“Western” Masculinity (Part 3 / 3) — It’s a moving target
Why is there a part three to this discussion?
Why is it that we are (supposedly) experiencing this uncertainty about masculinity?
Why aren’t we able to just naturally act the way that God/Evolution/Tradition/Whatever intended us and created us to do?
Why can’t we just do it right?
I think that the reason becomes fairly obvious once you take a moment to consider even a few of the many changes that masculinity has gone through over the years.
Likewise when you look at the fact that there are different ways of defining what is masculine, that other cultures have a different list of traits that men “should” have.
The reason we are constantly in a panic over whether men today are masculine enough is because we haven’t bothered to acknowledge a very basic, fundamental fact about masculinity:
Like so many other things in our world — money, laws, political systems, Star Wars — masculinity is made up.
Masculinity is not a fixed fact, it is not a law of nature, it is not a way of being that is programmed into our DNA, it is not some monolithic, permanent, physical thing that we can examine or emulate; it is a socially constructed role created by an odd little species of largely-hairless ape on one tiny planet in one tiny corner of a vast universe.
Masculinity is confusing and hard to pin down because it is something that is forever in flux, forever being redefined.
What makes a man a man is a discussion that we are all having each and every day and what we need a man to be changes with the times and circumstances.
We will never have a single perfect definition for masculinity, we will never have a single role to fill precisely because it is an evolving concept that must grow and change with us.
This realization can be a little scary; finding out there is no one right answer is never fun, being told that you will never get that certainty you crave can be demoralizing.
At the same time, it can be reassuring to know that we are not the first to confront this question and the insecurities it can spawn — every time society goes through major shifts there is a great deal of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about how these changes will result in weak, effeminate men that will be unable to fulfill their role in society.
Sometimes this narrative is correct, in that the “traditional roles” become outdated and unneeded, men can’t, or at least shouldn’t be able to, fulfill that role anymore because it is no longer useful and those men have moved on to better things.
That reminds me…
Toxic doesn’t work anymore
You knew I had to bring up toxic masculinity eventually right? The term gets used and misused so often there is simply no way to talk about men or manhood without mentioning the word toxic.
I shouldn’t need to spell this out, as it has been done a million times, but to pre-empt any fools coming here to claim that I am calling all men toxic, let us take a brief moment and talk about what toxic masculinity is.
Being assertive, or courageous, or confident, or any of the other “masculine” traits you can name is not toxic, but any of them have the potential to become so, like every other personality trait.
Being assertive means making your wants and needs known, and not letting people walk all over you — trying to force your wants on others, making unreasonable demands of people, and walking all over them is not being assertive, it is being aggressive, unpleasant, and toxic.
Being courageous means facing your fears and doing the difficult thing because it is the right thing — ignoring risks to yourself and others, forging ahead without thought for the consequences and mocking those who display forethought and caution is not being courageous, it is being foolhardy, inconsiderate, and eminently stupid.
Being confident means knowing your strengths and skills, knowing what you are capable of and standing by your choices and work — thinking yourself an unrivaled expert in all things, diving headfirst into topics you have no experience with, and loudly talking over others is not confidence, it is toxic arrogance and it pollutes everything you touch.
There is always a line; there is always a point where you can have too much or too little of a good thing, there is always the potential for something positive to mutate into something toxic without the right oversight.
We are still stuck with the toxic expression of many traits because there was a time when these unhealthy forms of normal personality traits were, if not beneficial, then at least successful.
I think there are some very interesting insights that might be gained from looking at the way that capitalism rewards certain anti-social, domineering, violent tendencies and the prevalence of those traits in men.
For decades our political and economic systems have encouraged some of our worst impulses and we have accepted this cost because, for a time, toxic masculinity and the growth-at-all-costs mentality of Capitalism did quite well for us (or at least some of us), because they are in fact good at certain things.
Capitalism, for example, is really quite good at destroying the planet, undermining democracy, and reinforcing systems of inequality that grind the love and joy out of millions to provide unparalleled luxury to a select few (Haha! Got you with my surprise socialist propaganda! Get used to it if you plan on sticking around.)
Note that the traits of toxic masculinity I mentioned above are all ones that can be quite successful in the cutthroat capitalist system where everything is run as a zero sum game — being aggressive, foolhardy, and arrogant allows you to bully others into letting you do some very stupid, shortsighted things that fill your pockets while hurting countless others.
In the economic reality of the 1970s — 2020s, the traits of toxic masculinity have been the kind of thing that get you labeled as “CEO material.”
It is a good thing that this attitude is, very slowly, starting to change because the actions and decisions of these “ideal CEO” types is what has led us into the pile of compounding messes that we find ourselves in here in the mid-2020s.
If we are to have any hope of successfully addressing the many problems that face us today we are going to have to accept the fact that we need to move forward, we need to progress, we need to evolve and become better than men in the past because the men of the past would be woefully unsuited and incapable of rising to the challenges of today.
They may have been the perfect match for the issues of their time (though that is debatable), but the ways of the past only work in the past and what we face now requires a lot more brains than brawn, and a whole lot more cooperation and compromise rather than competition and dominance.
Outdated fossils
There is a habit among the young to mock the old; they are so out of touch with the times, they don’t understand the way the world works anymore, their opinions and ideas and traditions don’t work in this modern world.
I can certainly see this being increasingly true with the way that the pace of change in our world only seems to be increasing year after year, and the fact that all of our systems — economic, political, scientific, etc. — are becoming increasingly interconnected and global; the ways of the past don’t work as well today.
But this is the same issue masculinity faces and I am beginning to think we need to start making the same kinds of jokes — “traditional men” are becoming increasingly out of touch with the modern world, they don’t understand how things work anymore (like relationships), their opinions and ideas are no longer valid with our increasingly digital world.
This is not to argue that we should be leaving anyone behind, regardless of age or gender expression. We absolutely do need to make an effort to support men as we all navigate these uncertain waters and chart a new course for masculinity, but at the same time we do need to discourage the people that are dropping anchor and trying to trap us all in the ineffective and outdated ways of the past.
I can already hear the pushback about how this is too difficult and too confusing. We are asking men to be trailblazers and forge their own path forwards by hacking through all the outdated expectations and the peer pressure from men who would rather never grow up.
But isn’t this what I keep hearing men are supposed to do? Doesn’t the world keep telling me that men are meant to do the difficult things, are meant to blaze new trails and have the strength and conviction to ignore negative peer pressure to do what is right? Isn’t this exact type of behavior the kind of heroic story that so many men seem desperate to embody?
Whether this is what men “are meant to do” or merely what many men aspire to be, the good news is that masculinity, and all the other things we made up, are under our power, we can decide!
You don’t need to go out looking for stories from the past or some self-declared expert on manliness to tell you how a man is supposed to be, we can talk about it and figure it out day by day as a society.
There is no higher power watching and judging our ideas of manhood.
There is no hidden evolutionary programming that will seize control and overrule your decisions.
There are no ghosts of our forefathers hanging about to call us effeminate for our inability to wrestle a lion into submission.
There is just us.
There is you, me, and all the other men and women of the world and it is what we think in the here and now that actually matters.
We do not need to hold ourselves to the standards of less informed, less evolved, less modern men from the past, we can be better.
Pining for a past that never was
As a species we seem to have a real problem with nostalgia; we long for the good times and simplicity of our youth, we even crave the “good times” from before we were born, despite having never experienced them.
I completely understand this, I am not immune to the siren call of the past either.
I miss simpler times when life felt so easy and straightforward, I miss carefree fun with friends I haven’t seen in years, I miss the times when I was not aware of the many injustices, horrors, and disappointments of the world.
I miss when I had all my hair.
I understand the allure of a nostalgic past, but I also recognize and accept that this is a childish impulse — you can enjoy your reminiscences of the past but you have to accept that you can never go back, those days are over and gone and will never return.
It can hurt sometimes, but you cannot go backwards, over forwards.
You certainly can’t go back to an idealized past that never existed, no one can ever go back to a “perfect time when men were men, women were women, and everyone was happy” because such a perfect world has never been.
Our stories of better days in times long gone are just that, stories. So much of what we idealize about the past is the sparkling facade that hides the same rotted structure that we have today. Our society’s have been filled with injustice for a very, very long time and the good times for one group, like men, almost always came at the expense of another group, like women. We have yet to build a world where everyone can agree we are living in the good times because we still insist on the right to exploit others for one reason or another; they have a different skin color, language, or religion, or perhaps they simply have less money and political power, or they have different genitals or are attracted to different people.
There is no going back to the “good old days” because those days were only good for very select people, just as today is only good for a very select few.
But it does not have to be this way.
I won’t pretend to have all the answers, or even most of them. Like most people I am pretty good at identifying problems and making criticisms, but am noticeably less skilled at fixing the issues.
What I can suggest is that we start looking forward rather than always looking back, the solutions to today’s problems will not be found in history books because our problems and needs are new — no other group in history has dealt with the digital age, or climate change, or globalization, or AI, or any of a million other pressing concerns. We cannot look to the past to see how men ought to act because the world of the past no longer exists and the past’s strategies of success are very frequently the cause of today’s problems.
We need to look forward and we need to look to each other.
Throughout history our ideas of masculinity have changed with the times because masculinity is the social role we assign to men and what that social role requires has always been subject to culture and environment.
During warlike times, the definition of masculinity was about violence and strength, the capacity to do war — fighting and killing was what made you successful and useful to society, so fighting and killing was what made a man.
During the industrial revolution manliness was about being a hard worker, a good, mindless cog for the machine — working all day without complaint then getting drunk in the evening to hide his emotions of depression and desperation day after day were what made you successful and useful to society, so being a mindless cog was what made a man.
Today, we live in a world where “softer” traits are becoming far more valuable — late-stage capitalism is grinding us all (the non-rich) into the dust and it is now our ability to communicate, to cooperate, and to care for each other that are more valuable and necessary.
Women are no longer forced by law or financial necessity into a relationship with men which means men have to offer something women want — generally women are not looking for a violent warrior or a drunk, burned-out worker drone anymore, they want a partner who they can rely on to face the innumerable challenges of life at their side.
Our current crisis of masculinity has little to do with masculinity being bad or wrong and a lot more to do with our glorification of the worst parts of masculinity and our refusal to evolve and adapt with our changing culture and environment.
Let’s get to changing.
