Among the more practical proposals to have emerged from the man-crisis discourse is that the U.S. should mount a campaign to recruit more young men to so-called HEAL jobs. (The acronym stands for Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy.) The teaching and nursing professions are facing serious labor shortages; these jobs don’t come with big paychecks and are often gruelling, but they’re also resistant to automation and relatively recession-proof. In the best-selling jeremiad “Of Boys and Men” (2022), the social scientist Richard V. Reeves writes, “We need to break the cycle of professions taught by women for women. Some robust affirmative action is justified here.” The economist and former Times columnist Paul Krugman has recently taken up Reeves’s refrain, writing, on his Substack, “Many of these occupations are female-coded and have become more so over time, partly because they’re underpaid. But they don’t have to be . . . we can help attract men into these occupations in part by increasing the wages HEAL occupations pay.”
Women, it should be noted, have dominated the teaching profession since the nineteenth century not because it’s a misandrist job-protection racket but because early public-education advocates found that they could expand the school system more quickly by hiring women teachers, whom they could pay less than men. One might ask if difficult, essential work might be well paid, at this moment in history, regardless of a person’s sex. But then much of the centrist manosphere’s rhetoric is predicated on refusing to see half of what’s in front of you.
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The deeper one sinks into our nation’s alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.
