Words like mansplaining, manspreading, and manels (panels with no women), have been coined already, the latest is mankeeping.

The term, according to a piece by Catherine Pearson in The New York Times, “coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It 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.”

Dr Ferrara published a paper in 2014 on the inability of men today to form close bonds with anyone other than their partners, which is placing a heavy emotional burden on women. It is, she says, “a contemporary and under-recognised form of labour resulting from men’s declining social networks.” She’s currently writing a book on the subject, called Men without Men.

The NYT piece says that in a 2021 survey, 15 per cent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from three per cent in 1990. The same report showed that in 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; two decades later, just over 20 per cent said the same. Dr Ferrara found that “women tended to have all........

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