"Mankeeping" is a term I've seen everywhere lately. That's largely because of a New York Times article from late July. It explains that "the term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University ... describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends."

Ferrara and her coauthor Dylan Vergara published an article last year in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities that analyzes how all the trend lines for male socialization are heading in the wrong direction. In part because of the collapse of traditionally male civic institutions, men appear to have fewer close friends than they did in the past, with a disturbing number reporting they basically have no one to talk to about emotionally charged issues. This burden, the reasoning goes, increasingly falls on their female partners.

The theory of mankeeping makes a certain degree of sense. But the way the term is being thrown around is a bit troubling.

For one thing, it's strange to isolate mankeeping as a negative for women, given that there are all sorts of imbalances in every relationship. And the public discussion of the topic has a condescending tone that is likely to inspire backlash from men rather than careful reflection.

I do think there's a genuine problem with men having trouble expressing their emotions in healthy ways, especially to other men.

Like (almost) everything else, there's a spectrum here. Some men are fine at expressing their feelings. Some are hardened psychopaths. On average we men are not good at simply saying "I'm sad, and here's why" without burying it in heaps of irony or other-people-have-it-worse or other defense mechanisms. Much of this comes from socialization; even in liberal households and towns like mine, boys often are taught to suppress their emotions.

But the problem here is the messaging. Mankeeping is a dehumanizing word.

Other words that include "-keeping" all involve inanimate objects or animals -- bookkeeping, peacekeeping, housekeeping, beekeeping, and so on. The whole point here is that the population in question, men, is suffering in a genuine way. So why describe the concept as a phenomenon that makes them sound burdensome and not quite human? Can you imagine an article about "womankeeping" or "gaykeeping" or anything like that being published in 2025? If you're a researcher purporting to care about the population in question, why would you use a term that causes people to immediately discount what you have to say?

There's a parallel to "microaggressions." Microaggressions are an actual thing -- someone making an offensive comment without realizing they have done so -- but the subsequent research and theorizing about it has spiraled out of control.

One of the most commonly disseminated "findings" from this terribly flawed area of research is that the more microaggressions someone experiences, the worse their mental health -- up to and including symptoms of suicidality.

I'm borrowing heavily from the late, great psychologist Scott Lilienfeld here, but the biggest problem with this is that what are termed microaggressions often involve reading into an ambiguous interaction. So there isn't a simple relationship between the frequency with which someone reports being microaggressed and their mental health. If someone is naturally prone to neuroticism, taking offense, or other negative emotions, that might make them overvigilant in their interpretation of microaggressions, complicating the causal relationship.

If "mankeeping" really escapes into the wild, I think there are some similar risks. This jumps out from Ferrara and Vergara's list of examples of mankeeping. As they write:

"Mankeeping can involve curating social interactions on men's behalf. A woman might suggest her husband reconnect with old friends, or a girlfriend might facilitate a group outing to help her boyfriend bond with other men. A mother's suggestion that her son get in contact with his friends qualifies under our definition, along with organizing social functions where the son might meet other boys. Asking men to get in contact with other potentially viable sources of social support -- for example, a woman reminding her husband to join a men's group therapy session until he does so -- aligns with our definition of mankeeping. Along this same vein, work done to encourage other people to provide support to men is mankeeping, such as a woman who reminds a male friend to reach out to another male friend until the two have scheduled a time to meet."

The authors say these are all examples of ways that mankeeping "is not fully reciprocated and potentially burdensome.... we expect that mankeeping comes at a cost, whether that be time, autonomy, or well-being."

The authors mention "the patriarchy," or variants of this term, four times in the piece.

If psychologists study this phenomenon, I hope they get men's side of the story too. For example, there's a generally accepted finding that women are more social than men. So one possibility in a marriage is that the wife senses her male partner is languishing and actively seeks to "set him up" with other men. Another possibility is that the male partner isn't as social and feels a bit put upon by his wife's efforts to get him out of the house. He plays poker or pickup basketball a couple times a week and doesn't feel the need for much more social engagement.

I'm not commenting on which of these two possibilities is more common, but I'm worried about research that simply asks a bunch of women in heterosexual relationships about their efforts to get their male partners more socially engaged, because it might deliver distorted results.

To take another common source of heterosexual tension: If you ask a bunch of men whether they feel they and their wives have sex enough, ask them why they don't if they don't, and take their answers at face value without consulting the women, you'll clearly be getting only part of the story! The same logic should apply here. Researchers should also be open to the possibility that women are not harmed but benefit, in some instances, from trying to set their men up for social engagement.