For the Love of Men

One of the quieter griefs in the book is about friendship. Plank talks to men who describe having close, easy, emotionally open friendships as boys — and then watching those friendships thin out somewhere in their teens and twenties, until they arrive at middle age with a wide circle of acquaintances and almost no one they'd actually call at 2 a.m. She draws on research from the psychologist Niobe Way, whose interviews with adolescent boys found them speaking about their best friends in language that was frankly tender — and then, a few years later, backing away from that closeness because it had started to feel unmanly.

The mechanism is the same one from the first chapter. Intimacy between men reads, under the script, as dangerously close to something forbidden. So men learn to route their friendships through activity — the game, the beer, the project — and to avoid the direct conversation entirely. Plank notes that women are quietly handed most of the emotional labor as a result. A married man's confidant is very often his wife, and only his wife, which means she becomes his entire support system while his own network quietly starves.

The book turns, in its most personal stretch, to fatherhood — because that's where the script gets passed from one generation to the next, usually without anyone deciding to pass it. Plank talks to fathers who realize, sometimes with a jolt, that they are teaching their sons the same lessons that damaged them. The boy falls, the boy tears up, and the father hears his own father's voice come out of his mouth: you're fine, tough it up. The transmission is almost automatic. That's what makes it so durable.

Plank frames fatherhood as one of the most promising places to interrupt the cycle, precisely because so much has already shifted there. She points to the rise of involved dads — men who want to be present, hands-on, emotionally available in ways their own fathers often weren't — and to the awkward fact that the culture still doesn't quite know how to see them. Paid parental leave in the United States remains thin, and a father who takes it can still be read at work as less committed rather than more responsible. The script punishes the men trying to rewrite it.

Step back from the interviews and a single argument holds the book together. The expectations of manhood look, from the outside, like privilege — men are told the world is built for them, that dominance is their birthright. Plank's counter-move is to show that the same script functioning as a throne is also functioning as a cage. The man is handed authority on the condition that he never appear to need anything, never break, never step off the pedestal. Power that comes with a ban on vulnerability isn't only power. It's a life sentence to performance.

This is where Plank parts ways with both sides of the shouting match. She won't tell men that masculinity is a disease to be cured, and she won't sell them the fantasy that their problems are women's fault. Her diagnosis is structural: the rules hurt men, and the same rules hurt the people around them, because a man who can't feel his own pain is often ill-equipped to notice anyone else's. She connects this, carefully, to the wider costs — to the aggression and control that the script quietly rewards, and to the violence that sits at its far edge.

The men Plank interviewed didn't set out to be studied. They just started answering a question no one usually asks them out loud, and what came back was less about power than about tiredness — the tiredness of holding a pose for decades. That's the thread that runs from the boy told not to cry, to the man with no one to call, to the father hearing his own father in his voice. It's one script, learned early, enforced quietly, and rarely examined by the people living inside it.