The secret to ‘womankeeping'

Spectator

3 days ago

God, men are pathetic. At least, that's the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come up with a new term to explain the emotional labour women are having to do to help men cope with their psychological problems: 'mankeeping'. According to Ferrara, 'patriarchal masculinity' stops men from developing 'emotionally intimate bonds' with each other, so they inevitably unburden themselves to their wives and girlfriends, expecting them to listen attentively as they drone on about their 'issues'. They can't open up to their male buddies about this stuff because they don't want to appear vulnerable and unmanly. So they unload on their female partners instead. Yet women are becoming so fed up with being therapists with benefits that they're leaving the dating pool, thereby exacerbating the fertility crisis. Soon, thanks to men's emotional constipation, the human race will die out.
OK, I'm exaggerating slightly. We'll have to wait for Ferrara's forthcoming book – Men Without Men – to find out what she thinks in more detail. But it's clear from a talk she gave at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research that she has a pretty low opinion of us. 'In the US, about one in five men claim they have no close friends,' she told an audience of nodding gender studies students.
As so often with these lectures about 'toxic masculinity', Ferrara's was accompanied by hand-wringing about the welfare of men and boys, as if we're as important to her as women and girls. So we've become more miserable, Ferrara says, as our social isolation has increased. Instead of getting emotional support from close male friends, we're either demanding it from women or – if they refuse to take on this 'gendered labour' – turning to the online hellscape known as the 'manosphere'. Some readers may recall that this was singled out in the TV series Adolescence as the principal cause of male assaults on young women. I'm not sure what the solution is, having not yet read Ferrara's book, but I expect it has something to do with getting in touch with our feminine side, possibly by undergoing voluntary castration, followed by massive doses of oestrogen.
There's an obvious flaw in this hypothesis, which is that Ferrara is taking it for granted that the male gender is socially constructed, with various lamentable developments associated with late capitalism, such as the emergence of social media and the widespread availability of pornography, having created a 'crisis' of masculinity. But haven't men always been quite emotionally reticent? My late father died in 2002, four years before Twitter was invented, and as far as I'm aware he wasn't a porn addict. Yet he never told me he loved me, was allergic to hugging and only played football with me on my birthday. I don't imagine the relationship between fathers and sons was much different in Stone Age times. I suppose you could blame 'the patriarchy', but average psychological differences between men and women generally persist across time and space. Which suggests they're genetically hard-wired, and browbeating men to behave more like women is unlikely to 'solve' the problem.
My suspicion is the reason men are unloading on their female partners is because they mistakenly think women want them to behave like this. For several decades now, we've been told that we're repressed and need to talk more about our feelings, often backed up with phoney 'evidence' that bottling up our emotions is bad for our mental health. Some women may have even convinced themselves that they'd be happier with these girly men, only to discover (and I think Ferrara is right about this) that having to listen sympathetically while your partner spews out his problems is incredibly tedious. Where Ferrara has gone wrong is in thinking the answer is for men to talk to each other about this crap. In fact, we should keep a stiff upper lip at all times.
One final point: haven't men been 'womankeeping' since the beginning of time? As a young man, I learnt that if you want to be in a successful relationship with a woman you have to listen to her talk about her problems. She's not looking for you to come up with solutions – a rookie mistake. She just wants to vent. So your job is to sit there with a furrowed brow, occasionally going 'ooh' and 'aah', and under no circumstances say: 'That's enough about you. Let's talk about me.' This isn't true of Caroline, thank God, who quickly saw through my attempts to fake interest. But it is true of most wives and girlfriends. We have put up with it for two millennia and you don't hear us complaining.