Why "Mankeeping" is Alienating Everybody.

How turning human struggles into zero-sum battles pushes us further from real solutions.

(Audio version here)

In a piece recently,

Jesse Singal

considered the concept of ‘Mankeeping’ as developed by postdoctoral scholar, Angelica Ferrara. This is an issue that I have also addressed. This term has antagonised many commentators because it is so dehumanising. It likens our closest human relationships to the upkeep of a house or car. As Singal points out, there is a genuine phenomenon here that merits being studied with rigour both for the sake of men experiencing loneliness and, potentially, if this is found to be a commonly experienced problem, the women supporting them with it. Singal addresses concerns with the research methods of Ferrara and her collaborator, Dylan Vergara, and asks,

[I]f you’re a researcher purporting to care about the population in question, why would you possibly use a name that is going to cause a bunch of people to immediately discount what you have to say?

I think this is because the population being cared about is “Women” but using a distorted kind of feminist lens through which few women wish to be cared about. Through this lens, there is a need for a word that conveys the theorised burden placed on women by male loneliness rather than the experiences of men suffering from loneliness.

Think of the term “Husbandry”. Originally meaning ‘homeowner’, the term ‘husband’ evolved to refer both to the care and management of livestock and being the male partner in the committed heterosexual union of two humans. How did this come to pass? I think it is clear that it was caused by a patriarchal society creating cultural narratives that did not see women as fully autonomous people like men, but rather as beings men had the burden of caring for and managing.

I’d suggest ‘mankeeping’ works in much the same way. The term is operating within a theoretical framework that sees women as the full human beings whose interests are paramount. Men are regarded as lesser beings whose needs are only worth considering in the context of how they affect women.

Feminism has always been explicit and unapologetic in its stated purpose to advocate specifically for women’s interests. Women do, indeed, have every right to advocate on their own behalf and have no responsibility to also advocate on behalf of men. Radical feminists have frequently rejected appeals to consider the feelings of men as part of the constraining socialisation of women to ‘be kind’ which causes women to place men’s interests over their own. Nevertheless, I think that addressing the male loneliness epidemic using callous and dehumanising language is a tactical error, especially considering that it is related to the disproportionate and increasing male suicide rate. While most people will accept that feminists have no responsibility to care about men, they will, themselves, care about men and, as Singal points out, be alienated by this framing.

This is a common problem that can arise when people focus specifically on the needs of a special interest group. This is often referred to as ‘identity politics’ although many feminists of the materialist and radical tradition reject the term, saying that ‘women’ are not an identity group but a sex class. Nevertheless, it has the same method of advancing the interests of a demographic at its core which is in direct contrast to the liberal approach to addressing social issues. Liberalism addresses social issues using an individualist and universalist approach. It holds that every individual must have the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and then seeks to remove any legal or social barriers that stand in the way of any demographic achieving that.

We can, perhaps, best conceptualise this as a bar chart. Imagine that unfettered access to everything society has to offer represents a score of 100. This is the standard that liberals believe should be universal. Then we place various demographics on the chart and see who is not reaching that bar and why and address that. This has commonly been been the working class, women and racial, religious and sexual minorities. This universal standard includes, most importantly, legal rights like the right to vote, the right to own property, the right not to be denied access to university and professions on the grounds of one’s sex, race or other innate characteristic, the right to get married regardless of race, sex or religion etc. Barriers here can be remedied by campaigning for legal changes. The universal standard can also include addressing problems with social norms and expectations like assuming that people in positions of leadership will be men, people of a professional class will be white and serious committed relationships will be heterosexual. These can be tackled with argumentation and persuasion.

The identity politics/special interest group focus works differently. Rather than asking “What rights and freedoms should everybody have and who lacks them and why?” it asks “What is in the best interests of women/men, black people/white people, homosexuals/heterosexuals” and then centres its activism on achieving that end. This approach often aligns with the liberal approach because no group benefits from being discriminated against. This single focus can also be very productive because it is much simpler. For example, it was quite clear to gender critical feminists that laws and policies that removed women’s sex-based rights went against the interests of women which enabled them to mobilise quite quickly and strongly against it. Many liberals, trying to ensure that trans people were not unjustly discriminated against took longer to find their place in that issue and work through which demands of trans activists caused harm and denied freedoms.

However, a movement that focuses on the interests of one group can also become blinkered and alienate people outside the movement whose social consciences typically extend more widely. People who supported gender critical feminists with their aim to protect women’s single sex spaces and sporting categories because this was so easily defensible on grounds of safety and fairness became alienated when a radical subset began to also demand that nobody who is male should ever be allowed to wear female-coded clothing or be referred to as ‘she.’ When some of them also made clear their contempt for men generally or gay men in particular, the movement lost support among some prominent male supporters and women who objected to this.

This single-minded focus on one interest group can also result in cherry-picking of data and biased reading of statistics through one’s own narrative. For example, feminists frequently take data showing that women earn less overall and claim that they show women to be discriminated against or be otherwise socially disadvantaged in being able to pursue their careers. Meanwhile, Mens’ Rights Activists commonly take data which show that women spend more than men on consumer goods and argue that this shows that women financially exploit men. Neither of them are wrong about their facts but they selected facts that were relevant to their own unifocus lens and end up with only part of the reality.

The strength of the universal and individual liberal approach to addressing social issues is that it holds the interests of all people to be equally important in principle, while recognising that some groups may need more attention than others in specific social structures. It focuses on removing artificial barriers in that social structure that impede certain groups from accessing all that society has to offer and identifying unjust lacks. Rather than saying, “We care about this group and it would be in their interests to X” it says “We think everybody should be able to X and currently this group cannot.” These two approaches - universal liberalism vs identity politics - have been used in all kinds of political activism and the universal approach is consistently more effective.

In the realms of activism to address racial inequality, we might think of Martin Luther King’s approach, especially the most famous line of his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Here, King appeals to both the individual and the universal and people’s sense of fairness. By making people think of his children and his dream that they should each be able to fulfil their individual potential, he causes them to think of their own children and their hopes for them. He engages both their empathy and their sense of fairness while invoking a noble universal value towards the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness which was not being lived up to in the case of Black Americans. At no point does he argue for the interests of black people in ways that are distinct from or in opposition to the interests of white people. Imagine our bar chart again. King gestures at that optimal 100 score and points out that Black Americans are far from reaching it. This remains, 60 years later, the essence of anti-racism that the majority of people would feel happy to claim as their own.

Compare this with the currently dominant form of ‘anti-racism’ as epitomized by Robin DiAngelo. She consistently frames the experiences, needs, beliefs and values of black people as both distinct from and in conflict with those of white people. DiAngelo even argues that white people should attempt to be ‘less white’ by which she means less oppressive, oblivious, racially ignorant, arrogant, apathetic, privileged, silent and superior. In her book, Nice Racism, she takes specific aim at white people who consistently oppose racism to explain to them how and why they are still not getting it. This, unsurprisingly, alienated vast numbers of people, and also emboldened some who were more than willing to accept her thesis that the interests of black and white people are fundamentally different and in opposition and used it for explicitly anti-black racist purposes. We are tribal, territorial apes and convincing one set of people to see another set of people as a distinct tribe in competition with their own is, frankly, a terrible idea.

We have some protection from going fully into tribalistic mode when it comes to The Battle of the Sexes, because, as Henry Kissinger put it, “There is too much fraternising with the enemy.” Nevertheless, the tribes emerge as men and women who engage in demeaning and dehumanising rhetoric about men, and men and women who engage in demeaning and dehumanising rhetoric about women. Although more people who hold misogynistic views are men and more people who hold misandrist ones are women, this kind of oppositional, zero-sum tribalism is much more driven by political polarisation than by a straightforward division in attitudes held by men and women.

The misogynistic worldview that surveys the world through a lens of what are considered to be men’s interests typically holds that we are living in a society that has moved away from essential gender roles that give men the positions of leadership they alone can manage competently and are entitled to. Women are held not to be suited to such positions and abuse them to the detriment of men, a functional and thriving society and even themselves. Women need to be put back in their place. This is an authoritarian form of social conservatism and is overwhelmingly found on the political right or in conservative interpretations of religion. This alienates not only women but also men who reject such thinking and respect women as competent adults.

For a certain kind of feminist reading the world through what she considers to be women’s interests, the foundational premise will always be that we live in a society still very much permeated by patriarchy and male entitlement. Men are cast as complicit, pursuing interests assumed to oppose women’s, regardless of their politics. This is a dogmatic and blinkered form of feminism and is found overwhelmingly on the left. This lens produces headlines which sound like, “Male loneliness crisis surges along with male suicide rates. Women most affected.” We saw this in recent media coverage of A level results which showed boys to have narrowed the gap this year and presented this as a problem for girls despite boys still lagging significantly educationally. An info-graphic on homelessness framed as “One in four homeless people are women” likewise sparked anger for implying less concern about the three in four who are men. Of course this alienates men but also women, including those who consider themselves feminists, who care about men’s well-being.

This is how interests-based identity politics becomes so counterproductive and self-sabotaging. It struggles to effectively address important social issues because its lens is trained to only pick up the parts of the picture that are considered relevant to the group’s interests. It causes resentment and hostility among members of groups considered to have opposing interests who might otherwise have supported the cause if appealed to on universal principles of fairness and reciprocity. Instead, it risks inspiring a backlash which is particularly dangerous when the group such identity politics claims to speak for are racial, religious or sexual minorities or the physically weaker sex. Meanwhile, it alienates and frustrates many members of the group whose interests it claims to represent who typically care about the well-being of people more broadly and do not wish to have divisive and dehumanising rhetoric presented as in their interests. This is regrettable, because there is genuine value in studying how women experience and respond to their partners’ loneliness. This can and should be done in a way that does not dehumanise men or dismiss their experiences and that complements the urgent work of addressing male loneliness and suicide as problems in their own rights which should be of concern to us all.

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