Sir, – So now we have “mankeeping”, the latest academic invention to explain why men apparently need women to organise their social lives, buy their mothers’ birthday presents, and nudge them out the door to meet their friends (“Mankeeping: why it’s bad for women and men,” Opinion, August 18th).
We are told this is a “crisis of connection”. Forgive me, but it looks more like a crisis of competence.
Men are not biologically incapable of buying a card, texting a mate, or arranging a pint. They have simply outsourced this labour for so long that its withdrawal feels like an existential shock.
Meanwhile, women now outnumber and outperform men in education, dominate university entry, and are catching up rapidly in the workforce. Richard Reeves’s Of Boys and Men sets this out clearly. The real gender gap today is educational, and it is men who are falling behind. Yet somehow the debate is framed around whether Seamus feels lonely because nobody booked him a trip to the pub.
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And into this confusion, LinkedIn, supposedly a professional network, now hosts invitations to research studies on infidelity. Between posts on procurement, leadership, and recruitment, we are asked to disclose our betrayals anonymously “for science”. What’s next? A call for participants who have embezzled, or fiddled their expenses?
The infantilisation of men helps nobody. Women don’t need to carry that invisible labour, and men don’t need new buzzwords that paint them as helpless. They need honesty. You’re not weak, you’re lazy. Organise your own friendships, schedule your own appointments, buy your own birthday cards.
If masculinity’s future is reduced to waiting for someone else to plan your pint, the crisis isn’t connection. It’s that men have forgotten how to stand on their own two feet. – Yours, etc.
Dr PAUL DAVIS,
Dublin City University.
