Though you may have heard reports that men are in decline, rest assured that American men are not losing a battle of the sexes. But a majority of men are losing a class war, and losing a class war hurts. A majority of women are losing the class war too, but there are systematic gender differences in what it looks and feels like to lose. Some harms fall more heavily on women than on men, while other harms lean the other way.

Dramatically — and devastatingly — men too often lose their lives when they lose economic stability and the attendant social status. So far in the twenty-first century, fatality rates from suicide and opioid overdoses have been trending upward for the US population of all genders (aside from a very recent hopeful reversal of the opioid overdose death rate — a reversal that lamentably has not reached black Americans, whose fatality rates continue to climb). Men, however, make up roughly 80 percent of suicide deaths (though women make more suicide attempts) and 70 percent of opioid overdose deaths. We need no more convincing indicator of real pain.

Some on the Right look at the harms that men are experiencing in the United States and blame feminism or women in general. Meanwhile, some on the center and the Left want us to attend to the ways men are suffering and, to their credit, want to avoid a battle-of-the-sexes interpretation in which one side’s win must be the other side’s loss. But when analyses don’t pay enough attention to economic class, their explanations of men’s struggles also fall short.