At Jacobin, Zoe Sherman’s “Solving the “Crisis of Men” Requires Tackling Inequality” makes a compelling case that policies addressing class inequality will do more to help men have better living standards than any gender-focused reforms. Here’s an excerpt of the article, with a link for those who want to read more of it:

Though you may have heard reports that men are in decline, rest assured that American men are not losing a battle of the sexes. But a majority of men are losing a class war, and losing a class war hurts. A majority of women are losing the class war too, but there are systematic gender differences in what it looks and feels like to lose. Some harms fall more heavily on women than on men, while other harms lean the other way.

Dramatically — and devastatingly — men too often lose their lives when they lose economic stability and the attendant social status. So far in the twenty-first century, fatality rates from suicide and opioid overdoses have been trending upward for the US population of all genders (aside from a very recent hopeful reversal of the opioid overdose death rate — a reversal that lamentably has not reached black Americans, whose fatality rates continue to climb). Men, however, make up roughly 80 percent of suicide deaths (though women make more suicide attempts) and 70 percent of opioid overdose deaths. We need no more convincing indicator of real pain.

Some on the Right look at the harms that men are experiencing in the United States and blame feminism or women in general. Meanwhile, some on the center and the Left want us to attend to the ways men are suffering and, to their credit, want to avoid a battle-of-the-sexes interpretation in which one side’s win must be the other side’s loss. But when analyses don’t pay enough attention to economic class, their explanations of men’s struggles also fall short.

By some measures, men in the United States today are doing worse than their fathers and grandfathers and, along a few dimensions, men are doing worse than women of the same age. The data on men over time show troubling trend lines such as falling prime-age labor-force participation rates, stagnant wages (despite growing national income), and, for some subsets of the male population, stagnant or falling life expectancy (despite gains for others). In their K–12 schooling, girls on average do better than boys do; in higher education, women participate at greater rates and with greater success than men; women have more friends; and women live longer.

It certainly matters that life is in some ways getting harder for men than it used to be, and it is certainly worth noting that there are some components of putting together a good life that men are struggling more than their female peers to achieve. But when diagnosing the ills and prescribing the remedies, we lay a trap for ourselves if we put too much emphasis on gender and leave class as a secondary consideration. In fact, we prime ourselves to fall into either of two different traps: the trap of a reactionary battle-of-the-sexes framing on the one hand, or the trap of a counterproductive “cry me a river” eye roll on the other.

Read more here.