You know that friend who always brings her boyfriend to the hang (go home, Brad!), and seems 100% occupied with meeting his various needs, whether that means doing his laundry or making sure he’s meeting up with friends and not succumbing to the male-loneliness epidemic? As it turns out, there’s now a word to describe her: she’s a “mankeeper,” and the work she does to keep her less-than-motivated male partner going is “mankeeping” in action.
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But where did the term come from, and what’s so wrong with it? Below, find everything you need to know about mankeeping:
What is mankeeping, exactly?
Mankeeping refers to the emotional and social labor that straight women often take on in their relationships with straight men, most specifically around social connection.
The term is notably used in a 2024 Stanford study titled “Theorizing mankeeping: The male friendship recession and women’s associated labor as a structural component of gender inequality.” The study’s researchers describe themselves as “introduc[ing] the concept of ‘mankeeping,’ a concept that continues the legacy of Carolyn Rosenthal’s sociological theory of ‘kinkeeping,’ where we explored three postulates: that women disproportionately compensate for men’s lack of social support, that this compensation constitutes labor, and that such labor often comes at a cost to women through their wellbeing and time.”
What’s an example of mankeeping in action?
One could argue that The Simpsons’s Marge is a logistical mankeeper, if not a socio-emotional one; while her husband Homer certainly has no trouble pouring his heart out to his close circle of guy friends over a few Duff beers at Moe’s, it often falls to Marge to make sure he’s meeting bare-minimum parenting expectations, going to the doctor, taking care of house and hygiene chores, and basically presenting himself to the world like an adult.
In terms of more emotional mankeeping, the episode of Gilmore Girls where Lorelai and Sookie force their significant others, Luke and Jackson, to hang out (largely against their will) feels relevant. Claire Dunphy from Modern Family also seems like a classic mankeeper…or is she just a Virgo-slash-control-freak?
And what’s so wrong with mankeeping, exactly?
On the surface of things, there might seem to be nothing so terrible about making sure your partner is socially supported, but a key aspect of mankeeping is that it’s unreciprocated.
