Here's what I think the core issue is, though—most men today are brought up by a woman.
Then they are going to school dominated by female traits—such as rule following and socialization—taught mostly by female teachers who are also government employees.
By the time they get out of this system, they have no male role models... they have no direction.
Typically and traditionally, men have always had to prove themselves through rites of passage—and men aren't able to do that today.
Who did they have to prove themselves to? Other men. Men had to compete and win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal.
Nothing like that exists today except the military, and not even that.
I think regarding rule-following and socialization as female traits is an effect not a cause. They've always been a key part of the military, for example.
My feeling based on my experience is not that (some) boys struggle with rule-following in school because rule-following is female coded. They struggle with following rules in school because the rules are enforced by females.
Speaking as a man who's been in the position of trying to enforce school rules and get students to follow and take them seriously, I don't think the boys who struggle with school rules do so because the people who're enforcing them are mostly women.
Some students struggle with following rules, whoever is enforcing them (although some are selective depending on which authority figures they like.) In my experience, there are more boys out on the tails for poor rule following, whoever is enforcing them
Do you know *how* the military historically inculcated obedience the authority in men?
Psychological and physical abuse, summary executions, and the promise of rape and plunder.
Even in modern professional armies, boot camp is about psychologically breaking the recruits to compel discipline and adherence to orders. And those are people who signed up to be there.
I'm not saying the military is completely wonderful, and I personally would never function well in it, but I'm saying that this particular path of having to prove oneself as a man is what we need to figure out today.
They struggle with following the rules because the rules are enforced according to female norms. Boys do well with rules and structure as long as those rules and structure provide avenues for competition, are clearly defined such that "unwritten rules" are minimized, and allow for roughhousing slightly more violent than most women are comfortable with.
There's a reason unruly boys are rarely as disruptive and disrespectful toward their coaches as they are toward their teachers. And it's because sports discipline is still built around male social norms. Messing around means physical pain (push-ups, laps, etc ) and letting down your team. And there's plenty of opportunity to burn energy through some safe, structured violence.
My father likes to say that the most important part of our weekly boy scout meetings was the 45 minutes of unstructured sport where we would play things like full contact tackle football. It regularly resulted in scrapes, bruises, and heated arguments, and the occasional mom stopping by would be horrified, but this was a vital part of male bonding that most of us had been largely denied throughout the rest of our lives. Getting our energy out, engaging in good-spirited competition, learning to resolve disputes among ourselves, these were all extremely important aspects of growing up.
And then once we were done and had retucked our now-ripped shirts we immediately fell in line to do our military-style flag salute to beginbthe meeting proper. You can't get the discipline without also providing some kind of outlet for all that boy energy.
Frankly, this is why I feel like things like Boy Scouts are a valuable and underappreciated organization. (I know they admit girls now as Scouting America, but troops are still gender segregated and it's still mostly boys)
It is a way that instills 'masculine values', with a sense of vaguely military-inspired discipline. Scoutmasters (at least if you have a good one) can act as good male role-models. It has a sense of proving themselves and rites of passage (rising in the ranks, especially reaching Eagle Scout). Scout campouts are places where horseplay and just messing around in the woods can happen.
But it also directs these masculine values towards socially good things like community service
100% the erosion of boys-only spaces is a massive shame in my opinion. Before getting into sports in high school, boy scouts was basically the one "safe space" we had to be boys without the judgement of women. The one place where the rules and vibes felt like they were built specifically for us, as opposed to the incredibly feminine norms at school (no running, no hitting, direct competition discouraged). We were able to burn off energy playing capture the flag, football, or sometimes literally just fighting/wrestling, almost completely unsupervised, then were ready to learn valuable life skills and develop civic-mindedness. And the highly structured progression, built around concepts of self-improvement and requiring the seeking out of older male mentors (the only way to earn merit badges was to look up a local person certified as a counselor for that badge and prove to them, to whatever their personal standard was, your mastery of the subject) provided a wonderful road map to manhood, to borrow a phrase from the review.
I remember Cub Scouts being a nightmare of bullying, and when we were out on hikes with the Boy Scouts, the Scout Master was a bullying asshole and he made his senior Scouts into little martinets. After one year as a Cub Scout, I never went back. Scouting taught me to *disrespect* authority at an early age. Later, I discovered that Scouting is predominantly run by LDS, and I realized that the bullying is probably a reflection the Mormon patriarchal worldview. Anyway, I didn't let my stepson join Cub Scouts.
I had a very similar experience as a Cub Scout\Webelo, and was hopeful that our local den would be a better experience for my son. The very first day we attended our first meeting, a group of boys tried to "vote my son out" of the group, and I had to use every ounce of emotional reserve to not deck the Scout leader who allowed it to happen. Scouting sucks
I have plenty of problems with Boy Scouts of America, but my experience was drastically different that yours.
The LDS church did sponsor a large number of scout troops, but unless you were involved specifically with an LDS troop, it would be quite unfair to blame them for your troop's poor behavior. The LDS church never sponsored a majority of BSA troops, and the leadership of the national organization was a corporation, not the church.
I have never even heard of a boy scout troop (usually 12-18 year olds) that took cub scouts (usually 8-11 year olds) out on hikes. My troop, and every one I've ever heard of, was age segregated. I was in an LDS troop that had almost none of the problems you experienced.
The LDS church also got out of scouting 6 or 7 years ago, so I didn't have my son in scouting. I can't speak to its current incarnation.
I agree that Boy Scouts is great. It definitely helped me. The ethos of thinking about how dangerous everything could be and making plans for how to handle the possible danger appealed to my adolescent self, and was probably very good for me.
Boy Scouts is an example though of how this isn't just, or maybe even primarily, a problem of bad people taking away the good institutions that could help boys learn how to be men. There's a general problem in society of good institutions being outcompeted by video games, streaming video, and such.
We had a cub scout pack and By Scout troop that helped my older son a lot.
The program ended up destroyed when we got a new jerk-ass Scoutmaster who deliberately and blatantly sabotaged the program, uninviting my younger son and then, unable to do any more subtle damage, took a handful of Boy Scouts to another troop and announced by himself to the sponsor organization that the troop was over.
I would agree a lack of plentiful (and healthy) male mentors is a large part of the issue.
Without plenty of healthy male role models and mentors, it's very easy for some manosphere creep to convince a fifteen-year-old that getting a woman requires becoming some form of predator.
With more male mentors, it would be easy for boys to see that "being a man" has many definitions, and there are many paths available to becoming an attractive and self-actualized individual.
I say that "rule following and socialization" are not "female traits," they are *human* traits that are absolutely necessary to have any kind of society larger and more complex than a sub-Dunbar-number hunter-gatherer band.
Are you implying that to be male is to be an antisocial rule-breaker? Because if so, that's the problem right there.
And lest you think I'm just writing from some man-hating woke perspective: at the dojo where I practice, the men are very much into rule following and socialization: like, follow the traditional rituals (e.g., bow when entering and leaving the dojo; don't wear shoes in the dojo), listen respectfully to the leader, respect your fellow karateka, don't lash out in anger, etc. Doesn't make them any less manly!
Reminder that the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by a men's movement in the 80's (the mythopoetic men's movement), not feminism.
Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad? Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing. Going to literally die in a war is not optimal, it's better to protest or donate money. I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people. You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
I can see how these requirements might seem hard to navigate if you're autistic or prone to extremely literal thinking tho, which many people in the Bay Area programming circles probably are.
A lot of this also seems so... American? It's like Americans feel the need to have some Grand Goals and a Purpose and Values, otherwise they feel like shit. Probably disproportionately men. But not everywhere is like this. I've felt the difference, from the US vs Scandinavia.
Also the idea that the patriarchy / sexism hurts men too is not, as the author seems to think, some big revelation that challenges contemporary feminism. It's a very common observation of feminist writers!
It does seem to be very common in higher-quality feminist discourse, but much less so in pop feminism where that part of feminist theory is often ignored completely or only given token acknowledgement.
Pop feminism is in the water supply, while more serious discourse tends to be something that one needs to seek out, so I understand how casual observers can just see the pop feminist memes and not realize the deeper theory is a thing.
The idea that contemporary feminism might be exhibiting a lot of that sexism is anathema to them, though. But it is - they are - and they deserve nothing but withering contempt for failing to humanize men.
Yeah it did feel like it was responding to a caricature of "polite society" rather than actually engaging with what people believe. Which puts it in this weird middle ground because the people who write in sophisticated ways about gender would mostly agree, and the vast majority of median Americans have never even engaged with the question, and still uncritically stick to traditional gender roles. So not sure who it's aimed at.
> Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing.
Women are better at reading emotions than men, and demanding men perform with the same skill as women here is akin to demanding that women perform as well in realms of physical strength and endurance.
And aggression *is* a good thing when directed and controlled. It's actively harmful to repress everything from brawling to raised voices.
> Going to literally die in a war is not optimal, it's better to protest or donate money.
Neither of those things are going to protect the people you care about from hostile force.
> I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people.
How much suffering and misery does this have to create before you acknowledge that the real world has an influence on identity and meaning?
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
If you're not going to reward people for being decent, and instead call literally anything they do "the bare minimum", you will not get decent people. You will instead get resentment, hate and rage. And, for a lot of people pushing this line, that seems to be the point.
Women are *slightly* better on average, yeah. The difference is not nearly as stark as physical strenght. If you think men are basically buffoons at reading basic emotions, then you might be in a bubble (ie the Bay Area with its focus on tech).
I'll take the controlled agression point. I guess I'd describe controlled agression with a different adjective.
Being a soldier is most often heroic, but I'd still prefer violence and war not happen. I think it is nice that the human race is less violent now than other time periods.
In my experience, more people are liberated by less focus on rigid gender roles, but that is obviously hard to measure.
How do you suggest we reward people for being decent? I'm a fan of verbally complimenting people I love for doing basic things (the dishes or whatnot), but I'm not sure what you should do on a society-wide basis.
> Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad?
I would firmly agree that many of the values of the current "map to manhood" are indeed good. I would love to live in a society with more emotionally adept individuals, less aggression, less war, etc.
Where the map fails is assuming that it's enough to just state these morals (ie: "don't be aggressive"), and morally shame those who fail. Testosterone is going to naturally cause aggressive tendencies in most young men. Telling them "don't be aggressive" is like telling someone with anxiety "don't be anxious." It usually doesn't work, and if you shame them when your loose guidance fails, it only breeds resentment and a lack of self-esteem.
What's missing is the actual *directions* for the map. The part that says, "You're male, so you're probably going to feel more aggression than most girls. Don't feel ashamed for that! You're not a bad person for it. But you DO need to learn how to properly channel that aggression into good things, like protecting the weak. Let's walk through some concrete steps on how you can do that..."
> I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people.
I would agree that obsession is not a good thing. But there has to be some acknowledgement of the difference of lived experiences, and the fact that the same goals often require different paths/efforts from different genders.
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
I believe being a good person who meets society's expectations is something that does indeed deserve a reward. In fact, I believe if you *don't* reward this, it's very harmful to social cohesion. (That reward, of course, must be within reason. Obviously a man doesn't deserve to sleep with any woman he wants just because he checked off the boxes on the "good person" list. But laying out clear and healthy rewards is a vital part of the map that's currently missing.)
> A lot of this also seems so... American? It's like Americans feel the need to have some Grand Goals and a Purpose and Values, otherwise they feel like shit.
I have no doubt the individualism in America exacerbates these issues. But if you look at other Western countries, you see the same stats that show men are floundering when it comes to education, to careers, to drug abuse, etc. So I don't believe this is entirely an American problem.
I think it's extremely human to crave a purpose and a role, and I think many Westerners currently feel they are lacking those things. Obviously, gender is only one facet of role/purpose, but it's a big one that deserves consideration.
> We need more high-profile, morally-sound men who openly discuss what it’s like to live with a testosterone-dominated body and how they learned to channel their natural instincts into positive and productive outcomes.
Well, I'm not high-profile yet, but I am taking on challenge made here!
Society (read: women) needs to realize that the positive male role models are going to be someone they *tolerate*, not someone they *like*.
Pre-coma Jordan Peterson was fine. You didn't have to like him, but you could tolerate him, and he was mostly about fixing men so they'd be better for the women in their lives.
Keep on vetoing the lobstermans and eventually you are left with the Tates.
Oh wow! On the substack app, most full length articles can be read out loud by AI generating text-to-voice. There's a male voice and a female voice. Which one is chosen by the writer.
I think this hits the nail on the head. The left doesn't have a clear point at which they tell a man "you did a good job at being a man" and the right basically requires you to either be Christian or an asshole.
Yeah, I mean I think the alt-right manosphere does tend to lead men to be assholes. I am sure that there are some people on the right who fulfill the more traditional male role (provider, father, community pillar) without the adde Christianity, but I would say that the men who are doing that are ovewhelmingly Christian (which is definitely a sampling bias)
Also, I actually think that the left has made a massive mistake by becoming unclear (and often actively negative) on the topic; my time at college was not supportive towards becoming a whole person in that way, while simultaneously seeming ineffective at protecting women from predatory men. I don't think that the left being simply "unclear" about it puts them ahead of the right on this topic; I have a lot more respect for the compassionate Christian groups on helping lost young men figure their lives out.
The only reason the manosphere is on the Right is because the Left hates men. There's nothing inherent in the different movements within that category that's actually right-wing.
> simultaneously seeming ineffective at protecting women from predatory men
This is not an accident. You protect women by 1) Elevating protective men and 2) Teaching women not to make themselves vulnerable. The first is bad because men are bad, and the second is bad because it's "blaming the victim" and suggests that women have agency and responsibility.
There's a reason the "male feminist" is almost always a creep, if not outright a rapist, and that's because the only men who will embrace such a model are men who will exploit it.
I feel like you understand my position a bit more clearly now, so I'm glad of that.
I think there are a few other important steps that my college missed (having rules that say that professors can't sleep with grad students for one, actually taking students seriously when they say that their boss is pushing them into a sexual relationship, etc.) But I do agree that your two points are also good when correctly implemented (what cannot be made bad by poor implementation?)
This was a strong and thoughtful essay, but I'm always a bit baffled by how many people think that being lost, depressed, and miserable is a universal experience.
Maybe I'm wrong, but most people I know seem pretty ok? Maybe there's some stress or whatever, but for most people I know life is good.
Maybe you're surrounded by people who're mostly okay, but maybe you don't associate with the people around you in contexts that lead them to expose how not-okay they are
Had the same thought. There's probably huge selection bias here: people who are mostly fine are hanging out with other people who are mostly fine, and people who are dysfunctional are more likely to find themselves in dysfunctional communities.
Yes, this. Except a lot of the dysfunctional probably aren't in community at all, so solipsism also plays a role.
There's also a life stages thing going on here. Being in your 20s, adapting to adult life, is disorienting for a lot of people. Probably goes double for people in magnet cities like SF that are likely to have moved away from friends and family.
But I was thinking of the fact that F3 (my workout group) is my most frequent point of socialization with other men. Working out hard outdoors at 0530 multiple times per week has to be an intense selection factor against depression and dysfunction.
I don't know about depressed and miserable, but most people have some problem in their life which prevents them from self-actualising. Depending on the person it can eat them up inside.
The title is "Men in the Bay" and the author has several paragraphs of preface saying this reflects the sort of men who live in the bay, #notallmen. I'd venture to say this sample aren't all men in the Bay, either, just set of men who find enough mutual attraction with the author to end up on a date with her, and of those, probably just a subset who are recognizable as a "type".
I don't know, found myself instinctively trying to put myself into one of the boxes, but I'm a married man and not in the bay, and grew up conservative, so it's probably, as they say, not for me.
I think there's a pretty basic unifying factor about all these guys; they're still on the dating market. I know a lot of guys who I think are doing great, in a variety of different ways, but pretty much uniformly all the "doing great" guys are married. The handful of dudes I know who are still single (I'm around 40, as are most of my friends)...you can generally identify why that's the case, and these buckets are broad enough that most will fall into one.
Dating at, say, 22 would probably capture a very different population of men than dating at 35, since the 22 year olds who you'd be most excited to date generally aren't gonna still be dating a decade plus later.
I should add, though, that I don't think this invalidates this as an interesting set of observations. "What's up with the men who aren't doing great" is an important question in itself, it's just a different question than "what's up with all men".
I was going to say something very similar but you beat me to it.
>Dating at, say, 22 would probably capture a very different population of men than dating at 35, since the 22 year olds who you'd be most excited to date generally aren't gonna still be dating a decade plus later.
There are a couple other factors here. One is that at 22, you're likely to be fairly immature yourself in such a way that your partners' immaturity is less likely to bother you or to be readily apparent as the root cause when it does lead to problems. Being at least somewhat directionless and immature when you're in your early 20s is so commonplace as to be unremarkable.
Another factor is that people vary in how much and how quickly they grow out of youthful immaturity, and that correlates with finding a healthy relationship in a synergistic way. Being in a healthy relationship anchors you and helps you grow, while people who are more mature tend to be at least somewhat better at finding good partners and forming and sustaining healthy relationships..
Yeah if a male friend said most of this stuff to me I'd tell them that their actual problem wasn't with dating and gender but needing antidepressants. Not in a dismissive way, but a lot of this reads like the sort of thing I thought when I was younger and depressed. And I just assumed was normal. But it really isn't.
Isn’t it a mistake to see all this and continue thinking these men need help “becoming a man”? They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
I know women who fell into each one of those archetypes (with a pseudo-feminist, less violent but still sexist gender flipped version substituting for manosphere). This and the “male loneliness crisis” seems to me like the symptoms of an atomised society where community ties are no longer solid, and while perhaps men are a more affected to a certain degree (especially in America perhaps), the causes are not gender specific at all.
I think it makes sense to frame it like that because, at least as the author has experienced it, men at large are struggling to find themselves and occupy a niche that feels right for them I'm society, in a way that's different from what women are experiencing.
If you build a framework for "how to become a person," and find that it's failing half your population, or failing both halves of your population in distinctly different ways, then you'd probably be better off separating out different frameworks.
I don’t see how there’s much about being a man that needs male specific advice with regards to finding fulfilment and happiness. Having deep friendships and a sense of community, hobbies, a well rounded personality, having a job you like, avoiding burn-out, not falling for online communities that preys on your identity (there’s equivalents of the manosphere for being a woman, Asian, gay, trans, white, conservative, anything you can imagine, teaching you to feel angry, victimised and powerless), being able to identify and talk about your feelings. Those are all universal things.
The later seems weirdly contentious but I think men’s unwillingness to talk in depth to their friends about their emotions is largely social. If you look at the historical record, deep emotions, physical affection between friends, strong emotional ties, etc were perfectly normal to have between men. Even in this article, some of the men jumped at the chance to trauma dump and treat their date as a therapist precisely because they were denied that due to social norms.
I agree that men's reservations about talking in-depth with their friends about their emotions is social and historically contingent, but I don't think that makes it less a distinct men's issue. In our modern context, our social environment is one where few men feel like they have appropriate outlets to share their emotional issues, and even if that's not inherent to the experience of being a man throughout history, it manifests for men today in a way that's distinct from what women ordinarily experience in present day society.
Sure, but the solution to that isn’t to bring back rites of passage and a path to manhood, but to free men of stifling gender roles and expectations that make little sense in today’s world, and let them have nurturing male *and* female role models. I’m not blaming individual men for this; this will take a social effort from all genders.
I think the experience of navigating life while being full of testosterone is different enough that you need a path that addresses manhood. It's procrustean to look for a one-size-fits-all solution.
I don't know what the solution is. Scott had an essay, years and years back, where he discussed differences in how strongly people associate with their gender, how much it's important to them as a facet of how they interact with reality, versus how much it feels like an incidental fact about themselves. I think I'm a fair ways towards the side of feeling like my gender is something incidental to myself, and not core to my identity, although I'm not at the far extreme for that. Some people's gender identity seems to matter less to them than mine does, but to a lot of people, it seems to matter much more, and compared to when I was younger, I'd say I'm now more open to the idea that a healthy and stable society might be one which features distinct gender roles and differing expectations around them.
I mentioned this in another comment, but you are missing the fact that "father" and "mother" are distinct social roles.
There are roles that are undifferentiated by sex, such as "employee", "taxpayer", or "tenured professor". There are also roles that can be undifferentiated, but can also have some differentiation by sex or traditional gender roles. For example, obstetricians or novelists. While many of the things that make a good obstetrician are not specific to ones gender, there will be differences in how you interact with many of your patients if you are a man or a woman. Similarly, many of the things that make a great novelist are common, but there are differences between how Hemingway and Jane Austin are great novelists that are not unrelated to their genders.
While there are commonalities in the prerequisites for becoming a good father and becoming a good mother, there are many important differences. Some of these differences will be unique to the individual, but others will be patterns or common to the role of father.
I think that one of the biggest differences in these is that to be a good father, you have to learn how to have a good relationship with your wife, who is a woman, as a man. (And for a mother, you have to learn how to have a good relationship with your husband, who is a man, as a women.)
I don't think that my wife would appreciate it if I treated her "like one of the boys". She doesn't particularly like horsing around, playing video games, competing, or things like that. Similarly, the homies would not appreciate being swept of their feet and being given a gentle kiss on the forehead.
As a man, I find it very weird! I identify with many of the questions about meaning and so on that her exemplars are dealing with, though I think I am mostly happy with my answers, and I do think the lack of community is a huge issue in our society. But as you say, there's nothing particularly male about any of it. I don't deny there are some sex differences in people's experience of our society, but when I think about my role in society my gender is like the tenth most important thing?
Because the last 10,000 years of human history might have more educational value than a self-absorbed academic discipline? Why are you assuming that men and women are the same?
Low effort and incorrect comment. MtF and FtM trans people reinforce gender roles and their differentiation. If you have ever seen FtM people post-transition, you would clearly see that they are deliberately working to learn how to _be a man_, not to "be a person".
If there was no purpose in "learning to be a man" or "learning to be a woman", then _why the fuck would anyone transition in the first place? (excepting nonbinary folks)_
Just think about it for a second. What are trans people transitioning from and transitioning to? Why the fuck do trans people talk about "second puberty" post-transition, and the awkwardness of learning to inhabit the new social role of their adopted gender?
You sound like a markov model who just spits out meaningless platitude and copy-pasted talking points when you pattern match things as "gender-related wrongthing".
And do you think this author would say that trans women are innately biologically built to give birth and raise children? The same as they say of 'women' in general?
Because if you do think that's what they would say, I have a bridge to sell you.
Trust me, I am well-versed and carefully-considered on the relationship between the trans movement and gender ideology, including the role of non-binary trans people which you conveniently neglect to mention. I'll link to my wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview if you want.
But what you're missing is that the *reality* of the relationship between trans people and gender ideology has very little to do with the right-wing *backlash* to trans people.
The right just sees the acceptance of trans people as an assault on traditional gender roles, and responds by reifying and reasserting those traditional strictures.
If they're smart like this author, they do that with a brush of Evo Psych as an 'academic' justification.
If so, it's a very wrongheaded way to backlash. Very few people are more aware of the significance of gender to identity than trans men and trans women.
I think that framing this as "how to become a person" misses some of the important differences between the social role of man and women.
One way to view "becoming a man" and "becoming a woman" is as "becoming a father" and "becoming a mother" (in the context of a stable monogamous heterosexual relationship). If you are a person and want to pair-bond and raise children in a stable heterosexual relationship, you have to inhabit either the role of man/father or woman/mother, and most people only realistically have the potential to inhabit one of these roles given their biological sex.
In her discussion of "the man who opts out", the author clearly describes men who successfully become a person (in the sense that they have friends, do well in the workplace, etc.) but who struggle to become a man/father. The role of "friend" and "employee" are roles that can be relatively sexless and undifferentiated. People can learn to perform these roles very competently and still fail to learn how to be a man/father. While I think you are right that atomization and other problems impact people of all sexes, I think there are distinct impacts and challenges that they pose for biological men trying to become men/fathers and on biological women trying to become women/mothers.
One thing that I think that the author misses is that there are different end-states that can be characterized as "becoming a man". I think that the ideal that she is gesturing towards is that of becoming a father in a pair-bonded long-term stable heterosexual relationship in which children are raised.
Historically, one could also "become a man" by becoming a marauding warrior. This was a somewhat successful strategy at the level of culture for a number of cultures, though I think there's a decent argument that it lost out at the cultural level to the monogamous pair-bonded father model because it is relatively incompatible with modernity and is less capable of sustaining technological production. (The traditional Comanche culture/society could not sustain itself against artillery and rifles. Warlordism still exists in e.g. South Sudan, but there is a reason that these places are not military peers of the great powers.)
Humans are a gendered species. Every human society has sex roles, and they all align with the innate psychological differences between men and women.
Trying to teach broken men to become a 'better person' is going to end up with advice that is too generic to be meaningful. Particularly in the realm of romance. If you want to help a guy end up happily married, then you need to give him advice on dating/life as a man, because the things he is going to have to do and be on the dating market are male-specific. For example, a woman looking for love doesn't need to learn how to ask a guy out on a date, but a man looking for love absolutely does.
My point was that very little of that “brokenness” in this article had to do directly with them being men. Moving to a new city and losing all your old friends, having only superficial friendships, being unfulfilled by a boring if lucrative job, not knowing what you want to do in life… what advice would you give a man that wouldn’t also apply to a woman?
Sure, heterosexual dating has social norms and expectations, but anyone who’s experimented with dating the same sex can recognise how arbitrary and stifling they can be, and how you’re so better off moving on from the framework of “I am the man, so I do X, you are the woman, so you do Y”. Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness. Fathers should be nurturing, warm and emotionally supportive, mothers should teach skills and promote strength and independence.
More to the point, raising your kids differently because of their sex is probably what leads to many kind of neuroses. I know families where only the girls are expected to clean and cook and take care of themselves, and then they wonder why the boys are slovenly manchildren who look to their girlfriends to fulfil the role their mother did.
You should teach your daughters how to change a tire and stand up for themselves, and your sons to clean and talk about their feelings. If they have preferences, that’s absolutely fine, but they should never think that they are forced on a specific path because of their sex , especially from their parents, because sooo much societal message will be working against them.
I agree. Most people are not *intentionally* mean to men and may even be mildly well-disposed-by-default, but this author is (I feel) somewhat rare, among both men and women, in having a level of empathy that makes her put in so much effort into understanding other men from their own perspective.
I keep running across women online who are overtly hostile to men, for example the woman who didn't want to hear about male loneliness because so many gay/transgender/women/etc. are lonely and no one seems to care about that.
I'm not sure how much of it is actually wanting to hurt people who are imagined as real.
There's a lot of free-floating cruelty these days and it does add up.
A person who is Whole does not obsess about whether they are a 'man'. They don't need detailed instructions on how to be one.
You want men (and women!) to be whole? Teach them to be self-aware and honest with themselves. Teach them basic virtues, and to avoid over-philosophising. It isn't rocket science!
This is exactly the kind of empty non-advice causing the problems the author is talking about. A lot of people do need detailed, specific instructions and are going to be lost and hopeless without them.
Sorry, was typing from a phone, so let me expand my point a bit. Children of both genders do need detailed, specific instruction. My point is that this instruction is not on how to be a man or a woman. It's on how to learn to be themselves, and how to learn to be good.
Men and women do have biological differences, but these are on average. Each individual is unique. Trying to enforce 'male' instruction on a boy whose temperament will reject that instruction will cause that child to become 'lost' and confused.
The issue the author has correctly identified is that we've told too many people that acting in line with their natural inclination is wrong and toxic. But their solution is to do the same at scale - teach all boys to behave like 'men' even when it doesn't suit them, and all girls to behave like 'women'. Why?
Because when your son gets older he's going to be bigger, stronger, faster and more powerful than most of the women he meets, and they are going to look to him in a crisis for that reason, and he will represent a threat to them if he does not have control over himself and a degree of humility.
How often do you encounter crises where your size, strength, and speed matter? Most 'crises' either of my children are likely to encounter will require composure, wisdom, courage, and kindness, and I can try to teach these virtues to both of them.
Character traits (confidence, decisiveness) are much more like to inspire respect than physical traits. And women can exhibit those just as well as men.
I empathize with your take, but we live in a mimetic world where most people will follow some fixed narrative (or combination of narratives). For all to self-actualize as individuals is too much to ask for. So I think the author is in search of better mass-narratives (cultures/maps/etc).
'Be self-aware and honest with yourself and others about who you are' *is* a detailed, specific instruction.
The fact that we think it's not is an indictment of our atomized consumerist culture, where the only way we can think to know ourselves is in relation to an external archetype or ideological avatar.
I do not think it's possible to get less specific than "be self-aware and honest with yourself and others about who you are." What does that even mean? Self-awareness is usually understood to be an attribute not a choice, and it must be cultivated by other behaviors. How does one be honest about who they are when they might not know themselves? How does one even explore that?
It's frigging pablum, a throwaway glib phrase. Specificity is nowhere to be seen.
Any single sentence is not a detailed list of instructions, yes.
Self-awareness is absolutely an active process, and a skill you can train. At every step, you can interrogate yourself for what you want and what you think, or reach for external validators to tell you what to think and what to do. Introspection is a skill with a very long history of study and development. It's not hard to find detailed instructions for these things if that's what you need.
Again, consumerist culture tries very hard to destroy this skill; it's much more convenient for advertisers to create 12 'types' of person, and then target brands and narratives to each group. Content recommendation engines will filter your content to match a 'type', if you click a bunch of Vtubers it will stop trying to show you sports. Any original thought you might have will have to fight against a hundred eloquent blog posts by persuasive pundits trying to get you on their 'side'.
That makes it hard to 'be yourself', to the extent that some people can't even comprehend what the phrase could be saying. Which brand do I buy to 'be myself'? Which blog do I read to 'be myself'?
This is very much a 'get out of the car' piece of advice, yes. But it's not *that* difficult, you just have to practice the skill of stopping and asking yourself what *you* want to do, what *you* think, before automatically accepting the cultural default.
See? You already got far more specific. Even breaking it down into how and when you train the skill of self awareness is infinitely more helpful then just saying "be self aware."
The author is kenning the gender differences that some men do honestly need things like that spelled out (and I include myself in thay category, and thank God every day I have a wife patient enough to explain it to me). And while I disagree with her assessment that its only the "evil alt-right" trying to spell those things out to men right now, I agree with her assessment that men today lack a platonic source of such knowledge.
If I had to guess the age of the author based on the content of their writing, I'd suspect older than twenties, but not so strongly that their say-so about being a twenty-something woman surprises me. I think that a lot of people overestimate the association between age and wisdom or maturity.
As an adult, I've known teenagers who I've considered better sources of good judgment, able to consider situations carefully, draw usefully on their experience and the knowledge they've absorbed, and make good decisions, draw appropriate conclusions, or offer helpful advice, than the majority of adults I've known who were well into the middles of their careers. And I've known plenty of adults, 50+ years old, who showed less maturity and good judgment than the average student I've taught in their teens.
There's a difference between wisdom and raw intelligence, but some people have much more aptitude in cultivating wisdom than others.
I agree that she doesn't feel like a young adult, but I could buy her being in her late 20s, especially if she's dated older men and has compared notes with older friends.
The way the author completely crawls inside men's heads is impressive enough that I had the same thought. I'll assume good faith and/or that Scott has done something to vet the author.
No, I wasn't; but if you are, consider that they could be trans, and have some amount of added perspective on biological maleness because of that. (But that's probably less likely, given the unironic affection for gender roles.)
It definitely feels like a lotnof stuff that I've read from men online talking about gender and dating for years. And the author doesn't actually describe the first person experience of dating the men very much (is she attracted to these men? Does she like doing things with them? Etc). But I'd still presume good faith
Yes. But to be fair I only skimmed after the first three paragraphs because the beginning seemed like antifeminist self-indulgent drivel. I am a woman btw.
First off, respect for writing this. It takes a lot of emotional energy and vulnerability to put this stuff out there for the public. Still, there were a few frustrating sections:
>"Yet realistically, this is a fantasy. A single person can rarely solve issues this severe; it requires the combined strength of an entire community to drag a soul back from such extreme depths. Any attempt at a romantic relationship would crumble under the weight of the void, and only leave the man feeling more hopeless."
This is psychological cope. Of course the best way to bring a man with low self-confidence back "from the void" is to *prove to him that he does have worth by valuing him*.
To be clear, no, you don't have a moral obligation to take it upon yourself to dedicate your life to any particular man-who-is-lost. This is different from believing the factual statement that "one person couldn't do anything."
>"Yet the logical side of me knows I need to judge–ultimately, it’s a necessary part of dating. And a crippling lack of self-esteem is a death blow for the stability of any relationship. If I want a healthy relationship, I simply cannot date someone with that trait."
More psychological cope. You would prefer a relationship with a man who doesn't have self-esteem issues. That's fine. You are allowed to have that preference. But note the language here: "stability," "healthy," preferences which you could choose to compromise on are written as objective dealbreakers. Thought experiment: suppose that 90% of straight women do not want to date men with self-esteem issues, and 30% of men have self-esteem issues. Solve for the equilibrium.
>"So my advice to men who fall into this category is to rip off the bandaid. If they want a partner, they need to start working toward it now. Overcoming insecurities and past traumas takes time and effort."
Time and effort doing what? This sounds deep and biting, but dig a little deeper and we find that this is essentially meaningless. "Just fix all of your unspecified problems bro."
I also want to note the conspicuous absense of rules 1 and 2. It may have been a good idea to leave them out in order to focus on the more intelectually interesting aspects of dating. To paraphrase Scott, I look forward to the, "Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument," follow-up article.
Maybe this differs between men and women on average, but while some people with self esteem issues may find them genuinely resolved by dating someone who values them, dating someone with self esteem issues, and valuing them, is not necessarily going to fix or even help them.
Also, if what the person needs in order to feel reassured is sincere, unreserved positive regard, and the best you can show is empathy and compassion, you can't offer them what they're looking for, even if you want to.
I think interpersonal issues can be grinded out to some extent. You just keep trying to date and make friends even if the process is sometimes painful and unpleasant. I know my social anxiety is lesser now than when I started two and a half years ago, even if it's not fully gone.
I'm not sure that social anxiety is the same thing as serious self-esteem problems. They can be related, but a number of these men have basic social competence.
Their problem is being unmoored about what they want and being unable to look for what satisfies them.
But sometimes the self-esteem problems are being driven by social failure, like in the men who opted out. If that's the case, there's really no option but to grind it out.
I don't really understand the focus on gender-specific Maps honestly. Obviously there are people who might benefit from highly gendered advice in specific circumstances, but in general I'm not sure the gender lens helps very often for whatever problems a person is facing.
The fact that all the posts like this suddenly talk about how there isn't really any one map/path/way/model/etc in reality once it's time to talk concretely and have to resort to meta-describing what manhood should be gives away the game a bit. Like look at this paragraph again:
"There is no one “right way” to be a man, just as there is no one right way to be a woman. But we need to provide young men with varied, concrete examples of manhood, highlight the positivity that each form of manhood brings the world, and provide stepping-stones for becoming each type."
This seems to make it clear to me that if there are no one right ways per gender, then splitting them up by gender seems kind of pointless. Just describe all the cool ways to be a person, and sure maybe some of them are class-locked or have aspects that are class-locked but in general I don't think that describes many of these ways or a large proportion of the features of any of these ways. I think most of the important things that a person might believe or the important things that a person might want to be or aspire to don't really involve gender at all. Even the few roles and identities that are more clearly gendered seem to make this clear to me, e.g. whether you want to be a "mother" type parent or a "father" type parent, the similarities between what would make a good one in each case seem much more numerous and important than the few aspects of those roles that are specific to one or the other.
Perhaps some people live extremely gendered lives where all of their beliefs and actions are highly gender-tinged, and that's fine for those people but it sounds like they don't really need any help. The people who do need help are the people are lost-in-general, and gender isn't really a big part of their issues. At least, all of the types of men described in the post don't seem to me like their problems are very gender-specific at all.
Gender specific maps can be good because there are cool ways to be a person, but the path to get there is very different and can be very gender specific.
For example: A good thing you can do for yourself is be in a loving relationship.
But as a man, I have always had to be a pursuer. I have never had a women come upto me and give me compliments. I always need to take the first step.
Women on the other hand get pursued a lot. Lot of times even when they don't want it.
You can't have the same map for dating for both of us. A woman once called me a creep for asking for a hug. I really wish there were concrete social rules I could follow so that something like this never happened, because it is mortifying.
Everyone’s experience is different and yes there are social norms and expectations and default experiences, but you can absolutely be in an environment where you will be pursued (by women) as a man. I’ve seen it happen, many times. Maybe it’s not the kind of women you want, and you need to present yourself in a certain way, but the same goes for women.
I haven't finished reading this yet, but the first few paragraphs are absolutely why I had difficulty socializing with the women I met in university, who unironically "hate men" and could not explain why they bothered talking to their male relatives, much less went on dates. Despite superficially embracing freedom in gender and sexuality, their view of womanhood was way too narrow to include me: the traits they hated in men were traits I value in myself. My non-Western parents believe in gender roles but my father doesn't believe women's culture has value, so I was raised under what most Canadians and Americans call "toxic masculinity" (though without much of an emphasis on feats of strength: in his culture, the scholar is also a hero). This has turned out to be a much bigger barrier between me and other women than my sex/gender has been between me and men.
Edit: having read more, I am/was the first guy. But I'm a non-Bay Area woman with a completely different experience of dating, and leaning on partners to get me through it made it both a lot worse and a lot better.
This is an odd review. The first four male types are basically all the same person - lost, confused, adrift, empty, may or may not be angry about it - but with varying degrees of career or past romantic success. The fifth type is a hazy romantic fantasy of encountering charismatic emotional wholeness in a man. The writer doesn’t seem to be very self-aware about what issues or needs she herself is bringing to the table that shape how she sees people.
Really the issues she is pointing to about lack of community in modern urban life affect both men and women. She hints she has solved them through finding some kind of deeply fulfilling community (although not a romantic partner apparently), but doesn’t go into any detail about how that worked.
Admittedly men and woman deal with these things differently, because we’re hormonally different, may have internalized different gender-related expectations, and also young women are in sexual / romantic demand for biological reasons that young men are not. But the similarities may be greater than the differences
I liked the post overall but I want to push back against the trend of reducing broad social trends to gender specific issues.
Most of the personal issues mentioned came down to problems with careers, problems with people's social lives or romantic problems. Which all seem like they're more affected by wider socio-economic forces like how the economy is structured, the issues around communities the Scott has posted about recently etc. than they're affected by gender norms. The basic facts of economic and social life are broadly similar regardless of gender
I'm sceptical changing attitudes around gender can affect how people experience those much.
If someone doesn't have professional or social problems it's probably because they just happen to be attractive, or have psychological traits that are better adapted to modern life than the average person's, or they're lucky and have a desirable job. Rather than because they did or didn't follow a script for being a man or whatever.
I have a major problem with the premise of the review, and it's the same premise that a lot of Scott's (especially early) writing on wokeness has: treating the values of the most progressive parts of the world as if they are the world's values or even the west's values.
The author is open about it centering on the Bay Area, but I think this is a bad approach for many reasons:
1. It silences the huge parts of the west that don't largely have these values (at least to anything like the same extent), or relegates them to a parenthetical.
2. It fails to engage with the core argument for wokeness that these values are not actually so widespread. I'm pretty anti-woke but you have to engage their arguments directly.
3. Above all, it leads you into fantasy thinking that "these feminist values are the values of the world, of the future, and they should have some empathy and be gracious with their power and notice some of their contradictions"...instead of "their position is extremely precarious, limited to certain elite parts of certain countries, and if they don't notice and fix their contradictions asap they *will* be, within 50 years or 100 at most, outcompeted and annihilated by some mixture of Islamic, East Asian, and Red Tribe values that don't have such contradictions."
>treating the values of the most progressive parts of the world as if they are the world's values or even the west's values
The argument is that these values are dominant in the "blue tribe" strongholds, the "blue tribe" ideologically dominates most of the "high status" western institutions, and due to the western hegemony those are disproportionally influential worldwide. I'm not sure which part of that you find non-obvious.
It depends what we mean by "these values" and by "feminism" and so on. There's an annoying equivocation, done by both left and right, about this.
If you mean wokeness, as in specifically the post-2008 social movement obsessed with identity politics and who's privileged and should therefore shut up...that is absolutely not very influential outside a few narrow circles, and even within the latter is both extremely recent and precarious to the extent that parts of it are already falling out of fasion. The Bay Area is one of those narrow circles and parts of the review really have the "I'm in a bubble" feel: putting "cisgender" in front of "men and women are biologically different" and suggesting movies don't portray men's physical strength as a heroic thing (if this is remotely true at all, it can only possibly be within the literal last few years).
If you mean the broad post-20s and post-60s liberalism about gender roles, I agree that that's globally hegemonic and part of the orthodoxy of our time. But it's still worth remembering that it's the orthodoxy only of the currently hegemonic civilization. The author does a good job of pointing out some of the ways this orthodoxy has developed a lot of absurdities and contradictions, but I don't think she's mindful enough of how precarious it is. She should be scared of its imminent collapse, she should be telling her fellow feminist to reform themselves right now in fear of its imminent collapse, and every anti-feminist should *also* fear its imminent collapse...at least, those who aren't *so* into their anti-feminism that they'd actually prefer Sharia law or pseudo-Confucian elder respect in its place. Because if we're not all really careful, those are going to soon be in its place.
>that is absolutely not very influential outside a few narrow circles
Sure, if you'll allow that such small fries as "public schooling" and "Hollywood" fit inside those narrow circles.
>If you mean the broad post-20s and post-60s liberalism about gender roles
I don't see how you can cleanly separate "wokeness" from that. Clearly the "blue tribe" consensus is that they are on the same right side of history, even if some of the hottest heads are perhaps a bit too eager about transing four-year-olds.
Fair point, but for better or worse the Bay Area has become an avatar for the Place Where Men Achieve Greatness, so even men who don't live there receive unconscious messages about it.
I think there's a problem where literal minded people take the opinions of the small number of people who write explicitly about a topic as the opinions of society on that topic. Most men aren't reading about gender to learn how to be men. They're learning it from the characters in tv shows etc. And if you look up popular culture of theast few decades it doesn't match OP's description at all
I was working as an interpreter for a group of female clients. My colleague (we usually work in pairs) was a man. Practically every meeting we went to was women only. During each meeting we discussed the professional topics at hand, but at the very end, there was about five minutes of “female bonding” where they would trash-talk about men. My colleague not only had to listen to that, he would actually had to interpret it. He is a professional, so he did his job, but I had a problem with it, so I would gently remind them: “Ladies, we have a man here.” I think that we, women should be aware that men have feelings, just like we do and we should treat them with respect.
Beautiful and inspiring the time you have taken to see the humanity in each situation. I love the categories and thinking, but even more the empathy the perspective you developed requires a lot of self-work over years to be so integrated. This was a gift I am excited to use to help better understand other men I meet in life, thank you. The only pushback is I think you are limiting the reach by the focus on "the Bay area", I live in Utah and this deeply resonates with what I have experienced as well. Thank you.
I liked this article a lot, not so much for the typologies of men (though some of what's in there rings true for different parts of my life), but for the real empathy for men that comes through from the piece. A lot of social media and the Discourse these days seems to be stoking tensions between men and women, so anything that pushes gender relations in a positive direction is a useful corrective, imo.
If I lived in the Bay Area I would be interested in finding out who the author is so I could try to date her, lol. I wonder how common of a reaction that will be.
Opt-out is the one that resonated the most for me too, although I like to think I'm in the process of "graduating out" of that phase right now.
I think your hit rate on the apps would probably be correlated with the size of your dating market. 1 bot match per month in the Bay Area might be comparable to none in the Midwest.
It always makes me a bit emotional when someone tackles men's issues in a nice way. And normally I only get emotional when cute anime girls achieve their dreams. This sort of writing is sorely needed. Thank you.
This was painful to read. I've had some good relationships, but you'd probably consider me to have "Opted Out" -- dating apps haven't worked well for me and I've mostly given up on them. All my romantic relationships have come from meeting people casually. (Though I do have one very good friend I met on okcupid!)
I guess my own feeling is that I'm pretty happy with my life and my friends, and my job is fine. (This essay suggests that an alarming number of single men in the Bay Area seem to have lost their jobs. I'm hoping that's just representative of this person's dating pool, and not of the population as a whole.) I don't feel a particular need to learn how to Be A Man, but I sure wish there were a trustworthy guide out there for how to Be Successful On Dating Sites.
If I wanted to rationalize the dating-site thing to myself, I'd probably say something like: "being successful on dating sites is anti-inductive (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-anti-inductive/): if there were a guide for how to do it, then everyone would start following the guide, and following the guide would quickly be seen as lame and pathetic."
----
Certain aspects of the essay feel irritating to me -- in particular this stuff about "having an intense passion for something and benefiting my community through my goals". Hardly anyone does that! My friends don't do it, the married people I know don't do it, the women I've dated sure didn't do it, and I think it's unfair that you're demanding it of me.
(I guess the solution is that "having children" counts as being passionate and benefiting the community, for this purpose? But I don't want to have children!)
I think the main thing is that you do have to spend a lot of time swiping to generate dates, but probably many guys don't get professional photos either, which I've found helped. And getting in shape, he says getting to 15% body fat, I find that difficult, but now I'm in shape enough that I can get matches with some consistency.
Who voted for this and why? What were you hoping to communicate or what did you like about this?
I mean, I didn't like it, obviously, but other people apparently did and I'm curious what they saw as good or insightful or useful about this. I feel like the "gender discourse" is passing me by and maybe this has reference or relevance to some modern discussions I'm not a part of.
Like, I know vaguely that the Dems spent $20 mil "reaching out to men" but that's just a headline. Is this on that vibe? Something else? Tate bad but Tate also...5 years old? More? What are the kids on these days?
I was curious about this too. This is very well written, and the author clearly has a lot of empathy for the men they're talking about. However, I had one major issue with this: none of the men sketched out here have *anything* to offer another person. They're all status-seeking in some way, and they all want friends and companionship and – to various degrees – seek those things out. What do they care about though? What do they do to be of service to other people?
> He tries to distract himself from his miserable job with his social life, but it’s not as easy as he expected. All his college friends moved to different cities, and their texts grow increasingly rare. The city is huge, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, but it feels like they're a swarm of NPCs.
This type of man, later disappointed that his Run Club friend doesn't know his "whole" self, dismisses other individuals as NPCs!
Even the provider is a poor friend and someone who sees their partner as a product to be researched and secured, not someone to *be a partner to.*
> Those “friends” in his Burning Man photos were from his startup incubator, and he hasn’t spoken to any of them in ten months. He misses speaking with them, if he’s honest with himself, but he worries they’d drag him down. Their startups haven’t been as successful as his, and he’s convinced it’s because of their attitudes and lack of work ethic. As for dating? Well, a partner is yet another thing to be optimized, of course. They must match or exceed his quality level, and a woman’s quality revolves around their job title and academic degrees.
This essay describes individuals that are wholly extractive. They want rules and structure that define the steps they should follow in order to get what they want, but none of them seem ready to give or contribute. You can't have a friend without being a friend, you can't find a partner without willing to be one, you can't feel successful without caring about the thing you're trying to have success at.
Men face plenty of problems at a societal level, many of them captured well here, but I'm sorry to say that none of the types described here can trace the core of their problem to anything but themselves.
It's not like anyone makes themselves, "themselves" is an output of their upbringing and family. Overcoming that is difficult, but doable. And I don't think people who do well in dating/socializing are in general more altruistic than these guys, altruistic people are rare.
I don't think altruism correlates to success dating/socializing, but I do think people who approach it with a "what can you do for me and how soon can you do it" attitude are less likely to succeed.
I'm pretty sure that's the attitude with which most people approach life, however. People don't befriend people who aren't giving them good vibes right off the bat.
Did this feel empathetic to you or did it feel sympathetic or both?
Like, do you think the author accurately captured the internal experience of these men, do you think she felt they were in pain and thought it was bad, or a combination of both?
- the writer empathizes with the lonely-making aspects of modern life, as well as the broken status-seeking guidance the world presents young people (these aren't necessarily limited to men)
- the writer does not accurately capture the whole internal experience of these men (an unfair expectation, arguably)
I think the length of the description of each type is telling+proportionate in terms of how much pain the author felt from each type of man and how bad they thought it was. How about you?
I voted for this to signal-boost a rare example of a "progressive" who is willing to at least somewhat criticize her side not in the "we need even more Stalinism" direction. I think this criticism doesn't go nearly far enough, naturally, but even so it was a surprise.
The prescription at the end calls for a lot of empathetic listening and validation of men. But men respond well to a challenge!
Something to consider is that a lot of the most depraved manosphere influencers challenge and criticize their audience, at least superficially. You'd think the winning strategy for a social media con man is to just validate your audience, but apparently young men looking for male role models want to be challenged.
This should be a consideration for anyone who wants to be a positive male role model.
(On the other hand, for boys, as in actual children, I think the prescription to protect them from negative remarks and cruelty is quite right.)
This is an extremely insightful review, thank you.
I would say, for all the points about finding the right therapist: there's aren't that many, but try specifically looking for a male therapist, and if possible a male therapist under 45 or so. I had female therapists for close to ten years and they all ended up trying to act a bit like a mom, aunt, or grandma and that really wasn't what I needed. Male therapists were more likely to act like a mentor or confidant and to intuitively understand the things I struggled to articulate..
Highly recommend Jon Tyson's "Intentional Fatherhood" for any dads on here interested in raising their boys to become men. It's written from a Christian perspective but would benefit any dad regardless of religious belief.
Great review! I do think that most men in the writer's sample might be at the edges of the normal distribution of "heartland" males. Bay Area (and the writer) are outliers. I do suspect that similar dynamics are at play everywhere, but I wonder how many more categories there may be across a broader crossection of average Joe's.
I am a woman, and I agree with some other commenters here. I know many women who fit these categories (including myself, if I'm being honest). It seems like atomization and lack of community are larger issues that affects everyone, regardless of gender (lacking meaningful relationships, including platonic ones, seems to be a recurring theme in this piece). You could make an argument that these issues affect men and women differently, but I am not sure it makes sense to frame the question as "how to be a man".
The author must have gone on many dates, perhaps hundreds, over several years to develop her categories. Why?
Long ago, dating was a path to finding a mate, someone you cared deeply about and intended to build a life with. Based on this essay, it seems that dating is a game, or perhaps a research project, but it is not a serious activity. Men appear to be interesting subjects for research, or perhaps toys to be collected, but not individuals to love.
I had some of the same thoughts - someone who has gone on this many dates probably doesn't know what she wants. But I don't think it's necessarily on purpose; plenty of people date a lot, and while I agree that's usually indicative of something wrong (often a kind of lostness), I don't think it's usually because of a desire to treat partners as research subjects.
Im extremely impressed with the empathy on display! If I wrote a review of bay area women it would be "mumble mumble overchoice leads to self sabatoge mumble mumble", id have no idea how to start profiling the taxonomy of different traumas and various ways people are semi broken.
I also want to point out: I think the different broken guys are roles or masks that all men inhabit to different degrees at different times! I dont think anyone is all the way one of those profiles
Whenever these conversations come up, I feel a bit confused by what specifically it is that men are missing, and what would meet this need. I feel like according to the discourse, the typical male malaise is "being lost" in the way the author describes, whereas the typical female malaise is struggling to balance career and motherhood and "have it all", as well as facing issues like abuse, inequitable burdens, etc. Whereas I'm a cis woman, and I feel like I've more often struggled with the "male" malaise of not knowing what my path is/should be, how to productively do good in the world, etc. (When I was younger, I also suffered the more male-stereotypical problem of being chronically single and lonely). So yeah, I guess I'm not sure how a gendered map would solve this. Like, in my own case, the 'motherhood' role can't solve it on its own, because I'm not a mother yet, and even if I have kids, I have other values. Would being told 'you should join the army/get a job and Provide/defend the weak' help these men? unclear.
Lately I've been really grappling with my status as what the author terms a Man Who Opts Out and trying to figure out how to overcome the deficits I've accrued, so it was interesting and slightly alarming to see my predicament pinned up on the screen as an archetype. The Bay Area expression of that archetype may be different from my low key LCOL existence but it was still close enough to hit home. (the other archetypes, fwiw, didn't feel quite as familiar - maybe living somewhere where real estate is closer to $100/sqft than $1000 reduces the all-consuming pressure for wealth and status that characterizes those other types of guys)
At the end of the Opts Out section I was hoping to find a prescription more specific and actionable than the extremely vague "So my advice to men who fall into this category is to rip off the bandaid... Overcoming insecurities and past traumas takes time and effort" but I guess when we come to anonymous blog posts for life advice we get what we pay for.
I was also a Man Who had Opted Out, I'm in the process of becoming whole. I do have a purpose and a goal in life, but I don't have community, nor have I experienced romantic success. Surely it's a process of trial-and-error to find the last two, I think a big thing is to persist even if the process is awkward and painful at times.
OPT IN. Hard to know the very best way to go about this in your location, but... go to bars and find meetups where people are open to being asked out. Strike up conversations, and close by asking them out before the end of the night. If you're not sure if they're open to it, start erring on the side of asking anyway.
If you find that you're too insecure about yourself to approach people, (1) man up and do it anyway, but also (2) give yourself reasons to be more confident. Go to the gym if you don't already; get a better haircut and wardrobe. You can improve yourself, and you can find love.
Sorry if this seems obvious, lecture-y, or unsympathetic. Good luck out there.
Thanks for this, it was a very therapeutic essay. As a man who had opted out navigating the transition into man who is whole, I think the big thing I lack is community (I do have purpose and a goal). I wonder if I'll have to move to find it, but then, I have no idea where.
Another point here is that there is a freedom/structure tradeoff between 'clear roles' (for genders + in general) and 'doing what you want to do'. If I had been raised with a clear expectation of 'you'll marry and raise kids and do domestic labour', then that would have taken away a lot of angst and soul-searching. But it also would have had the problem of 'what if I want to do other things and/or would be bad at being a parent and housewife?' And I imagine that's true of traditional male roles and structures too.
I don't have any better or more systematic evidence than the reviewer does, but as a Modern Man myself, the description of the Modern Map of Manhood has always struck me as a caricature/strawman -- one invoked as an example of the excesses of wokeness, but that I've never actually witnessed in real life. For example, I've never seen anyone so much as imply that men should not do sports, including very masculine ones. I was an amateur boxer and the only negative response that ever got (from either men or women) was, "Isn't that dangerous?", which was actually an ego-stroking backdoor complement because it was clear the speaker thought I was therefore brave and cool. Boxing raised my status in my otherwise very nerdy, intellectual social circles in both high school and college. No one ever said or implied that it was toxic and every single social consequence I had from boxing was positive. This was also true of every other boy I boxed with.
Similarly, no one ever said or implied I should not to be into girls, be assertive, or ask them out. The message I did get, very clearly (mostly from female but also normal male friends) was "don't be creepy or scary". I just honestly don't believe men who say they can't tell the difference between these messages. The difference between making someone laugh and saying, "Hey, I like you" one the one hand, and making someone visibly uncomfortable and then not backing off on the other is and always has been very obvious to me. I understand that this isn't the case for people with clinically deficient social skills, but if we're talking about the majority of men, I just can't believe these are confusable. It reminds me of how Trump tried to dismiss his "I like to grab them by the p****" comment as 'locker room talk'. The difference between making comments like that and hitting on a girl in a normal, healthy, non-creepy way is not some subtle fine line you can accidentally find yourself on the wrong side of, no matter how much creepy men try to convince you that they just can't possibly tell the difference. Whenever I did meet a man who would complain how some girl rejected him or thought he was creepy for just expressing interest, asking some questions quickly made it clear that either he really was being super-creepy in an obvious, uncontroversial way, or that he couldn't accept that the girl wasn't interested and blamed her for it instead of just accepting it and trying to move on.
I don't doubt that I've been lucky and it may be that my experience growing up wasn't representative. But even so, I would have expected to see just one single example, at some point in my teen or adult life, of this dynamic of men being shamed for normal, non-creepy masculine behavior outside of social media. I don't think this is a real phenomenon.
I want to add that I find the rest of this review very off-putting. Most of the men in these categories don't seem to get past the first date with the writer. In that context, writing so many psychoanalytic paragraphs about these men's problems and what the author judges to be the causal life history of those problems feels more like an exercise in imagination than in figuring out the common threads in a large amount of data (which is how the review is billed). As a result, these descriptions read to me like stereotypes -- characters I'd see in a sitcom rather than ones fully fleshed out in a novel or a drama. I have some close single male friends in the bay area, and they are not at all like any of these descriptions (though I can imagine how someone might confidently pigeonhole them into one of these categories if they went on one date, came prepared to categorize, and then did a lot of unwarranted imaginative extrapolation).
She does open by saying that these men tend to open up to her in their first dates, treating her like a therapist. So she might not have to imagine much more than what they already tell her.
Beware the obvious selection bias though: When a date occurs, the man has already made it past the author's filter at the dating app level; if she can assign all men into her handful of categories, which are either broken or extremely rare, I question the legitimacy of generalizing her findings to the Bay Area, much less any society larger than that.
In general: When someone complains that "all the people I date are this or like that", then it's much more reasonable to assume there is a subconscious selection bias going on, rather than concluding that all people in general are actually like this or like that.
I think I'm definitely in the bin where "don't be creepy or scary" can be interpreted to mean "never talk to a girl in a coffee shop", for example. I think a lot of men didn't receive positive instructions on what to actually do if there's a girl you're attracted to.
It's true that the fears of getting "cancelled", brutal social ostracism for hitting on a woman are mostly fake, just men projecting their own fears of rejection onto other people.
Also true that almost all men know the difference between making obscene sexual remarks and hitting on a woman.
However, per your own post you are athletic and outgoing. Imagine a time you successfully hit on a woman.
Now imagine saying the exact same thing, but with weird body language, tremulous voice, not making eye contact. It's just true that a woman would have experienced you as "creepy".
Guys who don't understand nonverbal communication, don't understand nonverbal communication, it's difficult to explain to them what's going on, and so they conclude "don't be creepy" means "never hit on a woman". The longer term consequences for being experienced as "creepy" are low though.
I was athletic as a teen, but definitely not outgoing. I was lanky, awkward, nerdy, and perceived as all those things. I am more outgoing as an adult because I learned how to be, mostly through the normal process of growing up -- cultivating friendships with women, both who I was and wasn't romantically into, and then a lot of romantic trial and error, trying to learn from failed relationships and attempts at relationships. In other words, normal stuff.
What I'm saying is I don't see any special "crisis" of masculinity or that the "map" has changed in some historically unique, cataclysmic way that makes it newly impossible to be a man. It all seems to me like just the eternal necessity of learning how to be a competent social actor and an attractive prospective partner. I spent years being seen as awkward but I always tried not to be creepy and if someone wasn't interested, I didn't push it. Eventually, I got better at not being seen as awkward and dating got better.
My point is not that this stuff is easy. My point is that the special woke crisis seems to me to be mostly made up kids-these-days sort of stuff. I find it dispiriting to see it described here in such stereotypical terms, and then to see so many commentators endorse it as insightful.
It's real, at least where I am. Plenty of people see men who are interested in sex as threatening or off-putting. But really, it's a target audience issue. Different kinds of women are comfortable being approached in different ways. Intuiting this is difficult, and failing to leads you to either be considered creepy or pathetic, depending on which direction you fail in.
This is some of the most horrifying and accurate writing I've seen in years. I wish I could say who wrote this, because everyone should be reading their other works. Amazing writing, and very important
I know this is a psychiatrist's blog but it's usually free of the ubiquitous pop psychology worldview in which everyone is broken and in need of some form of help. These "reviews" are a mess.
Not a bad essay, but honestly I was hoping for more of an actual "review" of dating men in the bay area. In other words, some actual stories/experiences, not just generalized theorizing from doing so.
Personally, while I think some of the problems the authors highlight are true, I think typically writing on this topic isn't representative of actual social dynamics. In particular, I'm talking about lines like this:
"Within polite society, there’s a strange insistence for men to be their true selves, yet a rejection of the idea that the average man could, perhaps, just maybe, be biologically programmed to act differently than the average woman, like all species closely related to us."
I think this description is representative of discourse on this topic, both online and in person, but when it comes to real behaviour I actually think men/women are penalized for not embodying the traditional traits. It sort of works like this, as an educated/proper individual you must understand that things like masculine/feminine traits are stereotypes to be rejected. To that end you should be able/willing to perform the tasks traditionally associated with either gender (e.g. childcare, cooking, cleaning, etc.). However, the reality seems to be that most of us actually do want our partner to exemplify those traits traditionally associated with their gender.
As a result, if you're the kind of person who struggles to read a room, you'll end up not knowing how to behave. You can end up thinking you simultaneously have to be "manly" and "non-manly" and get confused as to how to act. In other words, it's a bit of a game we're all playing, where we the values we espouse are not in actuality the values we prefer, even though they genuinely may be the values we want to prefer. It's sort of like how most people will agree that gossiping is a bad thing, but people will think you're weird if you never gossip.
I feel like "stigmatize sexism against men" might be the message we needed five years ago. But in 2025 the anti-woke backlash has gone mainstream and I just want the pendulum to stop swinging so wildly.
Not finished reading yet and will come back. In the meantime, this is excellently insightful. I agree and empathize with these points. Women can be deeply capable of understanding men. (The theory that those with less power have evolved empathetic tools for self-protection is one reason.) The author has also earned self-understanding through suffering and struggle.
However, the author forgot to "kill their darlings" (For writers, this means cut, cut, cut.) We readers end up skimming the latter graphs in each section. Good use of paragraphing, however; I guess the next step is to scrutinize the paragraphs and look for redundancy. I recognize the tendency to express all possible aspects of a good idea, but we need to let the readers work through the aspects on their own.
This is a great piece, and the kind that most of society will only take seriously because a woman wrote it. (Actually, most of society *won't* take it seriously, but as more of these kinds of pieces arrive from woman as diverse as Aella and Cartoons Hate Her, it will seep into the broader bloodstream.)
A couple books I recommend to young men who are struggling with dating:
1. Models, by Mark Manson. He's the guy who wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. He started out as a PUA and produced the best work of that genre. He is a good role model for men, though much of what he says applies to women as well.
2. Way of the Superior Man, by David Deida. It's quite bit more woo-woo, and if he wrote it today he would probably get cancelled for his "problematic" takes. Nonetheless, I did a workshop with him about 15 years ago, and got a lot out of it. There were women there as observers (wives and girlfriends of the men attending) and they all raved about it too.
I'll also mention The Game, by Neil Strauss. A lot of people push dislike that book because the first half talks about manipulative tactics. But if you read the complete book you'll see it's really a hero's journey in which he ultimately rejects those approaches. And Neil is a very gifted storyteller.
I read this piece in the selection round, and it made a big impression on me. It will almost certainly get my vote, but I promise to give the rest a fair shake. Here's what this essay convinced me of.
Men were evolved for violence, both delivering it and defending against it. Not always against other humans - often it was animals - but violence nonetheless. And the main thrust of Western civilization since the Enlightenment - to great effect - has been to eliminate violence. Papering over this hard truth with large doses of morality does little more than put men in prison or in psychological shackles outside it. Women will unquestionably climb to power in the coming decades - all the signs are there. And, I say, radically, that their main problem will be keeping men from destroying civilization in order to come back into power. Unless, of course, we're all neutered and on AI leashes.
This is an interesting mirror. I'm not sure about the classification, but the underlying dynamics are pretty vivid.
(It makes me wonder which one I am. My best fit seems to be "Former Man Who Opts Out" - maybe not 100% on the way to being whole - If nothing else, I'm still not married and am occasionally insecure about relationships - but mostly over it. Still, I'm not sure this works as classification rather than a list of examples).
On the opposite side from you, I've also dated women of these types in the bay area. It manifests in different ways for them (and women pretty much never go the "beast" route), and into different classes, but the women who go into tech often do have the same feelings of being lost as the men you describe do. It's a lot easier for women to just "get a date", but as you point out in a fe of these examples, that's far from solving everything for them too.
(I suspect women have a higher percentage of "whole"; At a ballpark it seems like around 40% of the women I know are, which is probably higher than for men. But then there's pretty severe selection bias in what kind of men and women I meet).
First off, the death of the old road map is actually really really good for guys like me. My spastic, ADHD-riddled brain cannot pull off stoicism, can provide but can't be defined by providing, and I'm not genetically blessed with a great physicality.
I got all my money and women (well, woman, singlular) from being a good listener, a thoughtful partner, and being skilled at guessing at and meeting needs. In jobs with more conservative bosses, that doesn't work out great for me. I don't think there's any way to both have a path to manhood, and to avoid excluding people. So let's be a bit careful with the balance.
But I also agree that everyone (not just men) suffers from a pendulum swing too hard the other way. Since we're talking about men, I'll use a video game analogy:
Many of the best games offer a lot of choice. You can explore the world at your leisure, and the game gives you loose goals. This is a lot of fun! You aren't forced to follow a script, and can customize the adventure to your own wants and needs. But if you look closely, all the allowed behaviors are part of a larger script. You decide to go explore the mountain way off the beaten trail, and it has something rewarding, because the game just provides that as a second option, and then draws your attention to it as a way to buck the "official script" of the game. You don't say "let's build a rocket and fly to Venus" because the game systems don't even let you consider that as a possibility.
But some novice game designers try to create a game that gives you infinite choice. Good games offer a lot of choice, so the best game offers the most choice. "You can go anywhere! You can do anything! We don't tell you how to play! If you want to build a rocket and fly to Venus, you can do that!" And these fail. Reality creates inherent limitations. Game design creates more. What a designer creates when they let a player "do anything" isn't a world of infinite decision space. It's a world where the decision space isn't clearly defined. It's a world where you don't know what you're allowed to do.
Modern life, for everyone, is the latter kind of game. We threw out every "script." We said, "All these ideas about who people are supposed to be are stifling their creativity and personhood. Go forth! Be free! No need to think of yourself as man or woman or father or son or student or programmer or deacon. You be your true, authentic, real self!"
And as much as I hate those old scripts, and am glad to be rid of them, that's not freeing people. That's just refusing to take responsibility for guiding them to personhood, acknowledging their limits, teaching them what they can and cannot do. That's throwing them into a world with clear, concrete rules, and telling them there aren't any. No surprise that people get one-shot by an endgame boss at level 20.
A slightly more scientific approach would have benefitted this piece, without requiring psychological or anthropological training. There seem to be pretty basic, important assumptions baked into it that have implications for the conclusion.
For example, regarding suicide: Yes, there is a clear gender difference in deaths by suicide, but it's been a relatively constant factor of 4-5 of men to women at least since 1950[1]. Female suicide *attempts*, however, are much higher in women, by a factor of 2-3[2]. Attempts by males still complete at the much higher rate both because they tend to use more lethal methods, and because they have a higher chance of completion with the same methods[3]. Even with those details, I'd find it hard to conclude who has it worse: Women because they attempt more often, or men because they seem more motivated/successful at it?
More significantly because it touches on the "map to manhood" argument: if one looks at the Wikipedia page of Rites of Passage[4], there are also gender-specific rituals concerning the maturing of girls/young women that have equally fallen out of use, especially in the liberal, industrial societies of the West. Is the argument of the review that girls didn't lose that equivalent "map to womanhood", or that they didn't need it in the first place? Why/why not? There is the slightest of allusions in the review that some women might also struggle ("Yeah, she seems kind of unstable and uncertain, but that’s to be expected."), but otherwise, the core argument is that men alone have lost their map. Would anyone help me out with a sketch of this "map to womanhood", if it exists?
Overly long, but interesting, and I’m still glad I read it.
I’ll note here that almost all of the “five types” she has dated graduated from college or are otherwise white collar, and most American men haven’t and aren’t.
I’m definitely not a “Man Who Is Whole” (I’m just not that passionate), and I don’t know many who are, but (despite my living in San Francisco and having spent 99+% of my living the Bay Area) I don’t know many that fit her other four categories either (but I’m not trying to date 25 to 35 year old men, and only have had experience being a man that age, never dating one, and when I was that age dating “apps” didn’t yet exist yet, or were just getting started, so I have had no experience with them).
I liked this essay overall and found it to be one of my favorites so far. It's well-written and covers interesting and familiar territory from a perspective very different from my own as a married lesbian trans woman living in the Bay Area.
From my perspective, "society in general and women in particular expecting men to basically be women in male bodies" does not seem to be the case. I very much did not feel like I fit with societal expectations while living as a fairly feminine man, especially not the expectations of straight women for the purposes of dating. Almost every woman I have dated has been bisexual and several have been closer to being gay than to being straight. I've been friends with several straight women who have seemed to enjoy my company and to have found me physically attractive pre-transition, but they pretty much uniformly didn't consider me dating/relationship material in a way that didn't carry over to bi women.
Comparing notes with other sapphic trans women online suggests both sides of this to be a fairly common pattern. Feminity in men seems like it tends to be unattractive to straight women and attractive to bi women, especially to women who are towards the gay side of the bisexual spectrum. Mostly-gay women getting into relationships with "men" who later transition is common enough that there's a word for it: "Preordering".
This is extremely obviously written by Aella and is also extremely obviously an advertisement for her "safe PUA" service.
"Look, the one type of guy succeeds but he becomes *unhinged* and *bad* because he listens to bad people and right wingers!" with the implicit promise of *her* service offering something that works without all the icky sexist right-wing stuff.
An interesting thought. You will definitely win some Bayes points if this ends up being true (of course, you will lose some if this turns out to be completely wrong).
Also very astute observation that the "bad guy" is the only one the system seems to be working for. Even within the internal logic of the world presented, he is the only one getting what he wants. No matter how bad you think things are, it's actually worse.
There was an interesting\depressing(?) piece in the NYTimes recently about men who go to a retreat to learn about shooting and self defense techniques as a form of finding themselves but that seems like such a counter-productive activity it just left me cold.
Many years ago the write Rod Dreher (who I otherwise can't stand) had an interesting idea he called the "Benedict Option" which was basically a form of withdrawal from the wider world into a smaller, more focused existence that I can absolutely see the appeal of, rather than trying to satisfy the sociocultural preferences of millions of strangers.
I dunno, I’m a woman and that’s not how the landscape of males looks to me. While a few guys are preoccupied with the problem of being them and are eager to display that and fill you in on the problem, most males (and females) that I meet seem to be energetic bundles of interests, talents, opinions, relationships, tastes, regrets, hopes and fears. I suppose my take could be different because I am substantially older than the writer, and dated man of a different era, in a different era. But the men I met while dating, mostly seemed like the kind of bundle I describe, and the men I meet now in other contexts mostly still do.
Maybe males are just doing really badly these days? On the other hand, I kind of wonder whether the author of this review has a kind of selective attention thing going on that leads her to take conversational turns that lead the man towards disclosing painful personal issues — and that also leads her to mostly classify men by their pains, doubts, frailties and absurdities.
I don’t think I’m very good at small talk either, but getting somebody to talk in depth about their tastes and interests isn’t small talk. Also, it’s likely to make the meeting fairly enjoyable for both parties, even if it’s obvious that the two of you aren’t a romantic match. And if you have that talk with a bunch of men you end up with classifications mostly having to do with different patterns of strengths and interests and values, with footnotes attached to some noting kinds of darkness in their lives — things like “but sometimes he feels like a loser because he’s the only person in his family not interested in academics.”
This review makes me kind of angry. If the guy’s a brute who forces himself on your friend at a concert, — good for you for punching him, and it’s fine to publish a complaint about guys of that type. But unless the man’s a godawful macho pig, it sounds like the author presents herself as full of sympathetic interest:
<Most men are not accustomed to genuine questions about their well-being, and will often respond with a desperate upwelling of emotion.
And then she mentally places him in her classification scheme of dysfunction. And then she writes a review like this one. It’s sort of like kissing and telling, but worse — making somebody tell secrets and cry, then telling the world what their secrets and frailties are.
I love this essay. I think a lot about men's issues as the key to understanding why so much of Western society is lurching to the right politically. I will share this essay widely.
I want to add just one point: I think it's important to think about reasons that have nothing to do with the ideology of "polite society" for why we are in this pickle. I think part of it is that meaningful, dignified work for men who have not successfully pursued higher education is getting harder to find than it used to be. It was always the case that many men would go off to "sow their wild oats" in their youth. This is as old as the story of the prodigal son from the Bible. But there used to be a host of jobs for the returning son, who had no particular skills, to come back to, allowing him to have a dignified life: farming, union or guild work, or the military. Now, most of that work is gone. Factory work will increasingly disappear, no matter what Trump does with tariffs. Farms employ a tiny percentage of people. One can still hope to learn a trade in one's mid-twenties: car repair, brick laying, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, etc. These jobs are not about to go away. But there aren't enough of them to provide careers for the volume of lost men who did not get a good college degree. And even those who do pursue these careers have to accept that they will probably be working in a small firm, making not a lot of money, doing something with no social prestige. So.... we need to address, somehow, the opportunities for dignified work, both by providing more opportunities for training, and more social prestige for those who take these jobs.
In addition, we need to recognize that broken families without male role models make it all the harder for men to succeed, and that rebounds back to reinforce the problems just discussed.
But these thoughts are just my current obsession as I try to see how society needs adjust to avoid slipping into just an angry, self-destructive, fascist approach to the problems of men. Meanwhile, I think your models of types of men are incredibly helpful in thinking about what problems result from the lack of a roadmap to manhood. Bravo!
The author of this review is very empathetic towards men, but she frames the issue as if men had this man-only problem to be solved called "being a man".
How to be a man?
Correct answer: be a human male over 18 years old.
How to be romantically or sexually successful as a straight man?
Now that is a better way to frame the problem that only straight men face!
Step 1: excoriate the left for their feeble dating advice of 'be yourself, have hobbies, get involved with the community, be confident'
Step 2: Talk about all your experiences dating men who fail to do those things and suck.
Step 3: Present your ideal of a 'whole man' who does the following: 'be yourself, have hobbies, get involved with the community, be confident... but not in a woke way!'
There's a lot to like in this article regarding actual interactions and observations of actual men, and it's important that these things get more attention. I agree with a lot of the observations about how men suffer under contradictory and vague expectations, that feel like there's no right answer.
But the framing device and conclusions just feel like someone rejecting woke ideology, doing their own research, finding out that actually the woke ideology was mostly right about a bunch of things, then repackaging those ideas with more right-leaning terminology and signifiers, while continuing to excoriate the woke people saying the exact same thing.
It's a common and sad pattern, where the culture war blinds you to where the other side is correct about something and forces you to rediscover their wisdom on your own.
The unspoken truth is that not all men are supposed to have kids. If everyone had kids, mutational load would wreck the genome. War and death used to prevent this, not so much anymore. Modern men who are less "fit" can still support their nieces and nephews.
Though I assume genetic modification tech will flip the table here within our lifetimes. Just not yet.
I agree with Covfefe Anon that this is probably written by Aella.
That said, the relationship woes of every typbe above have a very simple solution: get a mail-order bride from South America, Asia, or Eastern Europe. Lenny Kravitz seems to have been right about American Women.
I admire you for your journey.
Here's what I think the core issue is, though—most men today are brought up by a woman.
Then they are going to school dominated by female traits—such as rule following and socialization—taught mostly by female teachers who are also government employees.
By the time they get out of this system, they have no male role models... they have no direction.
Typically and traditionally, men have always had to prove themselves through rites of passage—and men aren't able to do that today.
Who did they have to prove themselves to? Other men. Men had to compete and win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal.
Nothing like that exists today except the military, and not even that.
I think regarding rule-following and socialization as female traits is an effect not a cause. They've always been a key part of the military, for example.
My feeling based on my experience is not that (some) boys struggle with rule-following in school because rule-following is female coded. They struggle with following rules in school because the rules are enforced by females.
Speaking as a man who's been in the position of trying to enforce school rules and get students to follow and take them seriously, I don't think the boys who struggle with school rules do so because the people who're enforcing them are mostly women.
Some students struggle with following rules, whoever is enforcing them (although some are selective depending on which authority figures they like.) In my experience, there are more boys out on the tails for poor rule following, whoever is enforcing them
Yes I agree, I expressed myself badly in response to the previous comment.
I don't think they struggle because of women, but I do think they tend to give women a harder time.
Do you know *how* the military historically inculcated obedience the authority in men?
Psychological and physical abuse, summary executions, and the promise of rape and plunder.
Even in modern professional armies, boot camp is about psychologically breaking the recruits to compel discipline and adherence to orders. And those are people who signed up to be there.
I'm not saying the military is completely wonderful, and I personally would never function well in it, but I'm saying that this particular path of having to prove oneself as a man is what we need to figure out today.
To suggest that boys don’t have trouble “behaving” because the military exists is ignorant. That was my point.
They struggle with following the rules because the rules are enforced according to female norms. Boys do well with rules and structure as long as those rules and structure provide avenues for competition, are clearly defined such that "unwritten rules" are minimized, and allow for roughhousing slightly more violent than most women are comfortable with.
There's a reason unruly boys are rarely as disruptive and disrespectful toward their coaches as they are toward their teachers. And it's because sports discipline is still built around male social norms. Messing around means physical pain (push-ups, laps, etc ) and letting down your team. And there's plenty of opportunity to burn energy through some safe, structured violence.
My father likes to say that the most important part of our weekly boy scout meetings was the 45 minutes of unstructured sport where we would play things like full contact tackle football. It regularly resulted in scrapes, bruises, and heated arguments, and the occasional mom stopping by would be horrified, but this was a vital part of male bonding that most of us had been largely denied throughout the rest of our lives. Getting our energy out, engaging in good-spirited competition, learning to resolve disputes among ourselves, these were all extremely important aspects of growing up.
And then once we were done and had retucked our now-ripped shirts we immediately fell in line to do our military-style flag salute to beginbthe meeting proper. You can't get the discipline without also providing some kind of outlet for all that boy energy.
Banned for this comment.
Frankly, this is why I feel like things like Boy Scouts are a valuable and underappreciated organization. (I know they admit girls now as Scouting America, but troops are still gender segregated and it's still mostly boys)
It is a way that instills 'masculine values', with a sense of vaguely military-inspired discipline. Scoutmasters (at least if you have a good one) can act as good male role-models. It has a sense of proving themselves and rites of passage (rising in the ranks, especially reaching Eagle Scout). Scout campouts are places where horseplay and just messing around in the woods can happen.
But it also directs these masculine values towards socially good things like community service
100% the erosion of boys-only spaces is a massive shame in my opinion. Before getting into sports in high school, boy scouts was basically the one "safe space" we had to be boys without the judgement of women. The one place where the rules and vibes felt like they were built specifically for us, as opposed to the incredibly feminine norms at school (no running, no hitting, direct competition discouraged). We were able to burn off energy playing capture the flag, football, or sometimes literally just fighting/wrestling, almost completely unsupervised, then were ready to learn valuable life skills and develop civic-mindedness. And the highly structured progression, built around concepts of self-improvement and requiring the seeking out of older male mentors (the only way to earn merit badges was to look up a local person certified as a counselor for that badge and prove to them, to whatever their personal standard was, your mastery of the subject) provided a wonderful road map to manhood, to borrow a phrase from the review.
I remember Cub Scouts being a nightmare of bullying, and when we were out on hikes with the Boy Scouts, the Scout Master was a bullying asshole and he made his senior Scouts into little martinets. After one year as a Cub Scout, I never went back. Scouting taught me to *disrespect* authority at an early age. Later, I discovered that Scouting is predominantly run by LDS, and I realized that the bullying is probably a reflection the Mormon patriarchal worldview. Anyway, I didn't let my stepson join Cub Scouts.
I had a very similar experience as a Cub Scout\Webelo, and was hopeful that our local den would be a better experience for my son. The very first day we attended our first meeting, a group of boys tried to "vote my son out" of the group, and I had to use every ounce of emotional reserve to not deck the Scout leader who allowed it to happen. Scouting sucks
I have plenty of problems with Boy Scouts of America, but my experience was drastically different that yours.
The LDS church did sponsor a large number of scout troops, but unless you were involved specifically with an LDS troop, it would be quite unfair to blame them for your troop's poor behavior. The LDS church never sponsored a majority of BSA troops, and the leadership of the national organization was a corporation, not the church.
I have never even heard of a boy scout troop (usually 12-18 year olds) that took cub scouts (usually 8-11 year olds) out on hikes. My troop, and every one I've ever heard of, was age segregated. I was in an LDS troop that had almost none of the problems you experienced.
The LDS church also got out of scouting 6 or 7 years ago, so I didn't have my son in scouting. I can't speak to its current incarnation.
I agree that Boy Scouts is great. It definitely helped me. The ethos of thinking about how dangerous everything could be and making plans for how to handle the possible danger appealed to my adolescent self, and was probably very good for me.
Boy Scouts is an example though of how this isn't just, or maybe even primarily, a problem of bad people taking away the good institutions that could help boys learn how to be men. There's a general problem in society of good institutions being outcompeted by video games, streaming video, and such.
We had a cub scout pack and By Scout troop that helped my older son a lot.
The program ended up destroyed when we got a new jerk-ass Scoutmaster who deliberately and blatantly sabotaged the program, uninviting my younger son and then, unable to do any more subtle damage, took a handful of Boy Scouts to another troop and announced by himself to the sponsor organization that the troop was over.
[writer of the review here]
I would agree a lack of plentiful (and healthy) male mentors is a large part of the issue.
Without plenty of healthy male role models and mentors, it's very easy for some manosphere creep to convince a fifteen-year-old that getting a woman requires becoming some form of predator.
With more male mentors, it would be easy for boys to see that "being a man" has many definitions, and there are many paths available to becoming an attractive and self-actualized individual.
I say that "rule following and socialization" are not "female traits," they are *human* traits that are absolutely necessary to have any kind of society larger and more complex than a sub-Dunbar-number hunter-gatherer band.
Are you implying that to be male is to be an antisocial rule-breaker? Because if so, that's the problem right there.
And lest you think I'm just writing from some man-hating woke perspective: at the dojo where I practice, the men are very much into rule following and socialization: like, follow the traditional rituals (e.g., bow when entering and leaving the dojo; don't wear shoes in the dojo), listen respectfully to the leader, respect your fellow karateka, don't lash out in anger, etc. Doesn't make them any less manly!
Reminder that the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by a men's movement in the 80's (the mythopoetic men's movement), not feminism.
Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad? Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing. Going to literally die in a war is not optimal, it's better to protest or donate money. I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people. You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
I can see how these requirements might seem hard to navigate if you're autistic or prone to extremely literal thinking tho, which many people in the Bay Area programming circles probably are.
A lot of this also seems so... American? It's like Americans feel the need to have some Grand Goals and a Purpose and Values, otherwise they feel like shit. Probably disproportionately men. But not everywhere is like this. I've felt the difference, from the US vs Scandinavia.
Also the idea that the patriarchy / sexism hurts men too is not, as the author seems to think, some big revelation that challenges contemporary feminism. It's a very common observation of feminist writers!
It does seem to be very common in higher-quality feminist discourse, but much less so in pop feminism where that part of feminist theory is often ignored completely or only given token acknowledgement.
Pop feminism is in the water supply, while more serious discourse tends to be something that one needs to seek out, so I understand how casual observers can just see the pop feminist memes and not realize the deeper theory is a thing.
Wtf is 'higher-qualoty feminist discourse'? I've just GOTTA know.
The idea that contemporary feminism might be exhibiting a lot of that sexism is anathema to them, though. But it is - they are - and they deserve nothing but withering contempt for failing to humanize men.
Yeah it did feel like it was responding to a caricature of "polite society" rather than actually engaging with what people believe. Which puts it in this weird middle ground because the people who write in sophisticated ways about gender would mostly agree, and the vast majority of median Americans have never even engaged with the question, and still uncritically stick to traditional gender roles. So not sure who it's aimed at.
Except that the patriarchy is usually conceptualized as some abstract social force which is enforced by fellow men.
I have seen very few critical insights into how women's free choices might reenforce and/or reify patriarchal expectations for men.
> Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing.
Women are better at reading emotions than men, and demanding men perform with the same skill as women here is akin to demanding that women perform as well in realms of physical strength and endurance.
And aggression *is* a good thing when directed and controlled. It's actively harmful to repress everything from brawling to raised voices.
> Going to literally die in a war is not optimal, it's better to protest or donate money.
Neither of those things are going to protect the people you care about from hostile force.
> I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people.
How much suffering and misery does this have to create before you acknowledge that the real world has an influence on identity and meaning?
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
If you're not going to reward people for being decent, and instead call literally anything they do "the bare minimum", you will not get decent people. You will instead get resentment, hate and rage. And, for a lot of people pushing this line, that seems to be the point.
Women are *slightly* better on average, yeah. The difference is not nearly as stark as physical strenght. If you think men are basically buffoons at reading basic emotions, then you might be in a bubble (ie the Bay Area with its focus on tech).
I'll take the controlled agression point. I guess I'd describe controlled agression with a different adjective.
Being a soldier is most often heroic, but I'd still prefer violence and war not happen. I think it is nice that the human race is less violent now than other time periods.
In my experience, more people are liberated by less focus on rigid gender roles, but that is obviously hard to measure.
How do you suggest we reward people for being decent? I'm a fan of verbally complimenting people I love for doing basic things (the dishes or whatnot), but I'm not sure what you should do on a society-wide basis.
> Women are *slightly* better on average, yeah. The difference is not nearly as stark as physical strength.
On what grounds do you come to that conclusion?
> If you think men are basically buffoons at reading basic emotions, then you might be in a bubble (ie the Bay Area with its focus on tech).
You're wrong on the facts because there's nothing I said that could support that reading.
> Being a soldier is most often heroic, but I'd still prefer violence and war not happen.
That's nice. It also doesn't matter.
> I think it is nice that the human race is less violent now than other time periods.
This is really, really, wrong.
> In my experience, more people are liberated by less focus on rigid gender roles
When you take the structure away from something, it collapses. That's not liberation.
> How do you suggest we reward people for being decent?
We could start by not saying "You don't get any fucking credit for doing the bare minimum, you stupid entitled troll."
[writer of the review here]
> Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad?
I would firmly agree that many of the values of the current "map to manhood" are indeed good. I would love to live in a society with more emotionally adept individuals, less aggression, less war, etc.
Where the map fails is assuming that it's enough to just state these morals (ie: "don't be aggressive"), and morally shame those who fail. Testosterone is going to naturally cause aggressive tendencies in most young men. Telling them "don't be aggressive" is like telling someone with anxiety "don't be anxious." It usually doesn't work, and if you shame them when your loose guidance fails, it only breeds resentment and a lack of self-esteem.
What's missing is the actual *directions* for the map. The part that says, "You're male, so you're probably going to feel more aggression than most girls. Don't feel ashamed for that! You're not a bad person for it. But you DO need to learn how to properly channel that aggression into good things, like protecting the weak. Let's walk through some concrete steps on how you can do that..."
> I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people.
I would agree that obsession is not a good thing. But there has to be some acknowledgement of the difference of lived experiences, and the fact that the same goals often require different paths/efforts from different genders.
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
I believe being a good person who meets society's expectations is something that does indeed deserve a reward. In fact, I believe if you *don't* reward this, it's very harmful to social cohesion. (That reward, of course, must be within reason. Obviously a man doesn't deserve to sleep with any woman he wants just because he checked off the boxes on the "good person" list. But laying out clear and healthy rewards is a vital part of the map that's currently missing.)
> A lot of this also seems so... American? It's like Americans feel the need to have some Grand Goals and a Purpose and Values, otherwise they feel like shit.
I have no doubt the individualism in America exacerbates these issues. But if you look at other Western countries, you see the same stats that show men are floundering when it comes to education, to careers, to drug abuse, etc. So I don't believe this is entirely an American problem.
I think it's extremely human to crave a purpose and a role, and I think many Westerners currently feel they are lacking those things. Obviously, gender is only one facet of role/purpose, but it's a big one that deserves consideration.
> We need more high-profile, morally-sound men who openly discuss what it’s like to live with a testosterone-dominated body and how they learned to channel their natural instincts into positive and productive outcomes.
Well, I'm not high-profile yet, but I am taking on challenge made here!
https://maptomanhood.substack.com/p/a-map-to-manhood
Society (read: women) needs to realize that the positive male role models are going to be someone they *tolerate*, not someone they *like*.
Pre-coma Jordan Peterson was fine. You didn't have to like him, but you could tolerate him, and he was mostly about fixing men so they'd be better for the women in their lives.
Keep on vetoing the lobstermans and eventually you are left with the Tates.
Incredibly minor point, but, is there any reason you selected a male voice to read an article by a woman? Any chance you can change that?
What do you mean "a male voice to read an article by a woman"? Is there a voice reading this article? In what sense?
Oh wow! On the substack app, most full length articles can be read out loud by AI generating text-to-voice. There's a male voice and a female voice. Which one is chosen by the writer.
More information on this page. https://on.substack.com/p/new-read-aloud-voices-quote-restacks
Sorry, I didn't mean to drag you into a whole feature you were in blissful ignorance of. I find the podcast-ification of these pieces very helpful.
I can't find a way to change this on a less-than-site-wide basis.
I think this hits the nail on the head. The left doesn't have a clear point at which they tell a man "you did a good job at being a man" and the right basically requires you to either be Christian or an asshole.
"The Left isn't clear but the Right is evil"
You don't live in the Bay Area, do you?
No, grew up in a tiny conservative town, went to an ultra-liberal university and now live in a moderate-left mid-sized city.
Also, wouldn't call needing to be Christian bad per se, just not for everybody (just to be clear)
"Or an asshole"
Yeah, I mean I think the alt-right manosphere does tend to lead men to be assholes. I am sure that there are some people on the right who fulfill the more traditional male role (provider, father, community pillar) without the adde Christianity, but I would say that the men who are doing that are ovewhelmingly Christian (which is definitely a sampling bias)
Also, I actually think that the left has made a massive mistake by becoming unclear (and often actively negative) on the topic; my time at college was not supportive towards becoming a whole person in that way, while simultaneously seeming ineffective at protecting women from predatory men. I don't think that the left being simply "unclear" about it puts them ahead of the right on this topic; I have a lot more respect for the compassionate Christian groups on helping lost young men figure their lives out.
The only reason the manosphere is on the Right is because the Left hates men. There's nothing inherent in the different movements within that category that's actually right-wing.
> simultaneously seeming ineffective at protecting women from predatory men
This is not an accident. You protect women by 1) Elevating protective men and 2) Teaching women not to make themselves vulnerable. The first is bad because men are bad, and the second is bad because it's "blaming the victim" and suggests that women have agency and responsibility.
There's a reason the "male feminist" is almost always a creep, if not outright a rapist, and that's because the only men who will embrace such a model are men who will exploit it.
I feel like you understand my position a bit more clearly now, so I'm glad of that.
I think there are a few other important steps that my college missed (having rules that say that professors can't sleep with grad students for one, actually taking students seriously when they say that their boss is pushing them into a sexual relationship, etc.) But I do agree that your two points are also good when correctly implemented (what cannot be made bad by poor implementation?)
This was a strong and thoughtful essay, but I'm always a bit baffled by how many people think that being lost, depressed, and miserable is a universal experience.
Maybe I'm wrong, but most people I know seem pretty ok? Maybe there's some stress or whatever, but for most people I know life is good.
Maybe you're surrounded by people who're mostly okay, but maybe you don't associate with the people around you in contexts that lead them to expose how not-okay they are
Had the same thought. There's probably huge selection bias here: people who are mostly fine are hanging out with other people who are mostly fine, and people who are dysfunctional are more likely to find themselves in dysfunctional communities.
Yes, this. Except a lot of the dysfunctional probably aren't in community at all, so solipsism also plays a role.
There's also a life stages thing going on here. Being in your 20s, adapting to adult life, is disorienting for a lot of people. Probably goes double for people in magnet cities like SF that are likely to have moved away from friends and family.
But I was thinking of the fact that F3 (my workout group) is my most frequent point of socialization with other men. Working out hard outdoors at 0530 multiple times per week has to be an intense selection factor against depression and dysfunction.
I don't know about depressed and miserable, but most people have some problem in their life which prevents them from self-actualising. Depending on the person it can eat them up inside.
The title is "Men in the Bay" and the author has several paragraphs of preface saying this reflects the sort of men who live in the bay, #notallmen. I'd venture to say this sample aren't all men in the Bay, either, just set of men who find enough mutual attraction with the author to end up on a date with her, and of those, probably just a subset who are recognizable as a "type".
I don't know, found myself instinctively trying to put myself into one of the boxes, but I'm a married man and not in the bay, and grew up conservative, so it's probably, as they say, not for me.
I think there's a pretty basic unifying factor about all these guys; they're still on the dating market. I know a lot of guys who I think are doing great, in a variety of different ways, but pretty much uniformly all the "doing great" guys are married. The handful of dudes I know who are still single (I'm around 40, as are most of my friends)...you can generally identify why that's the case, and these buckets are broad enough that most will fall into one.
Dating at, say, 22 would probably capture a very different population of men than dating at 35, since the 22 year olds who you'd be most excited to date generally aren't gonna still be dating a decade plus later.
I should add, though, that I don't think this invalidates this as an interesting set of observations. "What's up with the men who aren't doing great" is an important question in itself, it's just a different question than "what's up with all men".
I was going to say something very similar but you beat me to it.
>Dating at, say, 22 would probably capture a very different population of men than dating at 35, since the 22 year olds who you'd be most excited to date generally aren't gonna still be dating a decade plus later.
There are a couple other factors here. One is that at 22, you're likely to be fairly immature yourself in such a way that your partners' immaturity is less likely to bother you or to be readily apparent as the root cause when it does lead to problems. Being at least somewhat directionless and immature when you're in your early 20s is so commonplace as to be unremarkable.
Another factor is that people vary in how much and how quickly they grow out of youthful immaturity, and that correlates with finding a healthy relationship in a synergistic way. Being in a healthy relationship anchors you and helps you grow, while people who are more mature tend to be at least somewhat better at finding good partners and forming and sustaining healthy relationships..
She's dated a lot more men than you have.
Yeah if a male friend said most of this stuff to me I'd tell them that their actual problem wasn't with dating and gender but needing antidepressants. Not in a dismissive way, but a lot of this reads like the sort of thing I thought when I was younger and depressed. And I just assumed was normal. But it really isn't.
Isn’t it a mistake to see all this and continue thinking these men need help “becoming a man”? They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
I know women who fell into each one of those archetypes (with a pseudo-feminist, less violent but still sexist gender flipped version substituting for manosphere). This and the “male loneliness crisis” seems to me like the symptoms of an atomised society where community ties are no longer solid, and while perhaps men are a more affected to a certain degree (especially in America perhaps), the causes are not gender specific at all.
I think it makes sense to frame it like that because, at least as the author has experienced it, men at large are struggling to find themselves and occupy a niche that feels right for them I'm society, in a way that's different from what women are experiencing.
If you build a framework for "how to become a person," and find that it's failing half your population, or failing both halves of your population in distinctly different ways, then you'd probably be better off separating out different frameworks.
I don’t see how there’s much about being a man that needs male specific advice with regards to finding fulfilment and happiness. Having deep friendships and a sense of community, hobbies, a well rounded personality, having a job you like, avoiding burn-out, not falling for online communities that preys on your identity (there’s equivalents of the manosphere for being a woman, Asian, gay, trans, white, conservative, anything you can imagine, teaching you to feel angry, victimised and powerless), being able to identify and talk about your feelings. Those are all universal things.
The later seems weirdly contentious but I think men’s unwillingness to talk in depth to their friends about their emotions is largely social. If you look at the historical record, deep emotions, physical affection between friends, strong emotional ties, etc were perfectly normal to have between men. Even in this article, some of the men jumped at the chance to trauma dump and treat their date as a therapist precisely because they were denied that due to social norms.
I agree that men's reservations about talking in-depth with their friends about their emotions is social and historically contingent, but I don't think that makes it less a distinct men's issue. In our modern context, our social environment is one where few men feel like they have appropriate outlets to share their emotional issues, and even if that's not inherent to the experience of being a man throughout history, it manifests for men today in a way that's distinct from what women ordinarily experience in present day society.
Sure, but the solution to that isn’t to bring back rites of passage and a path to manhood, but to free men of stifling gender roles and expectations that make little sense in today’s world, and let them have nurturing male *and* female role models. I’m not blaming individual men for this; this will take a social effort from all genders.
I think the experience of navigating life while being full of testosterone is different enough that you need a path that addresses manhood. It's procrustean to look for a one-size-fits-all solution.
I don't know what the solution is. Scott had an essay, years and years back, where he discussed differences in how strongly people associate with their gender, how much it's important to them as a facet of how they interact with reality, versus how much it feels like an incidental fact about themselves. I think I'm a fair ways towards the side of feeling like my gender is something incidental to myself, and not core to my identity, although I'm not at the far extreme for that. Some people's gender identity seems to matter less to them than mine does, but to a lot of people, it seems to matter much more, and compared to when I was younger, I'd say I'm now more open to the idea that a healthy and stable society might be one which features distinct gender roles and differing expectations around them.
I mentioned this in another comment, but you are missing the fact that "father" and "mother" are distinct social roles.
There are roles that are undifferentiated by sex, such as "employee", "taxpayer", or "tenured professor". There are also roles that can be undifferentiated, but can also have some differentiation by sex or traditional gender roles. For example, obstetricians or novelists. While many of the things that make a good obstetrician are not specific to ones gender, there will be differences in how you interact with many of your patients if you are a man or a woman. Similarly, many of the things that make a great novelist are common, but there are differences between how Hemingway and Jane Austin are great novelists that are not unrelated to their genders.
While there are commonalities in the prerequisites for becoming a good father and becoming a good mother, there are many important differences. Some of these differences will be unique to the individual, but others will be patterns or common to the role of father.
I think that one of the biggest differences in these is that to be a good father, you have to learn how to have a good relationship with your wife, who is a woman, as a man. (And for a mother, you have to learn how to have a good relationship with your husband, who is a man, as a women.)
I don't think that my wife would appreciate it if I treated her "like one of the boys". She doesn't particularly like horsing around, playing video games, competing, or things like that. Similarly, the homies would not appreciate being swept of their feet and being given a gentle kiss on the forehead.
General agreement except that you can, in fact, kiss the homies goodnight (as a bit)
ok but that's only after I tuck the homies into bed and read them a bedtime story
As a man, I find it very weird! I identify with many of the questions about meaning and so on that her exemplars are dealing with, though I think I am mostly happy with my answers, and I do think the lack of community is a huge issue in our society. But as you say, there's nothing particularly male about any of it. I don't deny there are some sex differences in people's experience of our society, but when I think about my role in society my gender is like the tenth most important thing?
Because the last 10,000 years of human history might have more educational value than a self-absorbed academic discipline? Why are you assuming that men and women are the same?
>They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
As far as I can tell, backlash against the trans movement.
Low effort and incorrect comment. MtF and FtM trans people reinforce gender roles and their differentiation. If you have ever seen FtM people post-transition, you would clearly see that they are deliberately working to learn how to _be a man_, not to "be a person".
If there was no purpose in "learning to be a man" or "learning to be a woman", then _why the fuck would anyone transition in the first place? (excepting nonbinary folks)_
Just think about it for a second. What are trans people transitioning from and transitioning to? Why the fuck do trans people talk about "second puberty" post-transition, and the awkwardness of learning to inhabit the new social role of their adopted gender?
You sound like a markov model who just spits out meaningless platitude and copy-pasted talking points when you pattern match things as "gender-related wrongthing".
Uh-huh.
And do you think this author would say that trans women are innately biologically built to give birth and raise children? The same as they say of 'women' in general?
Because if you do think that's what they would say, I have a bridge to sell you.
Trust me, I am well-versed and carefully-considered on the relationship between the trans movement and gender ideology, including the role of non-binary trans people which you conveniently neglect to mention. I'll link to my wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview if you want.
But what you're missing is that the *reality* of the relationship between trans people and gender ideology has very little to do with the right-wing *backlash* to trans people.
The right just sees the acceptance of trans people as an assault on traditional gender roles, and responds by reifying and reasserting those traditional strictures.
If they're smart like this author, they do that with a brush of Evo Psych as an 'academic' justification.
If so, it's a very wrongheaded way to backlash. Very few people are more aware of the significance of gender to identity than trans men and trans women.
Yes, but they are also foremost in recognizing gender roles as social constructs and gender expression as performative.
Which is what the right rejects, and is why they bring up discredited evo psych platitudes to justify their claims of biological gender essentialism.
I think that framing this as "how to become a person" misses some of the important differences between the social role of man and women.
One way to view "becoming a man" and "becoming a woman" is as "becoming a father" and "becoming a mother" (in the context of a stable monogamous heterosexual relationship). If you are a person and want to pair-bond and raise children in a stable heterosexual relationship, you have to inhabit either the role of man/father or woman/mother, and most people only realistically have the potential to inhabit one of these roles given their biological sex.
In her discussion of "the man who opts out", the author clearly describes men who successfully become a person (in the sense that they have friends, do well in the workplace, etc.) but who struggle to become a man/father. The role of "friend" and "employee" are roles that can be relatively sexless and undifferentiated. People can learn to perform these roles very competently and still fail to learn how to be a man/father. While I think you are right that atomization and other problems impact people of all sexes, I think there are distinct impacts and challenges that they pose for biological men trying to become men/fathers and on biological women trying to become women/mothers.
One thing that I think that the author misses is that there are different end-states that can be characterized as "becoming a man". I think that the ideal that she is gesturing towards is that of becoming a father in a pair-bonded long-term stable heterosexual relationship in which children are raised.
Historically, one could also "become a man" by becoming a marauding warrior. This was a somewhat successful strategy at the level of culture for a number of cultures, though I think there's a decent argument that it lost out at the cultural level to the monogamous pair-bonded father model because it is relatively incompatible with modernity and is less capable of sustaining technological production. (The traditional Comanche culture/society could not sustain itself against artillery and rifles. Warlordism still exists in e.g. South Sudan, but there is a reason that these places are not military peers of the great powers.)
Humans are a gendered species. Every human society has sex roles, and they all align with the innate psychological differences between men and women.
Trying to teach broken men to become a 'better person' is going to end up with advice that is too generic to be meaningful. Particularly in the realm of romance. If you want to help a guy end up happily married, then you need to give him advice on dating/life as a man, because the things he is going to have to do and be on the dating market are male-specific. For example, a woman looking for love doesn't need to learn how to ask a guy out on a date, but a man looking for love absolutely does.
My point was that very little of that “brokenness” in this article had to do directly with them being men. Moving to a new city and losing all your old friends, having only superficial friendships, being unfulfilled by a boring if lucrative job, not knowing what you want to do in life… what advice would you give a man that wouldn’t also apply to a woman?
Sure, heterosexual dating has social norms and expectations, but anyone who’s experimented with dating the same sex can recognise how arbitrary and stifling they can be, and how you’re so better off moving on from the framework of “I am the man, so I do X, you are the woman, so you do Y”. Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness. Fathers should be nurturing, warm and emotionally supportive, mothers should teach skills and promote strength and independence.
More to the point, raising your kids differently because of their sex is probably what leads to many kind of neuroses. I know families where only the girls are expected to clean and cook and take care of themselves, and then they wonder why the boys are slovenly manchildren who look to their girlfriends to fulfil the role their mother did.
You should teach your daughters how to change a tire and stand up for themselves, and your sons to clean and talk about their feelings. If they have preferences, that’s absolutely fine, but they should never think that they are forced on a specific path because of their sex , especially from their parents, because sooo much societal message will be working against them.
A+ excellent comment
This is one of the best articles I've read on substack
I agree. Most people are not *intentionally* mean to men and may even be mildly well-disposed-by-default, but this author is (I feel) somewhat rare, among both men and women, in having a level of empathy that makes her put in so much effort into understanding other men from their own perspective.
I keep running across women online who are overtly hostile to men, for example the woman who didn't want to hear about male loneliness because so many gay/transgender/women/etc. are lonely and no one seems to care about that.
I'm not sure how much of it is actually wanting to hurt people who are imagined as real.
There's a lot of free-floating cruelty these days and it does add up.
A person who is Whole does not obsess about whether they are a 'man'. They don't need detailed instructions on how to be one.
You want men (and women!) to be whole? Teach them to be self-aware and honest with themselves. Teach them basic virtues, and to avoid over-philosophising. It isn't rocket science!
This is exactly the kind of empty non-advice causing the problems the author is talking about. A lot of people do need detailed, specific instructions and are going to be lost and hopeless without them.
Sorry, was typing from a phone, so let me expand my point a bit. Children of both genders do need detailed, specific instruction. My point is that this instruction is not on how to be a man or a woman. It's on how to learn to be themselves, and how to learn to be good.
Men and women do have biological differences, but these are on average. Each individual is unique. Trying to enforce 'male' instruction on a boy whose temperament will reject that instruction will cause that child to become 'lost' and confused.
The issue the author has correctly identified is that we've told too many people that acting in line with their natural inclination is wrong and toxic. But their solution is to do the same at scale - teach all boys to behave like 'men' even when it doesn't suit them, and all girls to behave like 'women'. Why?
Because when your son gets older he's going to be bigger, stronger, faster and more powerful than most of the women he meets, and they are going to look to him in a crisis for that reason, and he will represent a threat to them if he does not have control over himself and a degree of humility.
How often do you encounter crises where your size, strength, and speed matter? Most 'crises' either of my children are likely to encounter will require composure, wisdom, courage, and kindness, and I can try to teach these virtues to both of them.
You missed the point. If they know they cannot look to him in a crisis, they will not respect him.
Character traits (confidence, decisiveness) are much more like to inspire respect than physical traits. And women can exhibit those just as well as men.
I empathize with your take, but we live in a mimetic world where most people will follow some fixed narrative (or combination of narratives). For all to self-actualize as individuals is too much to ask for. So I think the author is in search of better mass-narratives (cultures/maps/etc).
'Be self-aware and honest with yourself and others about who you are' *is* a detailed, specific instruction.
The fact that we think it's not is an indictment of our atomized consumerist culture, where the only way we can think to know ourselves is in relation to an external archetype or ideological avatar.
I do not think it's possible to get less specific than "be self-aware and honest with yourself and others about who you are." What does that even mean? Self-awareness is usually understood to be an attribute not a choice, and it must be cultivated by other behaviors. How does one be honest about who they are when they might not know themselves? How does one even explore that?
It's frigging pablum, a throwaway glib phrase. Specificity is nowhere to be seen.
Any single sentence is not a detailed list of instructions, yes.
Self-awareness is absolutely an active process, and a skill you can train. At every step, you can interrogate yourself for what you want and what you think, or reach for external validators to tell you what to think and what to do. Introspection is a skill with a very long history of study and development. It's not hard to find detailed instructions for these things if that's what you need.
Again, consumerist culture tries very hard to destroy this skill; it's much more convenient for advertisers to create 12 'types' of person, and then target brands and narratives to each group. Content recommendation engines will filter your content to match a 'type', if you click a bunch of Vtubers it will stop trying to show you sports. Any original thought you might have will have to fight against a hundred eloquent blog posts by persuasive pundits trying to get you on their 'side'.
That makes it hard to 'be yourself', to the extent that some people can't even comprehend what the phrase could be saying. Which brand do I buy to 'be myself'? Which blog do I read to 'be myself'?
This is very much a 'get out of the car' piece of advice, yes. But it's not *that* difficult, you just have to practice the skill of stopping and asking yourself what *you* want to do, what *you* think, before automatically accepting the cultural default.
See? You already got far more specific. Even breaking it down into how and when you train the skill of self awareness is infinitely more helpful then just saying "be self aware."
The author is kenning the gender differences that some men do honestly need things like that spelled out (and I include myself in thay category, and thank God every day I have a wife patient enough to explain it to me). And while I disagree with her assessment that its only the "evil alt-right" trying to spell those things out to men right now, I agree with her assessment that men today lack a platonic source of such knowledge.
I disagree.
With what part, and why?
Is anyone else doubting this is actually written by a woman?
I'm mostly doubting the age not the gender. It feels like it was written by someone older than in their twenties.
If I had to guess the age of the author based on the content of their writing, I'd suspect older than twenties, but not so strongly that their say-so about being a twenty-something woman surprises me. I think that a lot of people overestimate the association between age and wisdom or maturity.
As an adult, I've known teenagers who I've considered better sources of good judgment, able to consider situations carefully, draw usefully on their experience and the knowledge they've absorbed, and make good decisions, draw appropriate conclusions, or offer helpful advice, than the majority of adults I've known who were well into the middles of their careers. And I've known plenty of adults, 50+ years old, who showed less maturity and good judgment than the average student I've taught in their teens.
There's a difference between wisdom and raw intelligence, but some people have much more aptitude in cultivating wisdom than others.
I agree that she doesn't feel like a young adult, but I could buy her being in her late 20s, especially if she's dated older men and has compared notes with older friends.
The way the author completely crawls inside men's heads is impressive enough that I had the same thought. I'll assume good faith and/or that Scott has done something to vet the author.
No, I wasn't; but if you are, consider that they could be trans, and have some amount of added perspective on biological maleness because of that. (But that's probably less likely, given the unironic affection for gender roles.)
Intensely psycho-analysing the men she dates and doing a good job of it is exactly what I would expect from a woman who works in the Bay Area.
It definitely feels like a lotnof stuff that I've read from men online talking about gender and dating for years. And the author doesn't actually describe the first person experience of dating the men very much (is she attracted to these men? Does she like doing things with them? Etc). But I'd still presume good faith
Yes. But to be fair I only skimmed after the first three paragraphs because the beginning seemed like antifeminist self-indulgent drivel. I am a woman btw.
First off, respect for writing this. It takes a lot of emotional energy and vulnerability to put this stuff out there for the public. Still, there were a few frustrating sections:
>"Yet realistically, this is a fantasy. A single person can rarely solve issues this severe; it requires the combined strength of an entire community to drag a soul back from such extreme depths. Any attempt at a romantic relationship would crumble under the weight of the void, and only leave the man feeling more hopeless."
This is psychological cope. Of course the best way to bring a man with low self-confidence back "from the void" is to *prove to him that he does have worth by valuing him*.
To be clear, no, you don't have a moral obligation to take it upon yourself to dedicate your life to any particular man-who-is-lost. This is different from believing the factual statement that "one person couldn't do anything."
>"Yet the logical side of me knows I need to judge–ultimately, it’s a necessary part of dating. And a crippling lack of self-esteem is a death blow for the stability of any relationship. If I want a healthy relationship, I simply cannot date someone with that trait."
More psychological cope. You would prefer a relationship with a man who doesn't have self-esteem issues. That's fine. You are allowed to have that preference. But note the language here: "stability," "healthy," preferences which you could choose to compromise on are written as objective dealbreakers. Thought experiment: suppose that 90% of straight women do not want to date men with self-esteem issues, and 30% of men have self-esteem issues. Solve for the equilibrium.
>"So my advice to men who fall into this category is to rip off the bandaid. If they want a partner, they need to start working toward it now. Overcoming insecurities and past traumas takes time and effort."
Time and effort doing what? This sounds deep and biting, but dig a little deeper and we find that this is essentially meaningless. "Just fix all of your unspecified problems bro."
I also want to note the conspicuous absense of rules 1 and 2. It may have been a good idea to leave them out in order to focus on the more intelectually interesting aspects of dating. To paraphrase Scott, I look forward to the, "Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument," follow-up article.
How is that paraphrasing Scott?
It's a reference to his "The Origins of Woke" review. Ctrl+F "Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument"
Ah, that's at https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/144030929/the-origins-of-inequality
Maybe this differs between men and women on average, but while some people with self esteem issues may find them genuinely resolved by dating someone who values them, dating someone with self esteem issues, and valuing them, is not necessarily going to fix or even help them.
Also, if what the person needs in order to feel reassured is sincere, unreserved positive regard, and the best you can show is empathy and compassion, you can't offer them what they're looking for, even if you want to.
Hang on, what are Rules 1 and 2?
I assume this is a reference to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/be-attractive-dont-be-unattractive.
> Time and effort doing what?
I think interpersonal issues can be grinded out to some extent. You just keep trying to date and make friends even if the process is sometimes painful and unpleasant. I know my social anxiety is lesser now than when I started two and a half years ago, even if it's not fully gone.
I'm not sure that social anxiety is the same thing as serious self-esteem problems. They can be related, but a number of these men have basic social competence.
Their problem is being unmoored about what they want and being unable to look for what satisfies them.
But sometimes the self-esteem problems are being driven by social failure, like in the men who opted out. If that's the case, there's really no option but to grind it out.
I don't really understand the focus on gender-specific Maps honestly. Obviously there are people who might benefit from highly gendered advice in specific circumstances, but in general I'm not sure the gender lens helps very often for whatever problems a person is facing.
The fact that all the posts like this suddenly talk about how there isn't really any one map/path/way/model/etc in reality once it's time to talk concretely and have to resort to meta-describing what manhood should be gives away the game a bit. Like look at this paragraph again:
"There is no one “right way” to be a man, just as there is no one right way to be a woman. But we need to provide young men with varied, concrete examples of manhood, highlight the positivity that each form of manhood brings the world, and provide stepping-stones for becoming each type."
This seems to make it clear to me that if there are no one right ways per gender, then splitting them up by gender seems kind of pointless. Just describe all the cool ways to be a person, and sure maybe some of them are class-locked or have aspects that are class-locked but in general I don't think that describes many of these ways or a large proportion of the features of any of these ways. I think most of the important things that a person might believe or the important things that a person might want to be or aspire to don't really involve gender at all. Even the few roles and identities that are more clearly gendered seem to make this clear to me, e.g. whether you want to be a "mother" type parent or a "father" type parent, the similarities between what would make a good one in each case seem much more numerous and important than the few aspects of those roles that are specific to one or the other.
Perhaps some people live extremely gendered lives where all of their beliefs and actions are highly gender-tinged, and that's fine for those people but it sounds like they don't really need any help. The people who do need help are the people are lost-in-general, and gender isn't really a big part of their issues. At least, all of the types of men described in the post don't seem to me like their problems are very gender-specific at all.
Gender specific maps can be good because there are cool ways to be a person, but the path to get there is very different and can be very gender specific.
For example: A good thing you can do for yourself is be in a loving relationship.
But as a man, I have always had to be a pursuer. I have never had a women come upto me and give me compliments. I always need to take the first step.
Women on the other hand get pursued a lot. Lot of times even when they don't want it.
You can't have the same map for dating for both of us. A woman once called me a creep for asking for a hug. I really wish there were concrete social rules I could follow so that something like this never happened, because it is mortifying.
Everyone’s experience is different and yes there are social norms and expectations and default experiences, but you can absolutely be in an environment where you will be pursued (by women) as a man. I’ve seen it happen, many times. Maybe it’s not the kind of women you want, and you need to present yourself in a certain way, but the same goes for women.
I haven't finished reading this yet, but the first few paragraphs are absolutely why I had difficulty socializing with the women I met in university, who unironically "hate men" and could not explain why they bothered talking to their male relatives, much less went on dates. Despite superficially embracing freedom in gender and sexuality, their view of womanhood was way too narrow to include me: the traits they hated in men were traits I value in myself. My non-Western parents believe in gender roles but my father doesn't believe women's culture has value, so I was raised under what most Canadians and Americans call "toxic masculinity" (though without much of an emphasis on feats of strength: in his culture, the scholar is also a hero). This has turned out to be a much bigger barrier between me and other women than my sex/gender has been between me and men.
Edit: having read more, I am/was the first guy. But I'm a non-Bay Area woman with a completely different experience of dating, and leaning on partners to get me through it made it both a lot worse and a lot better.
This is an odd review. The first four male types are basically all the same person - lost, confused, adrift, empty, may or may not be angry about it - but with varying degrees of career or past romantic success. The fifth type is a hazy romantic fantasy of encountering charismatic emotional wholeness in a man. The writer doesn’t seem to be very self-aware about what issues or needs she herself is bringing to the table that shape how she sees people.
Really the issues she is pointing to about lack of community in modern urban life affect both men and women. She hints she has solved them through finding some kind of deeply fulfilling community (although not a romantic partner apparently), but doesn’t go into any detail about how that worked.
Admittedly men and woman deal with these things differently, because we’re hormonally different, may have internalized different gender-related expectations, and also young women are in sexual / romantic demand for biological reasons that young men are not. But the similarities may be greater than the differences
I liked the post overall but I want to push back against the trend of reducing broad social trends to gender specific issues.
Most of the personal issues mentioned came down to problems with careers, problems with people's social lives or romantic problems. Which all seem like they're more affected by wider socio-economic forces like how the economy is structured, the issues around communities the Scott has posted about recently etc. than they're affected by gender norms. The basic facts of economic and social life are broadly similar regardless of gender
I'm sceptical changing attitudes around gender can affect how people experience those much.
If someone doesn't have professional or social problems it's probably because they just happen to be attractive, or have psychological traits that are better adapted to modern life than the average person's, or they're lucky and have a desirable job. Rather than because they did or didn't follow a script for being a man or whatever.
...romantic problems aren't gendered, but instead are economic? I notice I am confused. Would the issue be improved by raising class consciousness?
I have a major problem with the premise of the review, and it's the same premise that a lot of Scott's (especially early) writing on wokeness has: treating the values of the most progressive parts of the world as if they are the world's values or even the west's values.
The author is open about it centering on the Bay Area, but I think this is a bad approach for many reasons:
1. It silences the huge parts of the west that don't largely have these values (at least to anything like the same extent), or relegates them to a parenthetical.
2. It fails to engage with the core argument for wokeness that these values are not actually so widespread. I'm pretty anti-woke but you have to engage their arguments directly.
3. Above all, it leads you into fantasy thinking that "these feminist values are the values of the world, of the future, and they should have some empathy and be gracious with their power and notice some of their contradictions"...instead of "their position is extremely precarious, limited to certain elite parts of certain countries, and if they don't notice and fix their contradictions asap they *will* be, within 50 years or 100 at most, outcompeted and annihilated by some mixture of Islamic, East Asian, and Red Tribe values that don't have such contradictions."
>treating the values of the most progressive parts of the world as if they are the world's values or even the west's values
The argument is that these values are dominant in the "blue tribe" strongholds, the "blue tribe" ideologically dominates most of the "high status" western institutions, and due to the western hegemony those are disproportionally influential worldwide. I'm not sure which part of that you find non-obvious.
It depends what we mean by "these values" and by "feminism" and so on. There's an annoying equivocation, done by both left and right, about this.
If you mean wokeness, as in specifically the post-2008 social movement obsessed with identity politics and who's privileged and should therefore shut up...that is absolutely not very influential outside a few narrow circles, and even within the latter is both extremely recent and precarious to the extent that parts of it are already falling out of fasion. The Bay Area is one of those narrow circles and parts of the review really have the "I'm in a bubble" feel: putting "cisgender" in front of "men and women are biologically different" and suggesting movies don't portray men's physical strength as a heroic thing (if this is remotely true at all, it can only possibly be within the literal last few years).
If you mean the broad post-20s and post-60s liberalism about gender roles, I agree that that's globally hegemonic and part of the orthodoxy of our time. But it's still worth remembering that it's the orthodoxy only of the currently hegemonic civilization. The author does a good job of pointing out some of the ways this orthodoxy has developed a lot of absurdities and contradictions, but I don't think she's mindful enough of how precarious it is. She should be scared of its imminent collapse, she should be telling her fellow feminist to reform themselves right now in fear of its imminent collapse, and every anti-feminist should *also* fear its imminent collapse...at least, those who aren't *so* into their anti-feminism that they'd actually prefer Sharia law or pseudo-Confucian elder respect in its place. Because if we're not all really careful, those are going to soon be in its place.
>that is absolutely not very influential outside a few narrow circles
Sure, if you'll allow that such small fries as "public schooling" and "Hollywood" fit inside those narrow circles.
>If you mean the broad post-20s and post-60s liberalism about gender roles
I don't see how you can cleanly separate "wokeness" from that. Clearly the "blue tribe" consensus is that they are on the same right side of history, even if some of the hottest heads are perhaps a bit too eager about transing four-year-olds.
Fair point, but for better or worse the Bay Area has become an avatar for the Place Where Men Achieve Greatness, so even men who don't live there receive unconscious messages about it.
I think there's a problem where literal minded people take the opinions of the small number of people who write explicitly about a topic as the opinions of society on that topic. Most men aren't reading about gender to learn how to be men. They're learning it from the characters in tv shows etc. And if you look up popular culture of theast few decades it doesn't match OP's description at all
I was working as an interpreter for a group of female clients. My colleague (we usually work in pairs) was a man. Practically every meeting we went to was women only. During each meeting we discussed the professional topics at hand, but at the very end, there was about five minutes of “female bonding” where they would trash-talk about men. My colleague not only had to listen to that, he would actually had to interpret it. He is a professional, so he did his job, but I had a problem with it, so I would gently remind them: “Ladies, we have a man here.” I think that we, women should be aware that men have feelings, just like we do and we should treat them with respect.
Beautiful and inspiring the time you have taken to see the humanity in each situation. I love the categories and thinking, but even more the empathy the perspective you developed requires a lot of self-work over years to be so integrated. This was a gift I am excited to use to help better understand other men I meet in life, thank you. The only pushback is I think you are limiting the reach by the focus on "the Bay area", I live in Utah and this deeply resonates with what I have experienced as well. Thank you.
I liked this article a lot, not so much for the typologies of men (though some of what's in there rings true for different parts of my life), but for the real empathy for men that comes through from the piece. A lot of social media and the Discourse these days seems to be stoking tensions between men and women, so anything that pushes gender relations in a positive direction is a useful corrective, imo.
If I lived in the Bay Area I would be interested in finding out who the author is so I could try to date her, lol. I wonder how common of a reaction that will be.
I'm in the MidWest, and I kinda figured I'm several income classes lower than the writer.
Sadly, I was opt-out for decades for a variety of reasons. At least the hypothetical guy on the apps got 1 hit a month, I don't even get the bots.
Opt-out is the one that resonated the most for me too, although I like to think I'm in the process of "graduating out" of that phase right now.
I think your hit rate on the apps would probably be correlated with the size of your dating market. 1 bot match per month in the Bay Area might be comparable to none in the Midwest.
Yes but that's less funny. :P
It always makes me a bit emotional when someone tackles men's issues in a nice way. And normally I only get emotional when cute anime girls achieve their dreams. This sort of writing is sorely needed. Thank you.
This was painful to read. I've had some good relationships, but you'd probably consider me to have "Opted Out" -- dating apps haven't worked well for me and I've mostly given up on them. All my romantic relationships have come from meeting people casually. (Though I do have one very good friend I met on okcupid!)
I guess my own feeling is that I'm pretty happy with my life and my friends, and my job is fine. (This essay suggests that an alarming number of single men in the Bay Area seem to have lost their jobs. I'm hoping that's just representative of this person's dating pool, and not of the population as a whole.) I don't feel a particular need to learn how to Be A Man, but I sure wish there were a trustworthy guide out there for how to Be Successful On Dating Sites.
If I wanted to rationalize the dating-site thing to myself, I'd probably say something like: "being successful on dating sites is anti-inductive (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-anti-inductive/): if there were a guide for how to do it, then everyone would start following the guide, and following the guide would quickly be seen as lame and pathetic."
----
Certain aspects of the essay feel irritating to me -- in particular this stuff about "having an intense passion for something and benefiting my community through my goals". Hardly anyone does that! My friends don't do it, the married people I know don't do it, the women I've dated sure didn't do it, and I think it's unfair that you're demanding it of me.
(I guess the solution is that "having children" counts as being passionate and benefiting the community, for this purpose? But I don't want to have children!)
I guess this means I'll keep being single.
This is probably a good guide for online dating: https://www.fantasticanachronism.com/p/how-to-be-good-at-dating
I think the main thing is that you do have to spend a lot of time swiping to generate dates, but probably many guys don't get professional photos either, which I've found helped. And getting in shape, he says getting to 15% body fat, I find that difficult, but now I'm in shape enough that I can get matches with some consistency.
Who voted for this and why? What were you hoping to communicate or what did you like about this?
I mean, I didn't like it, obviously, but other people apparently did and I'm curious what they saw as good or insightful or useful about this. I feel like the "gender discourse" is passing me by and maybe this has reference or relevance to some modern discussions I'm not a part of.
Like, I know vaguely that the Dems spent $20 mil "reaching out to men" but that's just a headline. Is this on that vibe? Something else? Tate bad but Tate also...5 years old? More? What are the kids on these days?
I was curious about this too. This is very well written, and the author clearly has a lot of empathy for the men they're talking about. However, I had one major issue with this: none of the men sketched out here have *anything* to offer another person. They're all status-seeking in some way, and they all want friends and companionship and – to various degrees – seek those things out. What do they care about though? What do they do to be of service to other people?
> He tries to distract himself from his miserable job with his social life, but it’s not as easy as he expected. All his college friends moved to different cities, and their texts grow increasingly rare. The city is huge, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, but it feels like they're a swarm of NPCs.
This type of man, later disappointed that his Run Club friend doesn't know his "whole" self, dismisses other individuals as NPCs!
Even the provider is a poor friend and someone who sees their partner as a product to be researched and secured, not someone to *be a partner to.*
> Those “friends” in his Burning Man photos were from his startup incubator, and he hasn’t spoken to any of them in ten months. He misses speaking with them, if he’s honest with himself, but he worries they’d drag him down. Their startups haven’t been as successful as his, and he’s convinced it’s because of their attitudes and lack of work ethic. As for dating? Well, a partner is yet another thing to be optimized, of course. They must match or exceed his quality level, and a woman’s quality revolves around their job title and academic degrees.
This essay describes individuals that are wholly extractive. They want rules and structure that define the steps they should follow in order to get what they want, but none of them seem ready to give or contribute. You can't have a friend without being a friend, you can't find a partner without willing to be one, you can't feel successful without caring about the thing you're trying to have success at.
Men face plenty of problems at a societal level, many of them captured well here, but I'm sorry to say that none of the types described here can trace the core of their problem to anything but themselves.
> anything but themselves
It's not like anyone makes themselves, "themselves" is an output of their upbringing and family. Overcoming that is difficult, but doable. And I don't think people who do well in dating/socializing are in general more altruistic than these guys, altruistic people are rare.
I don't think altruism correlates to success dating/socializing, but I do think people who approach it with a "what can you do for me and how soon can you do it" attitude are less likely to succeed.
I'm pretty sure that's the attitude with which most people approach life, however. People don't befriend people who aren't giving them good vibes right off the bat.
Did this feel empathetic to you or did it feel sympathetic or both?
Like, do you think the author accurately captured the internal experience of these men, do you think she felt they were in pain and thought it was bad, or a combination of both?
I think the following are true:
- the writer empathizes with the lonely-making aspects of modern life, as well as the broken status-seeking guidance the world presents young people (these aren't necessarily limited to men)
- the writer does not accurately capture the whole internal experience of these men (an unfair expectation, arguably)
I think the length of the description of each type is telling+proportionate in terms of how much pain the author felt from each type of man and how bad they thought it was. How about you?
I voted for this to signal-boost a rare example of a "progressive" who is willing to at least somewhat criticize her side not in the "we need even more Stalinism" direction. I think this criticism doesn't go nearly far enough, naturally, but even so it was a surprise.
Thanks for your response! Curious, what criticism would have gone far enough?
I had a bit of a back-and-forth with the author in the comments to the announcement: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025/comment/123049144
The prescription at the end calls for a lot of empathetic listening and validation of men. But men respond well to a challenge!
Something to consider is that a lot of the most depraved manosphere influencers challenge and criticize their audience, at least superficially. You'd think the winning strategy for a social media con man is to just validate your audience, but apparently young men looking for male role models want to be challenged.
This should be a consideration for anyone who wants to be a positive male role model.
(On the other hand, for boys, as in actual children, I think the prescription to protect them from negative remarks and cruelty is quite right.)
Excellent point. Therapeutic methods aren't the delivery method for whatever vaccine someone might come up with.
This is an extremely insightful review, thank you.
I would say, for all the points about finding the right therapist: there's aren't that many, but try specifically looking for a male therapist, and if possible a male therapist under 45 or so. I had female therapists for close to ten years and they all ended up trying to act a bit like a mom, aunt, or grandma and that really wasn't what I needed. Male therapists were more likely to act like a mentor or confidant and to intuitively understand the things I struggled to articulate..
Highly recommend Jon Tyson's "Intentional Fatherhood" for any dads on here interested in raising their boys to become men. It's written from a Christian perspective but would benefit any dad regardless of religious belief.
Great review! I do think that most men in the writer's sample might be at the edges of the normal distribution of "heartland" males. Bay Area (and the writer) are outliers. I do suspect that similar dynamics are at play everywhere, but I wonder how many more categories there may be across a broader crossection of average Joe's.
I am a woman, and I agree with some other commenters here. I know many women who fit these categories (including myself, if I'm being honest). It seems like atomization and lack of community are larger issues that affects everyone, regardless of gender (lacking meaningful relationships, including platonic ones, seems to be a recurring theme in this piece). You could make an argument that these issues affect men and women differently, but I am not sure it makes sense to frame the question as "how to be a man".
I enjoyed reading this piece. However...
The author must have gone on many dates, perhaps hundreds, over several years to develop her categories. Why?
Long ago, dating was a path to finding a mate, someone you cared deeply about and intended to build a life with. Based on this essay, it seems that dating is a game, or perhaps a research project, but it is not a serious activity. Men appear to be interesting subjects for research, or perhaps toys to be collected, but not individuals to love.
I had some of the same thoughts - someone who has gone on this many dates probably doesn't know what she wants. But I don't think it's necessarily on purpose; plenty of people date a lot, and while I agree that's usually indicative of something wrong (often a kind of lostness), I don't think it's usually because of a desire to treat partners as research subjects.
Im extremely impressed with the empathy on display! If I wrote a review of bay area women it would be "mumble mumble overchoice leads to self sabatoge mumble mumble", id have no idea how to start profiling the taxonomy of different traumas and various ways people are semi broken.
I also want to point out: I think the different broken guys are roles or masks that all men inhabit to different degrees at different times! I dont think anyone is all the way one of those profiles
Strongly agree – tried to get at this a little in my other comment, but the types here felt like a creative writing exercise and not any real people.
Whenever these conversations come up, I feel a bit confused by what specifically it is that men are missing, and what would meet this need. I feel like according to the discourse, the typical male malaise is "being lost" in the way the author describes, whereas the typical female malaise is struggling to balance career and motherhood and "have it all", as well as facing issues like abuse, inequitable burdens, etc. Whereas I'm a cis woman, and I feel like I've more often struggled with the "male" malaise of not knowing what my path is/should be, how to productively do good in the world, etc. (When I was younger, I also suffered the more male-stereotypical problem of being chronically single and lonely). So yeah, I guess I'm not sure how a gendered map would solve this. Like, in my own case, the 'motherhood' role can't solve it on its own, because I'm not a mother yet, and even if I have kids, I have other values. Would being told 'you should join the army/get a job and Provide/defend the weak' help these men? unclear.
Relates to the whole malwnas unmarked gender thing. The struggles of manhood are the struggles of life in general
Lately I've been really grappling with my status as what the author terms a Man Who Opts Out and trying to figure out how to overcome the deficits I've accrued, so it was interesting and slightly alarming to see my predicament pinned up on the screen as an archetype. The Bay Area expression of that archetype may be different from my low key LCOL existence but it was still close enough to hit home. (the other archetypes, fwiw, didn't feel quite as familiar - maybe living somewhere where real estate is closer to $100/sqft than $1000 reduces the all-consuming pressure for wealth and status that characterizes those other types of guys)
At the end of the Opts Out section I was hoping to find a prescription more specific and actionable than the extremely vague "So my advice to men who fall into this category is to rip off the bandaid... Overcoming insecurities and past traumas takes time and effort" but I guess when we come to anonymous blog posts for life advice we get what we pay for.
I was also a Man Who had Opted Out, I'm in the process of becoming whole. I do have a purpose and a goal in life, but I don't have community, nor have I experienced romantic success. Surely it's a process of trial-and-error to find the last two, I think a big thing is to persist even if the process is awkward and painful at times.
OPT IN. Hard to know the very best way to go about this in your location, but... go to bars and find meetups where people are open to being asked out. Strike up conversations, and close by asking them out before the end of the night. If you're not sure if they're open to it, start erring on the side of asking anyway.
If you find that you're too insecure about yourself to approach people, (1) man up and do it anyway, but also (2) give yourself reasons to be more confident. Go to the gym if you don't already; get a better haircut and wardrobe. You can improve yourself, and you can find love.
Sorry if this seems obvious, lecture-y, or unsympathetic. Good luck out there.
Thanks for this, it was a very therapeutic essay. As a man who had opted out navigating the transition into man who is whole, I think the big thing I lack is community (I do have purpose and a goal). I wonder if I'll have to move to find it, but then, I have no idea where.
Another point here is that there is a freedom/structure tradeoff between 'clear roles' (for genders + in general) and 'doing what you want to do'. If I had been raised with a clear expectation of 'you'll marry and raise kids and do domestic labour', then that would have taken away a lot of angst and soul-searching. But it also would have had the problem of 'what if I want to do other things and/or would be bad at being a parent and housewife?' And I imagine that's true of traditional male roles and structures too.
I don't have any better or more systematic evidence than the reviewer does, but as a Modern Man myself, the description of the Modern Map of Manhood has always struck me as a caricature/strawman -- one invoked as an example of the excesses of wokeness, but that I've never actually witnessed in real life. For example, I've never seen anyone so much as imply that men should not do sports, including very masculine ones. I was an amateur boxer and the only negative response that ever got (from either men or women) was, "Isn't that dangerous?", which was actually an ego-stroking backdoor complement because it was clear the speaker thought I was therefore brave and cool. Boxing raised my status in my otherwise very nerdy, intellectual social circles in both high school and college. No one ever said or implied that it was toxic and every single social consequence I had from boxing was positive. This was also true of every other boy I boxed with.
Similarly, no one ever said or implied I should not to be into girls, be assertive, or ask them out. The message I did get, very clearly (mostly from female but also normal male friends) was "don't be creepy or scary". I just honestly don't believe men who say they can't tell the difference between these messages. The difference between making someone laugh and saying, "Hey, I like you" one the one hand, and making someone visibly uncomfortable and then not backing off on the other is and always has been very obvious to me. I understand that this isn't the case for people with clinically deficient social skills, but if we're talking about the majority of men, I just can't believe these are confusable. It reminds me of how Trump tried to dismiss his "I like to grab them by the p****" comment as 'locker room talk'. The difference between making comments like that and hitting on a girl in a normal, healthy, non-creepy way is not some subtle fine line you can accidentally find yourself on the wrong side of, no matter how much creepy men try to convince you that they just can't possibly tell the difference. Whenever I did meet a man who would complain how some girl rejected him or thought he was creepy for just expressing interest, asking some questions quickly made it clear that either he really was being super-creepy in an obvious, uncontroversial way, or that he couldn't accept that the girl wasn't interested and blamed her for it instead of just accepting it and trying to move on.
I don't doubt that I've been lucky and it may be that my experience growing up wasn't representative. But even so, I would have expected to see just one single example, at some point in my teen or adult life, of this dynamic of men being shamed for normal, non-creepy masculine behavior outside of social media. I don't think this is a real phenomenon.
I want to add that I find the rest of this review very off-putting. Most of the men in these categories don't seem to get past the first date with the writer. In that context, writing so many psychoanalytic paragraphs about these men's problems and what the author judges to be the causal life history of those problems feels more like an exercise in imagination than in figuring out the common threads in a large amount of data (which is how the review is billed). As a result, these descriptions read to me like stereotypes -- characters I'd see in a sitcom rather than ones fully fleshed out in a novel or a drama. I have some close single male friends in the bay area, and they are not at all like any of these descriptions (though I can imagine how someone might confidently pigeonhole them into one of these categories if they went on one date, came prepared to categorize, and then did a lot of unwarranted imaginative extrapolation).
She does open by saying that these men tend to open up to her in their first dates, treating her like a therapist. So she might not have to imagine much more than what they already tell her.
Beware the obvious selection bias though: When a date occurs, the man has already made it past the author's filter at the dating app level; if she can assign all men into her handful of categories, which are either broken or extremely rare, I question the legitimacy of generalizing her findings to the Bay Area, much less any society larger than that.
In general: When someone complains that "all the people I date are this or like that", then it's much more reasonable to assume there is a subconscious selection bias going on, rather than concluding that all people in general are actually like this or like that.
Excellent point.
Good point.
I think I'm definitely in the bin where "don't be creepy or scary" can be interpreted to mean "never talk to a girl in a coffee shop", for example. I think a lot of men didn't receive positive instructions on what to actually do if there's a girl you're attracted to.
It's true that the fears of getting "cancelled", brutal social ostracism for hitting on a woman are mostly fake, just men projecting their own fears of rejection onto other people.
Also true that almost all men know the difference between making obscene sexual remarks and hitting on a woman.
However, per your own post you are athletic and outgoing. Imagine a time you successfully hit on a woman.
Now imagine saying the exact same thing, but with weird body language, tremulous voice, not making eye contact. It's just true that a woman would have experienced you as "creepy".
Guys who don't understand nonverbal communication, don't understand nonverbal communication, it's difficult to explain to them what's going on, and so they conclude "don't be creepy" means "never hit on a woman". The longer term consequences for being experienced as "creepy" are low though.
I was athletic as a teen, but definitely not outgoing. I was lanky, awkward, nerdy, and perceived as all those things. I am more outgoing as an adult because I learned how to be, mostly through the normal process of growing up -- cultivating friendships with women, both who I was and wasn't romantically into, and then a lot of romantic trial and error, trying to learn from failed relationships and attempts at relationships. In other words, normal stuff.
What I'm saying is I don't see any special "crisis" of masculinity or that the "map" has changed in some historically unique, cataclysmic way that makes it newly impossible to be a man. It all seems to me like just the eternal necessity of learning how to be a competent social actor and an attractive prospective partner. I spent years being seen as awkward but I always tried not to be creepy and if someone wasn't interested, I didn't push it. Eventually, I got better at not being seen as awkward and dating got better.
My point is not that this stuff is easy. My point is that the special woke crisis seems to me to be mostly made up kids-these-days sort of stuff. I find it dispiriting to see it described here in such stereotypical terms, and then to see so many commentators endorse it as insightful.
It's real, at least where I am. Plenty of people see men who are interested in sex as threatening or off-putting. But really, it's a target audience issue. Different kinds of women are comfortable being approached in different ways. Intuiting this is difficult, and failing to leads you to either be considered creepy or pathetic, depending on which direction you fail in.
This is some of the most horrifying and accurate writing I've seen in years. I wish I could say who wrote this, because everyone should be reading their other works. Amazing writing, and very important
I know this is a psychiatrist's blog but it's usually free of the ubiquitous pop psychology worldview in which everyone is broken and in need of some form of help. These "reviews" are a mess.
Not a bad essay, but honestly I was hoping for more of an actual "review" of dating men in the bay area. In other words, some actual stories/experiences, not just generalized theorizing from doing so.
Personally, while I think some of the problems the authors highlight are true, I think typically writing on this topic isn't representative of actual social dynamics. In particular, I'm talking about lines like this:
"Within polite society, there’s a strange insistence for men to be their true selves, yet a rejection of the idea that the average man could, perhaps, just maybe, be biologically programmed to act differently than the average woman, like all species closely related to us."
I think this description is representative of discourse on this topic, both online and in person, but when it comes to real behaviour I actually think men/women are penalized for not embodying the traditional traits. It sort of works like this, as an educated/proper individual you must understand that things like masculine/feminine traits are stereotypes to be rejected. To that end you should be able/willing to perform the tasks traditionally associated with either gender (e.g. childcare, cooking, cleaning, etc.). However, the reality seems to be that most of us actually do want our partner to exemplify those traits traditionally associated with their gender.
As a result, if you're the kind of person who struggles to read a room, you'll end up not knowing how to behave. You can end up thinking you simultaneously have to be "manly" and "non-manly" and get confused as to how to act. In other words, it's a bit of a game we're all playing, where we the values we espouse are not in actuality the values we prefer, even though they genuinely may be the values we want to prefer. It's sort of like how most people will agree that gossiping is a bad thing, but people will think you're weird if you never gossip.
This was probably the hardest one to read so far, but also one I couldn't stop reading.
I feel like "stigmatize sexism against men" might be the message we needed five years ago. But in 2025 the anti-woke backlash has gone mainstream and I just want the pendulum to stop swinging so wildly.
Not finished reading yet and will come back. In the meantime, this is excellently insightful. I agree and empathize with these points. Women can be deeply capable of understanding men. (The theory that those with less power have evolved empathetic tools for self-protection is one reason.) The author has also earned self-understanding through suffering and struggle.
However, the author forgot to "kill their darlings" (For writers, this means cut, cut, cut.) We readers end up skimming the latter graphs in each section. Good use of paragraphing, however; I guess the next step is to scrutinize the paragraphs and look for redundancy. I recognize the tendency to express all possible aspects of a good idea, but we need to let the readers work through the aspects on their own.
This is a great piece, and the kind that most of society will only take seriously because a woman wrote it. (Actually, most of society *won't* take it seriously, but as more of these kinds of pieces arrive from woman as diverse as Aella and Cartoons Hate Her, it will seep into the broader bloodstream.)
A couple books I recommend to young men who are struggling with dating:
1. Models, by Mark Manson. He's the guy who wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. He started out as a PUA and produced the best work of that genre. He is a good role model for men, though much of what he says applies to women as well.
2. Way of the Superior Man, by David Deida. It's quite bit more woo-woo, and if he wrote it today he would probably get cancelled for his "problematic" takes. Nonetheless, I did a workshop with him about 15 years ago, and got a lot out of it. There were women there as observers (wives and girlfriends of the men attending) and they all raved about it too.
I'll also mention The Game, by Neil Strauss. A lot of people push dislike that book because the first half talks about manipulative tactics. But if you read the complete book you'll see it's really a hero's journey in which he ultimately rejects those approaches. And Neil is a very gifted storyteller.
I read this piece in the selection round, and it made a big impression on me. It will almost certainly get my vote, but I promise to give the rest a fair shake. Here's what this essay convinced me of.
Men were evolved for violence, both delivering it and defending against it. Not always against other humans - often it was animals - but violence nonetheless. And the main thrust of Western civilization since the Enlightenment - to great effect - has been to eliminate violence. Papering over this hard truth with large doses of morality does little more than put men in prison or in psychological shackles outside it. Women will unquestionably climb to power in the coming decades - all the signs are there. And, I say, radically, that their main problem will be keeping men from destroying civilization in order to come back into power. Unless, of course, we're all neutered and on AI leashes.
This is an interesting mirror. I'm not sure about the classification, but the underlying dynamics are pretty vivid.
(It makes me wonder which one I am. My best fit seems to be "Former Man Who Opts Out" - maybe not 100% on the way to being whole - If nothing else, I'm still not married and am occasionally insecure about relationships - but mostly over it. Still, I'm not sure this works as classification rather than a list of examples).
On the opposite side from you, I've also dated women of these types in the bay area. It manifests in different ways for them (and women pretty much never go the "beast" route), and into different classes, but the women who go into tech often do have the same feelings of being lost as the men you describe do. It's a lot easier for women to just "get a date", but as you point out in a fe of these examples, that's far from solving everything for them too.
(I suspect women have a higher percentage of "whole"; At a ballpark it seems like around 40% of the women I know are, which is probably higher than for men. But then there's pretty severe selection bias in what kind of men and women I meet).
A couple thoughts.
First off, the death of the old road map is actually really really good for guys like me. My spastic, ADHD-riddled brain cannot pull off stoicism, can provide but can't be defined by providing, and I'm not genetically blessed with a great physicality.
I got all my money and women (well, woman, singlular) from being a good listener, a thoughtful partner, and being skilled at guessing at and meeting needs. In jobs with more conservative bosses, that doesn't work out great for me. I don't think there's any way to both have a path to manhood, and to avoid excluding people. So let's be a bit careful with the balance.
But I also agree that everyone (not just men) suffers from a pendulum swing too hard the other way. Since we're talking about men, I'll use a video game analogy:
Many of the best games offer a lot of choice. You can explore the world at your leisure, and the game gives you loose goals. This is a lot of fun! You aren't forced to follow a script, and can customize the adventure to your own wants and needs. But if you look closely, all the allowed behaviors are part of a larger script. You decide to go explore the mountain way off the beaten trail, and it has something rewarding, because the game just provides that as a second option, and then draws your attention to it as a way to buck the "official script" of the game. You don't say "let's build a rocket and fly to Venus" because the game systems don't even let you consider that as a possibility.
But some novice game designers try to create a game that gives you infinite choice. Good games offer a lot of choice, so the best game offers the most choice. "You can go anywhere! You can do anything! We don't tell you how to play! If you want to build a rocket and fly to Venus, you can do that!" And these fail. Reality creates inherent limitations. Game design creates more. What a designer creates when they let a player "do anything" isn't a world of infinite decision space. It's a world where the decision space isn't clearly defined. It's a world where you don't know what you're allowed to do.
Modern life, for everyone, is the latter kind of game. We threw out every "script." We said, "All these ideas about who people are supposed to be are stifling their creativity and personhood. Go forth! Be free! No need to think of yourself as man or woman or father or son or student or programmer or deacon. You be your true, authentic, real self!"
And as much as I hate those old scripts, and am glad to be rid of them, that's not freeing people. That's just refusing to take responsibility for guiding them to personhood, acknowledging their limits, teaching them what they can and cannot do. That's throwing them into a world with clear, concrete rules, and telling them there aren't any. No surprise that people get one-shot by an endgame boss at level 20.
A slightly more scientific approach would have benefitted this piece, without requiring psychological or anthropological training. There seem to be pretty basic, important assumptions baked into it that have implications for the conclusion.
For example, regarding suicide: Yes, there is a clear gender difference in deaths by suicide, but it's been a relatively constant factor of 4-5 of men to women at least since 1950[1]. Female suicide *attempts*, however, are much higher in women, by a factor of 2-3[2]. Attempts by males still complete at the much higher rate both because they tend to use more lethal methods, and because they have a higher chance of completion with the same methods[3]. Even with those details, I'd find it hard to conclude who has it worse: Women because they attempt more often, or men because they seem more motivated/successful at it?
More significantly because it touches on the "map to manhood" argument: if one looks at the Wikipedia page of Rites of Passage[4], there are also gender-specific rituals concerning the maturing of girls/young women that have equally fallen out of use, especially in the liberal, industrial societies of the West. Is the argument of the review that girls didn't lose that equivalent "map to womanhood", or that they didn't need it in the first place? Why/why not? There is the slightest of allusions in the review that some women might also struggle ("Yeah, she seems kind of unstable and uncertain, but that’s to be expected."), but otherwise, the core argument is that men alone have lost their map. Would anyone help me out with a sketch of this "map to womanhood", if it exists?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-suicide-in-the-us-by-gender-since-1950/
[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=db9OHpk-TksC&pg=PA191&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
[3] https://plos.figshare.com/articles/dataset/1474268
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage
jesus that was a brutal read. and so accurate.
Overly long, but interesting, and I’m still glad I read it.
I’ll note here that almost all of the “five types” she has dated graduated from college or are otherwise white collar, and most American men haven’t and aren’t.
I’m definitely not a “Man Who Is Whole” (I’m just not that passionate), and I don’t know many who are, but (despite my living in San Francisco and having spent 99+% of my living the Bay Area) I don’t know many that fit her other four categories either (but I’m not trying to date 25 to 35 year old men, and only have had experience being a man that age, never dating one, and when I was that age dating “apps” didn’t yet exist yet, or were just getting started, so I have had no experience with them).
I liked this essay overall and found it to be one of my favorites so far. It's well-written and covers interesting and familiar territory from a perspective very different from my own as a married lesbian trans woman living in the Bay Area.
From my perspective, "society in general and women in particular expecting men to basically be women in male bodies" does not seem to be the case. I very much did not feel like I fit with societal expectations while living as a fairly feminine man, especially not the expectations of straight women for the purposes of dating. Almost every woman I have dated has been bisexual and several have been closer to being gay than to being straight. I've been friends with several straight women who have seemed to enjoy my company and to have found me physically attractive pre-transition, but they pretty much uniformly didn't consider me dating/relationship material in a way that didn't carry over to bi women.
Comparing notes with other sapphic trans women online suggests both sides of this to be a fairly common pattern. Feminity in men seems like it tends to be unattractive to straight women and attractive to bi women, especially to women who are towards the gay side of the bisexual spectrum. Mostly-gay women getting into relationships with "men" who later transition is common enough that there's a word for it: "Preordering".
This is extremely obviously written by Aella and is also extremely obviously an advertisement for her "safe PUA" service.
"Look, the one type of guy succeeds but he becomes *unhinged* and *bad* because he listens to bad people and right wingers!" with the implicit promise of *her* service offering something that works without all the icky sexist right-wing stuff.
> This is extremely obviously written by Aella
Oh hell I hope not. Talk about a source that would be completely discrediting.
There are tells sprinkled throughout.
Explain?
>"This is extremely obviously written by Aella"
An interesting thought. You will definitely win some Bayes points if this ends up being true (of course, you will lose some if this turns out to be completely wrong).
Also very astute observation that the "bad guy" is the only one the system seems to be working for. Even within the internal logic of the world presented, he is the only one getting what he wants. No matter how bad you think things are, it's actually worse.
There was an interesting\depressing(?) piece in the NYTimes recently about men who go to a retreat to learn about shooting and self defense techniques as a form of finding themselves but that seems like such a counter-productive activity it just left me cold.
Many years ago the write Rod Dreher (who I otherwise can't stand) had an interesting idea he called the "Benedict Option" which was basically a form of withdrawal from the wider world into a smaller, more focused existence that I can absolutely see the appeal of, rather than trying to satisfy the sociocultural preferences of millions of strangers.
If I were single, I would like to date such a deep and empathic woman.
I dunno, I’m a woman and that’s not how the landscape of males looks to me. While a few guys are preoccupied with the problem of being them and are eager to display that and fill you in on the problem, most males (and females) that I meet seem to be energetic bundles of interests, talents, opinions, relationships, tastes, regrets, hopes and fears. I suppose my take could be different because I am substantially older than the writer, and dated man of a different era, in a different era. But the men I met while dating, mostly seemed like the kind of bundle I describe, and the men I meet now in other contexts mostly still do.
Maybe males are just doing really badly these days? On the other hand, I kind of wonder whether the author of this review has a kind of selective attention thing going on that leads her to take conversational turns that lead the man towards disclosing painful personal issues — and that also leads her to mostly classify men by their pains, doubts, frailties and absurdities.
I don’t think I’m very good at small talk either, but getting somebody to talk in depth about their tastes and interests isn’t small talk. Also, it’s likely to make the meeting fairly enjoyable for both parties, even if it’s obvious that the two of you aren’t a romantic match. And if you have that talk with a bunch of men you end up with classifications mostly having to do with different patterns of strengths and interests and values, with footnotes attached to some noting kinds of darkness in their lives — things like “but sometimes he feels like a loser because he’s the only person in his family not interested in academics.”
This review makes me kind of angry. If the guy’s a brute who forces himself on your friend at a concert, — good for you for punching him, and it’s fine to publish a complaint about guys of that type. But unless the man’s a godawful macho pig, it sounds like the author presents herself as full of sympathetic interest:
<Most men are not accustomed to genuine questions about their well-being, and will often respond with a desperate upwelling of emotion.
And then she mentally places him in her classification scheme of dysfunction. And then she writes a review like this one. It’s sort of like kissing and telling, but worse — making somebody tell secrets and cry, then telling the world what their secrets and frailties are.
Oh come off it, society has been perfectly clear about how to be a man:
You must be swift as the coursing river,
with all the force of a great typhoon,
with all the strength of a raging fire,
Mysterious as the dark side of the moon
Actually, on second thoughts, that might be a bit much to live up to.
Would many of these men benefit from moving out of the South Bay?
Well, yes, but that's not necessarily relevant to the question ;)
I love this essay. I think a lot about men's issues as the key to understanding why so much of Western society is lurching to the right politically. I will share this essay widely.
I want to add just one point: I think it's important to think about reasons that have nothing to do with the ideology of "polite society" for why we are in this pickle. I think part of it is that meaningful, dignified work for men who have not successfully pursued higher education is getting harder to find than it used to be. It was always the case that many men would go off to "sow their wild oats" in their youth. This is as old as the story of the prodigal son from the Bible. But there used to be a host of jobs for the returning son, who had no particular skills, to come back to, allowing him to have a dignified life: farming, union or guild work, or the military. Now, most of that work is gone. Factory work will increasingly disappear, no matter what Trump does with tariffs. Farms employ a tiny percentage of people. One can still hope to learn a trade in one's mid-twenties: car repair, brick laying, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, etc. These jobs are not about to go away. But there aren't enough of them to provide careers for the volume of lost men who did not get a good college degree. And even those who do pursue these careers have to accept that they will probably be working in a small firm, making not a lot of money, doing something with no social prestige. So.... we need to address, somehow, the opportunities for dignified work, both by providing more opportunities for training, and more social prestige for those who take these jobs.
In addition, we need to recognize that broken families without male role models make it all the harder for men to succeed, and that rebounds back to reinforce the problems just discussed.
But these thoughts are just my current obsession as I try to see how society needs adjust to avoid slipping into just an angry, self-destructive, fascist approach to the problems of men. Meanwhile, I think your models of types of men are incredibly helpful in thinking about what problems result from the lack of a roadmap to manhood. Bravo!
The author of this review is very empathetic towards men, but she frames the issue as if men had this man-only problem to be solved called "being a man".
How to be a man?
Correct answer: be a human male over 18 years old.
How to be romantically or sexually successful as a straight man?
Now that is a better way to frame the problem that only straight men face!
> How to be a man? Correct answer: be a human male over 18 years old.
Why 18? What's special about that?
And why is your answer obviously superior to the answers of 10,000 years of human development?
There is nothing special about 18, it's an arbitrary number.
A man is an adult human male, and the legal definition of adult is 18 in most countries. Human language is arbitrary.
Cool, so it isn't an answer at all.
It's the answer with which the whole world agrees.
Clearly they don't, because the article exists.
Step 1: excoriate the left for their feeble dating advice of 'be yourself, have hobbies, get involved with the community, be confident'
Step 2: Talk about all your experiences dating men who fail to do those things and suck.
Step 3: Present your ideal of a 'whole man' who does the following: 'be yourself, have hobbies, get involved with the community, be confident... but not in a woke way!'
There's a lot to like in this article regarding actual interactions and observations of actual men, and it's important that these things get more attention. I agree with a lot of the observations about how men suffer under contradictory and vague expectations, that feel like there's no right answer.
But the framing device and conclusions just feel like someone rejecting woke ideology, doing their own research, finding out that actually the woke ideology was mostly right about a bunch of things, then repackaging those ideas with more right-leaning terminology and signifiers, while continuing to excoriate the woke people saying the exact same thing.
It's a common and sad pattern, where the culture war blinds you to where the other side is correct about something and forces you to rediscover their wisdom on your own.
The unspoken truth is that not all men are supposed to have kids. If everyone had kids, mutational load would wreck the genome. War and death used to prevent this, not so much anymore. Modern men who are less "fit" can still support their nieces and nephews.
Though I assume genetic modification tech will flip the table here within our lifetimes. Just not yet.
Saw more than a little of myself in this essay. Well done.
I agree with Covfefe Anon that this is probably written by Aella.
That said, the relationship woes of every typbe above have a very simple solution: get a mail-order bride from South America, Asia, or Eastern Europe. Lenny Kravitz seems to have been right about American Women.