I just stumbled across a new study published in Sex Roles titled "Measuring Mankeeping: Development and Validation of a Scale Assessing How Women Experience the Impact of Men's Declining Social Networks."

The article encapsulates how mainstream sociology views men’s suffering. The authors acknowledge some concerning statistics about the "male friendship recession":

  • 15% of men now report having zero close friends, a massive jump from just 3% in 1990.
  • Chronic loneliness increases the risk of mortality by 26%.
  • Isolation is directly linked to the skyrocketing rates of male suicidality.

But instead of focusing on how to help men, how to rebuild male-only social spaces, or how to tackle this public health issue, what does the study do? It invents a new metric called the "Mankeeping Scale" to quantify how men's lack of friends creates an "unreciprocated emotional and temporal burden" on women.

The framework pathologizes lonely men as passive, incompetent extra weight that women have to "manage". The paper literally focuses on how women are "exhausted" by helping their partners maintain a social life.

One of the authors is the Global Director of Men’s Health Research at Movember, and a leading figure in Young Men’s Mental Health. Movember is supposed to be the global charity funded by men's health advocacy.

It's strange that the head of research at Movember putting his name on a paper that reframes a social issue for men it as an unfair domestic chore for women, and implicitly endorses a sexist framing of an issue to cast males and female in roles that will lead to further negative stereotyping of men and further sympathy for women only.

Measuring Mankeeping: Development and Validation of a Scale Assessing How Women Experience the Impact of Men's Declining Social Networks | Sex Roles | Springer Nature Link