The Masculinity Gurus

Do masculine men need to prove how masculine they are?

Brace yourselves. The masculinity books are coming.

What is wrong with men?

With Donald Trump’s recent triumph representing the most consequential illustration of a conservative turn among young men, masculinity is bound to be the focus of intense discourse in the coming months and years. More than it already is.

Liberal commentators have been agonizing about what could have happened to turn young men to the dark side. Was it Joe Rogan? Andrew Tate? Is some sort of toxin concealed in nicotine patches?

Yet conservatives are unhappy with the male sex as well. Too many men, it seems, are alienated and adrift — hooked on porn, video games, and introspection. Marriage rates are down. Birth rates are down. NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training) are more numerous than ever.

So, again, what is wrong with men?

It is worth preempting the debate. After all, we have been here before. Trump’s election in 2016 helped to fuel a race for books that deconstructed so-called “toxic masculinity”. Elizabeth Plank’s For the Love of Men and Clementine Ford’s Boys Will Be Boys, among other works, attempted to avoid mere vitriol, which was so often splattered across social media, to provide an at least somewhat sympathetic case for how masculine orthodoxies harm men as well as women.

Whether hostile or sympathetic, all of these arguments were afflicted with the fundamentally destructive premise that masculinity was a problem to be solved rather than a phenomenon to be engaged with. If someone is cutting out your heart it doesn’t really matter if they have a cynical desire to sell it or the delusional impression that it will save your life. So, the common male interest in violence was not approached as something to be channeled but as something to be amputated. (Oddly enough, there were few complaints as men were conscripted into the Ukrainian military and women were not.)

Ironically, the cloaked “pro-male case” against masculinity might have ended up seeming more obnoxious than the honest man-hating of earlier radicals. The demand that men see therapists, and cry, and talk about their penises had a manipulative edge that straightforward denunciation of supposed privilege had not.

This is not to say that men were not suffering, of course (in ways, that is, that were distinct to their being men — just as women were suffering in ways that were distinct to their being women). Monolithic explanations are marketing strategies. Some were suffering from a lack of male influences as a result of the boom in fatherless homes. Others, especially in America, were being sucked into the vortex of addiction that whirled around economically depressed areas.

More generally, men suffered from new spiritual vacuums in their social and economic lives. Work had become more corporate and insecure. Romance had become more corporate and insecure (with dating apps promising the raw excitement of a job interview). Scolds and hysterics were policing pop culture. Many sank into a lukewarm bath of the vicarious (porn, podcasts) and the soporific (marijuana, opioids).

The mainstream took note. Richard Reeves, a British author and one-time Special Advisor to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, wrote in Of Boys and Men that society should work towards addressing the needs of boys and men as well as girls and women. This is commendable. Yet the danger here is that “young men” will just become another special interest group, taking its place amid the ups and downs of managerial egalitarianism.

Broader cultural pathologies were at play. So conservatives began to muse on the theme of masculinity as well. For Jordan Peterson, in Twelve Rules for Life, the cure was moral self-improvement. Young men — not just young men, but especially young men — had to stand up straight, clean their rooms, and become productive and responsible members of their communities.

For others, this traditionalist approach seemed as stifling as the liberal moralism it opposed. The philosophy at the core of manhood in Bronze Age Pervert’s Bronze Age Mindset was one of physical excellence, piratical mischief, and bold contempt for social norms. Talented young men, for this writer known also as “BAP”, should not be tied down to their communities at all but should master space wherever it can be mastered.

Some were more satirical than prescriptive. The writer known as Delicious Tacos was a Houellebecq for the online age — immersed in sexual obsession but with a shapeless longing for transcendence. His stories, in The Pussy and Savage Spear of the Unicorn, were morbid, gruesome, often funny, and sometimes moving in their grim portrayal of the libido dancing as the heart shrivels from disuse.

In the darkest outposts of androcentric thought, ideologues and opportunists were using ideas as a fig leaf for resentment. Sex-centric elements of the online “Manosphere,” which had been devoted to strategies for sweet-talking young women into bed, took a hard turn into a kind of theatrical moralism that projected the imaginative deviance so richly described in The Pussy onto women as a means of purging shame and defiling objects of unrequited attraction. Instead of feeling remorse about their lonelier and grimier sexual urges, men could feel outraged by the objects of their lust. Years later, Andrew Tate, an online pornographer accused of human trafficking turned Muslim life coach, would take the same route.

Others used fantasies of male dominance to ennoble bloodlust. That sounds borderline hysterical until one hears about the case of Roman McClay — real name Lyndon James McLeod — who wrote the three-part revenge fantasy Sanction before murdering five people in an armed rampage in 2021 to manifest his story into existence. This is a marginal case, of course, but it reminds us that power and violence are not simply abstractions or words devoid of the power for action.

One should not reduce all this to the realms of the instructional. The writer BAP mentioned earlier, for example, is no mere commentator but a kind of philosophical performance artist — baffling liberal critics who have no idea when to take him literally or even seriously. My impression is that he is always serious but often esoterically so. When he dwells on images of the imperial, he is creating an imaginative universe through which his followers can perceive social media more than the material world — guiding their posts and their trolling. (This is not to repeat stale insults about “Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” because, after all, what happens on the internet can be a lot more consequential than what happens on the high seas.)

It would be dishonest to feign such cool detachment as to hide the fact that I have the humanist impression that his outlook bears comparison with the male models that he features on his X account — with their impressive muscles yet glazed expressions. Still, there has been substance to the jibes that BAP and his spiritually pagan brethren have aimed at Christian-oriented writers on manhood. The Petersonian prescription of local virtue suffers from excess austerity, with an emphasis on struggle and sacrifice that, while undoubtedly essential, can obscure the role of fun, excitement, and beauty, both as ends in themselves and as motivating and consoling forces in life.

The conservative can’t simply lecture men into being virtuous husbands and fathers any more than the progressive can lecture them into being soggy-souled egalitarians.

Here, I should be honest with you. Just as chefs must be seen with mouth-watering creations on the covers of their cookbooks, the male advocate of men feels obliged to establish their credentials. The moral traditionalist works in reference to their large and happy family. The exponent of a more primitive form of manhood hints towards their rippling muscles and their battered bedsprings.

Churchless, childless and unmarried, with a lingering history of anorexia, I’m not about to flaunt my masculine status. That said, a lot of men who have been most proud to advertise their masculinity have seen their image fall apart — the happy family imploding or the macho front being tarnished by sordid revelations of quite traditionally unmasculine sexual preferences or not-so-impressive physiques.

Whatever else it is and isn’t, being a man is difficult. One can’t whip up one’s sense of self like a pasta dish.

To even reflect on “masculinity” illuminates a challenge of the modern world. People who are most content with, say, their body image never think about the concept of “body image”. Those most content with their families don’t feel the need to lecture others about their failure for not having one. To consider it in abstract terms is itself a sign of insecurity. Yet having thought about it one cannot simply unthink it. What is deconstructed has to be rebuilt.

I have written elsewhere about two opposing and unsatisfactory models of manhood: “the drift” and “the march”. The drift is to roam without direction (family, career et cetera). To march means you have nothing but direction. The drift might get you nowhere, in other words, but the march might drain you of the will to actually be anywhere.

There will be no one model of manhood because there is no one model of man. Still, the literature on masculinity should find a mode somewhere between the drift and march. We need the purpose of the march, yes — the individual achievements and the collective attachments — but we also need the joy of the drift — joy, that is, in the sense of adventure, the thrill of camaraderie and romance.

There is an online influencer named Jocko Willink — a hulking ex-Navy SEAL who wakes up every morning at 3 or 4 am, posts a photo of his watch, works out and posts a photo of the sweat-splattered floor with a caption like “AFTERMATH”.

I respect him. We need discipline to realize our goals. But does he ever head out to enjoy the sunrise? He can go and do his workout afterwards of course. But what is the point of being disciplined if we can’t even enjoy the sunrise?

Ben Sixsmith is an English writer and online editor of The Critic Magazine.

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