The Entitlement to Mankeeping Pipeline

The problem isn’t that men are isolated, so they rely on women; it’s that men rely on women, so they end up isolated.

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The mental load. Invisible labor. Emotional labor. Emotion work. Cognitive labor. Kinkeeping. We seem to keep getting new labels for more or less the same problem: women are doing too much within heterosexual households. Men are doing too little, and relying on female family members—predominantly their wives—to pick up the slack and ensure the wheels of life run smoothly.

The latest entry in this genre, if you haven’t heard, is “mankeeping.” Defined by Stanford sociologists Angelica P. Ferrara and Dylan P. Vergara as the “labor that women take on to shore up losses in men’s social networks and reduce the burden of men’s isolation,” mankeeping has touched a nerve and resonated with many Gen Z women on TikTok. Some straight women have even gone so far as to say that mankeeping has ruined dating and driven them to celibacy.

But what if the notion of mankeeping doesn’t get to the heart of the issue? We encounter here a Euthyphro dilemma about the order of explanation: is men’s social isolation driving women to do too much by way of managing a male partner’s emotions, mental health, and social life? Or does the fact that women do too much in this vein—because their male partners expect them to and feel entitled to these services—drive and predict men’s social isolation?

My money is on the latter. In other words, I suspect that the root problem is male entitlement.

Let me back up. “Mankeeping” strikes me as a useful name for a common, specific form of women’s unpaid labor, wherein women are expected to be their male partner’s best friend, emotional confidante, therapist, personal assistant, and perhaps even health coach. She is expected to not only hear but draw out his big feelings, and minister to his needs, often without any real hope of long-term reciprocity. She is expected to either provide for all of his social needs—simultaneously playmate and drinking buddy and intimate partner—or arrange that his social needs otherwise get met, by managing his calendar and reminding him to call his friends and family members. She is to be a social secretary. Often, she will arrange friend and family catch-ups for a male partner in much the way that she might manage a young child’s playdate schedule. She will remember his family member’s upcoming birthdays and holidays celebrations and buy the gifts, organize the festivities, prepare special dishes, and so on and so forth.

It’s exhausting; it’s untenable; and, above all, it’s grossly unfair that one capable adult partner do this for another.

The trouble, I think, is not in having a new term for this particular form of emotion work and the resulting gender inequity. It’s that both academic and popular work on mankeeping suggests a diagnosis that likely gets things backward. It’s not that a man’s social landscape is so winnowed that he needs all of this upkeep, like a barren, ailing plant in desperate need of shelter from the wind and a more nurturing environment. It’s that men are socialized to rely on just one person—namely, a female partner—for pretty much everything, and so do not cultivate the other connections and sustenance they need to keep themselves whole and healthy and functional. Men’s social isolation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon in which they are passive and blameless; it’s a choice, however unwitting, that is borne of entitlement.

To be fair, Ferrara comes close to recognizing this in a recent New York Times interview: “What I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central—if not the central—piece of a man’s social support system.” (She rightly notes that this dynamic of course doesn’t affect all straight couples.) But both her original co-authored paper and much of the subsequent discourse may be confusing cause with effect here. To wit, the idea is that “a growing proportion of men lack physically and mentally vital sources of social support,” and that mankeeping is a “cascading effect” of this on the “time, autonomy, and well-being of the women with whom men are most intimately connected.” “Men’s thinning social circles may lead women to experience their own emotional and temporal burden through labor that shores up men’s lack of diverse and supportive bonding structures,” write Ferrara and Vergata. The picture is thus this: most or at least many men are subject to what the authors call “social deprivation.” So a female partner steps into the fold to prop up a man in trouble.

There’s an alternative picture according to which the men who are partnered with women often receive an enormous amount of her emotional labor, mankeeping included. He hence doesn’t need to cultivate friendships or close family ties or other sources of social support, at least for the most part. He is not isolated and hence leaning on a woman for mankeeping; he leans on a woman for mankeeping and hence becomes relatively isolated—as becomes salient if and when she is no longer in service. A man who feels entitled to have his life run by just one woman may also encounter a rude shock when the two of them have children, and she has other, more pressing commitments—as can be evinced in the pitiful but not uncommon phenomenon of men who become resentful and almost jealous of their infant children. (This has had horrific and tragic consequences in the cases where it figures as the motive for family annihilation.)

The picture I’ve suggested jibes with what we know about marriage and rates of health and happiness. Married men have lower rates of depression, better physical health, and evince excellent patterns of longevity and recovery from serious illness, as compared to their unmarried counterparts. When the system works for men, it works well—and it works to the detriment of their female partners.

The main problem, of course, is that this is unsustainable for women, as Ferrara and Vergata rightly call out. Relying on one person to be your emotional and social everything is burdensome and precarious and often simply untenable. Moreover, what if a man who subscribes to this life plan cannot find a suitable partner, as more and more women recognize and reject the bad deal on the table? What if a man’s extant female partner ups and leaves him? What if she suffers ill health, or becomes disabled, or dies? Down this road we find bitterness, anger, violence, and, yes, male loneliness too. (Although stay tuned for my brilliant student Ryan Bollier’s work on the neglected reality of women’s loneliness as caregivers.) The haves have it all—at women’s expense—and the have-nots may be lured down dangerous roads that include that of the incel.

But we make a mistake to think that this system isn’t working for anyone. It’s difficult to dislodge precisely because, for a lucky and not small proportion of men, exploiting women’s labor—emotional, domestic, material, and reproductive—leads to a remarkably good deal. It can be efficient and convenient and personally gratifying to have all of your needs met and coordinated by just one person, who lives with you and is legally tied to you and who shares your finances and, often, children. The singular dedication of the support is part of the point: it’s how militaristic capitalist patriarchy has long shored up male workers and soldiers. After a long day in the factory, or on the battlefield, one woman—his woman—is deemed obligated to feed him, fuck him, patch him back up, and put him back together to work or fight another day in perpetuity.

In “Theorizing Mankeeping,” Ferrara and Vergata tout the proliferation of men’s groups and circles and “Men’s Sheds”—where men make things together in sheds as a bonding exercise—as “exciting progress” in solving the problem of male isolation and women’s subsequent social burden. But these efforts in fact go back decades. And, if Ferrara and Vergata are getting the order of causal explanation backwards, as I suspect, then they will only go so far: many men will be slow to join these groups because they don’t yet need them. And others who do need them will be reluctant to get their social needs met in alternative ways, when they’ve been sold a bill of rights that says that one woman should be tending to all of their needs with alacrity and enthusiasm.

Creating new social options for men hence won’t solve this problem. Nor will raising women’s consciousness about the unfairness of what we’re doing, or expected to do, for male partners. In the end, we need moral ideas that get to the root cause: men are not entitled to a wife who is and does everything.