Save the Males

So Many Men Telling Men How To Be Men. Why?

Why aren’t I talking about race, class, etc?

This incredible article — “On Christian Masculinity” by Michael Witcoff — was Gab’s Post of the Day on December 10th. Gab, if you did not know, is what would happen if Facebook and Twitter had a baby but the baby didn’t work very well and was also racist.

Just look at that featured image. Gaze into the piercing blue eyes of this magnificent Aryan specimen. Admire his resplendent military dress. The very picture of masculine strength and competence from the glory days of Western man.

This man, chosen by author Michael Witcoff as avatar of masculinity, is none other than Tsar Nicholas II, a leader well known for his soft and vacillating personality and his deferral to his wife Alexandra in matters of state. The guy who lost his crown because a bunch of women got really angry and his own soldiers were like “yeah, they’ve got a point.”

Great beard, though.

With a start like that, the obvious thing to do is roast the absolute shit out of Witcoff’s article and call it a day. And believe me, “On Christian Masculinity” is Kalua-pig-level roastable: juicy and hilarious.

Do we really need another roast, though? I’m pretty sure half the Internet consists of people making fun of men telling men how to be men. All it does is provide some laughs for people who hate the same things I hate and alienate the people who don’t.

Men keep writing these articles because there is a seemingly bottomless appetite for them. Why? What problem do they address? Why do they resonate so hard with a certain type of young and angry man?

Before we try to answer that, though, we do kind of need to know what the article says.

So let’s have a tiny roast. Just a little one. As a treat.

How to Be A Man

“With every passing generation, men become weaker and more confused.”

Witcoff holds this absolute banger of an opening sentence to be self-evident: that all men are created Weak and Confused, that they are endowed, by their Society, with certain unalienable Problems, that among these are Low Testosterone, Single Mothers, and Female Schoolteachers…

It’s OK, though. Witcoff is going to teach us how to reclaim masculinity using the power of scripture.

This is no easy task. After all, gender is a very complicated thing. What, precisely, is the masculine? Where did it come from? How do we parse the myriad contradictions inherent in the concept and--

Beards. The answer is beards.

Hygiene generally is suspect, as it turns out, but razors are especially problematic. “The beard signifies the courageous,” said Saint Augustine. “For the law says: You shall not mar your beards,” commands the Apostolic Confessions. Clement of Alexandria, however, really goes all-out:

“For one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, to arrange his hair at the looking-glass, to shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them, how womanly!”

It turns out a major bulwark separating the genders is a razor and some shaving cream. No wonder gender fluidity is a thing.

(No word on what all this implies for men who do not grow facial hair. I’ve reached out to Witcoff on Gab and asked about this. If I find out, you’ll be the first to know)

Order, Obedience, Authority

It is, of course, not enough to simply have a glorious beard. One must also act like a man.

Witcoff isn’t like the other male self-help guys, though. He isn’t one of those hedonistic, “Nietzschean” materialists from the pick-up artist (PUA) scene. And he’s not entirely wrong about that. A lot of PUA and manosphere-based ideas of masculinity center around the acquisition of stuff: mostly money, cars, and women. The alpha male and the successful capitalist are indistinguishable. The manosphere exists entirely within the status quo. 

Photo by Nate Johnston

Witcoff does not say any of that stuff about capitalism, of course. Instead, he just points out that this kind of hedonism does not center God and then does what every other right-wing self-help guru does eventually: advocate for rigid, patriarchal authoritarianism.

As a Christian, Witcoff’s authoritarianism features God at the top, man in submission to God, and woman in submission to man. Simply fit yourself properly into this paradigm, grow a luscious beard, and find yourself the manliest of men.

Depresingly predictable. Boring as hell. Whatever the problem, whatever the presentation: authoritarianism is always the far-right solution. More hierarchy. More structure. A place for everyone, and everyone in their place. Obey the people above you. Control the ones below.

Hard to blame them for sticking with a winning formula, though. Authoritarianism has incredible appeal.

Why?

A Spiritual Crisis

Let’s read that first sentence one more time:

“With every passing generation, men become weaker and more confused.”

We are so used to rhetoric like that on the right that we no longer register how profoundly strange it is to feel that way about oneself. Try it with some other groups and watch what happens:

“With every passing generation, women become weaker and more confused.”

“With every passing generation, Black people become weaker and more confused.”

I enjoyed typing neither of those sentences, and I suspect neither group in question enjoyed reading them. As a woman, my reaction to an article that started with such a sentence would not be “Tell me more,” but instead “We’re done here, goodbye, fuck off.”

Young men, however, line up around the block to hear that shit about themselves. I mean this literally. I have personally stood in a line that wrapped around a city block to hear Jordan Peterson speak. 

What a man. "Jordan Peterson" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Peterson is the most infamous self-help grifter of our age, but he’s far from the only one. And none of these grifts work without a large pool of unhappy customers filled to the brim with self-hatred and insecurity.

This is a very sad thing.

It is both tragic and disturbing that an enormous number of young men feel this awful about themselves and their future. 

Jordan Peterson and Michael Witcoff cannot solve that problem, but it is a big problem.

The knee-jerk reaction of most left-of-centers to this kind of white male angst is a big eyeroll and a jerking-off motion. Oh look, the white men are sad. The most privileged group in America feels unfulfilled. Read the fucking room, guys. The American legal system is essentially a meat grinder for Black men, trans people experience violent crime four times more often than cis people, one out of every six women will experience rape in her lifetime. Stop crying.

Imagine a shipwreck. No rescue in sight. There you are, treading water, and someone floats by clinging to a spar of wood. That person is doing a lot better than you, but both of you are going to die if someone doesn’t come along soon and change this situation. 

This is true even if the guy with the spar of wood is being a total dick about it.

Photo by Matt Hardy

Things Could Be Better

Some of us are doing better than others. But the world, right now, is pretty bad for everyone. There are plenty of reasons to feel isolated, alone, and powerless in America right now.

Economic insecurity

78 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. One in four Americans have no emergency savings. Over 20 percent of Americans are either unemployed or underemployed. As of September 2021, almost 10 percent of Americans faced food insecurity and a staggering 33 percent faced possible eviction. 

Social isolation

Americans move far more often than people in Europe do, often because of work. Many of us are always just passing through; eternal strangers. These moves also take us far away from extended family. Nuclear families aren’t exactly robust either: a third of American marriages end in divorce. 

(I am not saying that moving and divorce are necessarily bad–I live very far away from my family and am divorced. But family does not dependably provide us with community)

We are a rootless people, forever forging and breaking connections. No wonder, in 2019, over 20 percent of Americans reported feeling “serious loneliness.” That number skyrocketed to 36 percent of the overall population during the pandemic, and 61 percent of people ages 18-25.

Politically Powerless

The myth of democracy seems quaint when we look at the obscene amount of power wielded by someone like Elon Musk, who regularly moves the stock market with a single tweet. Shadowy corporate donors pour fortunes into political projects. Lobbyists regularly override public opinion and expose the lie of our supposedly democratic system. The Senate recently voted 67-30 to sell arms to Saudi Arabia to facilitate continued Saudi murder of the Yemeni people, even though 64 percent of voters across the political spectrum oppose the deal.

Don’t even get me started on Jeffrey Epstein.

In what meaningful sense can we call this rule by the people?

With so much helplessness and such little prospect of change, you’d have to be crazy not to struggle with feelings of emptiness and sadness right now.

Identity Crisis

The concrete effects of this broken and dangerous system weigh heaviest on women and minority groups. But the emotional fallout, I think, hits men the hardest. 

The concept of masculinity centers the ideal of individual power, control over one’s destiny. Ambition. Aggression. Competence. When a man feels weak, or powerless, or unable to provide for himself, it reads as an attack on identity. A crisis of economics, or isolation, or political corruption, becomes a crisis of masculinity. Men do not feel this way. Something is wrong with me.

Dismiss that spiritual pain at your peril. Mental health problems kill people all the time. Suicide is the second most common cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 34. And rates are skyrocketing. 

And guess what group kills themselves most often? Like, 3.7 times more often? 

Men.

Authoritarian Mirage

Authoritarianism seems to offer a solution for emasculated men: a guaranteed and relatively-privileged place in society. A simple role to fill. Some people will be in control of you. You will be in control of some people. You will, by default, possess the things men are supposed to possess, whether that’s a shiny car (PUAs) or an obedient Christian wife (Orthodoxy). You will be able to stop worrying. Things are going to be OK.

Except, no. Things will not be OK.

The biggest reason to oppose authoritarianism is the massive amount of impoverished, exploited, miserable people required to man the very bottom of the pyramid. But even if you don’t care about that–even if you’re OK with sacrificing justice for your physical/emotional/spiritual comfort–it still won’t work.

In practice, authoritarianism requires someone like God at the top: someone incorruptible, capable of dispensing justice. But even if God exists, the people who claim to speak for Him are human, and humans are often trash. Rulers and leaders are anything but infallible. You expect justice from above? You expect stasis and harmony?

Have you met people?

But even if it worked as advertised, authoritarianism would still suck. At its best, rigid power structures offer absolute security. Zero agency. The life of an infant. The comfort of never facing challenges, never dealing with change.

This is not freedom from unhappiness, but a prison that binds you. It is the ultimate emasculation.

Leftist Abdication

What we need is not a regression into an imagined dusty age of stultified certainty, but an entirely new way of being. What we need is leftism.

Leftist thought can parse the root causes of these problems. It can offer real solutions that elevate everyone’s quality of life. It can fix these systemic problems and offer something better.

So why isn’t the Left writing these self-help articles for men?

The far right exploits spiritual agony to recruit armies of the furious disaffected into their ranks. They offer bad solutions to real problems, and seduce countless unhappy people into a world of fury, violence, and misery.

Why has the left–a movement with actual solutions to problems faced by masculine people–ceded that ground entirely to the far right?

We’ll talk about that next week.

Read Part 2

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