The Stress Of “Mankeeping” Is Taking Its Toll On Women

Words like mansplaining, manspreading, and manels (panels with no women), have been coined already, the latest is mankeeping.

The term, according to a piece by Catherine Pearson in The New York Times, “coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.”

Dr Ferrara published a paper in 2014 on the inability of men today to form close bonds with anyone other than their partners, which is placing a heavy emotional burden on women. It is, she says, “a contemporary and under-recognised form of labour resulting from men’s declining social networks.” She’s currently writing a book on the subject, called Men without Men.

The NYT piece says that in a 2021 survey, 15 per cent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from three per cent in 1990. The same report showed that in 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; two decades later, just over 20 per cent said the same. Dr Ferrara found that “women tended to have all of these nodes of support they were going to for problems, whereas men were more likely to be going to just them,” she said. She sees “mankeeping” as an important extension of the concept of “kinkeeping”—the work of keeping families together that researchers have found tends to fall disproportionately on women.

These social trends are often broadly generalised, but as the web show Adolescence pointed out, men are banding together in a kind of resurgent toxic machismo that has created deep web hate groups of incels (involuntary celibates) and conservatives, who want a return to the traditional roles of men as breadwinners and women as homemakers. Under conditions like this, obviously men are afraid to show an emotional side of themselves to other men for fear of ridicule. And if they cannot, after a point, relate to the misogyny sprouting in these groups, they lose a connection with other men. As drinking buddies, maybe, but as emotional sounding boards, they turn to women.

As Pearson’s piece says, “Rather than viewing ‘mankeeping’ as an internet-approved bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men, experts said they see it as a term that can help sound the alarm about the need for men to invest emotionally in friendships.” She quotes Tracy Dalgleish, a psychologist and couples therapist, “The reality is, no one person can meet all of another’s emotional needs. Men need those outlets as well. Men need social connection. Men need to be vulnerable with other men.”

Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank, and author of Of Boys and Men, about what afflicts the modern male, points out, “Some of the challenges men face in making strong connections are societal. Many of the institutions and spaces where men used to organically make friends have eroded,” he said, “like houses of worship, civic groups, and even the simple workplace.”

Another piece by Claire Cain Miller, also in the NYT, notes, “Boys and young men are struggling. Across their lives—in their educational achievement, mental health, and transitions to adulthood—there are warning signs that they are falling behind, even as their female peers surge ahead. In the United States, researchers say several economic and social changes have combined to change boys’ and men’s trajectories. Schools have changed in ways that favour girls, and work has changed in ways that favour women. Boys are often seen as troublemakers, and men have heard that masculinity is “toxic.” Young people themselves tend to agree that girls are now at least equal to—and often doing better than—boys. Many young men say they feel unmoored and undervalued, and parents and adults who work with children are worried about boys. It’s not just a feeling: There’s a wealth of data that shows that boys and young men are stagnating.”

There is also constant social judgement made worse by social media. Girls and young women are still not mocked for sharing feelings, while men, theoretically encouraged to show vulnerability, are, in practice, shamed for it.

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Also, while breaking away from the family unit and the arranged marriage scenario is the accepted lifestyle in many Western and some Asian cultures, it has made the dating scene full of social landmines. Will inviting a person of the opposite sex to dinner constitute harassment? How to decide who will pay for a movie or dinner on a date? Will sharing the bill be perceived as juvenile? Who will initiate the next level after a few good dates?

The mankeeping phenomenon has triggered debates and discussions, which is always a good thing. Even if there is no immediate solution to be found for the problem, retreating into a man cave is certainly not it.

Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author.