Man Out

Men on the Sidelines of American Life

Andrew L. Yarrow

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780815732754
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

The story of men who are hurting—and hurting America by their absence

Man Out describes the millions of men on the sidelines of life in the United States. Many of them have been pushed out of the mainstream because of an economy and society where the odds are stacked against them; others have chosen to be on the outskirts of twenty-first-century America. These men are disconnected from work, personal relationships, family and children, and civic and community life. They may be angry at government, employers, women, and "the system" in general—and millions of them have done time in prison and have cast aside many social norms.

Sadly, too many of these men are unsure what it means to be a man in contemporary society. Wives or partners reject them; children are estranged from them; and family, friends, and neighbors are embarrassed by them. Many have disappeared into a netherworld of drugs, alcohol, poor health, loneliness, misogyny, economic insecurity, online gaming, pornography, other off-the-grid corners of the internet, and a fantasy world of starting their own business or even writing the Great American novel.

Most of the men described in this book are poorly educated, with low incomes and often with very few prospects for rewarding employment. They are also disproportionately found among millennials, those over 50, and African American men. Increasingly, however, these lost men are discovered even in tony suburbs and throughout the nation. It is a myth that men on the outer corners of society are only lower-middle-class white men dislocated by technology and globalization.

Unlike those who primarily blame an unjust economy, government policies, or a culture sanctioning "laziness," Man Out explores the complex interplay between economics and culture. It rejects the politically charged dichotomy of seeing such men as either victims or culprits. These men are hurting, and in turn they are hurting families and hurting America. It is essential to address their problems.

Man Out draws on a wide range of data and existing research as well as interviews with several hundred men, women, and a wide variety of economists and other social scientists, social service providers and physicians, and with employers, through a national online survey and in-depth fieldwork in several communities.

CHAPTER 1

American Men on the Sidelines

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

—Henry David Thoreau, “Economy”

No one knows my struggle, they only see the trouble.

—Tupac Shakur, “Thugz Mansion”

Twenty to twenty-five million men—the population of Florida or Texas—are on the sidelines of American life.¹ They have the same Y chromosomes as the men you see at work, the men who play with their children, go out with their wives or partners, are involved in their communities, and earn a living to save for their children’s education and their families’ retirement. But these “men out” are doing few if any of these things.

They are still counted by the U.S. Census, but for all practical purposes they are absent from much of mainstream life. What they do doesn’t register in either the gross domestic product (GDP) or in the glimmer of a child’s eye. They aren’t engaged in their communities or country.

Viscerally, we know these sidelined men are out there. But they don’t fit old stereotypes of failure. We haven’t been able to name them or come to grips with who they are. We haven’t identified the problem or its dimensions. Why is this happening? What can we do? We see separate problems like white men who aren’t working, who are angry, whose education ended long before a bachelor’s degree. We see black men whose lives don’t seem to matter. We see adult boys living in their parents’ basements. We see drug and technology addicts, absent fathers, misogynists. We see men struggling with masculinity. We see men struggling with relationships and marriage and ones with physical and mental health problems. But we don’t see a single, larger story.

This is a cultural, economic, and political phenomenon that many have caught glimpses of but no one has defined. It is corroding American life in myriad ways. This problem without a name is fed by and affects the economy and politics, changing norms and technologies, and it bleeds into individual and social psychology and public health, as well as dating, marriage, and fatherhood. As Bob Dylan said, “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.”

This raises several basic questions: Who are these men, what are their lives like, and what makes them different from the majority of American men, who still navigate life pretty well? What are some of the qualities, barriers, pathologies, and other challenges these men face, and what are the common threads that tie together these various manifestations of dysfunction?

Many men try hard to do the right thing and succeed. Many see the problem in terms of being casualties of economic and cultural change. These men are at least partially correct. Rather than receiving a dishonorable discharge, they have been deported from mainstream America.

In this chapter we begin to explore the following: Who are America’s sidelined men? Why is this happening? (And why do often politicized explanations that lean too heavily on cultural factors, on the one hand, or economic factors, on the other, present an unsatisfactory, one-dimensional view?) What does being on the sidelines mean for these and other men, for women and children, for civic life, economic well-being, and everyday life? And is this the future for ever more American men?

WHO ARE THEY?

Sidelined men are a disparate population. Not all men out exhibit all of the characteristics mentioned above and discussed in the following pages. And the extent and the severity of their challenges differ. However, like the overlapping sections of a Venn diagram, all of them exhibit at least some of these qualities.

These men—different in many ways but kindred in ways we generally don’t want to admit—cut across demographic categories. The Trump-era stereotype of the laid-off white worker—that is, the former Stakhanovite in bedroom slippers—is but a slice of a bigger, more complex story. Central casting may put them in pickup trucks in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. But the cast is far larger.

Some groups—less educated white men, poorer African American men, young men, single men, and many middle-age men who are still far from the birthdays that will open the doors to Social Security and Medicare—are disproportionately represented. But there are men who at least once were middle and upper middle class, gay men, married men, and Latino men. Some are just trying to begin adulthood; others are well into middle age. Some are ex-offenders, but most have never committed a crime. They are Democrats, Republicans, and independents and are often detached from, disgusted with, and isolated from politics and public life. They can be found in all corners of the nation—from big cities and suburbs to rural areas and small towns. While many do live in Appalachia, the rural South, and formerly industrial areas, a surprising number live in exurbs, suburbs, and cities from Silicon Valley to New England. Not off-the-grid hermits holed up in mountain bunkers, they live next door or in our own homes.

It is impossible to pinpoint their numbers except to say that one-fifth to one quarter of the 100 million or so American males who are between their early 20s and mid- to late 60s exhibit many of the key characteristics.²

Many don’t work and either can’t find jobs or aren’t looking. These out-of-work, often alone men have disembarked from the labor force and other social institutions or have been thrown overboard. Their skills may be out of date and their former salaries too high for a profit-maximizing economy that sometimes gets airbrushed with exciting-sounding words like “competitive,” “global,” and “digital” but leaves them in the dust. The aging of the population has coincided with age discrimination against ever younger “older workers.” And there’s an increasing brokenness to their bodies and psyches.

Few are buying homes, and many are more likely to have—or be—liabilities than assets. Nor are they paying much in the way of taxes, although they are more than likely drawing on government benefits like food stamps and Medicaid and driving up government spending.³

They generally aren’t active in public life. Some younger men lack maturity. Others have become loners or suffer from poor health. They may be angry, or they may just be blank. Many are less than responsible, reliable, and loving fathers, husbands, partners, or workers, even when they do have jobs. A significant number feel they’ve been mistreated by women, unfair laws, and an unjust economy. Many drift in and out of relationships, having children with multiple women, prowling the virgin yet hardly virginal terrain of hookups and Tinder. Others who are married are neither good providers nor taking care of the kids and home, letting their wives support them—an embarrassment at best, a costly ball and chain and divorce material at worst. Other sidelined men turn to parents; millions of adult men in their 20s and 30s are back in their childhood bedrooms or basements. Spending all too much time online in a world of video games, social media, porn, and dyspeptic Reddit threads and quasi-fascist corners of the internet, they have largely gone offline from the real world of other, in-the-flesh human beings. They are beyond “bowling alone”; it’s more likely that they can’t find the bowling alley, and if they do, they don’t know what to do with the ball.⁴ Many feel disparaged, rightly or wrongly, which erodes their self-esteem and makes their lives even worse.

Midlife—one’s 40s to early 60s—once was the time when men were at the pinnacle of their careers. They had put in their time, climbed the corporate or organizational ladder, and attained what was likely to be the highest income of their lifetimes. They could support their families and look forward to a secure retirement. If they weren’t genuinely happy or content, at least they had checked all the boxes of middle-class success in the mid-twentieth century. Most still do, and many 25-year-olds are getting good jobs, marrying, and leading good lives, while more than a few 70- to 75-year-olds are hard at work in jobs they love.

The growing population of men out has become a drain on their families and the economy. Whether one sees these men as victims or as responsible for their own circumstances, they not only represent hundreds of billions of dollars in lost potential GDP, as well as tax revenues and increased government expenditures that together help drive up deficits, but they also are a cost to family and friends, who often pay to sustain them.

Are these men victims or are they culprits? The question is fiercely and inconclusively debated, yielding much more heat than light. Neither the left nor the right has a monopoly on this story. For now, let’s sidestep the question and say that most men out are some of both. Regardless, their lives are rimmed with losses, defeats, and sadness.

They aren’t all ne’er-do-wells, but they aren’t doing well for themselves, their families, their communities, or their country. They are disappointments to their children, wives (and girlfriends, if they have any), and employers or former employers. They, too, are disappointed, but more than likely they are hurting—economically, psychologically, and physically. Many are in poverty or in pain, are depressed and isolated, feel shame or anger, and are lost. They comprise millions of personal tragedies, and their collective condition has negative repercussions for the nation. And their numbers seem to be increasing.

Lorne, a middle-age white man in the Midwest who was last employed eight years ago, is angry. Very angry. He hasn’t “dropped out” of the workforce, he said emphatically when I spoke with him. “I’ve been kicked out.” Citing, at once proudly and cynically, his two science and math degrees and his career in information technology (IT), he said that he and men like him “are overeducated, overtrained, and overskilled.”

Lorne is angry at not only recruiters, women, journalists, and scholars who write about men like him but also society in general. He focuses his ire on what he calls “the deliberate and strategic discrimination in human resources departments, against middle-age white men.” The “recruiting industry,” a phrase used with scorn, is “female-dominated,” filled with “young, single women” and biased against men “to compensate for years of so-called misogyny.”

Society is brimming with “hatred” toward people like him who aren’t working, he said. They think that such people are mooching off the government. Lorne was quick to note, “The government hasn’t given me a dime. I’ve paid for everything with my own hard-earned savings.”

He recounted his efforts to find jobs, telling the story of one potential employer who took him to court for harassment because he sent an indeterminate number of follow-up emails after an interview. “My job-hunting efforts have been criminalized, in the true, literal sense,” Lorne said. “You wonder why I gave up looking for work?”

When the subject of available low-wage jobs came up, Lorne said he’s not “culturally suited” to working in a pizza parlor or other places where “high school dropouts” and college students taking summer jobs toil. As a former IT worker, he said, his “expectations” are higher.

Lorne is not alone in his bitterness. A lot has gone badly wrong in his work life. Naturally, he has looked for explanations and has come up with a long list of culprits. But having others to blame—rightly or wrongly—doesn’t ease his pain. He made a point of saying that he understands why suicide rates among men are up, concluding grimly, “I fully embrace the fact that I will die of starvation when my savings are gone. Bring it on!” Yet men like Lorne are largely out of sight.

WHY ARE THEY INVISIBLE?

Even more than the poor, or people of color, or underpaid workers, or the LGBTQ community, or women, men out are largely invisible. They are unorganized and lack advocates. They have no lobbyists on K Street or grassroots activists to support them. There are no charities for failing men, and very few scholars of gender studies focus on them. While these men out face a host of problems, as do other marginalized groups, most social scientists and the commentariat have put their problems into discrete silos: it’s a labor force problem, or a fatherhood and family problem, or an opioid or public health problem, or a political problem.

But there is another significant reason for their invisibility: gender-role norms and shame. Men are supposed to be strong, stoic fighters. If they’re not at the top of their game or vigorously competing, they’re not in the game. At the same time, our postfeminist culture tells us that women are still largely oppressed, the victims of a patriarchal, sexist society in which men cling to their privilege and too many are likely to be guilty of sexual harassment, if not assault. It follows that if men remain the unjust winners, it’s ludicrous or tin-eared to think of them as losers. In general, this story is correct, just like it’s true that America is generally a rich country. Yet the United States has many poor and economically struggling people, just as a still male-dominated society has many sidelined, struggling men.

Shame is compounded by another concept that few want to discuss: masculinity. For those on the left, feminists, and many women, the very term connotes retrograde norms and attitudes that are one step out of the cave. For those on the right, many men, and some women, the vague idea of masculinity suggests a positive, tough, in-charge persona. None of these groups has much of a place for struggling men. For a lot of sidelined men, establishing and maintaining a “masculine” identity is just one more cross to bear. Definitions of masculinity are in flux, leaving them confused or angry about how they should play their gender role. The acting coaches have left the theater. This is another key, similarly siloed dimension of the man out problem.

Different dimensions of many American men’s problems have been creeping into the head...