Taghi Naderzad

Originally published in the June/July 2013 issue

We write a lot about being men. I think this is the fifth time we've done an issue explicitly devoted to How to Be a Man. The definition of what a man is keeps changing, and unless we — men — continue to examine it and take an active role in redefining it, it will become smaller and more restrictive.

For the last 50 years, men have been seen as the problem. Men have been lumped together into one big roiling, oppressive, brutish mass. And seeing as how men historically helped to define women's role as one of secondary importance, that characterization led to fundamental societal improvements. Because of the concerted actions we as a society undertook over the last four decades, women and men are as equal as they've ever been. In fact, in some telling areas, women have flown past men. As we started pointing out seven years ago in Tom Chiarella's seminal story "The Problem with Boys" (July 2006), young women have long been better educated and better prepared for success than young men in America. This was a necessary corrective, and it has worked. In Richard Dorment's important story "Why Men Still Can't Have It All," recent research makes it ever clearer that the gender gap is widening to the detriment of men. To me, the most telling fact in Dorment's story is that single, childless full-time working women under the age of 30 earn more than men of the same age in nearly every U.S. city. With nearly 60 percent of college graduates being women and the majority of advanced-degree earners also being women, the gap is going to widen for the foreseeable future.

The pendulum must begin to swing in the other direction. Imbalance is always a destructive force. As Dorment's story also makes clear, although many younger women have surpassed their male peers in education and earnings, women often cede their career advantage over time. This creates a gap of an entirely different kind, one you may have heard about with the publication of books like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In. If women are better educated and better trained for the 21st-century workplace, who takes up the slack when they pause or reduce their commitment to work and career?

We need to be more attentive to the needs of boys and young men. Our education system needs to stop treating boys as problems that must be medicated or punished into submission. Law enforcement needs to do all it can to help boys keep out of courts and out of the penal system. Otherwise, the imbalance will cripple our culture. Educational reforms like those that enabled girls and young women to get the upper hand now need to be tailored to enable young men. We have to nurture boys and young men as we have girls and young women.

Advocating for boys and men, however, is simply not done. The idea that men have untold societal advantages is so firmly ingrained in the American psyche that to suggest otherwise is seen as offensive. But the attack on men and the role we play in this culture is becoming destructive. In his beautiful essay "Why Fatherhood Matters," Stephen Marche enumerates the ways in which the role of the father has been mocked and demeaned in recent decades, even as the role of the father becomes ever more important to the health of our society. This has to end. For the good of us all, it has to end.

David Granger Editor in Chief David Granger has been Esquire magazine's Editor in Chief since 1997.

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