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With the release of the recent Barbie movie, the old gender debates on the internet have been reignited. (Admittedly, I haven't watched it yet, might pen down my thoughts once I do.)
I recently encountered another article by a heterosexual, middle-class woman discussing how we can assist young men in discovering their masculinity. The piece, confidently titled map out of the wilderness, repeats the narrative tropes that countless similar works in journalism tend to focus on.
Does it argue that men are disoriented because women are no longer subservient? Indeed. Does it accuse men of falling for 'destructive' ideologues such as Jordan Peterson and Bronze Age Pervert whose political ideologies aren't personally favored? Yes. Does it claim men are discontent because women wish for them to behave more femininely? Absolutely. Does it state there's a lack of 'positive masculinity?' Oh, for sure.
To credit the writer, Christine Emba, she does highlight some of the more sinister issues that venture slightly beyond the bounds of conventional discourse. She openly criticizes feminists and women in general for refusing to assist men, citing an instance where Obama was chastised for attempting to help boys, and thousands of women denounced him in protest.
What prompted me to respond to this article was a moment of blatant self-awareness by the author, who admits when reproached by a man that she doesn't want to be intimate with men who heed her advice (emphasis mine):
Yes, dear writer, you recoiled in acknowledgment. If you, a talking head opining on this topic, felt this way, consider the reaction of those numerous women with lesser self-awareness when they encounter these feeble, effeminate men.
However, all the discussions around gender roles, sexual relations, power dynamics, and 'incels' are missing the real issue. They're distractions, veils obscuring the core problem.
At the risk of being cliche, I'll reference Nietzsche's most well-known line:
Why has this single paragraph echoed throughout recent centuries as one of the deepest and most frequently reiterated explanations of modernity's moral crisis? Obviously, Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed atheist, doesn't imply we've executed deicide in the literal sense. What we've done is obliterated any transcendent reason for existence. There is no apparent reason why young men should exhibit concern for their neighbors, work towards self-improvement, curtail their desires, or even make an effort to contribute to society.
For a young man in a contemporary world that is entirely individual-centric, what is the appeal of any altruistic act?
Regardless of the religion you choose, these systems provided us with a motive beyond primal, materialistic pleasures to care. They provided us with an aim to pursue. Most importantly, they offered us a social framework within which we could strive collectively with others and receive commendation for our benevolent deeds.
Nietzsche's suggested solution is that the New Men must 'become deities' to be worthy of God's murder. Regrettably, as we've found out, not everyone can ascend to godhood. Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?
How is a young man in his twenties, armed with a useless college degree and forced to work at a supermarket to get by, supposed to find purpose in what he's doing? How can he feel accomplished, or masculine, or empowered? He definitely can't rely on God or religion for that feeling. If he tries, he'll be overwhelmed by relentless mockery and cynicism from his society.
Returning to Ms. Emba's proposed solution, she states that men need to experience masculinity by:
This, she asserts, is 'Constructive Masculinity.' Let's look past the glaring issue that it's a woman attempting to define what masculinity should be - the question remains: why?
Without some larger mission, most men aren't going to be motivated whatsoever. Men need a reason to exist. And not a poor, weak reason like 'following your dreams' or 'getting money' or 'being a good person.' Men need something to strive for, something worth dying for, something that they can use to shield themselves from the terror of the void.
Of course this problem is applicable to far more people than just young Western males. This lack of meaning, lack of purpose, is at the core of modernity's societal problems. It waits like a tiger in the shadows, seizing us in our moments and weakness and pulling us into a black pit of despair, nihilism. Emptiness.
When you're on your deathbed, where will you look for comfort? What force or being or god will let you face your own death without flinching? What water will purify you?
How will you cleanse your hands of blood?
For the vast majority of human history the vast majority of men (and women) have been beasts of burden. All this stuff about men needing adventure or heroism elides the fact that only a tiny minority of men have ever been heroes or adventurers. Working as a cashier at Walgreens is not significantly more monotonous or miserable than year-round farmwork.
What has changed significantly in the last century or two for men is that simply surviving childhood and not being a criminal or an imbecile is no longer enough to guarantee a wife and kids. To the extent men used to have any kind of higher “purpose” or “mission” I guess it was that. It’s not like (99% of) premoderns were sitting around philosophizing about Faith and transcendental values. This is not because of feminism or liberalism or atheism (as can be seen by the same issues developing in countries much more conservative than the west) but pretty straightforwardly a consequence of modern industrial civilization, which means individual women no longer have to rely on individual men for economic and physical security. When Jane doesn’t have to choose between starvation and prostitution on the one hand and marrying John on the other, she’s not going to marry John.
Physical and economic security is increasingly provided by ever-smaller groups of ‘specialists’ who keep the lights on and the barbarians out (and who may be mostly men, but are certainly not most men). That goes for all of us of course, which is why nobody knows how to fight or farm anymore.
No amount of social engineering, whether right-wing fantasies of restoring traditional masculinity, or left-wing ideas of building a new positive masculinity or whatever, is going to change that. There’s no cosmic law that says there has to be a solution.
I'm unsure how historically accurate this most extreme formulation is, but I'm sure that in a world where manual labor meant a whole lot more, something like this probably happened in some capacity. I still don't understand why people say it.
I've seen this statement a lot. I've seen it said in many ways by many different kinds of people across many different hues and shades of culture and politics. I've heard it said in a few different tones, largely ranging from triumphant to bemused—which isn't the way I would say it if I thought it were true and a major cause of modern trends.
The first thing I think when I see it is that I wonder what the endgame is supposed to be. I think that people who have fun saying it usually intend it as some kind of polemic call to men to DO BETTER. I can't help but notice that this often comes coincident with a political framework that generally rejects not just the morality but the pragmatic efficacy of such a posture—but I suppose that by itself doesn't necessarily prove anything. I have an even harder time understanding people who say it with a rightward perspective. How exactly are we supposed to have healthy family formation in a future where this is true? There does seem to be a handful of small, right-facing factions that seem to recognize this contradiction to the detriment of modernity and its consequences, but funny enough I don't usually see those types saying this sort of thing. It's usually people like JBP et al and the occasional cathposter. I'm not really sure what the point is supposed to be when they say it, or if they fully realize the implications for the future when they do.
It's difficult to fully describe the degree to which this statement inflames my passions. What I really want to say is something like "wow, with all this porn and sex dolls, women can't just coast into success with men just by having a moist hole anymore"—but as we all know, the rhetorical switcheroo never works. Nobody is going to stop and think about the myriad ways such a statement would butcher women's dignity as a class of human being—nobody is going to think about how such a statement utterly de-romanticizes women's value as partner and mate, or how it faithlessly summarizes women's unique sacrifices that in part brought us to where we are today before cynically discarding it like a wet torch—and if they do, they're never going to relate any of it back to what they just got done saying about men. They're just gonna call you a hater and move on.
Now, I'm not the kind of man who is seriously deficient in
hole moistnessearning power, but I don't care. The simple fact that this the way my civilization views my caste makes me worry not that it isn't reproducing. The world should be inherited by men and women who actually love each other.Well I don't mean it in a smug "sucks to be a man!" way. And I consider myself a liberal so I don't mean it in a twitter fash "women should be property!" way. It just seems to me to be the case.
We're probably not. But I don't mourn its loss. I don't think the family is some beautiful, mystical union handed down by a beneficent God--it was a jury-rigged institution that persisted because it was the only apparent way to keep civilization from imploding, and was at least tolerable for a plurality of people. My personal experience is that huge numbers of couples, possibly an outright majority, end up resenting each other. I see little reason to think it was different in the past. Modernity is unpleasant in a lot of ways, including the one we're talking about, but it's far from clear to me that it's worse than what it supplanted. "RETVRN to coupling with someone who doesn't really like you all that much but will put up with you and raise a couple of kids" doesn't exactly inspire me. I guess it's 'healthy' insofar as it reproduced the status quo, but was the status quo all that worth reproducing? If that's the best we can aspire to, we might as well just blow the whole thing up.
Well you've phrased it crudely but is it not empirically the case that many men are replacing real-life relationships with porn? And if we really do get hyper-realistic AI companions in the near future, well...
Now maybe this is all just me. I can't relate to anything in the article OP posted because. Maybe because I don't consider myself particularly masculine, so it has never been a source of angst for me. I have never felt this drive for purpose and achievement that is apparently endemic to modern young men. I don't have the yearning for male spaces or brotherhood. I have never once in my life felt the urge to be a husband or a father. I feel less than no desire to ever be anyone's provider and protector, and the relationships I've been in, romantic and platonic, have shown me that the fastest way to make me to resent somebody is to be responsible for their wellbeing, material or emotional.
I mean...for a lot of guys, isn't this a pretty good deal or what they honestly already have? I've known: skilled blue collar workers in relationships with 450lb women that need canes to walk and get winded walking a hundred yards, women in relationships with guys they'd divorce if they had had jobs and hadn't chosen homemaking, guys who chose to remain married to women that tried to strangle their 10-year-old child after the child and their mom had an argument.
That being said: it is probably a good thing that only the best/most adapted/most graceful of men get to have families and children; the idea that patriarchy was a sheltered workshop for low-value men doesn't sound too unreasonable.
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I largely agree but, but I am not sure it is a given. There is nothing requiring the state to subsidize single women to the extent it does. Strong independent women who don't need no man do infact need massive bailouts from the tax payer. Single mothers get more government handouts and benefit from a plethora of social programs. If taxes were lowered and schools instead required tuition and if medical care was financed entirely privately single motherhood would become far less attractive. Even in terms of their jobs single women often work in tax payer professions often providing services to themselves. For example a single mother might work as a teacher thereby providing free child care services to other single mothers. Men who don't sleep with these ladies pay.
If there is a way that this unravels, it is the services deteriorating to the point that relying on them in order to be a strong independent women doesn't work.
I think that is one of the stupidest things I have read on the Internet, and I've read a lot of stupid things.
Is the education system in part a childcare system? Yes, unfortunately, but it's also in part a result of the kind of "home-making is not real work, only waged labour is valuable, get women into the workforce for the sake of the economy" attitude going on here. So if you have both parents out of the house all day working, and you have minor children, those children have to be taken care of by somebody.
But the real pith here is "providing free child care services to other single mothers".
Gosh, I had no idea children of married couples were not permitted to attend school in the USA! And that divorced and bereaved parents were also barred, because only women with no spouses ever could have their children attending
free daycare school!God knows, I'm a social conservative who does not approve of the explosion in single parenting, and even I think this is a dumb statement of how things are. Yes, let's not have single mothers working as teachers, the whores and hussies! They're not doing a job, they're only in it to help out the other whores and hussies!
The issue is that their lifestyle is heavily subsidized. A married couple generally pays far more in taxes than a single mother. Single motherhood is only possible due to state sponsored services making it viable. If people had to carry the weight of the children they had themselves there would be far fewer single mothers. In countries where having a child by yourself isn't feasible far fewer people have children by themselves. Instead of children spending time with their parents they are institutionalized far more than needed. Parents often do a far better job at teaching small children than schools do.
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And people argue in favor of them receiving more
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On the contrary, unmarried medieval laymen were commonplace, mostly due to poverty. And of course in other societies that practiced polygamy openly- do you think the bottom 40-50% of men were reproducing?
Which historical investigations can we read on this? Which medieval societies and their laymen, which polygamist societies?
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Here's where I disagree. If you read history, you'll find that religion was extremely central to premoderns' conceptions of the world. I agree that industrial society is what did it in, and in some cases it was very dramatic. Take the worldview described in The Pervasive World-View: Religion in Pre-Modern Britain:
Religion is often also the centerpiece of rebellions:
For an idea of what people thought about religion and superstition day to day:
I hope this shows that even right in pre-modernity, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religious worldviews and superstition were still going quite strong. We could expect that before the change of the industrial revolution these religious views were even more closely held.
To you point about mate selection:
I get so tired of evolutionary psychologists reducing everything to who gets to mate with whom. Clearly humans have a lot more going on than just trying to get their rocks off, and while the evo psych mating lens can be useful, it is not something which can explain away the whole of human experience.
Do you truly believe you can reduce the tens of thousands of years humans have spent contemplating God, building great works, fighting massive wars, and the general whole of human experience down to someone's sexual market value? If so, I think the inferential distance between us may be too far to easily bridge.
Definitely, but I think in a mostly non-transcendental way.
Religion was and is for most people, a very functional and indeed, material thing.
As for theology, canon law, universities—very much minority affairs.
No, but I think the vast majority of people never did any of those things. I think evopsych is often silly just-so stories, but it seems undeniable humans are largely driven by sex.
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I agree that religion was de jure central to life for most of human history, but it's not clear to what extent its details actually made a difference. Certainly they do matter a lot in some contexts. But most of the things that you say they're central to, such as rebellions, schools, and marriage all existed before and after any given religion and, I claim, mostly don't depend on the details of religious texts.
As for "who gets to mate with whom", that's what the OP was discussing.
Really? I would argue that religion is the central piece that made things like rebellions, schools and marriages even possible. Sure you can take a purely materialist view and say they exist separately, but how did we humans manage to rise out of prehistory to even create a functioning society? How did we get along without killing each other? Where did the idea of marriage, or the idea of teaching your descendants important truths, or the idea that a sovereign is beholden to a higher power, even come from?
All of these things have their roots in religion.
All of these things happen all the time without religion, and also happen to a lesser extent amongst animals. And even sovereigns notionally beholden to god didn't keep power long without armies.
Sure they happen without explicit religion, but could they happen without the framework religion provided? If people want to bring in evo psych arguments, we're talking an incredibly short timeline for evolutionary situations.
Yes, they happen without the framework religion provides all the time in the animal world, where we see pair bonding, leaders, and parents teaching children. I agree that religions shaped these institutions in the human world to some extent, but I claim that since these behaviors and institutions can clearly survive on their own merits, something like them would have arisen even if early humans somehow weren't religious.
That is a good point. Do you not think religion plays an important social role?
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How do gangs of monkeys and bands of apes stay together?
How do some animals regularly pair bond for life?
While religion may have once been a social lubricant, now it's sand in the gears.
If that’s the case, why can’t we create secular ideologies that function as well as religions created thousands of years ago?
You are, I assume, aware of the centuries of butchery produced by the European Wars Of Religion, all of which were fought (at least nominally) about Christianity? And the similarly brutal sectarian conflicts produced by the various offshoots of Islam? Note that I’m not downplaying any of the good and noble results produced by these religions; you have to take the bad with the good. It’s not remotely clear to me that, in terms of per capita, fascism and communism produced worse or bloodier results than their religious counterpart ideologies.
Oh don't get me wrong, it's all bloody as hell. The reason I keep pushing for religion is that I think it's bloody for a reason. It's bloody and awful because there is a there there. Because religion speaks to something fundamental, that humans cannot live without.
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