What’s the matter with women?
Perhaps they should be more like men
This article was originally published in The Critic.
What’s the matter with women? The litany of disquieting mental health statistics is almost endless, but let me list a few. Women are three times as likely to experience mental health problems as men, and twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety. For young women it’s even worse; they are more likely to feel lonely than young men, and have skyrocketing mental health issues linked to social media. It gets no better as they get older: women are more likely to be depressed than men when they work long hours, when they become bosses, when they get married, when they become parents, and in later life. Most seriously, women are more likely than men to experience suicidal thoughts and to attempt suicide.
So what’s the conclusion that we must draw from this disparity? Well, clearly, it’s that men have better emotional coping strategies than women, and therefore that women have much to learn from men in this regard. Perhaps talking to others less about their problems could be one answer, after all, 40% of men (the sex with fewer mental health problems, remember) won’t talk about their mental health with anyone. Or perhaps what’s needed in womens’ conversations with friends is less emotional support, and more cutting banter? That’s how men (the psychologically healthy sex) talk to each other after all.
Or maybe the problem is too much talking itself? Perhaps instead, women should do more of that very 21st century male hobby, lifting? Or play more online video games? Or maybe it’s team based activities that are the cause of better male mental health: women should think about joining more fantasy football leagues and board game clubs. Or perhaps what they really need is to adopt a more traditional approach: ladies, try going fishing with one of your closest female friends, but make sure to hardly speak to her for the entire day, except for a few sparing comments on how the fish are biting. This sort of activity as a form of male bonding has traditionally been seen as mostly baffling to women, but perhaps it’s this unwillingness to open their minds that is holding women back: give it a try! The possibilities are legion, in fact I’m already envisaging a whole series of female-focused inspirational books and TED talks: ”Talk Less, Lift More”, “It’s Kind to be Cruel”, and “Salmon and Silence”.
Having read the above, you’re probably thinking “this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.” To which I say, exactly. So why then do we continually get laughable commentary claiming that men will only solve their problems by adopting stereotypically female emotional coping strategies, an argument that is fundamentally no different?
The latest example of this genre, and that which prompted me to write this article, is of course Caitlin Moran who is promoting her new book, What About Men?, on the subject of “what’s gone wrong for men – and the thing that can fix them”. Moran is certainly well intentioned, and from reading the first half of her article her project even seems promising. She asks men about their problems, and identifies several valid ones, such as loneliness, underachievement in education, and overrepresentation among substance abusers, the homeless, victims of murder, the unemployed, and those who lose custody of their children in divorces. She also correctly identifies the soft-focus problematising of masculinity that makes up much social commentary on sex and gender issues these days.
However after this promising start, she concludes that the answer to all of these problems is … “Feminism. What men and boys need is feminism”. Oh. And what specifically do men need? To talk more about their problems, instead of banter. More thinktanks, charities, and hashtags. Men need, supposedly, an equivalent of the “Yass, Kween!” or the “dancing girl” emoji. So in the end her conclusion is routine: what men need is what women do. But if this doesn’t even seem to be working that well for women, as the statistics at the beginning of this article show, how well exactly should we expect it to work for men? Moran notes ruefully that women “organise the fuck out of International Women’s Day, while International Men’s Day still gets less attention than International Steak and a Blowjob Day.” But which of these mens’ days, appropriately celebrated in the life of an individual man, would actually be more likely to improve his mental health?
Moran is an exemplar of a certain class of female writer who invariably sees herself as highly empathetic, but who generally fails a basic test of empathy, which is to imagine oneself in the shoes of someone very different, in this case a member of the opposite sex. The key here is the difference between affective/emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. Writers like Moran may well be very high in affective empathy, i.e. sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering, with an understanding of their emotional state deriving from similar experiences. This can be seen in the fact that she has chosen to write about these issues at all. However she and other writers like her massively fail at cognitive empathy, the ability to understand another's perspective or mental state that one may have no personal experience with or intuitive understanding of. These two types of empathy are not necessarily correlated, as this paper describes, “strong empathizers are not necessarily proficient mentalizers", and furthermore that “in highly emotional situations, empathic sharing can inhibit mentalizing-related activity and thereby harm mentalizing performance.” Just because you care, it doesn’t mean you understand, or that your prescriptions are useful.
Cognitive empathy failings are also behind much of male-female incomprehension more broadly. They’re behind men who assume women live in a paradise due to their easier access to casual sex, and they’re behind women who assume that if a man sleeps with them it must mean he has emotional feelings for her. The other culprit behind these misunderstandings in the present day is our progressive and blank slate intellectual culture which maintains that men and women are fundamentally no different, but also, somehow, the female way is better. It’s the combination of these two influences that give us Moran’s kind of ‘feminism, but for men’ prescriptions.
In reality, we know what contributes to good male mental health: it’s not necessarily the exact same things that work for women, and it’s certainly not going to be a more enthusiastic celebration of International Men’s Day. Meaningful work or hobbies, strong friendships (which do not necessarily have to involve a great deal of explicitly emotional content), a good romantic relationship, and being needed and valued for what they do by those around them. Any efforts to improve men’s mental health must either focus on giving men the tools to achieve these things in their own lives, as the often maligned Jordan Peterson aims to do, or must focus on changing society to make the achievement of these goals easier and more natural.
So please, for the next writer repeating this genre of mistargeted advice, ask yourself first, would your response to the crisis in female mental health involve suggesting that women need more silent fishing retreats? And if not, why not?
