Slang dictionary
mankeeping
[ man-keep-ing ]
Mankeeping refers to the unpaid, unreciprocated emotional and social labor some women take on to manage the lives of men. This might look like a woman reminding her husband to call his bestie on his birthday, nudging a male coworker to plan a team outing, or encouraging her brother to actually talk about his breakup.
Coined by Stanford psychologist Angelica Ferrara, the term highlights the gendered labor that women perform to compensate for what Ferrara describes as the limited emotional networks of many straight men. Although the term most often applies to romantic relationships, it can also extend to family or workplace dynamics.
Where does mankeeping come from?
The word mankeeping echoes kinkeeping, a sociological term first coined by Carolyn Rosenthal in 1985. Kinkeeping described the hidden work of maintaining extended family bonds, a job Rosenthal says is disproportionately loaded onto women’s shoulders.
Ferrara and coauthor Dylan P. Vergara expanded Rosenthal’s concept into romantic and platonic heterosexual dynamics. They observed that while a woman’s emotional scaffolding often rests on a vast network of friends, family, and coworkers, a man’s scaffolding frequently rests on a singular person: her.
Mankeeping is interconnected with the “male loneliness epidemic,” a widespread rise in men’s loneliness and isolation. As of 2021, 15% of men reported having zero close friends, according to the American Perspectives Survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life. The number of men with six or more close friends has dropped by half since 1990. Mankeeping can hide this isolation issue until, for various reasons including breakups, those women are gone and the man’s social circle deteriorates.
Examples of mankeeping
Who uses mankeeping?
Sociologists, psychologists, and exhausted wives and girlfriends might use the term mankeeping. The concept has filtered into popular culture via essays, TikToks, and comedy sketches like Saturday Night Live’s “Man Park,” in which women bring their lonely boyfriends to a dog-park-style enclosure to socialize with other men.
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of mankeeping like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of mankeeping that will help our users expand their word mastery.
