Mansplaining Mankeeping

The title of the essay in the New York Times is “Why ‘Mankeeping’ Is Turning Women Off.” Before you read so much as the byline, you’re hit with the essay’s lead image, a cartoon of a woman with bright pink and green hair wearing a lustrous blue leotard and enormous pink high heels. She’s delicately watering a plant with leaves shaped like men. The image clearly conveys the message that women are thoughtful, nurturing, creative, luminous beings, whereas your average man possesses the emotional attributes of a ficus. The thing is, that’s not entirely off.

Straight men in the United States are in crisis. This distressing information comes to us courtesy of the Media, who have never been wrong about anything ever, not even that one time, so we best pay attention. Deploying various neologisms (manologisms?) the Media have established the ground rules for the Modern Man. He should manscape but not manspread. He must resist toxic masculinity and avoid the manosphere. He should limit his time in his mancave, lest his manbrain take over his thought processes. He can have a dad bod but not manboobs.

Above all, the Modern Man is in touch with his feelings. He isn’t afraid to cry, even if he is not watching the final scene of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and is nowhere near either the Grand Canyon or Pearl Harbor. He expresses, he emotes, he shares details of his most recent session with his therapist.

And, if the essay in the New York Times is to be believed, he is driving the woman in his life absolutely bonkers, because he does the vast majority of his mansharing with her, which leaves her emotionally drained and overwhelmed.

Clearly, some mansplaining is in order.

Copyright New York Times, but meh, screw it.

The essay opens with Justin Lioi, a therapist in Brooklyn who focuses on men’s issues. Which is one of the story’s biggest problems. The writer, a Times columnist named Catherin Pearson who writes about health, relationships, and sex, interviewed a bunch of therapists and a bunch of women, but only one actual regular (-ish) guy. Men’s experiences and perspectives are filtered through these others, such as when Lioi tells Pearson that his straight male clients’ partners have become “their unofficial therapists, doing all the emotional labor.” Except for the emotional labor those straight male clients are paying large amounts of money to him and professionals like him, as Official Therapists, to do.

Anyway, first things first. If you are a straight man, and if you’ve ever been in a relationship with a woman that was more intimate than passing her on opposite sidewalks, you almost assuredly have engaged in “emotional labor.” A female cashier at my local Ralph’s once divulged shockingly personal details about her life in the time it took her to ring up a six pack of IPAs and a frozen calzone. Just a few days ago, I bumped into a neighbor while walking my dog. I now know that she and her older sister disagree about their mother’s mental health and whether she should continue living on her own, and that while she loves her sister dearly she’s worried that she may have ulterior motives, a conflict that is really weighing on her. I know all of this because I made the mistake of asking, “How are you?” I engaged in emotional labor in the form of nodding and agreeing with everything she said until I could escape via a gap in some nearby rhododendrons.

The point is — and I say this as a feminist and ally — it’s pretty rich, here in 2025, for women to complain about the burden of being their partner’s or boyfriend’s or spouse’s primary source of emotional support. Isn’t that kind of central to having a partner or boyfriend or spouse?

More to the point still, human beings have walked the earth in one form or another for around 300,000 years. And for 299,999 of those years, women have complained that men were emotionally unavailable. A typical conversation between cave couples went something like this:

Cave Man: Me kill mammoth. We eat.

Cave Woman: Why you never talk how feel kill mammoth?

Men’s inability to communicate anything more emotionally consequential than a fourth down audible is also a recurring theme in poetry and literature. In an early, unedited draft of Romeo & Juliet, the one from the second folio, Shakespeare included this riposte:

Juliet: O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?

Romeo: Uh, about six o’clock, I think.

The point is, history and literature do not lie. Which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the crux of the piece, wherein we learn the concept of “mankeeping.” The term was coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow in interhuman studies at Stanford University and, presumably, an absolute scream at cocktail parties. Mankeeping “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.”

Which is what, before the postdoctoral fellows came along and set us right, we used to call “being in a relationship.” Thank goodness for the postdoctoral fellows.

Post-Dr. Puzio Ferrara works at something called the Clayman Institute for Gender Studies, which is so comically on the nose it provides evidence for Simulation Theory. She told the Times, “‘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 also “took care to note that the dynamic isn’t experienced by all couples.” Because making massive generalizations about billions of people across thousands of cultures would be irresponsible.

Ladies — and again, I say this with nothing but love and respect — you have some real chutzpah. For generations you implored the ficuses in your lives to be more emotionally available, to open up, to be vulnerable. You persuaded us to go to couples’ counseling. You gave us books like The Five Languages of Love for our birthdays when what we really wanted was a 30 pound bag of Jealous Devil Chunx XL Lump Charcoal for the smoker like we’d been hinting for weeks if you’d only listen to us. Out of love we endured multiple episodes of Girls. You wanted nothing more than to be that central core of our support system.

And now that it’s finally worked, now that you’ve gotten what you wanted all that time, now that the ficuses are sharing their feelings and seeking your support? You’re complaining about that, too.

Can you blame the menfolk for thinking maybe, just maybe, just this once, this one is on you?

According to the New York Times, one of the world’s newspapers of record, mankeeping has reached crisis levels, driving some women as far as celibacy. Men in previous generations would be gobsmacked, absolutely floored, to learn that society eventually reached a point at which the secret to getting laid was to not talk about their feelings. Millions of emoting, sensitive, love bead wearing Boomer dudes must be feeling pretty silly right about now.

Next, we meet 37-year-old Eve Tilley-Colson, an attorney and content creator from Los Angeles who talked about her relationship with her boyfriend of seven months, Glenn, who’s also an attorney and who asked the New York Times to use his first name only. Based on that sentence alone, you know everything you need to know about Eve Tilley-Colson. 

Nevertheless, the story dedicates several paragraphs to her woes, so I took a moment to Google her. On her Instagram, she’s shared quite a few posts belittling Glenn in various ways. In one, from a vacation in Lake Cuomo, she’s on the bed in their hotel room making a sour face and calling Glenn the “take two hours pretty princess one in the relationship.” Elsewhere, she informs the world that her ideal man “never complains” and “doesn’t make her question anything.” She’s fond of hashtags like #princesstreatment. Eve Tilley-Colson’s ideal man appears to be a doormat. She brags about getting revenge on an ex (who is, of course, a “total loser”) and reveals that she once co-signed a car lease and paid the phone bill of a man with whom she was in a “situationship” whose credit score was 425 and who bailed on her a month later, leaving her to pay off the car. In short, Eve Tilley-Colson is one of the last people you should ask for, say, guidance about the lighting in your next Instagram reel, much less life-altering relationship advice. Yet she’s dead center in the experiential part of the essay.

Glenn, God bless the poor sod, offers a moment of candor and levity in the piece, albeit unintentionally. When Eve Tilley-Colson womansplained mankeeping to him, his response was, “OK, but is that bad?”

No, Glenn, it isn’t! It’s perfectly all right and healthy that you primarily rely on your girlfriend for emotional support. It’s the way things are supposed to be!

Also, run, my man. Run away from Eve Tilley-Colson as fast as you can.

Apparently there are a lot of men out there trying to fix other men, because next up is Justin Pere, a therapist in Seattle who, like Justin Lioi, specializes in men’s issues. Let’s call him Frasier. Frasier suggests that men take the initiative to deepen their friendships with other men. They can start slowly, he suggests. He might encourage a client to share something new about himself with a friend he already has, for instance.

I for one would love, love to be a fly on the wall in the room, bar, or sports arena when one of Frasier’s clients tries this spontaneous sharing. I guarantee it goes down almost exactly like this.

For that matter, if you’re a man, and if you want some terrific entertainment, some true comedy, next time you’re watching a game and having beers with a few of the guys, randomly drop an intensely personal piece of information you’ve never shared before. You know, something “new about yourself.” Just make it up. Wait for a timeout sometime between beers #3 and #4, and in the middle of a commercial for potato chips or laxatives say something like, “You know, guys, I don’t think my parents had a healthy sex life, and that’s really affected my relationships with women.”

In an instant, a chill afternoon with the boys transforms into a scene from The Hurt Locker. Sweat beading on their upper lips, you see your friends’ minds frantically racing to try to figure out which emotional wire to cut to defuse the conversation, which threatens to detonate the entire afternoon. The silence is as thick as the Hubbard Glacier. The peril increases with each tick of the clock. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks.

Fast running out of options, and with game play set to resume literally any second, out of sheer desperation one of the men will resort to the only proven method men have ever devised to defuse highly perilous emotional situations involving other men:

He will rip an enormous fart.

And it will work. The peril will dissipate in a burst of laughter. That’s because men know a secret: Human beings can talk about equality until the cows come home. We can pass reams of laws and write thousands of papers on the topic. None of it will ever change the fact that the fart is the only true source of equality humankind will ever know, and the world’s most powerful social reset button. More powerful than the Constitution, Magna Carta, the Bible, the Torah, and the Sutras combined. Orders of magnitude, megatons more powerful than the rules of the Modern Man. A fart can make a knave of an emperor or an idol of a pauper. A fart can change the course of world history, as no less an authority than Heroditus tells us. In 75 A.D. an act of flatulence led to a rebellion of Jews against King Apries of Egypt. A single anti-Semitic gaseous expulsion from a Roman legionnaire triggered the Passover Revolt that killed 10,000. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

A rare, actual picture of men responding to an emotional situation.

The reason it’s a burden to be a man’s emotional support is that, generally speaking, men are terrible at expressing our emotions. Ergo all the farting. If you listen very closely, you’ll hear it every time a man breaks wind. Beneath the bweeee-fwaaaappp you’ll hear an undertone: I’m unfulfilled with my career choices. That pooooottt-toooot actually says, I’d feel validated if Jenny initiated more often. And so forth. When a husband tees one off at the dinner table in the presence of his wife and kids, it is an expression of the purest love.

In contrast, asking the average man to share his feelings directly is like asking a chimpanzee to fly an F/A-18 Super Hornet off the deck of the USS George “H.W.” Bush. Sheer inertia and adrenaline might get him airborne, but 99% of the time he will crash and burn almost immediately. It’s best to just leave him to his GI tract.

So let’s leave the mankeeping on the manheap of history. The old ways, as is so often the case, are the best ways. Men kept their feelings bottled up until they exploded at the age of 55 or 60 in the form of a heart attack, stroke, or the purchase of a Corvette ZR-1 Stingray. Meanwhile, both women and men expressed their feelings through actions, not sitting around talking about them.

Yes, it was imperfect. Yes, it led to the occasional world war. But we must acknowledge a far more horrifying alternative: A world full of Glenns and Eve Tilley-Colsons.

And none of us want that.