Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality

Abstract

Many men’s social support systems are romantically centered, with fewer men than women reporting regular emotional disclosure and intimacy outside of heterosexual romantic bonds. The field has not yet reckoned with the ways that shortcomings in men’s social networks may further instantiate women’s disproportionate emotion work on men’s behalf. The current article theorizes an increasing and unequal dependency on close bonds with women in response to the decline of men’s social networks through a discrete form of gendered labor we call mankeeping. Specifically, mankeeping is defined as the labor that women take on to shore up losses in men’s social networks and reduce the burden of men’s isolation on families, the heterosexual bond, and on men. Three testable postulates scaffold this theory that (a) women tend to provide increased emotional support to men who do not have it elsewhere, (b) women’s provision of this support is a form of labor, and (c) women experience a burden on their time and well-being when this labor is not equally reciprocated. Mankeeping, a new extension of Carolyn Rosenthal’s theory of kinkeeping, is framed in relation to the future of men and masculinities research to advance a fuller understanding of the impact of men’s changing social networks on society at large.