The modern masculinity MacGuffin
David Polansky
Marlene Dietrich once remarked that most women set out to try to change a man, and when they have changed him, they do not like him. I thought of this remark while surveying much of the recent commentary on the parlous fate of men these days, the bulk of which is authored by women. It seems that what was once an interpersonal dynamic has now been raised to a sociocultural one.
Whereas our gender reversal of fortune once induced triumphalism, such as Hannah Rosin’s 2013 bestseller, The End of Men, we are now witnessing something like magnanimity in victory. This year, the British feminist Caitlin Moran released a book titled What About Men? revealing her newfound awareness of their unhappy condition. Isabel Berwick, the Financial Times’s careers editor, recently lamented the epidemic of male loneliness both at home and at the office in a piece called “What’s the Problem with Men?” And, perhaps most seriously, the Washington Post’s Christine Emba wrote a much-discussed essay on what she calls a “widespread identity crisis” among men these days. Even the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg has taken a break from hectoring to acknowledge the scope of the problem.
TIPPING CULTURE HAS GOTTEN OUT OF CONTROL
All this suggests that the question of “what is a man for” is not one that exclusively preoccupies men themselves, fearful of being rendered obsolete by a modern, genderless world. It seems that we haven’t yet reached a brave new world peopled predominantly by androgynous meat puppets. Women are seeking male counterparts, yet they are underwhelmed by what they find.
Interestingly, their concerns were prefigured by the now-mostly-forgotten “mythopoetic men’s movement” of the ‘80s and ‘90s, which sought to recover a poetic conception of masculinity via a curious combination of makeshift rituals and Jungian psychology. (It is probably not incidental that the most famous living Jungian is one Jordan B. Peterson.) What they share with their latter-day female counterparts is the sense that there is a deep societal need for positive models of masculine behavior. The trouble in both cases is that the need for a solution for men, particularly young men, is not the same thing as identifying a need for men themselves. This dilemma is one I’ve come to think of as a sociological “flux capacitor” problem, after the device that makes time travel possible in the Back to the Future series. In the films, this is a brilliant screenwriter’s trick, devising a kind of scientific MacGuffin that allows the narrative to proceed smoothly without getting bogged down in the technicalities of time travel.
This is where the conversation about men and modernity has arrived, but that’s about as far as anyone has gotten, so we’re left with an elaborate solution that remains to be conceptualized. There is clearly a problem requiring an answer, but that’s about as far as anyone has gotten, so we’re left with an elaborate placeholder for a solution that remains to be conceptualized. The more sensible liberal female considers the declining social indicators for purposeless young men and would like to move on already to a social arrangement in which they have some purpose beyond playing Call of Duty and some role model beyond Andrew Tate. But sociology is not screenwriting, and there is no ethical equivalent to the flux capacitor that we can simply assign to aimless young men.
Caitlin Flanagan, for example, leans heavily in a recent Atlantic essay on the importance of masculine heroism in a crisis situation. And she’s not wrong! But one wonders how compelling it is to argue that we need to cultivate a comprehensive account of manliness in preparation for scenarios that most men will never encounter and that our society has been heavily engineered to prevent in the first place. (Not to mention the fact that these are tests many men will fail in the crucible.)
Once we acknowledge that the need to establish masculine roles is more pressing than the need for masculinity itself, the cat’s already out of the bag. We can argue, for example, that certain gender roles are salutary or desirable, but having admitted to ourselves that these are in fact roles, they necessarily lose their seriousness. It all becomes a kind of elaborate game. This is, incidentally, why the “trad” accounts one finds on social media have the feel of camp. The men are caricatures of manliness, just as the women are caricatures of womanhood. They have the same uncanny feeling one gets from encountering AI.
I don’t mean to be too harsh here. “Stop treating masculinity like a virus” is not at all bad advice. But one has the sense that these well-meaning observers have recognized a problem without thinking through its full implications or asking what they should start treating masculinity as. There is, I think, the hope that we can mostly keep things as they are while pulling back on some of the excesses of anti-male vilification or offering more outlets for masculine energy. But this is a sociological error; men are not a minority whose relations can be managed via greater religious accommodations or public pleas for tolerance — they are fully half the population.
Moreover, one cannot really grasp the challenge here without addressing the $64,000 question: As Machiavelli would have put it, has the modern world itself been made effeminate? After all, the ultimate male activity is organized violence, and the past 500 years has among other things featured a comprehensive project to control it. “The virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies,” as Francis Fukuyama put it in one of the best passages in The End of History. The passage goes on:
“There will be plenty of metaphorical wars — corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are ‘masters of the universe.’ … But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America.”
Historically, virility was strongly tied to a martial understanding of political life. Both the citizen of the ancient polis and the dynastic noble of the medieval era were at least partly defined by their status as a warrior. The association of manliness with bellicosity with honor would be undone in the modern era, as commerce and industry replaced warmaking as the organizing principle of society, and corresponding forms of government arose alongside it.
Yet, even fairly far into modernity, warmaking remained an organizing social fact. As late as 1960, some 40% of American men over 18 had served in the military. And though this did not confer formal prerogatives, the link with politics remained: In 1975, over 80% of sitting senators were veterans. That link has since thinned considerably, though we have seen various attempts to find a categorical masculine equivalent to war and grand politics. Nonetheless, having delegitimized (or at least degendered) the former central preoccupation of men, we have moved on to comprehensively restrict other traditional domains of male activity, from sports to leisure to boardrooms to fraternal organizations, as they too increasingly lost their raison d’être.
None of this, by the way, should be taken as a call to roll back modernity. Few people today could survey the wars of religion and think, “Yes, we could use more of that.” Nor does this mean that accepting the peace dividends of modern life inevitably means a world of spiritually neutered men. Not necessarily. Even three decades ago, the world looked quite different in this respect, and surely fewer attempts to medicate or demonize young men out of healthy male pursuits would go a long way. The future need not be a battalion of Nurse Ratcheds stamping on a teenage boy’s face forever.
But in a broader sense, this is just one more way in which we are stuck with modernity, and without a clearer understanding of our situation, it is unlikely that we will be able to RETVRN or social science our way out of it.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer. Find him at strangefrequencies.co.