Elodes
1d ago
300 Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man
Hey all, longtime SSC and TheMotte lurker here. Some of you might know me from TPOT.
Some years ago I wrote a blogpost series about masculinity and manhood, and the many struggles these entail that frequently go unnoticed in contemporary discussions. I've recently given it a full do-over, collating the whole series into a pdf and epub that I think look pretty great. It's now available to download for free. There remain few spaces on the internet where something like this might find a proper audience, but I figure anyone who appreciated Scott's writings on the topic — especially Untitled, Radicalizing the Romanceless, and the like — might find my writings on the topic valuable.
The pitch:
Contemporary gender discourse has left many men unseen. On one end of the debate, there are feminists: a largely virtuous group of people who have regrettably failed to understand men as more than defect women, and who have neglected to include men in their humanizing frameworks. On the other end, there are men whose visions of masculinity remain primarily rooted in outdated and often harmful ideas, and whose attitudes towards women frequently leave much to be desired. The modern man is stuck in a quagmire. Where does he turn, who has listened to women's pain but now desires to integrate his own? New voices on gender are needed. It is my hope that in this book, empathetic men may find their voice.
It is not needed to contest who suffers more, and suffering is not the whole of masculinity; nevertheless, it is a part of it, and it deserves an uninterrupted space in which it may be witnessed: known, and moreover allowed. It is my hope that in this book, unloved men may take off their heart's armour and find their sanctuary.
Even in these polarized times, many women still seek to know men truly, and through this have seen that being male marks men more deeply than society has cared to make known. It is my hope that in this book, compassionate women may find their love reflected.
You may find the book for free here: https://elodes.gumroad.com/l/300ways. Feedback is welcome. Thank you for your interest.
Seriously an excellent comment. Detailed and convincing, while showcasing a strong caring for the topic. Thanks for this.
I had a lot of trouble figuring out what framing to go with in my pitch. Ideally I wouldn't have had to write one, and the book's introduction would have sufficed; alas. I think maybe an alternative way to describe how I view the landscape here is that roughly speaking I really have seen primarily two groups talk on gender (with e.g. SA being a rare outlier outside of these groups). One of these groups is feminists, who certainly can get an awful rep sometime, and whose ideas, I agree, frequently end up being sufficiently harmful so as to make any right intention insufficiently moral on the whole. But I understand why they try to hold their beliefs, and I think they're frequently 'good' people in the sense that they care a lot about acting right, behaving well, listening to people, and so forth. Yes, there absolutely are also bad feminists; but there are many feminists too, including those I've known irl, who 'might yet be saved', and whose kindness and care I would like to have on my team. My ideal perfect-world goal would be for these people to read my arguments, be convinced by them, fix their own blindspots correspondingly, and come to my side. I think there is no way this will happen if I keep harping on about bad feminists who are bad.
There is a subtler point here, too, which is something like... This is a group of people who have come to their beliefs through trying to maximize how 'empathetic' they are, and they are thus unlikely to listen to any sort of criticism that marks them as bad, because 1) calling people bad isn't very empathetic, so probably the person doing so isn't worth listening to, and 2) they would feel misunderstood by someone who frames them as bad. Instead the approach I'm broadly trying to take here is to accept that empathy and kindness are to be optimized for — a belief I broadly share (though specifically it leads me broadly to conclude that being right is more important than being kind, because correctness builds trust builds cooperation builds many more opportunities for kindness, whereas kindness without truth builds mistrust builds dysfunctional communication builds frequent suffering) — and the book is an exercise in optimizing for kindness... for men. The byproduct here, which I leave somewhat implicit until the conclusion, where I make it much more explicit, is the ultimate belief that, yes, feminism has basically failed its own ideals, and I have now detailed the ways how it has failed and, in the process, directly specified an alternate movement that better upholds those same ideals.
(Edit: to clarify this further, and very compressed: I think feminism has the right ideas, but applies them so incompletely, they are indeed further from 'good' than non-feminists are. But the truth does not lie in non-feminism, nor in anti-feminism; the truth lies in post-feminism, where we apply feminist ideas to men and women alike, and earnestly grapple with whatever conflicting desires and narratives result from this. Thus even if I agree feminists are frequently immoral, they are also in some sense closer to becoming my allies, than people who disagree with feminism fundamentally, are. This is yet consistent with feminism being — I agree — in practice a net negative in much of the discourse.)
I agree moreover that feminism labels people misogynist far too quickly; nevertheless, the group of 'normal people' widely does not seem to say much on gender, instead broadly assuming that their ideas are so obviously true so as not to be worth stating. Certainly the vast majority of writing I've seen on gender has been from people who cared strongly about it one way or the other, and empirically for me, that has been primarily feminists or — sure — I wouldn't call them misogynists, and I don't; but I would say they frequently seem to have not integrated feminist ideas, by which I mean they frequently do not have even pre-emptive defenses against feminism and are stuck repeating traditional ideas. Even where those ideas are correct — and in the vast majority of cases I think they are! — it seems empirically the case that the traditional framework is vulnerable to get infected by feminist ideas; the solution, imho, is less "the traditional framework, but stronger!", and more "a new framework that has moved through feminism and has come out the other side, ready with well-defined arguments that guard against the more convincing-but-wrong parts of feminism."
This book is my attempt to create such a framework, by, regardless of anything else, seeing what all truths might dawn if we tried to treat men with the kindness feminism seeks to universalize for women.
(Edit: You say "There are plenty of men (and women) making sober, rational, kind, decent, truthful arguments that society should be a bit less crap towards men." I sincerely have come across very few such people throughout my years on the internet. Hence my framing! I would love to hear recommendations, essay links, etc. It saddens me a lot every day to believe that there are very few such people out there, so I'd be made genuinely happier if you were able to change my mind about this.)
Having said that, I'm well aware that many feminists live in such a closed-loop framework that it is easy for anyone to say "don't read Elodes, he has written misogynist things!" and then anyone who expresses they've read my writing will be met with "you read Elodes, even though you heard he's written misogynist things? you must be misogynist yourself!", the certainty of which response will certainly ensure many people will fail to read my actual words. Alas. Certain frameworks one must simply hope others will find their way out of. The only thing I can do is write my truth; certainly I despise being maliciously misunderstood, but past some point there is nothing I can do about it. Indeed, much of my introduction to the book is implicitly about how one must never find themselves in this kind of self-locking, disagreement-excluding framework-loop.
I hope this answers your question, and clarifies my views on the matter! I remain unsure what a better pitch might look like, since the above requires a lot of context and includes a lot of complex, incompletely-defined framings. If, having read this, you feel you'd know a better pitch, I'd be eager to hear it. Thanks again for your comment and for your interest.
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