Obama on the male malaise: 8 takeaways

Why he thinks it is time to focus more on boys and men

Last week, Barack Obama joined his wife Michelle Obama and brother-in-law Craig Robinson for their podcast, IMO. All the headlines have been about the Obama’s rumored marital issues, which they addressed directly at the top of the show.

But the conversation was actually all about boys and men. The title for the episode was “Focus on What’s Right About Young Men”. Now that’s the kind of pod title I’m here for!

It was a rich and thoughtful conversation. It further widened the permission space to positively address the challenges of boys and men, especially for those on the center-left.

I should declare a potential bias here: President Obama liked my book Of Boys and Men enough to put it on his summer reading list last year. But I will also say that I didn’t think either of the Obamas sounded the right note on this issue in the run-up to the 2024 election. So I’m even more delighted with the substance and tone of this latest conversation. Anybody who thinks that doing more for boys and men is somehow a reactionary project should just listen to this.

In fact, I’d really encourage all of you to watch or listen, but here I’ve summarized what I saw as some of the most important messages, with corresponding excerpts:

1. Progressives need to re-frame their narrative

It is still harder than it should be to advocate for boys and men in center-left spaces and institutions. The idea that being pro-male means being anti-female is a hard one to overcome. I get it; but also, people have to get over it. Obama (in what follows I mean Barack unless otherwise stated) offered an unflinching diagnosis:

What we're learning is that when we don't think about boys and just assume they're going to be OK because they've been running the world and they've got all the advantages relative to the girls - and all of which has historically been true in all kinds of ways. But precisely because of that, if you're not thinking about what's happening to boys and how are they being raised, then that can actually hurt women… And I will say, as ‘ progressives’, Democrats, progressive parents, enlightened ones, we've made that mistake sometimes in terms of our rhetoric. Where it's like we're constantly talking about what's wrong with the boys, instead of what's right with them.

The messaging here is absolutely spot-on. Obama’s willingness to scold his own side, and indeed himself, for the mistakes in how they talk about male issues is an important moment. We have got to get past the deficit-based framing on this issue, abandon terms like “toxic masculinity” (which does not appear once in the episode, I’m happy to report), and approach boys and men with empathy and compassion, not blame and shame.

2. We need more men in the lives of boys

A recurrent theme in the conversation was the importance of men in the lives of children, especially boys. Fathers got multiple shout-outs (see below). But perhaps even more salient was the focus on men in the community more broadly. As Obama said:

Even if you have a wonderful male partner who's in the house, I think it still would be good to find assets in the community. People in the community, friends in your community, places of worship, community organizations, what have you, where there are a bunch of men who can be sort of elders to boys. And so they're not just looking at one particular role model, but many.

Yes indeed. It takes a village to raise a child, as Obama’s once-rival and former colleague Hillary Clinton reminded us. But some of the villagers have to be men. The lack of male volunteers in so many of your youth-serving organizations is a huge problem. The lack of male teachers (who account for most coaches) is a huge problem.

[T]here are a lot of these things that apply to boys and girls. I do think that there are some particular issues with boys that, as a society, we're not addressing. I do think, as a society, we have to create more structures for boys and men to have guidance, rituals, frameworks, encouragement.

For Obama to be so strongly calling for male “elders” and more male-oriented structures is something I hope all these civic organizations take note of. But also I hope that men do too. We need to step up into these roles. We need a Call to Men; and we need men to answer that call.

3. Dads rock

All three talked about the importance of fathers, or rather of fathering: engaged, hands-on caring for and teaching of children. The Obamas were pretty old-fashioned, too. Here’s how Barack described their parenting philosophy:

[W]e both believe that you give unconditional love to kids, but you also give them structure. That you're always there for them and keeping them safe, but you're also saying as early as two or three, no, you can't do that. No, you can't have that. We believed in explaining why, but we also believed in being firm. We had bedtimes and bath times and, you know, you had to eat your vegetables even if you didn't like them.

He did the night shift in the early days, which as Michelle Obama explains meant she had to step back and give Dad space, an important lesson for many Moms I think:

I also had to let go. Right. I had to say, you know what? Whatever is happening between eight at night and five in the morning, I can't micromanage that relationship. They're going to be okay.

Fatherhood is a theme Obama highlighted before his Presidency, but not during. I hope he’ll return to it. (He might be interested in a report I just co-authored along with a politically diverse group for the Governor of Virginia).

4. Spaces for male solidarity are vital

I’ve written about the importance of all-male spaces and male friendship here before (see here and here). Obama again was pretty trenchant. He talked movingly about maintaining his own circle of friends even during the Presidency:

Having male friends I could talk to and count on was important to my life. And it turns out, actually, what we've learned is our families, our nuclear family was healthier and happier precisely because we had a bunch of friends…the point is, just creating some structures where guys can get together. And then in stride, in the flow, now a whole bunch of stuff is shared, talked about, etc. That turned out to be something that mattered a lot to me.

Obama and his friends met at Camp David every year, but they renamed it “Camp Athlon” because they turned it into a multi-sport, middle-aged male Olympics. And they continue the tradition to this day. I loved Obama’s point about how, during ferocious ping-ping matches or whatever—”in stride, in flow”—is when “a whole bunch of stuff is shared, talked about”. Beautiful and true.

I also liked his emphasis on the need to create structures for male solidarity. For whatever reason, female friendships seem to flourish more organically. Male friendships need more structure. So we should build them, in our own lives and more generally. The Men’s Sheds movement is a great example here.

I hope Obama’s comments, and the fact that Michelle not only supported but helped organize these events for her husband, will make other women more positively-inclined towards all-male social gatherings. When I wrote on this previously, I cited some Pew research showing some skepticism among women about all-male social groups.

I’ve since asked the folks at Pew to break the data by political leaning, and those results are starker still. Two out of three (67%) of Democrat or Democrat-leading women think that all-female social groups have a positive impact on society; but only one in three (34%) think the same about all-male social groups. Even most Democrat men aren’t in favor of all-male social groups:

I think a lot must depend here on what people think of as “social groups”. They might be thinking of clubs that deliberately exclude women; or fraternities than they might have negative feelings about; or stereotypical male misbehavior, more along the lines of the Hangover movies than Obama’s Camp Athlon. I don’t know. But I do know that the kind of all-male social groups Obama is promoting here are a good thing.

5. We need more boy-friendly education

There was not much discussion of schools and colleges, where boys and men are lagging well behind. (For those interested in college, do check our our own initiative on this, the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative.)

But there was one exchange that showed this is very much on Obama’s mind. As Michelle Obama said:

There are small numbers of male teachers in high schools. Boys are growing up in an education system where they're mostly surrounded by women. Barack, you've talked about the fact that the entire education system isn't even designed to recognize boys and what they need.

I wish they’d dug into deeper here. I agree, of course, with the Obama assessment that the education system isn’t boy-friendly enough. I love to have heard more about why he thinks that is, and what we might do about it. For me it’s more male teachers, more hands-on learning including CTE, early internships and apprenticeships, and the option boys starting school later (which DC just banned, unfortunately), high-dose tutoring, mentoring, more opportunities for movement and play, and much more besides. And honestly, in many of these areas we need a lot more research.

6. Men being protectors is a good thing

One theme that Barack brought up a couple of times is the positive role for men as protectors. Craig Robinson mentioned being raised to think of this protective role as intrinsic to his ideas of manhood. This can include small things. Both he and Obama mentioned being taught that when a man is walking with a woman, he should “always walk on the street side”. As it happens, I was taught exactly the same thing. Apparently it dates back to when the protection was as much from dirt and water splashing up as much as anything else. Chat GPT tells me:

Today, the rule is mostly symbolic, but still used by some as a chivalrous gesture—especially in dating or formal settings. It conveys attentiveness, consideration, and traditional manners.

Of course the AI goes on to say that it should now be a choice, some women might prefer the street side etc. Chat GPT is nothing if not thoroughly modern. But hey, chivalry, attentiveness, consideration, and manners aren’t horrible things, right?

Obama made an important connection between strength and protection in the context of masculinity. Referring back to the comments from Craig, he said:

I do like the thing you brought up, though, about being a protector. Because for some reason, that part of it, I think, appealed to me. And at its best, it then counterbalanced the idea of being strong. Like you're strong not to pick on people. Not to be a bully, not to dominate others. Instead, it's strength in order to protect.

7. Economic structures need fixing, not just men

Towards the end of the conversation, Michelle Obama ventured more into the “how do we fix men” territory, urging men to do the “self-work”. In response, Barack took a different tack, agreeing with the need for men to adapt but pointing to broader structural issues too:

[A] lot of male identity and status was tied up with being a provider, having a job, doing a good job, coming home. And when folks started losing jobs because of deindustrialization and offshoring. . .you had a bunch of men suddenly feeling lost because their identity had been so wrapped up in that one thing, which was being a provider. So part of what we have to do is, yeah, as men take responsibility for figuring out how to talk about and share feelings and cultivate relationships and friendships. But as a society, we also have to make sure that men don't feel redundant and don't feel as if there's not a place for them. And there are entire communities now where the women are more likely to be employed than the men are. They have more avenues for supporting their families. And that is something that no matter how much talk you engage in, if guys are feeling left out and not respected, they're going to act some kind of way. And they're also going to pass that on to their sons.

Well, just: Amen, Mr President. We have to shift the conversation from seeing men as being the problem to men as having problems. And one of those problems is not feeling needed, respected, valued even as the world moves away, thankfully, from the old economic reliance of women on men. As I wrote in Of Boys and Men: “The true cause of the male malaise, I believe, is not lack of labor force participation but cultural redundancy.”

It is vitally important to recognize the structural issues facing boys and men, not just the individual ones. Even as I’m writing this, I’m reacting to the new analysis from the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch showing that all of the rise in unemployment in the U.S. is among men:

8. It’s not zero-sum: we rise together

For too long, Democrats and those on the political left more generally have been reluctant to acknowledge and address the problems of boys and men, for fear that this will distract from or dilute the necessary work we still need to do for women and girls.

This zero-sum framing, as I know I’ve said too many times now, has been a disaster. I am so pleased to see us moving past it, led by awesome leaders like Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland and others. And now here’s Obama making his strongest statement to date on this front (clip below):

We rightly have tried to invest in girls to make sure that there's a level playing field and then they're not barred from opportunities. But we haven't been as willing, I think, to be intentional about investing in the boys. And that's been a mistake. And I think people are starting to recognize that. [But] I think there's a healthier conversation taking place now, both among this new generation of young women and men, but also among the public at large that's starting to see like, hey, we gotta do better by our boys. And if we do better by our boys and we're producing stronger, more confident men, that's gonna be good for our girls and our women as well.

Indeed. Say that again: “we haven't been as willing, I think, to be intentional about investing in the boys. And that's been a mistake.”

It has been a horrible error, leading to a damaging vacuum in our policymaking, our public conversation, and our politics. Thankfully, more and more people are indeed starting to see that. Credit where it’s due, Obama himself led some of the charge here, with his My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which lives on at the Obama Foundation.

But he’s not been as outspoken since—until now.

The chorus of voices from respected leaders and scholars about the challenges of boys and men is of course music to my ears. It makes me doubly grateful that I created the American Institute for Boys and Men to help channel this growing recognition into positive action. (if you haven’t already, do sign up for AIBM’s newsletter).

So, hats off to the Obamas. We rise together.