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Notes -
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 On the other end, there are men whose visions of masculinity remain primarily rooted in outdated and often harmful ideas, and whose attitudes towards women frequently leave much to be desired.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.
The caveats, disclaimers, inb4's and all the rest are impressive in their meticulousness. Same goes the '300' ways. I think that, whilst kind of autistic, it manages to speak in rhythm and terms that could easily reach a masculine minded woman. Which a lot of feminists are.
That being said, in a grander scheme of the old feminist/manosphere culture war, it's also just a very clever guideline for feminists to use as verbal cover to further chastise men for creating the patriarchy that harms women AND men. To that extent I'm not sure to where this work moves the needle.
I still see modern non-radical feminists trudge out long lists of half truths and outright lies about the plights of women and how unfair society is to them, punctuated by a much shorter list of how men die in wars and are homeless. This is a distinct change from the early internet feminist rhetoric that did not have the aforementioned punctuation, but any honest observer can tell that the feminist heart really isn't in it by the time they get to the mens issues. It's just an obvious inb4 to ward off the ghost of Warren Farrell and the likes. This fact invokes the broader question of why feminists have a hard time empathizing with men.
You are approaching the issue from a factual angle. They simply don't know enough about men and their experiences, so they can't see their pain. And how could they? They are not men, and most men aren't exactly advertising their emotional turmoil. From that perspective this book is theoretically perfect. Here is the list! But on the flipside, this blindside has been there for a while. So one could half jokingly wonder: Could the feminists not have asked?
This leads to the more pessimistic view of feminism. What's at the heart of feminism is ingroup bias. Ingroup bias felt by women for other women. Men are the outgroup. You don't empathize with the outgroup. Simple as.
From that perspective the book can at worst simply invoke cognitive dissonance. Like writing a book aimed at Christians to garner sympathy for the devil. But at best it can act as a sort of battering ram to knock down the fake reality of a radical feminist who has maybe spent too many college years engaging in performative man hating lesbianism.
At any rate, my personal critique of the position of the book and the modern state of 'masculinity' in the gender war is that it conforms to women, women's emotions, women's understanding of emotions and seeks to better men in a direction that conforms to womens conception of progress. In a crass 4chan post that I'll try to succinctly paraphrase in two sentences:
Never lift for women, and having sex with women is gay because pleasing women is gay.
That's an obvious hyperbole, but behind it is a kernel of truth. All men lift weights to look better to have better chances with women because they want to have sex with them. Working hard, flashy cars, big house, everything. In a word it's all peacocking. Men fighting other men to win the attention of floozy HOPS who are playing the same game against each other.
In such a world both sides of the gender war reach a similar conclusion, the only form of true love is gay. Because men/women aren't there to ruin it. But most men are rather repulsed by masculine homosexual activity, and the sexual boredom of lesbianism and repressed heterosexuality eventually kills the rebellious radfem lesbian that lives inside an otherwise surprisingly conservative young woman.
The only active players trying to work society out of this predicament are traditionalist religious types. They hold no real power or answers to any of the problems faced by the modern man and women other than hopes and prayers, and the insurmountable fact that if you wont overstep your own emotions and hangups regarding the opposite sex you will never have children and will grow old, bitter and finally extinct.
I'm not sure if there exist any gender reconciliation movements on the left outside of 'Not my Nigel', but the world could certainly use one. As I would prefer a government that could both reconcile the sex wars and not invade Iran.
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