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I will now answer how to become a Man
At its root "healthy masculinity" is an existential crisis that every individual man sort of has to navigate on their own. You can take advice from others, and the path you follow will be similar to many others, but it will still be your own.
The question young men need to ask themselves and repeatedly try to answer is "What makes me feel like a man?" They need to find answers that they can believe in. Then they need to pursue those things and believe themselves a man by achieving them. Humans are social creatures and they pick up on the behavior and beliefs of others. Women will love the genuine "I'm a man" energy, almost regardless of where it comes from. Other men will pick up on it and respect you more. Young boys will listen to your commands.
It can be almost anything, but you'll certainly notice lots of trends and similarities. A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man has a beautiful woman. A man is knowledgeable and intelligent. A man has a family. A man is powerful. A man is wealthy. A man has convictions. A man fights for a cause. A man appears effortlessly cool or funny. A man has a strong healthy body. A man is a good father.
The path to becoming a man can be given. Someone like Andrew Tate can get young men to believe that having beautiful women is what makes you a man, and he will teach you how to get those women. But its a weak path, for two reasons:
If you see being a man as having a beautiful woman, then you marry a beautiful woman and feel like the ultimate man. But slowly that woman ages, or her body is stressed and shredded by child birth. If she is no longer beautiful, are you still a man? No, you lose your man belief, and she notices and loses interest in you too. Both of you feel that the other has failed in the marriage, but you will both lack the words and ideas to describe it.
Instead you learn how to find many ways to be a man. A man is a provider, but what if you lose your job? A man has a healthy and strong body, but what if you get in a car accident and are maimed? This is why you must learn to forge a belief in yourself as a man for the things you achieve. A single path might become closed to you, so you need to know how to open new ones.
No it is not easy. Yes it takes a while. Yes the rewards are totally worth it.
Sure, that and a pair of testicles
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Maybe I've read too much Nietzsche, but the whole " A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man ..." always comes off as external validation seeking weakness.
What sort of man needs the world to tell them they are a man? What sort of man is concerned at all about their manliness? By even wondering how/if you are man enough, you become not.
In summation: The Cis Het Neurotypical etc etc so on so forth are not alright, I think I dodged a bullet when god was rolling up my traits and I didn't get "Really concerned with performing gender".
"Man" is a useful Schelling point for mentally organizing virtuous traits linked to systematizing and testosterone. Plenty of them would still be useful (critical even!) on a desert island.
That is true, but in a weird way caring about them makes you less likely to have them. I think of the "Manliest" men I have known in my life, and I think of Don Miguel, who ran his hillside finca his entire life, caused no trouble for anybody, resolved any trouble brought to him by others one way or another to his own satisfaction, and was carrying fenceposts a couple miles up a hill well into his 80's. When it was his turn to help the neighbor put up a roof he did it without complaint, when it was his turn to get a roof put up the neighbors were happy to help.
At no point in his entire life did he for a second thing about " A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man ...", or testosterone, or the dating marketplace. Similarly for my picks in the US; my neighbour Lloyd, old man Swede, etc etc.
None of these men would be considered particularly manly by the degenerates in the manosphere, but each of them would psychically and emotionally and in some cases (Swede was BIG big, like absentmindedly lift a stack of tires all at once well into his 70s big).
I guess this clarifies what I think of as the basis of virtue, which is being tough. Would you be as you were if life was a bit harder? This is also why I don't respect gender I suppose; because to in the end it's the same for all humans; regardless of your chromosomal or phycological arrangements.
I would suspect that to the extent this is true, it's because it was so utterly self-evident that talking about it would seem silly. Those old guys absolutely had strong beliefs about what makes a man a good man, or a woman a good woman, and they definitely knew and believed that those were separate categories. What they didn't have was a bunch of autistic or naval-gazing Discourse about it.
This is because the manosphere types are operating outside the paradigm of a community, so they have to hyperfocus on visually obvious elements. I've raised the topic before, and it seems relatively rare for the posters here to have opportunities to be helpful in their communities. Many are atomized, isolated.
Bluntly, if the girls never get to see you carrying 8 chairs at a time back to storage after church, then you might need to signal strength extra super hard by shallower metrics.
So this is just a universal experience I guess.
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I do think external validation is a "weakness", but that the line between external and internal is always blurry and nothing is fully internal. There is a spectrum and I think internal motivations are more lasting. That is why I have a problem with some of the Andrew Tate manosphere types. They are providing an external validation.
But truly internal validation seems a bit ... psychopathic to me. Humans are social creatures. Adam Smith is quoted as saying "Humans want to love and be loved." Optimum tradeoff from my perspective is probably 80-90% internal and the rest external.
What I really think matters on a social level is your personal belief in manliness. For many people that means external validation. I think it is healthy for most teens to have that external validation. To look to other male role models and see what works for them. But by your thirties as a male you should be charting your own path. I think midlife crisis is often men figuring out how to be manly on their own.
Fair enough. I grew up in a much more trad society, which weirdly cared way less about masculinity because everybody knew that at the end of the day the cows needed to be brought in and milked and the roof needed to be patched and dinner needed to be cooked, and getting it done was more important than being seen getting it done.
It helps one be a natural feminist when your formative experience of womanhood was Upon Dona Vicky (Capital D Dona) getting SO mad at a cow for stepping in the milk bucket on purpose then trying to step on her when she went to right it; then punched the cow in the head SO hard it (the cow) fell over and mended it's bitchy ways and acted rightly from then on (with her. Still a devil to everyone else until eventually it was eaten).
It makes all the peacocking western Manly Men do feel kinda hollow, because I can always refer to this subsistence and a bit extra farm wife I knew and think "I know a woman that could actually factually kill you in one punch, who was about 16" taller and 60 lbs heavier than her husband, and that shit was fine, so what's this dudes problem"
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Lets just take a quick audit, though.
Which of those things does western society actively deter and hobble young men from achieving these days? I'd argue almost all of them except the strong-healthy-body part, which is why so many men are now gym-maxxing, its the only unrestricted avenue left.
How much of the advice we do provide young men is actually outdated/useless under modern constraints? i.e. actively unhelpful and arguably setting them up for failure?
What if a prospective man surveys his potential paths to manhood, and concludes that the current structure of society is his primary obstacle to achieving it? What if he's correct?
What course of action does that man likely arrive at, assuming he doesn't give up and become a NEET on the spot.
And the whole problem with "the rewards are totally worth it" is that the big reward: wife, family, kids... those are objectively becoming less likely outcomes. Everywhere. So how do you convince these guys to get up and keep plugging away when they can observe with their own two eyes that it is increasingly unlikely that they'll get their preferred outcome unless something drastic changes?
Again, it is not easy. If it is easy, then it less likely to contribute to the feeling of manliness. Because manliness is somewhat a sense of achievement. It doesn't have to be that. But it is and it has been. If you are upset about that, then the blame does not lie with feminists it lies with ancient human culture and norms.
Artificial and natural constraints are interchangeable in my view. If people believe that only the top 10% of height is attractive that is fine. They might also believe that only the top 10% of funnyness is attractiveness. Add an endless number of competitive "best of" categories. With enough categories most men can be best at something. Its important for males to realize where and when they can be competitive with others. The smart guys will create their own categories.
I will emphasize again that this cannot be easy. To be easy defeats the purpose of it all. Working hard at being good at something is the point of it all. Its what women want. If it is too easy you won't be proving anything.
I think its somewhat less about being easy and more about being legible.
Redpill guys make the art of attracting a woman legible.
Looksmaxxers make the status game being played legible.
Bodybuilders make the process of slapping on absurd amounts of muscle very, VERY legible.
Science as a whole makes the basic biological/evolutionary/psychological underpinnings of our otherwise inscrutable traditions and social rules more legible.
If there's no legible rules, if the game being played changes on a dime or on the whim of some fickle women, or because political parties change, it becomes completely impossible to play this game in a 'rational' way.
And then people's fates are decided entirely by luck and a few factors they may or may not be able to control.
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Neither of these require any external input, western society does not deter or hobble you from doing them. It doesn't promote them, but that's the key underlying point. You need to do them on your own, because "figuring it out" is part of that skill. Competence is sexy.
Not going to weigh in on your other stuff because it's not necessarily wrong, but these two were glossed over and you are wrong about them.
Well that's two, then.
Of course, what's the incentive for doing them if the reward isn't there.
Men ARE in fact deterred from traditional paths that would lead to knowledge. A properly motivated guy can learn all he wants through self-driven research and reading and discussion... like we have here. He just won't get the official 'certificate' that signifies he is intelligent and knowledgeable.
But he will not earn much respect merely for his intelligence and knowledge unless he can convert that into money, which is also made very difficult these days.
And becoming skilled at 'hard things' ultimately depends on what barriers exist to acquiring the skills. And what, precisely, do we consider 'hard things' in terms of skill?
Existential self-satisfaction and discovery. Needing to be rewarded for doing/knowing/being good at things is the behavior of a child or a dog. Part of being a man is cutting your own path in the world for yourself, not because other told you to, rewarded you for doing so, told you: "you were are a good little boy", etc.
Yes, collectively society can be at tension with the individual in conferring certification of competence, and even that certification can degrade in actually being a clear signal of competence. Doesn't make that competence any less masculine.
For some things sure, but I disagree its difficult. Yes somethings like being handy around the house will not get you money, but being able to do them on your own displays competence, saves you money. People absolutely will respect you for it.
Idk, figure it out, its a personal journey towards being competent. For some its being handy, woodsy, crafty. For others its great partner dance skills. I don't know of anyone who has ever thought that being a Renaissance man was a negative. Giving people a template to follow destroys the credibility of the signal. You need to figure out what "being skilled or being competent" means to you on your own.
Cutting a path TOWARDS what?
There are some things that have to be terminal values or objective, or close to it, for people to keep charging on. Call if 'purpose,' or call it will to power, call it whatever, but there's some world-state, some emotional state, some actual place on the map that one is striving towards. What is the long-term payoff in this life?
I have engaged in a lot of 'discovery' over the past 10 years. Introspection, outrospection, research, experimentation, trying things, failing, and sometimes succeeding.
And it turns out that the factors that gives me the highest amount of existential contentment and self-satisfaction are having an attractive partner that loves me and having a genetic legacy in the world that I can expect will outlast me.
Bar none. I've had the experience, and I can say with zero doubt the happiest days of my life were having a woman that I expected to marry at my side. I am not guessing, I've been there, I know how it feels, I know how motivating it was, I can remember how happy it made me.
Likewise, turns out one of the most important things in my life is my little 18 month old niece. I can only imagine how important a child who is my direct genetic lineage would feel.
Amazingly, I also noticed that these are the exact things that the modern world has made much, much harder to achieve, for completely structural/economic/political reasons that are beyond any individual man's control.
I suspect I'm not the only one who has come to this sort or realization. Far from it.
Yeah sure. 10 years training Krav Maga 5 of those years teaching it. I can probably physically dominate on the order of 95% of the male population. If mating rights with local females came down to a contest of physical violence, I'm likely winning a whole harem for myself. But no, society is not (currently) arranged that way. How is it arranged?
Acquiring that skill was a hard thing. Maybe someday I'll have to us that skill. I'd love to never have to physically harm someone, but the capacity to do so is good.
But... why spend time building such skills. I point towards my earlier self-discovery. If I can't find a loving partner, if I can't pass on my genes and raise and protect children of my own, what in all that is good and holy do I do with these skills? If I'm destined to be alone for my whole life then I'm missing something that I am PAINFULLY AWARE would make me happier and more content.
And if developing further skills isn't appreciably increase my chances of getting this, then the motivation to put in the effort is simply not there.
Incentives exist, incentives drive behavior no matter your philosophy on the matter. If there's some reward for a behavior, you get more of it. Full stop.
And the current incentives are lacking for going out and doing 'great things' for a world that isn't going to let you achieve the favorable outcome that most people are biologically wired to desire.
Like, dude I don't, and most guys don't need someone holding their hand every step of the way. But support, positive reinforcement, and constructive criticism are sort of necessary. Rome wasn't built by a bunch of individual dudes self-maxxing. It was cooperation, coordination, building through team efforts (and some slavery), working TOGETHER rather than just saying "I dunno, you go figure out what you want to do." In short, men helping men figure out a unified purpose, and driving in unison towards that purpose for decades on end.
And when they didn't have enough women to go around, they banded together and guess what they did. And presumably your philosophy would approve of such path-carving. It shows gumption.
But it'd really help to make the whole process easier if we can at least agree that the social baseline is in fact slanted against men, and the factors that enabled and encouraged men to succeed not even 50 years ago have been knocked out from under them. AT LEAST BE HONEST ABOUT THE MAGNITUDE OF THE TASK, and then we can maybe acknowledge that solving it/overcoming it will require some serious cooperation between men, not just a bunch of individual guys wandering around 'figuring things out' ad hoc, with most of them failing, individually.
So, how can you cooperate/coordinate with other men to improve things?
You've written a lot, and tied much of it to your personal experience, I'm not sure I can match you in length but I will try in depth. I'm not really motivated to litigate point for point with you though.
Cutting a path through life, towards death, dissolution, non-existence, remembrance, the next life, pick your metaphysical ending. Not every journey is about the destination. I exist therefore I am. There is no purpose other than the one you give your own life. You need to forge your own meaning. That meaning is going to be deeply personal and deeply individual. No one can give it to you, or tell you what it is. The biggest crime our society has inflicted on men, is that by trying to control them, force them to fit in the square hole of society, we have created a class of men who need to be told what to do, how to think, how to feel, how to be. Lo for it to be me to fall to the common trap of now prescribing what manhood means, all I can say is that manhood is forge by the individual. You cannot forge something without resistance, without struggle.
It sounds like to you, meaning was found through family, you see your existence as the perpetuation of your familial line. That's an old meaning, common through history. But it has its risks. As stated elsewhere in this thread, it depends on others to engage with you. You have tied your own happiness to others, and are thus at the mercy of the fates, or the health of our society. You can rage against the darkness but accept it is the darkness of your own choosing.
I have never been one to find meaning in my genetic line. Oh I've had the thoughts about my biological purpose, but I'm not a animal. I am not chained to my biology. I find meaning, manhood, masculinity in the depth and breath of my knowledge and skills, my ability to overcome challenges. To me nothing gives me greater satisfaction than thinking about where I came from: an outcast, autistic child, to a pillar of my local community. I'm not going to humble brag about all the skills I've developed or knowledge I have acquired. But I look back on my struggle, and I find meaning in it.
I'm sure there are broad strokes around what meaning a man can find. What it means to "be a man" but its varied, and subscribing to a one-size fits all; these are the boxes you need to check to be "a man" is exactly the opposite of what manhood means.
Our major viewpoint differences is that you have tied yourself to others, to society, to reward you for "being a man". You have an external locus of reward. All your efforts, gaining skills, knowledge, capability, are all in service of peacocking your way into to having other's recognize you and reward you for those skills/knowledge/capabilities. Incentives do exist, they do drive behavior, but the mistake is that thinking life is some sort of video game where the rewards are deterministic: insert resources, tech, behavior, -> get predefined rewards for doing so. It's not and has never been. Yeah the previous generations paired up more, but those weren't all marriages of love, but economic necessity, social necessity, cultural necessity. Times change and people don't want to be shackled to someone who "was there and available and I could stand", they want a fantasy of love and marriage.
Your entire mentality seems to be as though you can engineer society like its some video game, provide the incentives -> get behavior. And then you get mad because society is not encouraging the incentives you think it should, failing to conceive that maybe society is not a video game. It's this weird technocratic thinking that is divorced from reality.
Different time period, Rome existed in a brutal world where most people died often, and to survive it required you to band together, build a community, struggle together, and win at all costs. Modern life is not that world. If you want to go back to subsistence farming and raiding your neighbors for sheep, then move to Afghanistan or Somalia and Iron-Age Max with the bros. You can forge this men-helping-men tribe the same way everyone has already figured out to: Shared Struggle. Modern life is currently too wealthy, safe, secure, comfortable to really give you that struggle. You find that sort of camaraderie in places where those comforts are stripped, or the struggle is emphasized. It probably doesn't scale well.
And lets be clear, your fantasy of Rome being this Men-For-Men paradise was far from the truth. The society was not propelled by the unified purpose, but by individual agents each seeking what was best for themselves with a society that had converged to channeling that towards its own continued existence. It was not engineered. Nobody sat in the game design room and was like "here add a pinch of republicanism, a dash of social approval from public works, and a splash of citizen armies" For every society that has converged to pro-social norms there are hundreds of societies that have converged on anti-social ones and failed. History doesn't remember them.
I have a fairly Nietzschean disposition, the ancient world was cruel and brutal. I do not judge the men of yesteryear by what was required to exist in such a time.
The Boers tried that. What ever happened to them?
Not deeply familiar with the Boers, but a cursory read of Wikipedia is it sounds like they got conqueror by the British. But that's a classic Iron-Age problem. Maybe they just didn't go pro-man enough to really give them the superior culture that was needed...
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Your comment reminded me of a quote-
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
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