Men and Boys Need Better Ideas but Most Likely Won't Get Them
[[[But What about Men?]]]
Hey Regular Subscribers. This is another post unrelated to my normal Galesburg content. I may end up making a separate stream for this different content in the future. But I hope you enjoy this anyway.
Recently, internet hyper-misogynist Andrew Tate was arrested in Romania. The man who presented as a hyper-masculine alpha was brought up on charges of human trafficking, which isn’t too much of a surprise since he bragged about profiting from human trafficking on his website. Nonetheless, this man who’s online persona always strived to present the most masculine image possible was appealing to young men. Tate seemed to offer a new vision for young men who are kinda lost in this world. To those men, Tate showed that you could still take some of the worst aspects of masculinity and be successful despite the feminist haters.
Tate isn’t the only figure on the internet appealing to downtrodden young boys and men. There are characters like The Liver King who sells to young men the idea that through sleep, eating liver, and exercise you can get massively shredded and lead the good life our ancestors had, all while he was secretly doing massive amounts of steroids.
Or there is Jordan Peterson, who sells a different vision to young men. He promotes ideas as banal as it’s good to clean your room all the way to the apparent claim that since lobsters have social hierarchies that existing human hierarchies are natural, good, and that any inequalities that exist from those hierarchies are justifiable.
Or this can manifest in communities, such as the online incel community. This group is lonely young men getting together to commiserate their loneliness and “take the black pill” which amounts to giving up all hope that their situation will ever get better and being as resentful and misogynistic as possible about it. There have been mass shootings inspired by inceldom.
I’m not here to say that Andrew Tate, The Liver King, Jordan Peterson, and incels are all the same or equivalent. But they all are symptoms of the issue that there are men and boys who are hurting and those men and boys are looking for answers.
The recent book, Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves, is a good look into the picture of how men are hurting and falling behind. More men and boys are dying from deaths of despair such as suicide and drug overdose, 3 times more than women. Fewer young men are getting into and graduating college as compared to young women. Boys are also having a harder time in K-12 education, are more likely to drop out, and are more likely to not participate in the labor force altogether. These issues are happening across the developed world and are also more likely to affect men and boys of lower socio-economic status and of minorities.
Reeves’ book is wonderful at spelling out the numbers and figures of how men are falling behind, but lacks actionable solutions with results in the short term. The book is written in the style of public policy books and contains a big public policy solution: hold boys back a year in school. This is due to boy’s brains developing slower in the prefrontal cortex region than girl’s, the part of the brain that houses impulse control. So the idea is to hold boys back a year to be on a more level playing field in regards to brain maturity. While this change may do some good we’re looking at a minimum of a 15-20 year headway on seeing results. Even then what would we do about the men who are past schooling age who are struggling now? Reeves has admitted himself that the book was more a statement of the problem and not necessarily a vehicle to propose a specific set of solutions.
There isn’t going to be one solution, it’s going to take many solutions and efforts. It’s going to take a whole change of mind and practice towards these issues. It’s going to require a gender movement of some kind to take hold. Feminism did wonders for women over the last 100+ years, but what about men?
Feminism has been very good for Women
Without a doubt Feminism has been one of the most successful and enduring political and intellectual social movements of the last 150 years. First Wave Feminism established that women were indeed people and should have the right to vote. Second Wave Feminism unshackled women from norms and laws that arbitrarily kept them from fully enjoying society, such as being confined to only being a housewife or being unable to get a bank account without a man cosigning. Third Wave Feminism has been dealing with sexual harassment and women’s power in relationships, work, business, government, and society as a whole.
While feminism hasn’t achieved all of its goals it has still accomplished so much and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. While some issues like the overturning of Roe have set women back, there doesn’t seem to be a credible movement to make women property again. Feminism has freed millions or even billions of women from living lives as second class citizens as indentured servants to their husbands. 150 years ago the idea that women are as free as they are today would be crazy, and this change should be celebrated.
And why would their current freedom be seen as crazy? Because the system of patriarchy completely dominated women in what their lives could be. The rules affected half of all people, keeping essentially all women on the sidelines. We could argue endlessly if there were good cultural or biological reasons for that patriarchy to exist, but to me it is useless to have the debate because we know now that whatever those reasons were aren’t relevant today. Women are free to be who they want to be today and that is great!
But how did we get here? Sure there was the gradual movement and granting of rights to women, but how did that happen? The arch of history didn’t just bend towards justice all on its own. One thing that actually benefited the movement was that the evils of patriarchy affected all women. This meant that these same arcane rules affected the smart, ambitious, and/or rich women just as much as poor women. While the average poor woman might not have been able to do much, those smart, ambitious, and rich women were able to form ideas to fight the unjust system and work toward enacting them. They had lives they wanted to live and the patriarchy was standing in their way, so they were motivated to do something about it.
Earlier I called feminism both a political AND an intellectual movement, this is key. Since feminism fights for a new vision of the future, there needs to be intellectual and theoretical legs for it to stand on. It has always been part of the feminist movement that ideas needed to be developed and then the masses of women had to buy into them. Remember, women didn’t all just go along with all the ideas of feminism right away, they needed to be convinced. Also importantly words and language needed to be given to phenomena that women were experiencing. Books, literature, pamphlets, and meetings have been core to the success of feminism since its earliest days. If anything, the movement develops theory of what the world should be, convinces women that they want that future, and then works to politically lock in those changes.
Women of today didn’t just figure out how to live in this new world individually all on their own. Sure there was trial and error and every individual has to find their own unique individual life, but there were also intellectuals and theorists who gave women tools to better navigate their new modern lives.
Feminism but for men?
Is it possible to take the framework of what feminism did and apply it to men? It’s complicated. I think it’s possible to have a men’s gender theory intellectual movement, but it won’t form in exactly the same way it formed for feminism.
First, there are no universal laws or rules keeping men down. The problem for men today is more of a malaise, a feeling of aimlessness, and less that the law is specifically keeping men from flourishing. There are no rights that men are lacking, and there isn’t anything obvious that men need liberating from. There isn’t much for men to organize against.
Secondly, which ties into the first, is that since these issues aren’t affecting smart, ambitious, and rich men there is little chance those men are going to take up these issues. It actually seems that the smart, ambitious, and rich men run and will continue to run the majority of society for the foreseeable future. They aren’t feeling the same malaise, even when they are the ones most needed to help those boys and men at the bottom.
Lastly, the branding of men’s issues is toxic. The subtitle of this essay is even a cheeky reference to this. There has been a long tradition of using men’s issues as a debate trick to try to deflect from talking about women’s issues. “But what about men'' has often been muttered by people who aren’t really interested in men's issues but want to shut down conversation of women’s issues. Men’s issues have almost only ever been discussed by either grifters looking to cash in on men’s misery or reactionaries trying to rally men to overturn the successes of feminism. Whether this is because these are the only people speaking to men or the men themselves are being misogynistic, most speakers who talk about “men’s issues” really only express anger at specific grievances they have with women.
I believe this is because there is very little positive theory for men on how to live a good life as a man in a post-patriarchal society. Now you may argue that there is still the patriarchy which is a position I agree with, but I think we can also agree we are long past the most extreme forms of patriarchy. And even if we aren’t living in a post-patriarchal world now, theoretically how would men live in such a world?
We are past the point where old cultural notions and norms for men are of value to today’s men. How are we expected to take ideas of masculinity from the past and apply them to today when even 15-20 years ago it was seen as deeply unmanly for one man to even hug another man?
Feminist intellectuals had to develop theories for how women could live in the world unshackled from rigid tradition. This happened because women were actively moving towards lives in which the old cultural norms provided no guidance. In order to live these new lives they needed to develop new ideas to help guide women. This same societal change from the men’s perspective has been a passive change into new lives but no new ideas were prepared to guide men on how to live as post-patriarchal men.
As I see it, the real issue is that we don’t have a real toolkit on how to handle these changes. In the absence of such a toolkit there are plenty of people willing to tell men that the issue is actually women and their newfound rights. I believe the advances for women have been great, but we also need a framework for how men can flourish as men while still respecting those advances in women’s rights.
There is clearly a need for a men’s utopian intellectual project in the same vein as feminism that isn’t centered on the notion of returning to the old days. When men’s issues arise we sometimes go to feminists to try to get answers, after all they are the people who think about gender. But feminists will never truly have good answers on what a better future would be for men because at the end of the day feminism was made for women by women. That’s kinda how it has to be. How successful would the feminist movement have been if the ideas were developed by men? They would not have been nearly as convincing to the masses of women, it wouldn’t have been successful.
There has long been an intellectual criticism of “male as norm”, that ideas and language default to the male perspective and that women are seen as just men with uteruses. This has led to much philosophical and intellectual work to flesh out ideas for women and explore what it means to be a woman and what you as a woman can be. Since then, we are now in a situation where the old literature that was coded as male not having nearly similar gender guidance muster.
For a personal example, I have found great value in the philosophical traditions of Stoicism and Existentialism. The main philosophers in these traditions; Marcus Aurelias, Seneca, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sarte, Albert Camus, are indeed all men. But the philosophy doesn’t offer any true direction on how to specifically live as a man in our culture, but really only gives general ideas of how to navigate life. Maybe women don’t get as much out of these philosophical traditions, but men aren’t necessarily walking away with great tools for living specifically as a man. If anything the “male as norm” has come around to the point that the male existence and social condition is just assumed and not worthy to be examined on its own.
And it’s hard to talk about these issues because we don’t yet have the language for it, it hasn’t been developed. If I want to read a book about being a man I really only have religious or “return to tradition” books on offer. There isn’t a normie liberal or even leftist positive vision of what manhood could be, there is no positive future being envisioned.
At times it feels like the most guidance we have as men is to not be toxic or misogynistic. These are 100% valid in their own right, but that’s a negative vision of what manhood should be. We know what we shouldn’t be doing in order to be a good man in today’s society, but what things should we be doing that’s good for society and fulfilling for us?
In Conclusion
So if anything, I am saying that men need their own intellectual tradition in a similar vein to feminism. We'll have an issue making this happen because the types of men who would work on the issues; the smart, ambitious, and rich men, are not affected by these issues thus not compelled to work on them. There’s also not much to really organize around other than “the vibes are off”. But until we can get a new vision of manhood made by men for men that broad swathes of men can buy into, we’re going to continue to have men and boys drifting away aimlessly in our society.
I also want to stress that we don’t need a competing intellectual movement, one that aims to stick it to women and to refute feminism. No, we can have a men’s gender intellectual movement that co-exists with feminism and the other gender theorists who are outside the binary. The genders don’t need to compete, but everyone needs their own tools for self-realization.
Men need a vision of what to work towards, what they can be. It’ll need broad appeal, and it’ll need its theorists. Until some serious thinkers come to work on this we’ll be stuck with the likes of Andrew Tate, The Liver King, Jordan Peterson, and angry men in Reddit comment threads. Sure all of those may offer some small positive help to some men, but we need a more unified framework. Right now the men’s gender intellectual space is very stereotypically masculine in structure, lone wolves trying to make it on their own.
Men need a unified group that can theorize, debate, and organize together. We aren’t quite in a place yet to find the solutions to men’s issues, but we can at least work towards organizing and theorizing in a way that’ll find those solutions. Feminism didn’t get where it is today all at once, it was built on the backs of many many women all contributing their little bit. So it’ll be that with men too, bit by bit, getting our thoughts out, and hopefully finding a more hopeful future for more men in this new world.