This week, we were pleased to publish an excerpt from Featured Author Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, which graced your inbox on Tuesday. Today, we’re back with replies from Richard Reeves (President of the American Institute for Boys and Men) and Aaron M. Renn (a writer, consultant, and Senior Fellow at American Reformer), as well as a final response from Sargeant.
To access the full conversation, click here.
Even Today, Men Put Their Lives on the Line to Protect the Vulnerable
Richard Reeves
When a writer as thoughtful as Leah Libresco Sargeant offers such an inspiring vision of fatherhood, it’s hard not to simply offer an “Amen.” In an era when distinct claims for paternal virtues can be treated with skepticism, any positive agenda for Dads is to be welcomed. My disagreements should therefore be treated as closer to quibbles than objections.
I especially appreciate Sargeant’s insistence on an embodied vision of parenting for Dads as well as Moms. It may well be true that much of the work of fathering is now in the social and emotional worlds, but it is still important for us to feel like our bodies matter to the enterprise.
Fathers’ presence matters less today for physical protection, of course (though that capacity must be retained), but just as much as ever for physical activities, including play. Mothers get flooded with the “love hormone,” oxytocin, following birth and from breastfeeding and holding their babies. Dads get an oxytocin spike from throwing their toddler in the air (and, importantly, catching them). The fact that fathers spend more of their time with children engaged in play can provoke accusations of being “Disney Dads.” But play is serious business in terms of child development. Dads use games to train their children for their lives ahead. And to have fun, of course.
Sargeant is right to say that the “paradigmatically womanly kind of risk” physical risks taken by mothers remain highly salient, above all in childbearing. She is also right that the requirement for fathers to put their bodies on the line for their families has radically diminished in modern societies, for good reasons related to social norms and laws.
But I think she understates the remaining opportunities for men to demonstrate physical courage in the service of others. “When men choose to step into danger, today it is more often as a shared competition with other men, in sports or foolish stunts,” she writes. “There is no beneficiary of their appetite for risk.” I disagree. I’ve just visited the site of the World Trade Center, where it is very hard not to notice that all 343 of the firefighters who died attempting to save others were men. The reason that men account for more than 90 percent of occupational deaths is that they account for the overwhelming majority of workers in the most dangerous jobs, including among first responders.
We should all be grateful that our culture no longer asks men to put their lives in danger on a regular basis. But we should also not assume that this requirement has inevitably evaporated for all time. After all, in present-day Ukraine, adult men under the age of 60 are not permitted to leave the country. They are expected—obliged, in fact—to stay and fight, while women and children are free to leave.
Even in peacetime, it is important to honor the ways in which men sacrifice their own safety and even their own lives for others. Each year, the Carnegie Hero Fund, founded in 1904, issues medals to civilians for courageous acts. The vast majority go to men. In 2024, recipients included Roland V. Hueston, 38, who was killed by a subway train after saving the life of a stranger who had been beaten and thrown onto the tracks in New York City. His mother, Millicent Hueston, said her son had “died the way he lived, helping people.”
If I had my way, there would be an annual White House ceremony for these medal recipients.
But there’s also a need to honor the physical contributions of men in everyday life, even through the much safer activities of sports coaching or leading scout groups and outdoor adventures. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote back in 1962:
The necessary virtues of the present age are essentially domestic virtues, virtues that have long been regarded as more appropriate for women—patience, endurance, steadfastness. It is essential that the tasks of the future should be so organized that as dying for one’s country becomes unfeasible, taking risks for that which is loved may still be possible.
Sargeant is absolutely right in her insistence that men, just as much as women, need to feel needed. She is also right that the task of including men in connections of mutual support is necessarily a greater one than for women, who are bound more obviously to their role as carers for children. She writes that “because men can more easily separate themselves from relationships with the weak, they often find that the world expects them to make this choice.”
It is certainly true that online reactionaries worship at the shrine of selfishness, urging men away from commitment and service. But I don’t think they are finding as many followers as feared. In fact, I sense a growing desire both on the part of “the world” and among men themselves for a recommitment to the virtues of fatherhood and family responsibility. It is striking, for example, that among Americans aged 18-34 without children, 57 percent of men say they “want children someday,” compared to 45 percent of women.
These men know, as Sargeant writes, that children are “the primary way that we are called to live for someone else.” They also seem to know that this is just as true of men as for women; perhaps even more so. And it includes those men who act as father figures as well as father themselves. Men may be slower to be transformed by the experience of parenthood, simply because our caring role in the time that it takes for a child to go from conception to weaning is less direct than that of mothers. But the transformation is just as profound.
One of the challenges of modern fatherhood is to support rich relationships between fathers and children even when there is no longer a romantic tie between parents. Those of us who have navigated this territory do not need to be told that parental cohabitation makes co-parenting easier. Nobody sensibly denies the ideal of the intact family unit. But nor should we discount, even in the slightest way, the continuing importance of fatherhood when parents separate, for children and fathers alike.
Fatherhood is a load-bearing wall in a healthy society. The idea of depending on Dad is not outdated. It never will be.
Richard Reeves is the President of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Of Boys and Men (Brookings Press, 2022).
In Elevating Dependence, Don’t Denigrate Men’s Autonomy
Aaron Renn
Men have an ambivalent relationship with autonomy and dependence.
On one level, autonomy is a key attribute of masculinity. In his book Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, anthropologist David Gilmore surveyed how various cultures around the world conceived of masculinity. While there was no universal definition, some themes emerged, notably those of protecting, providing, and reproducing. But Gilmore observed that these required some level of autonomy to be fully realized. As he wrote about Mediterranean cultures:
The above [protecting, providing, reproducing] depend on something deeper: a mobility of action, a personal autonomy. A man can do nothing if his hands are tied. If he is going to hunt dangerous game and, like Odysseus, save his family, he needs absolute freedom of movement. Equally important as sex and economic resourcefulness is the underlying appeal to independent action as the starting point of manly self-identity. To enter on the road to manhood, a man must travel light and be free to improvise, and respond, unencumbered, to challenge. He must have a moral captaincy.
Men are supposed to make their mark in the world, not just have the world make its mark on them. This requires some degree of legitimate autonomy and agency in order to be able to decisively act. It’s important for men’s autonomy not to be denigrated.
At the same time, such autonomy is not without limits. Odysseus was not free to abandon his wife to her suitors (protection). The Greeks had to honor their pledges to fight for the return of Helen. In gathering resources for himself, this comes with the obligation for the man to share them with his family and community (provision). As Gilmore notes of the New Guinea “Big Man,” “The mark of the authentic Big Man is that he is a large-scale net producer, always giving away more than he receives.”
The type of autonomy championed by manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate is a parody of the real thing. Men were not made for the autonomous pursuit of pleasure and material accumulation without any obligation to other people.
Still, we need to be careful in talking to men about autonomy such that we do not inadvertently alienate them by denigrating a characteristic that is legitimately important to them.
Sargeant highlights an important aspect of dependency for men, namely the need to have others feel dependent on them. This helps give men a sense of purpose and meaning in life, that others are relying on them for something important. Men need more than this. They need to feel that they are valued for who they are, not just what they can do for other people. But being needed by and for other people is very important. As she notes, a lack of this can be a factor in men falling prey to drugs or suicide due to a feeling of worthlessness.
She also rightly points out that men are seldom needed for physical defense today. The Star Spangled Banner goes, “Thus be it ever, when free men shall stand, between their loved homes, and the war’s desolation.” But as Sargeant writes, “The public, shared dangers that formed men’s character and courage become rarer. If a man needs to defend his family himself, something has gone wrong with the systems of law enforcement and international diplomacy that are meant to anticipate and deflect or deter the blow.”
Provision is also more ambiguous today. Men aren’t typically hunting game except for sport, don’t grow food, etc. Instead, their material provision is also mediated by the marketplace. A man works a job to earn money, which in turn purchases provisioning. She notes how this can encourage society to think of a man’s value in terms of “a recurring direct deposit in his family’s bank account.” The non-material aspects of provision, or the value of relationship with the man himself, are undervalued. This leads to our tolerance for easy or even frivolous divorce. Liberals are loath to acknowledge that the vital role of the father cannot simply be replaced with cash payments from child support or welfare.
These changes in the protection and provision challenge men to intellectually justify their roles to themselves in a way that the more visceral versions from pre-industrial society did not require.
On the other side of the coin, men are, as Sargeant notes, dependent on others at times in their lives. This is especially true when they are babies or young children, but also perhaps in times of old age or disability. Interestingly, many societies have attempted to bifurcate a man’s life in ways that separate him from the dependency of childhood. In the rite of passage, a man undergoes a metaphysical transformation. He is no longer the dependent boy, but now a man. And part of what is being left behind is precisely that era of dependency, which, in a sense, is attributed to a different being.
Men tend to process dependency more as interdependency on a band of brothers, such as the hunting party or the warband. The military today can still provide this form of solidarity and bonding, but as with traditional male provision, this direct reliance on others has atrophied in the modern age.
What we can do is work to ensure that men have the opportunity to have friendships with other men. It’s no secret that many men today are isolated, lonely, friendless. Sargeant has some good suggestions as to how married men with children can be welcoming and engaging to single men within their home. But one more basic need is for women to recognize and make space for their husbands to maintain male friendships, not to resent time they might spend away from home “with the guys.”
Sargeant’s book is obviously written for women. She is not trying to appeal to a male audience. Her short chapter on men makes some good and useful points. They should be recapitulated into a masculine register in order to resonate with a male audience.
Aaron M. Renn is a writer and consultant in Indianapolis, and a Senior Fellow at American Reformer. His writings can be found at www.aaronrenn.com.
The Habit of Heroism
Leah Libresco Sargeant
I’m very grateful to Richard Reeves and Aaron Renn for responding to my chapter on where men are called to take risks and respond to the weakness of others.
As a parent of three, I am particularly glad to see Reeves pay tribute, on a scientific and social basis, to play and roughhousing. It’s good to have dads in the home, taking advantage of remote or flexwork where they can, so they can sweep a child into the air at the bus stop. I hope, in the great post-COVID reshuffle, there is more room for both parents to take more time with their children. A dad offering his body as a jungle gym or rolling over the bed in a mock wrestling match offers a wonderful example of rambunctious, loving competition. Play is good training in what it means to strive for excellence without contempt for your competitors.
Renn picks up this theme in his praise of male interdependence as embodied by a band of brothers or a warband. At their best, men in these groups not only compete with each other but also egg each other on to greater feats of strength or daring, delighted by their rival’s performance. Today, both boys and girls both have too narrow a field for play. Children have a better chance of growing up to be responsible adults, with deep friendships, if they’re given the freedom to take on big projects without adults and to fail at them. It is hard to develop feelings of deep brotherhood under constant parental supervision, or, worse, in the disembodied world of social media, where you and your friends consume but do not build.
As a parent, I am constantly challenging myself to take a step back, even from my young children, to allow them to take risks and experience some of the consequences. I make a judgement from afar about what kind of falls will be painful, but not dangerous. I ignore the first wail of sibling conflict, take another sip of my coffee, and listen to hear if my older kids work out a solution themselves in the space afforded by my absence. As my children grow, my pauses will grow longer, and, eventually, they’ll climb without me close enough to call out, “ok, that’s as high as you can go today.” I’m aiming to give them room for play so that they can learn prudence. I want them to have room to apply, judge, and refine their own imperfect solutions.
I appreciate Renn’s emphasis that men need freedom for excellence, not just the open-ended freedom of autonomy. Vows and unchosen family ties channel a man’s strength toward particular people and ensure he cannot walk away from them and remain a man of honor. They force him to develop his strengths to keep up with his family’s changing needs. Children are more willing than adults to explore the edge of their mastery and fail forward. Adults can find that their obligations to others give them a reason to overcome their pride and, like a child, be willing to try something they are not yet good at for the sake of future mastery.
Finally, I was delighted that Reeves gave a nod to the Carnegie Hero Fund (and I’m privileged to know a man who was nominated for the medal for his river rescue). The question is: what forms men to be ready for those moments of sudden, urgent need? Part of it is physical readiness and training. But the other part is moral formation—the instinct that Darren Geist showed, when he heard a crash outside his home and assumed it fell to him to run outside to help. In a moment of crisis, there’s seldom time for rational reflection and weighing of duties.
A hero is made by habit—consistently being willing to be interrupted, holding his strength in trust for others.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is a writer who advocates for a culture that sees the dignity in mutual dependence, instead of aspiring to an impossible autonomy. She runs the Other Feminisms substack, which focuses on the way the world treats women as defective men. Her most recent book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, was published in fall 2025 by Notre Dame University Press.