachers, media makers, and all stakeholders in boys’ lives can give is to provide counter examples to the influences that teach and reward boys for embodying harmful masculine norms. Educating boys about these narratives, as they will inevitably encounter them, honours boys’ lives and protects their emotional selves from harm.

From EVRYMAN to Men’s Sheds, Men’s Circle to Mankind Project, Junto to Manifest - to informal groups sprouting throughout North America, Western Europe and Australia - more men are seeking organized spaces to work on themselves in community with other men. Or at the very least, more men in rich countries are joining spaces where they go beyond stereotypes of how men “should” relate.

I spoke to Harmeet Kaur at CNN about how men’s commonly experienced longing for a different type of substance in their relationships with other men are being explored in spaces sometimes called men’s circles or men’s groups. You can see the piece that came out of this conversation here. This behind the scenes conversation covers:

1. What are men’s groups? Are they similar to each other? Why are they on the rise?

2. What do researchers know about men’s circles? How effective are they, and effective at achieving what exactly?

3. What are the promises and pitfalls of men’s groups? Do they rely on male gender stereotypes, and is that bad?

4. How connected are modern men’s groups to the mythopoetic movement of the 80s and 90s?

5. So…should I join one? Should my husband/boyfriend/brother/father/uncle/son/friend join one?

Harmeet: Can you tell me how you first encountered men’s groups?

Angelica: I became aware of the rise of men’s groups while interviewing men for my forthcoming book Men Without Men. Every tenth or so interview, men’s groups continued to come up, either in the form of a man who had been helped by a men’s group, or one who was interested in joining.

Those who had been a part of one said the groups had supported their mental health and gave them the sense of community they desired but didn’t know how to access elsewhere. When Pasco Ashton, founder of the UK group Men’s Circle, told me about the reasons men in his group signed up to join, the number one reason participants chose on a poll was “social connection.”

A participant in my research suggested that I watch the 2017 documentary The Work, a film about group therapy between incarcerated and non-incarcerated men in California. It shaped my sense of what’s possible when men commune with an openness to relate beyond the often activity-centered, sometimes homophobic, competitive, nearly exclusively humor-based, or even violent ways many men have been raised to relate to one another or have seen presented in the media. Contrary to the long history of men’s spaces as one of consolidating male power and concretizing women’s exclusion from public life, contemporary men’s groups are, for the most part, questioning the emotional fallout of being raised under patriarchy. Men’s groups brand themselves as spaces apart from stereotypical male relating: in most, you’ll find men sitting in a circle or facing each other, speaking in a way that the pub or the working men’s club tends not to facilitate. With the right facilitator who has a solid training in an anti-patriarchal framework, this has transformative healing power, and many men speak to this. The paradox, though, is that many of these groups still traffic in new or recycled directives about what “real men” should be, but we’ll get to that later.

Harmeet: How do we define them?

Angelica: They vary massively. In this case we’re not simply talking about men any time they join a group or activity. Neither are we discussing Men’s Rights Activist groups. We’re also not talking about groups that are formally part of the mental healthcare system, such as men who have sought out group therapy under the supervision of a licensed professional.

What I’m talking about is the rise of a discrete form of male space organised around emotional openness, self-reflection, and community. Some look like group therapy, with check-ins and structured exercises borrowed from clinical psychology or corporate coaching. In the best case scenario, these are led by a trained facilitator. Others lean toward ritual, invoking common mythology and historic male archetypes, a legacy of the mythopoetic men’s movement of the ’80s and ’90s — I’ll talk more about that movement later, too. There are activity-based groups such as “men’s sheds,” offering informal, tool-in-hand camaraderie to counter social isolation aimed at getting older men out of the home and into each other’s presence. Another piece of the men’s group pie happens through weekend retreats built around initiation-like experiences, sometimes involving guided psychedelic journeys. One group I’ve worked with called “The Confident Man Ranch Retreat” brings men together to take a quantum leap in their relational skills through working with horses. Others blend breathwork, drumming, and primal or “authentic” movement (a less scary way of saying dancing); and hundreds of smaller circles take place in living rooms, yoga studios, and forests. Most men’s groups tilt in at least one of these directions, but their center of gravity hovers around a general drive for self-improvement, emotional wellbeing, and social connection.

Harmeet: Are these groups on the rise?

Angelica: No one is formally documenting the rise of men’s groups. That’s either because no one’s gotten around to it or that defining what counts as one is a tricky. Anecdotally, though, I’ve watched the number of groups in my awareness explode - I’m of course the kind of person who is extra aware of these things, but even for me, their rise is pretty notable. I see advertisements for them commonly in East London where I live - something I can’t remember even a few years ago. Flyers are increasingly common sights around New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, San Francisco, London, and Berlin. Again, this is without the data to support it, because we don’t have that yet, but it seems men’s groups of this nature (those aimed at relational skills and emotional evolution of some flavor) are more common in areas dense with affluent, younger, politically progressive people. Many men pay for their men’s group memberships, but which types of men are the most likely to have the discretionary income and time to do so? That tells us that the first wave of men’s group participants are likely to be an affluent sector of society who are open new ideas about masculinity - but we shouldn’t paint too broad a brush. Pasco Ashton’s group, Men’s Circle, been particularly successful at marketing to an age-diverse audience outside of major cities and to new fathers - groups that are sometimes hard to reach and face heightened pressures not to share emotional struggles with other men.

Harmeet: I’m curious about what can be learned from men who have participated in these groups

Angelica: For most men who were part of one in my research, looking another man in the eye for more than a few seconds was terrifying before taking the leap together, as a group. I think of that Liz Plank quote: “Expecting men to be emotionally intelligent in their relationships is like expecting people to know how to do a butterfly backstroke when they’ve been instructed to never get wet.” Hearing from men after or during their men’s group experience, which was often spurred by their wives or girlfriends (something the psychologist Terry Real calls “wife-mandated referrals”), or a significant event like a divorce or breakup, was the first time in a long time that they’ve gotten into the metaphorical “pool” with other men. They almost always liked it, despite how scary or awkward it was initially, and that surprised them.

I can only speak to the stories of men who have gone to groups that explicitly value expressing the emotions that men are generally socialised to suppress. Navid, a 44-year-old participant in my research, said this about life before joining a men’s group: “I didn’t know how to have intimacy with anyone I didn’t want to have sex with.” Navid was one of many people who said that joining a group was an enormous step towards becoming comfortable speaking to male friends about emotions typically considered to be tender or weak. Through a round about pathway, these groups also had a positive effect, men said, on their romantic partnerships with women. Learning intimacy in one context often translates to another.

Yet of all the things men may receive from these groups, one stands out the most. Steve Horsmon, one of the leaders of the Confident Man Ranch Retreat said something unforgettable about what men derive from the experience: “they don’t get what they want,” he said “but they get what they need.”

By that he meant that men often didn’t get their wives or girlfriends or jobs back just by simply working on their listening skills and interpersonal confidence, nor did they find a complete life transformation waiting on the other side of the retreat, but they made friendships based on a type of substance that can be hard to cultivate in the “real” world. Sometimes those friendships were with men twice their age. Men in my research spoke with warmth and achievement about having an ongoing an text message thread with the members of their men’s group. Community without having to perform a dominant, aggressive type of masculinity, or simply having someone to speak to outside of work or the home with the built in agreement of not being judged for weakness, is often the crux of the draw and the benefit. Men’s groups attempt to provide a new social contract for men to be with other men.

Harmeet: I’m also curious about the extent to which men’s circles still rely on stereotypes about who men should be. Have you come across any notable examples of this? If so, what are your thoughts on this contradiction? Do you still see these circles as a net positive in those instances?

Angelica: You’re right that many men’s groups rely on old or unhelpful ideas about who men should be. Some of these groups work by saying that a “real" man is emotionally vulnerable and a provider not just through finances, but through emotional support to others. Others frame the emotional work that men do within them as a type of fitness or strength. EVRYMAN has embraced its framing as “crossfit for your emotions.” It gets men in the door without stigma, but it relies on the very ideas that these men are trying to challenge.

When men’s groups use these tactics to attract members, they still imbue men with value and status in other men’s minds, solely on whether they are doing masculinity right—and often make statements about what makes a “real” man. This is a problem no matter what qualities or behaviors we put on the list of what a man should be, even if those are positive things. Adding additional directives to masculinity like “emotional crossfit” is an age-old exercise in telling men how to perform gender, adding to the list of ways they must be “fit” or else. That critique doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater: adding relational intelligence and deeper community to the laundry list of directives for how to be a man does have lot of potential upsides - but I see a huge cost, too.

That’s not to mention that many of these groups are very unclear in how their leadership was trained and whether they have the capacity to handle the emotional responsibility of group work. There’s also been some concern—and this is not exclusive to men’s groups but is more endemic to the unregulated wellness space—that they operate on a pyramid scheme model. Participants are encouraged to become facilitators, facilitators are encouraged to bring in participants, and money flows in the direction of a few leaders or founders at the top of the business. I’m not one to knock a group trying to do good, though, so I’ll save that discussion for another day.

Harmeet: To that end, what do we know about whether these groups can actually live up to their promises?

Angelica: We don’t know much yet. Research hasn’t caught up to the pace at which these groups are popping up, and there are factors that make it tough to assess them empirically. They are substantively different from each other not just in content, tone, and activities on-offer, but because they are interventions or experiences of wildly different durations. Some men’s work is done in a weekend retreat, other groups are conducted online across a period of six weeks or longer. Some have group chats that are active for months and years after the initial group work.

These differences mean there’s no standard way of assessing the efficacy of men’s groups. It’s also unclear what to measure: we’d expect that participating in these groups would enhance feelings of social connectedness, which shares robust relationships with mental and physical health. But there’s much more we could look at, such as if men feel their social and emotional skills have been strengthened. Researchers have talked about conducting surveys with the friends and family members of men’s groups to see if the changes men experience translate into the emotional atmosphere of their “regular” life. Some of the initial data we have on these contemporary men’s groups focus on men’s relationship with masculinity. A 2024 study assessing the EVRYMAN group reports that participants’ “masculinity attitudes become malleable when sharing vulnerability is met with the promise of connection, rather than the backlash.” That’s hopeful, but we need a lot more data.

Harmeet: In my research, I found that some men’s work organizations (Mankind Project, Sacred Sons, Junto) have their roots in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Do you see elements of this movement in men’s circles today? If not, how have they evolved past that?

Angelica: There are threads of the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 80’s and 90’s within the modern men’s circle trend, without a doubt. One of the big similarities between some men’s circles and the mythopoetic movement is the belief that men’s initiation rituals are critical parts of men’s development that have been lost, cast aside, or forgotten. Whereas men’s circles don’t usually go so far to say that society has lost male rights of passage that guide men through critical gauntlets of emotional and spiritual development, they are vaguely referential of these traditions and the particular sacred or structural “drama” of them.

Most men’s groups today use a very different lexicon than the mythopoetic movement, which can destabilize the idea that men necessarily need highly specific archetypes (i.e., the wounded warrior or the lost boy) or rituals to become self-possessed, emotionally whole adults. What’s shared between the mythopoetic men’s movement and men’s circles is the notion that rituals are important to many men’s lives and their emotional maturation, and I agree that rituals can have an important role for people of any gender, but I’m interested in how we can think about them in new ways. What if the rituals men and boys were part of involved learning the ins and outs of intimacy, not just strength and responsibility? What if we emphasized rituals of strength, responsibility, and protection in the raising of girls too?

Traditions that welcome people to their gender by giving them specific directives are always going to be somewhat (or even enormously) fraught. When we get to the heart of groups that bring men and boys together to “become men,” we often still see limited views of maleness that don’t let all men in the door, especially those that are not allured by tying their manhood to how strong or protective or emotionally “fit” they are. I know how powerful men’s communities can be, but if a group is claiming to be for men but is only for a certain kind of man, is it really for men?

Harmeet: So do you think these groups are a net positive or net negative? Should people be joining them?

Angelica: I believe these groups are a net positive, and the majority of scholars in the field tend to agree on this. There will always be exceptions. Still, they are among the first line of solutions for scalable interventions combatting men’s social isolation, which we know improves the lives of women and children, too. My hesitation around a more enthusiastic endorsement comes from knowing that some of these groups package community and brotherhood within a strict view of manhood that is ultimately reductive (such as saying that a “real” man provides, not just financially but emotionally). As bell hooks says, until we value men for being people—literally JUST for being—and not valuable based on what they do or provide for us, we won’t be liberated from constraining ideas about gender. Not everyone agrees this is the right approach though—see a panel we did at Stanford University for a deeper discussion on whether masculine norms are important to keep in tact. Not all my colleagues agreed with me.

It still stands that the more men create community involving the competencies that deep intimacy involves, and are doing so with other men in the presence of an intentional facilitator, more men might question how useful masculinity is as a governing system for their lives and behavior all together. Men’s groups can make that interrogation more widespread and gently introduced. And along the way, the friendships they take from them, as well as the strengthened relational skills, benefit everyone in men’s lives, not just men.

I’ve looked at the poster for the 1987 film Date With an Angel a hundred times. The room for interpretation draws me in: it’s unclear whether this man carries a barefoot angel through a busy city sidewalk, or if her presence allows him to walk surefooted through the world. She’s draped around him, wings outstretched, radiant and ethereal, suspended just above the pavement. He beams, holding her shoes like a proud errand boy or a triumphant suitor. We get the sense that the world around them carries on without anyone noticing the angel in their midst.

There’s a romance and absurdity to it. And for many women, a visual metaphor recognizable for those without wings: the exhausting role of lifting men emotionally while being expected to float weightlessly through the demands of modern life. What is perhaps most striking is that the two are not on equal footing.

What’s depicted in this image is also revealed in my research. In October, my colleague and research assistant Dylan Vergara and I put out a paper called “Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality” (A title so academic that even I’m tired reading it) in a journal from the American Psychological Association called Psychology of Men and Masculinities. In it, we name the labor many women take on to facilitate men’s emotional worlds, especially when men lack deep friendships of their own. We called it mankeeping.

We were struck by - and honestly totally unprepared for - the amount of media attention given to the paper. Women wrote to us from around the world to say “this is me,” with mankeeping soon translated into French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. Illustrations describing our work went viral online. From Vanity Fair to The Daily Mail, Forbes to local news stations around the US, people were talking about mankeeping. A lot of what’s out there is sensationalized, turning our research into clickbait.

Mankeeping has escaped the ivory tower, for better and for worse. I want to add back a nuance that not everyone will see or hear, but that the curious and nuance-minded (you, if you’re reading this) might find and appreciate. With Dylan’s help, I keep trying to set the record straight. Our newest article, “The Hidden Costs of Men’s Declining Social Networks” in Scientific American, out in print in May, works to provide some of the nuance we often feel is lost.

That commitment to nuance and transparency is why I was excited to talk to Andrea Insa Marco at El País, Spain’s most widely read newspaper, to answer a few common questions about the topic. Andrea’s article will come out sometime soon, but I’ve gotten her permission to publish our entire conversation. So without further delay, here’s everything you might want to know about mankeeping — but haven’t asked, maybe because of the clickbait, or the dense academic article behind it.

Andrea: The first one is quite obvious. What is Mankeeping? Where does it come from?

Angelica: Mankeeping is the labor that women do to help compensate for the ways that men often have lacking social networks, and it can take many forms. It’s important to remember that mankeeping doesn’t have to be between romantic partners - it can also be between family members, friends, or coworkers. The term was coined by me, but its roots come from sociologist Carolyn Rosenthal. She introduced the concept of kinkeeping to describe the often invisible labor that women do within their families, like remembering birthdays and maintaining harmony between members of the family.

Andrea: How does Mankeeping connect with kinkeeping? What are the differences between both theories?

Angelica: Mankeeping is a specification and extension of the work on kinkeeping. While kinkeeping speaks to the work women do in the nuclear family, mankeeping is specific to bonds between men and women. Both constructs are a form of feminine labor that are part of how gender inequality can manifest in our private lives.

Andrea: What are the components of Mankeeping? Can you explain them?

Angelica: Mankeeping has three main components. First, there’s social facilitation—when women act as behind-the-scenes managers of men’s friendships. Think: “You should call your friend back,” or “Let’s invite your old roommate over for dinner.” Second is emotional outsourcing: men receiving disproportionate emotional support from women because they’re not getting it from their friends. Third is emotional education: women teaching men how to communicate, empathize, and even name their own feelings. These components often blur together, but they all speak to an imbalance in how care circulates across gendered lines. It’s important to mention, too, that the reason why women often don’t require social facilitation, emotional outsourcing, and emotional education from men, especially their romantic partners, is because most women are having those needs met, and relational skills strengthened, in their friendship groups.

Andrea: Is mankeeping a type of gender inequality? How do people experience this kind of gender inequality?

Angelica: I think so! Mankeeping is an under-theorized and under-appreciated form of it. It’s often mistaken for personality differences or “just the way things are,” and it is typically experienced privately, which can make it feel so isolating. Women experience it as exhaustion, as the invisible burden of tending to someone else’s emotional and social needs on top of their own. Men, on the other hand, might experience it as comfort, or worse, dependency, without realizing that someone else is doing the invisible labor of making their emotional life work (thinking back to the Date With an Angel poster). We sometimes think of this as just features of heterosexual dynamics, but we should see it instead as a way inequality manifests and is made real in the most intimate parts of our lives.

Andrea: Women compensate for the losses in men's social networks. But, is this phenomenon reciprocated? Do women with male romantic partners seek emotional support inside or outside the relationship?

Angelica: That’s one of the core asymmetries. The research my colleague Dylan and I highlight in our original paper shows that women are more likely seek and receive emotional support from multiple sources—friends, family, therapists, community members, spiritual leaders, etc. But many men rely heavily, even exclusively, on their romantic partner or on a woman friend or coworker. This creates a lopsided dynamic where women are sometimes supported but are nearly always supporters, while men are primarily supported. It’s not that men don’t care - our research shows that clearly. It’s that they have, through living in patriarchy, been encouraged not to show or maintain the skills that make for excellent friends and partners: listening, perspective taking, and empathy.

Andrea: Does the phenomenon of Mankeeping only happen in romantic relationships, or does it also occur between friends and family members?

Angelica: Mankeeping is everywhere, unfortunately. You see it in sisters coaching brothers through breakups, in female friends reminding their male friends to check in on each other, in coworkers gently nudging male colleagues toward vulnerability. Romantic relationships are often where it’s most concentrated, but it’s by no means confined there. Anywhere that emotional labor and gender norms intersect, mankeeping can and often does show up.

Andrea: What are the most common manifestations of mankeeping?

Angelica: The everyday forms of mankeeping are often the most revealing. A woman reminding her boyfriend to call his dad. A sister texting her brother’s friends to organize a birthday dinner. A girlfriend teaching her partner how to apologize sincerely. A female friend offering therapeutic support on a level that borders on unpaid counseling. These moments add up in time and energy, and as we’re trying to emphasize, in emotional toll.

Andrea: Can you name a few more examples of mankeeping and why they are such problems?

Angelica: If there’s a marked lack of reciprocity, a sense of burden experienced by the woman doing the caring, and if its worsened by the man involved having few or no other confidants, these all count as mankeeping: A girlfriend planning all the social outings because otherwise her boyfriend wouldn’t see his friends is mankeeping. A woman listening to a male coworker’s ongoing marital issues, offering emotional support that’s not part of her job description is mankeeping. A daughter being her father’s only emotional confidant is mankeeping. What makes these examples “mankeeping” is that the emotional labor flows primarily in one direction, and that flow is shaped by gendered norms and expectations.

Andrea: What is the "male friendship recession" and why is that related to mankeeping?

Angelica: The male friendship recession refers to the long-term decline in close male friendships, particularly in the U.S. and U.K. Many men report having fewer confidants than they did decades ago. Structural changes, like the loss of third spaces, covid, lower participation in churches and clubs, and increased mobility, have eroded traditional sites of male bonding, whereas women have been accustomed to seeking out their friends with care and intention in public and private. But it’s also a cultural issue. Masculinity has often discouraged vulnerability, intimacy, and emotional expression, all of which are among the bedrocks of real friendship. Mankeeping is upheld by men’s lack of social support beyond women, so the two phenomenona are linked.

Andrea: How do societal expectations shape the way men and women interact in relationships?

Angelica: To speak really generally, our culture typically expects women to be emotionally fluent and men to be emotionally stoic. That expectation shows up everywhere, from who’s expected to notice a partner’s mood shift, to who’s expected to initiate a hard conversation, to who’s expected to be “the rock.” These norms don’t just affect what we do; they shape what we believe is even possible, and what can be seen as “normal” in a relationship. Feminists like myself are always trying to get people to question if what’s “normal” is how things have to be. Many people think mankeeping is part and parcel of heterosexuality and the “natural” state of affairs between men and women. I think that’s a myth.

Andrea: How do societal expectations of masculinity influence the way men express and receive care?

Angelica: Masculinity as it exists in the dominant culture has often defined care as weakness and emotional need as something to be overcome rather than met. That means many men have been socialized to be wary of intimacy, to distrust vulnerability, and to feel shame when they need support - especially around other men, who are positioned as their competitors rather than their companions. This doesn’t mean men don’t want to be cared for or that they aren’t cable of showing others real care—it means they often haven’t been given the tools, language, or models to receive care in ways that are reciprocal with others. Women, on the other hand, have been expected to be overly attuned to the needs of others at the expense of their own voice and needs. I call this a “skill differential” between men and women. Men are on the side of that differential that causes learned relational incompetence - pardon my harshness. A lot of the things that society expects from men are directly at odds with the things that make someone a joy to be with as a partner or friend - that’s a big problem that my work wants to help solve, and that so many men are ready to work on.

Andrea: Does mankeeping show how modern relationships work?

Angelica: It shows how some modern relationships work by giving us a hint at what is missing. We often think of modern relationships as egalitarian, but mankeeping reminds us that gender inequality is alive within public and private spheres. Emotional labor doesn’t show up on chore charts or income statements, but it shapes who feels held and who feels worn out. It’s a hidden infrastructure that modern love still relies on between many couples, friends, and families around the world.

When Alex Lawrence turned 30, he realized he had plenty of male acquaintances but few deep connections with other men. 

“That’s where the trouble is,” Lawrence, now 32, explained. “I wish I had more really close friends.” After making a 2020 resolution to build stronger male friendships, he found himself isolated and indoors for the majority of the year. 

The pandemic has made finding and maintaining close friendships difficult for everyone. But unlike women, pre-pandemic data indicates that most adult men have few same-gender close friendships, a problem that social scientists have called “the friendship crisis.” Long term bonds are even harder to come by if you are a straight, cisgender male. But for those breaking the norm, there’s good news. 

In a new study, sociologist Dr. Ríos-González and his colleagues found that men who regularly engage in sincere, emotionally open conversations with other men tend to have better physical and mental health. Men in the study reported that their friends encourage them to take better care of their bodies and overall well-being. 

To experience health benefits, friends must venture beyond conversations that revolve around topics like sports or politics - what Ríos-González calls “the superficiality of life.” When men speak openly about their relationships, goals, disappointments, and fears, they become invested in each other. “These kinds of relationships can be transformative to men’s health,” Ríos-González said. 

Ríos-González’ study is a small one, but his group’s findings are replicated by other researchers. Using a large, global sample, other groups have shown that men with better physical health often report placing high value in their friendships.

These studies adds to a growing field of research on the benefits of close friendships. Several groups of top scientists have stated that the association between positive social relationships and better mental and physical health is causal, not simply correlational. 

“Sharing our feelings and being in it together reduces our stress,” said Dr. Izzy Eliaz, a clinical psychologist who assists men with interpersonal difficulties. “There’s a direct physiological response to emotional connection.” 

Dr. Max Belkin, a couples and individuals therapist in New York City, believes that traditional manhood plays a role in hindering men’s friendships. “The notions of masculinity that a man receives through all kinds of explicit and implicit messages informs their ability or lack of ability to form close friendships,” he said.  

With growing evidence confirming the connection between male gender norms and health risks, the American Psychological Association revamped its practitioner guidelines to position traditional masculinity as a public health crisis. “The crux of working with men is the understanding that masculinity is both associated with a wide range of health concerns and less willingness to seek help for those problems,” the report reads. 

Often, traditional masculinity is incompatible with the skills required for forming high quality connections as adults. The rules of masculinity are absorbed in boyhood, when boys learn that the archetypal man is competitive, hyper-independent, and stoic, a recipe that leads many to conceal interest in forming emotional bonds. 

Boyhood is also the time when children internalize and begin to model cultural representations of social relationships. Examples of men sharing emotions with other men on screen, or in a book, are few and far between, Lawrence explained. “I’ve seen men as partners in crime, business associates, or buddy cops. I can’t think of any male friendship in the media where they're not on a quest together.” 

Virginia resident John Gorra, 61, told me that men are often portrayed as not needing relationships all together. 

“When I grew up it was the lone wolf,” he said.“I watched westerns and war movies. Those guys didn’t have friends.” To combat this narrative, Gorra organized a weekly coffee group where men from various faith backgrounds and age groups have a standing hour to discuss their inner worlds. They’ve been meeting regularly now for 16 years.

Matthew Nacier, a 28 year old private equity associate living in Dallas, Texas, told me that he too has resisted the lone-wolf stereotype. Instead, he’s spent his twenties building close same-gender connections where no topics are off limits. “We talk about what’s making us happy or concerned, what we look forward to, and what we dread.” 

But Lawrence adds that it’s often difficult to move the conversation beyond small talk about subjects like sports and stocks. The same is true for Dionysius Sabalos, a 93-year-old man living in an assisted living facility in Tucson, Arizona. “You’d think men would speak with one another openly this far into life. It’s just not the case,” he told me over the phone. 

Men’s emotional intimacy deficit does not necessarily mean that men spend more time alone. Researchers show that the majority of men’s bonds are activity based, such as a shared sport or hobby. “It’s a secret code to say we want to get together, but we don't want to actually say something affectionate,” said Michael Robinson, 58, a pharmaceutical sales representative. 

When I asked these men how they typically spent time with friends, they spoke of doing activities that ranged from golf and tennis, to skateboarding and drinking in bars. Initiating contact outside of exercise or alcohol was often uncomfortable, uncharted terrain. 

Men also disclosed that their struggles to find close friends has caused stress in their romantic relationships. The reliance heterosexual men place on women to fulfill their emotional needs, in the absence of close friendships, has been coyly termed “emotional gold digging” by twitter users and sociologists alike.

“It’s too much dependence on one person,” said Dr. Belkin, “I think it creates a lot of problems.” One that often becomes a woman’s responsibility to solve. The good news is men can change how, and with whom, they spend their emotional lives. 

Ríos-González said educational initiatives that teach boys and girls how to make, and maintain, emotionally rich friendships should be a priority for educators and researchers.  Parents can also address this at home, through dialogue or sharing books that accurately represent the challenges and benefits of cultivating close friendships. 

For adult men, Dr. Belkin recommends therapy. A counselor can provide a low-risk environment to practice the skill of tending to an emotional bond with another man.  

Informal gatherings can also promote a type of caring community. Asking friends to join a zoom call, with no set activity, or occasionally switching up a regular basketball game for a coffee date, could pay mental and physiological dividends. 

Mr. Gorra’s weekly coffee group is set to resume in-person this summer as more members get vaccinated. 

I asked him what the group members gain from meeting on a regular basis. 

“Who was it who said ‘most men lead quiet lives of desperation?’” he asked. “I think it's the deep desire for a real level of intimacy.”