For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

Liz Plank. St. Martin’s, $27.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-250-19624-8

In this compassionate and skillful social analysis, journalist Plank’s first book, she highlights the perils of an unfinished gender revolution that has failed to offer healthy alternatives to archaic expectations for men. She explains that patriarchal norms feed directly into a mental and physical health crisis for men. The shame experienced by men who don’t feel they can embody the dominant, stoic provider archetype creates unaddressed depression and high male suicide rates, and internalized pressure not to ask for help leads men to avoid seeking needed health care. “Moral masculinity panic,” meanwhile, traps men in outdated, pseudoscientific, and possibly self-fulfilling ideas about testosterone and violence, and limits their movement into caring professions where jobs are on the rise. As well, she writes, men romantically interested in women are stuck between the cultural norm of male emotion suppression and potential romantic partners’ expectations of more emotional fluency. Plank intersperses brief profiles of individual men, which allow for exploration of some intersections of race, sexual orientation, and disability with norms of toxic masculinity. Plank’s thoughtful approach and ability to elicit emotional responses from men by engaging them about masculinity as a curious, compassionate outsider yield a well-rounded picture of what contemporary men are facing. Agent: Eve Attermann, William Morris Endeavor. (Sept.)