Some Thoughts On “Mankeeping”

There’s a lot that could go wrong if researchers and theorists don’t act with rigor here

“Mankeeping” has been everywhere lately. That’s largely because of a New York Times article on the concept from late July, which explains:

The term, 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.

The key recent article here, co-authored by Ferrara and Dylan Vergara, is titled “Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality” (unpaywalled copy here). It was published last year in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities. As the authors note, all the trendlines for male socialization are heading in the wrong direction. In part because of the collapse of traditionally male civic institutions, men arguably have fewer close friends than they did in the past, with a disturbing number reporting they basically have no one to talk to about emotionally charged issues. This burden, the reasoning goes, increasingly falls on their female partners.

I’ve got thoughts!

At The Bottom Of All This Is An Actual Phenomenon

First, I think there’s a genuine problem with men having trouble expressing their emotions in healthy ways, especially to other men. This is one of many facts about the world that — especially if you’re online — is often communicated by the most annoying messengers possible. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Like (almost) everything else, there’s a spectrum here. Some men are fine at expressing their feelings in adaptive ways! Some are hardened psychopaths, perhaps because of buried internal trauma. I just think that, on average, we are not good at simply saying “I’m sad, and here’s why” without burying it in heaps of irony or other-people-have-it-worse or other defense mechanisms. I have a lot of personal experience with this. For most of my twenties and thirties I was horrible at simply expressing my emotions. I did a lot of bottling. Part of this was because I felt shame about opening up even to close friends. It just didn’t feel right to be vulnerable; it felt like I was doing something wrong. I strongly think that this comes from socialization; even in liberal households and towns like mine, boys are taught to act a certain way. When it comes to the most basic, stripped-down theories of male versus female socialization, I’m right there with the pink-haired wokescolds. (Though I also think biology must play a role, which I’ll get to in a bit.)

But again, the messengers. . . “mankeeping” is not packaged in a careful, empathetic way.

“Mankeeping” Is A Condescending And Dehumanizing Word That Is Going To Turn Tons Of People Off

Other words that include -keeping all involve inanimate objects or animals — bookkeeping, peacekeeping, housekeeping, plantkeeping, beekeeping, and so on. The whole point here is that the population in question — men — is suffering in a genuine way, so why give the concept a phenomenon that makes them sound burdensome and not quite human? Can you imagine an article about “womankeeping” or “gaykeeping” or anything like that being published in 2025? Of course not. I think this speaks to a disdain for some groups that often sneaks into otherwise mainstream and respectable peer-reviewed research — a disdain that can lead to bias and blind spots.

In much of academia and liberal life, it remains okay to beat up on men and/or white people (white women, of course, come in for their fair share of criticism) in a way that would simply be unacceptable for any other group. For a long time I dismissed this as conservative whining, but it’s obviously true. It’s waning, for sure — hopefully things will never be as crazy as they were back in 2020 — but if 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 say this as someone who is anything but a language cop — but to choose, as your newly coined term, something that makes men sound like they are troublesome house pets is obviously, to borrow a word, “problematic.”

Future Research On “Mankeeping” Needs To Be Conducted Carefully And Rigorously, Or Misunderstandings Could Mount

I’ve written a fair amount about “microaggressions.” Microaggressions refer to an actual thing — someone making an offensive comment to a member of a group without realizing they have done so — but the subsequent research and theorizing about it was so poorly constructed that it led us all on a quick train to Crazyville.

One of the most commonly disseminated “findings” from this terribly flawed area of research is that the more microaggressions someone experiences, the worse their mental health — up to and including symptoms of suicidality.

I’m borrowing heavily from the late, great psychologist Scott Lilienfeld here, but the biggest problem with this is that because noticing a microaggression often involves reading into an ambiguous interaction, there isn’t a pure, simple relationship between the frequency with which someone reports being microaggressed and their mental health. If someone is naturally prone to neuroticism, taking offense, or other negative emotions, that might make them over-vigilant in their interpretation of microaggressions, complicating the causal relationship.

Once “mankeeping” really escapes into the wild, I think there are some similar risks here. This jumps out from Ferrara and Vergara’s list of examples of mankeeping:

Mankeeping can involve curating social interactions on men’s behalf. A woman might suggest her husband reconnect with old friends, or a girlfriend might facilitate a group outing to help her boyfriend bond with other men. A mother’s suggestion that her son get in contact with his friends qualifies under our definition, along with organizing social functions where the son might meet other boys. Asking men to get in contact with other potentially viable sources of social support—for example, a woman reminding her husband to join a men’s group therapy session until he does so—aligns with our definition of mankeeping. Along this same vein, work done to encourage other people to provide support to men is mankeeping, such as a woman who reminds a male friend to reach out to another male friend until the two have scheduled a time to meet. Finally, mankeeping is specifically in reference to emotion work that is not fully reciprocated and potentially burdensome. In this unequal administration social support, we expect that mankeeping comes at a cost, whether that be time, autonomy, or well-being.

If and when psychologists start researching this phenomenon, which seems inevitable, I hope they get the man’s side of the story too. For example, there’s a generally accepted finding that women are more social than men. So one possibility, in a marriage, is that the wife senses her male partner is languishing and actively seeks to “set him up” with other men. Another possibility is that the male partner isn’t as social and feels a bit put-upon by his wife’s efforts to get him out of the house. He plays poker or pickup basketball a couple times a week and, at the moment, doesn’t feel the need for much more social engagement.

I’m not commenting on which of these two is more likely, and of course it could be somewhere in the middle and will vary from couple to couple, but I’m worried about research that simply asks a bunch of women in heterosexual relationships about their efforts to get their male partners more socially engaged, because it might deliver distorted results. To take another common source of heterosexual tension: If you ask a bunch of men whether they feel they and their wives have sex enough, and the reason they don’t if they don’t, and take their answers at face value without consulting the women, you’d clearly be getting only part of the story! The same logic should apply here. Researchers should also be open to the possibility that women are not harmed but benefit, in some instances, from trying to set their men up for social engagement. Again, sticking strictly to ancient and offensive stereotypes, a man might not enjoy every second of the day he spends antiquing with his wife, but on balance, he might enjoy the fact that he is making her happy, that they feel closer, that they can laugh and joke in the car, and so on.

None of this is to say that there aren’t instances in which “mankeeping” (ugh, that term. . . ) might be a drag on a female partner. All I’m saying is that this is just a theory, and every relationship is different, and there are ways to set up the future studies on mankeeping that will effectively rig them to deliver certain results. I hope that doesn’t happen.

For The Love of God, Someone Needs To Address The Citation Crisis

There are numerous points in their article where Ferrara and Vergara make a strong empirical claim and support it with a citation. In many cases, I found myself deeply skeptical that things could be quite as simple as they suggest. I didn’t want to drown in citation checking, so I just picked one at random to check. (I mean, you have no way of knowing this is true! But it is. I promise.)

Here’s the context:

Indeed, when men cultivate close relationships with other men, they are less likely to have mental health difficulties than men who do not form such relationships, and may be less likely to burden women through unequal seeking out of social support (McKenzie et al., 2018).

This is exactly the sort of causal relationship that sounds perfectly reasonable but is quite difficult to establish empirically. Does McKenzie et al., 2018 actually support this interpretation? (I guess there’s a way to read this sentence as not technically implying a causal relationship, but I really don’t think that interpretation makes sense in full context.)

Here’s the abstract:

Men’s mental health has remained undertheorized, particularly in terms of the gendered nature of men’s social relations. While the importance of social connections and strong supportive networks for improving mental health and well-being is well documented, we know little about men’s social support networks or how men go about seeking or mobilizing social support. An in-depth understanding of the gendered nature of men’s social connections and the ways in which the interplay between masculinity and men’s social connections can impact men’s mental health is needed. Fifteen life history interviews were undertaken with men in the community. A theoretical framework of gender relations was used to analyze the men’s interviews. The findings provide rich insights into men’s diverse patterns of practice in regards to seeking or mobilizing social support. . . . Overall, the findings suggest that patterns of social connectedness among men are diverse, challenging the social science literature that frames all men’s social relationships as being largely instrumental, and men as less able and less interested than women in building emotional and supportive relationships with others. The implications of these findings for promoting men’s social connectedness and mental health are discussed.

I did not read the whole article because I do not need to. Qualitative interviews with 15 men cannot come close to supporting a claim like “when men cultivate close relationships with other men, they are less likely to have mental health difficulties than men who do not form such relationships.” Among the million other reasons a single study like this can’t support such a strong empirical claim, it could be (of course) that men with strong mental health are more likely to form lasting friendships.

There’s nothing unusual about this sort of nonsense citation — that’s what it is — but it’s really sad that in the Year of Our Lord 2025, journal editors find this acceptable. If I ran the world, this would be considered an error, full stop, and require correction. But a vast swath of the academic world has decided that it’s totally fine to buttress specific empirical claims with citations that don’t come close to actually doing so. If anyone has more patience than I do and wants to seek out other examples, feel free to post what you find in the comments.

The Authors Make Sweeping, Unjustified Assumptions About What Does Or Doesn’t Explain Differences Between The Sexes