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To extrapolate on my initial question about the reputation of the Promise Keepers organization:
Back in the days I remember reading a succinct definition on one of the Manosphere blogs that used to exist: the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) When this system is dismantled as oppressive and outdated, as it has very obviously happened throughout the developed world already (contrary to the loud protestations of die-hard feminists), we inevitably end up in a social rule set where women are no longer accountable to men and men are no longer responsible for women.
As it was also observed on said blog, it’s safe to conclude if you have eyes and ears that society is generally OK with the former and doesn’t even think twice about it but is ambiguous at best about the latter. This ambiguity manifests in various attempts to compel men to claim responsibility for women one way or another**, and is exacerbated when there’s an ever taller mountain of evidence to observe that the brave new world of sexual equality and freedom is failing to materialize in the way normies imagined it would***.
One obvious consequence of this is that anti-feminist public figures appear. They include both men and women from the onset already, but anyone can observe that the only ones getting any positive attention are women, of course. And society is generally structured in a way that a critical mass of women advocating for something is perceived as a sign by men that it’s also safe and even beneficial for them to advocate for it. And since said women are generally promoting some murky concept that can best be described as a new positive masculinity****, you’ll inevitably see men’s groups appearing with the aim of promoting the same concept.
As far as I know, the Promise Keepers was just one of these and not even all of them had a religious profile, and there were/are many outside the US as well. Their common denominator is that they are nebulously pushing a narrative that rejects both radical feminism and rigid old patriarchal norms and endorses a new positive view of masculinity that is designed to appeal to normies, especially women, without antagonizing lipstick feminism (they claim no allegiance with PUAs, for example). As you can imagine, this is largely doomed from the start already for the simple reason that defining masculinity in any form would also necessarily entail defining (and thus restricting) femininity as well, and as you can imagine, that is today a big no-no. As I alluded to above, any message such groups carry is thus destined to be rather murky.
(On a sidenote, I even find the name cringy. “Promise Keepers” implicitly means that other men do not keep their promises, the scoundrels they obviously are. I guess the naming was designed to gain sympathy from single mothers. Then again, maybe I’m just a dick.)
Before I continue I should mention that the organization briefly had a sort of heyday in the ‘90s but has long been defunct in a practical sense, as many of you might have already noticed and commented on (I assume they still exist in the legal sense). That is no coincidence, and I’m sure the main reason is that their leaders made the most obvious rookie mistake there is in politics: when their opposition (in this case, some radical feminist talking heads) denounced them in the press for some made-up reason, they apologized. (Take this with a grain of salt though, as I’ve only read this claim on a long-gone blog.) They thought they need to apologize to some feminist loudmouths, even though their entire public image hinged on being as inoffensive as possible, which clearly renders any idea of publicly apologizing a really bad one (why would you want to give any impression that you need to apologize when you’re a bog standard church org?). Anyway, even if this incident didn’t happen the way I remember it or if it didn’t happen at all, I think the general point still stands: it’s clear that the Promise Keepers were treated with either indifference or scorn and ridicule by the mainstream media, and only found sympathy within their own culture war tribe / wagon fort. This is a general rule of society: a man making any complaints about women, no matter how indirect or mild, is a sign of low status. Or to quote a former Manosphere blogger: a man pointing out the pettiness of petty women is actually seen as a sign of he himself being petty. For further proof just look at what public image fathers’ rights groups and activists have; they are basically lepers.
(end of Part 1, I suppose, as at this point I’m just rambling maybe)
*In reality it went even further than that. It was generally expected of young men to keep socially undesirable men away from their sisters, and it was normal for said sisters to act as matchmakers for their single bothers etc. But that is largely beside the point here.
**Exhortations by Christian preachers and so on for single men to marry single mothers and gamers/slackers to man up, man-shaming in the media in general, the endless denunciations of “deadbeat dads”, the Bradley Amendment, affirmative consent laws, the Duluth model etc. are all examples of this, I’d say
***I guess this included the notion that promiscuous women will be able to live without sexual shame and that “average” women will have casual sex with “average” men because they actually want to have sex for the sake of it; then again, I’m just guessing (I’ll explain the quotations marks if anyone is interested)
****Believe it or not, a handful of sympathetic women did visit these Manosphere sites back when these existed, at least for a while; they generally agreed that while the post-patriarchal age means that women don’t need men in their lives per se, they still generally want [some of] them, and that it should be possible to be a functioning masculine man in a feminist cultural milieu still
A thing I don't think the 'manosphere' (loosely defined) has really grappled with, is men's role dismantling the 'patriarchy' (loosely defined).
" the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) "
That works as a definition well enough.
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
Its relevant that concurrent with Promise Keepers, we had elected Bill Clinton twice to the highest office in the land, JFK was considered the coolest possible politician, Joe Namath had been famous for going on 30 years at that point for being good with the ladies.
Culturally, men, held up that ideal as something to be aspired to.
If men are going to aspire to be cads, a feminism that decides that men aren't worth trusting the patriarchy to is a reasonable response.
My mental model of Promise Keepers, their main message was "hey men, be worthy of the patriarchy"
Promise Keepers as a phenomenon, it was always fighting massive cultural headwinds, it was founded with that express purpose.
Is it a failure that it's not still going strong 30 years later? idk, what's that half-life of these things? I mean Lilith Fair isn't still selling out shows, whatever Louis Farrakhan is up to, a million people aren't showing up in DC on the regular to hear him. These things peter out.
If some men took it to heart and actually lived better lives, I would say that counts as success, even if in 2025 the movement is a minor footnote in history.
Bit of a trick in this one. What are 'male responsibilities?'
I'd posit:
Almost any role men are expected to perform in society is one of these or a subset of these. Killing a spider in the house? 1. Tracking down and capturing a criminal? Blend of 1 and 2. Change the oil in the car? 4.
1 has been obviated by modern tech, and we prefer it that way.
4 is still a thing, but has been rendered pretty low status overall.
2 has been a nonissue in most places, especially the U.S., for a long time, and we prefer it that way.
3 DEFINITELY still happens, and we have systems in place to ensure it happens, but we have managed to mitigate much of the risk. And we prefer it that way.
But at any given time, if the need arises, men CAN be called upon to fulfill these responsibilities, to the death, if needed.
So the fact that most men haven't been called on to fight a war, kill a mammoth, or go down with a ship while the women and children escape doesn't change the fact that they could be called to do this at any time. And indeed, many of them spend a lot of time preparing themselves to jump into action even as the actual chances of needing to do so go down, since the impact of such events is still deadly and widespread.
So there's a disconnect. "Men don't live up to their responsibilities anymore" really means "men have managed to arrange a society that is mostly peaceful, robust against disaster, and produces more food than we know what to do with." And ignores "they also maintain readiness to take action to preserve this society if it is threatened" factor.
And this means mens' responsibilities are kind of invisible most of the time. So others (especially women) just assume men are getting all the perks whilst doing none of the work to earn them. Which might even be true... until its not.
This also explains why Firemen, Police Officers, and Soldiers still get some automatic cachet with women, since they signal themselves as a man who has actively sought out the male responsibility. Even though each of those jobs has only gotten safer/cushier over time for the reasons outlined above.
I do think its 'cheating' to suggest that women are excused from their obligations on the grounds that men aren't living up to their own standards, when the womens' obligations are relatively painless but very visible on a social level, and men's responsibilities are harder to perceive but extract a drastically higher cost when drawn upon.
So what seems to be the issue is that men DO maintain certain responsibilities... but thanks to successfully creating a highly advanced civilization, they've made it much less likely that they'll be publicly expected to perform those responsibilities at scale.
And yes, there are probably a lot of men who would reject the call to fight off an invader, track down a violent criminal, dive into floodwaters to save a child, or even to lift heavy equipment in the hot sun to construct a building.
And those that refuse those responsibility should, I say, be fairly ostracized.
But that's not really the question. As a man, I ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY want/accept these responsibilities.
With that said... I ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY want to minimize the chances of being called on to fulfill these responsibilities, by maintaining a civilization that is robust against such risks.
So bit of a contradiction there. "Yes, give me all the perks of maledom, and I will do my best to ensure that I am not called on to fulfill the responsibilities if I can help it."
But the problem I do keep hitting on, if you remove incentives for men to fulfill their responsibilities, and enough of them drop out of that role, its increasingly likely that the civilization they maintain will start to crumble.
I'm not sure what kind of obligations you are thinking of for women, but the first one that comes to mind for me is pregnancy and childbirth, and I would not describe that as "relatively painless". Sure, it's better now to have 2.1 children with an epidural instead of 10+, but I think it's still a more arduous obligation than what the average man in the west will be called upon to do in their lifetime.
You might need to recalibrate your perception the sort of work the average dude has to complete in his life, and the pains they will suffer as a result of them.
Looking at the top, call it 20% of guys and assuming they represent all men is the EXACT issue that leads to intersex resentment, I think.
And just as modern society has relieved a lot of the risks that men are otherwise expected to deal with... it has also made the entire childbearing process less painful and FAR, FAR less risky for women.
(thanks to men)
So this sentiment doesn't move me an inch, although I'm on record with saying that bearing and raising children SHOULD accord a woman high status!
Hmm, I think it's definitely true the average (as in the mean) man does more dangerous and arduous work than the average woman. The workplace fatality rate for men in 2023 (that was the year I could find consistent numbers for) was ~7-8x the maternal death rate that year.
However, I'm less convinced that the average (as in the median) man does as much dangerous work. About 65% of men work some kind of management/service industry/sales job, and I don't think these jobs cause as much pain as birthing a baby. Even if the do, there's just as many women working them as men.
Not only that, but the workplace fatality rate for men exceeds the maternal death rate + the female workplace fatality rate by a huge amount. For example, I looked into this a while back and the number of men killed during 2018 by occupational injuries caused by transportation incidents, contact with objects and equipment, falls, slips and trips, exposure to harmful substances or environment, and fires and explosions is 4,119 men killed. This excludes injuries caused by "Violence and other injuries by persons or animal" as that category includes deaths by self-inflicted injuries on the job. Even excluding that, the number of male deaths exceeds the number of women killed in ALL occupational deaths (413 women) AND maternal deaths (658 women) added together (1,071 women).
Just to give you a sense of how large that margin is, in 2018, the number of men killed in occupational-related transportation incidents alone (1,929 men) exceeds the number of women killed in all occupational deaths and maternal deaths added together.
It heavily depends on how you define "dangerous". Work is something you do for most of your life, whereas childbirth is a very transient condition (especially today). Management/service industry/sales jobs are highly disparate types of work with highly differing demands, the stressors encountered there definitely impact health, and just because women are as likely to participate in that large category of work does not mean they are subject to all the same stressors. It's been brought up fairly often in the context of the wage gap, but even within the same occupational categories your median man is likely to work more, take more strenuous and demanding jobs, and prioritise flexibility less, which results in women having higher satisfaction with their jobs (a consistent finding within the literature).
As for the health effects of constant stress, it results in elevated levels of cortisol over a long period of time, poor sleep, and so on, increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, infections, strokes, etc. The WHO made an attempt at estimating the number of ischemic heart disease and stroke-related deaths linked to long working hours for the year 2016, finding that the worldwide number of deaths from long working hours was 745,000 from only these two causes of mortality. Men made up 72% of the deaths, and if you do the maths that means men represented 536,400 of these deaths and women represented 208,600. In contrast, worldwide general maternal mortality for the year 2016 accounted for an estimated 309,000 deaths. And there are undoubtedly more sources of death from long working hours and other job-related stressors which doesn't just amount to things like "death by lobotomy via a falling metal pipe". I would not assume that job-related mortality in even these more sedentary jobs is less of an issue than maternal mortality is for your average American woman of the same social stratum, and I would not assume that the prevalence of this mortality is the same between the sexes just because there are roughly equal numbers of men and women with jobs belonging to this large category of work.
Obligation and sacrifice manifests in many ways which aren't immediately obvious. In general I tend to think people overweight things that are obviously unpleasant but transient compared to stressors that cumulatively accrete over one's lifespan - and in general I think the latter tends to have a greater overall impact on health and wellbeing in spite of the fact that they're often overlooked as sources of mortality. Attrition is important; it's the difference between feeling intense temporary grief vs. clinical depression. Unexpectedly getting kidney stones, while more painful in the moment, would not impact my overall life as much as being stuck in a job I dislike. I have a sedentary job which sometimes requires me to work a lot of overtime and weekends during crunch time (in fact I did so earlier this month), if asked to make a tradeoff between spending large swaths of my life slogging away at an inflexible, stressful job and giving birth to 1.5 kids at any given point in my life I'm inclined to say that at least personally, I think the latter may be a superior value proposition. That's not to trivialise any of it, but I don't think this conception of unpleasantness actually aligns with how people experience it for the most part.
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