Not Waving But Drowning

On the well-being of our nation's men and boys

When you talk about the suffering of boys and men, a strange and saddening thing often happens. Otherwise caring people display a shocking degree of callousness. A few weeks ago at dinner, I told the story of a beloved Toronto public school teacher of 24 years who tragically took his own life after suffering racist verbal abuse. When I finished telling the story, one woman at the table rubbed her thumb and index finger together, playing the world’s tiniest violin. Not because she finds racism amusing. Nor because she thinks suicide is funny. Rather, because the victim was male.

In a recent essay, I discussed the unbelievable fact that contemporary feminism has managed to convince a significant number of women that men pose a greater to them than a wild bear. But the problem is even worse than I described. It’s not merely that some women have less than a kindergartner’s understanding of the animal kingdom. It’s also the popular sentiment that all men are scum. Related to this is the constant diminishment of the male sacrifice. Or the almost demented belief that anything men can do, women can do better. The dating coach Bernadine Bluntly had a good response to this, in which she simply presented a montage of some the jobs men do.

We see the same oversimplification and demonization in progressive discourse regarding white people, heteronormativity, the United States, and Western civilization. But anti-male sexism is arguably the worst variant as it targets roughly half the planet. One root cause is the misguided notion that men have forever enjoyed so much privilege and dominance that they scarcely deserve sympathy on the incredibly rare occasions that they actually suffer. But the truth is, men have always suffered far more than women in practically every society that has ever existed, as well as in the societies of all our nearest primate cousins.

Yes, women tend to make less than men for the same work, have less access to education than boys, and are at higher risk of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. They also have higher rates of anxiety and depression. But when it comes to the brutal labor of physically building civilizations, or the horrors that are entailed with defending those civilizations, this has always overwhelmingly been the work of men. Even in the event of natural disasters or tragic events such as a sinking ship, men are raised to abide by the Birkenhead drill and stand silently aside to allow women and children first into the lifeboats while they themselves are sacrificed, only to be scorned by modern society for their trouble. As Jordan Peterson once said:

What the hell are we gonna do without men? You look around this city here. You see all these buildings go up. These men are doing impossible things. They’re under the streets working on the sewers. They’re up on the power lines in the storms and the rain. They’re keeping this impossible infrastructure functioning. This thing that works in miraculous manner. They work themselves to death. And often literally. The gratitude for that is sorely lacking. Especially among the people who should be most grateful. You see university professors, especially of the social justice bent, take everything they have for granted, failing to understand entirely that there’s a massive infrastructure of unbelievably hardworking, solidly laboring working-class men breaking themselves in half on a regular basis, making sure that everything that always breaks works.

And yet what is the response to this incredible sacrifice for which we all ought to feel an aching in our hearts? In many cases, a near sociopathic lack of empathy. As the writer Wanye Burkett recently posted:

In my experience, most men have some sense that life is uniquely dangerous for women, but when women think about men’s safety they picture The Rock strolling confidently along at night without a care in the world, intimidating everyone they pass. The fact is that most men cannot walk around at night with impunity and yet the number of times in my life I’ve heard something like, “you don’t have to worry about being alone at night, you’re a man” is quite revealing. The average man has much more empathy, sympathy, and understanding regarding the average woman’s safety concerns than the average woman has for the average man’s.

This certainly resonates with me. I simply cannot count the number of times I have been walking alone at night and found myself in a very dangerous situation. Nor can I count the number of times I’ve had someone say to me, you don’t have to worry about being alone at night. And yet consider the following statistics. In Washington state, which has an extremely high quality of life overall compared to other U.S. states, boys and men made up 56% of missing persons in 2022. They also represent 60% of high-school dropouts, 63% of homeless, 65% of uninsured, 66% of deaths from alcohol, 70% of unsheltered, 72% of drug overdoses including 73% of opioid deaths, 76% of homicide victims, nearly 80% of suicides, 94% of prisoners, and 97% of military deaths.

Male privilege is a quite a treat, isn’t it?

“If we don’t turn this around, we’re not gonna be okay,” said Rep. Mary Dye, a Republican from Pomeroy, Washington. Dye has introduced a bill to create the Washington State Commission on Boys and Men to address shocking declines in their well-being. “This isn’t about men versus women, it’s about acknowledging declines in this whole group of people and their well-being, and a Men and Boys Commission could come up with solutions so everybody can prosper and excel.”

Dye added, “Last year we had a 37% increase in suicide rates and almost 80% of those are male, and young boys are committing suicide between the ages of 12 and 16. What’s making our boys check out of life before they even get a chance? Someone commits suicide because they feel hopeless, worthless and useless.”

Dye said many boys don’t have a male mentor as more and more homes are run by single mothers. With few men going into professions such as education and counseling, she said boys are growing up without male role models. In Washington, recent data shows males make up only 25% of mental health counselors and 16% of social workers.

House Bill 1270 and Senate Bill 5830, sponsored by Dye and Democratic Washington state Senator John Lovick, would establish a commission to produce policy recommendations focused on five areas: education, mental and physical health, family and relationships, employment and financial health, and the court systems.

When I recently spoke to

Richard V Reeves

, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, the nation’s first and only think tank dedicated to issues affecting men and boys, he echoed Dye’s sentiment that this is not about prioritizing men over women.

“The headline issue is the much higher rates we see of suicide among men,” Reeves told me, “four times higher than among women across all ages. And what’s unusual about the U.S. is that the suicide rate is rising. Since 2010, almost all the rise has been among young men. Every year, we lose 40,000 lives to suicide. It’s a public health crisis. Absolutely massive. Related to that are losses to drugs and ‘deaths of despair.’ We’re now losing a lot more men to drugs than we are to driving. Underpinning all this is a sense of isolation, desperation, and loneliness.”

Sadly, in our current cultural climate, when men are isolated and alone, we are just as likely to sneer at them and mock them as “incels” as we are to extend sympathy.

Reeves continued, “It is literally fatal to feel unneeded as a human being. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman decides he’ll be more useful to his family dead than alive. This can create a real fatalism that can lead to taking your own life. But even well short of that it can lead to drug addiction, retreat, and so on.”

When I asked him how our societal attitudes succeed or fail in addressing the issue, Reeves replied, “That’s the million-dollar question. I’m a policy wonk. My instinct there is to think about potential policy solutions. But I actually think, this discourse about men is incredibly important. We’ve got to have a better conversation about this. Figures like Jordan Peterson, they’re just providing empathy. Some basic empathy. Male suffering almost sounds like an oxymoron. And I understand that reaction. But I think it’s incredibly counterproductive. It causes many boys and men to go silent about their suffering. We’re just not creating enough space to be empathic about the real problems boys are facing because we see it as zero-sum with regard to women.”

I then related to Reeves the story of my friend who made the tiniest-violin gesture, as well as Peterson’s comment above. Reeves paused for a moment then said, “Peterson’s genius is to look a lot of these guys in the face and say, I see you. I hear you. A lot of these guys feel their suffer is somehow invalidated, unheard. Feeling unneeded is basically fatal. If they raise an issue, they will just not be treated as fully human. And I think we know from history that if a group starts to feel like they’re thought less of, that’s incredibly bad for them and for society. There’s some truth to the empathy gap theory. Just saying we need you is powerful and evokes tears sometimes. And that’s just not difficult. And it frustrates me that we’re just not able to do it somehow.”

Reeves has been a strong supporter of the Commission on Boys and Men from the outset. Last year, he wrote an essay titled “Will Washington Lead the Way?” He believes the commission would complement existing ones that serve women.

“The problem isn’t feminist groups,” he said. “They’re doing their job. The problem is we don’t have groups for men doing an equivalent job. Gender equality is not a zero-sum game.”

I share Reeves’s concern, and his optimism. I eagerly hope the Commission on Boys and Men becomes a reality. But until I see substantive action, I keep thinking of a poem by Stevie Smith, one of the greatest British poets of the early 20th century. Ironically, Smith grew up resenting her absent father and hated two things in life more than anything else—Adolf Hitler and men.

But empathy was the abiding theme of much of her work and her most famous poem, “Not Waving But Drowning,” published in 1957, is the one that feels to me most representative of this problem. In it, a drowning man’s desperate flailing is mistaken for waving by distant onlookers. It’s a bleak metaphor for the failure of the suffering in society to gain attention. The line that hits hardest for me is the first line of the third stanza. It was too cold always.

It’s not too far out for our boys. Not yet. And we may have raised them to keep a stiff upper lip, but we have to recognize that many of them are not waving but drowning.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning: 
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead 
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.  

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always 
(Still the dead one lay moaning)    
I was much too far out all my life    
And not waving but drowning.