The title of Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen's new book, My Brother's Keeper: What The Social Sciences Do (And Don't) Tell Us About Masculinity (InterVarsity), is a little misleading.

It is not a book about what the social sciences do or do not tell us about masculinity. It is a book about "the general state of males in the Western world after the advent of second-wave feminism," seen through the eyes of an intrepid feminist professor of psychology in the Reformed tradition.

In its introduction its author writes of having "made the case" in an earlier volume "for mutuality rather than hierarchy in gender relations and for flexibility rather than rigidity in gender roles"—and this is what she seeks to do here as well, the difference being that here her focus is on masculinity: how to study it as a Christian; its cultural setting in the early church; what several scientific disciplines have to say on this subject; masculinity's changing place in religion; the impact of feminism; and finally, how men are faring so far as marriage, parenting, sexuality and work are concerned.

Her underlying thesis is that masculinity, like ethnicity, is an ongoing cultural production, "not something that just happens to us by reason of biology or socialization, though … these too are important."  "'Doing gender'," she writes, "is a responsible cultural activity whose mixed blessings need to be critically examined, not least from the standpoint of a Christian worldview." The worldview she refers to is one in which "postfall man is continually tempted to turn the legitimate, God-imaging dominion of Genesis 1:28 into domination, and to impose it in illegitimate ways on the earth and on other men, but also on woman … In complementary fashion, womanhood as a creational power is warped by the woman's postfall collusion with the man's domination."

The remedy proposed for reversing "fallen" gender relations is "for men to be less assertive and women more." Van Leeuwen believes women especially need encouragement "to start living as God's stewards, heirs and priests"—but if women need encouragement to do more, "Isn't it time [she quotes theologian Philip Cary asking] for men to stop? Isn't it time for men to acquire a conscience about male prerogatives and use of power?'" Some second-wave feminists are raising questions about prescriptions of this kind due to the debilitating impact they see their broad acceptance having had on the lives of men—but this is obviously not the viewpoint of this volume.

Van Leeuwen too, however, is concerned by "the negative trends in men's lives" over the past forty years. The statistics she cites in this regard are sobering. Except for suicide and crime (in which males excel by far) women are now outpacing men in high school diplomas, college degrees, and master's degrees, and are moving into traditional men's professions at twice the rate of men entering traditional women's jobs. Most troubling of all, men are proving to be far less interested than women in caring for the children they procreate. At the turn of the millennium, Van Leeuwen writes, some "twenty million U.S. children were living in single-parent households," the vast majority headed by women alone.

On the face of it, men appear to be in decline and in need of doing more, not less. So how then is Van Leeuwen's renewed call for flexibility and mutuality in gender relations still relevant? I see her book as a well-written, erudite, wide-ranging, sincere, but flawed attempt at answering this question. That it is well written, wide-ranging (perhaps too much so) and erudite is only too apparent. That it is sincere is evident from her many personal asides about family and friends (she is married and the mother of two sons). That I regard it to be flawed is primarily due to inadequacies in her analysis of why masculinity is now proving to be such a problem in a culture awash in egalitarianism of the kind she espouses.

I fully agree with Van Leeuwen that gender identities are vulnerable to cultural ideologies and applaud in particular the amount of attention she devotes to cultural issues surrounding male identity-formation in early childhood. Her forays into this vitally important but neglected subject area are among the book's strengths—but her analysis is truncated and confusing at points.

For one thing, while recognizing that gender identities are formed in early childhood and while acknowledging the special difficulties males have in this regard due to being born to opposite-gendered mothers, her account of these difficulties lacks precision and depth due to a neglect of the phase-specific nature of this process. She is unaware or dismissive of the substantial research indicating that gender-identity formation occurs (or does not occur as the case might be) during the 18th to 24th month of children's lives, right at the point they are learning to talk.