6 Things About Rural, Disconnected Men

Real men provide.

Or so it says in the Manly Book of Mandates of Masculinity, page 5.

In this version of the world, a man who is gainfully employed has the keys to unlocking the door to all of life’s joys.

What is a man without such a job? What else could define him?

In the year leading up to the pandemic, it was my job to drive a junky, rusted out, silver Prius all over Wisconsin’s rural counties to find and understand men who didn’t have, and who were not applying for, employment. Many of these men were the same disaffected white guys who cast the deciding votes for Trump in the 2016 election. They were bogey men, the shadowy figures at the fault line of society’s growing fissure.

Most importantly they were men without the beating heart of masculinity – a job. In academic circles, they are called “disconnected men” because they tend to be unplugged from society’s most important institutions. Because they are “hard to reach”, they are hard to understand.

Here are a few things I learned about them:

Growing up on a farm emotionally terrorized them

As you might expect, in a state known for having more cows than people, a lot of the men I talked with grew up on farms. Childhood on a farm has a way of making a boy grow up quickly – get up at 3AM and quickly milk hundreds of cows before the school bus arrives. But the demands of life were the least of their early burdens. Every ex-farm boy I met had a father who beat him. Sometimes, this was at night after a six-pack of beer or half a bottle of whiskey, sometimes it came first thing in the morning, when it was discovered that the boy had neglected to sweep the barn. It was not universally true, but there was a clear pattern: for many, their first experience of masculinity was a bruising, heart wrenching, and emotionally crushing trauma.

They are connected, but to something else

The men I interviewed weren’t usually shut ins or hermits, but rather enmeshed in some other way of life. One had a child with special needs that he couldn’t bear to leave at home while he was away working a menial job. Many found a place in the informal economy: tarring driveways, building roofs, clearing land, serving as rental house repairmen. The prevailing portrayal of these men is that they are lazy and have no life, but the men I met worked and had lives. They just didn’t fit easily into the popular imagination.

They don’t want to be a cog in the wheel

If you paint by numbers, which demographers tend to do, you get a picture of a world full of men who can’t cut it, men who didn’t have the gumption to work hard and move up a career ladder. For the most part, Wisconsin’s disconnected men just didn’t want to be an automaton. Time after time, I heard stories of the mental numbness caused by work on the factory floor. They repackaged cat food, quality checked bolts, filled cans with green beans, made frozen pizza – and they hated every minute of it. The system wanted them docile and standardized. But they wanted to think on their feet and breathe wild, forest air.

They think of themselves as experts

It’s a bit of a paradox, but every unemployed man I spoke to saw himself as master of his craft – not an “unskilled worker”. If he worked on roofs, he was the fastest, most efficient roofer around. If he power washed houses, he did so with lightning speed and artistic precision. Some claimed a preternatural ability to frame houses, while a handful each claimed to be the best meth cooks of all time (with customer reviews to support the assertion). These men defined themselves by their specialized skills, and they felt frustrated that the world had not yet recognized what they could do. In many ways, they were holding out for the world to catch up, to see them for their ability.

They want the life that their father had

White, disconnected men from Wisconsin feel disappointed that their lives have not unfolded in the same way that their father’s lives did, but that path did not take them to the same destination as it did their fathers. Those jobs don’t pay enough, and that settled domestic life is hard to get, hard to keep. Black and Latino men tended to have a different experience, as they often had more opportunities than their fathers (who often faced even steeper discrimination). But for Wisconsin’s white majority, the path of masculinity past was a thing to lament, a birthright withheld.

They feel it all like a deep, deep cut

These were emotional men who were not shy to express the pain and joy of life. They burst with excitement as they described their plans to homestead, to patch the holes in an old RV and cultivate a garden that could sustain them and their partner. They filled the room with tears as they recounted their stories of childhood, struggle, and relationships. One man felt he had been tricked by a Columbian woman who married him to get citizenship. Another man crumpled to the floor weeping as he felt the emotional weight of his inability to pay child support and the time he would have to spend without seeing his daughters as he waited out a jail sentence for this failure. Disconnection brought a different kind of emotional labor, and these men were the types to feel and explore it.

All this, and then the pandemic happened.

Men have not become more connected to the formal economy since the pandemic started. The labor force participation rate plummeted, and that means more stories, more lives in the shadow of institutions, and more changes to the way people experience masculinity.

Manhood is a moving target.

-Adam Talkington