What Happened to Men & Women? - Richard Reeves

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Reeves attends feminist conferences and sees a shift: leaders are openly acknowledging that demonizing men is a bad strategy and that boys and men need attention. However, many couch this in instrumental terms — 'we should care about boys and men because it's good for women.' Reeves has a friendly but firm disagreement: he believes the moral claim should stand alone, just as we don't say we should care about women because it's good for the economy or good for men. He says he personally does not couch his message that way, even when speaking with figures like Melinda French Gates, who supports his work as part of gender equality. He tells purists on the pro-men side to 'take a win' rather than demand that feminists completely abandon their framing. He warns that conditional care — 'you only care about me if I do something bad or something bad happens' — is exactly what men perceive and find alienating. What men need to hear is 'No, dude. We just care about you.' This represents a nuanced position: collaborate where possible while holding to the principle of intrinsic care.

Reeves describes how he initially tried to make the case that caring about boys and men was in women's romantic interest — a sort of 'zero-sum empathy' argument. He wrote a piece on it, arguing that if you don't care about boys and men falling behind and also complain there are no good men to date, you are committing a kind of 'mating logic seppuku,' creating the very dearth of eligible partners you decry. However, he was uncomfortable having to legitimize concern for men only insofar as it served women's romantic desires. He prefers the straightforward moral principle that we should care about any struggling group. Still, he acknowledges that different audiences may come to this realization through different doors — for example, Melinda French Gates supports boys' and men's work because it's not good for women and girls if boys and men are struggling, and that is acceptable to him as a starting point.

Reeves argues that the left tells young women life is tough because of men and the patriarchy, while the right tells young men life is tough because of woke feminists and women. This creates a dynamic where each gender is encouraged to blame the other, which is 'a colossal waste of political energy and not true.' He worries that this political polarization is now affecting dating and mating, citing work by Dan Cox for the American Institute for Boys and Men showing a decline in dating among high schoolers and young adults. He emphasizes that dating is not just about finding a partner; it's where people learn relational skills like gracefully enduring and delivering rejection. Losing these formative experiences could have long-term consequences for relationship formation.

Reeves engages with Paul Eastwick's work, which he and the host have previously debated. The host claims Eastwick said mate value literally doesn't exist after a couple of meetings; Reeves reads Eastwick more moderately — that it gets flatter but doesn't flatten completely. Reeves's own position is that completely denying any consistent difference in mate desirability is 'batshit crazy.' However, he strongly endorses the idea that over time, as you learn about someone's kindness, humor, resilience, and how they treat others, those attributes become additional elements of mate value that weren't visible at first glance. He gives the example: you see him, you don't hear him speak, you might rate him one way; then after conversation and seeing him care for his mom or work hard, your perception changes dramatically. He criticizes the 'marketplace' view for being too static and oriented to short-term mating — 'almost everything, all of the mating advice is for short-term mating' — and for implying that once you've 'mated' it's over, whereas marriage is just the beginning. He also links this to his belief that it's 'much less about the wife you choose than it is about the husband you become,' shifting the focus from selection to ongoing growth.

Reeves agrees with the argument that we evolved in smaller groups where we would know people and they would be socially sanctioned — someone you meet through the workplace, a friend of a friend, etc. That context provides richer information than an algorithmic attachment from an app. He sees this as a middle ground: it's clearly insane to suggest that mate value doesn't exist, but the way we encounter potential partners in a hyper-connected, anonymous digital marketplace is also evolutionarily novel and may distort outcomes. The socially embedded meeting adds a layer of 'being known by the people among you,' which he finds very powerful. This ties into his broader call to rebuild social infrastructure for real-world connections, especially for young people.