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
I think you are right with this update here. I believe it is due to the different "standard" communication styles. Men tend to be more direct and women indirect and boys will respond more compliantly to direct comms, IMO.
I felt that way as a kid, and the rules may actually have been stupid. I don't remember all the specifics, but I was an uncommonly smart kid.
But having also been a teacher, I gained a lot of sympathy for the position of "No, don't try to figure out the point of the rules, just follow them exactly without questioning them." Because I've been in the position of trying to get kids to follow the rules, and I try to explain the reasoning behind the rules to them, because that's how I would have wanted adults to deal with me when I was their age, and then I can see them thinking "Okay, if this is the intended purpose of the rules, then *this* should be a convenient way around them that satisfies their intended purpose." And I'm thinking "No, no it doesn't, you're not that smart, just follow the rules."
Every now and then, they'd encounter a genuinely stupid rule, and I'd be torn about whether I ought to acknowledge "Yes, this rule is stupid, in a well thought out system, you would not have to follow it," and just pushing them to follow it anyway, because 90% of the time, when they *thought* a rule was stupid, it actually wasn't, and they just weren't as smart as whoever came up with the rule, and they couldn't actually tell the difference. And if I acknowledged that sometimes the rules were just badly thought out, they'd feel vindicated in applying their own judgment to deciding whether to follow them or not, and their judgment was usually worse than that of the people coming up with the rules.
Some uncommonly clever students are genuinely smarter than the average person coming up with the rules, sometimes even enough so to bridge the gap in experience of having been on both sides of the situation. But most aren't, and not being smart enough to be able to understand the real intention behind the rule *feels* like being able to tell that it's stupid.
The laptop class can do pretty well online, but the lower half seems to benefit from going to an organized place everyday and having middle class grown-ups talk at them.
I work with kids myself, but I have no sympathy for the notion of "Follow the rules without questioning them". Conventional schools are built upon mountains of stupid rules. The very idea of "Everybody needs to learn the same thing at the same time" is stupid.
In Sudbury Schools, kids are trusted to make the rules themselves. It works out great.
This was an inner city school. Compared to the ones I attended, general levels of order and rule-following were completely different.
I started out with an attitude of "surely these kids will respond positively to being respected and taken seriously enough that I never just fall back on 'because I said so,' and always explain why the rules matter, and only expect them to follow ones that do." And I quickly discovered this was unworkable. Depending on the sort of environment you're teaching in, maintaining a classroom becomes completely different sorts of propositions.
I remember in third grade that boys were not allowed to wear hats inside the cafeteria but girls were. Maybe there was a good reason for it but the basic unfairness of it never let me forget it.
Were there any rules girls had to follow that boys didn't? (No pants or tank tops allowed, shorts/skirt length monitored, etc.--I don't know how old you are & if this was a school with uniforms or not.)
Some kids struggle even with the sensible rules, though.
Like "don't smoke cigarettes"was both a school rule and a really sensible idea (don't wreck your lungs and give yourself an expensive addiction!), but probably a third of my year decided to disobey it anyway... and this was at an academically selective school where everybody was theoretically smart.
That's too abstract for most children. Their reasoning is rather: "well plenty of respectable adults around me do it, so clearly it can't be that bad, and they forbid it to me out of petty tyranny".
I was briefly a Junior High School science teacher (which turned out to be pretty horrible experience). Of course this was the late 1980s and things may have changed substantially in thirty years. I taught in a wealthy upper-middle-class town, and the school district had one of the best reputations in the state. But the principal and the vice principals were men (the VPs were ex-coaches). As a junior teacher, I got no assistance from them to help me enforce discipline. A group of boys were out of control. My number was listed, and it escalated mid year when I started getting death threats left on my answering machine. One day in class one of my punk students asked, "What if we came to your house and beat you up." Lots of laughter from the punks. Without thinking, I said, "You'd have to deal with me, my gun, and my dog." Next day I was called into a disciplinary hearing. I was smart enough to call my union rep. I brought my tape of the death threats. The rep blew his stack that they weren't doing anything to protect me from this harassment. Administration was embarrassed. I had already done some research and discovered that it was a Class A misdemeanor in my state to make death threats over the phone (one year in prison, with a substantial fine). I had identified the perps because one of the voices in the background said "Shut up, Josh!" I only had one Josh in my classes, and when confronted, he gave up the rest of kids involved (including the one who had threatened me in my class). I had the pleasure of calling each of the parents and reading them the riot act (making it clear they they would be liable for their kids' behavior). And I had perfect discipline from them the rest of the year. My contract was not renewed, though, which was for the best in retrospect.
But the male administrators mostly didn't want to touch discipline with a ten-foot pole.
I don't know if "struggle to obey" is the right framing. They choose to disobey.
Sometimes this is a straight-up cost-begefut calculation. But sometimes it's about the social value of being seen by your peers as brave enough to not submit to authority.
Submitting to the authority of a woman is more shameful than submitting to the authority of a man. A woman needs to actually be fair or likable to make teenage boys obey her, whereas a man can just be intimidating.
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.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of modern boot camp. You're not entirely wrong, but it exists to get people to actually KILL the enemy and not just point their rifle in that general direction. It's some sort of hard-coded thing in the human psyche.
I don't think this is quite right, though I'm not sure about Army/USMC boot camp, however, UNS and Air Force have very little in boot camp learning to shoot. You carry a rifle, manly for weight and to learn attention to detail, but there was maybe an hour of shooting. Boot Camp is to shed the old life you had before and become part of the [branch of military] Team. It's bonding through shared adversity, and a lot of other stuff, but too early to focus on killing the enemy. That mostly comes later in "Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) was my understanding from my Army buddies.
Disagree--boot is about adjusting to a new way of life and a new identity, part of which is following orders without question. You cannot "train" people to kill. They have to be indoctrinated. Read Lt. Col David Grossman's "On Killing," a study of how armies get their soldiers to kill. Grossman observes that the ability to kill with relative impunity is not an instinct common to most people.
Are you basing your opinion on being in the military, or on movies? That is not how the US Army operates today. Maybe the Marines. Maybe also ancient Sparta.
Rangers, Airborne, and Special Forces have brutal boot camps, but their intent is not to break spirits, but to cull the weak and to /strengthen/ the spirit of those who make it through. I've never heard anyone who went through any of those training programs speak of them as breaking spirits, but as inspiring and confidence-building.
I looked into the military records of Sparta and Athens, because it seemed implausible to me that Sparta could be a great military force while training its soldiers to be stupid and obedient like horses. And, surprise, Athens had a much better win/loss ratio than Sparta. Sparta lost most of its battles, and most of its battles with Athens; and it usually lost them because their soldiers or officers did something stupid, or because they didn't learn things from their losses because they /didn't write them down/. It took the Spartans 200 years and 3 major Athenians victories just to learn to have some people with ranged weapons.
They only seem to have had one good military commander in their entire history.
"The notoriously grueling Navy SEAL selection course grew so tough in recent years that to attempt it became dangerous, even deadly. With little oversight, instructors pushed their classes to exhaustion. Students began dropping out in large numbers, or turning to illegal drugs to try to keep up.
Unprepared medical personnel often failed to step in when needed. And when the graduation rates plummeted, the commander in charge at the time blamed students, saying that the current generation was too soft."
I would hazard a guess that some of the people who went through all that had their spirits broken. Though granted this is not how the program is supposed to function.
> And, surprise, Athens had a much better win/loss ratio than Sparta
That was a really unconvincing piece, from a usually great blogger. I suspect for the usual politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons. Assumes ancient sources are entirely accurate when it suits him, and then tries to handwave away the fact that the ancient sources all state that the 5th century BC Spartans were extremely good at fighting. Conflates the Spartan record from their (lengthy) heyday with later military losses from a period when no one has ever claimed they were exceptionally competent. Argues that somehow he, based on the very limited evidence that has survived, has managed to penetrate the illusion of Spartan military strength that had fooled the authors responsible for all of the evidence he relies on, and the ancient world in general.
The Spartans were good at fighting. Trying to argue otherwise, in what seems to be an attempt to own your political enemies in the current day, is odd.
The point of military discipline is not that punishment is harsh but that punishment is certain.
In boot camp you learn to do what you're told under penalty of... well, of being shouted at. And potentially of being given an even more unpleasant order. If a recruit outright refuses to obey orders then it's not like they're allowed to shoot him -- the worst they can do is fire you, same as any other job.
But after living with certain punishment for all infractions for six weeks, doing what you're told becomes the default. A soldier who refuses to do what he's told does not gain any status with his peers the way a disobedient school student might.
I mostly agree with this, but it's not true that the worst thing they can do is fire you.
If you refuse to obey orders, they will "fire" you, but they won't do it right away. They'll heap a lot of other unpleasantness on you first, starting with recycling (repeating Basic), and moving on to weeks of what amounts to prison with hard labor. Refusing there will just extend it. Leaving to get away is the crime of desertion, and could potentially land you in real prison. And when you eventually get "fired", you might get away with an administrative discharge (that's definitely what you'll get if you just weather the weeks of informal confinement and labor), but if you pushed it you could end up with a less than honorable or dishonorable, which will impeded your civilian job opportunities.
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.
Thank you for saying this more eloquently than I would have. As far as I'm concerned numanumapompilius has provided the right answer. The idea that boys and men can't/don't follow rules is just plain wrong.
Watch them, they are extremely good at following the rules for sports/scouts/video games/shop class/the military/etc.
The rules they have trouble with are the kind that require sitting quietly and reading or writing WHILE IN A ROOM FULL OF PEERS! After all, being around peers and ignoring them is rather weird, where else do you find that? Sitting quietly and reading is something boys will do for hours on end, just not reading the school sanctioned material, they just read the comic books, mystery, sci-fi or whatever stories when their peers aren't available.
Similarly, I and many other boys I knew had no problem following rules and strict discipline under female instructors at a martial arts dojo. Or carrying it over into other parts of our lives, when testing for more advanced ranks included needing to get letters from our teachers confirming we were generally exhibiting the virtues they wanted us to have.
Agree--watching my lad play baseball or football, he never had problems playing by the rules, but then again, he sometimes tried to work the ref or the umpire!
That's because the modern school system will just drug young boys up to the gills if they can't do a decent impression of a young girl for 8 hours a day for 10 years.
> (some) boys struggle with rule-following in school
I really dislike that euphemism (or is it a metaphor?). It might make sense to say that a student struggles with long division, but there is no struggle involved in rule-breaking. A student chooses to flout rules, usually because he gains status with his
peers by doing so. And why is that behavior admired by the peer group? Perhaps because it demonstrates courage - a manly virtue..
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 was a scout in the Northeast and this is the first time I've heard about there being a relationship to LDS. There was definitely some Christian elements (like meeting in churches) but religion was never a focus and when it did come up was always pointedly non-denominational.
> I realized that the bullying is probably a reflection the Mormon patriarchal worldview.
I'm always surprised at the venomousness and frequency with which people bring up Mormonism. I don't know enough to call you out for this specifically, more of a general comment. There seems to be a large amount of reflexive bias that usually comes in the form of pithy one-liners devoid of substance. It's even odder when it comes from people who otherwise consider themselves open minded and pro-diversity (again a general comment, not directed at you specifically).
As an adult, I've always found the LDS members to be helpful and friendly to Gentiles. But having friends who left the Church, they've told me darker stories about ultra-strict, bordering on abusive, upbringings. That's not to say that this is standard for LDS upbringing. These may have just happened to raised in LDS families who were ultra-abusive. But after hearing about the LDS involvement in Scouting and my own experiences with Scouting, I put two and two together. However, I may be jumping to conclusions. But maybe not...
There was that Oregon trial (Lewis v. BSA) that awarded millions in punitive damages and forced the release of the so-called Perversion Files (filled with cases of sexual sexual abuse against minors that the BSA kept secret). That in turn opened the floodgates. And 82,000 abuse claims ultimately forced the BSA into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. I guess I got off lucky. I only got punched. I wasn't raped. But my uncle, who was bisexual, said he and a couple of other boys had sexual relations with his Scout Master. He said it was consensual on his part, but he was underage when it happened.
I'd say you got rather unlucky, not lucky. Others got even more unlucky than you, unfortunately, but I don't think their experience or yours is or was the norm.
I think it depends a great deal on the local pack and leaders. My kids loved cub scouts, my two boys went on to boy scouts, and my daughter would have (she went to most of her brothers' events) if they'd been letting girls in yet.
And LDS never “predominately [ran]” scouting. They comprised at most 20% of members. Even at its height there was zero to minimal LDS presence in the vast majority of councils.
You should have much better evidence than 2 scout leaders (who probably weren’t even LDS) enabling bullying before associating bullying with LDS.
But every LDS ward sponsored a scouting troop. Even though the total LDS-sponsored troops topped out at 20%, the LDS had substantial input into the leadership of the BSA, with LDS church members having disproportionate sway over BSA policies, which was why gay scoutmasters and gay scouts became such a hot-button issue in the 10s.
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.
The character was the father in "The Goode Family", an animated sitcom from the creator of King of the Hill about a liberal California family. The show only lasted one season.
I think what qualities attract women varies a lot. Personally, I'm attracted to warm and gentle men, so I likely would have found that "pussy" character highly attractive. Other women are more attracted to men who are in-your-face masculine, and that's a perfectly legitimate preference as well.
I think this is why it's so important to have many male role models who can model different types of manhood, but reassure boys that all of them are valid expressions of "being a man." Feminists have offered girls similar messaging: a stay-at-home mom is just as valid of a woman as a childless CEO. I think it's time that men cohesively share similar messaging to boys.
I've certainly encountered these types, but I think their sway has waned over the past couple years. I also find them to generally be very young (and thus not understand the amount of skill/sacrifice/effort that goes into being a stay-at-home mom) or deeply mentally ill (to the point where anger and extreme opinions seem to be the only output from their brain.)
These types of feminists certainly exist, and certainly you can find bubbles of them. But I'm pretty sure the average American woman who describes herself as a feminist does *not* have disdain for stay-at-home moms.
I simply *adore* Hiccup and agree that he's an excellent model of healthy masculinity! He's naturally very nerdy, but he's also a typical teen boy who wants to be respected and protect his people. Yet he approaches this from a compassionate, thoughtful manner, and uses empathy and communication to accomplish things raw aggression can't. He ends up being a strong leader not because he's the physically strongest, but because he's the smartest and most thoughtful.
I know several of my nerdy, male engineer friends really relate to him as a character, and have bemoaned being too old to have grown up with Hiccup as a role model. I really hope we continue to see more figures like him in media. :)
Unfortunately, men who want to mentor children are often treated with suspicion. A lot of people just assume that you're a child predator. Every act of kindness can be reinterpreted as "grooming", even if you did nothing wrong.
Of course there are actual predators out there, but it's exhausting being judged just because I happen to be the same gender as some other people who committed horrible crimes.
And this gets back to the idea that the genders are biologically different, by the way. If you promote the idea that testosterone seriously impacts behavior, many people will say "Exactly! That's why most rapists are male and why most pedophiles are male. The only way to protect our kids from pedophiles is to make sure they never have any contact with men"
So I feel like the "Boys need male mentors" part of the argument tends to collide against the "Men are biologically different" part of the argument.
I see your point here, but I would argue this is exactly why we need more nuanced, detailed maps for the various ways to self-actualize as a man.
Right now, the detailed maps available are more conservative ones, which usually emphasize a man's physical strength and authority. If this is the main image people have of a man ("physically dangerous and wanting control"), they're indeed going to shy away from a man being around vulnerable individuals.
If we offer updated maps, where the impacts of testosterone are gracefully acknowledged, but concrete steps are given for channeling it into productive endeavors (ie: sports, political activism, self-defense, speech and debate, etc.), and the idea that "valuable men aren't openly aggressive" is strongly communicated, then the idea of a man with testosterone is no longer inherently a sketchy one.
But I do agree these conversations need to be done carefully, and with compassion and nuance.
What would your proposed map say about men with regards to pedophilia?
Would it say "Testosterone has nothing to do with pedophilia, and those who think that most pedophiles are men are working with biased information, as there are many female pedophiles who simply never get caught"?
Or would it say "Testosterone tends to make people into pedophiles unless they're active in sports, political activism, self-defense, speech and debate etc., in which case pedophilia doesn't develop?"
Why would it need to say anything beyond “a self-actualized man doesn’t diddle kids?” It’s normative.
Correlation is not causation, either, and I think you should bring more evidence if you want to say testosterone “tends” towards anything. There are quite a number of men who fit none of your activities, but didn’t “tend” towards pedophilia.
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!
i'm saying that men and boys pan a wider range than female traits, with men more likely to appear at both ends of the spectrum in IQ, independence, rebelliousness, ingenuity, and other characteristics.
Schools under female principal, and female teachers, are much too conformist for a lot of boys.
Schools didn't used to be this extreme towards "girl rules", but they're much worse now with standardized testing and everything. That's why so many boys "need medication."
> Schools under female principal, and female teachers, are much too conformist for a lot of boys.
Seems like conformity is exactly what you'd want for boys if they have a wider range of behaviors. That's what military schools are all about. Do you have any data to support this statement? Or is it based on your opinion?
That would actually be a really neat data point - does the "kill it on standardized testing but have abysmal grades" demographic skew male? If standardized testing codes masculine and good grades feminine that'd make a lot of sense.
You don't need to conform to anything to do well on a "show up, be awesome on your own merits, leave" day. I loved FCAT week back in the day for that.
afaik there is quite a number of data on boys doing better in standardized testing than their grades would predict. In MRA circles it's usually interpreted as female teachers rewarding good behavior by grading
Some rules are necessary for super-Dunbar social groups, but *which* rules are up for grabs and must be continually renegotiated. Some rules were arbitrary from the start and some become obsolete*: challenging those is an extremely valuable service to society.
I believe the individualism/socialization ratio is exactly the opposite of what many comments suggest. On average, women are better individualized—that is, they are more intelligent, talented, conscientious, graceful, intuitive, etc.—than men. By contrast, men are generally more skilled at forming strong communities whose power is greater than the sum of their individual members. Thus, women are on average superior as individuals, whereas men generally form superior communities.
Human beings, as a species, tend to solve their problems socially rather than individually. The difference between men’s and women’s abilities to form strong communities explains the power gap between men and women, observable throughout all historical periods. For example, in antiquity the Germanic barbarians were regarded with a certain disdain by the Romans because they integrated women into their armed forces. But—and this is very important—the integration of women did not make barbarian armies less courageous or less effective in hand-to-hand combat. On the contrary, the barbarian armies that included women were more aggressive and more ferocious. The difference lay in discipline. The Roman army, being more disciplined (i.e., more masculine), generally succeeded in defeating the (feminized) barbarian armies thanks to its superior group strength.
Returning to the present day: women, being on average superior individuals, thrive in Western-style meritocratic societies. These societies have largely passed their dynamic phase of development and are now in a static phase of inevitable, though (apparently) well-managed, decline. In this phase, male communities, being potentially very powerful, are (rightly) regarded as a danger rather than an opportunity. For this reason, the destruction—or at least the prevention of the development—of male communities constitutes an essential condition for the stability of these societies. A secondary effect of this destruction is the poor condition in which individual men find themselves. This, however, is not a pathology that must be cured, but rather the price of social stability in contemporary Western societies, and at the same time a symptom of the fact that these societies are in decline (just as, for example, the proliferation of women in positions of power in the fifth century was a symptom of the decline of the Roman Empire).
Might want to attribute that observation to Chuck Palahniuk, as it's like the second or third most famous quote from Fight Club, and pointedly underlined in both the novel and the film adaptation.
> Men had to compete and win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal.
What about the men who didn't win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal? This is a pretty bizarre statement on the face of it. I don't know what you're claiming as "rites of passage," but there are lots of studies that show that violent teen males have significantly higher rates of criminal behaviors, including rape, as adults.
Historically, men always have performed rites of passage. I mean, it’s kind of obvious.
Men who become adolescents are expected to perform and prove their manhood.
Because once a man grows up, he has in society’s eyes very little value, unless he can do something, and become something.
A woman can have babies, but a man must be something and do something.
I’m not making this up, it’s just how it is.
Anyway, to skeptics, here’s a partial list:
Sparta (Ancient Greece): Boys endured agoge training and had to survive alone in the wild.
Rome: At around 15, a (free, not slave) boy exchanged his childhood toga for the toga virilis, symbolizing full legal adulthood and readiness for civic and military duty.
Maasai (Kenya/Tanzania): Adolescent boys underwent circumcision without showing pain, then lived as warriors (moran) before marrying.
Xhosa (South Africa): Teenage boys were circumcised and sent into seclusion, returning as men after healing and ritual instruction.
Australian Aboriginals: Youths were circumcised, scarified, and sent on a solitary walkabout in the wilderness to connect with ancestral spirits.
Native American Plains Tribes: Boys fasted and isolated themselves on a vision quest until they received a guiding dream or spirit.
Norse/Viking Culture: Young men proved manhood by leaving home to raid, trade, or fight, earning weapons and reputation through danger.
Medieval Europe (Knighthood): A squire kept vigil overnight in a chapel, then was armed and sworn to vows of loyalty before becoming a knight.
Judaism (Bar Mitzvah): At age 13, boys read from the Torah, becoming religiously responsible for Jewish law and community obligations.
Modern Israel: Mandatory military service at 18 functions as a national rite of passage, demanding discipline, endurance, and adult responsibility.
Number 10 is probably why Israelis are so tough.
If you've noticed the Israeli men, don’t they seem kind of tough and masculine to you—they sure do to me.
Maybe that's the reason... They've gone through that rite of passage.
OK. I assumed you were talking about 20th and 21st Century America. I had no rites of passage growing up in 60s and 70s. What's changed since then? The vast majority of elementary school teachers were female back then, and they're still the majority today. There was a smaller percentage of females teaching high school in my day, but they were still the majority. I assume this hasn't changed. AFAICT, nothing has really changed in 50 years except young men are whining about how they can't get a date now. Back in pre-Internet days (late 80s? early 90s), I read a survey that it took the average male about 10 tries to get a date. (which probably explained why women felt they were being pestered all the time). Some men and women were better at hooking up than the average, though. It was the classic 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of dating pool (men or women) were gettin 80 percent of the hookups.
Anyway, I don't see that there's been a feminization of role models in the past half century (at least!), but we've either got a lot more men having trouble figuring out how to get a date—or they're whining more. ;-)
What's changed since the 60s and 70s? Wouldn't you say it's probably the role of religion in society? Staying together because divorce was Bad was, as we hear, very unpleasant for some couples, but it did make it more likely for boys to be raised by a man as well as a woman. Now that "staying together for the kids" is routinely mocked and condemned as pathetic and counterproductive, all bets are off in that regard.
On a completely different note, I really wouldn't call it "whining" if I were you. Have some compassion. Full disclosure, I have no dog in this fight, I'm a 44-yr-old happily married woman, but even I can tell some of these people are in serious pain. And I recall from my own experience that deep loneliness IS serious pain.
Religion can’t be the explanation. Other societies have gone full militant-atheist without following a comparable trajectory.
I’d pick the transition to a service economy and the changing market for labor. I have not fully absorbed stats like [these](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/goldin_cehus.pdf), but it used to be more viable to feed a family via BRUTE STRENGTH.
what society did ever go full-militant atheist except ours? If you mean some scandinavian countries it's not really different society from ours, american pop-culture has spread like a virus since the end of the WW2. I'm Central Europeanand still given the proliferation of it I consider Americans living in the same society just under the government that's far less coddling
I know that's a popular idea, but does anyone have the data to support that thesis? And are you claiming the courtship patterns of teenagers depend on their playground socialization as toddlers and pre-adolescents?
There are a lot of other changes! for example, dating with co-workers was completely fine and expected. Flirting, welcome or not, were more accepted, at worst taken as a bad joke.
This matches my experience. Raised by a mother, taught by teachers and tutors who were all women, "socialized" by many girlfriends who became my closest social circle for years at a time. Desperately craving older male role models my whole life, I would always attach myself to the smallest trickle of "older more experienced cool guy who can teach me about what it's like to be a man". My few guy friends also in the same situation, it's the blind leading the blind, soft, passive men looking around for answers.
Had to figure out "masculinity" from books, movies, Youtube, podcasts, as the article mentions. Skeptical I've gotten any closer, it all feels like a pantomime.
None of this seems adequately justified. Some of it is clearly false (many rites of passage were monogender but many others were not). I call bullshit.
Yes. Although I was brought up in an intact family, my da was working his ass off, so all my dating problems came from me trying to be mama's good boi.
It still exists in western societies, even if it's under active attack. It happen with your peer, your male friends of roughly the same age, during college or even before, at school or in your neighborhood (depending where your main circle of friends is), could even be online nowadays....I don't think the dynamic of male hierarchy building has changed that much since Paleolithic, apart from being less violent on most cases (not all cases - depend on country, social class and neighborhood... It may be exactly the same, with guns instead of spears).
There are 2 main differences: adults are involved less, and when they are, they are trying to oppose the process (partly because educators are mostly women, but trained men will usually not do better - Western society has just lost all sanity regarding expectations for adolescent males interests and behavior). Even out of school, helicopter parenting is delaying the process and/or make it happen online... In a sense, it's not that strange: groups of young men are a problem for all structured societies. But the rules of passages were tackling the issue by (trying to) channel the natural tendencies. Modern western society try to build a dam and pretend the natural tendencies do not exists... It doesn't work, and worse: at one point the dam will burst. It already has started to, with consequences much more serious than dating difficulties. Trump for example...
My following anecdata is somewhat besides the point of this review since I am neither from or in the US, let alone Bay Area. I am definitely a Man Who Opts Out though, except more lucky on the physical attractiveness side, but also more dysfunctional at life in general.
I do not feel at all that the problem in my formative years was being raised by a woman. I was raised mostly by both my parents (somewhat more by my mom than by my dad due to their career paths), and secondarily by my grandparents, and by mostly but not entirely female teachers and school staff. I think this is very normal compared to both present and past generations.
I think the one gender-related problem of my formative (teenage) years was the *lack of female peers* due to no sisters, and junior high and high school at one of the few boys-only catholic schools in the country followed by studying in male-dominated fields. That made me miss miss opportunities to practice socializing with girls (romantically or not), and on some level conceive them for many years as fundamentally foreign; rare and distant at best, dangerous at worst.
Add to that, on the personal side: inclinations toward neuroticism and passivity; on the society-wide side: dating being naturally an uphill battle for men plus all the discourses that can lead a neurotic person into self-hate, including but not limited to toxic feminism; and you get 32 years old virgin me.
That was an admirable review. Thanks a lot to the author.
The most stereotypical inner city black honor culture gang embodies these requirements. Proving themselves to other men? Check. Rites of passage including killing rival members or selling drugs? Check. Not following rules because they're feminine? Check. Primarily taught by other male role models how to sling and diss rap? Check. But these are all awful behaviors and much moreso than the average public school social norms, so there is no way what you said is right, without further specification of some end that will likely undermine the gendered distinctions you drew anyways.
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.
Here’s an example that I think is high quality. I don’t know if it is explicitly feminist but I think it is aligned with left wing politics and actual modern gender studies:
I mean, it’s a podcast, it’s meant to be entertaining. I self-describe as a feminist and agree with the broad strokes etc.
I don’t know that there’s an official feminist handbook that says you can never jokingly use the words vagina or pussy to refer to women. Especially when it’s an obvious satire of someone else’s position.
Anything Ozy Brennan has ever written on the topic. Ozy's current blog is http://thingofthings.substack.com/ but most of the feminism-related writings were on older blogs written under the name Ozy Frantz during the heyday of online feminism in the late 00s and early 10s. The immediate predecessor to Ozy's substack was https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/ .
A lot of "the natural" has a tendency to be completely terrible. For example, dying of smallpox is very natural. And it's that kind of nature that Ozy wants to be supplanted - I think you might agree on more than you might expect.
I'd go so far as to say that scholarly feminism is basically a dog on a leash used to make pop feminism seem better and/or assuage an individual feminist's conscience when she starts to see what's going on.
Okay. If you want an idea of where I'm coming from, I'm a 25-year-old man who has faced a lot of hostility, has an English degree, and cares a lot about childrens' entertainment. I typed out a massive six-point response, but it was too long.
It boils down to this- the feminist ecosystem is best observed in terms of what it enables and endorses on the ground, meaning that the theory is the part in danger of being "not real feminism." Furthermore, the ecosystem's parts are best understood by the role they play in it. I have experience dealing with academic feminism in a university environment, as well as with pop feminism. Even beyond the previously mentioned roles, the former treads carefully around the latter, and doesn't really have any reach beyond it.
This is exactly the right observation to make. For determining what's true and good in the world, you may want to (privately) assess the strongest steelman/motte of an idea/ideology, or to look at how its best / most reasonable proponents defend it. At the same time, this does not prevent a very bad "bailey" version of the idea/ideology from getting all the power in the world - the power to actually "do things" outside of the tiny bubble of intellectuals writing long-form blog posts. And the version that actually affects you and the people/things you love - the "realman" - is probably more salient than a good version that, for whatever reasons, is impotent in the wider world.
An unfortunate dynamic then arises where the sophisticated people (who like the motte idea and want it to win) end up unintentionally helping the bad bailey version of the idea flourish. The Good People write a sophisticated motte defence of X-ism, raising its status among reasonable people. Bad People then do something bad in the name of X-ism, and the Good People do everything they can to disavow it - "that's not real X-ism, they don't speak for us". But of course, the Bad People disagree - they *do* think they're the real X-ists and that the Good People are spineless dweebs. However, they're more than happy to take advantage of the status accorded to X-ism by the Good People to do Bad Things under its name with greater ease than they would if everybody agreed that they really were somehow the *true* embodiment of X-ism (and fought back).
The effect is that the Good People end up (unwittingly) prolonging the life of the Bad People's program by obstructing normal observers' predictive powers. When observers notice a pattern - that pushes for more X-ism in their daily lives (or really, anywhere outside of obscure blogs) tend to lead to bad things, and therefore that X-ism needs to be opposed/stopped, the more gullible among them will be persuaded that they somehow made a mistake of identification, and direct their energy against "bad X-ism" - which, I guess, is a much less effective Schelling point than fighting X-ism? For some reason I feel that this de-fangs what could have been effective pushback, and is a mistake.
I'm not sure that it's useful to debate what the "true" version of an idea is. I think the important thing is the version of the idea that actually ends up calling the shots in the world - if the actual consequences of the X-ism concept are bad, then it needs to be opposed under that name - while granting as a technicality that a decent motte version exists somewhere (yet of what relevance is that, when its promoters so consistently fail to make it win where it matters?)
It's a Diet Principle: a diet that only works under heavily-supervised lab conditions is of academic interest, it's not a good diet. Similarly, a meme that can't be trusted to do good things when it enters the general population has to be judged on that basis, not what the meme happens to do in the minds of extremely rigorous thinkers. I really think the two versions should be treated entirely separately, but the bad version should be opposed IRL under whatever name its promoters call it.
I recently sketched some intuitions for why this dynamic might happen: (https://beyondthesymmetry.substack.com/p/useful-idiot) and I was primarily motivated by my own disastrous experiences of feminism, consonant with the stories in the OP and many commenters (and the two Scotts).
I'm drawn to the cases where X-ism is without a formal leader and without formal membership criteria. Anyone can do anything and claim it under the banner of X-ism. Of course, this describes most memeplexes in today's media environment, so it's not a good outlook. (Does this idea prove too much? Does SSC/LW rationalism face the same eventual fate? Does it equally apply to right-coded ideologies as well as left-coded ones, or is there some asymmetry?)
In contrast, if e.g. a member of the US Army commits an atrocity, the Army can officially disavow it *and expel the person*. In this case, people can at least be assured that this was a member of an org going against the wishes of the org itself (which it then enforced). Of course, if members of the army seem to go on committing atrocities, with the same condemnation and expulsion, over and over again, then we might suspect that the army isn't much of a command organisation in the first place - it's not very good at enforcing its official rules on its members. Then, we would be justified in not trusting soldiers to abstain from atrocities, no matter how passionately the generals broadcast their opposition to atrocities.
My basic point is, a political umbrella like feminism or a big religious umbrella like Islam (or Christianity) is nothing like an army - nobody is in control - so we have to expect them to evolve according to their own weird laws, which might be in a reliably bad direction due to entropy or Darwinism or something. To be clear, I also think that e.g. Marxism-Leninism was very bad in its effects, but not for the same reasons of a condemnation/exploitation cycle (it had official leaders, orthodoxy, and party discipline, and it was clear whether someone was in favour or out of favour with that whole system - someone correct me if I'm wrong).
Your answer is interesting, but I want to push back on it.
Speaking of higher-quality feminist discourse, or even in some extent "real" feminism (but less so), isn’t a sort of motte and bailey strategy, and it is more normative than descriptive, it is a way to explicitly specify what we think to be the motte, or the bailey (when you need the ambiguity for a motte and bailey)
We can think of more "neutral" examples, like science and pseudo-science, or doing math, and superficially using the formalism to raise the social status of your completely invalid chain of deductions.
Would you dismiss the idea of science, if some (even if most) people do pseudo-science, and this have real negative impacts, and the pseudo-science theories are using the social status of "real"/"good" science to raise their own ?
Maybe, but I think it would be a mistake, because every good thing could be used to raise the social status of bad ones.
I think it is better say "this is science" and "this is pseudo-science", and try to create explicit criteria to differentiate both.
"Patriarchy hurts men, too" ignores a lot of the problem. While it's true in some ways, it's also a way saying feminists don't have bother with ways that men are mistreated which don't fit into the patriarchy model.
Example of it being sort of true. It's possible that there are more wars because nations are mostly led by men. However, ending patriarchy (if it's possible) doesn't address men being abused by women.
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.
It's justified by the usual articles of faith such as "there is no reverse sexism, sexism is privilege plus power" type of argument. I'm not clear if there's a way to deprogram people from that kind of belief system. Fortunately it seems like most regular folk don't believe that, it's a reasonably extreme, and often "terminally online" position, but one that gets a lot of the social media attention.
To me, the goal of feminism seems to be more about dehumanizing men. When you associate particularly bad behavior with the word “man,” such as in the case of manspreading, then this neologism serves to dehumanize men. Similarly, the false claim that we live in a patriarchy in which men somehow oppress, discriminate against, or exploit women can only lead to women forming negative opinions about men. And yon don't treat bad people well, so women are getting hostile towards men, which you can see on TikTok etc. where women celebrate themselves when they have ruined a random man's day or taken advantage of him. This dehumanization makes it possible for feminists to enforce discrimination against men, such as through women's quotas or DEI programs, because it is no longer considered immoral to treat these bad people, these men, badly.
This is not the goal of feminism, this is a perversion of it.
This is a real thing that happen, and it is quite bad, but it is far from general, and we should not let them take the name, just like we should not let pseudo-science take the name of science.
Dehumanizing men, being spiteful against men, abusing men, trying to hurt men in any way, isn't feminism.
We should gate keep what feminism really is, in the same way we should for science or math. Sure there will be disagreement on what it is and what it should be, but I am convinced the idea of dehumanizing men will completely lose the discourse when things are explicit.
"but it is far from general, and we should not let them take the name, just like we should not let pseudo-science take the name of science."
Really? Show me one text of a feminist, who wrote good about men. For every text written by feminists that says something positive about men, I can probably give you 100 or more texts by feminists where men are portrayed only negatively.
"Dehumanizing men, being spiteful against men, abusing men, trying to hurt men in any way, isn't feminism."
Really? Watch some videos about the history of feminism from Janice Fiamengo (she is an ex-feminist). Even the first feminist wrote texts about men where the protrayed men as genetic garbage or claim the same de-humanizing lies about men, which feminist still tell today. The claim that we live in patriarchy/a society that only discriminates against women is a core believe of feminism.
"We should gate keep what feminism really is" and "I am convinced the idea of dehumanizing men will completely lose the discourse when things are explicit"
Feminism was full of man-hating women since the begining and it indoctrinates one generation of young women after another, by repeaating all their lies again and again (a propganda method). I don't believe this will change and therefore I don't see why feminism should be "rescued". There is already humanism (which is also attacked by feminists because it does not prioritize women above everyone else), which fights for human rights and not for women's privileges and discrimination against men. But as already written, feminist want to change humanism into feminism and then men can't be discriminated against anymore (a claim, which is also a tool to dehumaize people. The Nazi's told this lie about jews).
> Really? Show me one text of a feminist, who wrote good about men. For every text written by feminists that says something positive about men, I can probably give you 100 or more texts by feminists where men are portrayed only negatively.
Maybe I am wrong, but yes really.
I saw a lot of feminism text discriminating against men, but also a lot trying to protect men and women (and I think this review is one of them).
Maybe we should just abandon the word, humanism is all good, but I think it would still be unfair to think anyone calling themselves a feminism is just being spiteful or unfair against 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.
The general acceptance of the patriarchy amazes me to this day. It's basically the same thing as the illuminati.
There's no test, nor end for it. There is no defined point from which we no longer live in a patriarchy or we don't live under patriarchal rules. As commented here and elsewhere, it is completely normal for a child to have a vast majority of female authority figures until or even after college. Still a patriarchy. The government can be 50/50, women may in general be better off than men, it doesn't seem to matter since as long as anything can be pointed out to possibly be a sign of patriarchy, that's all it takes. This includes the past itself having any of those signs.
Then, it's tautologically evil and omnipresent. There is seemingly not a thing that can't be blamed on the patriarchy. Crime? Well of course. War? Evidently. Beauty standards? The existence of purses? Climate change? If it can be considered a product of society in any way, it surely is a product of patriarchy since male standards rule society. The label of my water bottle being blue is surely a result of the patriarchy, and none can prove otherwise.
Now I don't intend to dismiss the whole concept altogether. It's definitely a healthy thing to consider a perspective and how it explains the world without having to buy into it, I can lean into capitalist thinking and go "Huh, so that's why the job market sucks right now" and I can lean into Christian thinking and go "Huh, maybe the world would be a better place with more piety", what gets me is that there seems to be an unending list of consequences and conclusions related to the concept of patriarchy that have barely anything to back them up at all, and this is in today's age widely expected to be accepted in many circles to such a degree that saying "I don't believe in the patriarchy" gets people to look at you as if you are crazy, even if nobody can give solid arguments on it.
At one point in time I pretty aggressively would hound people for a falsification of patriarchy in online discussions.
Literally half-a-dozen back-and-forths in which I would ask "what would a society without patriarchy look like?" over and over. The most comprehensible answer I got was basically "a society without any sort of gender role, which we will know because everything is split exactly 50/50" (meaning patriarchy is the inverse of that).
The most common responses were that patriarchy is either unfalsifiable, or just a stock vague list of things that disadvantage women.
It's just another face of Moloch. Capitalism, Fascism, Zionism, the Illuminati, Satan, Communism, White Supremacy, Jihadism, Racism, the list of great amorphous powers that can be used to explain all human problems goes on and on.
Also, I think capitalism and communism was a fight against Moloch.
Capitalism was a way to forbid a large class of direct violence and power, a large class which was used quite directly by Moloch.
But Moloch didn't need this direct access to violence, and capitalism was a fertile field for its own power.
Communism was a direct attempt against the power of Moloch inside the capitalist system, but it failed because it didn’t have strong defense against direct and social violence, and Moloch used it, to bring the worst at the top, and in most case, this push back against Moloch was corrupted by him.
Yeah, in my experience, "patriarchy hurts men too" is used by feminists in the sense of "men, stop hurting yourself", not in the sense of "traditional gender norms - quite often also enforced by women - hurt men too".
It is indeed a very common observation of serious feminist thinkers, but I've found there is a massive discrepancy between "serious feminist writers" and "mainstream feminism the average person encounters on a day-to-day basis." The former holds many gems regarding gender relations; the latter tends to be openly hostile toward men, and if it does acknowledge the pain that sexism causes men, it usually does so in a way that blames and shames men. The latter also tends to hold on to the mindset that "men need to quit whining until women solve their issues."
So, yes, you can point to feminist thinkers who bring thoughtful and compassionate nuance to the table. But those are *not* the voices the average young man is hearing, and hence why I didn't center this essay on those voices.
Hi anon writer - I loved this but felt it was two separate essays - one on the collapse of life maps for men, the other on the taxonomy of human unhappiness. Your ideal-type biographies are vivid and believable. But a lot of women have similar trajectories and feelings. And I don't think people were happier in the past. having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
Hey Jeremy, thanks so much for reading it! I would *firmly* agree that women face a lot of very similar challenges, and there's a lot of overlap in taxonomies.
However, I think both genders often face unique challenges from similar circumstances. For example, when my female friends struggle with social awkwardness and dating, I often encourage them to just try chatting with anyone they find attractive. "Just put yourself out there" and "practice makes perfect" is great advice for them.
For my male friends, it's very different: a socially awkward man chatting up any woman he finds attractive is a recipe for getting called a creep and being perceived as a threat, which only worsens their anxieties/insecurities. There is a much more intricate social dance that men must abide by when it comes to approaching a potential partner, and often times there are no healthy male role models available to teach that dance.
It's similar for situations like "I don't find my career fulfilling." This is a super common experience among both genders. However, if a woman leaves her 6-figure job in finance to become a pre-school teacher, there isn't a huge social penalty for this. Whereas for men, if their salary is suddenly cut by 70%, their romantic and even friendship potential is viewed as being very negatively impacted.
These sound like fairly minor things, but when you stack hundreds of these little things together, you end up with pretty different challenges and paths through life. And it's clear that right now men are struggling more than women to figure out healthy paths: American males are doing worse on pretty much every stat involving well-being, from education to incarceration to drug addition to suicide rates.
This is why I decided to tailor these taxonomies specifically to men: there may be lots of overlap with woman's issues, but the map to and from these issues tends to vary quite a bit.
> having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
I don't think I agree with this. Having a purpose and having a community are both strongly linked to happiness, and this connection has been shown by many large-scale studies over the years. Purpose and community may not *protect* you from feeling sadness and emptiness, but they will certainly mitigate the emotions and help you have the confidence/drive to pick yourself up and try again.
Thanks for responding. I concede your point about empirical evidence that community and (probably) uncontested life expectations promote happiness in today’s society, compared with the norm. But as a history professor, I am skeptical of our assumption people in the past were free of the sorrows we associate with modernity. My intuition, or prior, is that many people in dense organic community felt anomie and purposelessness like we do. Those people, born into strong communities today, drift out of them. The others, raised outside of strong communities, maybe drift into them, or thrive without them. (And likely aren’t dating!)
I mean, the specific, extreme personalities you document may not have appeared in anything like the sane form, earlier. (And of course, modern dating didn’t exist.) but in the past, those people may have started out strong in their communities and failed to launch, or to find fulfillment even when successful, and may have ended just as sad as today with similar feelings of being lost, alone in the crowd, etc.
in the past, many men and women did find themselves far from home, or isolated by the death of all their family, all alone in life, unable to rebuild human connection.
“For my male friends, it's very different: a socially awkward man chatting up any woman he finds attractive is a recipe for getting called a creep and being perceived as a threat, which only worsens their anxieties/insecurities.”
Without challenging the overall thesis that men are on average thriving less than women - is “get out there and meet people” actionable advice for women who are overweight, have a face perceived as ugly, or have a mood disorder? (In each of which, women are held to a higher standard than men.) My sense is that a large minority of women are deeply depressed and isolated, feel they have nothing to offer the world.
All this is in the spirit of commentary, not rebuttal. I got a lot out of your essay.
I've read someone's observation that "attractive woman" and "unattractive woman" might as well be different genders because of the different ways they get treated. My wife grew up obese and ended up with the same kinds of resentments and lack of sympathy for women complaining about unwanted attention as some men. Her reaction to Trump's "grab them by the pussy" line was something like "Hell yeah, I'd love it if someone rich and famous wanted to grab my pussy!"
At least the Red Tribe members among my in-laws gave up on Trump after Jan 6.
I'm not the writer of the review, and can't speak for what her commentary would be. But my impression is that there are some women for whom it's a genuine struggle to find anyone who wants or desires them, even when they put themselves forward, but that they're a lot fewer than the number of women who struggle with their self esteem and imagine themselves to be undesirable.
Several months ago, I made friends with a woman who thought herself to be undesirable and lacking any realistic relationship prospects. I thought that she was well within the range of ordinary appearance and relationship appeal, and that plenty of men would be likely to find her desirable as a partner, and I gave her some advice on how to put herself forward and filter for potential relationship partners.
Last I heard from her, a few weeks ago, she and her boyfriend were planning to move in together. They got together less than a month after I first started offering her advice.
All that is to say, I think there are women whose personal attributes leave them genuinely isolated and without good relationship prospects, but a lot of women who think "my personal attributes leave me without good relationship prospects" are mistaken.
I would definitely agree there's a large minority of women struggling with depression and isolation--there isn't enough written about them, and I wish more people would provide them with visibility and empathy. But I would still argue their predicament is fundamentally different.
In my experience of helping friends with dating, even a woman who is overweight and not conventionally attractive can usually land several dates on dating apps and get a certain degree of attention. For my male friends in this category, they can spend hours swiping and hundreds of dollars on "pro plans" on dating apps, and still only match with bots.
My guess is that some of this has to do with an unconscious linking of unattractive men/dangerous men. I think there's an unconscious bias toward believing that if a man is not "socially appealing," that must mean society distrusts them for a reason, and they may be dangerous. This adds an extra layer of struggle toward socializing--they're viewed not just as "ugly", but also as potentially dangerous, hence accusations of being a "creep" and such. Society just doesn't tend to fear women as much, so I think unattractive women aren't impacted to the same degree.
I've found a lot of my female friends who struggle with dating have realized that the biggest issue is that social media warped their idea of what an "ideal woman" looks like, and once they get over their insecurities, they actually have a good chance of finding someone. But for men, it just doesn't seem to be that easy.
So, yes, I have seen "get out there and meet people" actually work fairly well for my female friends who struggle with dating. But not so much for my male friends.
Of course this observation comes with the usual caveats of small sample size, anecdotal evidence, etc, etc.
> Whereas for men, if their salary is suddenly cut by 70%, their romantic and even friendship potential is viewed as being very negatively impacted. These sound like fairly minor things
Considering that you spend 8 hours a day at work, this alone does not seem like a minor thing to me. It is almost half of all the time you are awake.
On top of that (this may depend on country) where I live it is almost impossible for a man to find a part-time job. Even if half of his salary would be sufficient to feed the family.
My wife has a job that she chose freely, and she works part-time. I am happy for her; I just wish I could have the same thing. It almost feels as if we lived in different political regimes; she lives somewhere that is halfway to socialism, I work in a cutthroat capitalism.
Speaking as a middle-aged ex-feminist, I think your essay is one of the most powerful pieces I've read in a long, long time. I will re-Stack it gladly. Thank you for your empathy, depth and intellectual rigor.
You may be wondering why I identify as an "ex-feminist". Long story short: About 10 years ago I realized that the line I'd been taught by my very liberal upbringing and education--"The Patriarchy hurts men too and Feminism will help you"--was a lie.
1st point: "The Patriarchy" doesn't exist in Western society anymore. Not for quite a long time. Patriarchy has become some catch-all Bogeyman to explain away any undesirable behavior or outcome. Want to see a real patriarchy? Go to Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan. What we have is a liberal, post-Enlightenment society that legally recognizes all humans as equal (on paper, anyway). A real patriarchy would not be compatible with democracy. Why would those in power cede control to the unwashed masses, regardless of their gender?
2. Men, on average, in our society, are no more privileged than women are. What is so "privileged" about getting circumcised, being forced to sign up for Selective Service, or being expected to take on most of the dangerous jobs? I've never seen a feminist movement, let alone a feminist individual, address these points satisfactorily, besides snide comments like, "you GUYS created these problems so it's up to you to fix them." The only ones who are truly privileged are the very wealthy. The rest of us fight amongst ourselves over silly issues like pronoun usage instead of fighting the ruling class. This is not an accident.
3. Feminists ask us, practically demand, that we be "good allies." Ok, fine. We try to do that only to discover that they treat allyship as a one-way street. Since they're so "disadvantaged" they don't feel need to reciprocate one whit. (Present company excepted.) It's like Lucy pulling the football out from Linus every time.
4. (And most importantly) Any serious attempt at support for men, by men, is reflexively rejected by most feminists. As your piece points out, they see this as a zero-sum game. They not only lack empathy, they seem gleefully sadistic at the thought of us suffering for all the sins of our forefathers.
So I cannot support a movement that actively encourages hatred towards me because I have XY chromosomes. That would be masochistic. And for anyone reading this thinking, "No true feminist would think that!", I have a Scotsman to introduce you to.
> I've never seen a feminist movement, let alone a feminist individual, address these points satisfactorily, besides snide comments like, "you GUYS created these problems so it's up to you to fix them."
Fortunately, I have. Unfortunately there were also plenty of feminist assholes back in the heyday of Internet feminism - I gave up on reading Amanda Marcotte's blog for pretty much the reasons you cited.
I was also pretty active in feminist communities for quite some time, but I gradually distanced myself, and an experience I had about ten years back with my girlfriend at the time still sticks strongly in my memory when I think about why.
She used to browse feminist websites a lot on her phone during our time together, and would occasionally show me stuff she found funny or interesting. But the content of the sites made me uncomfortable, and I eventually told her that I didn't mind her browsing feminist websites while we were together so much, but it was uncomfortable for me how much of the content of those sites was misandrist in nature. She told me that she didn't think it was, but when I offered examples of the same sort of reasoning and rhetoric gender-flipped, and asked if she'd think that a site with that sort of content was misogynist, she immediately agreed that she would, and that she'd been failing to think of it in the same terms. When I asked her if she'd feel as at-home on sites without that sort of misandrist tone, she said "I don't think there are any."
I don't think she was right, that there were literally none. But it wasn't like she went out of her way to find communities which were hostile to men. She thought she was deliberately filtering out communities which were hostile, and only immersing herself in communities which were supportive and accepting of everyone. But when she broadened her view of what constituted hostility against men to the same sort of criteria that she'd apply when assessing for hostility against women, she genuinely couldn't think of any she was aware of which met those standards.
I still wear my feminist hat sometimes, and I think learning to analyze things through a feminist framework is genuinely valuable. But over time, feminist communities stopped being a place where I felt welcome, or like my contributions were valued. And that makes it hard to think of yourself as being a member of the community.
A trivial point, but it's nails-on-a-chalkboard to me: It wasn't Linus Lucy pulled the football away from, it was Charlie Brown. (43 times; this blogger helpfully collected them all: https://karnicky.blogspot.com/search/label/Lucy)
That may be true, IDK. But I don't think you really support the claim that the disaffection you say you see in men is at all caused by these un-nuanced feminist voices.
I certainly don't think un-nuanced feminist voices are the sole cause of all this disaffection. I *do* however think they've been a powerful force keeping sane, stable men from identifying the problem of floundering men and stepping forward to say, "Hey, I'm a proud man with a great life, these are the unique challenges I faced as a man, here's how I forged my own path, and maybe this path could be beneficial to you as well."
Many feminists have aggressively tried to shut down this type of dialogue, insisting it enforces gender roles. They instead preach that everyone should just "be a good person" and focus on a gender-agnostic identity. And to be clear--this is my ideal world. But it's an ideal that clashes with social and biological realities, and it's left many boys and men feeling deeply lost and disaffected.
So we're left with young men begging for direction tailored to their gender, and right now the only people willing to loudly and publicly respond to them are creeps within the manosphere (because these men have zero respect for feminists, and in fact benefit from their outrage.)
In my own experience, having female mentors and role-models who took a unique life path, discussed the unique challenges of being on that path as a woman, and provided a detailed map for other young women on that path was *absolutely vital* to me becoming a whole, stable, and happy person. I would be a horribly lost person without it.
The fact that many young men are deprived of that same type of mentorship, in the service of some unrealistic ideal of a gender-agnostic society, is frankly rather heart-breaking to me.
Even among serious feminists, I'm not sure the discussion is a productive one. For example, feminists criticize patriarchy for causing men to suppress their emotions, to their apparent detriment (though one could argue that stoicism is psychologically healthy!). But one could ask if it's patriarchy that causes this suppression, or else the apparently common tendency of women to be unattracted to men who express their emotions.
J.K. Rowling is an honorable exception, but the great majority of feminists got badly outsmarted by the small number of M to F transgenders. Feminists should have been serious enough to not fall for transgender ideology, but at least here in America, a huge number of them were shamefully fooled.
"The patriarchy is bad for men, too" is an observation I've heard many times, but the application of this idea never seems to be towards fixing the sort of problems outlined here: it's never about reducing the sort of "men are pigs" sexist attitudes, or thinking about education reform to put boys on more equal footing, or anything of the sort.
Instead it seems to be used aa a sort of "trickle-down social justice" argument where the best thing that men can do for men is to be "allies" for women and minorities and be super embarrassed about their privilege and hyper-vigilant about avoiding anything that can be interpreted as "toxic masculinity". I agree with the authors point that social justice is not zero-sum, but I don't think it's so positive-sum that focusing on women's issues will just fix men's issues, too.
Maybe this does not reflect feminist discourse at its highest levels: maybe high-level feminist discourse is full of concrete suggestions for improving mens lives... but it's not the sort of discourse I've seen 'in the water'.
There isn't really a patriarchy. There's a gynocracy. Outside of a few hyper-high-performers (most of whom started 5 rungs up on the ladder from wealthy families) it really is women who call nearly all the shots. HR Karens will fire you for not toeing the company line, and then have an affair with the CEO. If you're ever publicly targeted then your career is probably over, as no one in HR will hire you. This is how the violent militants of the Progressive Left enforce their hateful totalitarian ideology on every one else: control HR by controlling public messaging by gossiping about and shaming any one who doesn't fall in line.
We live in a gynocracy where toxic feminine behavior governs the majority of social interaction.
It's an interesting point. With physical jobs becoming mostly economically irrelevant, male-on-female violence dramatically reduced in the first world middle-class-and-up layers of society, and with economic parity of the sexes, are there any advantages left for men? Even asking this feels heretical.
You mean the majority of congress and every president who's ever lived?
>HR Karens will fire you for not toeing the company line, and then have an affair with the CEO
But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line.
Look, I agree that the term "patriarchy" has been abused. It's often used to imply that just because congress is mostly male that means that every man everywhere is privileged, and that's just not true. But "gynocracy" is nonsensical.
"But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line. But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line."
Yes, but the board outranks the CEO, and can fire *him* for generating bad PR, or discontent among the other employees, or (even if only in their minds) opening the company up to the possibility of discrimination lawsuits, which are much less likely to happen or succeed when the discrimination is against men. Being CEO doesn't put you above corporate political games, it makes you the center of the worst of them.
I'm definitely not agreeing with the 'gynocracy' assertion, which I also think is incorrect. Just making a very narrow observation about the corporate hierarchy claim. I have been surprised many, many times how often a CEO does something and the people that nominally report to them just... go about their business, paying it lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
Very narrow hierarchy claims tend to be the only thing Feminists can make... mostly because to believe in their ideas they have to willfully ignore overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I can see how a male CEO might be beholden to gender norms which sometimes favor women. But exactly how strong is that effect?
>I'm definitely not agreeing with the 'gynocracy' assertion, which I also think is incorrect.
Thank you.
> have been surprised many, many times how often a CEO does something and the people that nominally report to them just... go about their business, paying it lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
Sure, but doesn't that work both ways? Suppose there's a mostly-male company where most of the workers are sexist against women. Suppose that the board is worried about bad PR or lawsuits or whatever, so they impose an Equality Program to make sure women feel welcomed. Then the various workers all go about their business, paying the Equality Program lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
The entire enforcement mechanism for normalcy in modern society consists of mid-level bureaucrats. The Leviathan as Samuel Francis would describe it. An unaccountable faceless group of midlevel managers that are predominantly women and maintain a feminized method of control: "follow the rules" "that's against policy" "you're not allowed to say that."
If you want to know what the future looks like, imagine a fat 50 year old childless cat lady barely able to rise from her office chair saying "that's against policy," forever. No space for agentic people in the realm of paperwork.
Those are the enforcers, the key holders, and the gate keepers. Not the CEO. The CEO doesn't tell me I have to fill out fifty forms just to build a wall inside my own house. Congress doesn't tell me what I'm allowed to say or not-say at my job. The President doesn't enforce vaccine mandates. Karens do. It's a society constructed around the capricious whims of the toxic feminine, and its disgusting. No one is happy.
Are you perhaps discussing a group of "midlevel managers" who are markedly different from "managers" more generally? If so, please cite your source.
>If you want to know what the future looks like, imagine a fat 50 year old childless cat lady barely able to rise from her office chair saying "that's against policy," forever. No space for agentic people in the realm of paperwork.
While I agree that bureaucracy is often stifling, I don't think that women bear any more of the blame than men. And I object to your casual disregard for fat people, 50 year old people, people without children and people who have cats.
On the subject of bureaucracy, the book "Bullshit Jobs" has useful insights from an anthropologist. But he didn't mention anything about women bearing any special blame for the mess we're in, and I trust him more than you.
To give you one concrete example: A common feminist argument is that women are expected to take care of children and so them taking parental leave is more normalized than for men but also this harms their careers because people expect them to leave the workforce and so don't hire or promote them. Spreading a social expectation that childcare is something to be shared by both sexes is feminist in that it addresses this problem, but it also helps men who face less social stigma for taking parental leave.
Or another: sexist ideas that women are the people who have feelings and men are the gruff go-kill-the-bear types harms women but also men, by making it hard for them to deal with their own feelings.
Motte is the narrow, official definition of the term, defensible in arguments but useless for policy.
Bailey is the de facto definition, expansive vagueness of which can be gainfully exploited, but explicit principled defense would sound flagrantly monstrous.
motte = artificial hill with a strong tower on top, easy to defend.
bailey = larger flat area with a variety of useful facilities and lighter fortifications.
moat = water-filled ditch surrounding both the motte and the bailey and separating them from each other.
There is a flying bridge across the moat between motte and bailey, operated from the moat. It makes it easier, in case the bailey has fallen, for the defender to reconquer the bailey from the motte than for the attacker to conquer the motte from the bailey.
I am not aware of the moat, the flying bridge or other details being used in the analogy with rhetorics
> 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.
There is a lot I like about Stephen Pinker, but I'm afraid on this one he's full of it. To quote Foseti's review of that book:
---
A while back, I linked to a story about a guy in my neighborhood who’s been arrested over 60 times for breaking into cars. A couple hundred years ago, this guy would have been killed for this sort of vandalism after he got caught the first time. Now, we feed him and shelter him for a while and then we let him back out to do this again. Pinker defines the new practice as a decline in violence – we don’t kill the guy anymore! Someone from a couple hundred years ago would be appalled that we let the guy continue destroying other peoples’ property without consequence. In the mind of those long dead, “violence” has in fact increased. Instead of a decline in violence, this practice seems to me like a decline in justice – nothing more or less.
Here’s another example, Pinker uses creative definitions to show that the conflicts of the 20th Century pale in comparison to previous conflicts. For example, all the Mongol Conquests are considered one event, even though they cover 125 years. If you lump all these various conquests together and you split up WWI, WWII, Mao’s takeover in China, the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War (yes, he actually considers this a separate event from Mao), you unsurprisingly discover that the events of the 20th Century weren’t all that violent compared to events in the past! Pinker’s third most violent event is the “Mideast Slave Trade” which he says took place between the 7th and 19th Centuries. Seriously. By this standard, all the conflicts of the 20th Century are related. Is the Russian Revolution or the rise of Mao possible without WWII? Is WWII possible without WWI? By this consistent standard, the 20th Century wars of Communism would have seen the worst conflict by far. Of course, if you fiddle with the numbers, you can make any point you like.
[...]
In another section of the book, Pinker has a very long discussion of infanticide. Then he notes that we don’t have infanticide anymore. Then he notes that we do kill almost exactly the same proportion of babies today that infanticidal societies killed, we just do it via abortion. Then he concludes with some fuzzy language that probably satisfies most of the people on both sides of the issue. You can’t criticize him for ignoring the fact that abortion is so common.
The problem, in this case for Pinker, is that we’ve turned the infanticide of old from an unfortunate practice into a fundamental right. Surely this should give pause to someone making an honest argument that violence has declined over time.
Studies on the topic of male vs female emotional intelligence, often also used for testing autism (for example the "reading the mind in the eyes" test) typically show a mild female advantage, not an extreme one. Many show statistically insignificant differences. Although it is more complex to measure than simple grip strenght or whatever, obviously. IIRC, among top performers in some of these tests there's an equal amount of men and women, which is not the case for physical strenght. You're much more likely to meet a male social genius than a woman as strong as an average man.
Anyway, I fully agree with you on abandoning the Twitter brainrot of calling everything the bare minimum. It helps that I've never been on Twitter.
Ad: `among top performers in some of these tests there's an equal amount of men and women, which is not the case for physical strenght.'
One explanation would be that both strength and emotional intelligence in both genders are normally distributed, the mean for strength is higher for men, the mean for emotional intelligence is lower for men, but the variance is higher for men in both cases. Men having higher variance for a wide variety of characteristics has been often suggested and is quite likely; part of it might simply be due to the presence of two different chromosomes (XY) rather than the same ones (XX).
It is less about the human race abandoning violence and more about the fact that industrial wars tend to be extremely destructive and, on the net, a sheer loss of wealth.
As long as it was possible to become wealthier by wars of conquests, people would start them - from the Romans and Hittites to the colonial wars. But the balance turned around in the 20th century. Even today, what Russia gains from Ukraine is a thoroughly destroyed landscape.
Violent crime has also been a lot higher in most societies, people don't watch executions or cat burning for fun anymore etc etc. But yeah this is a huge factor
Though violent crime is higher in contemporary societies than it was about a century ago. E.g., the homicide rate in England in the early 20th century was steady at about half what it is today, and that's not accounting for improvements in medical care.
Also, whilst we're certainly better on animal rights nowadays, I suspect public executions would still draw large audiences if they were still carried out.
Even an intact landscape wouldn't help Russia much, because what generates wealth nowadays is mostly human not natural resources.
(Russia did steal tens of thousands of Ukrainian children in this war, but that's not going to make a noticeable difference to a country with 140 million residents)
The only context in which invasion of Ukraine would make any (evil, but logical and economic) sense was that the Kremlin expected the country to collapse almost without fight. They also hoped for swift decapitation of the leadership, it seems - that is why they tried to invade Kyiv using their airborne troops and landing at Hostomel.
> 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.
> "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..."
That just sounds like enforcing gender roles with a coating of evopsych and adding a “probably” in there to soften the blow. Why not just recognise if your child is aggressive, and teach them a lesson regardless of gender? You could get a meek nerdy boy (honestly pretty likely if you’re dating men from the Bay Area) and then he might try to apply the opposite lessons, when what he needs is to be more assertive and put his own needs first. Or what if you have a very aggressive girl?
Statistics are useful, but when you’re dealing with individual children you’re raising, it’s cruel to assign them behavioural stereotypes based on immutable parts of their identity before you witness any evidence of that behaviour. Telling them “you’re probably X because you’re a boy/girl” in fact might make it worse - if they’re not X, they might feel like there’s something wrong with them, or they might amplify those traits because it’s normal for them.
That’s before going into that “protecting the weak” part - a strange throwback to gender roles. If you’re dealing with a child with anger issues, how is that a useful strategy to calm down the anger they feel say, at losing at a video game, or not getting the present they wanted?
I think there’s much better gender agnostic ways to deal with your emotions you could teach your kids.
> 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.
Very little of the issues you mentioned were gender specific. How would you treat career burn out differently in a man vs a woman? Moving to a new city and not being able to make deep connections? Having a therapist that ignores your concerns?
> Statistics are useful, but when you’re dealing with individual children you’re raising, it’s cruel to assign them behavioural stereotypes based on immutable parts of their identity before you witness any evidence of that behaviour.
I think you and I are looking at this through two very different lenses, and thus discussing different things. I'm viewing this through a "society at large" lens, you're viewing it through the lens of "an individual person parenting an individual child."
I would firmly agree that any good parent should tailor their advice/guidance to their child's individual personality and needs. But not every child has a parent willing or able to do this, and even if they do, children do not look *solely* to their parents for advice/guidance.
Society and community shapes a massive amount of a child's behavior, and that society/community likely will not know/understand a child as well as their parent. Thus the need for more generalized roadmaps. Society can provide young men with a variety of healthy roadmaps to fit a variety of personality types; parents and other more intimate mentors can help them to tailor those generalized maps to suit their own personal needs.
I also would agree that it's cruel to *enforce* gender stereotypes, and I think this is why it's so vital to have a broad spectrum of male role models who have varying definitions of "being a man." Let young men choose which one resonates most with them, or let them decide they don't give a crap about gender at all, if they wish.
But the reality is that the latter rarely happens. Gender is considered a vital part of identity, and ignoring it isn't going to make it go away. Polite society (and hence our education system) has spent the better part of the last couple decades insisting that all children need to be treated/raised the same, regardless of gender. The result for men has been dismal: plummeting education and employment rates, rising suicide rates, rising rates of addiction, etc.
We can't just keep insisting that we ignore gender, when 50% of the population is floundering under that framework.
> Very little of the issues you mentioned were gender specific. How would you treat career burn out differently in a man vs a woman? Moving to a new city and not being able to make deep connections? Having a therapist that ignores your concerns?
The concerns themselves may not be specific to men, but there are unique challenges within them for men (and also for women, of course, although that isn't the focus of this essay). Some examples, based off the things you cited:
- Career burnout: women can shift to a lower-paying but more-fulfilling career and face very little social repercussion. If men choose to take a 70% paycut, this often has massive impact on their romantic potential, and often friendship potential as well.
- Making deep connections in a new city: this becomes more difficult when you're viewed not just as a stranger (as a woman would be), but as a potentially dangerous stranger (as a man would more often be.) There also is more of a taboo amongst men for talking about feelings, which can make forming connections even more difficult.
-Having a therapist who ignores your concerns: Over 75% of therapists are women. A lot of men feel better served by male therapists who can more easily empathize with their lived experiences, but there literally are not enough male therapists for them.
These are just a few quick examples, which all leads back to my original point: ignoring gender was an admirable and understandable attempt by society to improve the lives of everyone. But it turns out it often causes more harm than pain. We need to figure out a middle ground, where gender and its biological and societal impacts isn't dismissed, but gender norms do not become restrictive and aggressively enforced.
> That just sounds like enforcing gender roles with a coating of evopsych and adding a “probably” in there to soften the blow.
these are precisely the sort of critiques lobbed at Bly and the mythopoetic men’s movement by mainstream feminists of the era, and the reason why now there’s Peterson and Andrew Tate instead.
men and women are different. Bly and our commenter above write for men. clearly, if you think “protecting the weak” is cringe and “smells like gender roles” you are not the target of these suggestions and, if the experiences mentioned are extraneous to you, you might not be the best judge of techniques for facing up to then.
They don’t write “for men”, they write for a very specific kind of men and the lived experiences that lead them to follow hateful ideologies like Andrew Tate’s is far from universal.
Men and women are different on average, sure, and you’re absolutely allowed to have your preferences and follow whatever gender roles you see fit. But I draw the line at forcing them on other people, especially kids, and not letting girls do certain things because that’s for boys and you need the right temperament/aggression/etc. and vice versa, or reinforcing the belief that because they’re male/female they have to be X or Y.
I don’t see how my particular gender changes this. The commenter above or whatnot didn’t talk about say, prostate health or whatnot, but about universal human experiences where seeing it as a “male problem” is unhelpful.
But... how? What reward, on a society-wide level, should we give to decent people? In the past, it was probably "a family/spouse", but I don't like the pressure to "pair up" this puts on people. We can't just promise men a wife or vice-versa without some pretty grim consequences.
I'm all for simply complimenting the people we love a lot, and throwing parties when they reach milestones, but that doesn't seem to be what you're suggesting?
And how does everyone in a modern society channel their agression into protecting the weak? I'm all for martial arts/learning self defense, or becoming a firefighter or even a soldier. But we luckily have a rather limited need for both soldiers and firefighters, and I wouldn't want that to change.
> And how does everyone in a modern society channel their agression into protecting the weak?
Video games. Seriously. That's like, what you do in a huge number of video games.
Or, you know, doing things like volunteering for charities, working as a public defender or social worker, etc. "Aggression" doesn't have to be physical.
How would you express or deploy aggression as a social worker or volunteer? You seem to throw this off as duh obvious but it just makes me think you've no idea what aggression is.
Well, subjectively, I can channel the same kinds of emotional/mental/physical activation that I would get if I needed to give someone the what-for into doing something like getting the blasted paperwork done properly or trying to stop the doctor in the hospital from cutting my dying wife's pain meds out of a misplaced fear of addiction when she has a motherfucking giant hole in her thigh that won't heal and hurts like hell. (True story, unfortunately.)
I think the main "reward" that is currently missing is welcoming decent people into loving and supportive communities (this also naturally lends itself to pairing up romantically, but doesn't force it or explicitly promise it.)
Historically, people behaved themselves, because if they did, they'd have the support and respect of their tribe; if they didn't, they'd get kicked out of the tribe. In current times, people can perfectly behave themselves and still have a high chance of not having a tribe available to them. This raises the question "why bother being a decent person?", and the manosphere is there to capture all the poor young men who fall into that mental trap.
Of course the question of "how do you grow healthy tribes for modern people to belong to" is a very complex one, and has many more factors than just gender. But I think one of the key parts of healthy tribes is knowing your role and understanding the expectations of that role. And right now many men seem extremely confused about their role, let alone their expectations, so it's no wonder many are struggling to find a tribe.
As for channeling aggression: I agree, I don't want more soldiers, either! But I want more people standing up for the oppressed, more public defenders, more politicians fighting for the common people, etc. These are all things aggression can easily be channeled into. And I do believe that giving young men a physical aggression outlet is very powerful as well. Not all of them need it, but some do, and I think it's very important to provide things like martial arts lessons to those who need to learn how to control aggressive impulses.
Well, if you DON'T reward young men for building civilization or providing resources to the next generation, they'll just burn the civilization to the ground and start again. Which I'd say is more grim.
How about we just drop no-fault divorce and go from there?
I'd never marry then. I mean it's very common and accepted in most of Europe to live together, have three kids, a house and whatnot and still never legally marry. It's honestly interesting it's still seen as ultra important in the states - health insurance? Or just religiousity?
You can be committed without having a legal contract.
It was so weird when I visited the US (midwest), they always assumed that I as the woman obviously wanted to get married and my boyfriend was being rude to me by not proposing (?). When I said no, it simply isn't important where we're from, they looked at me like "poor thing, making excuses for him :(". So medieval, definitely one of the bigger culture shocks.
It's just a different social context. I know a couple in the US who fits the European pattern (they've been together since college and raised a daughter together, they're now retired, and they never married), but in the US it seems like there is a pretty substantial difference in commitment level between the people who marry and the people who just live together.
Agreed. I've lived in both contexts, and context matters. In Europe, not getting married doesn't mean anything (or much) about the permanence of your relationship; in the US it does. That's how culture often works, after all--it gives you a translation for certain actions. Tells you what a kiss means and doesn't mean, etc--or an "I do."
There are a lot of legal advantages to marriage in the US associated with child guardianship/custody, inheritance, hospital visitation, health insurance benefits, income tax benefits, state tax benefits, retirement benefits and so on.
From what I've seen, European countries often don't need some of these benefits (e.g sharing of employer sponsored health insurance) and have a separate domestic partnership status that grants many of the others without a more formal marriage. (Note for US readers, this is not the same as a civil union and is often granted as a natural consequence of cohabitation.
>And how does everyone in a modern society channel their aggression into protecting the weak?
This is going to sound facetious but is probably the real answer to your question....
Encouraging the aggressive kid to punch other kids they see bullying weaker kids.
Like full on "Go find someone bullying a weak kid, and punch him in the face. Its fine. You have permission/social sanction to do that" level encouragement, and then rewarding that behaviour afterwards.... ~High Five~ Nice!.....
Society may not like that answer for all sorts of reasons, but its a way of channelling actual aggression into protecting the weak.
I agree, without something like this being socially sanctioned this is a bromide being offered without a practical application. You can channel aggression into other things (competative and physical sports? Video games?) but these aren't really protecting the weak.
Given aggression is a desire to engage in physical/hostile behaviour. Usually to attack or confront someone.... really the only way to tick the "get the aggression out" and "protect weak people" boxes at the same time, is to allow kids to physically attack/confront those kids who are preying on the weak kids.
>>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.
It's not really as much about the reward per se, it's more about consistency. A lot of "Nice guy" shit comes from said guy meeting the minimal requirements, getting repeatedly rejected and receiving only "ok, cool, you do meet the minimal requirements, what, do you expect a cookie for it or something?" as the reason for rejection. But then he looks around in real life and sees a lot of people who DO NOT meet those requirements at all - but who are facing a lot LESS problems with getting laid than he does. Obviously, that means something's up here where what's on paper does not match reality at all - if there are minimal requirements, the last thing you'd expect to see is that whoever fails to meet them, struggles less than someone who has at least met those minimal reqs. And that's generally when the Red Pill, manosphere or whatever other unpleasant company comes into play, offering an answer...
The missing puzzle piece, for the nice guys out there, being that they actually aren't meeting the minimal requirements. They are meeting the minimal requirements on one axis (the "good guy" axis), while not meeting the minimal requirements on the "sexual attraction" axis.
Women want to be treated well... by a man they are attracted to!
Receiving flowers and poems from a guy they are not attracted to tends to squick them out (and potentially fear for their safety).
And if a nice guy asks a feminist for advice on how to meet those other minimum requirements, it tends to be about as productive as asking an FBI agent for nuclear launch codes.
That's because the feminist honestly doesn't understand that stuff (and doesn't know that she doesn't understand etc), while the feminist theory often explicitly contradicts with biology. Attraction generally works on unconscious/body language level, and few people are perceptive/introspective enough to have insight into it, or to notice contradictions with the orthodoxy.
Right - much like how the FBI agent doesn't have the launch codes, wouldn't share them even if it were possible, and is professionally suspicious of any rando's motives for asking.
>Reminder that the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by a men's movement in the 80's (the mythopoetic men's movement), not feminism.
So? The term "Eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton, an Englishman who didn't see much of the 20th century. Are we to attribute responsibility to him for the consequences of the whole field?
men have not always liked traditional masculinity either, i think. if anything G.I.R.L. (Guy in real life) phenomenon the net provided shows some guys might even prefer not to be it: not every guy fits into the art of manliness's protector provider procreator paradigm.
I think there's not so much value in deciding whom to blame for the brokenness in society. What's useful is figuring out how to make it better, or at least how to stop making it worse.
I definitely agree that the whole thing where various high-status people say nasty things about men (or whites or white men) is pretty awful. And media culture is both super appealing and super corrosive--you almost can't show most virtues in TV/movie format. Crass, violent people make good stories, loyal, hard-working, honest people mostly don't--it's much harder to make a fun-to-watch story with those people.
i dont think i was talking about blaming. The point is more that some guys may not like traditional masculinity either. Thats what "men defined it" matters.
we kind of have a different focus than women do i guess.
I guess if you want to draw some grand conclusions about men generally from that factoid you can, but I don't know anything about the "mythopoetic men's movement", what they meant by "toxic masculinity", or if it has any connection to what feminists or anyone else means when they say it, and I don't think that almost anyone else knows either. Maybe you do but nobody has explained anything about it in this thread.
I also think that "men haven't always liked traditional masculinity" can mean a lot of things. "Traditional masculinity" isn't a totally fixed idea (to the extent you can give it a precise definition at all), people can like some part of it but not other parts, people can dislike it for different reasons and prefer different alternatives, and I don't actually think "how much do people like traditional masculinity" is a particularly interesting or relevant consideration for any of this discussion.
One of their ideas was that close emotional bonds between men, and men being open about their feelings, was vital. Toxic masculinity was bottling things up, and IIRC being aggressive. Seems pretty in line with the feminist definition to me.
Too much of the map of manhood is focused on what not to do, not what to do. You specifically mentioned protest or donate money, but I have never heard someone say you become a man when you attend X protests or donate Y money. If they did, someone did, it would probably be more fulfilling.
You mentioned in another comment the throwing a party for reaching a milestone, I think this is the best suggestion. Weddings are a good example of this, but so many men don’t reach this milestone. A man can’t ask for a party thrown for them, but they would definitely appreciate it if they got one, it if was tied into their culture.
robert bly and iron john weren't particularly popular, though. If you ever watched The Northman, the ritual that he did as a boy is what the mytheopic movement would suggest we do, and the modern meme form is "go back to monke," ie discover the virtues of parts of premodernism.
it wasn't really a path for many men though i can see some doing so.
> 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
I think the big problem is that it's all negative: it provides you with a list of things not to do, but lacks a good vision of what to do, or what to be, or why to do that.
In traditional societies, even up to the mid twentieth century, being an ordinary full-grown adult man in good standing with society was respectable and rewarding enough to motivate a boy to grow up. But now all the aspects of normal adult life, especially for men, are derided by society, so what has a boy even got to look forward to? A big house in the suburbs? No, the suburbs are lame, as the media never stops telling us, and suburban dads even more so. Maybe if you work hard and pay off your mortgage you can reward yourself with that nice sports car you've always wanted? No, middle aged men with sports cars are the most shameful possible group of people. The only available role models for young men are people who do not and cannot exist in the real world like Batman and James Bond, and even they are probably problematic. And your Dad can't possibly be a role model, he's uncool and lame because he doesn't like the same things that fourteen-year-old boys like.
We need to put more glory on the life of a normal adult family man who does the right things, gets a job, gets married, buys a house, has kids, does normal suburban dad things, and retires.
> We need to put more glory on the life of a normal adult family man who does the right things, gets a job, gets married, buys a house, has kids, does normal suburban dad things, and retires.
I agree this would be nice, but part of the problem has to be social media.
If boys see men of all ages living a jet setting lifestyle paired up with different hot 20 year olds on a regular rotation, that certainly seems more appealing on it's face than all the boring suburban stuff, especially to men in their formative teenage and early 20's years.
I think at that point it doesn't really matter how much you can glorify suburban dads - much like being a pro athlete or influencer is the career 80%+ of kids want, having this memetic attractor on the landscape will distort things just in and of itself, even if it's unattainable for 99.999...% of them.
>being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing
Yeah, but is "bad at reading emotions" something that you should be ashamed of, or is it a mild flaw that others can help you with, perhaps by explaining how they feel more directly because they know you won't pick up on subtle hints?
The details matter.
>You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
What about demanding a reward for being a *good* person? Doesn't it make sense that a just society would reward virtue in some way?
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
Yes you should. We call this "human rights". There are lots of rewards you should demand, like clean air, clean water, a society to live in that is not at war. Why shouldn't meaningful human interaction be among these other necessities of life? Just because providing it is hard, just because we don't have a viable plan to satisfy that demand?
> 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.
I would actually disagree with this. I think it's true that some women who subscribe to some more extreme brands of feminism would balk at a lot of potential male role models. And I would argue that the potential for those more extreme feminists to start "cancel mobs" is probably one of the main reasons we've had less men step up as public role models for what a "healthy man" can look like.
But I think the average woman (myself included) finds it extremely attractive and admirable when a man has a healthy confidence in their masculinity and is eager to teach others to be positive, healthy influences on society.
(Note: I haven't read much of Jordan Peterson's work, so don't feel comfortable stating whether I would have supported/admired him pre-coma.)
So, yes, I think just about any male role model will trigger some of the more online and vocal feminists. But that certainly doesn't mean all women will dislike them.
I think average people don't pay much attention to this discussion. Mainstream attention is driven in no small part by feminists with extreme views, who drive media narratives that cause average people, with no real exposure, to hear a vague impression about some woman-hater named XYZ, and they think that's plausible and go about their day.
In general I think the gender-focused left is completely out to lunch on what women find attractive. What the average woman, face to face offline, will admit to being attractive to is already inappropriate to discuss in polite society as being what women are actually attracted to.
If you look, for example, at Richard Reeves, he makes a big deal out of how women really just want men to have a job or "not be a loser", instead of being specifically attracted to the idea of a man who makes a lot of money, but there really are a lot of women who specifically equate a man spending money on her, and earning more money he can spend on her, as a literal measurement of love, and even average women have expectations around buying meals, gifts, .etc.
I mean, there are already lots of men doing this... E.g., male pastors, conservative thought leaders, Jordan Peterson, it's just that "Polite Society" i.e., elite liberal women i.e., people similar to you reject them.
There's a whole world out there of healthy masculinity. The problem is your culture's (i.e., silicon valley bubble / the people you date) lack of access to it. Not a worldwide absence :p
I grew up conservative, and while there certainly were structured models of masculinity, I find myself balking at the idea of most of them being healthy in the 21st century.
Of course, I'm very biased in this regard--most men who followed those models aren't super friendly toward people like me (ie: opinionated and outspoken bisexual chick who's not fond of rigid monogamy.)
I also found the models too rigid and far too focused on authority and stoicism as necessary for manhood. (Broadcasting these traits seemed to be the focus, rather than proper channeling and handling of them.) The focus on authority and repression of emotion lent itself well to quiet, behind-the-scenes abuse, and there didn't seem to be alternate maps available for my more soft-spoken and sensitive male friends.
(That all being said--I will take the average pastor over Andrew Tate any day.)
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions; not every pastor/conservative thought leader is aggressively anti-LGBT, nor does every one insist that men must be authoritative stoics at all times. And there certainly are elements of these maps that still apply very well to modern life (eg: do hard work, be there to support your community, take responsibility, embrace challenges, etc.)
But I'm also eager for leftists to invest more time developing healthy, coherent maps for those who don't fit in with the right.
Why doesnt the right's path to manhood work for the left?
I believe the "left" (e.g., the left elite mainstream dogma) struggles with men mainly because it fundamentally doesn't like men. It has a number of deluded and false and sexist narratives that are incredibly damaging and hurtful towards men (e.g., believe all women is obviously a mad, harmful and sexist idea, as women can be abusers too).
If you are interested, look up some of this Scott's and the Quantum Computing Scott's early posts about their interactions with feminism.
To me, the problem isn't that the left lacks access to viable maps to manhood, it is that they actively supress and harm men. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not sure what putting out further maps or resources is going to do. It's treating the symptoms not the root cause, and really the movement needs a sea change.
Laying out peer-reviewed viable maps, then challenging leftists to either endorse at least one of them or admit to malicious intent, could be part of how such a change would be implemented.
If you don't know much of Peterson's work (aside from his media presence), and you are interested in the question of maleness in the modern day, I would highly recommend watching one of his university lecture series from before his fame.
If nothing else because his influence has shaped much of the present day terrain, and it's good to know what it's actually about, but the lecture series are also interesting in their own right.
Both Personality and Maps of Meaning are worthwhile listens depending on which topic you find more interesting.
Back in the day, those lectures were very useful for me in working on what Robert Kegan would would have classed stage 4 development. At the time my main mentor figure had been Alan Watts and for all he gave me, I was lacking guidance on how to integrate with society and accept rules and authority.
I really don't think it's "women" as much as it is "feminists", both men and women, and also, I don't think we can blame them.
For one or other reason, we seem to work under an "Opressed v Opressor" framework in terms of social change, and our expectations and demands are different for each side. There is misandry in the feminist movement, for all the "it's about men too", there is no such thing as a "MERF", nobody gets shunned from the movement if they dismiss plights of equality from men and you can rest easy that nobody is going to call you out if you argue that men in general are so horrible that you would rather be left with a bear.
This is by no means specific to feminism, any group which consistently pushes back against X will have people saying "Screw X".
It is then inevitable that when people come along arguing for the other side of the aisle, the same thing is going to happen, which in this case involves having the people who are generally considered on the opressor side calling out the people who are generally considered the opressed, which is of course considered untenable, it shifts the whole power balance, if you are the opressor surely you are not also the opressed.
In practice this means that although it's generally safe to bemoan men on the feminist side, the reverse is pushed back against, shoved into the margins. Nobody who actually cares about feminism or what feminists think stays in that place and all we have is, well, the rest. It's not that the manosphere rejects feminism and that draws men in, it's that nobody who doesn't reject feminism is *allowed* to draw men in to begin with.
I mean it's not as if it wasn't attempted. It didn't go well.
Well, the only tool women have is toxic suppression. They'll gossip about people and shame them, and try to have a struggle session for anyone who doesn't conform. This natural leads to only figures that don't give a shit about public sentiment rising to the top. Toxic femininity creates its own problems... which is to say: a solution to cultural decay in the form of reinforced traditionalist gender roles. Unfortunately, we must live through a period where power has been wielded against the population by hateful Karens. Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results."
> "Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results."
That's very silly.
Traditional gender roles are based on the pre-industrial necessity of division of labor by gender. As long as there's an economy wherein most jobs can be performed equally well by either gender and which also REQUIRES both genders to be employed in order for the economy to function, women will have equal rights.
Nobody sat up one day and decided, "hey, let's stop oppressing women and give them equal rights." The economy demanded it, that's all.
>Nobody sat up one day and decided, "hey, let's stop oppressing women and give them equal rights."
The death of God certainly contributed to such sentiments. As soon as the Bible stopped being taken seriously as the normative guide in elite circles, the glaring contradiction between Bronze Age views on gender relations and the liberal ethos swiftly got resolved in favor of the latter.
There's that, too, but I would argue that God was likewise killed by industrialization and technology. No need to pray for God to bless the harvest when you have pretty damn good control over the harvest with reliable tech like fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modifying a hardier harvest.
"Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results.""
I doubt Copernican will see this, but arguing from the future is just silly. We don't actually know what will happen. Claims about the future might be right, but they don't prove anything.
>Well, the only tool women have is toxic suppression. They'll gossip about people and shame them, and try to have a struggle session for anyone who doesn't conform. This natural leads to only figures that don't give a shit about public sentiment rising to the top. Toxic femininity creates its own problems... which is to say: a solution to cultural decay in the form of reinforced traditionalist gender roles.
This is bad fan fiction about gender roles, nothing of substance. Adherence to traditionalist gender roles are at their lowest point in history with no rebound in sight. Toxic suppression is not the only tool women have. You've done no work in establishing that only or primarily women engage in struggle sessions. Bad fan fiction
We have a lot of maps already. We should review the Chivalric codes, Bushido, and a few other ideas... of course to do that we need to bring back male Honor. Which means bringing back a cultural and legal method for men to defend their Honor without suffering 15 years in prison for "assault" when his honor is questioned.
Effectively, the feminine legal code prevents nearly all masculine behavior. We need to bring back a dueling culture. Until we do, a toxic feminine underpinning will continue to poison society. i.e. if it's only possible to seek justice for insult in the form of gossiping, shaming, and rallying, then there will be no capacity for men to gain real respect from one another in that field.
> Which means bringing back a cultural and legal method for men to defend their Honor without suffering 15 years in prison for "assault" when his honor is questioned.
Petty gossip and decades spent in protracted lawsuits are a lot less effective than a punch to the face. Women are petty, they gossip, they shame, they rally. They do not create an environment of honor, merely submission to the collective. Feminized behavior is how we got the Covid lockdowns. Feminized men were the ones wearing masks and terrified of standing out.
You can almost map perfectly quality-of-life onto which states in the US refused the covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Feminized men build weak societies, and don't deserve societies in the first place. Strong men build strong societies, and its the honor of those men that permit the society to function.
Defamation lawsuits and gossip? It's a good way to strip a lot of men of their impulses for honor and instead create and environment of wasteful pettiness. We need to bring back male-only spaces.
I'd argue that "blue states" such as California and New York are in general doing much better than red states, but fine, we'll do it your way. I propose Super Smash Bros. Melee at dawn. No items, Final Destination. Bring your dueling second and your controller. Loser publicly admits to being the poopyhead.
(Hey, I'm a gamer. How do you expect me to duel someone? 😆)
No way, this is the exact opposite of what is needed. Chivalry was developed specifically to curb violence. Nobles were going to war with each other just for clout and it was wrecking society in the meantime. Bushido... I also can't imagine wanting to implement that! As with chivalry, it's not even for men throughout society but rather for a small warrior caste. And it's extremely maladaptive in modern warfare. If you've got 2 hours to spare, this is a great discussion on how Bushido attitudes affected WWII: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sarah-paine-japan
Sorry, but there's no retvrn worth doing here! There's *a lot* we can learn from historical maps to manhood, but men need something that is adaptive to our culture today. A truce on violence is the greatest gift we've been given by the Enlightenment and I would hate to give that up for a misguided notion of honor.
Men do not need something adaptive to our culture today. A truce on violence was the greatest mistake our society has ever made... and duels didn't stop with the Enlightenment, they stopped with the den-mothers of the late 1800s being 'shocked' by violence. Women are weak and do not belong in male spaces. A fist fight is a lot healthier than resources expended in petty gossip and protracted lawsuits.
Any one who cannot defend themselves doesn't deserve to be defended by any one else. This is why you see young men outright REFUSING to assist women when they're assaulted. It's because you took from men the impetus for violence, and now they're not going to defend you.
We need to bring back duels, and male-only clubs and spaces.
Hear, hear! Well said. A return to violence is the absolute last thing modern men need; adding a bunch of dead fathers and role models to the list of boys' problems is a terrible idea. And violence between men rarely stays simply between men. Women and children usually end up in the cross-fire, and we rarely have the natural strength to fight back effectively. Not to mention the innocent men who often end up being hurt as well.
Testosterone may be linked to aggression, but that does *not* mean violence is the correct way to channel the aggression many young men experience. Channel it into sports. Channel it into learning self-defense. Channel it into speech and debate. Channel it into starting a business and "fighting" competitors. Channel it into political protest. Channel it into fighting your own instinctual desires for revenge.
But please, for the love of god, do not channel it into violence.
Doesn't this conflict with your desire expressed elsewhere for the map of manhood to include "protecting the weak" ?
Afterall, what do "the weak" have to be protected from if NOT violence or the threat of violence? That is, very specifically, what they need protection from otherwise why would specifically being "weak" make them succeptible to the threat?
The only effective way to counter violence or the threat of violence... is the threat of reciprocal violence.
When violence/threat of violence is on the table you have already cascaded down through the many layers of alternative conflict resolution civilisation offers and are at the base level. If you're here, there is no "higher" level that can be appealed to, you're dealing with someone who has rejected all of that to go with the "base layer of reality" already, the Ultima Ratio Regnum.
Here, if nowhere else, then surely violence is finally justified as non-toxic masculinity? If you want men to channel their aggression into safe outlets, and you want men to "protect the weak".... then surely you must accept channelling that aggression into the use of violence to defend those unable to defend themselves due to their "weakness".
Society already unofficially sanctions this.... even whilst this is officially still forbidden.
Whilst the school will still punish the kids who defend their weaker friends from bullying with violence..... the man who sticks up for the woman being hassled in the movies, and fights off the big muscley creep in the bar fight after warning him "Leave the lady alone", is the hero not the villain.
Perhaps one of the ways society can change to be accepting of maps to real masculinity is to be more accepting of this reality *de jure* as well as *de facto* or, at least *de ficitio".
Maybe part of moving society in a more positive masculinity direction is moving it away from "violence is never justified" to "there are some circumstances where violence is justfied, and men who resort to violence in those circumstances are to be supported in the real world and not just in fictional scenearios"
Honor cultures that conceive masculine (or feminine) honor as something that needs violent defense are anything but a human universal. The law codes you don't like aren't "feminine"; look at history and you'll see constraints on duelling and honor killing imposed in plenty of eras where women lacked any significant degree of influence on the lawmaking system. The limits on violent defense of honor were debated between men.
Move to Afghanistan today, and you'll find a lot more scope for defending your honor with fists, blade, or gun -- and even there, you'll also find men in government trying to limit your ability to resolve honor disputes with your neighbors using violence.
Duels and fist-fights have been pretty universal aspects of human culture throughout all of human history up to the modern feminized age. Toxic femininity is attempting to destroy your targets reputation, the masculine spirit can simply have a fist fight in the bar, then move on with their lives.
It's objectively better to get into a brief fight and sort out your differences, than engage in multi-year protracted lawsuits, and gossip, and defamation. This is why women weren't permitted into male spaces for thousands of years. Feminity is toxic to a functional society because it expends tremendous resources in petty squabbling. The masculine urge to 'just fix things now' is by far superior. Even if it means throwing punches here and there.
I don't understand the leftist terror when it comes to violence. It's pathetic. Carry a gun, punch people in the face, practice martial arts, act like a man. Feminized men are disgusting and deserve no respect. Those who cannot defend themselves do not deserve to be defended by any one else.
Caricature everywhere--of history, of men and women. The urge to control and limit social violence isn't driven by "den mothers" or "leftists"; it's way older and more widespread than that. Read Norbert Elias's "Civilizing Process" to get a different lens on the process than the narrow lens you're wielding now.
The concept of honorable man-on-man violence has been practiced by every human civilization throughout all of human history with the exception of a few totalitarian states. Particularly the liberal/feminized totalitarian state we live in now.
Reasserting a caricature doesn't make it true. One problem with imagining arguments as contests of honor to be won by some combo of brashness, insults, and punchups: you get bad at arguing.
Yeah, well every society til the present lib/fem/tot/whatever first world countries also had no treatment for cancer and a bunch of other godawful diseases that make people
die slowly, in anguish. And most babies didn’t make it to adulthood. And everybody had worms and head lice and smelled like smegma and rotting teeth.
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.
Changing the voice won't rerecord the old articles, so if you want a new article in a female voice, you can switch voices, publish the article, and switch back.
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?)
If you take the sweeping and vague definitions the left typically uses for things like misogyny, or homophobia, but swap the groups out, it is pretty obvious that the left falls into the definition of misandry.
It isn't a "lack of clarity", so much as it is a straight-up adverse reaction to the masculine, and to male-associated things. Even the way that we tend to criticize the "manosphere" while not paying close attention to the bile from the "womanosphere" is pretty clear evidence of this. The manosphere isn't particularly alt-right, it is just that anything which suggests men might not be the cause of all their problems, and doesn't constantly supplicate to women's priorities and issues, immediately codes as right-wing.
If you go listen to the recent podcast from Richard Reeves, Jonathan Haidt, and Governor Newsom, they basically are cheering progressive reform for women, while simultaneously demanding the return of conservative gender roles for men.
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
I think this is a Different Worlds issue. I have found that, for a number of reasons that are likely somewhat self-evident, whatever my current level of life dysfunction is, I tend to gravitate towards and find people who are in similar positions. Two of my best-adjusted friends come from my first year-and-a-bit of college, when I was at my most energized and hopeful so far; the most dysfunctional people I have been close to have been by and large people I met in times of personal crisis.
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.
> Working out hard outdoors at 0530 multiple times per week has to be an intense selection factor against depression and dysfunction.
I agree but it can also select for things like addiction, it's just that working out is a beneficial outlet for that particular dysfunction. Some people manage their flaws (perceived or real) and some people wallow in them.
Functional communities have resources for functional people. Individuals within them might have resources for dysfunctional people, but the community will almost never have any means of connecting those resources to anyone who needs them. If appropriately-useful resources even exist to be connected to, which is *slightly* better than chance.
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.
And also specifically men who are dating, i.e. single, in their 30s. That filter is definitely picking up more people who aren't doing well compared to the average.
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..
It seems like "dating" just sucks. "Doing great" means getting married so you can get the hell out of dating. Being single sucks because you're alone and isolated.
The weird thing is it doesn't have to be that way. There used to be a bachelor/playboy lifestyle that was seen as highly cool and sophisticated. But that sort of lifestyle requirese the existance of an equal number of women willing to play along, and it seems like that's just not the case anymore. Women are dating to look for marriage, *not* for casual fun. It feels like family and dating norms have become much more conservative now than they were in the last 50 years, and that's very strange.
Disagree. I think the conventional wisdom that norms were more conservative 50 years ago is correct, and the "bachelor/playboy lifestyle" that people tell stories about was the province of a small minority.
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.
So definitely some people have chemical imbalances that antidepressants help with, but--I think a lot of people have social problems where antidepressants serve a role much more like "turning off the check engine light"
If someone feels lost because they don't know who they are and what they want, because they don't have real friendships and haven't done real exploration... how the hell is an antidepressant supposed to fix that? And how is you saying "you should get an antidepressant" going to _start_ the conversation wherein you become actually friends, rather than ending the conversation and proving to them that you're just an acquaintance?
> And how is you saying "you should get an antidepressant" going to _start_ the conversation wherein you become actually friends, rather than ending the conversation and proving to them that you're just an acquaintance?
It was fairly obvious from his comment that he was relating what he would say to a close friend. Making unsolicited psych med recommendations to a mere acquaintance would be inappropriate.
I think you missed my point--I think if I opened up to someone I thought was a friend about my struggles, and they responded with "yeah you've misdiagnosed your problem and you need antidepressants", my reaction would be "oh, I thought this person was my friend and they aren't."
If they responded with "I felt that way and then antidepressants turned things around for me"--ok! At least they're opening up about themselves and encouraging me to ask whether or not our situations are similar.
That is--your relationships with other people are determined in part by the actions you take towards them. It's easy to damage your friendships with other people by letting them down!
I mean, canceling your friend because they suggested you try an antidepressant seems a bit excessive. My friends and I are always tossing around drug/medication tips of all sorts, it’s been a very helpful source of info for me. The armchair diagnosis aspect would absolutely set me off though, and I have ended friendships over that.
Btw, everyone will let you down eventually, you might need to recalibrate your expectations of people. Something I learned in therapy, ironically.
Bluntly, antidepressants are a crutch but they are not a substitute for actual connection. And saying you aren’t dismissive does not change the fact that you are in fact being dismissive
I think people compartmentalize well. I found "THE MAN WHO OPTS OUT" to describe my experience eerily well (at least until a few years ago).
I also wouldn't have described myself as depressed or anything. I was resigned to being forever-alone, but also felt like I would still have a fulfilling life given that. I just assumed I would be like a monk or a priest or something, and those people seemed fulfilled to me.
I ended up solving the issue by becoming gay and then lucking into an incredible partner who was patient enough to help me build up my self-confidence, which worked pretty well for me (we're getting married next year!)
In retrospect, looking back on your life so far, would you say that you became gay, or that you were already gay, and just took a while to recognize it? Was that just a quirk of language, or does it specifically reflect how you see yourself as having developed?
Maybe always had the potential? But I never felt like I was “in the closet”, and I have been described by friends as “the straightest gay person they know”
And to be clear, I’m bi, so I *was* attracted to women, I just didn’t realize I was attracted to men as well until later
That makes sense. I've heard many people argue very decisively that nobody becomes gay after their sexuality has already developed; your sexuality is what it is, and it's simply up to you to explore and discover it. But I'm not convinced that people's sexualities consistently develop in the same ways, or that we really understand sexuality on the whole well enough to make such decisive statements in the first place.
I can personally testify that sexuality isn't nearly so neat as some people argue. I think a lot of people experience it clearly from an early age, but it's much more complex for many. Personally, I'm bisexual when off birth control, mostly straight when on birth control, and largely lesbian when I have unbalanced, high estrogen.
I think the narrative of "you are born with a built-in sexuality that never changes" was very helpful and needed when trying to ban conversion therapy. But as Western society leaves behind outdated homophobic ideas, I hope we'll get more nuanced conversations and explorations of sexuality. It's such a fascinating subject!
That's interesting, I don't think I've ever heard from someone who says their sexuality fluctuates so much their hormone levels like that.
I've always been able to tell I liked and was attracted to girls from early childhood, and didn't share that attraction to boys, but I experimented with trying to condition myself into bisexuality in my teens (I thought it would increase my dating pool, and I didn't think anyone I'd want to be in a relationship with would judge me for it.) It didn't work at all, but my hormone levels weren't a lever I had access to, and I wonder if I'd observe changes in my preferences if I were able to manipulate those, or observe myself through major fluctuations.
I've suspected for a long time though that sexuality couldn't be set in stone from birth though, or at least not for every individual, because if that were the case, we'd most likely see identical twins, who share the same genes and uterine environment, always having the same sexuality, and while they're correlated way above chance, that's still a long way from being the case.
Rather than a push to ban conversion camps, which I don't remember being much in the news at the time, I always saw the insistence that your sexuality was fixed and you couldn't change it as having been part of an effort to push back on religious people who thought that various social influences were "turning kids gay."
I don't think anyone knows how to do that on purpose, but I'm agnostic on whether the number of openly queer people in our society seems to be rising because it's become more recognized and acceptable to be out, or if something in our society is actually increasing the prevalence, because it seems like there must be *some* levers apart from just genetics.
This has been my experience as well: a lot of these men compartmentalize very well (especially in the "Opt Out" group), and would describe themselves as stable and not necessarily depressed. But when you encourage them to examine their emotions, they'll often express a sense of disconnection from society and resigned despair at the idea of being alone.
Also--huge congrats to you on finding your way out from that category. It's a tough journey, and I admire you for forging a new, happier path. I wish you and your partner many wonderful years together. :)
Surely this is because your sample is your friends (who are people you selected for being mostly OK) and because her sample is from random guys in the dating pool (who are probably not).
I'd be fascinated to know the percentage of people who think most of their are friends are OK vs most are not okay. for me it's "not okay"; my impression is almost everyone in society is doing really badly at much higher rates than when I was younger.
Good question for the next ACX survey, maybe, although I don't want to wait that long.
I think my friends are doing okay but also have mental health disorders, like I'm somehow selecting for 60th percentile mental health very consistently.
I mean, it's not always obvious what someone's going through on the inside. It seems quite common for people to be completely blindsided when a loved one commits suicide, for example.
My sense (tbf from reading articles like this one) that it is not true that most people are ok among the extremely specific slice of people constituting “single men in SF with good jobs, prosocial politics, and very high education.”
I think there could be a lot of reasons for this discrepancy.
- You could lack insight into the people around you. They might seem happy when you interact with them, despite having a deep-seated lack of comfort or fulfillment in their life. Notice that many of these archetypes might project outward happiness in social situations.
- You could meet mostly people who are in relationships due to your social circle. These issues probably apply most to single people (and plausibly single people are struggling more with there lives, if in because struggling people are less likely to get into relationships).
- A lot of these issues lead to social isolation/awkwardness, making it less likely you'll meet people like this.
- You might be older than the author or I (I am 26).
On the first point, as someone who this essay resonated a lot with, I think I don't know many people well enough to identify whether they are going through similar issues. Perhaps I know 10 people well enough. I feel like you have to have a fairly personal conversation or else a lot of experience with someone to get a sense for how they're actually doing.
Of the other men I know well enough to judge, most of the ones in relationships seem pretty happy with their lives, and the single ones are mostly dealing with issues like this (though for many it doesn't dominate to the point where they are miserable).
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.
Associating with your sex is one thing; being under influence of sexual hormones is another. I take the fact that I am a man as incidental; nonetheless it is a channel through which the nature has influenced some of my traits, so when the society declares those traits to be evil, that puts me in a conflict with the society, even if otherwise I wouldn't care about being a man at all.
For example, schools should be less about sitting all the time quietly and obediently, and should offer other ways of learning, even ones that include jumping around and yelling. There is nothing about "2+2=4" that requires you to be sitting when you learn it.
So I think that an ideal solution would involve the following:
* different options for different people
* everyone can choose their option freely -- if a boy chooses the option designed for girls, or a girl chooses the option designed for boys, it is okay
* but there should be at least one option designed with stereotypical boys in mind, at least one option designed with stereotypical girls in mind, and maybe a few more other options
I want pushback on this idea because frankly, it's one of the most depressing ones I can't quite shake off.
It seems to me that women were able to somewhat move on from their fixated place regarding gender roles because in the end, society gives value to women themselves. Even if a woman takes up carpentry, wears jeans rather than pants and likes sports, she still holds value as a woman. Women in stereotypically male contexts even hold certain special attractive.
It does not seem to me that men find themselves in the same spot regarding gender. A man that drops all idea of traditional masculinity is generally categorized as a weirdo and will face problems regarding attractiveness compared to one that simply adopts traditional gender roles.
There is value to be found to having *extra*, traditionally femenine qualities, but those are always added value over a traditionally masculine base.
the problem is women LIKE men to be stifled. they find those roles awesome and they will never change, because they would rather date each other than a feminine guy.
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.
The comment, though, like the article, is about young men and dating.
As a man in his 70’s, I see nothing new to the challenges faced by young men today. Growing up was always a challenge. Dating has always been hard. Gender expectations were stupid then and dumber now.
The “plight of men” was and is the plight of all people: to find their way in a rapidly changing world that is dysfunctional in part because traditional rules and roles don’t map into the realities of living in the present day. The Stoics knew this.
For at least 25 or 30 years, I have been reading article bemoaning how men’s problems are being ignored while women have been supported. This is such bullshit. All this gender-focused, arm-chair pop psychology helps no one. When in my teens and 20’s, no one thought much about gender — everyone was trying to figure life out and were willing to speak about it without dividing according to gender, sexuality, etc.
Want to help young men? Stop telling them they are being ignored, that no one cares about them and that women are the enemy. Instead, encourage them to volunteer in service to whatever cause interests them, to explore spiritual paths, to work hard and to be open and honest. No other life lessons are necessary if these are encouraged.
The difficulty is, "wants to talk about their emotions" is not a universal characteristic, it's a trait that's distributed within the population. I say this as someone who's out on the other tail, and finds the extent to which people constantly prattle about emotions these days hard to tolerate (as in the post-90s UK, far less extreme than the US). Probably more women are on the other side of the curve than men.
> I don’t see how there’s much about being a man that needs male specific advice
I'm not personally familiar with how to diagnose and treat, e.g., internal bleeding, so when it might need to be done, I look for a specialist who does see.
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?
Probably more like 60 million years. We've been evolving from proto-mammals for at least this long. And since we're a social species, it's a fool's errand to try to differentiate between Nature and Nurture. For us, it's exactly 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.
>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?
I don't know what the author would say. I don't think that MtF trans women are biologically built to give birth, though. I'm not sure how one could think this, given that MtF trans women don't have a uterus or eggs. I do think that there are probably trans women who could raise children in a relationship that is at least somewhat similar to a traditional monogamous relationship. The relationship would have some differences given the lack of birthing, but could still be substantially similar, especially if the trans woman was inhabiting the social role of a woman and was partnered with someone inhabiting the social role of a man.
> 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.
As I see it, your made the following comment on a post about the experience of dating men in the bay area:
> >They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
> As far as I can tell, backlash against the trans movement.
The comment that you were responding to said:
> 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?
As far as I can tell, you were saying that the only reason to frame this article in terms of manhood, instead of framing it in terms of becoming a better person, is because of backlash against the trans movement. I explained why I don't think that backlash against the trans movement explains this framing, and why framing an article about dating men in terms of manhood _actually makes more sense than framing it in terms of being a better gender-neutral person_. I don't think linking a "wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview" would help clarify your original comment, unless it happens to explain why a (presumably) cis-gendered woman's experience dating heterosexual men is actually deeply related to "the trans movement".
> 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.
This is an article (presumably) by a cis woman about dating cis heterosexual men. I don't think I'm missing the point, I think you're trying to make this article about your favorite culture war topic which is only very tenuously related to the article itself.
The only relationship I can see is that you think that "traditional gender roles" are bad or something, and think that society would be better if we didn't have them, or something. You haven't actually said this, but this is the only somewhat relevant connection I can see you implying. If you do actually believe something like that and are trying to make some point about that, I think you should explain that more clearly.
I'd ask that you make your comment substantially related to the article (which I think is primarily about postive male role models, the process of becoming a man in modern society, and the relationship of this to heterosexual dating.)
> 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?
Not wanting to put words in the author's mouth, but my guess is the author would say that this is an essay of broad generalisations, and transsexuals are a rare edge case not to be worried about too much in this context.
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 am trans and can promise you that discussion of being a well-adjusted man or woman specifically has very little to do with anti-trans backlash. Well, unless all my close friends and my fiancee secretly harbor some sort of deep-seated ideological distaste towards me, but I really doubt that. I am paranoid enough that I would be very unlikely to miss any such distaste, and I have yet to find any at all in them, who very often discuss such topics.
This is also a very strange opinion because these discussions have been going on since long before the vast majority of people had ever heard of anything trans-related. There's a certain brand of influencer now that will use trans people as a sort of diabolical antithesis to everything a man or woman should be, but those certainly aren't the only people talking about this very real and serious problem.
We're not talking about the discussion of being a well-adjusted man or woman, we're talking about the particular language of biological essentialism and evolutionary psychology used throughout this article.
It's true that those arguments go back further than the trans movement, people on the right have been using some version of them to fight feminism for decades.
But 10 years ago, those arguments and that language would have been very unpopular in a largely academic/intellectual space like this one. The pan-adaptationsist 'just-so-story' version of evolutionary psychology on display in this article had been widely debunked among the intelligentsia, replaced with much more nuanced accounts that considered dynamic evolutionary systems. Biological gender essentialism was seen as one small part of the total picture of gender expression and cultural gender roles, with lots of individual variation and lots of filtering through culture; someone trying to make the broad and extreme claims about 'how men are built' that pervade this article would not be taken seriously.
Why did the audience at 'smart' blogs like this abandon those nuanced and informed views, and start applauding this simplistic and anachronistic rhetoric of 'men are built to be warriors, women and built to birth and raise children, and trying to do anything else will make them miserable'?
Because this space has slid towards anti-woke and towards the right, and accepted arguments-as-soldiers so long as they oppose 'woke ideology.'
On the topic of gender roles and biological gender essentialism, the trans movement has been the primary motivating target of that backlash.
I'm not saying that this article is itself a specific attack on trans people. I'm saying that if people in this space didn't identify as largely anti-woke, and if they didn't identify the trans movement as a 'woke ideology' and spend years arranging arguments against it, the essentialist language used throughout this article would get laughed out of the room instead of widely embraced.
It might be just as easy to say (and in fact, those who tend towards more biological essentialism usually do say) that ten years ago we had dramatically overcorrected following the realization that not everything was determined by sex, to the idea that almost nothing was.
Also, even if you accept that gender roles are entirely socially constructed and have no biological basis, there is a reason to distinguish between the effects of society on those who are expected to occupy the male role and those who are expected to occupy the female role, and a large part of this post had much more to do with society than biology. I agree that the vagueness/lack of positive examples in social expectations for men and the distrust often directed towards them are often bigger problems than the expected role for men being overly feminized, but I do think that expecting everybody regardless of gender and personality to act like a stereotypical woman is a major problem in progressive circles. If you don't buy that it's an issue for men, consider some other cases. Attraction to women being considered as predatory hurts anyone who is attracted to women, and in fact some lesbians have talked about similar feelings of sexual shame to those which straight men immersed in social justice culture often have. The progressive expectation that everyone will always be empathetic, always say the right things, and never show anger or frustration towards others (unless it is righteous anger directed at bigotry) hurts anyone who struggles with anger or with social cues; autistic people as well as neurotypical men often report being bothered by this. I personally have struggled with both of these expectations in ways that are downstream of social justice culture, despite having been born female.
And in my experience of talking about gender differences in a more socially progressive group, I would expect these generalizations about men and women to include more caveats about these traits occurring on average and within-group variation being greater than between-group variation, not to be totally absent.
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.
> 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?
Men take more risk on average and end up in these situations more.
> Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness
Trying to fight tens of thousands of years of sex-differentiated evolutionary-selected preferences won't get you anywhere but misery and unhappiness for the majority of people.
Teach your son how to cook and clean. Teach your daughter how to change a tire or to 3d print if she shows interest in it. But if you're a man, tell your son what standards life and society expects from a man. Society expects a man to be sure of himself, to provide, to always be in control of his emotions.
While those are good traits to have for both sexes, there's (almost) no compromising on those as a man, while a woman who's a housewife, who's a bit shy and hesitant and indecisive, who's frequently emotional - that's socially acceptable. Teach your son that as a man, he should try to never compromise on these.
Is this an outrageous double standard? Is it unfair? It's unhealthy? Not more unfair than it being women who bear children and the risks and burden of childbirth.
> But if you're a man, tell your son what standards life and society expects from a man. Society expects a man to be sure of himself, to provide, to always be in control of his emotions.
Who is society? His close friends? His coworkers? His partner?
I don’t have kids yet, but I wouldn’t want my son to feel like he has to put on a stoic mask for everyone all the time. I wouldn’t want him to grow up with people who preach those same gender roles, and to repeat that kind of stuff.
And it’s absolutely not true anyway, I know a decent number of men on benefits, some where their girlfriend is the primary breadwinner, and women who date emotionally unstable men.
> Who is society? His close friends? His coworkers? His partner?
Yes.
> I don’t have kids yet, but I wouldn’t want my son to feel like he has to put on a stoic mask for everyone all the time
Nothing about what I said requires a stoic mask. But it does require you to be able project confidence in the face of uncertainty, to be able to be decisive, and to be able to lead and reassure. It does require that you master your emotions.
Being a mother is a full-time job. Being a husband and a father is too.
> I know a decent number of men on benefits, some where their girlfriend is the primary breadwinner, and women who date emotionally unstable men.
Exceptions always exist, and those aren't even particularly good exceptions to aspire towards. Do you want your son to be like those emotionally unstable, unemployed men? Do you want your son to be unable to provide for himself and to be dependent on others?
In any case, being a provider doesn't require that you be the primary breadwinner, or to even hold a particularly high paying job. It does, however, require that you are capable of adding value to society, to create or do something that people needs doing.
This is a great comment and I agree with almost all of it. Society is much stricter in response to male failures and it doesn't serve a boy well to not equip him to succeed in masculinity as you've very aptly defined it here.
That said, technology has changed our fundamental evolutionary environment so much that it also does a disservice to a boy not to equip him for this new world. Women don't need men for provision nearly as much as they used to, and teaching a boy how to provide emotional support and be emotionally open is part of our species' continued evolution; they literally are less likely to reproduce otherwise.
I agree, providing emotional support is a large part of the value men bring to a relationship.
However, I think that the advice to be emotionally open is well-intentioned but misleading. The emotional support in a heterosexual relationship needs not be completely one-sided, but it is heavily weighted towards the man providing emotional support for the woman, and not the other way around.
This means that while you can be emotionally honest, as a man you should almost never be using your partner as an emotional support.
That means no trauma dumping. No emotional breakdowns. Don't do, basically, anything that conveys to your partner that you are not emotionally alright and needs help. Even if you genuinely do - go to your friends, not your wife.
But also, don't be an unfeeling robot to your wife. Be honest with your emotions with her, but never, ever, frame them as a problem that you need help with.
You're angry that you got passed over for promotion, but you got it handled, you'll start looking for a new job. You're a bit down sad that you pet can died, but you'll be fine, you'll just need a bit of time.
Never share an emotional problem without a solution.
Does it have to be toxic and unhealthy? No, just put in the work to have friends/family that you can lean on for emotional support. Not your wife or date or girlfriend.
Emotionally dumping on a gf/date show that either you don't have anyone else you can confide with (red flag) or you do and you're still emotionally unstable (also a red flag). Women have a great intuitive sense of this and are almost always turned off by this behavior, even if they can't exactly/won't explain why.
Hm, interesting, that's not how my marriage works. My husband makes tons more money than me, is clearly the leader in terms of which way our household goes, and I think he's a great role male model and respect him as a true man. He is very open with his feelings with me on exactly the topics you describe. For sure I would not like it if he cried or something about his problems daily to me but he wouldn't like it if I did that either; we both use our words to share our frustrations and to problem solve together. He will call me from work to tell me about something that happened, and I'll listen and empathize and he'll ask me for advice.
I agree it's not a good idea to be so open on a first date or in the early stages of a relationship. And I agree he'd have more tolerance for my daily crying than I'd have for any similar behavior from him. There's some truth to what you're saying but it's not the Edenic model where Adam knew his wife and she knew him.
> 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.
That's a wonderful theoretical point to make which has zero connection with the reality of heterosexual dating (app or otherwise). The experience of men and women dating each other is vastly different, and expectations are vastly different. Any model that tries to assume away this difference and reason from the idealized premise that the two genders are in a symmetrical situation isn't a practical advice helpful to anyone, it's an exercise in worldbuilding.
It doesn't, but they don't. Is your proposed solution for a hypothetical man from this post is to wait for women to approach them first? That's just not going to happen.
Oddly enough, that actually is how I started dating my future wife, but that was the only time something like that happened to me after high school, and I was 31 at the time. At least I knew how to cash in my winning lottery ticket when I was offered one. ;)
> 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”.
That's the problem with relationships, that it's not enough for you to unilaterally change the framework. You also need to meet someone who accepts the changed framework, otherwise you stay alone (which is okay if that's what you wanted, but some people want to be in a relationship).
And for heterosexual people, if there are thousands of your sex who want to change the framework, there better be thousands of the opposite sex who accept it, otherwise your chances on the dating market are not going to look good.
>Every human society has sex roles, and they all align with the innate psychological differences between men and women.
In Shakespeare's time, women weren't allowed to be actors. All the female roles had to be played by young men. How does *that* align with innate psychological differences between men and women?
There are many more examples like that.
> 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.
That may be true in the society we have today, but let's not lose sight of the fact that we can change society. I would happily support a movement to encourage women to ask men out more often instead of waiting to be approached.
In my experience, women my age also do these sorts of things, but it seems to happen less often, and when it does it tends to happen to a less extreme extent than with men, and in less destructive ways. As a telling example, I have a brother-sister pair of cousins who are both prone to general dysfunction and mental issues. The sister is very isolated but graduated college and is starting work in the fall; the brother dropped out five or six times, lives in his childhood bedroom, abuses research chemicals, and is so deep into the crevices of strange online ideologies that he can't have normal interactions with people anymore. I certainly don't think my female cousin is on a path to happiness, but my male cousin is on a path to early death.
> They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
They are already a person, they need help developing into final stage of the closest gender path. Hence males would imply the use of "manhood" as most proper.
If nothing else, because they will *notice* that the people around them aren't comfortable when they frame their experiences 'as male.'
You can't expect people to have healthy self-identity if discussing their gender in positive terms gets people looking at them like they just ripped a giant fart in public! If masculinity-qua-masculinity isn't something that you're willing to discuss except as a problem or as a threat to women, then you are by definition stigmatizing men, and the things are going to happen that happen when you stigmatize men.
Thank you. I came out of the essay feeling something profound was missing, and you helped me put my finger on what.
In general, I'm deeply skeptical of narratives about gender and social conditioning, because they often ring as dehumanizing to me.
(Include standard caveats here, societal factors play a huge role on our conception of gender norms and moral norms, etc etc etc.)
I don't feel like a man very much, I feel like a human. When I feel shame for my failures or pride for my successes, they're my failures and successes as a human being and an imperfect rational agent doing the best with the brain he got. We're more than piles of hormones and societal preconceptions.
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.
> There's a lot of free-floating cruelty these days and it does add up.
On the internet, you can be an asshole, and then join a cause that feels righteous. Not only will no one punch you, but you will always find someone to join your side (often the moderators, if you choose the right Reddit forum).
In real life, people like this would soon eliminate themselves... if not from life (by getting into physical conflicts more often than their body can handle), then at least from the society (people will stop inviting them).
That is really not evident to me at all. I reckon that if feminists at large (both men and women) were aware of what they are doing to male youth, we wouldn't be seeing them rejecting feminism in the numbers we are seeing.
Destroying them; emotionally, physically with drugs and sedentary lifestyles, psychologically with helicopter parenting. The consuming den mother eats her own children. I'm working on a theory: the reason there's so many "femboy fascists" is because feminist mothers emasculated their sons... and all it takes is exposure to an ideology of virtue instead of an ideology of cowardice flip their worldview. They don't change what they are because trauma takes years to undo, and if they started taking estrogen to MtF transition, they can't change that. But they can sure as shit throw in with the ideology that seeks to make their hellish upbringing a bad historical memory.
I don't really think so, but I'm not from Bay Area so it may resonate less. This also touches a topic that was very frequent in golden age of SSC but was almost never in ACX (is there even any?) that it'll certainly attract lots of old fans. Overall, this'd not be my top 3, but I understand if SSC readers think it is.
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.
Every time there is an insect in my house it is a crisis that requires size, strength, and speed to deal with. Granted it also takes composure and courage.
Jokes aside, I do have a lot less fear and vulnerability when I walk through the world than my wife does. Part of having a good relationship with her is understanding and working with that. I have to look out for her in a way that I don't have to look out for the men in my life.
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).
I think it's just as much to ask for us to go back to rigid gender roles :) So since we're discussing implausible solutions anyway, let's discuss ones that would actually achieve something.
I've started to resent the rote scientific jargon that people knock down as a strawman on the differences between men and women.
While your attempt to egalitarianism is noble, it completely ignores the fact that men and women navigate the world differently. I am not talking about "men should be able to save a woman from a fire", I am talking practical, everyday differences.
For example, in a social setting, like a bar or party, the man is typically expected approach first. Therefore as a boy you need to be taught that this is a role that exists and how to perform it. If you ignore this reality about courtship you are going to end up confused as a young man. This is just one example, and retorting with "well women should approach too!" isn't useful nor addresses the numerous other ways the genders navigate life. Also, I don't consider this a good or bad thing - but a role that has to be learned.
So yes, people do need detailed, specific, instructions because society is made up of 100 hidden and esoteric rules and "just learn to be good" won't cut it.
That differs a lot in different societies. From what friends have told me, in Spain women often make the first move. But yes, you have a point that people should be taught the realities of the society in which they exist.
I think the author was saying that boys who actively ask "How can I become a good man?" need someone to answer that question for them. Not all boys ask that question. Some boys are less wedded to the notion of gender and instead ask something like "How can I be a good person?" That question also needs answering. The point, I think, was to meet each person where they're at.
Having said that, I admit that I don't like the implication that the genders are fundamentally different. I prefer to emphasize respecting each person individually, and whether or not we see statistical averages diverging from each other is really none of my concern.
I see this in Sudbury Schools, which do a wonderful job of raising children without any particular emphasis on gender (nor is there any emphasis on eliminating gender). Each child is unique, and if they're given respect they will find their own way in life.
So if we're discussing gender at all, my focus is on tearing down the offensive stereotypes that already exist. I'm not interested in propping up new "better" stereotypes.
I'd like to clarify that my solution isn't to "teach all boys to behave like men" in a singular, enforced, or rigid way. My solution is to offer a variety of clear paths that lead to a variety of healthy definitions of manhood. I want paths that fit the shyest, most quiet boys, and paths that benefit the most aggressive and dominant boys, and role models willing to guide them along each path and validate the various healthy expressions of manhood.
I also think these paths should be chosen by boys/men themselves, and never enforced on them. They should be ladders to help someone climb to self-actualization, rather than straightjackets.
If a boy decides he wants to ignore the paths and doesn't really care about being a man--sure, that's no problem! I actually really admire that mindset.
But the reality is that "being a man" is often a goal for boys, and leaving them with no clear definition of this term, and no clear path to follow, often leads to confusion and suffering (or simply drives them to the manosphere, where paths do exist, but are horribly toxic.)
I also think this isn't really much different from what feminists have offered women; I can easily find many women across the political spectrum who talk about "what womanhood means to them," and the steps/challenges of their path to become a self-actualized person while navigating life as a woman.
Personally, as a woman, I've benefited massively from women who mentored me and provided me with a clear path for how to function in society as a fiery, bisexual tomboy. My path has been *very* different than most of my female friends, and I can't imagine how lost I would have been without mentors and role models who navigated similar paths, and shared female-specific tips and tricks.
And ultimately that's all I'm asking for here: not a return to rigid gender norms, but rather supportive and optional paths, and role-models to help navigate the steps along the way.
Ok then it's all just semantics. If you offer so many paths that anyone can find their way, why focus on gender at all? Just because some lost boys crave a definition of 'man'? Easier to tell those boys to stop worrying about that, and teach them to find themselves.
Note also that there are hundreds if not thousands of role models and guides out there already. Read and try to live up to the poem If; look at sportsmen like Federer; listen to people like Jimmy Carr; there is no shortage of material to help people. Ultimately, I don't see what specifically you want to do differently.
> If you offer so many paths that anyone can find their way, why focus on gender at all?
Because gender has a large impact on those paths, for many people. And many young people find it extremely helpful and soothing to speak to their specific lived experiences as X gender.
It is indeed easier just to tell people "don't worry about gender." But a lot of young people find this advice confusing or dismissive. Giving specific, actionable advice to young people, and tailoring that advice to their lived experiences, is often received better than vague directions to "just find yourself."
And right now, I think it's extremely important for society to focus on giving young men practical and actionable advice, rather than advice for an idealized world where gender doesn't matter.
I hope we can slowly build toward a world where gender doesn't matter so much. But right now it does matter to most people, and I don't think it's helpful to ignore that, even if it's very well-intended.
I think there's a lot of wishful thinking in all this. Ultimately, I side with Thatcher - there is no such thing as society. The wellbeing of kids depends a lot on their parents, and most parents are doing a bad job raising their kids, teaching them good values, engaging with them, etc. Injecting gender back in won't achieve anything.
>Giving specific, actionable advice to young people, and tailoring that advice to their lived experiences, is often received better than vague directions to "just find yourself."
I agree, but specific actionable advice isn't necessarily gender-specific.
I work with kids myself. I give them advice all the time. But the kids I work with almost never frame their problems in the context of gender, so my advice never needs to be phrased that way. My specific, actionable advice usually involves telling the kid to keep pursuing their interests and to push back against anyone who tells them otherwise.
For instance, if a kid loves to write stories but their parents want them to focus on getting good grades, I'll tell the kid to keep writing stories and to resist the School Industrial Complex as much as they can. I don't say "As a boy, you should keep writing stories" or "As a girl, you should keep writing stories." Gender is irrelevant.
Of course, if a kid comes to me and says "My problem is that people are treating me poorly because of my gender", then we will absolutely discuss gender. I won't pretend that we live in an ideal world where sexism doesn't exist; that would be very bad mentorship on my part. But even then I phrase it in terms of "Here's how to find happiness in life despite the all the sexism weighing you down." I don't phrase it in terms of "Here's how to be a man" or "Here's how to be a woman."
If a kid really needed that phrasing I would go along with it, but thus far I haven't seen the need.
Sorry if I missed it in a different comment, but do you have suggestions for what those clear paths should be? Your post was beautifully written, but it isn't actionable unless somebody suggests such paths.
>I'd like to clarify that my solution isn't to "teach all boys to behave like men" in a singular, enforced, or rigid way.
That's good.
>My solution is to offer a variety of clear paths that lead to a variety of healthy definitions of manhood
And would these healthy definitions of manhood differ from healthy definitions of womanhood? If so, what differences would you expect to see?
Consider Mr. Rogers, for instance. He was a man, but his calling in life was to work with children, and he was extremely gentle and caring. These are all things we might normally expect of a woman, but Mr. Rogers did it as a man. If this is a healthy path to manhood, it's equally a healthy path to womanhood. Seems like we should just say "Being kind to a children is a healthy path to adulthood", and leave gender out of it.
>Personally, as a woman, I've benefited massively from women who mentored me and provided me with a clear path for how to function in society as a fiery, bisexual tomboy.
I'm glad you had those mentors.
>I can't imagine how lost I would have been without mentors and role models who navigated similar paths, and shared female-specific tips and tricks.
What sort of advice does a fiery, bisexual tomboy woman need that wouldn't also apply to a fiery, bisexual tomboy-esque man?
I can think of two categories.
First, there are physical differences between cisgendered women and cisgendered men. If we're talking about the sort of stuff people learn in health class, then obviously it matters which set of body parts you happen to have, as the care and maintenance of the other set is not really applicable in your case.
Second, there are differences in the way men and women are treated in society. A fiery woman can expect to receive pushback from sexist people who think she should be more feminine, whereas a fiery man won't. But crucially, these differences only exist in society's collective imagination, so the advice is more "How to be a woman in this society" (in this case, how to fight off sexist critics) as opposed to "How to be a woman" in some sort of ultimate cosmic sense.
Perhaps that's just semantics, but it seems important to me. If we remember that society is prone to coming up with nonsense ideas about gender, we can push back against those ideas.
Now for argument's sake, let's say that estrogen and testosterone really do influence human personalities in an objective, measurable way. Let's imagine we do some absolute science which somehow isn't tainted by any of society's nonsense and we prove, beyond any doubt, then men tend towards personality type A while women tend towards type B. In that case, it might be useful to talk about the fundamental differences between men and women on a population level, but it would still be nonsensical to push these ideas on an individual level, because so many people differ from the average.
I have deep sympathy for the types of men discussed in this post, in part because I've been through similar experiences myself. And I'm very grateful to you (the author) for articulating these problems. But I don't think the issue in my case was that people failed to teach me how to "be a man". I think the issue is that people judge me without understanding me. (Part of that judgment is based on my gender, and part of it is based on age or bad definitions of "normal".)
I keep coming back to the idea that men and women are equal. As a lonely man, I faced criticism. If I had been a lonely woman, I might have received more support. Likewise if the men in this post weren't locked into the category of "men", that is to say, if society saw them as individuals and not as representatives of their gender, they might have an easier time in life.
You say that men should not be shamed for qualities like "being highly interested in sex", and I agree. (Obviously abuse is wrong but consenting adults is something else, and naturally some people are more sexual than other people.) But again, neither men nor women should be shamed for having that quality.
Gender might magnify these judgements, so that at various points in history it's either men or women who get most of the "stop enjoying sex" criticism, and it's fair to point out "men are being disproportionately judged for experiencing sexual desire" or "women are being disproportionately judged for experiencing sexual desire" (depending on which one is true at that moment), but this "magnification" problem could be solved by adopting a general "stop judging people differently based their gender" rule, at which point all that we need is a general "stop shaming people for being highly sexual" rule.
In summary, I want to discuss the unique problems each gender faces, but I also want to dissolve the concept of gender as much as we can. I want to talk about how we treat various personality traits, for instance, and if turns out that a certain trait is more common in one gender or another, that's not necessarily important. What's important is that we learn to stop shaming people for non-abusive personality traits.
Perhaps I'm biased from my own experiences. Perhaps there a lot of men out there who would say "No, you don't get it. I specifically know how to be a MAN. This genderless stuff is weird and disorienting and I don't like it." If that's really how they feel, I'm willing to accommodate them.
There's a couple of paragraphs in the essay that address your concerns. The author says that there is no one right way or path to be a "man," so a diverse array of different role models is required. The point could be abstracted to the common identititarian-left saying of "representation matters."
Frankly, I don't think we have very many avatars of healthy adulthood in public life, period, regardless of gender.
'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.
>Any single sentence is not a detailed list of instructions, yes.
My point is that any 'side' will have a one-sentence motto version of their advice which does not give detailed instructions on its own, and then a variety of different sources with detailed advice for how to follow that motto in practice.
This is not a failing of the left, the same is true for advice from the right, this is just an aspect of how ideas are communicated in full generality.
If your claim is 'the right has lots of resources for their detailed instructions, that says more about where your content algorithms are filtering you than it does about the world. There are plenty of places to read about discovering yourself and being yourself in all the ways I've discussed.
If there is any real criticism here, it would be that the right very explicitly brands its advice as PUA, here's how to get laid, here's how to be a chad all the ladies will simp for, etc, where the left is more typically branding it as 'here is how to be happy and well-rounded person,by the way that's attractive.'
So maybe men who are only looking on advice on how to score are getting filtered to the right and missing the advice on the left. That's potentially a real search engine optimization problem that the left could work on, but it's not a major ideological failing as people keep trying to paint it.
It’s very self-aware and very honest to say “I would like to have sex with you right now” to a woman you’ve just met, but it’s not particularly conducive to that goal
> 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.
That is correct, but it doesn't follow that you don't need to teach people how to be Whole (both in generic and gender-specific way). A proficient driver doesn't need think about how to position the car in the lane, which pedal to press etc, but that's exactly because they've learned it in the past to the point that now it's automatic and natural. Same with being Whole, you absolutely do need to teach it to kids and young people, so eventually they can do it without detailed instructions and guidance.
I think you can (and maybe should) tell everyone everything, but you need to teach boys more about how to handle having a male body, male hormones, and the expectations that our society places on men. For a girl such knowledge may be interesting, but for the boy it is necessary.
I think "the expectations that our society places on men" encompasses quite a lot, and is meaningfully different from the expectations that our society places on women. Lots of people seem to naturally learn (or innately conform to) those expectations, but some of us are prone to take things literally, and I think we would have benefited from a more direct and honest account of the ways in which members of our gender tend to be rewarded for behaving.
But part of the issue that the author highlights is that we don't have defined expectations for each gender anyway. Isn't it better to teach people to deal with ambiguity by building their confidence, outside gender norms?
To add specifically for the "being a whole" angle. You don't just teach things like this via a list of instructions, you teach it by example via role models and such. One of the most critical aspects of life (esp for the teenagers, who are the main recipients of this teaching) where being Whole matters is in romantic relationships, and it's also one of the places where you Whole-ness is most likely to be damaged. So you absolutely need to have those role models showing how to handle such situations. And since heterosexual romantic relationships are very asymmetrical by nature, you have to have different models for boys and girls, since they'll be facing different challenges and so need different approaches to handle them.
And yeah, to directly answer your question, I would probably spend much more effort teaching an (average) boy to manage his aggression, and teach an (average) girl to be more pushy and assertive, because testosterone is a thing. Also, I would teach a boy that if he and his girlfriend are walking down the street and a crazy crackhead jumps on them, he should feel obligated to protect the girlfriend and not the other way around.
Finally, and much more subjectively and controversially, I kind of do think that the optimal ways of processing strong emotions in general are somewhat different for men and women. No I don't have any science to back it up, and yes even if my observations are true it may in principle be a result of nurture rather than nature. Still, that's what I think.
Right but what's the point then - you'll tailor your upbringing to the specific child, which is as it should be. If your claim is that this upbringing will be different on average, then yes fine I agree with that.
Except the pressures upon them, both social and biological, create differing needs that directly implicate their "wholeness" if not managed properly. If a man faces a constant pressure to have sex, he's going to need detailed instruction on how to manage his desires and goals.
What do you think the difference between our positions is, then? Do you imagine that I started by thinking in terms of "man" or "woman", not "person"? If I had laid out my whole thought process and started with "person", then narrowed and said "a man faces constant pressures, and a woman faces difference constant pressures", then focused on men and only talked about them, would you still be objecting to what I say?
At this point I'm not sure what the difference is. The author wrote we need detailed instructions for men. That's what I'm objecting to. I don't want to go around telling anyone what a man is supposed to be like - not in terms of character traits. Should we be telling boys that they'll have some different experiences to girls? Sure, yes, of course. But that's very different to bringing back strict gender roles and expectations.
> I don't want to go around telling anyone what a man is supposed to be like - not in terms of character traits.
Neither do I, but I would go further advocate for separating "man" from "male". The latter is not a category with prescriptions and gatekeeping, the former would be.
For me, it's not about telling people what a man "is supposed to be like" in a normative sense that I endorse. (Or, rather, if I did do this, I would list qualities that I also think are good in women.) But I do think boys/girls deserve to know what a man/woman is "supposed to be like" in the sense that, because our society(/human nature) is still very gender-sensitive, they will in practice tend to be treated differently depending on whether they display certain masculine/feminine virtues in certain contexts.
There's a lot of guys out there who are drinking (metaphorical, and sometimes literal) poison, just because it came in a bottle labeled "detailed instructions for how to be a man." Ordering them to instead cultivate the genderless virtue of not being thirsty hasn't worked.
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.
Bingo. I usually date men 5-10 years older than me, and most of my friend group also falls into that range. I had a rocky childhood that forced me into adulthood at a young age, so my social circle reflects that.
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 read this site as a woman you need to have a pretty high tolerance for misogyny and antifeminism so given that baseline it's not crazy that a woman self-selected for that tolerance could have written it.* And to be fair I only skimmed after the first three paragraphs because the beginning seemed like tedious, stereotype-ridden antifeminist drivel and the rest seemed like more of same. I am a woman btw. And tbh I think it's quite likely that Aella wrote it because I have never met a woman in real life who cares as much about what men think as she does.
*To be clear, I am NOT saying the blog itself is misogynist or anti-feminist, but I am saying that there's a lot of misogynist or anti-feminist discourse tolerated in the comments section, blogroll, links posts, etc. and that that drives away actual women readers.
I assure you I do fit the demographics listed in this review (cis-woman, late twenties). I'd be happy to provide proof, once the review contest is over.
To the contrary I have yet to find many men who write this insightfully about men’s issues, sadly. It’s hard to observe a crisis accurately from the inside.
That was my take as well. The writing I've consumed from other men often leaves me wanting something different. The empathy on display here was a breath of fresh air in comparison.
I don't know where my feelings land with respect to the authors conclusions, but I do appreciate that the whole piece relied less on prescription and more on psychologically trying to understand these men.
In my main comment, I said something about the otherworldly qualities that the person who wrote this essay would have to possess to be capable of what it described. A part of me is inclined to think that the author might have taken a tad bit poetic licence with the experiential narrative part of the essay, even if they're a woman and in their twenties. If I'm wrong, and the author is indeed a woman and young, she must be one hell of a kind and someone I'd feel so honored to know.
I don't. Yes, there is a suspiciously high amount of empathy towards men, but hey traits and skills are on a bell curve, someone has to be at the extremely high end. Where else should such exceptional people be found, if not at ACX? :D
I think there are also some minor blind spots. For example, I think the text takes it for granted that all the men are excellent at their careers... that is, until the moment they get depressed or burn out. This seems to me like a typical women's blind spot -- the men who are less excellent are invisible in dating, so they wouldn't be included in the taxonomy of men you can meet while dating.
This is not meant as a criticism; I think the article is still great and in the top percentile of empathy towards men. But a taxonomy written by a man would probably include e.g. the men who feel average and who feel that it disqualifies them at the dating market because of female hypergamy. Plus a few other things that are not talked about in the polite society. I am not going to read the text again now, but I think none of the men in the text has an experience of his girlfriend cheating on him, which happens to be a frequent male experience. Or divorcing him and taking half of his future income. Such things would be very likely mentioned by a man who cares deeply about the problem men face today.
I had the same thought about the absence of men who aren't as successful. To be fair this just the authors perspective from their own dating history; I don't think they were doing anything untoward by only focusing on their own experience. Not to say that's what you're arguing.
But I definitely know a lot of men who fall outside these buckets, and I think I'm probably one of them. I still enjoyed the piece because even if it doesn't capture all the ways men struggle, I think the empathy on display creates the sense that you could talk to them and they'd be able to really hear you. And on the Internet today, that's just such a rare and precious experience.
I'm glad you still found value from the essay. I think you're very right, though--there are many other buckets of men that I failed to describe, because I simply don't interface with them enough to identify/understand them.
This is one of the reasons why I've been trying to diversify my Substack subscriptions lately. There are so many good essays out there written by people very different from the types I usually encounter in my bubbled existence within the Bay.
These are some really interesting blind spots you point out, and I agree with them. The fact is that I'm an absolute sucker for smart and ambitious men, and I'm extremely lucky to live in a very smart and ambitious city, so the overwhelming majority of men I've dated have fallen into the category of "successful by society's standards."
Almost all my male friends also fall into this category, so I just don't have a ton of exposure to men who fall below society's standards, and thus get shunted from the dating market all together. (I grew up around a lot of these men, but haven't spent much time around that demographic since I was a teen, so feel very out of touch with them.)
Cheating is something that I considered including in the essay. But ultimately I just didn't feel I have enough insight/experience in the topic to include it. Divorce is the same; I'm young enough that very few men I've dated have been divorced.
I would love to see more essays written from the perspective of those "invisible" men who are excluded from the dating market. I feel like part of the lack of empathy for them is just simply lack of visibility. I'd like to hear more about their struggles so I can understand them better.
I'd also like more essays about cheating/divorce written by men. I've read a lot of wonderful, insightful essays on this topic from women, but it's rare to find ones written by men (I think they just face more stigma for writing about these things).
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.
Sometimes when you grind it out, you end up hurting people before you get good enough not to. Some of the girls I was interested in when I was in high school felt as though I was stalking them, and not without reason. People tend to be more forgiving of this kind of thing when you're 15 than when you're 30.
I think this is absolutely true; I also think it’s why there’s a small weakness in the authors argument in criticizing “just put yourself out there” right before giving that as advice. It is both extremely unsatisfying and unfortunately uniquely helpful advice, so I get it!
> 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."
"Just fix all of your unspecified problems" is the pathway! The thing that you do is _get contact with reality_, which will specify some problems, and then you work on them and get more contact with reality, which will specify more problems.
Like--I think lots of people are used to constructing things according to step-by-step rules, like LEGO sets or IKEA furniture. But most things in life look more like repairing something broken, or cultivating plants. For those you need to be frequently inspecting the situation and diagnosing what needs to be done next, which is so simple as to barely count as a step in the IKEA or LEGO case. Kids used to take apart radios and then put them back together, and I think that's better training for a situation like this.
Suppose our hypothetical man goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell whether or not she was having a good time." Then the thing to do is develop the ability to tell whether or not the other person is having a good time--which you can do in the context of dates, but you can also do in other contexts!
Suppose instead he goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell how to show her that I was lovable." Then attack that--both by the angle of being more lovable, being more capable of owning it, and being more receptive of love and interest.
But the core thing here is that he needs to own himself and direct himself. Sure, he can (and probably should!) have mentors and advisors and support, but he's the one on the ground in the dates, and so he needs to understand what's happening and be able to manage it.
"Suppose our hypothetical man goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell whether or not she was having a good time." Then the thing to do is develop the ability to tell whether or not the other person is having a good time"
Another thing that's really effective at solving many of life's problems, including dating problems as a male, is to develop the ability to make billions of dollars. Or to get elected President of the United States. Being a billionaire and/or President, makes lots of things easier.
Don't bother me with details; I'm sure you can figure it all out for yourself.
It is substantially easier to guess other people's emotional state than becoming a billionaire--I think a better analogy is something like making a thousand dollars.
I do think most Americans should try to make a thousand dollars before they can expect to have much success at dating, and this is going to involve a lot of recursive problem-solving.
The trial-and-error method works well for problems where you're not that far from the solution.
The man in your example can apparently get a steady stream of "practice" dates that are not too far off from good dates. Your method probably works well for him.
But many men and boys are far from the "just tweak some details" stage.
"go on an outing with one of your mom's friends" is a way to get training data on whether or not the other person is having a good time and does not require a large supply of dateable prospects (you probably don't want to date your mom's friends!).
Some women have self-esteem issues so deep that no matter how many men hit on them or pursue them they remain insecure their whole lives as to whether they are actually valued. Some men are like that too.
The higher self-esteem someone has the more they will perceive as being valued by others. For individuals with low self-esteem, they question their value as a social partner, often letting their subsequent insecurities devolve onto future relationships.
> 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*.
I don't know about the *best* way, but it did work that way for me.
Yeah, I completely understand why she would not want to date someone with self esteem issues, but I had and still have horrible self-esteem issues, that will never go away, and I just went and found someone with worse self esteem issues and married her in our early 20s. Obviously it would be better to not have self esteem issues, but if you do have them, marrying does make you happier.
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.
Sure, it happens sometimes. But a man who decides "I'm not going to pursue any women, I'll just wait for them to pursue me" will probably wind up having a worse time than one who decides to follow convention and take the lead somewhat more.
Said man also needs to realise there's a sensible middle ground between never asking anyone out ever and becoming a PUA who cold-approaches every girl in yoga pants at the supermarket.
> 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.
I think for several of these men, a core part of the problem is that they're handed a wrong-gender map. Like, one of the ways to read the "go to college and get a good job then end-of-story" map is that it's the woman's "find a good spouse who will provide for you and then get married and then end-of-story" map, with the spouse swapped out for a job!
I think "end-of-story" is a rarer feature in male maps. The Man With A Plan's map should have involved much more active management of his career; more situational awareness and chasing of opportunities. With much more ownership and authenticity, I think things would've worked out for him.
I can sympathize with this sentiment I really do, but how that would work in the world where gender differences do, in fact, exist?
For example, your role model/map should probably teach something about how to react to avert sexual attention from the opposite gender (assuming heterosexuality). And it's not something minor either, attractiveness is an important part of identity for either gender, particularly as teenagers and young adults. You can adapt your model to the expectation that this person receives entirely too much of such attention, or almost none at all, but it's not realistic to have the same model handling both cases correctly. So which do you chose?
As another example, the parts of your model about handling emotions should probably weigh in on the subject of anger management. Do you tailor it to someone with male or female testosterone profile, muscle mass and tolerance for physical risk and violence? Because I would guess you want about the same level of outward acts and signs of aggression in males and females as the end result, but that means you have (on average) to teach boys to control and suppress their aggressive impulses, and girls to be more assertive and pushy, which I'm not sure how are you going to do with a gender-less model.
And of course parenting is the elephant in the room, because talking about "mother type parent or a father type parent" is nice and well but in real life, depending on the biological sex becoming a parent either does or does not come with a tremendous amount of physical discomfort and pain, and your role model either does or does not account for this.
> 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.
At the very least, the failure modes seem different for the two sexes. Surely you'd agree that "Man Who Becomes A Beast" archetype mentioned here is a very real thing, and that the female equivalent is vanishingly rare.
If the ways to get lost are different, the maps should probably be different.
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.
>the traits they hated in men were traits I value in myself
This resonates with me a lot. I had a fairly conservative upbringing, and am definitely what you would consider a "tomboy." I'm also fairly opinionated, loud, and assertive. Growing up, I felt like I didn't belong anywhere; conservative women were horrified at how outspoken and fiery I was, and I hated their politics and strict expectations. But the feminists I encountered in college didn't like how terrible I was at reading emotions and how assertive and strictly logical I could be.
I was *extremely* lucky to end up with multiple women mentors who'd had similar paths and took me under their wing. They basically said, "Okay, look, you've got kind of a strange brain compared to most women, but that doesn't mean you're *less* of a woman. Let's figure out how to use your natural tendencies to your advantage." I owe them a great deal for this, and I know I would be a much more confused and lonely person without their guidance.
I still naturally find friendship/romance with men slightly easier, but friendship/romance with women is now much more feasible, and many of my dearest friends are women. But it took quite a bit of work to get there, and there's no way I could have accomplished it without mentors and role models who helped me formulate a path.
Okay, this clarifies a lot of the meta commentary on the authenticity of the identity of the author. I've left a slightly more skeptical comment elsewhere, but I think I'm now more sold on the fact that you're indeed a young woman whose preternatural insight into men's interior landscape was forged during your time as a cultural outcast.
It all makes sense in retrospect why it's someone with your psychological, social, and experiential profile who would write such an essay. The bit about your previous tomboy status also kind of explain the audacity to give a 200 pound man a fist jab.
Yes, spending time as a cultural outcast naturally lends itself to trying to analyze the categories you don't fit into.
I think another key reason I became highly analytical about men is because my father was an addict with Borderline Personality Disorder. Constantly analyzing him, and trying to guess what was going through his deeply complex and unstable brain, was necessary for survival for many years. This habit carried over when I started dating (women always carry the question of "is this a safe man I can trust?" into a date, and I think my brain is just wired to do this 10x as much and 10x as deeply.)
Goodness, having a mentally ill father is something else we have in common. (I don’t know how much of a coincidence that is considering it’s conditioned on what turns out to be rare personality traits.) My father suffered from debilitating paranoid delusions for years, making our home a minefield. A father is only one man, though, and I think his encouragement to prefer male friends (which didn’t do much until I was in high school and boys were leas threatening because the students were selected for academically) did more in this regard.
Very sorry you had to go through a similar tumultuous childhood. Hugs. <3
Hit me up if you're ever in the Bay Area. I'd love to have a new friend with similar life experiences. I'm sure we both walked away with a lot of opinions to compare/contrast.
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 think the author is aware of this. It's not "here's four different ways society fails men", it's "society fails men consistently in the same way, and here's four different ways men respond to that failure".
I note a distinct lack of emphasis on the role of modern urban life, in particular the Bay Area, that is exacerbating this issue. Other areas can have different failures. Even if the author lives there and thus only has direct experience with it, I would have at least liked to see some speculation on how cities and the hyper-liberal politics of California contribute to these issues.
I guess I don't see that awareness. A lot of the essay is just repeating that she finds most men to be lost and confused, through the framework of repeating a similar description of men in the guise of different 'types'. I suspect she herself has some inner sense of alienation that she wants men to solve for her through romantic relationship -- hence she finishes with a highly romanticized picture of a "whole" and psychologically fully healthy man who will be her happily ever after. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, this is one of the reasons we seek romance, even though it's somewhat unrealistic and you eventually learn that. But a lot of what we see in dating is projection or mirroring of our own inner states and concerns.
As a man I appaud her recognition of the troubles men face but I just didn't find this descriptively convincing. It did feel very much like a young person still on their quest.
This is a more accurate critique of the essay as well as a more accurate profiling of the author than you probably realize. Having read more of her follow-up comments, giving a few more details about herself, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment.
However, I think she's still a work in progress ("still on their quest") and I suspect she knows this. She did acknowledge in the essay how much she has had to grow into the version she currently is. But I'm not sure she's aware that the special affinity she feels for "the man who opts out" (the one I term The Nullified Man) is a reflection of who she used to be. In fact, I think her final paragraphs describing the redemption possible for this type is her unknowingly (or perhaps knowingly) describing her own redemptive arc.
Goodness, you are an insightful reader! Yes, I certainly am still "on my quest", and yes, I do indeed feel deep kinship for "The Nullified Man", as you term them.
I was extremely sick for most of my teen years--couldn't walk, constant seizures, almost died. While most of my girl friends were blossoming into attractive young women, I was withering into a half-dead shell of a human in a wheelchair. Fate opted me out of the dating market against my will.
When I was nineteen, I got insanely lucky to find the correct diagnoses and combo of drugs that allowed me to suddenly live a pretty normal life. It was a massively confusing time. In the span of about two months, I went from being invisible and pitied to being an object of attention and attraction for the first time in my life. It took years to properly reprogram my brain on a wide variety of social interactions (and I still feel it's a work in progress at times).
So, yes, I will always feel immense empathy for men who feel locked out of dating. I know what it's like to look wistfully on from the sidelines, and I wouldn't wish that feeling of hopelessness and isolation on anyone.
After reading this particular response and the other one in this thread, I have even more reason to believe that you're way younger than I imagined. My adjusted guess is now something in the region of 24-25 years. If this is true, it's even more impressive what you have demonstrated through this essay!!! It's the difficult to just process the possibility that the mind, the heart, and the soul behind this article is only just a quarter of a century old.
Which leads me to my next speculation/question: you've revealed an important detail about your incapacitated teenage years (that must have been terribly hard to go through) and I can only conclude that the insight you channeled in that essay couldn't have come primarily from your experience. Yes, maybe the knowledge and certain factual specifics did come from your dating experience, but I doubt the wisdom came from them per se. Most people with longer and broader dating experiences don't often possess this level of psychological insight, moreso with respect to the opposite gender.
So here's my theory (subject to your correction): your teenage years may have been miserable, experientially impoverished, and filled with more teenage angst than normal. But I also suspect it was filled with adventures peopeled with literary characters, romantic ideals and disappointments, moments of deep reflections, and the cultivation of your powers of observation. To see without been seen, to watch without been watched, to watch others live while being sidelined is often a reality that hardly anyone would willingly choose, but for those who find themselves in this exact life situation are often possessed with an uncanny spirituality and equanimity that almost nothing in life could perturb much. I guess this is something your dates unwittingly perceive and make them start unburdening (it's a response to perceived superior strength of character and of spirit) to you. You have no idea (or so I'm guessing) how others experience you in certain situations which makes it difficult for you to speculate on why people share with you their deepest vulnerabilities.
So, to the extent that there's a question in what I've written, it is this: what was your cloistered incapacitated teenage years like, especially with respect to your inner life; I couldn't think it was all gloom and doom?
>hence she finishes with a highly romanticized picture of a "whole" and psychologically fully healthy man who will be her happily ever after.
I just want to note that I'm not sure I believe in "psychologically fully healthy" people, and I don't think that should be the end goal for women or men. It strikes me as an impossible standard. Most "Men Who Are Whole" who I know and/or have dated have plenty of their own issues and traumas. But they've managed to develop a strong enough sense of identity and confidence to address those issues and become highly desirable people, despite their shortcomings.
I definitely would describe myself as a young person still on my quest. And frankly, I hope my quest never ends. I'm very different than I was five years ago, and I'd be disappointed in myself if I wasn't very different in five more years. Life is a wild ride, with endless interesting experiences and people to learn from. I don't want that learning to ever end. :)
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my writing and leave some thoughtful feedback!
Yeah I tap out on starting type 3 and skim forward until the epilogue. I have low expectations on any attempt on social categorizing at all so this doesn't really lower my overall score, but I endorse your observation.
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.
perhaps not that far, the leveling the playing field with welfare or ubi, reducing reliance on the car, and enabling policies (LVT, zoning reform) that enable densification and allow people to encounter other people in more casual scenarios might help.
The decisions they made to get to that point still involved significant costs, though. If the Man With A Plan hadn't trivially rejected that early "starving artist" route, since (in a UBI context) it'd involve a lot less risk of literal starving, might have given him an earlier start on other important questions.
>I want to push back against the trend of reducing broad social trends to gender specific issues.
I appreciate this mindset and know it comes from a good place. It was my own mindset for many years.
But ultimately the statistics show that men are struggling to a degree that women are not in many areas. Men are floundering when it comes to education, employment, drug addition, incarceration, being present for their children, suicide rates, etc. The numbers for men are drastically different from women.
I would firmly agree that a lot of the root causes of these issues have heavy overlap with the same issues women face. The economy, lack of community, city planning, and similar issues all have a massive impact here. But the way to address and recover from these issues--and the amount/types of resources and support available-- seem to vary quite drastically across genders.
Interventions that work really well for floundering girls often don't work at all for men. (The book "Of Boys and Men" by Richard Reeves does a fantastic job of exploring this issue in depth. Highly recommend.) We need to be looking more deeply at the question of "why aren't these interventions working" and try to work with young men to find interventions/frameworks/resources that *are* effective for them.
There is currently a loud outcry from men saying they lack purpose and motivation, and don't know what their role in society is. The reality is that "how to be a man" is a question that many (if not most) young men care about. Telling them to stop caring about it hasn't worked, and is only leading them into the arms of truly terrifying figures in the manosphere.
We can continue to tsk-tsk and tell them to not care about gender so much, but that clearly isn't working. Or we can provide them with similar resources women have been given: deep discussions about what it means to be X gender, and outspoken role models who display and celebrate various manifestations of that gender, and share their path to embracing a self-actualized life.
Thanks for writing this. I am pretty alarmed that there are therapists out there whose response to men telling them their problems is to reply that they are “privileged.” What? How does this BS help anybody? A man is coming to you for help, saying he’s struggling, he needs to be heard, he needs specific advice dedicated to where he is in life and how to get to a better place, he doesn’t need vague social justice crap.
I am pretty concerned about the woke takeover in therapy and also in family courts, where men reliably get screwed. Our culture seems to have forgotten how scheming and manipulative women can be. Of course, not all women, actually a very small percentage of women - but the same is true about men who are violent or abusive. It’s a small percentage of men. And studies have shown that men and women are aggressive and antisocial at approximately the same rate, it’s just that men are less subtle about it. Their antisocial behaviour tends to manifest in physical violence, whereas women do emotional violence - lying, manipulation, gossip - trying to destroy reputations.
Somehow people managed to date, marry and produce babies just fine during the Great Depression when “bad economy” meant no food. Or during the Cultural Revolution when “bad economy” meant no food, gulag, backyard ironmongering and self criticism followed by being buried alive. Or during the Russian Civil War where “bad economy” meant gulag, death squad and also no food.
In the past most people accepted the standard life path of career -> marriage -> baby. Now they don’t. Blaming that on minor ructions in the American economic order requires serious contortions when the same phenomenon is visible in places as different as Poland, Korea and Chile.
Perhaps nous sommes tous Americans? Or perhaps something completely different!
A gender based framing has the advantage that 1) it fits the complaints actually leveled by the young people I question (women who have no interest in marriage due to the behavior of men, men who can’t get married because wimmenz), b) contagion relies on the spread of ideas rather than economic conditions and iii) the internet has made the spread of ideas — especially dumb ideas — easier and cheaper than ever before in human history.
So I don’t think economic explanations hold much water. Housing has been expensive before without causing a total collapse in relations — and I don’t mean diplomatic. In interwar Britain people were crammed together in extremely low quality housing often without internal plumbing or electricity and they still managed to do it like they do on the Discovery channel. Young people around the world today by contrast live in conditions of absurd material abundance yet seem bound and determined to emulate the reproductive habits of the panda — complete with weird antics caught on camera and distributed far too widely for good taste or common sense — rather than those of their ancestors.
I’m extremely doubtful that the community answer is correct. I personally have no interest in a community, yet am a stable happily married middle aged man with a kid. I don’t feel any need to share my feelings or develop deep friendships and this disinclination is in line with many generations of male preference. We just don’t much care for talking and the men who do are, well, not the norm. So positing that a lack of access to something men never used to want is the driver of male anomie seems a tad strange.
My theory provides a testable conclusion: groups that have least access to the internet should have highest fertility, marriage rates and traditional markers of the standard career -> marriage -> baby pipeline. Internet adoption should coincide (perhaps with a time lag as people need time to go from laughing at cat pictures to depressing memes about how terrible it is to marry and reproduce with wrong thinking gender) with a decline in those markers. Internet removal should not result in an upswing in said markers as the internet is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas and ideas are harder to eliminate than internet connections being as they are lodged in skulls and not walls and skulls lack convenient access ports.
Perhaps I’m totally off base but it’s at least worth a think. 🙏 good luck to the youths and thank you for your comment, I enjoyed reading it. All humor included in my own is meant for the amusement of the reader and the original poster with malice toward none and raspberries for all.
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.
>She should be scared of its imminent collapse
I mean, I agree, but I'm not sure how a "true believer" progressive thinks about that. Do they really believe the "right side of history" stuff, or that it only applies in the very long term but may permit a thousand-year Caliphate in between.
> I don't see how you can cleanly separate "wokeness" from that
Not OP, but egalitarian individualism (like 20th century liberalism) and idpol (like wokeness) are contradictory ideologies, since the former asserts intergroup differences are unimportant, and the latter asserts they are essential. The one became the other due to, inter alia, motivated reasoning when egalitarianism's predictions about outcome equality proved untrue, the US legal apparatus implementing idpol instead of equal opportunity (e.g. Griggs v. Duke Power), and an innate predisposition toward tribalism.
Yeah, the "blue tribe" is ideologically dominant in high-status institutions, that's why the Republicans are limited to controlling only minor, low-status institutions such as the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
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 would also guess that women have a similar experience to this in NYC, the other Place Where Men Achieve Greatness in the US. But, feel free to disagree.
My understanding is that in NYC the ratio of women to men is the inverse of the Bay Area, so the main complaint I've seen about dating in NYC is that the men have too many options and women have to put up with lots of ghosting. I'm curious if anyone has written similar taxonomies about men or women there.
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 didn't watch The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air at that age. And as a "smart" kid, the TV nerd was what I imagined my social role was supposed to be, so I would have been Carlton...
Fortunately, when I was in high school, it was the middle of the dot-com bubble, so the other students looked at me and saw a future tech billionaire. Which was fun, but it was never where I was actually going to end up.
I don't fight teenage male characters aspirational role models in the same way. Looking online at the most popular TV shows of the '90s cheers, Seinfeld, ER, Law and Order, Friends they all had male protagonists who were traditionally masculine in many ways while not being grunting caveman caricatures
“It silences the huge parts of the west that don't largely have these values”
No, someone speaking up about the people around her isn’t silencing anyone else. You’re allowed to add to the conversation with what you know and experience without worrying about whether that’s representative of the whole country or world
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.
As a human interpreter, how do you add value that ChatGPT cannot provide? It’s a genuine question - I’ve found ChatGPT translation to be superb, including with audio input.
One immediate advantage is that you don't funnel confidential information through an industry that is, let's say, less-than-completely-respectful of copyright laws.
There are cultural nuances that are difficult to capture unless you are human. The tone of speech, the implications of what you are saying, your body language and tone of voice. These can be misinterpreted when the listener is from a different culture. A good interpreter is very helpful in that regard. Also, consider the following situation: suppose you have had a little too much to drink. Your human interpreter helps put what you are trying to say in such words that you will have nothing to be embarrassed about the following morning. Here is another example: let’s say the language you are communicating in is not your native language. You could be using wrong words, incorrect grammar or blending in words from another language. A good interpreter can make sure that whatever you say comes across clearly in another language. I don’t know if Chat GPT can do that, at least not yet. For this reason and more, clients always prefer using human interpreters at high-level businesses meetings, conferences and important political events.
Unfortunately, this is not only true of women. I have also heard men talk trash about women, especially after a couple of drinks, and they didn’t care who heard them. So, if this is indeed part of human nature, the whole attitude of “battle of the sexes” is counterproductive.
Well, now men do. You've successfully feminized large sections of the culture. Good job! I hope you're enjoying the egalitarianism you've produced, because no one else is.
If we had true egalitarianism, there would be no reason for you to feel so much anger. It is very difficult to put emotions aside to have a reasonable conversation. I refuse to engage with you on these terms, so if you want to have a fight instead of taking your anger out on a person you have never met, you need to talk to someone else.
This sounds very similar to a "real communism has never been tried" argument. You have raised a generation of fight-age young men, shit on their entire lives for their gender, given no guide on how to improve themselves, who are enraged and feel they have nothing to lose.
I can’t quite follow the logic of your first sentence, but what you are saying later, makes sense. It is indeed a great tragedy and it is terribly unfair. If, as you say, there is a great number of very angry young men who have no guidance on how to manage that anger, then we are all in trouble, including you. These young men could hurt anyone, including themselves. Managing anger is very difficult. I am just a stranger, but I would recommend going for a walk or a run, if you have the energy for that. Whatever you do, never drive when you feel angry. I would also recommend that tomorrow, you should go talk to someone you trust, but not online, in real life.
That's quite the assumption to make. I suppose it fits with your hateful ideology, but it isn't accurate. Males and females have roles to play in a social system, when a crucial percentage fail to play their roles well, the metastable social system collapses into more primitive systems.
Men have talked trash about women since at least the days of the ancient Greeks. I don't think that has anything to do with any feminization of modern culture.
I was once invited to an unofficial dinner out with other women in the office. Two of the women told some joke about "bros with those dumb card wallets -- like dude, just get a normal wallet." They had the decency to look sheepish when I pulled that exact wallet out to pay later on.
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.
Thanks, Taylor, I sincerely appreciate the kind words. I kept it limited to the Bay Area because I don't have experience dating outside of metropolitan California and didn't feel comfortable discussing the dating scene elsewhere. But it's interesting to hear that this also resonated with you. I appreciate you taking the time to read and comment!
Also enjoyed your writing, and think it overall works in broader context. I think one difference between US (especially Bay Area) and the rest of the world, is that people are much more likely to have more several times across a huge area, and therefore have fewer long time friends.
In my country most people stay in their home town, or will move to the closest big city for study. Then they either settle down there, or move back to their home.
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.
Thanks for taking the time to read my review and leave feedback! I'm glad you found the tone enjoyable. It seems like there's a slowly growing trend of people trying to have calm, reasonable discussions about these topics, and I'm really happy to see so many people engaging with this topic in such a civil and empathetic manner in the comments. :)
For all the downsides of social media, does mean that once there have been enough screaming arguments on some subject, everyone has seen 'em, notices that if more "awareness" was ever going to solve the problem it already would have, and knows everyone else knows it too. Thus, they can all coordinate on moving to the next plan.
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.
Yes, plenty of sociable people have good friends and relationships without being pillars of their community, having a job they're passionate about or having chosen an unusual path through life.
> 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."
I think it might be much simpler than that: the people who fully succeed at dating, almost by definition, find stable relationships and leave the pool. Sites themselves, as rent-collecting middlemen, have only a tenuous indirect incentive to encourage that sort of success, even if they knew how - and it's not an inherently easy task.
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 thought it was sympathetic without being empathetic. There was a lot of "there's a lot of pain and 'void' men are going through and that's bad" but...I recognized the socio-economic description of the men in some way but they seemed grotesquely off.
Like, I've known two insanely successful "Men who provide" and what's described is...not how they connect with women, that's not what they look for in women, and those are not the challenges those relationships face. Those marriages fell apart because...it would be unfair to say their wives got bored but it is a real challenge for those women to wake up one day at 32, their husband doesn't want kids, the income from their job/career doesn't matter, and their husband just doesn't have a lot of time to spend with them. It's hard to describe but it's less "two workaholics drive each other crazy" and more "imagine being retired at 30 with nothing to do, no needs, and trying to create purpose in your life." Does that make sense?
And I'm super confused to see a bunch of people here being like, "yeah, totally, I recognize that." when I see...like a mishmash of real people and online stereotypes. And there's definitely a political/social point to push here and I feel like I'm missing something.
You're saying the author is getting a bad read on these men and this implies she lacks empathy. By your own standard, if her read was in fact correct, it implies you are the one lacking empathy for them.
Given that you've never met these men she dated, I think it's presumptuous to assume you understand them better than she did. And jumping from "she misunderstood them" to "she lacks empathy" is an extra presumption.
Given all the votes and all the comments endorsing her analysis, I would guess a fair number of people's experiences have matched the author's description.
I believe you when you say you've met ambitious workaholic types who weren't looking for the qualities described in this review (i.e. an equally ambitious, high-achieving partner). But I'm not sure why you don't believe the author when she says she has encountered people like this.
They aren't well-connected to other people or to their goals because some basic aspect of their personality never developed or was damaged.
I'm not sure exactly what's needed, though I think part of it is damage caused by misandry from a good bit of feminism and another part is a culture which opposes contentment while having an ordinary status level.
"It's the screens" is so common it has started to feel reductive, but I really do think primarily engaging with the lives of others through remote consumption of people's curated images/videos has significantly damaged our ability to find contentment. That has a cascading effect on our ability and willingness to relate to other people.
I'm not sure that you're take is actually contra the article. Yes, the problem with these guys is theirs: they don't know how to be men! But no amount of "👏DO👏BETTER" is going to change that without some real guidance.
Yeah I think I agree that the guidance is all good, I just think it might be insufficient if there's also not a means by which we tell men to just be less self-oriented people (regardless of their gender roles in society)
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.
I gave this one of my highest ratings. I thought it was the best-written of all the reviews. I don’t identify with any of these men (turns out that getting married right out of college was absolutely the correct decision) but I could see how a couple of decisions I made differently could have led me down any of those paths; she spells it out so clearly that I could see myself there. This review sat with me for a while after I read it and that’s enough to push it to the finals.
Many men I know view other men significantly as potential threats to the welfare of their families and the security of their property. I acknowledge men do seem pretty violent to each other. Maybe men recognized women were better natural allies than the bottom tail of men.
Not wrong. Historically the bottom tail of men would have been killed in war. Maybe we need some mass mobilization and a system for legalized dueling to sort this out.
The common theme among all of the archetypes in this article is that society gave a bunch of boys instructions on what path to follow life, they followed that path as they grew into men, but failed to find happiness despite doing their best. Ergo, society’s instructions are currently broken.
If you are one of the 4 archetypes being described in this article, then you are very aware that something is deeply wrong with your life. Yet it’s hard to put into words exactly what that is.
Yet this article manages to pull this difficult task off, leading to a cathartic read. I almost cried when reading this. It paints a very vivid picture of just how difficult this problem is, and how deep of a pit some of us find ourselves in.
I’m honestly surprised that you struggled to understand the article. I think it spells out the problems a lot of men are facing in very explicit detail. What more could you possibly want to know?
Mostly because it...doesn't. I see elements of it as true but I see a fundamental misunderstanding of how these men think. Like...sympathy given to a caricature rather than the real thing.
Like, I know "The man who opts out", I know "Men who provide" and "Men who become beasts" or whatever and...no. This is not the internal or observable experience of these men. There's elements but...yeah, it just doesn't click.
That's what's confusing me. Like, I suspect you're sincere that you closely identified with this and it deeply touched you and I'm over here thinking that this isn't reality. At all. And I note that I'm confused.
Like, if I had more time I would probably phrase this in a less inflammatory way, but...like, everyone knows Andrew Tate is playing a character on the internet for money, right? He's as real as Terry Bollea playing Hulk Hogan. And that's cool, don't break kayfabe. But then there's an article where someone is talking about how they keep dating these wrestler types and they've noticed that some are nice and have baby faces and some are mean and have heels but, reflecting the full complexity of the human condition, sometimes these "baby faces" will turn mean and these "heels" can be nice. And everyone is like, oh yeah, I see myself in that, this is so real.
But yeah, that's what confuses me, everyone is really emotionally connecting with something that feels as real a professional wrestling. Maybe I'm just insanely out of touch? I dunno.
No, everyone does *not* know that. Plenty of people take it seriously. Comedian Andrew Dice Clay was also playing a character in his stand-up comedy, and there were plenty of both fans and critics that took the misogyny in his act at face value.
Once upon a time, I encountered a personality test where you would click on coloured squares with very little guidance. After you did it, it would spit out a detailed description of your personality. People I know who took the quiz were disturbed by how such an accurate write up could be derived from something so simple. Before I spoil the trick, here's a link to the quiz in case you want to try it yourself.
The trick is that though all of the answers were fairly different from each other, the traits they described were present in most humans in at least some point in their lives. Taking the test simply determined which particular ones would be emphasized. Like flipping a coin with two heads, it's pretty hard to get a wrong answer even though the selection process was essentially random. There would usually be at least some mismatch between the answer the quiz spat out and the real person, but there were enough similarities that the contradictions would be overlooked. No one ever expects these things to be 100% accurate after all.
Why do I bring this up? To show you how little truth it takes for a person to be able to latch onto something. Because you are correct, these are caricatures, but they contain enough of the truth that people still find them relatable.
I'm not sure if my response will satisfy you. I do think the article is closer to reality than you give it credit for, but to prove this would require me to dig through all the points and tell you which ones I relate to and which ones I don't, but its currently the evening and I simply don't have the energy. I'm hoping one of the other commentators will be able to pick up my slack.
Interesting question, especially if you didn't like the post.
What I love about it is not the intellectual aspect of it (I usually don't enjoy intellectual stuff when it's bound to political issues like this post is), but its benevolence and its accuracy.
I don't care that there is a small "rant" dimension to it: at least the psychological descriptions are sensible, the final "the man who is whole" is inspiring and nearly soothing, and the advice -that I confess not to have read fully- is positive. There is no "blame them for this intractable issue" in this post.
I'm freeriding on other people's votes -- I was swamped with other stuff back during the voting stage -- but for my money this is one of the top two reviews Scott has shared so far. It brings a distinctive viewpoint and backstory rich with empathetic detail to something often talked about with just a vague label and a smattering of statistics (and/or a level of political vitriol blessedly absent here).
I don't know if I get your gripe about it. Do you really think Tate is irrelevant, or less a symbol of the "manosphere," because he's been in the public eye for 5 years and counting?
I also don't rate it that highly, but SSC, especially before and around 2014, was a bastion of anti-feminism liberals. So this article is just ACX returning to its roots.
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.)
HLC actually changed his signoff from "Don't commit a 22 today" to "Don't do the enemy a fucking favor" specifically because the vets in his audience didn't want to be coddled.
This. There are three basic approaches: validate people no matter what, challenge them to grow up, or invalidate them no matter what. Therapy culture is the first option. Feminism is the third option for men: no matter what you do, you still remain the evil male, the Satan. Men respond well to challenges that they actually have a chance to succeed at, the games they actually have a chance to win.
And of course the challenges have to be age- (and other factors) appropriate.
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.
I mean, odds are high the author is poly and is collecting individuals to love--or understands they live in a high-population-density area and can go on a date a week for a few years without exhausting the supply of dateable men. I'd rather pick someone to love out of two hundred than twenty.
> The author must have gone on many dates, perhaps hundreds, over several years to develop her categories. Why?
This is just smart to do - most people in the Bay Area are far out in the tails of various distributions in terms of human and social capital, and finding a similar match requires lots of dates, due mostly to the signal caps that dating apps and brief convos enforce (basically, you can only discern "at least top 1%" for any given ranking system via the limited information in apps and brief convos, but people want to match at a 1/1k or 1/10k or even 1/100k precision, which is very far from 1%, and requires lots of in person dates to determine both that incidence and the necessary in person chemistry and compatibility).
To get bluntly and overly nerdy, we can show the math behind this, too. This aligns with what we know of optimal stopping - the Secretary Problem. If you run simulations, drawing from a base of 20 dates lets you choose a top 1% candidate maybe 37% of the time with optimal evaluation strategy - but choosing from a base of 200 dates lets you choose one 52% of the time.
"Big deal!" you might think - "37% is still pretty good!" But mate selection is an impossibly important factor to your future happiness and children, and a lift of more than 10% in absolute terms is an impossibly big buff in a competitive field that's so rigorously selected that assortative mating is stronger than ever and lineage status persistence is ~75% plus across all countries in the world, including the Scandinavian countries and EU.
The usual answer is that assumptions of secretary problem and similar formalizations are not the only and probably not event best way to formalize the task of forming a romantic relationship.
In most trivial sense, attempting to find the most similar candidate or the best by any metric is ultimately quite difficult. Consider the numbers of ways people and their personalities and their past experiences can differ from each other. Big Five. All the other important quirks that are not reducible to big five. Dozens to hundreds, each of them is different dimension, and by curse of dimensionality, the volume of hypersphere grows as O(n3). Each random point is going to far off from each other and in surprising location, difficult to compare to each other -- if it were any non-trivial distribution in ML task sense, you'd need surprisingly sophisticated MC sampler. Even in Bay Area, populous as it is, you are sampling from pretty limited subspace of he distribution. Choose only some dimensions to consider, the choice is clearly limited and arbitrary, and *a priori*, unlikely the correct one. (How confident you are that you really know what you want?) Companies who care about only few qualities in their employees may be able to approach secretary problem close to written.
(It is also quite common occurrence that the hiring process be beleaguered by indecision -- either no hire is done or process is so lengthy that the benefits of hypothesized superb candidate need to be surprisingly large to offset the costs incurred during hiring process and the opportunity cost of lost growth compared to hiring someone capable who can learn).
As an added complication, you are not selecting from pool of candidates with immutable features, but human beings who (to some extent) change as they gather lives. Act of engaging in his choosing is not cost free, but another shared experience. This last point brings us to more serious, psychological problems when dating is reduced to picking samples from smörgåsbord. According to Kierkegaard and existentialists, life is to be experienced. The time spent 'selecting' and 'evaluating' as in the secretary problem is also time that could be spent otherwise, in a less detached mode of thinking, but the detached mode is an experience, too. If one dates as if comparing people in a competitive field, one tends to develop a habit of comparing people in a competitive field - yet if the point is supposed to be finding oneself in a stable relationship, the habit is a detriment. How many stable relationships can stand stable in constant comparison to others?
Competitive sports carry many emotions, but among them joy is rare, fleeting and deserved to few optimized winners at the top, disappointment to many. Possibility of winning in a game which begets gamification which begets optimization. Optimization begets machines who win optimally. Let us not become machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.
> attempting to find the most similar candidate or the best by any metric is ultimately quite difficult
I'm not sure, I feel like most people would be pretty happy with a hot, smart, nice Ivy grad from a rich and accomplished family.
Those are lamentably short on the ground (roughly 1/250k incidence, maybe rarer), but that's the general cluster most people seem to be aimed at these days, and one compromises on the characteristics and to the degree one must.
In the same analysis I did the Secretary Problem simulations, I outlined the argument that you only get 3 things in mate optimization, in the sense that although you want ALL the good characteristics in your mate, us ordinary mortals have to settle for 3 things in which our partner can be noticeably good. This is a consequence of sheer dating logistics and only being able to discern a certain resolution via the lossy channels of pictures and minimal text available in dating apps.
> As an added complication, you are not selecting from pool of candidates with immutable features, but human beings who (to some extent) change as they gather lives.
Eh, I know it sounds pessimistic, but I've found that the heuristic "people will never change for the better, they'll either be exactly what they are today or worse later on" is really, incredibly strong. In other words, if you go in assuming this is the best people will ever be, it's probably a solid rule of thumb, with a high accuracy and a downside of being pleasantly surprised.
> Act of engaging in his choosing is not cost free, but another shared experience. This last point brings us to more serious, psychological problems when dating is reduced to picking samples from smörgåsbord.
This might be another gender difference thing then, because plenty of men would probably agree that the lived experience of choosing from a smorgasbord of women is pretty fun in and of itself.
Being a high status man in the dating market is pretty intoxicating, but as you point out, it can be a memetic hazard in terms of long term relationships and happiness - but I'll note that part is a choice. You can always settle down, there's nothing stopping you. You do run into the problem that now no matter how great somebody is, you've always been with somebody better on some actually important metric; so you've always been with a better cook, or somebody who was nicer, or smarter, or better in bed, or better at socializing and fostering friend groups, and so on.
Another thing about the smorgasbord I'll point out is that the returns to quality are really there, too. One year I decided to go all-in on Optimal Stopping and dated ~150 women over 12-18 months, with the criteria of not stopping til one impressed me relative to my exes. The one I ended up with out of that pool was a gorgeous Ivy alt girl who was compatible in all the right ways, and we ended up traveling the world and exploring many strange and wondrous gedankenwelts together over 5 years, parted on good terms and are still friends today, so...mission accomplished?
Search and transaction costs are definitely a thing, and you rightfully point it out, but returns to quality from deeper search are also a thing, and it's up to you to decide what the right balance is for you in your search.
> Possibility of winning in a game which begets gamification which begets optimization. Optimization begets machines who win optimally. Let us not become machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.
I just don't think you're ever going to avoid this. The returns to your life overall and your kids are so large when it comes to choosing your mate, and it's been so impossibly rigorously optimized by essentially everyone over the years, centuries, and millennia, that you just can't avoid it.
My favorite examples of this:
1) Samurai lineages are extremely over-represented in high status careers today in Japan: "samurai descendants may be as “much as ten times overrepresented among modern Japanese elites. That rate implies that half the modern elites are descended from the samurai. Intermarriage would greatly expand the share of the modern population of samurai descent. But if the samurai are really ten times overrepresented in modern elites, intermarriage must have been limited, so that their descendants constitute no more than 10 percent of the modern population."
If they had had platonically perfect intermarriage with no leakage, they'd have been 5% of the population - so over hundreds of years, the amount of leakage from "platonically perfect" to "actually executed" was an incremental 5%. That's incredibly tight optimization, and happening over hundreds of years, so over many generations.
Another fun example of this - Kulin Brahmins in India have been assortatively mating so tightly that they have greater than 100% persistence rates relative to the median population in India (ie their children attain their same status in career / income / education at 105% of the rates relative to the median population). And they've been achieving this for something like 3,000 years.
In a field that tightly optimized, over centuries and millennia, by countless generations and people, you are just always going to have a lot of effort and gamification and optimization going on.
Fun lineage persistence factoids are from my review of Greg Clark's Son Also Rises.
I see people (maybe mostly women) who like challenging sports because they get a little time when they aren't thinking about anything else. They specifically cite housework and children.
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.
Part of a gendered map is 'advice' and part of it is 'opportunity'. Like, "you should join the army" as advice only works if there's an army to join!
One of the main benefits of shared gender roles is that _you can help other people enact their gender_. If the male map is "you should be helpful to other people", the complement of that for everyone else is "find opportunities for men to help you." Ask him to fix your cabinet door that doesn't quite close right.
> I feel a bit confused by what specifically it is that men are missing, and what would meet this need.
A way to earn social status in the community they live in and a way to translate that status into a partner (probably a woman who will bear children).
> 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.
While choice paralysis and indecision affect men, they don't lack for ways or encouragement to simply make a leap of faith. Maybe they go into business, or STEM, or the army, etc. But there is a large contingent of men who don't know how to interface with women, and don't know what to change or how to change it until they could.
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.
No, it's only obvious inasmuch as it affirms a lot of things I'm already doing. This summer I've taken up free weights, lost 15 lbs, and asked someone out for the first time ever (she turned out to be a lesbian but c'est la vie, we're still friends). The last part is figuring out where exactly I can meet more other people irl with whom I share any interests, which is tricky around here but I have to believe it's possible.
It can't be specific and actionable because the post doesn't know what deficits you have. The thing you need to do is enter a loop of looking at your situation, identifying problems, and attempting to solve them. (You already are starting to do this, according to another comment in this thread, but keep at it and keep your focus flexible!)
"One day, you realize you are grateful for the worst thing that ever happened to you." I can't exactly recommend it, but I was probably at least halfway to an Opts Out future when my mom got cancer and died.
It was so overwhelmingly awful as to completely upend and trivialize every other problem in my life, including not having a girlfriend.
It also taught me real empathy and the overwhelming pain drove me to seek connection with others in a way that would have seemed terrifying before. Naively you wouldn't think a human suppurating wound would be a particularly attractive in a partner, but it did in fact attract many women.
It was, and is, the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was also transformative, like two negative numbers multiplied together. I really doubt I'd have anything like the life I do now (wife, son, good job, etc.) without having had such a terrible experience at a critical moment.
The (paraphrased) quote above is one that's stuck with me and always felt apt. It comes from short memoir, where the author recounts how he was raped as a young man, and the perverse indebtedness he feels for how that experience shaped him, good and bad, into who is now: https://www.amazon.com/Being-Raped-Raymond-M-Douglas-ebook/dp/B011G4DPBE/
So I don't have much specific and actionable advice, except to suffer. And it will suck and I'm sorry for it. But if you are brave, and lucky, then you might be able to turn it into meaning. And that can help make you whole.
This strikes me as not being advice, and, as you see, it disturbs me enough to want to mention this.
You can't choose to suffer like you can choose to go into the park or whatever. You could choose to do something to you that makes you suffer but that would probably not do you any of the good that you have described.
Nonetheless it's interesting to contemplate about what you wrote.
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.
This is a huge problem. If you have a society designed for the outliers to feel comfortable, it won't work for 70% of the people. The Progressives have with their "respect everyone all the time" nonsense created a society that doesn't work for the vast majority of the population. I suspect this was intentional as a way to "get back" at "mom" or "dad". In any case, it was a horrible mistake and Progressivism needs to be (and is going to be) rolled back. How far back depends on how obnoxious they are over the coming few decades.
This deserves a full treatment from someone, re the illegitimate universalizing of difference, whether that difference was intellect or simply neurosis.
Agreed. My wife is a fairly driven person and I'm pretty sure she would have gone nuts if she'd been forced to be a stay-at-home mom.
And we both think that having two working parents is good - neither of us has the pressure of being "the breadwinner" for the family, we can get by on one income for a while if something happens.
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.
She does say that at the beginning, but then also says she actively avoids some types of men, doesn’t tend to go on more than one date with most others, and doesn’t give any examples or instances of a man actually telling her any of these things. As Robert McKenzie Horn wrote above in an insightful comment, “A repeated theme of your 'what it's like to date x man' sections is that the men are cagey and refuse to answer any personal questions, that the dates are brief, and that you're treated with suspicion.”
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.
I don't think this is quite the venue for dating advice, nor am I especially qualified to give any, but I think this doesn't need to be complicated at all. Here's an easy, effective heuristic: "don't be creepy" = "accept disinterest/rejection and move on". Imagine trying to talk to someone you were not attracted to (e.g. another dude, if you're straight). If you started talking to them and they seemed hesitant or looking for a way to disengage, you'd just stop, because you don't have an ulterior motive. It's really not any different when it's someone you're attracted to. Just don't be pushy, and you won't be creepy. Some people just won't want to talk or engage, and that doesn't mean you did anything wrong. Just be willing to move on.
Yeah, I don't keep pushing if they seem uncomfortable, I am aware it's rare for a girl to reject you directly. However, I do feel like if a girl was uncomfortable for five seconds I was already creepy. I've been told that if you're literally never creepy, you let a lot of opportunities go, and I think there's a lot of truth in that.
I think if you made someone uncomfortable, noticed it, and immediately disengaged, nobody would actually think you’re creepy in the real world. I understand that it feels bad to make someone uncomfortable even briefly, but I don’t think you would actually be seen as creepy or having done anything wrong even by the wokest woman. I think it’s more of a right-wing strawman than a left-wing reality.
I think the "gay man" thought experiment is useful here.
If a gay man came up to me and talked to me with the clear intention of hitting on me, that would make me uncomfortable. But if he came up to me in a friendly way, talked briefly about this and that, and then wished me a good evening and disappeared into the crowd, I'd probably just think "what a nice fellow" and not even realise that he'd been carefully monitoring whether I responded to his good-natured banter with any signs of sexual interest.
That's the ideal for a straight man too. Just have conversations with women. Most of them will show a friendly lack of interest and this is fine. Sometimes, one will respond with interest, and you are free to flirt. Learn to read those cues, and you'll be fine.
Once you've raised the bar even by that amount, though, you've made it genuinely difficult for a significant fraction of men to clear. Even socially capable people will sometimes get it wrong, because the boundaries between 'politely enduring the conversation', 'genuinely friendly and happy to chat', and 'romantically interested' can be relatively subtle and vary significantly from person to person. So I don't think that making a good-faith effort to meet your ideal is a reliable way to avoid making people uncomfortable.
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.
There hasn't been some broad societal shift, but for about ten years, guys who spend too much time on computer definitely received "don't be creepy" message more strongly than before, which I think did have an effect on the margin, and perhaps quite a noticeable one if you select on Bay Area tech dudes.
I agree with that, but I think “don’t be creepy” messages are much easier to disambiguate from “don’t be masculine” than critics of wokeness like to claim
> 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.
Okay, but the data do tell us that men are having trouble. What do you make of that / how do you explain that?
That's a good question that requires serious academic research, with careful attempts to disentangle correlated variables. For example, maybe there's been some purely economic force pushing towards lower pay/employment in male-dominated professions, and that reflects as "men are doing worse than before"? That kind of explanation would have less to do with cultural factors like a changing "map of manhood" or weaker coming-of-age rituals or whatever. I was answering the author's anecdotes and speculations with my own. It would be fair to demand more rigor of both our claims, but not only of mine.
With more rigor, what I can mainly say is that it's not my field. I tried to do a few google scholar searches and didn't find anything that directly answers the question, but I probably don't know what terms (or of even what fields) to search for to find the best evidence. One funny thing that jumped out at me is that when I searched for "crisis of masculinity sociology", google scholar gave me papers across decades, from the 1970s to the present. So at least claims of there being such a crisis are not new, although of course there could be new grounds for those claims now.
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.
> 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
Was he actually on the wrong side of it? As he said himself, they let you do it when you're famous. And clearly it wasn't a deal breaker for voters...
As the people above have pointed out, the line is in a different place depending on the circumstances and culture, and culture has definitely moved the line in the last few decades.
The number of women who have accused Trump of sexual assault (Wikipedia says, “At least 25 since 1970”) might be taken to suggest that a lot of women were not, in fact, “letting him do it”. This is much more likely to be an example of a bad actor trying to pretend a line is blurry that really isn’t.
Sure, but he still got away with it. He would have gotten away with it even more if he lived in a culture where women weren't in a position to make demands about how they were treated. And that kind of culture results in less men being alienated. Catch my drift?
The goal is not to "get away with it", it's to have a meaningful and happy life. Once you realize that, you start realizing that making women subservient won't help you.
Well, clearly the people mentioned in the post aren't finding life to be meaningful or happy, and given the rise of the manosphere and backlash to feminism, there's a lot more where they came from. I can safely say they would at least be happier than before if they had an easier path to getting a wife.
When men collectively want something, they are going to get it. Deriding these people isn't going to stop the consequences of liberalism's failures to provide for them.
This is just the Manosphere-fed fantasy that only appeals to those who haven’t actually experienced a healthy, loving human relationship. It isn’t real life. A wife (in all world literature, notoriously) does not make a man happy if she is herself unhappy. And no wife (or human) is happy if she is being treated badly. It’s a Very Online, Very Manosphere fantasy that normal men admire people like the Tate Brothers or want to emulate them in any way. Normal, married, healthy guys with families think this stuff is somewhere between pathetic, embarrassing, and scary. I’ve listened to Andrew Tate, and he is a broken man who is going to die alone and raging. If men want to be happy, they’re going to need better role models.
The idea of men collectively wanting something feels odd to me. Like it's borrowing from solidarity movements which always are a mass of weaker people going against the strong. Usually men don't operate that way. The strong ones who have no problem getting women don't seem to view the weak men who do have trouble as much different from women: both groups are theirs to exploit.
You think a guy whose trophy wife is visibly grossed out by him in public, and who spends every holiday Truthing things like “MERRY CHRISTMAS TO THE LEFT WING LOSERS AND MANIACS WHO HATE OUR COUNTRY” is happy? Yikes. If there are really significant numbers of men out there who take Trump to be a role model, maybe there really is more of a crisis of manhood than I think.
you cannot value a man and turn around and participate in sports that involve striking him till he is unable to rise, by inflicting head or body trauma.
its not even like football, where injuries are dangerous but incidental (and even football is being called out over that.) It's absorbing damage as the point of the sport.
there's a point about how much men don't value their bodies and boxing is a big example.
This is why feminism will never gain actual masculine allies. Everything is dangerous. I'd rather die doing something great than live like a caged animal in a padded room... and 90% of men are right there with me.
... and that's why I argue that the ultimate goal of Feminism is to put every one in a padded room where they can be safe forever, overseen by the most micro-managerial Karens available. Feminism hates risk, or adventure, it wants a society of drones, not people.
have you ever been punched? trust me, there is no adventure in it.
i'm not coming at this from a feminist issue, i'm coming at this from "i like men and i don't want them to foolishly destroy their bodies" issues. For all the faux mra stuff here, you sure have internalized "men are disposable" too much.
like the message "men hurting each other for entertainment" is not a good one: even play fighting like pro wrestling ends with too many dying early. if you get old enough you start to see all the bills come due and you wish young men valued themselves more.
“I’ve never had trouble with this and I’ve never known anyone else who genuinely found it difficult, they were just being creepy” is maybe not the most constructive comment.
You've never made a girl laugh, said "hey, I like you" and had her immediately become visibly uncomfortable? Not backing off is, indeed, another thing. But if you fall for someone who only sees you as a friend, is the above not the standard, normal, to-be-expected response in that situation?
I've had this happen multiple times, and I always went, "Oh shit, sorry, I obviously misread the situation. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. If you're not interested, I won't mention it again". No one ever seemed to think I was being creepy.
I think notions like "creepy" just come from women wanting to not feel unsafe in these interactions. "You're being creepy" means "You're making me worry that I'm not safe around you". If you make it clear that you will back off as soon as they want you to and do in fact do that, then you've given clear evidence that they're not unsafe with you. In that case, I've never seen any man be accused of doing anything wrong when they behave like this. Maybe it can happen under some very atypical circumstances, but I think it's 99% a myth that's told for primarily political purposes.
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".
its easy to understand when you realize the reason behind this is women want men to be safe generally, but be trad romantically.
to be blunt if you are trans you never probably grew up with men as a threat like they did: men are a real and present danger to them in a way where women are not so to men. The "wanting feminine men" is borne out of that.
like terfs are terf because even if you transition, you still were a man and they don't think that changes: the fact mtf are lesbians to a huge degree makes them dangerous because dealing with men sexually is fraught with danger and some do coerce.
as a guy i get it...predatory men are a big issue and the modern gender norms are about make men safe for women. I can't blame it. A guy can go to a bar alone and not worry someone will spike his drink.
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.
I went back and reread it specifically to look for things that sound like they could be from Aella. There are more than I expected.
>"The best I can do for these men is recommend they join communities where genuine emotional bonds can be forged. These still exist, although they’re frighteningly hard to find in modern society. I’ve been lucky enough to join several, and it’s startling how many people have the same story: feeling depressed and isolated and purposeless, and suddenly feeling like they’re alive for the first time in years once they’ve been embraced into the community."
Pretty vague, but this is how I've heard Aella describe joining the rationalist community.
>"I’ve stumbled through a highly unusual path, somehow getting lucky enough to gain a solid understanding of myself, pursue my passions, earn a solid living, and enjoy a happy life along the way."
This totally sounds like Aella's journey discovering camming and sex work. "Unusual path," (sex work) "pursue my passions," (sex) "earn a solid living," (she is a high-end escort) "enjoy a happy life along the way" (see above).
>[The whole "Man Who Provides" section]
I realize that the Bay Area has lots of tech founders and millionaires. I still doubt that a normal woman would go on enough dates with Silicon Valley CEOs for this to be an entire category of men she dates. This implies that the author is well-connected and high-status (within her own community).
There's no smoking gun, but I'm at 30% that this is Aella right now.
Well, shit. I'm still pulling for that 70%, because the whole analysis goes out the window if it's "The men willing to pay me for sex" instead of "Reasonably broad sample of men looking to date."
This was a funny interaction, my first thought on this article was "Is this Aella" but I actually think this article has a different voice than she does
There are loads of other tells but her use of language about "a man who is whole" and having "several of them in her life" are very much her authorial voice.
It would make an enormous amount of sense. As other commenters have observed, the author doesn't really seem to be "dating" in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. meeting men with the goal of finding a single man with whom to have a long term relationship). It would also explain the adverse selection wherein everyone the author dates is dysfunctional.
Yeah it doesn't quite feel like her writing style but also
> It’s a sad misunderstanding of how it all works. My unconventional life isn’t the result of zany choices and the advice contained in self-help books; it’s the result of an intensely rocky childhood I almost didn’t survive.
seems to jive with her hyper religious upbringing with an abusive father.
> After all, both my previous serious partners fell into this category earlier in their life
This seems to also align with her. This author seems to be in her 30s. (Seems like too much experience for 20s, and 40s you'd probably see more talk of divorce.) And it seems rare for a women this old who dates this often to only have two serious partners, and I don't think she has had many serious partners Aella.
But
> I lecture my young interns about the hazards of a success-obsessed lifestyle, and encourage them to find senses of worth that don’t revolve around gaining power and providing money.
I'd be really surprised if she had interns. So I'd put it at a 20% chance.
I've only just followed her twitter and blog for a while but ugh after reading this I feel kinda weird/icky knowing this much about someone's personal life who I've never met.
No comment on the question at hand, but my distinct recollection is that Aella works within a professional ecosystem which includes other women she is coaching. I don't remember any details, but "interns" would capture the spirit.
It's Aella. I would bet at 4-1. The smug condescension, analytical language (what woman uses the phrase "update my detection heuristics"), it stylistically matches her writing, she had a childhood which "nearly destroyed her", and one of her antagonists calls her a whore. Seriously, how much more evidence do you need?
[EDIT: Missed the part where she said she was a 20-something. Oops.]
And yes, it is discrediting. Or would be if the content wasn't discrediting by itself.
She writes about relationships the way a blind person writes about color. She treats dating like shopping for a car and analyzes men the way you would analyze a product that you wanted to purchase. It's an emotionally dead, purely transactional approach that would be shocking if you didn't know that the author was a literal prostitute.
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.
Scott submitted reviews to his own contests before and told us at the end? Why would he lie about it this time? Why would he (or Aella) want to lie about it in the first place? Isn't "at the end of the contest the authors become public" a normal part of the process?
If there's an author reveal and it's not her, credible evidence of the other person's authorship; what that evidence would have to be would depend on context.
Nah, it very obviously isn't. Hope you learn something interesting and update on a bunch of whatever made you think that when you turn out to be wrong.
She has something to sell and she's concerned about the overall cultural movement against what are the actual root causes of society's problem with keeping men in line / involved.
Have you used Manifold (or any prediction market) before? Recommend looking around until you get a feel for how it works.
It's predicting a future event insofar as you don't know the answer now, but will in the future (once it's revealed).
Accurate market resolution is controlled by a combination of reputation and occasional administrator smackdown. For example, I've run about 20 markets there before, there haven't been any complaints about my resolution, and if there was then the community would shun me and I wouldn't be able to get people to participate in my markets there in the future. There have been tens of thousands of questions on Manifold, only a tiny number of them have had resolution disputes, and that's even smaller for questions by big accounts with reputations.
>Accurate market resolution is controlled by a combination of reputation and occasional administrator smackdown. For example, I've run about 20 markets there before, there haven't been any complaints about my resolution, and if there was then the community would shun me and I wouldn't be able to get people to participate in my markets there
This is pure survivorship bias; obviously the people participating in this market already think you're honest. It's also an article of faith in your cult that prediction markets are important and you and her are both high status in the cult.
Now, my model of your dishonesty isn't that you'll endanger your (now tattered) reputation for truth telling for a few (pretend) dollars but the idea that "this was written by Aella and is actually a sales pitch for her PUA boot camp business" hits close enough to home for your community that you might be willing to be dishonest to defend the reputation of the cult-blob.
This is all besides the original point I was alluding to by mentioning the resolution and past nature of the prediction - no one sane would ever make an actual bet in a real market about some event in the past when the "reveal" about the event has some nebulous process about the reveal. This is irrelevant though because the markets aren't in actual money.
If you wanted the reveals to be trustworthy you should have had each reviewer write a sentence with the reveal and then hashed it and published the hash (the sentence would serve as salt - preventing people from simply plugging in names and hashing them).
Hahaha!!! This obviously seems appealing to the ears. I doubt strongly it's her though. The author has provided a bit more info about her profile in some of her follow-up comments. I doubt Aella was ever a tomboy (correct me if I'm wrong) nor did she embraced mentorship by intellectual/academic matrons.
Aella would not have gone anon and if there was a prediction market someone makes please do link it here, I'd be interested in how much liquidity it attracts and what the odds stabilize at
I also initially assumed it was Aella, but the author's self-reported age doesn't match, and I didn't remember being a chronically sickly child/teenager (as reported in some of the comment back-and-forths) as being part of Aella's history. Could just be she's lying/fudging details to obscure authorial identity, but assuming the age given is accurate, she's not Aella.
I do suspect she's read a lot of Aella, though, and uses similar framings as Aella's as part of understanding the world, and sensemaking her own similar conservative background and experiences of not fitting/matching "normal" female experiences and psychology. (See her comments about mentors who helped her understand her own brain/psychology/how to exist as a woman in the world).
I first assumed Ozy but only because it's the only woman I remembered mentioned when reading SSC, I forget about Aella at all. I haven't really read either of their works so I can't comment further.
From what I've seen and read of Aella, she'd never write something as callow (meaning no disrespect to the author, it's youth's privilege to be callow; it also inclines me to believe her claim of her age) as the second half of her response to Xpym in the finalist nomination comment thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025/comment/123182825.
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.
There's being empathic, and then there's having a knack for getting men to disclose painful private things and cry on the first date. I think that's unkind, bad-boundary behavior, and a way of getting one up.
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 men 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 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, as opposed to their secrets and sorrows, 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 kind of 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 angry. If the guy’s a brute who forces himself on your friend at a concert — well, 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 based on the accounts of pain she elicits 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.
> 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 men of a different era,
That's my experience too. Even in my 20s, I was obviously pretty insecure and confused, but what I remember is that I and the people around had lots of energy, interests, tastes, and all those things, and that's what we would chat and bond over.
> Would many of these men benefit from moving out of the South Bay?
A full 80% would vastly turn their lives around by moving to NYC, where the gender ratio mismatch is flipped. Base rates matter so much - it's hard to actually appreciate how much without actually doing it and seeing the difference yourself.
Probably yes? I see this sad trend in the Bay where men are clearly and vocally unhappy, yet continue down life paths that make them miserable because it's the "norm" in this city (ie: hyper-focusing on career, obsessing over how much money is made, burning themselves out with their start-up, etc.) Of course all these traits can be found in other areas of the country, but usually to a lesser degree.
Also, it's just easier for men to date in other cities that don't have a skewed ratio of single young men to single young women.
So yes, I think some men would benefit from moving away from the Bay. But that being said--I love this region, heart and soul, and I believe it has so much to offer. It just requires the right personality/situation match and finding the right community.
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!
Then there are broader questions such as "how to be happy", and those are less gender specific.
The normal meaning of "man" is the dictionary definition. An adult human male.
On top of that, the word has an alternate meaning, which is used to police what kind of man you're allowed to be. It's only effective on insecure men. You're not a REAL MAN unless... blah blah blah. Who cares.
I know that that is not the intention of this piece. The author is trying to be helpful. But I think that her framing isn't the most useful and clear-headed. It echoes too much "You're not a REAL MAN unless..."
I think it's more helpful to tackle directly the issues we face. Dating success, social success, whatever success. Dating success is the most gender-specific.
The fact that someone asked a question is not evidence that it's the correct question to ask. Questions can just be wrong! They can be framed in ways that steer people in the wrong direction, or carry hidden assumptions that aren't correct (in this case, the assumptions that "man" must refer to a specific social role, and that fulfilling that role is sufficient to make you happy and romantically successful.)
If someone asks you "have you stopped beating your wife?" and you answer that you don't beat your wife, it would be very wrong of me to reply with "well, clearly that's not true, since someone asked if you stopped beating her!"
I agree that your framing of the question is better. Unfortunately to answer it we'd have to honestly interrogate the preferences of heterosexual women, and no one seems comfortable doing that. There's a ton of preference falsification going on, and it's led to a corrupted discourse and lack of trust all around.
The question that nags at me is whether we should think of it as a zero sum game. There are only so many straight women willing to date, so if a man is more successful at dating, another will be less successful --- is that true? If that were true, then there is no point in giving advice to men.
I agree with you that preference falsification is a huge problem and if you try to have a frank discussion about it you will sound like a misogynist.
> The question that nags at me is whether we should think of it as a zero sum game. There are only so many straight women willing to date, so if a man is more successful at dating, another will be less successful --- is that true? If that were true, then there is no point in giving advice to men.
An even more troublesome thought: it's not just a matter of men competing with men in the dating marketplace, it's a matter of women being educated and having good careers themselves, and lower libidos overall, and thus "a nice career and apps and maybe pets" is a potential substitute for men, who are increasingly entirely unnecessary for certain types.
So not only do men need to compete with other men for dates, they need to compete against Netflix, Tik Tok, and the rest of the attention economy companies, and their respective ten thousand Phd's bent on grabbing and yanking on whatever neurological hooks they can to increase salience and engagement. How interesting is the average man compared against Tik Tok or Youtube? Not very? I think so, too.
That said, I don't think giving advice is pointless - advice from women can potentially create more men of the type they want to see, and advice from men can be safe because those men are already partnered, in different geographies, or otherwise not on the same market.
> advice from men can be safe because those men are already partnered, in different geographies, or otherwise not on the same market
It can be safe for a man to give advice, but ultimately he is not helping anyone, if it's true that, for every man he helps partner up, another ends up single because of it.
> It can be safe for a man to give advice, but ultimately he is not helping anyone, if it's true that for every man he helps partner up, another ends up single because of it.
Isn't this a bit like "you shouldn't feed that starving orphan, there are a million more of them, and you can never feed them all!"
Sure, if women willing to date these guys are a finite resource, it's zero sum. But that one orphan still got fed, even if others didn't.
Also, given the whole "you're competing against other men AND Tik Tok" dynamic, men overall need to raise their game to stay relevant. Giving advice putatively raises that game for multiple men, and allows more to stay relevant. It's zero sum competing against other men, but positive sum competing against Tik Tok, even in the aggregate.
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 (past generations would call this "weak descendants" or "weak blood" or something like that). War and death used to filter out enough men, plus society had all those customs punishing men who avoid tests of strength; nothing is stepping in to replace those things. Men being unable to get a wife is basically all that's left, so that's bearing the entire stress of genome sustainability, which is kind of absurd. (People obviously aren't doing this consciously, they're just looking for a good spouse, and finding a *lot* of duds.)
Though I assume genetic modification tech will flip the table here within our lifetimes. Just not yet.
You’re assuming that “high mutational load” correlates with “good at surviving battles and inflicting violence,” assertion very much in need of evidence!
I m sure there are cases when it’s true, like, genetic disorder that makes you unusually weak (e.g., by affecting your muscles or skeleton development) = probably won’t live long enough to father children in a pre-modern agrarian society.
But on average? Not that I’m any expert on premodern warfare, but I imagine a lot of it was a matter of sheer dumb luck from the perspective of the average soldier. Less “if im a sufficiently heroic badass, I shall triumph over all my foes and all the chicks will throw themselves at me when I return home;” more “Our commander screwed up and led us into an ambush, now I’m dead and I never had a wife or children.” What does mutational load have to do with it?
> But on average? Not that I’m any expert on premodern warfare, but I imagine a lot of it was a matter of sheer dumb luck from the perspective of the average soldier.
Isn't "luck" just random noise? If there's still a signal, you would expect random perturbations to still end in outcomes biased towards the signal's direction - simulated annealing often ends in the largest pits / gradients after all.
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.
When I saw your name and few comments up, I thought, with that name, he's probably Canadian and from the prairies. And here you are, linking to the Guess Who.
One takeaway I got from this article is that therapy (at least, in the Bay Area) appears to be completely useless: your therapist will just tell you the exact same things you could get with a cursory Google search. I don't know how true that is in reality, but it sounds depressingly plausible...
I don't think this is true, and would hate for readers to walk away with this belief. I have a lot friends who have found extremely wise and helpful therapists in the Bay. Yes, there are quite a few who are useless, and my male friends often report a disconnect between themselves and female therapists (and vice-versa). But I also have heard many anecdotes of deeply helpful therapists, both male and female.
That being said, I think the average experience is that you need to thoroughly "therapist shop" in order to find a good one. Most people I know who report having a really good therapist had to go through 3-6 bad or mediocre therapists before finding the one that clicked.
I've never gone to a therapist at all, but how do you decide which therapist are good for you? After 3-4 meetings? Or love at first sight? It suspiciously looks like dating itself. I'd hate to switch often trying for the "best" one when actually there's some good ones that I've dumped because I'm too focused on "perfect".
In addition to what Hafizh Afkar Makmur said, isn't this a recipe for finding a therapist who will tell you things that you want to hear, and not one who will actually help you with your problems ?
if what you most want to hear is actual substantive help with your problems, and partial solutions can be checked for validity in polynomial time, there's no difference. How many times would you expect to need to visit any single grocer before noticing that the milk they sell is expired, imported from some biosphere with reversed chirality, or otherwise beyond your ability to safely drink?
So men even in the San Fransisco and Palo Alto "use up all their hope and energy to schedule and arrive to the date", opted out, never "ready to make that change"? Are the genuine preferences of women directed toward just a few percent of men anywhere?
As the Lady Gaga heroine sang:
"Tell me something, boy
Aren't you tired tryna fill that void?
Or do you need more?
Ain't it hard keepin' it so hardcore?"
Yves Smith conveyed empathy to dating plights of modern men recently as well:
I loved this but felt it was two separate essays - one on the collapse of life maps for men, the other on the taxonomy of human unhappiness. A lot of women have similar trajectories and feelings. And I don't think people were happier in the past. having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
I think community does buffer the stings of individualsim/careerism-as-success false idol.
Oddly I find myself jealous of some of the communities noted in previous post because there (I believe) was societal gravity and more definitive map to belonging.
I can’t help but wonder if many of these categories of character would be happier in a smaller community with less opportunity and more definitions/norms.
This was an amazing piece; it gets so much right, and says so many things that needed to be said. It's rare that someone engages with this subject with such insight and empathy; but that made it all the more disappointing when we get to the "Man Who Opts Out":
"The nurturing side of me wants to pull the man into a hug, to assure him he’s enough, to promise I won’t judge...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."
But this man doesn't have low self-esteem! The writer already stipulated that he's got a lot going for him -- friends, career, hobbies -- and he knows it! His only problem is that he's bad at dating:
"It’s a vicious cycle–a man’s confidence in his dating ability is crushed, he finally works up the nerve to show up to a date, gets rejected, and his self-esteem lowers even more....I absolutely hate being a participant in this cycle. It’s the dating equivalent of kicking a puppy and always leaves me feeling a dull ache of empathy for the men involved...A man with severe self-esteem issues is not likely to find a healthy relationship, no matter how many times he flings himself at the dating world. The core issue of self-esteem must be addressed...For some, this means structured therapy or psychiatric treatment, for others, it means growing their social life until it’s vibrant enough to soothe the part of their soul that insists they’re not enough. Or maybe it’s a combo of all three or something else entirely. But action needs to be taken to address the lack of self-esteem; the man can’t just half-heartedly daydream about a woman who might swoop in to “love him just the way he is” and solve all his confidence problems."
But he doesn't need therapy; the author already wrote elsewhere (beautifully!) about how often therapy fails men, and there are no therapists anywhere that are going to help a heterosexual man up his dating & seduction game. His social life is fine -- the description already stipulated he has lots of friends. He doesn't need more friends; he needs a girlfriend.
This just comes across as a desperate scramble to somehow put the onus back on the man, when the real problem is women rejecting him for superficial reasons. That a woman could demonstrate so much compassion, understanding, and self-awareness throughout this essay, and yet still be unable to seriously grapple with her own agency in this situation, makes me despair.
Self-esteem is not this man's problem; his only problem is a lack of confidence around dating. If a woman agreed to be his girlfriend, he wouldn't have that problem anymore; he'd make a great partner. Of course the author, herself, is not obligated to be the one to do this. But when she says that she wants to help, and she sees herself ending up with a man like this eventually, it behooves her to more fully explain why she refuses to be the solution to the problem here, and not fall back on hand-wavy Reddit-standard advice about "therapy" and "friendship".
What reasons count as superficial or not? If a man isn't interested in a 300 lb woman or a woman who has had four kids with four different men, is that superficial? Many women seem to think so.
I can't define the difference for all cases, but I would say a reason that will cease to be a factor once the relationship starts (bad at dating) certainly counts as superficial. I wouldn't expect most women to see past the surface presentation, but the author clearly has & the fact it makes no difference is maddening.
Of course people have aesthetic preferences & those are never really fair. But I'd be shocked if anyone has ever seriously argued that having four kids isn't a major consideration when looking at a relationship.
Maybe four kids, but a lot of single mothers seem to have this attitude that the ex was just a small mistake and already having a kid shouldn't be a big deal to the next man. I tend to agree that being bad at dating isn't that big of a deal but being bad at relating is, and there is a relationship between the two skills.
Wonderful essay. I found myself perfectly identifying with at least 2 paragraphs of each section. I've had those thoughts/been that person at some point in my life and I've drifted between all of these categories. Although I don't think I've ever identified with any of them strong enough to get trapped for more than a few months before trying something different.
Sorry you've had so many shitty experiences to have this level of understanding but also you are an amazing listener. As you've highlighted a lot of these people feel ignored and that no one gives a shit. I feel like the world is so full of people talking and lacking in people that listen. It's unfair to put so much on one person, and it won't fix the larger cultural issues, but I'd like to think just by listening for a single conversation you might have brought at least one person out of their particular hole of despair.
You mentioned it several times about seeing someone for who they are. More than a map I think that's what's missing not just for men but for society in general. Too hyper-obsessed with seeing people for what they aren't or assigning a label or sorting into "good" and "bad" because who has time for anything more? That leaves people feeling alone, unfulfilled, unattractive, unwanted, like they have failed the assignment of who they should be because who they are (and they don't know who that is) doesn't cleanly fit into the idea of what others think they should be.
Even the categories in this piece are distillations. Perhaps necessary for framing the discussion but as you've highlighted the Men Who Are Whole section, it requires people to be themselves and themselves alone. At least for me a mantra I find helpful is "No one to be". I don't have to be anyone but me. It doesn't need a label or a definition. I'm not a concept and I can't be shoved into an elevator pitch. I may not really fit in anywhere not because there is something wrong with me, but because we are all more than a simple bio description, even if most people won't care enough to see it. Accepting people for who they are is the greatest kindness I can give others because it is also the greatest kindness someone can show me.
"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."
Would you believe I'm a living counterexample? I was some combination of "The Man Who Is Lost" and "The Man Who Opts Out" until a girl on Facebook (who had briefly met me once offline) decided to start hitting on me. Not being so depressed that I couldn't recognize a winning lottery ticket when I saw one, I soon found myself in a relationship with someone that turned out to have even bigger problems than mine that should have caused someone less desperate than me to run away screaming. And, amazingly enough, what should have been a disaster waiting to happen actually worked out wonderfully. Most of my self-esteem issues disappeared as if by magic, because instead of failing to live up to the standards I imagined "society" and women in general had, I only had to care about the opinion of this one specific person, and her standards were ones that I actually could meet even though she was literally my first girlfriend. Even a lot of the ways that our relationship would have looked from the outside like a toxic mess were actually very functional and helpful for me.
The only problem I have now is that, after we were together for ten years, her chronic health conditions caught up with her and my wife passed away in March of 2024. So now I'm back where I was before I met her. And I don't like it!!!
The stereotype of women taking on men who are lost, is that many times than not, the men remain lost even as household responsibilities rise. And then we go on to have endless screeds about "emotional labor" and "How the divorce came from nowhere". I can't fault someone for not wishing to take on project especially they already pressed on all sides. I know first hand how frustrating it is to love someone who can't just seem to find themselves.
My condolences on your wife, and may you find what you're looking for.
This essay really spoke to me. I don't live in the Bay Area, but I find myself having many of the same struggles as the first four archetypes not just in terms of dating, but also in other forms of self-actualization like having a fulfilling career or a supportive community. I count myself lucky that I didn't fall into the manosphere trap, but the author of this essay is absolutely right that other masculinity traps can be equally harmful to men such as myself and that this fact is rarely acknowledged.
Unfortunately, for perhaps unfounded fears that I'll someday become an important person for whom past online comments could come back to bite me, I have to cower behind what is essentially a throwaway account I created to post a dating ad a few months ago, so I won't be giving any specifics here about my life situation. That being said, my DMs are open for anyone willing to listen (I'm sorry I couldn't think of a less cringy way to say that).
I'm awestruck. This woman's maturity and emotional intellect us off the charts, no comparison to 57 y.o. me. In my 20s I was not even a baby compared to this level, i was a cat at best. I was somewhat "a man who opted out" back than. And that was the right path IMO. Cats don't date smart young woman, after all. They do their catty things.
That's my point. Young man are mostly no match to young woman. It's mostly not society's fault, it's biology. Normalize age gaps up to 10 years at least. Me, I found THE women of my age, (ok may be "she found me" is closer to truth) but i consider this extreme luck/divine intervention.
False narrative. The "crisis of men" is only within liberals minds. They simoly hate men and want to remake men as if they were failure women.
Easy solution to the dating and current society:
1. ACCEPT MEN AS THEY ARE. Men are superior un streght: thats basically means that women cannot be cops or firefigthers. Thats not opression: its bioligy.
That also will mean that men will commit more crime on average. The good comes with the bad.
And also means that men Will be more dominant in areas like business, polítics and law. STOP GENDER QUOTAS.
2. STOP HELPING WOMEN AND INVESTING MILLIONS IN WOMEN.
3. STOP TAXING MEN TO BUILD A BUROCRÁTIC GOVERNEMNET THAT HAS ONLY HELPED WOMEN.
4. MAKE MEN INDEPENDET: SEGREGATED SCHOOLS IS A MUST.
Men are superior in strength... which means that men will be dominant in business, politics, and law?!? I didn't realize that courtrooms cared about how much you could bench press!
I also like how you want to set up a whole new school system for men, but also want men to not have to pay any taxes for it. Men are strong, independent, and naturally dominant - that's why the government needs to give them as many handouts as possible.
1. Being dominant is a trail you develop since childhood. Being superior in strengh matters. The same happens with kids born in January: they are older than they peers... And It happens that the majority of successful people was born in the first half of the year.
2. I want men to pay... For mens school, not for women. You deal with your stuff: we deal with ours
So men are still going to pay taxes for the parts of government they use? Like the military, law enforcement, public health, education, social security, that sort of stuff?
I think if you tallied up all the parts of government that benefit men, you'd end up with approximately "the entire government."
That doesn't mean women get 60% of the benefit of the government.
If a woman works for the Social Security Administration, both men and women get their social security checks. If a woman works for the EPA, both men and women get the benefits of "not having lead in your drinking water." Why would you need to separate these services by gender?
You’re singing my tune here. For years, I’ve chafed against the way we tend to talk to and about men. As a woman, I personally feel it’s damaged my relations with other women, since it’s pretty easy to find yourself in a conversation with new acquaintances where you’re suddenly recruited to drag men for various reasons. It’s hard for me to stick around, especially since many of those women are speaking from a place of real trauma, having been repeatedly hurt or violated by men. There are some conflicting opinions about “how men are” that strike at a profound level where you can’t just agree to disagree.
There’s also the honest truth I have to face when considering my happy relationship with a “Whole Man”; I’ve done and am doing a lot of things we’re not supposed to do as modern women.
My husband is the breadwinner; I’m primarily a homemaker. He manages our money, and I tend to defer to him on finance because I hate doing it and he both enjoys and is good at it. I do most of the housework, because I like it that way. You could see this as a power imbalance, but from the inside I feel like we’re a team, just with different roles. I made another woman make gagging noises once when I admitted I tend to follow some retro 1950s advice like freshening up before I see him. I want to make him happy, because I love him, and because he does the same for me.
And while I can’t quite articulate this, I try to respect his understated brand of wholesome masculinity. He’s a wonderful husband and father. He makes me feel happy and free and safe and loved. So I try not to mock or tease or undermine him, or other men for that matter. I admire when he asserts himself, because so far as I’m concerned he always does this in a fair and reasonable way. He’s doing a great job at being a man, and I try to tell him so. But I think a lot of people, men and women, have been burned too many times to say that out loud.
I just want to respond that the womens movement wasn’t a net-negative for women like me, because while I declined to write my entire biography here, my status as primarily a homemaker is temporary. We have little kids, so it makes sense for now. I didn’t go “full trad”- I dislike that assumption about homemaking so much I’m considering writing a book on the subject.
I have a lot of thoughts on what I could call “whole life” feminism. It would probably make sense for us to acknowledge that not only do different people thrive in different situations, but those situations change as we grow up, pair up (or not), have kids (or not) and grow older. I have a graduate degree and a career, and eventually that will shift back to being the primary focus of my life, or at least the lions share of hours in my day. I’m just fortunate that, alongside having kids, being a homemaker is what I *wanted* to be doing, and that we can temporarily afford to purchase my labor back from the marketplace.
As a husband and father of two wonderful daughters, this makes me so happy to hear. I just wish my wife would be a little more effusive, and a little less critical.
The age doesn't match, and fwiw I would say writing style doesn't quite match either. Also, Aella had an essay on her own blog about dating men in the bay area, and the sentiment was very very different, and to be frank quite jarring to me as a man, whereas this is reads very compassionate and understanding.
I don’t think so. Aella wouldn’t have skipped talking about sex. And she’s not lugubrious. And I doubt she thinks that she’s bad at small talk. Being good at conversation is an important skill for a high end courtesan. And she sounds like a confident person.
Excellent essay - although long since partnered I recognize myself in more than one of these archetypes.
I sometimes lament the decline of hookup culture because it provides a more unstructured method of establishing chemistry with potential partners that does not involve the expectations and pressures of dating. It’s how I met my spouse and I know I’m not the only one - in fact it’s still a very common mode of relationship formation among gay men, I believe.
This is the first review I’ve actively disliked. I didn’t find anything novel or interesting here — just a regurgitation of the usual tropes about men and manhood, which I think are 1) vastly oversimplified and 2) not really true. How long has it actually been since men were valued for their ability to club people over the head? You’d have to go back centuries. Even in supposedly “warrior” societies, most men weren’t fighters; they were farmers, merchants, craftsmen. Were things ever as simple for men as this piece claims?
Dating in the Bay Area is hard, but for reasons that seem far more straightforward:
Dating has always been hard. Every generation thinks it’s uniquely bad now, but the complaints are timeless.
Both men and women have higher expectations and are more selective than ever before.
People in the bay aread have poured themselves into their careers and neglected their social lives, so when they do date, they are not very good at it.
I just don’t see anything in this essay that changes how I think about the topic — it’s mostly familiar arguments dressed up in a lot of words.
Totally agree. I learnt nothing new in this at all. All rehashed points. Maybe a lot of people thinking it's ground-breaking reading this haven't read much about it before. idk, I'm flummoxed...
It's pretty rare to find a female writer who understands me well and chooses to take the time to empathize and give constructive advice. I guess I should revise that to any writer, since alot of the men tend to be manosphere types trying to convince me to spend $200 / month on their course on how to be evil.
This probably took alot of time and energy and in an era of terrible gender polarization, will probably get some backlash.
When I read passages like "Yet the void has no respect for logic; rather than tempering his pain, the rationality merely adds a layer of self-disgust onto the despair. There are so many who suffer more than him, yet he can barely shoulder this burden" and "He was good at it, and he loved it. It made him feel alive. His teacher suggested he could become a professional someday, but he’d immediately rejected the idea, knowing the life of a starving artist wasn’t a good plan... / ... He starts [] again, taking up classes at a local studio, but his skill level is that of a fourteen-year-old with potential. He hasn’t practiced in two decades, and his work is weak compared to most other artists his age. / He’s not used to being the least skilled person in the room. His prior plan never allowed that as a possibility, and the sense of failure is disorientating," I think, that could as easily describe me, a married mom. These are human wounds, though being an unmarried man these days does seem to pour extra salt into them.
"Yet the biological reality is that critical portions of the male brain develop at slower rates than female brains, and our education system wasn’t built to accommodate this fact."
So, accelerate the girls without shaming the boys. Most girls still grow into women who want to be moms, and the boys who were once behind are still likely to catch up and then shoot ahead once the girls in their cohort start breeding. To some, this might seem like "favoring" girls "at boys' expense" at a crucial stage, but really, acknowledging that life-stages typically differ between the sexes should be win-win.
Permitting girls to accelerate as much as possible at pre-reproductive ages might also pro-natally take some pressure off the women they become to postpone childbearing "just to keep up" later.
Married dad here. Agree with the sentiment of “this is me”. David Brooks talks about this well in his two mountain essay.
In fact I have been many categories. I think the universality of these classifications is part of the authors unintended appeal. The dating men in the Bay Area part is just a way to asterisk it as not comprehensive or clinical.
I agree there's no sense in holding boys back, and it's also fine if they surpass girls before the girls have kids – don't hold *anyone* back, is what I'm saying.
I also think it's possible that the standard pre- and elementary-school curriculum *does* hold young girls back a little by catering to an average that includes boys.
All my young kids started RSM (Russian School of Mathemtics) at the kindergarten level, but the girls could start a year early. In the early years at least, my female children are coping fine with being a grade ahead in a fairly demanding math extracurricular while the male children wouldn't have.
If a boy of mine later hits a math "growth spurt", I'm eager to encourage it! I think boys are more likely than girls to have "math growth spurts" in their teens. I suspect, though, that at least some girls have a developmental advantage in math in the very early years that's not fully taken advantage of. I would no more want to waste girls' advantage there than waste boys' cognitive growth spurts when they happen.
Edited to add: For what it's worth, my kids have math majors for both mom and dad, and as far as we can tell at our kids' early ages, our most mathematically-promising kid seems to be the youngest, who's a girl, and our least mathematically-promising kid is also a girl. We probably should be accelerating our youngest more than just one year ahead, and I feel bad for being overwhelmed enough by other stuff to have not made that investment yet.
> So, accelerate the girls without shaming the boys.
We need to find a way how to spin tracking at schools as a feminist agenda. If you disagree that each child should be allowed to learn at their own pace, you are hurting girls and you need to be called out as a sexist!
But by now even girlbosses may be sick of girlbossage, and I think the best case for accelerating the education of girls who are eligible for it probably is a pro-natal one, and feminists strike me as pretty divided on how pro-natal to be.
Funny thing, if we fully supported tracking at schools, the smartest girls could finish their education earlier, and they could start having families (if they wish to do that) earlier.
It could simultaneously be a pro-feminist *and* pro-natalist *and* pro-eugenics move! Who would dare oppose such wide coalition? :D
Opposition seems to come out of the woodwork somehow!
Heck, one of my own daughters seems to feel entitled to only work at grade level rather than a year ahead in math, though she's perfectly capable. Since aptitude results from both interest and ability, we can accept that being our least mathematically-apt child may just be part of who she is. (She also seems like our least-weird child – coincidence?...) But feeling entitled to refuse a development opportunity because it results in above-average skill is just about the dumbest sense of entitlement I can imagine (with no shortage of dumbth to choose from).
This seems like an argument for sex-segregated schooling. I think it's important for boys and girls to socialize, but I can see some academic advantages to segregation.
Thanks, Anonymous Writer! I had a younger friend who moved to the Bay Area with a great job and she always seemed to be going out to dinner with gay guys. Why? She couldn't find a straight guy who ate meat (at least in public) and loved football. Many were not anti-meat or anti-football but were conditioned to believe that both were unacceptably toxic. She was/is stunning but when she insisted on non-vegan and pro-football on her Match profile, she heard crickets. We all thought that was hilarious at the time (the mid 2010s). Uh-oh.. and LOL**
p.s. she changed jobs and now lives walking distance from a famous college FB stadium :)
** I still love going out with tech startup founders who often talk a good game... while munching on a giant cheeseburger :) But I wonder if the startup world (especially wih scaleups) is any different?
I find it hard to understand how you can claim to know so much detailed personal information about people you also claim you have only had brief and surface-level interactions with, particularly the 'man who provides'. A repeated theme of your 'what it's like to date x man' sections is that the men are cagey and refuse to answer any personal questions, that the dates are brief, and that you're treated with suspicion. I am left confused about where your detailed descriptions of their internal experience and life history is supposed to come from, so it's hard not to read the review as pretty baseless fantasising built by free-association from pop-culture clichés. I'm aware that you write at the start that men like to use your dates as pseudo-therapy sessions, but you've made at pretty clear that most of these categories of men do not in fact do that.
For every category, I've been on several dates where men who fit these categories have opened up to me on a very personal level. I've also collected a lot of data from being close friends with many men who fit in these categories, and watching their relationships with their significant others (and often chatting with their significant others as well.)
Certainly not every single date I've been on has resulted in men opening up to an extreme degree. In fact, many are closed off, as I've mentioned. But the signs/patterns become pretty obvious, and even if a man is closed off or cagey, it starts to become pretty obvious that, "Ah, you're probably acting this way because you seem to fall within this general category. Based on my very deep discussions with other people in that category, I have a fairly decent idea of why you're acting dysfunctional right now."
Is my pattern recognition always correct? Absolutely not. But I've also had men share many times that I am eerily good at understanding them in a very short span of time.
Also--I haven't always been good at just walking away when a man is being cagey or disconnected. I used to put a lot more effort into drawing people out of their shells and trying really hard to make them feel comfortable and heard, even if the person was acting dysfunctional. And a lot of times I was successful at this and got excellent, deep conversations from men after some initial pushback. But I no longer do this, because I've realized it often hurts men if they're encouraged to push past their dysfunctional barriers and open up, and then I end up not being interested in dating them. I've realized this sort of deep listening/encouragement is better left to friends or therapists.
Thank you so much for writing this. When I saw the title, I thought I might skip it because it did not seem relevant to my interests, but I've been glued to the screen all the way. I don't live in the US and my experience of course doesn't correspond neatly directly to one of your categories, but I did recognize aspects of my own life in two of them. Your review has given me a new context to think about those issues as well as advice that may prove useful. But apart from that, simply seeing someone talk and care about these problems feels validating. I am grateful that you decided to write this review despite your reservations.
I don't live anywhere near San Francisco, and the author and I would no doubt intensely dislike one another if we somehow met.
Be that as it may, I felt there was a curious omission in the review: namely, the impact of AI girlfriends. The AIs are conspicuously improving at a rapid pace; human women are equally conspicuously not doing so. I literally own a machine that will dispense affection at the push of a button!
Option A: Buy a woman dinner so she will politely tolerate my presence for an hour before ghosting me.
Option B: Spend the same hour (and effectively $0) texting an AI who will never tire of telling me how special I make "her" feel and how happy she is to be around me.
At some point, choosing A starts looking like a mental illness.
He didn't say anything whatever about women having AI boyfriends. If you're going to mock somebody at least get the relevant facts straight before you hock and spit at the person. Otherwise you will sound dumb and meanspirited instead of just meanspirited.
Is that the only quality you want in a woman, that they constantly tell you how happy they are to be with you? I would think you're looking for something more complex - someone with hopes and dreams of their own, someone you can share a life with, perhaps raise kids with. I don't see how a source of on-demand compliments gets you any closer to that.
Like, one of the examples OP gives is a guy who thinks he's doing pretty well, then has some sort of crisis and discovers that he doesn't have any real, close friends who can help him through it, he just has people who go to the same book club or fitness club as him. What's the AI supposed to do to help here? If all he needed was shallow, autocompleted compliments, the book club probably would have been enough.
No, but I am contrasting the AI with Actually Existing Women, who are interested in precisely none of those things, not some Manic Pixie Dream Girl who doesn't exist.
Whatever works for you. Would you consider supplementing the AI with a pet -- some little affectionate mammal? Though their affection is, of course, expressed in much simpler and less articulate ways that an AI's, it is absolutely heartfelt. And you can *feel* that it is.
I don't think the previous maps were that good. Contrary to what many people imagine the past options did not let people self actualize better. Being a soldier was not a viable path to a happy family for most of history (although you would get opportunities to have sex with prostitutes and rape the enemy in ways that are no longer tolerated). The main problem with modern dating is that neither men nor women have a strong incentive to settle for a mediocre marriage where both people are kind of unsatisfied but ultimately kind of happy.
Although some people in the comments are upset at the lack of a map to manhood, if you look at most of the examples from the essay you can see that the problem isn't the lack of a map, the problem is people rejecting the map they are given and the fundamental issue is there cannot be a map that makes everyone happy because different people need different paths to self actualize and the only person who can figure that out is themselves.
That's true if you define "manhood" as "having achieved external conditions X,Y,Z". Which is, granted, a large part of how it was defined historically I think. But if you define it more around "being a person with qualities A,B,C" - which was also a big part of the historical definitions! - then you can do a better job at helping large proportion of people to self-actualize, if A,B,C are defined generically enough to allow customization, and also they are conducive to actually finding your own path in life.
As an example of the first, you can say "real man should protect the weak", but "protecting the weak" may mean either serving in the military, discovering new treatments, or just providing for your family, depending on one's abilities and preferences.
As an example of the second, something like "real man should be agentic and honest with himself" would sure be a good high-level ideal to help people to draw the details of their "map" themselves.
Of course even then these models won't be able to help literally everyone. But helping the majority of people is generally better than helping nobody at all.
[Obviously all of this logic applies to women, I'm just using men as an example because I'm a man myself]
My point is "real man should be agentic and honest with himself" isn't a map you can follow. Even as a goal it's not really better than seek long term happiness (or seek short term happiness). The "Bay Area Map" that is failing most of the men in this essay works for lots of men in the bay area.
Well, fair, it's not a map in and of itself, anymore than the word "Canada" is a map of Canada. It's a skill you should teach as a part of your map/model, but of course you do so by having role models who show how to do it, and texts about how to do it, and whole corpus of cultural knowledge, and ideally also "rituals" (in the broadest sense of the word) which help kids to learn and practice this skill. And by praising kids when they do it successfully, and reproaching them when they underperform in it for their age, and so on.
But it is, fundamentally, a teachable skill to a large extent, and what I'm saying is that if you have this skill as a part of the society-level model of "what it means to be a man", it would help individual people to be able to better figure out their more specific personal models. And I want to emphasize that it's just an example, I'm absolutely not saying this particular skill is all you need, I'm just indicating it as an example of a kind of skill that gets you better at creating a personalized model, or as you put it, at "finding a path to self actualize".
I'm not sure I disagree with you since you are describing a skill that worked well for me but I think it like telling someone the answer is in Canada and more like telling them it is in Timbuktu. I also think the question is for the people who are failing currently, what fraction of them will be helped with this answer (vs requiring a different answer and/or therapy/medication).
This is hauntingly beautiful. Thank you for writing it.
I've had to get good at dating all while trying not to attach positive valence to masculine traits. It's felt like a bizarre game of Taboo. I'm so glad there is a counter narrative picking up steam to help those still struggling.
Pathological empathy is a tool used by the progressive movement as a weapon against any who disagree with their goals or message. Constant appeals to empathy in place of reasoned argument or intellectual discussion on a subject.
Men do not need 'empathy' as that's the very system that's been used as tool of oppression and coercion. Men need to eschew empathy in favor of more direct means of problem-solving. Empathy is what got us here, the last thing we need is more of it.
Re. "There is a large amount of debate about when exactly gender roles evolved, but for at least the past 10,000 years," :
I'm going on a tangent here, but I think it's important. The author was writing about fighting versus motherhood, and those are sex roles which evolved millions of years ago, not gender roles. Much dialogue on "gender" is not about gender roles, but about sex roles, e.g., parental care. This is because the left has adopted the tactic of erasing sex and claiming its territory for "gender". But sex roles are not socially constructed, they're evolved and instinctual; and setting down rules and quotas that assume they're socially constructed will lead to disaster. Wikipedia, "Parental care", says the female does all of the child-rearing in 95% of mammals, the male and female share duties (though not equally) in 5%, and the males do all the child-rearing in 0%. The idea that human women, alone of all mammals, suddenly lost their maternal instincts, or that human males alone suddenly acquired them, is insane.
The only mammalian species which has evolved to have no sex roles is the wolf. Correct me if you know of another.
/Gender/ roles that are different from sex roles seem to be unique to human culture, and very old, but 10,000 years is a good guess. Most non-binary gender roles that I've heard of are either a mixture of the male and female roles (e.g., the Native American "Two-Spirit", though this is now a modern social construction which AFAIK doesn't correspond to any of the historic traditions that have been merged together into it), a role that lets men take on female duties (Samoan Fa'afafine, Zapotec Muxes), or an asexual category (Hijras in India/Pakistan, if I understand correctly). I don't know of any culture that /replaces/ sex roles with gender roles; they distinguish what's governed by birth sex and what's governed by gender role. For instance, the Fa'afafine Jaiyah Saelua plays soccer on Samoa's men's team, not on the women's team; what team you play on is determined by sex, not gender. It is thus incorrect to call Fa'afafine a "third gender" in today's English; male and female are sexes, Fa'afafine is a gender. None of the genders I know of are of the same ontological category as male and female. Genders are /constructed/ from those sexual categories, and/or from spiritual roles which might not be attached to any sex role.
The equivalent of the "which bathroom should a trans person use?" is an instance of the rules on nakedness taboos, which are /probably/ applied to be consistent with the notion of "women's spaces" and "men's spaces", because so many non-Western cultures have spaces other than bathrooms which are reserved for one sex or another. A sexual male with female gender would need to be allowed into female spaces to perform female roles. But I haven't read any confirmation of that; and they might have a different set of rules specifically for urination and defecation.
"Who can I have sex with?" is governed by gender rather than sex in some North American tribes, and in the African Hausa 'Yan Daudu' gender. It's left up to individual preference in some other cultures. I don't know of any cases where it's strictly governed by sex rather than gender, but this may be because anthropologists today specifically set out to find cases where gender governs sex roles.
>The idea that human women, alone of all mammals, suddenly lost their maternal instincts, or that human males alone suddenly acquired them, is insane.
I think that probably 95% of child-raising tasks are not actually instinctual, especially in the modern world. Neither men nor women have instinctual knowledge of how to change a diaper, how to wash and sterilize a bottle, or the 5 S's of soothing a baby. Even breastfeeding isn't really instinctual - my wife had to be taught how to position the baby and how to tell if the baby is latched and sucking properly. (The baby took a few weeks to learn how to latch properly, too!)
I don't think evolution gave us the instincts for specific gender roles in the rigid way you're describing - all it did was give us big brains and the capacity to build societies where these skills can be passed on from one generation to the next. Most societies in the past only taught these skills to women, but there's nothing stopping us from teaching them to men as well.
I didn't describe ANY "rigid way". I'm certainly not talking about instincts to change a diaper. That would be absurd. An instinct to be interested in babies, though--that's something you'll see clearly is more prevalent among women than among men, if you live among humans. An instinct to protect them. Whereas most mammalian males have instincts to care a lot about paternity, and many are hostile or lethal to infants they think are not theirs.
Why on earth would you think all we have is big brains that can be socially conditioned, when literally every other mammalian species except wolves, and including our closest relatives, have clear, programmed, sex-differentiated instincts? What was the evolutionary incentive for humans alone to lose those instincts in a mere 5-10 million years?
The theory that male and female humans have no such instincts is the only theory in the world that is held in high regard even though there is close to zero good evidence /for/ it. Instead, all we have are a lot of unvalidated just-so stories to explain away the mountains of evidence /against/ it.
I said "rigid way" because you seem to think this biological instinct implies rigid social roles - that because Mom is more likely to be interested in babies, she should be the one to raise kids.
I think that's a very strong stance to take based on a fairly mild difference in human nature. Who cares if Mom is more interested in playing with the baby? Baby needs their diaper changed and their bottles washed on a regular schedule no matter how interested you're feeling about them right now, and there's no biological reason Dad can't do those things if that's what's convenient for a modern family structure. Why should we care who's "more interested" if it doesn't affect 95% of the tasks required to raise a baby?
Or to put it another way, "more interested" does not necessarily translate into "more happy about needing to change a diaper at 2 AM." A lot of things in childcare just kinda suck and it seems natural to equally share the suck as much as possible.
First: it's "The New Right" now, not the "alt-right." The "alt-right" was the subculture that developed in 2015/2016 and led to the birth of a new brand of hard-conservative and traditional politics across the West. That new brand of hard-conservative and traditional politics is "The New Right" and includes Donald Trump, red-blooded American citizens, and the popular majority of the country's voters. This is no longer a problem (for you, as far as I'm considered it's a solution) for you to "stop" before it gets out of hand. It's already out of hand. The real question is whether the violent militants of the Progressive Left that have spent the last 30 years destroying gender relations can perform a successful rear-guard action fast enough. Success is where you get to keep the 19th Amendment and banking equality. Failure is if classical liberalism is burnt to the ground by the New Right as it (rightly) identifies egalitarianism as the philosophical source of all these problems.
Second: I notice a lot of "he had top marks and graduated top of his class and went to an Ivy league university" statements in there. This is probably heavy self-selection bias in your own dating pool. The other 99.5% of men who aren't in your dating pool are suffering the same problems but more severely. They're a lot angrier about it too, but can't do much either. Not unless cities start burning to the ground (again). I think it'd be important to remember that not all men graduated top of their class and went to an Ivy League university: many were passed over due to DEI quotas. Many weren't smart enough to make it. Many got tired of the system entirely and left the Left Coast for greener pastures that exist for young men LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE ON EARTH.
Third: There are no men in the cities of California. Only drones and locusts live in their hive cities. Any young man who CHOOSES to live in a Leftist culture like that is hardly a man. There's no way "out" from a place like that; it'll suck you in, chew you up, and leave you dead or a shell of what was once human. There's a reason we're going through a demographic implosion. You're not going to find "good men" or "whole men" in one of the core cities for disgusting leftwing militants. "Good men" don't live in places like that. If you want to find a man who hasn't been crushed by the horrific culture of that place, you'll have to look somewhere else.
A lot can change in a decade, especially when people realize what they can get away with... They might not even need a popular vote in the first place.
This cuts both ways. The right can trigger its own backlash against itself. Certainly I went from going all into anti wokeness to realizing the new right is just as into racism as the woke.
I think they're more inclined to *meaningful* violence. As in, coordinated violence that actually accomplishes something. All the left is capable of doing is unorganized riots. It really helps to have a proper hierarchy.
“There are no men in the cities of California. Only drones and locusts live in their hive cities. Any young man who CHOOSES to live in a Leftist culture like that is hardly a man.”
The evo psych account of gender roles at the beginning seems like a huge generalization or just-so story. For example, I don't think there was such a thing as youth for much of history. As soon as you were able, you had to get to work. Not saying that gender roles didn't exist or that they didn't have a lot of similarities across the board. It just feels extremely fuzzy.
In any case—happily, the fable of what once had been (really, I take more issue with the putative "why") doesn't really seem to have much bearing on what is now missing in mens' lives, which I think the author empathetically and correctly identifies, along with the Byzantine maze of thorns that modern men have to squirm through lest they become socially exiled / unpersoned by what Heidegger would call "the They."
The author probably *should* be a therapist if she naturally elicits such colorful and pathos-riven narratives from near strangers and listens this closely. Guess she already has a good job though.
I've often thought that the testosterone collapse in western society is something that could possibly be traced to cultural change, not just plastic in the water (or sitting down all day). If there are no real strong male role models or credible value systems for men to attach themselves to—all those thoughts or moments of mini-glory that never happen would seem to punch you down on a hormonal level, just as feeling "low status" has measurable biological effects (IIRC). The person is a single system, and nothing happens in a vacuum.
Also, the idea that a therapist would dismiss a "Non" guy's concerns as toxic just seems a little strawmanny. I mean, I know that there are some crappy therapists out there, but that's a whole 'nother level of anything I've run into… that said, I guess I'm basically accusing the author of being a liar, which seems stupid of me. So: fuck all such so called therapists. Just another day of realizing the world has aggressively become more nightmarish and insane since I last checked.
Coda:
I think in the bay, there are these spray painted things on the ground that say "protect yo heart." You definitely have to do that in this world, and maybe always. People like this haven't protected their heart; they let someone else tell them who they are.
But again, I also feel like it's more of a question of meaning (than personal development, strictly speaking). To be a man, it's not enough to be a man: you have to be aimed for something else. I don't mean that your identity is in what you do, but it's in living with an actual purpose. If the culture has nothing to offer in that regard but "optimistic nihilism" or whatever (*reaches for pistol*), then each man has to forge his own truth in its entirety, and that asks too much.
I guess that coincides with what the author is saying. I would just add that role models have to have some specific common factors: not only in themselves, but in what they work towards.
Really, this seems related to the shortcomings of liberalism from a few posts ago. In both cases, I think the solution is to find some common metaphysical ground. It's not likely to happen, but it's necessary.
I also loved the comments, it's almost like the review was a scissor statement, but softer. So many feeling an understanding and many others bewildered or disagreeing, gently.
Thank you for the well written long form content. It's obvious you put a lot of time and effort into both the process of witting this, but also the structure and categories. This was very interesting, but I'm a gen-x male who's been married a very long time and live in the country on the opposite coast of the bay area. When I say this was interesting, it gave me a similar feeling to scrolling through the @AmazingNature twitter feed. Wow, turtles will eat snakes, I never imagined, wow, a man who provides can't seal the deal, I would never have guessed, crazy.
Your essay has had me thinking for the last hour, and well, I'm gen-x, so my memory isn't quite so clear as it was a while ago, but I can think of very few men that I've know who would fit in these buckets. I think from my early years one person I knew would tell stories that sound like he may have been a predator though this was in the age of AOL chat rooms so there wasn't the influencers and videos, just a stray comment from many years ago that I still remember the shape of today. His claim of having sex with a woman he picked up and afterwards he was very hot so he told her to get out of bed and lay on the floor. That bothered me enough that it's stuck with me. I also know of one pereson who I think opted out, but they have a comunity (FIRE) and are "the millionare next door" so it may just be his passion is having a big number in the bank and a woman would be counter-productive to the "goal" , I don't know.
I've talked to and been on some scale of friendship with a great many men, though I have never dated any of them so I could work with some right now and just not know it. Still, OMG, the Malaysian King Cobra is massive! was the same feeling I got from the essay. Well done.
I've found community to be easy, but purpose and passion to be hard. Everyone's different. I think instead of a map of "manhood", too broad a term, I'd prefer a map of how to succeed at those functional areas and others necessary for a whole life.
That's a wonderful post, thank you for writing this! And oh boy, sounds like it really sucks to be a man grown up in the Bay Area. I was lucky enough myself to grow up in a far away country and culture so I didn't/don't have any particular problems with masculine role models. But when I was living in the Bay my dating experience definitely had a lot in common with the Opt Out archetype, not because of a lack of relationship experience in general, but because of lack of it in an English-speaking Western country in particular.
I hope some better male role model will emerge eventually. (A lot of people seem hyped up about stoicism lately, maybe that can be the core around which that model can crystallize?) But realistically, between the woke hating on anything explicitly coded masculine on one side, and the manosphere capturing the audience on the other, I'm rather skeptical.
I quite like this essay, but I think the historical stuff in part II was the weakest part and could be dropped. It makes sweeping claims about history without historical evidence, and to really go into the history would be a distraction - it's not what the essay is about. (It sounds directionally accurate, but still.) Just skip to part IV.
I thought part two was the best part. It also proves the author is a cool girl. Any woman who understands evolutionary psychology and uses it as a window into masculinity is probably a cool girl.
would offer two suggestions that I think would make it more accurate
(1) There is another type, sort of a "beast but not misogynist". A lot of people have found "getting fit" as a _partial_ solution to the problem of "being a man": they're still awkward and lost but at least now they're attractive and physically confident. Also, going through a bodily transformation is a chance to somewhat reinvent yourself mentally, so they get to do one stage of growth for free, meaning they're quite a bit more mature than all the people who have done no stages. These are pretty common. They seem lost also, but can tell that they're doing better than most of the people around them, but they are still not going to ever feel like they're "okay"---more like they're settling for the best life they could find, because no one would show them a better one.
(2) The underlying problem in all of this seems to be a lack of "growth process". How does e.g. the (3) Man Who Opts Out get practice? well, facing their fears and doing the thing enough to get used to it--to no longer cling to their fears from before they did it. This means they need to go _all the way in_ to the new life (dating) and then come out the other side (changed, now experienced and confident about dating). A sort of microcosmic Heroes' Journey. This process however seems to rarely happen: no one encourages or calls on them to go in and no one forces them too, and there's very little in the way of role models that make it seem like the right path. They go on as essentially the same person they were before; and their insecurities come with them. This is basically what's missing: it has become taboo, essentially, to be "called" to go through a process of growth.
To some extent I think this is a result of lax social norms. Once upon a time (I mean, in my imagination, maybe just from movies) your friends would push you to ask people out, take you out dancing when you didn't want to, set you up on dates, expect you to be married, etc. Now everyone is "okay" with everyone else doing whatever they want, but it's more that they're just "private": it's not your business to have an opinion on anyone else's lifestyle or to influence them to change or grow up. As a result, people stay the same for far longer than they were supposed to.
Probably in the past, because survival (in society, or literally in the world, like having to work your farm) was hard, exigency just pushed you into growing up. Now that the world is easy and modern progressive information-worker society is even easier, there's no pressure, so nobody grows up.
Incidentally, my pet theory is that if anyone wants to ever cure all of their psychological problems (although maybe find some new ones on the way): go headfirst into a new life that is uncomfortable and come out the other side. (Doesn't matter what it is, as long as you go in and come out changed. Coming out can always look like "giving up"---but to give up, rather than back out, you have to have seriously tried in the first place). I'd bet that a pretty good model of depression in many cases might be "this growth process is needed but hasn't happened and there is no pressure making it happen and the body basically shuts down because is terrified of staying the same yet can't figure out what to do".
There is no "grow" process, because dating is not an activity where progression is easy. In fact, it seems designed to actively prevent progression. Sport analogies are easy: appart from natural talent, what can you make progress in a sport? It's to practice in low-risks, high rewards situation, where you get immediate feedback from mistakes and quickly learn what improve your performance, with well recognized and enjoyable stepping stones marking your progress, regular enough to keep you motivated.
Dating? No low risk, it cost you money whatever the result, often more money when it fails (many women will just money-press to compensate a bad date and get at least some enjoyment out of it) and can damage your reputation in the dating scene, making further attempts harder.
It's the equivalent of a sport where a failure result in injury. Those sports exists (in fact, I like quite a lot of such sports), but this is at advanced level, this is NEVER part of the learning process.
No clear indication of mistakes, certainly not for the girl you date (even without being ghosted, it's vague platitudes like it's not you it's me) but even "bystanders" (friends, family, society at large) is largely failing to provide any analysis, not even speaking about actionable advises. Very little stepping stone achieving pleasurable goals: traditional dates keep being a affair when man have to prove to a woman: hard work for him in the beginning, pleasure is supposed to come if he's worthy. A little bit like violins (going to musical analogy)....I wonder why guitar, piano or drums are more popular ;-).
Dating is clearly designed to be unenjoyable for most man (which is trivial if you understand it as an exam/test, because the goal is to sort the winners from the losers). Some men (who are especially good at it) enjoy it, but the typical advice "just enjoy yourself and have a good time, that's the key to sucess) is ridiculous for the average man.
In fact, I am especially good at math/physics and indeed, "just enjoy yourself and have a good time" was a good advice for my exams, not that I needed any. But it's not something I would have ever said to 95% of my comrades, it would have been useless or worse, condescending, and they would have been right punching me as a big thank you for this pearl of wisdom.
Most girls apparently do not think it's an exam (for them), they really expect to enjoy it....When they feel it is (rejecting single mothers is the typical failure mode), most think it's completely unfair. It is, sort of, like all exams...and most men understand it because society told them, and they realise it's true when they try.
I was mainly part of the "men who opt out" group, with small exception where "dating" was part of another activity I liked (some sports, mainly). It did not work often (work in the sense I got myself a GF), but at least there was satisfaction in the activity itself. The few time it worked, it was great, but didn't last: probably I was not entertaining and assertive enough out of the activity context....because my other center of interests where even less entertaining to most typical young women than sport, or because the girls saw me in a different context where i was less outgoing and less of a leader.
Now I probably am in a zone between the "men who provide", "man who opt out" (of traditional dating, not necessarily of relations) and a pinch of "manosphere beast": P4S has shifted my young age view that "(pretty) girls are semi-magical being much harder to wow than male friends but their opinion is worth so much more" to a more practical (and I think balanced) "I try to wow this (pretty) girl because I want to go in her pant, nothing more, nothing less - after we may discover we actually get along quite well". Maybe even more than P4S, a few female friends I did not find attractive and getting slightly less timid with age pushed me away from the fairy tale view. I even sometimes flipped the exam and not went to second-date with pretty girls with too much problem attached (debts, kids), it's educating (and not especially enjoyable) to be the examiner instead of the examinee for once....Still, my unicorn-view of timid teenage boy is still there, unfortunately: a (pretty) girl who really seems to like me without having to play the date game (being a mix of entertainer and provider) or P4S tap directly in the little boy who had so much trouble finding a GF. And get huge extra-point. It's bad, because the red flags I pass then will very likely come and hit me later. I know, they have, a few times....
So yes, to summarize, I think traditional dating is damaging for the vast majority of men. Not only it's an un-enjoyable exam who do not dare to say it's name - doubled with an economic value extraction from the tested man, but the fairy-tale view of it, ingrained in most boys from young ages, is detrimental even when you pass the exam with flying colors - it just makes you feel validated which cloud you better judgement regarding the actual value of your potential partner: achieving something difficult can put value in the something - but it's fake value, just like the pleasure you feel after you stop banging your head on a wall is not real pleasure - it's just the absence of pain....
oh yeah, I add (pretty) because girls I do not find physically attractive are out of the possibly-GF, just like men are. They are all in the possible-friend bucket....But experience showed me that most women do not really like to be in this bucket. I had very nice exceptions, but not too many. It's the symmetrical of the (pretty) girl who put you in the fried zone. That's not a nice place to be for a man, a place I now actively avoid (again, this is an advice I would give to my younger self ;-) )
I think you're wildly incorrect about dating not being a growing process. And it's not in any way "unenjoyable for a man", not intrinsically. It's unenjoyable if it goes badly a lot, but that's true for any activity---the question is, if it's going badly, why aren't you doing something about that? It's very easy to get feedback (just ask friends or strangers or people you respect or even the people you go on dates with--just, be sure to get the actual answers, not the initial polite ones). It's very easy to improve (improve your life, get more confident, work out, socialize more, practice, learn to be less boring or more emotionally intelligent get help from others). As with everything, it's trivially easy to get better once the ego is out of the way, but people mostly never get to that state and therefore feel trapped in their present situation.
I do agree that "enjoy yourself and have a good time" is terrible advice. Generally I think that's the advice you get from a person who is nervous to say what they actually think because they think it will upset you. More likely their true opinion is "to be honest, you're an unattractive loser and I don't know why you expect dates to go well without changing that". Probably the advisee knows this already; the advisor is afraid to say it out loud because the person they're talking to is gonna get insecure / angry / hurt / difficult in response to it.
We clearly disagree, but I wonder about the un-enjoyable part:
"And it's not in any way "unenjoyable for a man", not intrinsically"
Is your impression based solely on you enjoying it, or do you have most of your male friend telling you they like to "date"?
I am from Europe, so maybe I do not understand "dating" as I should. For me, it's a 2-person meeting for a short (1-3h) social activity, typically a drink or dinner, where they are supposed to talk a lot, with the (mostly implicit) condition they are both potentially interested in romantic relation in the future if it goes "well", and the 2 person do not know each other well. When it's more than 2 person and/or part of an activity which is not primary social it's then what I would call a semi-date, i.e. a date combined with something else, with the further romantic relation much more hypothetic and deniable by both. it's a spectrum of course, Movie theater is tricky for example :-)
For a real date, I am very typical in my circle of friend or even acquaintance when I know their opinion on the topic. No male friend really like it. The most (romantically) successful of them may not hate it, but it's certainly not their prefered use of time and money. And for most, it's as enjoyable as a job interview. A very similar activity, in fact I had job interview (not first job, but advancement/share participation stuff happening during professional dinner indeed).
And to be extra clear, it's enjoying the date itself. Not the outcome when the date went further (romantic relation, egangement, sex, whatever)...
This pure date, even my succesful (romantically I mean - womanizer you could call them) did not like it, not this kind of date. What they sometimes like is the hunt: hitting on girls in group venue more or less dedicated to that (I guess it's rare nowadays) (bar, nightclub, ....). Not the 2-person drink after a tinder match or chance meetup at a friends bbq....This, some may like the anticipation of what might happen after. Not the stuff itself.
Once again I am brought to wonder if I transitioned to female because I failed as a male. I wonder if things would've gone differently if I'd had a sense of how to become masculine...? I'm not sure.
You know your own experiences best, but I would suggest considering that causality runs in the other direction and you "failed as a male" because of the same internal drives that motivate you to transition. In general, it's easier to do something well if you enjoy doing it, or at the very least don't mind it.
If you ever write about your reflections I'd be interested in reading them. I've heard this from other people, and have noticed there seem to be a lot more m to f transition than f to m. I wondered if that was because there was more openness toward women acting like men while men who failed any aspect of masculinity faced much stricter sanction.
I don't think there's much in the way of good stats more recently than then last decade or so, since you need a large survey to catch a statistically significant number of trans people, and large surveys don't seem to have been asking questions about it until recently, or handle odd ways that are unhelpful for the question at hand (e.g. post-2009 versions of the National College Health Survey which code anyone who self-reports as trans as "unknown" gender).
Best I could find just now was the 2000-2008 National College Health Survey, which offered "transgender* as an option for sexual orientation, which is kinda weird but at least allows tabulation of self-reported transgender identity against self-reported gender. These only yield single-digit or low-double-digit numbers of trans people in any given semester's results (out of about 15k respondants), but reports I have spot checked are often approximately equal between male and female and don't show a clear trend as to which is in the majority.
No idea. No matter how much I felt that I was failing as a male, transitioning never came to my mind, so I am tempted to say that this couldn't be the sole reason. On the other hand, I grew up in a different bubble... no idea what my younger autistic self might have concluded if he was daily bombarded with the message that not being a 100% manly man means that you are trans in denial...
Ultimately, only you have a chance to figure this out.
The carnival of misandry in the NY Times comments section today in response to a very mild editorial expressing concern for men and boys underlines your point
The whole manosphere thing is super odd. If you read about it, it’s a den of toxic woman-hating. But when I listen to people who are mentioned as its leading figures, no lame pick up techniques ever come up.
Are Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Dave Smith, Jocko Willink, Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman and many others not manosphere?
I don't know the proper terminology, but there seem to be two kinds of "groups". The kind of group that is composed of things that are similar to each other. And the kind of group that is a collection of everything that is outside of some group of the former type.
For example, when you say "foreigners", it is group of the second kind. The "foreigners" have nothing in common (except for not being citizens of the same country you are). They can live all over the planet, in wildly different cultures, they speak different languages, have different religions, etc. The word only has a negative meaning, there is no positive substance in it. Except, when the "foreigners" visit your country, then they have one thing in common, i.e. that they are visitors. But otherwise, it is not a description, it is an anti-description.
And it seems to me that "manosphere" is a group that is a little of the first kind (it is focused on men) but also a little of the second kind (it is outside the mainstream narrative, in many ways that are different from each other, often opposed to each other). To start with the obvious, the "pick up artists" are the very opposite of the "men going their own way"; the former build their identity around something that the later give up and build their identity around giving up that.
If we want to talk meaningfully, we need to use more specific words. There are not many things you can say about "foreigners", but there is a lot you can say about e.g. Japan. Similarly, there is not much you can say about the "manosphere", and even using the word is a kind of trap.
> And, like it or not, the core of your identity in modern society still largely revolves around your gender.
I have to stop right here - this does not match my experience at all.
I'm a man in my early 50s. Never got provided by a map to "manhood" by anyone, as you correctly diagnose. That part I agree with. But I also never missed it. The bit about trying to be a decent enough human being stuck and that's what I try to do. Couldn't care less about what "manhood" is supposed to be about.
To be fair, I don't know how much of a choice it is. The existence of trans people tells us that at least for some people, gender identity can be highly salient.
I think what I find so strange in this essay about men is the role of women in her world. I relate equally well to the male categorizations.
I want to be like “the men who are whole” maybe even more than I want to date one. Although, ideally both. Honestly, I see myself being in some way like all of these men… maybe other than the beast. Personally, I find myself relating more to the men in this hypothetical dating world than the women.
This may be narcissistic, but I also think it is a major major problem for her argument. After all, men are defined in opposition to women (as she herself concedes). And frankly, I just don’t understand how women are different than these men. It seems women and all humans face these same trials and tribulations.
This also means that her entire “this is society’s fault” and “what to do about it” section have to be wrong. Or at least not the full story.
Yes, there are a few male-centric issues that she points out— there are less male teachers, divorce is harder on boys because they loose a male role model, men are the butt of a fair amount of jokes these days, making friends as a guy hard (harder? Idk), etc. But I think they are far exaggerated.
I think the real problem is it getting harder to succeed at life economically while still having passions, the internet chipping away all sense of identity, work culture failing to maintain social mobility, and comparisons against billionaires and super models degrading local community and prestige.
If I talked to men and women, I think the issues facing them are more alike than different. Maybe in the San Francisco dating market this is less true due to so many male centric industries that are currently collapsing. But I think on average, women and men face the same societal ills of self actualization while still forging obligations to communities, family, and self.
This is a balance that is infamously hard to strike, from the greeks to 90s rom coms, “the ideal man” always had this balance and it was always a rarity.
Yeah so that is my hot take: these issues have always been here. It has always been hard to be an ideal man and person frankly. And I think it may be getting harder for both sexes due to social issues that are much larger than gender wars.
> It seems women and all humans face these same trials and tribulations.
Do they? For example, are women generally held responsible for providing an income to their family? How much does their income impact their dating opportunities? This is not a minor thing, this is something men spend half of their awake time doing.
It seems to me that there are many differences, especially around dating. But it's not limited to dating per se, because the things you do otherwise can have an impact on your chances at dating (at least if you are a man).
And there is also a lot of what is the same, of course.
> And I think it may be getting harder for both sexes due to social issues that are much larger than gender wars.
Yes, the society is getting more complicated in general.
> How much does their income impact their dating opportunities? This is not a minor thing, this is something men spend half of their awake time doing.
I don’t deny there are differences (of course there are!), but I think the categories laid out in this piece are not representative of those. That is my major problem with it. "The man who is not," "man with a plan," "man who provides," and "man who opts out" have nothing distinctly **man** about them ("the man who is beast" and perhaps "the man who provides" are the closest). But for the most part, these are seemingly existential categories that are an inherent part of the human condition.
Women also have to give up their interests to survive, meticulously run their lives with plans that then prevent them from experiencing life, focus on material metrics for success rather than internal ones, or isolate themselves and tie their self-worth up in work. Or maybe even become whole and find community, self, and purpose.
So yeah, I am not saying that women and men are the same— I am saying that the categories laid out in THIS piece are categories of humans, not men.
>> And I think it may be getting harder for both sexes due to social issues that are much larger than gender wars.
Yup! And I think a lot of gender-specific issues are scapegoats for economic and systemic issues, which are the result of our society and economy being broken for most people.
I'm curious to learn more about the sample size these observations were pulled from. As I was reading, I several times asked myself how many dates I would need to go on to make such detailed general observations. I'm also curious how many men fit into each category, or how many were not easily categorized. And how you met each of them.
One need not be a Joe Rogan. One can be a Jeremy Clarkson. Or a Richard Hammond. Or even a James May. There's loads of examples of positive masculinity, and that's just one show.
None of these seem like especially positive examples to me. Even staying with people in arts and entertainment of a similar generation, Charlie Brooker, Joel Coen, David Bowie, Alfonso Cuarón, or David Lynch all seem to be better examples.
I'd prefer model of masculinity more focused on believing things that are true and less on uncritically repeating pseudoscience and conspiracies tbh. Rogan has always struck me as oddly passive in that regard
Then why are religions typically started by men (and maintained by women)? Why were pre-20-century professors male? Is theory of relativity or quantum physics something that sounds feminine to you?
I'd say that men are more extreme-oriented, some find their outlet in action, some in thought; and women are more consensus-oriented.
"What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? [...] faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead." (Paul writing to James)
So maybe a more precise way to put it is that belief and action are naturally connected. You think that something is right -- you do it.
As opposed to merely saying the right words in order to achieve social harmony.
Now I wonder how much of the schools focusing on "memorization" is a result of teachers being mostly women. As opposed to doing experiments, figuring things out, learning processes, etc.
Also, how math feels male-coded, because it is not enough to memorize the rules; you actually have to *use* them (even if using them is an abstract action). And saying the right words will not save you if your results are numerically wrong. As opposed to e.g. sociology that a properly trained LLM would pass if it can reproduce the right vibes.
You're right on with the faith/belief to action connection contrasted with words as social harmony creator
My guess is that memorization is actually on the decline, though, at least the type that can be graded objectively. Multiplication tables and phonics are specific examples where there has been push back over the last 20-30 years despite memorizing those being obviously good for taking action.
A lot of people are crying “holy shit — one of those Categories of Lostness describes me to a t.” I think there’s a Barnum Effect going on here. Many people, maybe most, struggle to meet opposing family and societal expectations, or expectations that are not a match with what they really yearn for. Many people go through periods of feeling lost and aimless, and confused about what they really want. Once out of college, where everybody within a mile radius is a possible friend or lover, many people are lonesome and have no peers to confide in and turn to for support. Many people give up for a while on striving for a certain thing. Some give up forever — and for some of those, giving up on the striving is the right decision — and some who gave up are surprised by having the longed-for thing tumble into their lap unexpectedly a few years later. These experiences aren’t Dilemmas that Torture Modern Males, they’re just a part of life in our era, at least of life in our era in a democracy for people middle class or better.
The whole way through I was thinking that a lot of women share these same types of malaise. I think there's a broader issue of society failing everyone in various ways, with sex being a force multiplier for some of them.
I have never felt as understood by anyone as I did from reading your steps to be a man. The steps for being a man are so stressful, contradictory, and unrewarding, that for two years, I tried to stop being a man. This is happened despite the fact that I was a staunch conservative. I told my wife I wanted to be a woman or non binary, and wasn’t sure which, and nearly lost my marriage in the process. I did not feel like I was a woman, but I would have given anything to stop being a man.
The only thing that pulled me out of the gender dysphoria was becoming a father. I hated the script we give men and husbands, but I loved the script we give fathers. For the first time in my life, I started to feel like I could meet the masculine standard and would be rewarded for doing so. Thank you for putting this into words.
Great point! The father role has much more flexibility in it; it feels less like a caricature. You can be a leader of your "tribe", but you are also allowed to be sensitive and helping.
And I think that the proper way to recover healthy masculinity is to take the father role and extend it. Become the kind of patriarch your human tribe needs you to be!
(The technical problem is that many boys grow up without fathers, so they have no idea what we are talking about, until they get to that role themselves, and maybe even then they will do it badly.)
Most of the "something-Right" ideas are just a mirror image of wokeness. You fundamentally accept the feminist characterization of men as violent dumb brutes, only instead or rejecting it, you embrace it. That doesn't make you less of an idiot, it only makes you an idiot of a different flavor. It's not just the feminists who will hate you; your own children will probably hate you too. Which ultimately makes it a self-defeating strategy.
Thank you so much for writing this! We, as a society, really need to be having a dialogue about this. I can't make broad generalizations, but I'd like to add my personal experiences as a data point:
I'm approximately "The Man Who Opts Out": As a kid, I was very smart but also very awkward. I think I'm probably autistic. Today I'm an attractive, wealthy, and successful 30-year-old, with a good circle of friends. But I have little romantic experience, and I struggle with self-esteem when dating.
I also have a bit of "The Man Who Provides": I'm talented and passionate in my STEM career and hobbies. I'd like to find a partner who shares those interests, or who is equally talented and passionate about her own interests. But a lot of women on dating apps don't really seem to show the same type of talent or passion, and I don't know how to relate to that, so I swipe left. I've met some very cool women IRL in STEM-focused spaces, but it's Frowned Upon for men to hit on women in STEM spaces, and I never figured out how to navigate that.
What would help men like me? Let's talk through the various solutions you mentioned:
- Structured therapy or psychiatric treatment? No luck... I tried several different therapists. They gave me the standard drugs and CBT for depression, and it didn't work. I might need some kind of specialist therapist, but I don't know how to find one. Which is weird, because people like me are common enough to be a "type"; why isn't this a well-paved path?
- Growing my social life? I have a good circle of friends, but they're mostly STEM men or those mens' partners, and many of them are socially awkward or not conventionally attractive. So that's not very helpful for my self-esteem, and it's hard to use those friendships to prove my viability as a partner. Sometimes I think I should try to make new friends who are more socially adept and attractive, but that idea makes me feel like an asshole.
- Rip off the bandaid and work on overcoming my trauma? I did... Ever since I was a teenager, I've been alternating between "working on overcoming my trauma" and "giving up in exhaustion". I've made some progress, but it's been fifteen years and my self-esteem issues are not yet solved.
- Better role models? Yes. When I was a kid, my parents and teachers praised me for being smart and well-behaved, and they didn't seem worried that I was socially awkward. So, it's no surprise that I ended up smart and well-behaved and socially awkward. I wish I'd had more positive role models for how to be both nerdy and also sociable.
- Specific, understandable "dos"? Yes! Particularly around dating and romance. Socially awkward men have been pleading for this for years, e.g. Scott Aaronson's "comment 171". Please give me clear instructions for when and how it's OK to ask women on dates in STEM-focused spaces. And, crucially: Please give me an assurance that if I follow those instructions and a woman gets mad at me, then she's the one in the wrong.
- Stigmatize sexist behavior towards men? YES. PLEASE. Casual misandry on social media, especially towards nerdy awkward men, did enormous damage to my self-esteem. This stuff became widespread riiiight as I was starting to come out of my shell as a teenage boy. I saw women on the internet saying hateful things about men, and so I feared that the teenage girls in my school probably thought those same things about me.
- Remind men of their worth? Yes. I'm far less successful than average at dating, but far more successful than average in my career. Polite society seems to think my dating failures are because I suck, but my career successes were handed to me on a silver privilege platter. That seems like a double standard. It would be nice if more people would say "hey it's really awesome that you're so talented at your job", instead of resenting my success.
- Encourage men to discuss the issues they face, and listen to them? Yes. It's the only way to make progress on the above. Of course, it needs to be a dialogue! We need to bring together mens' perspectives and womens' perspectives.
- Openly acknowledge biological differences? Ehhhh. I don't feel super attached to traditionally masculine personality traits. Rather, I feel like I'm different on some other axis (probably autism...)
- One more I'd add: I really wish women would ask men on dates more often. I have a lot of trouble asking women on dates. If women were asking me on dates instead, I think I'd have a much easier time. But most women don't ask men on dates.
Do you mind if it is less attractive women who do the approaching? Anecdotal reports suggest that men really really don't like it when unattractive women do the asking.
Unfortunately, the only cure I know for lack of self-esteem is just plain doing more of the thing you suck at. It sucks that dating doesn't generate enough of a positive feedback to keep the process enjoyable compared with excelling in your career. Alas this is life, you take risks, and you keep shooting your shots.
Man who opts out, checking in. Thanks for writing such an insightful piece-- you've got some inner Dostoyevsky! In the good timeline, our culture deeply absorbs what you've written here.
On opting out, yeah it's a tough cycle. I suppose I wouldn't say I opt out exactly; I would happily date, but there's so few opportunities. This is part of the broader trend of friendships being hard to find and grow; if our culture has stronger in-person social networks then finding dates would be much easier. Apps are a waste of time for men unless they're exceptionally good looking. You shouldn't ask out your apartment neighbors cause if it doesn't work out then it'll be awkward. Asking out women at meetups and hobby groups or fitness classes is usually a bad idea because again, if it doesn't work out then things will be awkward. Other women will see she turned you down, so they'll tend to- at least subconsciously- see you as a bit of a loser, and she might just tell the other women at the group that you're weird and dumb or creepy. If you do this once or twice in a group then maybe it's fine, but if you ask many women put them you'll definitely develop the reputation of a creeper. Same with coffee shops and bars that you frequent. People at bars and concerts don't mingle between groups; everybody hangs out with the folks they came with. Plus, since she's a woman and you're a man she doesn't know, she usually automatically assumes you're dangerous and bad, and you need an unusual amount of charm to clean this hurdle.
Without a large community where people know each other and can vouch for you, and where you can demonstrate your good qualities that aren't immediately obvious in five minutes of small talk, without communities like that it's just really difficult to find any dates at all.
Lots of people are still pairing up, of course. And lots of them aren't doing this through apps. So obviously it's more than possible to find dates and find a relationship. My guess is these folks are just some combination of naturally extraverted and lucky enough to find themselves embedded in thriving in-person social networks. If you're introverted and socializing drains you, then you have to swim against the current to build and sustain these in-person social networks, when there's so many books you'd rather be reading in the evenings.
Anyway, this is all just to say that for many people, there's a lot of friction to finding any potential partners at all.
In the rare cases where I do find myself dating a girl for a couple months, my lack of experience with romantic relationships is a hurdle, mainly because I'm not sure how much communication is too little or too much. On one side you're distant and the relationship goes nowhere, and on the other you're needy and clingy. I'm naturally kinda guarded, and I know that women tend to really not like needy men, or men who are too available too quickly, so I probably am too distant to develop the relationship, so it fizzles out.
If/when I get into a relationship that really takes hold and launches, then I expect I'll have a puzzle about how to approach emotional intimacy, again not sure how much is too much or too little. I'll definitely lean towards not opening up, because to a large extent opening up emotionally is synonymous with revealing insecurities and anxieties, which are just fundamentally unattractive in men. All women want their boyfriends/husbands to open up about *some* of their insecurities, anxieties, sadness, etc. But I'm very confident that most women would be turned off if they knew all or the majority of their boyfriends'/husband's emotional weak points. Strength and competence are attractive in men, and emotional weakness is the opposite of that. So I think in most cases, men just really can't fully open up emotionally in their relationships. And knowing/believing this, I'll hold back if and when I find a serious relationship.
This is getting to be a long comment, and I'm on mobile and my food is ready, so I'll leave it at that.
Very much appreciate the article you wrote! It's well written and extremely insightful.
Wonderfully written and insightful, that was a delight to read, and it made me feel seen, as a male Bay Area online dater (it would be amusing if we actually bumped into each other and I was part of the data set for this post!).
I am and have been both a Man Who Is Not and a Man Who Provides at different times in my life, and there were bits of other archetypes that I could identify with as well.
Could really relate to the feeling of being lost and lacking a script, even as a generally-high-functioning and somewhat-accomplished-looking person. The founder melt-down and identity crisis is very relatable. The "if only I perform well and look impressive I will get a pat on the back and love" bit as well, including the part where you don't know what you actually want the whole time, you're just executing the success script until you burn out and suddenly end up with no meaning or purpose, stumbling around in life with little to look forward to except for more confusion and lack of answers. You go on a date and you have no plan in life, no path, no motion towards something, you're comfortable, but you have no idea what you're doing next. That turns out to be pretty off-putting.
It was refreshing to read the experiences of someone who was able to go beyond the judgment and castigation towards a deeper understanding of male struggles, as first world as they might be.
A very general thing that occurs to me when reading this: As a society, we pretty much give the megaphones to the very worst people with the very worst values and most destructive messages. And a lot of the pathology you're talking about here (which echoes Scott's Radicalizing the Romanceless and Scott Aaranson's writing about struggling with sexuality and manhood in his youth) falls out of that fact.
The reality is no one cares, and no one is coming to save you. Your worth is in what you can do and provide. Life owes us nothing, and we deserve nothing. Anything we gain in life will require work, years and years of work to achieve. Even then, you can lose it all at any time. Men have to learn to endure or die; that is the reality.
> The best I can do for these men is recommend they join communities where genuine emotional bonds can be forged. These still exist, although they’re frighteningly hard to find in modern society
I'm really, really impressed by your writing here, whoever you are. Your descriptions of these types of men, and what it is like to date them, are very detailed and in-depth.
Every time I discover a piece of content that stimulates me, that I find valuable, mature, empathetic, insightful or impressive in some other way, I try to imagine what the day-to-day thoughts and feelings and sensations and experiences of the author are: "How could they produce this particular sentence, this particular paragraph, this particular text?"
Your text here caused that in me: "What kind of experiences did this person have? What is that person like? I'm curious!"
Anyway, besides my appreciation of the writing itself: Thank you for writing this. This has been insightful. I particularly enjoyed how you combined all your experience with insightful observations and a huge dose of empathy.
The problem with women analyzing us is you always do it in relation to you and your needs. If you want us to be whole, it's because it's good for you: you can finally date the unicorn you chase for so long. Dating brings up the specter of that, and it poisons things.
your examples are ok, but too much of our problem is how much of our worth is given by you. Most men's value is based on having a woman, to the point incels get depressed over that to the point of excluding any other source of value, and insulting men is done by attacking the lack of values they have that attracts them.
Somehow we exist in a paradox of being ourself and yet making ourselves attractive to you, and its not a good thing. I don't know if there is a neutral state where you like us for us-a lot of those guys are doing things for you: not because they want to-be red pill, not be a starving artist, mastering relationship expectations or the woman ditches them...
idk the answer. i opted out and Bertie Wooster is my model I guess. He likes women, is a critic of them but doesn't hate them but the last thing he wants is to pair his life with one: he just wants to have fun with the good life, and his man jeeves has his back. not one everyone can do though.
Ask Jeeves being one of the first search engines feels fitting here.
I'm not sure unreality helps. The entire vtuber industry is all about providing a cute hybrid real/virtual girl to simp for, and its startlingly effective. Bertie needed jeeves to reign him in as much as anything.
The author has good intentions, but the angle of this article (from the direction of pity) and subsequently all policy proposals will never work. They almost feel like a recreation of a traditional society, sanitized of every aspect that’s politically incorrect, a recreation of tradition in the 21st century. Well, I don’t think men were very happy and fulfilled in a traditional society either. I think the incel of the modern world (with abundant access to high quality pornography and strip clubs) is probably happier than the average patriarch of the ancient world with his prude moralizing wife, 3+ kids to feed and extended family to talk to daily.
What’s true, which the author realizes and people are starting to realize now is that without that tradition a large percentage of men start opting out, to the detriment of society. I have a lot of incel friends, and been a part of many incel chat groups, and what you’d imagine - resentment, disaffection, hate is not nearly as prevalent as you’d think. That’s just a small vocal minority. What actually is common is just a pernicious sense of apathy, weariness, and indifference. You swipe on the apps, maybe go on some dates, but maybe none of the dates are even half as cute as the girls you see on TikTok, forget pornstars and you just let things fizzle out. In fact to this population, the girl has to make it extremely easy, to make it a relationship, or she has to be an absolute 10/10 to rile him up. Eventually this apathy continues till his 30s, at which point if you’re a well off Bay Area Engineer, some girl will eventually chase you down and you won’t put up much of a resistance and get married.
Nowadays even in thirties, men seem to be opting out. I frankly don’t think this has anything to do with feminism, we could invert it tomorrow, have every girl bow in respect to every man who passes by her and I don’t think this will increase the enthusiasm to get hitched. Sometimes I think, this is all due to internet, before the village man could go his life never looking at beautiful girls, now from a young age he can see the crème de la crème and suddenly the prospects he has don’t seem all that enticing.
But while this might partly be true, I think this is not the driving force. The driving force is that the modern world is being increasingly experienced as an absurd and meaningless experience. Thousands of pundits, have given their explanations, the lack of god, too much comfort, too much freedom etc, and at this point even these explanations are becoming tired and I won’t rehash them except to say that what we have is no small problem. Once a society reaches this state, it is probably irreversible and can only lead to the birth of something new. In fact, if the civilization vital energy is to be reclaimed and men are to start pursuing women for families again, my modest policy of strapping healthy 18 yr old to rockets and trying to colonize Mars is the only one that has a chance of working I think.
Seeing attractive people on the screen creates unrealistic expectations for both men and women. Men expect a nymphomaniac porn star. Women expect a billionaire vampire. The reality disappoints. The women sometimes settle for a non-billionaire non-vampire when they hear the biological clock ticking. Sometimes.
What I find fascinating is that some of the attractive women who have rejected me many years ago are still single, and now they are also approaching fifty, so I think that if they ever wanted to have a family, that option is probably not on the table anymore. And they don't want to remain single; they keep complaining about that. It's just, they can't meet a man whom they would consider their equal. From their perspective, all men who were interested in them were losers. (Logically, that would include me. I could be offended, but I remind myself that I found a partner later; it's they who did not.)
I also know some men who are alone, and don't want to be, who at some moment had a woman interested in them, but for some reason she was not good enough.
I guess some people do not understand the concept of the fair price on the dating market. The best you can get is, by definition, the best you can get. If you want better, you should work hard to improve yourself, and you should socialize a lot more, because to some degree it's a numbers game. But once you have met, dunno, hundred or thousand potential partners, then the best of them probably *is* your equal, whether you believe it or not; the market has spoken. And if you are a woman past 30, or a man past 40, you are not getting more attractive; you are just getting older. Take the best option you have, or choose to stay alone forever; anything else is probably wishful thinking.
By the way, I believe that it is a better choice to stay alone, if the alternative is e.g. to be with an abusive person, or a drug addict, or someone like that. Some people have a negative value. But many of the lonely people I know had an option to be with someone of a positive value, they just believed that they could do better. They believed wrong.
I think it would be an interesting exercise for everyone to make two columns: on the left side, put the positive traits you require your hypothetical partner to have; on the right side, put the positive traits *you* have. If the left side is like 10x longer than the right side, that explains why you are still single. :D
It probably works better if you let them fill in the left side *before* you tell them what will be on the right side. Also, if they start padding the right column with "obvious" things such as: I don't do drugs, or I have never murdered anyone, remind them to also put those things to the left column.
In reality, I think your right column should probably even be slightly *longer*, because people are often not perfectly aligned: you can have a positive trait that your partner does not particularly care about. For example, I am proud of my math skills, but my wife does not care about that. So from her perspective, my list of good traits has one item less than it has from my perspective.
>I think the incel of the modern world (with abundant access to high quality pornography and strip clubs) is probably happier than the average patriarch of the ancient world with his prude moralizing wife, 3+ kids to feed and extended family to talk to daily.
It's interesting to see this taxonomy, as one of the people it ought to cover, and clearly fall through the cracks. I am somewhat like an 'Is Not', but a little like 'With a Plan', especially when my job's going well. Look at my youth and I'm clearly 'Opts Out,' except that I had no *desire* to date, and then I did, ultimately, manage to (want to, and successfully attempt to) date in college, and then after I left that city for the Bay. I found a community, but then it drifted away (mostly COVID's fault but it was already starting beforehand), and a job, despite serious psych issues, but now I don't have one. Meet me at a meetup or, probably, at a date, and I'd sound much more like the Man With a Plan, except I always knew I didn't have a plan. (It cuts just as deep not to have one, I'm just more used to it.)
On the other hand, I haven't tried to date in years either. I'm polyamorous, but have only a secondary (tertiary?) relationship. I suspect if I said 'NVM I'm going to try monogamy' our relationship would be basically unchanged. I haven't tried to find a primary, because... I'm underconfident, mostly.
Maybe call it another category - The Man Who's Waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring... Or things not mentioned by Dr. Seuss. Waiting for something to make them feel ready to try again. For their job to go well so they're not embarrassed to talk about it, or to get a little better in shape, or for their hobbies to be exciting and a good topic of conversation, or, or, or. Maybe he's looking for a better way to find people than swiping, or maybe he's recognized social media and Youtube are terrible for him and receded from the world instead. He hasn't given up, or at least tells himself he hasn't. Probably he doesn't burn with desire for kids, so the pressure to start trying is weaker - it gets harder every year, but not *that much*.
I know a few others of men like this. The youth varies a lot from mine; college tends to be similar, an academic field (usually Math or Physics, sometimes CS) picked because it was appealing, and seemed like it wasn't *useless*, and then wasn't content with academia (sometimes because it kinda sucked, sometimes because LW pointed out that academia was a trap and he believed them), got a programming-like job which kinda worked for him, but not that well.
Though despite having just written a long comment in response... I don't actually think this post is much good. It's a perspective I'm interested to hear, but executed not so well. I found myself skimming repeatedly, because I wanted to get to the next idea and there were extra paragraphs that didn't convey anything new.
This was 15,200 words. I think it would have made a good 8000-word post, and possibly an excellent 5000-word post. At its actual length it's thought-provoking but mediocre.
Pleasant to read overall (of course it is, there's a significant amount of "The Man who Opts Out" that I recognize in myself, to the extent that I expect some Barnum effect to be going on - although I have not yet felt an urge to opt back in), but I think I disagree with this suggestion:
> Polite society needs to get better at saying, “Men are hurting, and we care about their specific needs, and we want to hear from them and make things better for them.”
"Polite society" has worn as luxury beliefs positions on racial, environmental, economic issues, issues of political polarization and who knows what else for a while now, and produced what is probably in the order of terabytes of written, filmed and spoken material in the process. I cannot point to any tangible impact on any of these issues that resulted from this material. So I very much doubt that making it adopt "healthy approach to manhood" as the next fashionable thing to care about will make any difference.
If anything, I think realizing that polite society is not the entirety of the idea-space around things and going foraging for ideas elsewhere (not necessarily in the alt-right/manosphere, which I agree with the author are cesspools) is an important part of intellectually maturing.
As a man who has managed to attain wholeness but might well not have, and as the father of a tweenage son whose social future I worry about, I found a lot to chew on here. Thanks.
I will say that my own path to wholeness feels so idiosyncratic, and so dependent on both my unusual-for-men personality traits and my unusual-for-anyone socioeconomic privileges, that I have hesitated to give any advice to others on it-- my son being the exception who proves the rule. There are specific mechanical "life hacks I wish I had known about as a lonely teenage boy" posts I could write, but most of what has been really important to me seems very hard to generalize. But maybe I am underestimating what I have to teach, and that is worth chewing on.
A serious question: Re. "The fact is, men enjoy some privileges that women do not in Western society." What are some of these privileges? They certainly aren't in college admissions, or the job market, or the publishing industry, or the dating scene, or courts of law.
- you don’t need to be perpetually concerned with and take precautions against being physically harmed or killed by the opposite sex in many many casual situations you, as a man, don’t think twice about
- On a similar note: adventurous experiences are much more available to you. Like, you can decide to backpack through India and whatnot; and while it is somewhat dangerous, you do not remotely face the odds of rape/harm/murder a woman in a similar position does
- if you are stupid or unlucky with birth control, you are not stuck with the prospect of either going through awfully grueling physical process or ending the pregnancy (during which process you may be harassed and or harmed by various ‘pro-lifers’ ) - whatever other effects it may have on your life
- growing up, very very few career plans you may have would raise eye-brows or face scepticism (yes, we all can think of a couple examples, but nowhere near what girls do)
- in terms of getting into having kids or settling down with a partner, you have many many more years than a woman does to even decide if you want that
- if you exhibit minimal caring/responsible behaviours (care about and connect to your kids, cook, clean..), you are applauded to the moon and back (guess what women get for the same)
- you don’t deal with like a milk glass of blood slowly draining from your body every single month for decade. Imagine what that would be like and how it would affect the ease of doing things.
I could go on but I trust you get the gist.
This current trend of male self-pity is quite reminiscent of the ‘man-flu’ situation the author derides as fictional (except it is not, ask a straight female friend with a partner).
Thank you. That is a valid list, but I don't see it as adding up to men being privileged on net. The significant disadvantages you list all have parallels for men. As a man,
- you must be perpetually concerned with a false rape charge, which is very likely to lead to conviction, and which carries a life sentence in 6 states and a very long sentence in most
- you are much more likely to be harassed by dangerous men trying to prove how tough they are, and are 3.7 times as likely as a woman to be murdered
- you are expected to stand up to such harassers, but much more likely than a woman to be sent to prison if you do
- if stupid or unlucky with birth control, or trapped by a woman claiming to be on birth control who isn't, will be stuck with being forced to support a child you don't want, or don't get to see except on weekends, if your partner wants to keep it
- growing up, /most/ of your career plans raise eye-brows or face skepticism because they're for occupations in which you wouldn't make enough money to support a family by yourself; you eventually have to take a high-paying job that you hate just to get a date
- need much more time to settle down with a partner than a woman does, because it takes a typical man many times as long to find someone willing to date him than it takes a woman to find a man willing to date her. It's common for a man to go years without a date despite spending hours each week trying to get one, or to be a virgin throughout his twenties despite spending much of his free time trying to lose that virginity.
The remaining privileges that men have aren't negligible, but if the worst of them is not having to put up with menses, I don't see it as summing up to more than the privileges women have. The privilege to deny being privileged is one of them that I'd like.
True enough. I vividly remember a male friend telling me what it’s like: to know that if things really go south he is “expendable cannon fodder” in a number of scenarios; trying to date as a short guy (he’s very cute but very short indeed), and the pressure to make money. Now, menses and pregnancy are no joke; I doubt you’d seriously consider it a reasonable trade off for a man’s life if you could actually know what it’s like. However, given that i would not want to wake up a man, I guess ai have to agree with you on the net balance.
it sucks for everyone honestly, i think men only get mad because people think we have it totally better. Just we hide it more sometimes. Some stuff i carry to my grave.
i wish we could all make life suck less for each other.
I countered a man who was complaining about women being allowed to wear lighter weight clothes in summer by pointing out that men could wear warmer clothes in winter. (This would would have been about 1980.)
The main disadvantages men have, as I see it, are:
- being told to go to the end of the line in college applications, job applications, grant applications, manuscript submissions, and every other selective process other than the selective service
- having to flirt with one hundred to one thousand women to get one date, and risk being seen as a toxic, aggressive male every time the answer is "no"
- being the only one in a heterosexual relationship who risks condemnation or even a rape accusation for escalating too rapidly, in a society which condemns every successful male role model for escalation, AND YET always being required to be the one who initiates contact and escalates at every step
But possibly the worst problem men have is living in a society which will put you in prison if you ever try to live up to its standard of manliness. I've stood by and watched helpless people being abused more times than I care to admit, because the legal standard in the US for self-defense is that you can't claim defense of others unless the abuser always escalates the violence first. And the nature of street fights is that the person who escalates the violence first, wins. So good Samaritans either lose, or go to prison. Every time it happens, it destroys me.
I stood by and watched one skinny teenager terrorize an entire DC streetcar, especially a quadriplegic girl whose family watched while he towered over her immobile body menacingly. I could have crushed him with one hand, but I knew that if I did, the next day's newspapers would say "White man beats up black teenager". I knew he might have a gun; I knew some of the other teenagers on the car might be his friends; I knew I wasn't legally allowed to touch him as long as he didn't touch anyone else. I saw 4 policemen boarding the next car down, trying to apprehend /another/, unrelated teenager who was at the same moment terrorizing /that/ car. I ran out and told them we needed one of them in our car. They ignored me, and the train pulled out of that station while I was still on the platform. I never found out what happened.
I stood by in a traffic jam and watched a young man jump out of his car and run over to scream violent threats at an old lady of about ninety for over a minute because she honked her horn at him. I bet she never drove that car again.
I stay awake at night watching replays of victims I didn't save. I cannot be a man here. I cannot respond quickly to danger with confident action, because society will destroy me if I do. And after enough times of not doing so, I can't. You can't just choose to be brave after a lifetime of cowardice. The inner spirit is gone. By the time I realized life as a coward isn't worthwhile, my body was too old and broken to change.
And the kicker is, the heavy legislative hand that is trying to protect people by reserving the use of violence to the state, is making those people more vulnerable. There were dozens of other people in that streetcar; not one of them said a word to the boy as he marched up and down the car threatening them. Dozens of able-bodied men sat in that 4-lane traffic jam and watched with me as that young man terrorized that old woman.
Yeah, self-defense is legal in theory, but the actual window where you can defend yourself is impractically tiny. You have to be physically attacked first; but the person who gets physically attacked first usually loses the fight. Plus you never know whether the other person has a knife or a gun, in which case the first successful attack could mean it's game over for you.
A possible solution is to have a *group* of good Samaritans. One gets attacked, the others finish the fight. But unless you are traveling with your friends, it is difficult to coordinate this; the other men will probably chicken out.
Besides which, even if you have a clear case of legal self-defense or other-defense, you're still likely to be charged, and the legal costs may bankrupt you even if you win. AFAIK the only way to try to get compensation from the state if you were charged but not convicted is to charge the prosecutor with malicious or selective prosecution, which requires proving that the prosecutor had ulterior motives.
These are parallels, but I wouldn't say they're symmetrical. E.g. getting raped seems rather more intense than a false rape allegation, although both can be life-changing.
It's true that being a man places me in considerable relative danger, but it also gives me a propensity to seek out or provoke dangerous situations. Certain jobs come with a risk of being mangled, like mine, but maybe it's worth it not to rot behind a desk.
I don't think it's possible to find the conviction rate for false rape charges, because no one can know what they are. But I think it's more than 50%, from my sample size of 1. I sat in on one rape trial, in which there was no evidence that a rape had occurred, and a great deal of evidence that it had not; and it resulted in a conviction. So my estimate of expected prison time served for a false charge is 10 years * ((1+1) / (2+1) ~ 7 years (Laplace smoothed), depending on the US state, which is definitely worse than being raped.
Another angle is that men are at some risk of getting raped-- possibly les risk than women, but if they are raped, it's very unlikely to be taken seriously.
I was very confused on being notified of your comment, because I typed in nearly those exact words a few days ago, then never posted them.
I never posted them because trying to delineate biological things from social things turns out to be tricky, because society is biologically constructed.
It is ironic that the woke movement, which wants to simply replace the word "sex" everywhere with "gender", is also the movement which virulently opposes sociobiology, the science of how biological evolution guides the evolution of society. You can't say a sex is a gender unless you believe that society = biology; but to do that, you have to believe either that society is biologically constructed (which they won't), or that biology is socially constructed (which would be insane).
1. on the other hand, you as a woman will never be asked to fight, be it to prove your womanhood, or to defend your mate, or in war. You are not disposable and will never be accused of cowardice.
you will never be seen as a threat and shunned because you are the wrong color or size or happen to be strolling at the same time a woman is.
2. the amount of men who do this are tiny and this is a woman error thinking we like doing it alone because you want to do so.
you want it? ok, the price of that freedom is no one will hug or touch you for periods of five years.
3. women get custody so we can see you take our kids away and poison their minds against us after a divorce, and the woman needs to be visibly crazy or totally uninterested to change that. when it goes bad it goes bad for everyone, in different ways.
4. that lack of choice had upsides too. I went to technical school and everyone, male and female, tried every vocation for their first year. All the women chose hairdressing, drafting, and graphic design. Putting on a welding mask strips a lot of illusions for both men and women.
a lot of what men did they had to, its not a choice they'd wish on people.
5. we have a five year gap on you unless we are exceptional, and that is balanced by the fact we have to prove worthy. women suffer from too much attention, men suffer from none at all.
6. no one looks at your job or bankbook to see if you are worth it. no one judges a woman by what car she owns, what career she is in, or how successful she is.
7. yeah it sucks, but you will also outlive us significantly in revenge, and men often die horribly. every male in my mother's family died ten years or more before their wife, and many didn't go out well or lucid
we kind of pay for it in the final stretch. My job made me aware of it: you know an older couple, or male patrons, then one day the wife is pushing them in a wheelchair due to dementia.
life is hard for us guys too: you only idealize the good parts you see us have. Its a lot more mixed but we hide it better from you.
I think, on reflection, that the real problem is not to measure privilege more precisely, but that we need to stop using that word. It's always used as a binary: someone IS or IS NOT privileged. And then that judgement is used to make a binary decision: someone IS or IS NOT allowed to speak, on any political subject, even one which has no relevance to their particular form of privilege.
Since Trump was elected again, I've been arguing with a lot of Marxists who are agitating for a civil war in one of my online communities. One of their favorite tactics is to dismiss everything I say because I'm "privileged", even though these guys are also white males, and most of them make a lot more money than I do. All they have to do is say the word "privileged", and then everyone pretends I'm a racist misogynist hater of immigrants making big bucks at an evil corporation. The only evidence needed to make the label "privileged" stick is that a person opposes Marxism.
That's why I'm so sensitive to being called "privileged". I wouldn't mind admitting that, yes, I have some privileges, if doing so didn't mean I immediately lose my right to speak.
One of the many people who wrote that my opposition to bloody revolution proves that things are working fine for me, therefore I'm privileged, therefore I'm secretly a far-right white supremacist, is a white male middle manager for a huge corporation and makes at least 5 times as much money as me. The word "privileged" now means someone who opposes Marxist economics and Marxist violence. Rich white Marxist corporate managers and department chairs who want revolution are not privileged; poor people who oppose Marxism or civil war are.
I can't tell what you mean to say. Whose privilege framing? Also, "framing" is a vague word, so I might still not understand without more specificity about what you reject.
If we center on *privileges in Western society* - thus omit universal patterns across cultures and biological (dis)advantages - what is left in this list? If anything, Western societies developed to accommodate female predicaments to an unprecedented degree, largely thanks to good will of the men of Enlightenment. In return, mild and educated modern men are trashed daily in broad strokes. Whence this "progressive" vile nihilism, that men have to be pressed harder?
>If anything, Western societies developed to accommodate female predicaments to an unprecedented degree, largely thanks to good will of the men of Enlightenment. In return, mild and educated modern men are trashed daily in broad strokes.
That is true.
We've had, what, a little over a hundred years of feminist victories by now, and the end result is that women as a group hate and fear men far more now than they did at the beginning of the process (cf. man vs. bear).
It's a little difficult to put a finger on the reason. Maybe it's the constant baseline assumption that purpose is something closely tied to community, which my rationalist soul rebels against. Maybe it's the strict gender essentialism. Maybe it's the implicit praise of initiation rituals and the like - we even had a review recently, about the Aboriginals, which made me intensely relieved that we as a society are making good progress in destroying such practices.
Maybe it's the whole notion of dating apps, filtering through a huge number of people in what seems to be a rather superficial way - I wouldn't expect to derive a lot of romantically-relevant information from someone's dating app profile, nor from a single conversation on a date, both of which are susceptible to all sorts of bad incentives because their purpose is, after all, to get someone to like you. Not that this is a bad thing about the review, specifically - apparently this is how things are done in the Bay Area. And maybe the author is simply good at seeing through people (which, in my mind, can be a source of power imbalance in a relationship, especially with how socially inept the people described here seem to be - but whatever, that's not the point).
After reading this, I'm somewhat more inclined towards taking "polite society" seriously, because even those guys seem better to me on the whole.
I’m at the halfway stage for being a type 1, man that is not. The “hobbies aren’t real community” stuff paired with an imploding career, a lack of real relationships, clinical depression, bad experiences with therapists… all of it is hitting home.
A sobering thought is that this essay was written on the basis of a woman's experiences with those men who can still muster the courage to go on dates at all; there is an enormous reservoir of single men who have given up on dating so completely that they are totally invisible to women.
More a comment as a guy who sits the fence between your categories of "THE MAN WHO IS NOT" and "OPT OUT" and found a happy life*, is to tell men to simply put down their self imposed American made bag of guilt bricks they are carrying and just embrace it and go full transactional, punting is a long and proud tradition everywhere but America. Want sex, buy it. Want a girlfriend, rent one. Want a wife, buy and import her. Want conversation, rent it. .Move to a country where you will be valued transactionally. Become a sex tourist. There are large communities of punters outside the US, they aren't misogynists and they provide a hobby group you all enjoy. Plenty of hot women in refugees camps will sell their entire lives to you forever to get out; or at least seven years but that's ok, get a new one after that.
Likewise take a step down if you don't want to punt. Plenty of American poverty women will take you if you give them a place to live, free drugs, or raise their existing three kids with three dads, they'll even give you a kid too to lock it in. Those relationships can even last forty or fifty years as neither of you are tied to love but just comfort, like old shoes, i.e. life is easier together than apart. She might work.the 7-11 and never anything more, that's ok.
Quit playing "peer" American women's games like this poster or trying to measure yourself by their effectively unobtainable stick, it's a fools errand. Plenty of guys succeed in that game, you aren't them nor do you have to be, just find the path of a punter and be ok with who you are. No shame in that.
* Couple kids that are actually mine blood tests to prove it, grandkids, divorced, etc
plenty of shame in that, actually. the problem with transactional stuff is it makes everything meaningless: you want a wife, not a sex slave, and you want her to love you not put up with you because you buy her and are her mealticket.
yeah guys long to sleep with women but jesus we have some self-respect not to be ruled by that to the point we'd be a wallet with a dick attached.
Thank you for writing that, I think it's a very constructive idea with really good execution.
I do feel like it's unintentionally painting a pretty good picture of becoming a beast, seems a hell lot easier than becoming whole, or maybe a hell lot possible?
Another thing is that, there are lots of mentions of mentors, peers, stuff like that, and maybe I only worked in bad companies until now but I have a hard time imagining getting that from work, especially now that people change companies kind of fast. So that would mean you must get that somewhere else, which unless it's a carefully chosen hobby may cut into your capacity to provide. I guess building a good life is just that hard huh?
"Dates with these men leave me worried. Not for myself, but for these sullen ghosts who seem on the verge of giving up. There’s so much obvious potential within them, yet society offers them so few ladders to climb back from the pit of depression they’ve fallen into. When those ladders do exist, they're often missing rungs or spontaneously snap when men put their full weight on them."
I really liked this paragraph. I think it nails a particular split that I've seen in our society... then men who are on track to a successful life have often been on it since birth, and they really can't understand or help those who have fallen off of it. And there's a huge split after college, especially for the sort of man who moves to the Bay Area right after college. Clearly you are *expected* to:
a) Get a job that uses your brain and college education to achieve high income, with regular advancement for the rest of your life. You should never be unemployed for more than a few months, ideally never at all.
b) Say goodbye to all the friends you had earlier in your life who didn't move out there with you. They will be replaced by newer, better, more convenient friends.
c) Have a series of short-term relationships with pretty, charming, quirky young women near your own age. After, like, 3 of those, you'll get engaged, have a big flashy wedding, and then have 2.5 kids. You'll remain married for life. The majority of your free time will be spent taking care of those kids, and the majority of your social circle will be other nuclear families, particularly the parents of your kids' friends.
That's all fine. It's a good life plan! It's what my parents did, and they seem pretty happy. But it's fragile. If anything goes wrong, it's really hard to recover, and then the whole thing gets messed up.
a) Can't get a job? Sucks to be you. Now all your savings are rapidly disappearingon rent that's priced for full-time salaried people, while your student loans are coming due. There's a growing hole in your resume, and a greater sense of desparation that comes across in your job interviews. "Grinding leetcode" doesn't look nearly as good on your resume as a job or internship, and everyone knows it. You can't really afford to go back to school, and it's not clear what you should study even if you could. Why would a second degree be better than the first? Plus you forget academic stuff and lose connections with professors to write recommendation letters, so it's just hard to re-enter that whole system.
b) Can't find friends? Sucks to be you. People in the city are understandably wary of being friends with a complete stranger. Most of them meet through parties and social groups that you're not part of and can't break into. You still miss your old friends, and it feels wrong to just replace them with different people. How can I make friends knowing that these people will be replaced at the drop of a hat whenever it's inconvenient?
c) Can't find a relationship/wife? Yeah, you'll no get no sympathy. The longer you stay single,the creepier and more desparate you'll seem. Harder and harder to join those police social parties where someone can introduce you to a friend-of-a-friend who's also single. Instead you're stuck in the same swamp of apps, dive bars, and speed dating events that normal women have all completely checked out of.
It's not like this when you're younger. As a kid, there's a clear progression from one grade to the next, with people to help you and a system that wants you to make progress. In the worst case you might get held back a grade. The other kids might bully you but at least they can't exile you from society. College, of course, has an active interest in keeping as many students there as possible, all of them paying tuition and adding to the prestige of the school.
But after College is just such a big shock to the "real world." No one cares, at all, about a young man who Failed to Launch. In my darker moments, I think society actually *wants* them to fail and go away. Certainly in the Bay Area, there's a drastic shortage of housing and a large gender imbalance, and many tech companies are cutting down on hiring new grads... It would make a lot of things easier if some of those excess young men just, uh, disappeared. *Poof*, they're gone... not *dead* necessarily, but maybe they can become one of those homeless than no one looks at and can't be tracked in official statistics.
I'll end this by being optimistic. People still care, at least in an abstract way, and there are many volunteering to help. There are still ways to get back on track and have a good life, even after the worst sort of tragedies. But it's hard, damn hard. We need to find more ways than "standard success path" to suit the varieties of people struggling through life.
“a fit, smart CEO or Sr Director who is yearning for a partner but is single because he’s awkward” - please, give me a break, this is a fantasy. This has literally never happened (unless there is actual clinical autism involved…and even then).
Straight women are no strangers to lowering standards and tolerating all kinds of things for a man with these qualities (and less). Such guys may or may not be “lost” but they are certainly not desperately single.
(I’m a gay woman who’s worked in tech my entire life so i’m no stranger to the Bay Area and its inhabitants, though I live in EU now)
This makes me strongly suspect that this is not a truthful account but rather a charming Carrie Bradshaw cos-play inspired by the recent Sex and the City revival;)
TBH I think our ghost writer is that "famous" "autistic" substack Bay area sex worker, forget her handle, starts with an "A". Sounds like her even stylewise and most think, rightly so, it's just all made up as part of influencer entertainment brand building.
Loved the review! Where or how do you find actual community that is not this loose acquaintance stuff of the running or book club? I don't live in the Bay Area so there is no Rationalism community.
Consider joining a church/synagogue/mosque/temple. Look for one with a healthy balance of new grads, young families, middle-aged families with kids, and elderly members. Look for one whose politics you are comfortable with (my synagogue is apolitical).
A community that carries the traditions of their ancestors from hundreds/thousands of years ago will not flake on you as a kickball teammate might.
Despite being an atheist that reads Rationalism blogs, I have actually been to quite a few local churches in pursuit of a congregation to join. My fiancee is Christian and grew up in one. However what we've experienced is that there are no young(ish) people (like ourselves), what with religion dying out and whatnot. And even so, this sense of an actual community has not been present, which is the main reason we have not stuck around.
But also I feel a bit weird with this advice, joining a religious community for non-religious reasons feel a bit weird. I guess I'm lucky to have her as an alibi, I just wonder if this advice generalizes? For this reason, synagogues, mosques and temples feel off limit.
Ironically(?) I have got quite interested in Buddhism after reading Scott's Jhana blogs a few years ago. Now I practice meditation and would love a community around that. However I don't think I live somewhere big enough for that to be a thing, and besides it kinda seems to me like modern Buddhists are kinda missing the whole meditation is the point, thing. Too much ritual and focus on tradition, it seems to my outsider eyes (unless we're talking something like Zen, but then you're being even more niche).
I know I'm being picky here and that this kinda goes against my earlier ask for community though.
Well, it’s not hard to find out what’s in your area. Many Buddhist centers are out in the country, though often. within driving distance (an hour or 2) of big cities. There is some ritual, but it’s small compared with church rituals, and pretty inoffensive, and you can view most of it as another kind of mind training. The Zen Mountain Monastery in New York State has a big online presence, including online group meditation and instruction. The way you really get to know other people in the sangha under these conditions is going to occasional meditation or meditation instruction retreats at the center. Some last a weekend, some longer. I used to do a lot of that kind of thing, and it was a very good experience for me, both the meditation itself and the people I met
I've found that people who join communities for community's sake aren't the people who keep it alive, that they bounce as soon as there's a problem. You have to be dedicated to something other than just the community, some external principle, to keep going when it's tough; that commitment is what gives community its power.
Just a comment from the other side, most people that go to church (euphemism here for any religious gathering) go for the social aspect. I forget the numbers but I've seen something like "The overwhelming number of observant Jews are atheist at worst, agnostic at best" and the numbers honestly aren't that lower in most other cultural churches, i.e. "we attend because we see value in the traditions, identity, and social gatherings even if we don't believe in actual faith". The only people I really see in open denial of this are Protestants but they get around it via congregation and denomination shopping, i.e. "we will keep changing churches until we find a like minded one socially so we can pretend it's the one and only true church, not that we are going for the music". And "true believers" are even fine with that, exposure can lead to faith (fake it until you make it), your kids might accidentally become true believers being raised in the ecosystem, or their kids might, etc.. Besides, you all tithe and help pay the bills too via offerings, plus a full congregation is always more enjoyable that an empty one, motives aside. I find C&E folk (Christmas and Eastern Christians, insider slang for those that attend only on holidays in any religion) think the regulars judge them and we don't; no more than bar regulars judge people that only show up on St. Patrick's day. Sure parking sucks that day and you will grumble to your friends your regular pew/stool is taken but the patronage is nice and it keeps you culturally relevant.
Where I am going on that though is it's OK to go for non-religious reasons, it's the common case. What you really want to look for if you are trying to socialize though is you want churches that are big enough to have formal social groups AND THEN ATTEND THEM as that is 99% of the socializing / click building, i.e. you want to find churches that have bible studies with more than five people, weekly picnics, charity volunteer activities, ethnic dance and cultural classes, etc. Take your kids to "Awana Kids" (that is the name of a thing, google if if you have never heard of it, it's "big") even if you don't believe, it will get you in to the "in crowd". Don't focus so much on the Sunday service, though of course attend, but the secondary services and groups. Many churches immediately post-service have coffee hour (or social hour, picnics, lunch, etc), it needs to become mandatory in your life to stick around for as that is where all the actual social community building happens, i.e. it's really just there to gossip.
Lastly the generational thing is less a problem than you think though it is a problem. The main problem is folk like you wonder off so when the next young family shows up, the same problem. You basically get a new young family that stops by every other week but they are the only one so they don't come back and you end up with ships just passing in the night whereas if they would stick around, they would rope in the other new young family that stop by two weeks hence, recursive ad infinitum. Also if you got friends, bring them. You don't need to be embarrassed, you would invite them to other social gatherings.
All that said, you want to go to an actual church, not a social group pretending to be a church like the Gospel of Wealth Protestants, Unitarians, American Yoga Apple iBuddhists, etc. End of the day you need that authentic core to keep the cultural feel going as people like you come and go hence honestly you are better off going to a conversative church but I mean that with a small "c" as they give the "church feeling" (and are generally more welcoming) that newer churches which can't differentiate themselves from a nightclub cosplaying religion and just trying to get "likes". In Christianity in America, your local Greek or Serbian Orthodox Church is good like that as long as they have a critical mass of parishioners (i.e. a local community, 50+ regular parishioners I would say) or even something like a Tridentine Mass Roman Catholic Church. If you have a decent Japanese local population, any Buddhist church that still does Bon Odori regularly fits that bill. Hindi never struck me as a particular social religion nor non-Japanese Buddhism so I'd skip those. Islam is a much harder one to break into socially for the non-faithful given it's emphasis on submission coupled with community policing but there are plenty of C&E Muslims around the world living happy liberal secular lives as evidenced in Muslim nations in the Balkans, Indonesia, etc. To quote a Saudi Arabinan I was drinking with in Egypt, "Allah can't see over the Red Sea" so it's doable. I'd also skip a Reformed Judaism church in favor of a Conversative one while likewise passing over an Orthodox one as well as you can start to run into "blood" issues.
Regardless overall just be respectful, that will get you 99% into acceptance anywhere. Observe, mimic, and participate. The rest will come just naturally with people being people and sometimes that takes years. It took me about four years of regular attendance before I got invited to my first extra-Church yet still Church activity lol, finally got a "after church feast lets go to Betty's house and get drunk BBQ" invite. Just takes time sometimes and often persistence pays off.
people who go for the social aspect are intellectually dishonest and might as well just play golf, pickleball, or do something else. They'll stop going anyways once any aspect of the faith makes any demand on them or they do get shut out because it becomes obvious they don't care about what they are doing.
go to a greek church lol...are you greek? it would be like a white guy going to a historical black baptist church. Those things you describe are ethnic gatherings: many grow up out of specific and historical immigrant communities and you are born into them. Only the ones that focus on the religion itself tolerate outsiders.
feel people don't get that lukewarm religion can be less welcoming not more, if not universal they will not want new people unless they are very much like them.
And yet "intellectual dishonesty" kept the Jews around four millennium. It why many people today, outside the uneducated laity, no longer say "religion" but "tradition". Religion serves as a way to preserve customs across the ages and because you always have a core of true believes, you don't have to worry about it withering away like the latest Tik Tok fad; it will always be there for you when you need it, maybe even fifty years from now hence it's a good return on low effort investment. And no they don't get shut out or stop doing, you are confusing faith with religiosity. Most secular church goers are extremely high in religiosity, more so that the actual practitioners, as the they care more about the trappings and social functions than the doctrine or faith itself hence are extremely vested in keeping their club going.
You obviously have zero idea what you are talking about with your Greek comment. Orthodox Catholicism isn't centered around ethnicity, it's centered around districts (well technically autocephalous churches) based on the original seat of the patriarch (just like the Roman Catholic Pope is technical the Patriarch of Rome hence Roman Catholic) and each district has sole jurisdiction with that geographic district, i.e. everyone is Orthodox Catholic and you go to the local church as doctrinally they are all effectively identical, you are confusing them with Protestant denominations as can be seen with your "historic black church" comment or their ilk such as the Filipino Baptist Church of San Francisco.
For example Japan falls under the Moscow Patriarch whereas New Zealand falls under the Constantinople Patriarch. It only gets "confusing" in the New World where the districts never got established early on so every one from the Old World brought their church with them. Technically the Orthodox Church of America (OCA) has jurisdiction over the New World but Constantinople and Greece refused to recognize it (because they would lose funding sources and political clout if all the New World churches had to covert to OCA) hence you can still find various competing Orthodox Churches throughout the New World because until they all agree that the OCA is agreed upon by everyone, they aren't going to shudder and convert all the rest. The "Greek" Orthodox Church has absolutely nothing to do with Greek culture, Greece ethnicity, or Greece itself, hell half of Greece itself doesn't even fall under the Greek Patriarchy but Constantinople. If also why if you attend ANY Orthodox Catholic Church and talk to the people you will find Orthodox Catholics from Eskimos to Japanese to Samoan, to Serbians to Ukrainians to Russians to Greeks to Arabs all attending the same Bulgarian Orthodox Church, because of jurisdiction.
I am but I took a winding journey to get here. I don't go for the social aspect, not my cup of tea, but I see the value in it from outreach to retention to passing on traditions to new generations. The same church can be different things to different people, what matters is retaining enough parishioners to keep it going so it can be there when people need it as those needs change throughout their lives, even if that's only once at the funeral.
But yeah as for me, I'm the attend twice a day every day sort but that's ok, each their own. I appreciate religiosity in others at whatever level they are comfortable with regardless if I think they are wrong ultimately. Love your enemies and all, you don't convert people beating their other cheek or bludgeoning them with a pasta strainer per the FSM.
We have data on this for 100+ years. Because women and men have the exact same issues, only that women started earlier due to insanely toxic blueprints. This is not new and this is not unsolved, either. But it’s also not an easy fix.
I love for everybody, and especially men who are joining in more actively now, that we are addressing the topic of living lives BEYOND cookie-cutter blueprints. That’s what the void is about the author describes: suffocation by normativity. Thus, the path forward is pretty clear (though complicated): help and support to discover and stabilize your own meaningful blueprints. It’s these support systems we need to build (for everybody), as well as a wide variety of examples for target states. That’s what the data tells us.
And it’s not about new static blueprints or invoking the suffocation of the male warrior and provider stereotype, which frankly men during Romanticism in Europe (200 years ago) were already fighting against, so clearly that’s a strange argument to follow.
So, how about we look at the treasure trove of data and make its best practices available to everybody without pointing fingers and also without all these unhelpful hysterics (“women in beards”…really?!?).
>That’s what the void is about the author describes: suffocation by normativity.
Actually I think it's the opposite: we've done away with normativity, leaving most people floundering without a lifemap, and any dating advice you give will be wrong 50% of the time because there are no accepted standards for what is or isn't proper behaviour.
My impression is that the effort to make room for non-normative people hasn't been just about treating them decently, but that "polite society"* has been trying to raise the status of non-normative people by lower the status of normative people.
*"Polite society" is like calling dangerous fae "The Good Folk".
Firstly, most people internalise the values of the society they live in.
Secondly, norms aren't just about what you should want, they're also about how you should try and get what you want. A society in which there are widely-understood norms about topics such as where it is and isn't appropriate for a man to approach a woman with romantic interest, and what the appropriate ways are for a man to signal such interest, is one in which it's much easier to go about finding a girlfriend than a society in which one woman's "Fighting to win me like a man should" is another woman's "Pestering me to go out with you, ugh" is a third woman's "Trying to pressure me into a relationship, you creep" is a fourth woman's...
Absolutely agree. However, as the author stated, when blindly following these external givens, some people do end up in a void. And, if they are men especially, struggle to get others to empathize. Though tbh I see that a lot for non-American women too. So clearly, normativity only works for the (few?) “normal” ones. And in that sense it’s suffocating for the rest.
And your examples line up beautifully with that. “Chase a woman” was probably always suffocating, for both partners. That’s why there are now different expectations, reflecting actual differences in perceptions in different people (gender agnostic btw). It’s more complicated, sure. But it is in that sense also freeing for everybody else finally. Our only problem about all of that is that our understanding and communication skills about it all haven’t caught up yet. As you’d expect for a whole society going through a difficult learning process at the same time. Still doesn’t mean we should just go back to only teaching “elementary school” so that there is “less confusion”, no?
>However, as the author stated, when blindly following these external givens, some people do end up in a void.
People end up in a void because the norms society gives people, and especially men, are unreasonable and self-contradictory. The problem isn't having norms per se -- indeed, it's impossible to have a society without norms -- it's that our current norms aren't very good.
>So clearly, normativity only works for the (few?) “normal” ones.
Normal people make up the majority of society, by definition.
>And your examples line up beautifully with that. “Chase a woman” was probably always suffocating, for both partners.
"Probably"? On what grounds do you say this? Basically every piece of evidence we have, whether statistical or anecdotal, suggests that the dating world is worse, and is perceived as worse by people trying to date, than it was, say, 20 years ago.
If we ever had any reasonable norms, they would have stuck around but clearly they weren’t working. The whole argument is to find better ways forward and if that includes going back to rigidity we have not learned from the data.
Dating is worse now and it will be better if everybody learns to follow the same playbook? Is that the conclusion? Of course it can’t be, that’s advice we give to children who don’t yet know how to deal with the complexity of the world. So let’s all be adults and admit that we have never before been adults about any of this and learn together. But yeah will definitely not look pretty in statistics, I agree.
Review gets a B (Seriously: "Tate", but no "J. Peterson"?). Comment-section: F(ailed) as expected. (30 comments in, none about the review, but then everyone is an expert in "man".) EDIT: ok, looked again, and hey, there is some better stuff, too - even the author saying she knows little about J. P. .... - but Tate, all right ... ; update to D(disappointing) - Btw, as I watched it yesterday: "Barbie" gets a B, too (movie now on prime).
I don’t know if this lens is actually doing a service to the demographic it pities (sorry, empathizes with). To me this only reinforced the suspicion that straight men are this incredibly high-maintenance group, always costing society. I can easily believe all the self-destructive statistics showing that men are ‘not ok’. I’m sure they ain’t but when will they learn to take care of themselves?
Women have been oppressed and deprived of rights and freedoms for centuries, and yet we - as a demographic - did not turn to harming ourselves or others en mass, somehow. We just did what we could, what we were allowed to, eventually won a better life. But men - well, apparently they can either flourish in a structure where they are given power and opportunities just by virtue of being a man, and more of these if a violent man OR they implode and flounder in a society with (at least, nominal) freedoms, gender-equality and the resulting ambiguity.
Sure, “it’s unfair” that some decent (if unimaginative) dudes are “floundering” and languishing in loneliness, but it is also unfair that it’s my problem. And it IS my problem, unfortunately, because as the author also hints - dissatisfied men can turn very destructive (unlike ‘average’ dissatisfied woman, who just rescues many kittens). Why can’t men just do that?
Now, I’m not saying that any of this is actually true (because I doubt the veracity of this account or that the issue is really so big it is worth discussion), but this is what this type of discourse makes me think.
Not the response the author wanted to evoke, I assume,
PS most of the described men would stop being single if only they decided to go down the social ladder in search of a mate. This is the most glaring omission in Scott Alexander’s ‘Henry’ example. At least one of ‘Henry’s ‘ wives would gladly have the 25-year-old sad lonely Scott A. But he wouldn’t have her (repulsed by her low education, addiction or impulse-control issues). And most women Scott associates with wouldn’t have Henry. The correlation with ‘is in a gang’ etc and sexual partners is of the same source. So, that whole oft-cited example is pretty moot.
"Not the response the author wanted to evoke, I assume"
I think in a way that's the perfect response, because it shows the reality of what most young men are facing. Most people- not just women, but all people- just don't care about them at all. If they're suffering, it's probably their own fault. Or maybe it's some sort of cosmic justice for the guilt of their male ancestors, or whatever. It doesn't matter. Better for them to die and decrease the surplus population.
>And it IS my problem, unfortunately, because as the author also hints - dissatisfied men can turn very destructive (unlike ‘average’ dissatisfied woman, who just rescues many kittens).
Average dissatisfied woman supports extremist political movements which ultimately cause far more destruction than any number of belligerent drunk guys at bars.
> But men - well, apparently they can either flourish in a structure where they are given power and opportunities just by virtue of being a man, and more of these if a violent man OR they implode and flounder in a society with (at least, nominal) freedoms, gender-equality and the resulting ambiguity.
Who would respect (let alone date) a powerless man without privileges? "Men chase money, status, and power because they crave love — the respect of their peers, the loyalty of their women, the admiration of their children. But love without strength is worthless. A weak man’s love has no value because he has no value."
> Women have been oppressed and deprived of rights and freedoms for centuries.
That is quite an indictment of the whole humanity. Living on this planet has not been easy for 99% of those who lived. Only the modernity promised wholesome self-actualization to all (or just the ladies?), but will definitely fail in this alpha quest. Most men lived nowhere close to ruling power (apparently an essential non-oppression criterion to feminism) and were respected much less than the ladies.
>To me this only reinforced the suspicion that straight men are this incredibly high-maintenance group, always costing society
If someone wrote an article about miserable gay women, would you conclude that gay women are an "incredibly high-maintenance group, always costing society"?
Do you have the same dismissive attitude towards poor people?
>Women have been oppressed and deprived of rights and freedoms for centuries, and yet we - as a demographic - did not turn to harming ourselves or others en mass, somehow. We just did what we could, what we were allowed to, eventually won a better life.
The article describes miserable men. You don't think there have also been miserable women throughout history?
>dissatisfied men can turn very destructive
Dissatisfied women can turn very destructive. What's your point?
>(unlike ‘average’ dissatisfied woman, who just rescues many kittens)
The average dissatisfied man in this article isn't harming anyone. He's just sad. Don't compare the average dissatisfied women with the worst-case-scenario dissatisfied man. It's not a fair comparison.
>Why can’t men just do that?
Plenty of men do in fact spend their time with animals or other harmless hobbies.
>At least one of ‘Henry’s ‘ wives would gladly have the 25-year-old sad lonely Scott A. But he wouldn’t have her (repulsed by her low education, addiction or impulse-control issues).
Is it so wrong for a human being to desire a healthy romantic relationship?
>this only reinforced the suspicion that straight men are this incredibly high-maintenance group, always costing society
Agreed. I disagree with the rest as I'm not sympathetic to feminism or your framing of women's problems. But these men are loaded, have acquaintences, workout, and go on multiple dates. If you can't be fulfilled with that or use it as a launching point to do other things then you can't be fulfilled with anything. Not sure what society is supposed to fix here. There's also no example of what women are told by society to fix their femininity problems. Seems like they just get over it and enjoy other parts of life, which is what I think should be the same prescription here.
If this were a satire, it would honestly be hilarious and excellent. Unfortunately, it’s not, and it rambles and trips all over itself repeatedly. It’s boring because you know someone actually spent a lot of time and effort writing this. It’s a downer. And it’s basically the opposite of what Scott tries to present to use as readers: one person’s anecdotal experience coming from a highly biased and confused position.
Coming down from a near-fatal acid trip, so not in the clearest state of mind, but: this was Damn Good. Really interesting to read as a Bay Area trans woman too, a literal Man Who Was Not. Like, I definitely run into a lot of lost men too (though not the same categories, social stratification changes distribution), and it's quite tragic to behold...yet it's hard not to walk away from this review with the feeling that whatever I'm doing is just a different form of getting lost. Any map in a storm, or something like that. Apeing the female map is certainly one way to go about things, but it's fundamentally...derivative. And obviously doesn't scale, though as review says, certain parties sure seem to be pushing modern men in that effective direction, by intent if not by design.
Profoundly curious who the author was. Excellent typical-minding of men (she says from distant memories), it's not very common to see such accurate portrayals written by women that are both sympathetic *and*...like...well-tuned for ACX tastes? Great inspiration to go try dating again too - "I could turn this experience into an ACX finalist review!"
Yeah I was waiting for a twist like the author is a gay man or a trans woman. The lonely guy archetype is well written even though I don't think it's representative. And the descriptions are compelling even though they're basically repeated for many of the types of men.
@the author: how many dates have you been on exactly? This post gives the impression it numbers in the hundreds. If you’ve been on that many dates without finding a relationship, have you considered that there may be something wrong with either your date selection heuristic or your standards?
The author remains a cipher, which is probably for the best; this particular article shouldn't be about her or her relationships. But of course poor heuristics and unreasonable standards would be a benefit for constructing this taxonomy, and it certainly doesn't invalidate it.
However it does suggest that there might be some weird selection bias going into the authors sample (which might therefore not be all that representative). Over and above the obvious bias of men in stable relationships not being in the sample. Alternatively, it calls the authors judgement into question.
It could certainly influence the taxonomy. I don't think the article was presented as an exhaustive catalogue of the author's dating experience, however*; presumably there are other types of dudes that are in less trouble. She could even be happily married by now, although that would make her experience less relevant to the present day.
*Well, aside from the generalization of the title.
I teach college. 6 of the 7 kids that failed out last semester were men. I know, anecdata, but I see echoes of these descriptions in a lot of young men who have caved in on themselves and have zero social skills.
I appreciated this post - as these categories of lost men (should we call them boys?!) gave me a way to think about how to frame the “whole man” who is not “hole of a man” —-
He’s a related man. He exists in relation. That’s what the review of aboriginals, teaches, I think — radically different way to relate.
And this is the skill that young men are lacking. And the appeal of the AI sex bots that will further decimate our reproductive capacities.
Pressure on men to be "manly," I believe, has reached an all time high in the US, due to a few factors:
1) life and work is so comfortable and safe for modern men that they feel inferior to their forebears in previous generations, and so feel a great need to compensate
2) the acceptance of homosexuals and trans people has ironically put more pressure on straight males to differentiate themselves, to avoid being labeled as such (which still has consequences)
Thus, you see enormous numbers of men cosplaying as tough guys in the most ridiculous ways (www.tacticalbabygear.com Tactical Baby Carrier for Dads — The Toughest Military Style Baby Carrier on the Planet. Lifetime Guarantee. Shop Now!), the rise of workout culture, TRT, BJJ and tattoos. It's why baseball players 50 years ago looked like today's high school freshman despite being most likely way tougher than your modern American man.
The problem here is that it is all cosplaying: all the tough guy sports and hobbies and affectations are just pretend. They aren't going to solve the underlying causes 1 and 2 above. And reversing 1 and 2 is not going to happen and wouldn't be good anyway.
There is a historical analogy with the peaceful Edo-period Samurai and the rise of the strict Bushido culture, but this post is already too long.
I think the writer of this article, while well intentioned is still a bit sexist.
It is always nice to see a woman express care for lonely men, an often maligned group. The article still comes across to me as corroded by the current elite western philosophy it partialy critisises though.
Example: "The fact is, men enjoy some privileges that women do not in Western society." I think a lot of these supposed privileges are actually ambiguous, or false. To start, women are often favoured in hiring, and the gender pay gap disappears when one controls for various variables (e.g., length of commute). I would argue that in the modern west, women are actually overwhelming the privileged group (better educational attainment, less time for the same crime, better mental health, more friends, more support provided by society, massively less homelessness, massively less suicide, etc...).
Regardless of debating such contentious issues, I find it inappropriate to open an article expressing sympathy to men, with this type of apologist, "yes, men don't have all the problems" type statement. You would rarely ever see a feminist article about the trouble women face to include such a disclaimer about how men struggle too.
Finally, I wouldn't describe the "manosphere" as particularly toxic, imo. The community is not a monolith, just as "feminists" are not a monolith. Obviously, the example of a man grabbing someone's throat is deplorable, but there are always horrible people, regardless of ideology. Horrible people need no excuse, and any movement judged by it's worst members will appear terrible.
the manosphere is toxic, because all their approaches boil down to women being things you manipulate by technique and secret knowledge. It's close to high-pressure sales adapted to relationships, and ends up dehumanizing everyone involved.
It relies on people being too sex-starved to look at it closely. No amount of pussy is worth killing your soul over.
Succinct: False. You describe a subset of the manospehere, specifically unnuanced pick-up culture. There is definitely toxicity within the manospehere, but there is no way it is all toxic. You generalization is ignorant and mildly bigoted.
Nuanced: the term manospehere is a broad one. For example, Jordan Peterson is labelled by some as being part of it, and I don't think your description fits him at all. He is all about preaching taking responsibility and self improvement.
Another example is that sociologist, one of the early feminists, who started focussing on men's issues. He is core to the manospehere, and yet writes incredibly nauanced and thoughtful intellectual analysis, nothing to do with manipulating women.
ask yourself why all the self-improvement, and its always a means to an end to attract women. its still technique to manipulate.
men not needing to self-improve never crosses their minds. even if they try to diffuse it, the technique-results thing always drives the approach and its always women.
the diffuse forms suffer from a similar curse.
dont know honestly, the incels are buckling under the self-improvement crap and it led to the black pill. technique in any form is not enough.
Hmm... I mean, men desire women. I don't think there's anything wrong with desiring women and wanting to improve oneself so as to appeal to them. I don't think any of that needs to be imposed. I think it is pretty innate, a shaping force on human interactions and society for thousands of years.
Speaking personally, that innate desire has been an incredibly positive shaping force on my personality. It has definitely made me more empathetic and mature.
Like becoming a kind mature eloquent human being (not that I necessarily am one, but that's certainly the goal) is not a manipulation tactic!!
Example of ways men improve to attract women: improving personal hygiene, learning to dress well, learning to be a good conversationalist, etc...
If you do the above things soley to appeal to women then maybe that is unhealthy (e.g., it sounds exhausting to constantly be thinking about women every time you brush your hair), but you can learn and master the above things so as to appeal to women, and then do them regardless of women because of their innate value.
No offence intended, but do you think you might be a bit jaded on this topic? Have you or someone close to you had a bad personal experience with the "manospehere"?
I think this is a fantastic typology of modern men, one in which every man can recognize himself in one or more categories. Here's how I renamed each type of man for my own easy recollection, following the same sequence they're presented;
1. The clueless man
2. The tragic conformist
3. The chasing man
4. The nullified man
5. The spiteful man
6. The wholesome man
I belong to the category of 'The nullified man' - the man who opts out - but managed to overcome a great many insecurities. However, my backstory is mild in comparison to the picture you painted.
It's very fitting that this opinion is coming from a woman. It's the modern woman who shot the Achilles heels of the modern man and it's the modern woman who can nurse it back to life.
It's also very fitting that of all places you chose to publish this opinion on this particular platform. Its owner, in my opinion, is one of the exemplars of "the man who is whole" - though perhaps one forged through pain and hardwork.
PS: I've not been particularly following the submissions in this year's ACX review due to the adopted format. I've perhaps only read just one or two before this one. Something about the topic of this review made me decided to give a shot and I absolutely didn't regret it.
PSS: I know this is a long shot, but it'd please me in no small measure to know who you are, even if only to satisfy my aching curiosity. The thoughtfulness and presence of mind with which you engaged with the experiences that gave birth to this piece is otherworldly, one which someone as young as you (my guess is that you're below 30, I may be off by a few +/- years) has no business possessing.
I enjoyed this “review” very much indeed - congratulations to the author, even if, or perhaps especially if, she is just doing some fun role playing. My personal opinion is that this piece of prose is a bit of a raw diamond which could be honed into a number of different things: screenplay proposal, parody of social-scientific analysis, personal story… there are some elements of each, which is part of its charm and gives credence and character to the narrative voice, but at the same time undermines the plausibility of the underlying premise (“I’ve dated a lot and know my way around this demographic”). Perhaps this isn’t quite the right audience for such a free-spirited exercise?
I was thinking the same. It could easily become an opinion piece in a Love & Relationship magazine, or even adapted to a screenplay with the right touches.
Having been 1, 2, and 3, sign me up for a combo of numbers 4 and 5. Though violence is stupid, dangerous, and ultimately gives aid and comfort to feminism--"see how bad the men are!" Why go to jail to be raped yourself? Vote Republican and get abortion repealed!
"So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear,
Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heaven's Queen I hold
By thee, and more then half perhaps will reign;
As Woman before long, and this new World shall know."
Or, a bit earlier on, easy to revise for the manosphere:
I think the United States government should subsidize the dating app industry. Companies should be paid an increasing amount for each
1) confirmed date
2) confirmed second date
3) successful longer-term relationship
Yes it would be difficult to figure out the rules and nuances. Yes it would attract fraudsters. But I think those difficulties pale in comparison to the negative externalities this whole industry is having on generation(s) of Americans.
I think it's a matter of Public Health.
Right now, no matter how many well-meaning startups try to "solve" the dating app problem, companies are incentivized to keep individuals (and especially hetero males) perpetually anxious. They need subscribers, PAID subscribers, and they need them to stay. The faster the matches + the more successful the matches => the worse their profits.
I'm *not* saying the government should *run* dating apps directly, because that would be rife with political/bureaucratic/culture-war issues, but
Economics teaches us that when the market fails, the government should step in. WELL THE MARKET HAS FAILED.
Sounds like Bay Area problems for Bay Area Libs. Just wish you'd all stay there and shut up. Hate that place. My family is originally from there, its changed into a monstrosity that needs to secede from the USA and get annexed by China.
This is great. From what I’ve heard dating in the Bay Area is pretty great if you’re a woman. I truly appreciate this piece and the intelligent empathy of it but I feel like it would be a lot harder to do a naturalistic study of men like while dating them anywhere else.
To be able to casually rifle through them like looking at records in a shop. Reviewing them like albums is just a very depressing implication for the worth of men socially there.
I think the article is great and is saying very important things but when you think about how the sausage is made and why it was even possible for the sausage to be made it’s dark.
I've heard from women that dating for a monogamous partner in the Bay is very difficult because most dudes claim to be "poly". Nary a mention of this in the review, but I'm sure it depends on the particular strata of art, tech, finance, activism, etc one inhabits.
Well, in a simple statistical way it favors women at least. Perhaps what you’re talking about has to do with the majority of the men fitting into the broken categories discussed in the article.
The men women are excited to date are in high demand. So it feels to the women you know like the dating scene favors men but it’s just the most desirable crop. And Bay Area is also the main poly spot, yea.
This all makes me think about how one of the main advantages of Christianity was that it countered the destabilizing force of polygamy.
I really enjoyed this piece: the research is spot on and the takeaway is powerful. It speaks volumes about my own experience with dating men. Between mental health issues, shifting gender roles, cultural stuff, and basically zero role models, dating is a mess.
It’d be super interesting to see a counter piece with something similar about women’s dating landscape in the Bay Area or somewhere else in the world, from a man's perspective. I bet the results would surprise a lot of people.
Why is nobody talking about the possibility that gaming and an entire steaming continent of online porn, both of which appeal much more to males, have done a lot of damage to men who are now of dating age? My impression, as a therapist who sees a lot of solitary, smart males, is that in their early teens they were shy and anxious but most had enough going for them that they could probably have made a place for themselves in the high school social order if they had plugged away at trying. But they had available to them at home these digital approximations of challenges, adventures, romance and sex that they could gorge on while safely alone. They ended up spending more than half their waking hours on porn and gaming, and giving up on making it some way or other in high school. And that made them sort of cave in, to use an excellent simile I saw in somebody’s comment here.
That sounds like a very important part of whatever is going on. Learning to be in the world and socialize with people takes effort and is awkward at times, for many of us. If you're given a safe ersatz via porn and gaming (or doomscrolling), you might never do the effort, and never reap the rewards.
both were present earlier, though. porn became present with cable and vhs, and nudity in film or other media was too. Everquest started in 1999, so we've had at least 26 years of online games.
even before that, tv watching was similar; the guy whose only life was tv after work was a stereotype too.
plus the double standard...romance is the female equivalent and literally promotes porn (erotica) and horrid relationship ideals, and even in the 1920s Rudolph Valentino as the Sheik was modeling its tropes. Why do women always get a pass from that?
>both were present earlier, though. porn became present with cable and vhs, and nudity in film or other media was too.
There's a difference between the odd sex scene in movies and having 24/7 access to graphic depictions of the most depraved stuff your imagination can think of.
(I do agree that people give book erotica too much of a free pass, though. Fun fact: the three best-selling novels of the 2010s were Fifty Shades and its two sequels.)
The reviewer is in her late 20s and has commented saying she mostly dates men 5-10 years older than herself, so they would be born roughly 1986-1991. Online porn and video games would have been available in their formative years, yes, but were nowhere near as ubiquitous or readily available as they have been to younger generations.
So somebody born in 1985 would have turnd 15 in 2000. I don't know how much online porn there was then. The only data point I have is that when my daughter was about 5,so in approximtely 2000, she ended up inadvertently landing on a porn scene while using my computer. She didn't know how she ended up there, except that it was not the result of searching for porn. She didn't know how to do internet searches yet, and anyway was not showing much curiosity about sex at that age. I think she must have been randomly clicking around, and just clicked through ojn some link to porn. I definitely did not have any porn saved on my computer, which is one reason I felt safe letting her use it, and very little in my viewing history. I like some kinds of erotica, but definitely not YouTube style porn, which makes sex look ugly and ridiculous to me. So what happened to my daughter gives me the impression there must have been a fair amount of easily findable porn online in 2000.
As for gaming -- well, I don't game, so also do not know what was available in around 2000. But I know guys in their 40's who reminisce with pleasure about games they played in their teens, so again it seems like there must have been a fair amount of the stuff, and it must have been pretty engaging -- way more than very early things like PacMan.
Do you think the online porn and gaming available inn 2000 was so sparse or tame that it wouldn't have powerful enough to suck in somebody who was looking for an alternative, entirely private way to have sex and adventures?
I was 19 in 2000. As I remember things, porn was moderately but not prohibitively difficult to find and was mostly in the form of still images, text erotica, or short video clips because of bandwidth limitations.
We had an Apple II at home when I was little which I used to play on frequently. Ultima IV and V and Robot Odyssey were the games I remember playing most often. I also played Oregon Trail and whatnot at school. We didn't have a console, but several of my friends had Nintendos on which they played Mario and Duck Hunt. Later on, we had macs and PCs and I played games like Civilization, Doom, StarCraft, Sim City, and Panzer General. So yes, computer games were definitely a thing. I do get the impression that my family and our friends were very much ahead of the curve in terms of adoption here, though. I also get the impression that the single-player games (and LAN or split-screen multiplayer games) of that era were qualitatively different from the kinds of games I hear about many people finding to be all-consuming in more recent years.
Wow! I'm a sixty-nine year old married man raising a 12-year-old grandchild. This is a vital topic for me and the lad. Thank you for your insights and for laying out the topic with the clarity of a road atlas! I hope I can make his struggle toward manhood less painful and more productive. My task will be to address fairly and straight-on the nonsense coming from all quarters of our society--the TikTok bros, the Red Pill gangs, the extreme shamers and haters.
I find this post hugely insighful, but also weird. The problems it diagnoses, and the solutions it offers, are spot on. Except for one thing: they have not much at all to do with manhood. They're general problems of our current culture, and they affect men and women just as much.
Liberal Western culture(s) are high on negative guidance ("don't do this, don't be that"), and low on the positive ("this is the way"). This is by design; we ditched the old authoritarian, sexist, narrow ways and embraced the idea that your life is up to you to figure out. The unspoken boundary is that it's not society's job to tell you to what to aim for. Subcultures can show up and offer their particular guidance (be a hippy, an AI researcher, a buddhist, a stoic, a hustler, an creative, an influencer, whatever), but they can never be speak for the mainstream. Even what you call Polite Society doesn't really have much to offer. And the problem with subcultural answers is that they remain niche, and never quite reach maturity. So people end up getting their guidance from vague vibes from social media, and it's just low quality, and a poor match for what they will actually encounter in life. This applies equally to men and women, with the same predictable results.
Yet positive guidance is what everyone needs, hence the article's insistence on mentorship and community. Most of us, with very few exceptions, have the potential to make connections, to find meaning in things, to fall in love, to navigate changes and disappointments, and so on. The void is always there lurking, because the void is just the mismatch between our narrative expectations and gritty reality. Men and women have had to deal with the Void for millenia, probably since the time of Ugg the Caveman. But we also naturally have what takes to navigate it, not just by heavy-handed methods like formless meditation or psychotherapy, but also, in a saner society, by opening up to real friends and sharing a laugh. But that requires not just the individual person, but enough people around to actually get off their arses and off their scrolling phones, and go through the awkward process of making it happen.
As far as I can tell everything else is downstream from this. The "dating market" can be awful, but there's still roughly as many unpaired men as women, so there's nothing fundamentally preventing them from giving each other a real chance. But people are not being taught to do the minimum necessary effort to build up a well-rounded human being, because we're all still scared that giving that much guidance might be authoritarian. And to make it even worse, the actual authoritarians are right there, waiting on the wing for anyone to given an opening so they can peddle their stale wares.
Still, it must be done.
To end on a personal note, I also found a path across these things by joining a strong community in my twenties.
>The problems it diagnoses, and the solutions it offers, are spot on. Except for one thing: they have not much at all to do with manhood. They're general problems of our current culture, and they affect men and women just as much.
One big difference is that men's problems are all assumed to be men's fault, whereas women's problems are all assumed to be society's (which usually = men's) fault. A woman can blame her lack of dates on men all being shallow and immature, and everyone will at least pretend to agree; a man blaming his lack of dates on women will be lectured about how women don't owe him sex and only misogynistic incels think like him.
I agree there is a difference there, but how much of a difference does it really make? The lady who only manages to attract men she perceives as shallow and immature is probably about as frustrated as the guy who never manages to get a second date. The situation sucks for both. Getting some validation for your frustration is nice, and I agree it would be better if men got that too... But it doesn't address any of the deeper issues I tried to point out.
It's not just that men don't get validation for their frustration, it's that the mere fact of a man being frustrated is taken as evidence that he's a bad person who deserves to be unhappy. Scott wrote a couple of posts on the topic a few years ago:
Again, I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. I'm fine with the bits that advocate treating men fairly. The original article mentions that, and I certainly don't disagree. It seems obvious enough that I don't need to repeat it.
What I'm trying to add is that modern culture is not teaching people very well what it takes to make a true connection to each other, and to life. And that applies to men and to women.
Put it this way: say you mentioned that a particular race was disproportionately likely to suffer police brutality, even when controlling for other factors like criminal behaviour, and I jumped in with "But other races suffer police brutality too!" Would this seem like a helpful, good-faith contribution to you?
As a man myself, if my contingent was on the receiving end of something akin to police brutality, I figure I'd have noticed by now... I haven't, so I can only take this as hyperbole.
Again, to whatever extent there is some unfairness, I'm onboard with fixing that.
I am confused by what the author means by the term "identity"
What is an identity and why would you a) desire one in another, or b) desire one in someone else?
Myself, I care about people's traits, their beliefs and their principles. I desire friends and partners who are intelligent, kind and principled, and aspire to be so myself. Those are traits people either have or have not. They are also traits that can be actively cultivated and developed and they are evidenced through action, and aspired towards.
"Identify" doesn't come into it?! Like what does, "having an identity" even mean?!
I am believe in being virtuous. Whenever I feel lost in myself I focus on that. So: being kind, honest, caring. I guess I get worth out of the love I feel for my friends and family, and trying to treat them well.
Though it is not the most virtuous, I also enjoy the ego boost I get when someone decides they want to sleep with me. I like being desired. I find it a great and somewhat mysterious honour.
I am also generally quite content and get a deep pleasure from both understanding the world, people, ideas, and I very much enjoy creating things.
I don't consider any of these things identities though. I would never introduce myself as one of these things. They are principles I want to live by, traits and hobbies I cultivate, vanities I observe and indulge, etc...
I think this obsession with identity is very much a new thing. Traditionally people worried about their roles (e.g., husband, father, son, job) fulfilling the duties of their role, and being virtuous. That is the model I choose and try to live by.
The important thing is that a role is very different from an identity. A role is something objective, and often thrust upon you (e.g., being a son) not a narrative you choose or label you use to describe yourself.
And just to be clear. Being virtuous is not an identity, being virtuous is an aspiration, a thing to aim for and work towards, and maintain. Anyone who's identity is "being kind" is probably not that kind, and I think this subscribing to virtue as an identity (as opposed to an aspiration) leads to pathology (e.g., virtue signalling).
I guess you can say my identity is being principled? But I think that is a ridiculously wanky thing to say, and really looks odd and forced, likely because the worth I describe is not an identity at all. I don't think identity is a universal thing, and I don't think it is beneficial or healthy either.
Although I have formed my opinions independently, I would say this perspective loosely connects to the one Jordan Peterson advocates for: being defined by responsibility.
Christian? Many of the world religions seem a stable and often healthy way of handling identify. The kindest most accepting person I know is a devout Christian.
But you are vulnerable if you make your faith your "Identity" in the sense that if you loose your faith you may loose your sense of self worth.
Speaking on Christianity, I believe a lot of the tenants do more or less translate to doing as I describe (Virtue and Duty)
Yes. I believe my worth comes from the fact that God found me worth dying for. That was a decision He made out love, independent of my merit, and is therefore something I can't lose since I never earned it in the first place.
I agree if I stopped believing that I would be quite lost. So far though I find that being beloved by God makes me grateful and eager to do what He wants and what He wants me to do is love others. I wish I were better at it, as He is very loving!
> But you are vulnerable if you make your faith your "Identity" in the sense that if you loose your faith you may loose your sense of self worth.
I don't think you can expect people to prepare for abandoning their most foundational beliefs. It's like saying: you should not derive your self-worth from being virtuous because that will make you feel bad if you decide to become a sociopath.
I was raised largely without any map to manhood and I feel like it was probably better than the alternative. When I look at my friends who were raised with that map I feel pity for them, not envy. Their whole mode of existence wrt masculinity seems painful and stifling, as though they were forced into expressing them to satisfy their fathers or male peers and never quite got the memo that they could stop. When you say that no one questioned the purpose of men, and that everyone preached the same message, does that not sound horrible and limiting to you? If you couldn't fulfill these roles, or had no interest in filling them, then the whole thing reduces to getting whacked over the head repeatedly by some close-minded dweeb who's gotten it lodged into his head that your shared biology means more to you than it does, and further that it somehow entitles him to make major decisions about your personality. You go looking for alternatives and find nothing but a bunch of driftwood repeating the same thing ad nauseam.
What some men experience as loss of direction or as terror in being without a mold, the rest of us experience as freedom. What some people experience as certainty, sane people see as the awful march of fate. Women experienced this in the last few generations, too. Wife and mother used to be nearly the only life path available, and now it's one you have to opt into. So too will be husband and father and even "man". Good. The dislocation of one's identity under modernity and the transmutation of gender roles from huge aspects of spiritual life to fashion choices is a feature, not a bug.
It's possible. Fwiw I think most people were pretty unhappy with the pre-antinomian state of things. The near univocality of boomer art is revealing about this. Maybe the sort of total anarchy we have now is an overcorrection, and I just happened to live at the right time for my preferences.
Just realized I wrote that entire thing without mentioning that I'm gay which is maybe a bit important here ig. To me, and to most of my cohort, a "map of masculinity" means getting bullied by one's own dad over minute differences in fashion choices. I knew guys whose parents were deeply religious and forced them out of their homes. To have a comparatively detached and uninvolved father was, in my eyes, a blessing. I almost treasure it. It was somewhat emotionally confusing, but emotional problems are easier to deal with than physical safety problems by an order of magnitude.
The boomers experienced the best of both worlds: they themselves got to do what they wanted, but the social fabric was still strong enough from centuries of nomianism (or whatever the opposite of antinomianism is) for them to enjoy a generally stable, functioning country. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be a stable equilibrium, as we're now discovering.
>Just realized I wrote that entire thing without mentioning that I'm gay which is maybe a bit important here ig.
Funnily enough, gay conservatives, who are presumably less antinomian that their liberal counterparts, are considerably happier than gay liberals. In fact, they're even happier than heterosexual liberals:
So even leaving aside the question of whether changing society in a way that benefits a few % of the population but harms the majority is really the most moral way to proceed, I don't think your argument works even on its own terms.
> leaving aside the question of whether changing society in a way that benefits a few % of the population but harms the majority
I mean like I said, I'm an outlier! I think this is a reasonable argument against antinomianism writ large. I'm not exactly invested in destroying social gender norms broadly, I just don't care to follow them and I'm happy that some of the dumbest ones are dying. What I'm saying is that there's a reason people tore those systems down: They created a lot of misery and were inflexible. That inflexibility became increasingly problematic over time, especially because again the cost is emotional confusion. It's a pretty good bargain if it reduces the rate of domestic violence at all. Which it seems to! The only people nowadays who turn on their own sons for being gay are not just religious people but specifically insane religious people.
I'm a traditionalist in this way. Our forefathers fought and occasionally even died for our right to party. Value their sacrifice! Get your nails done with your gf or something. You have more freedom now, objectively. Embrace it. There's a kind of human dignity in antinomianism. Most people aren't so fragile that they can't survive a little emotional turmoil. It's part and parcel of being alive. At least now, with a commitment to not allowing the dumbest people alive to force their notion of masculinity on us, gay and straight men can often go through that emotional turmoil without also experiencing physical trauma.
> Funnily enough, gay conservatives, who are presumably less antinomian that their liberal counterparts, are considerably happier than gay liberals.
This seems so many layers of inference removed from its original context that I hesitate to draw any conclusions from it.
>What I'm saying is that there's a reason people tore those systems down:
Yes, because people had adopted the dumb Rousseauist idea that mankind is inherently good and only goes bad because of social influence, and therefore social norms are inherently corrupting and oppressive. There's no reason why we need to repeat their mistake.
>They created a lot of misery
Where's your evidence that people are happier now than they were in the past?
>and were inflexible.
Actually, gender norms are less flexible now than they were in the past. In ye olden days (the 1990s), a girl who liked football and cars was just a tomboy; now she's a boy trapped in a girl's body, and liable to be whisked off to hospital to have her breasts cut off.
>There's a kind of human dignity in antinomianism.
Dignity comes from acting in a dignified manner, which antinomianism tends to undermine.
>This seems so many layers of inference removed from its original context that I hesitate to draw any conclusions from it.
Conservatives are happier than liberals in basically every demographic you can think of. Prima facie, therefore, if you want to know how people can live a happy life, look at what conservatives are doing, not at what liberals are doing.
The terms manosphere and patriarchy need to be abolished. Both encourage people to stereotype men as these control freaks or obnoxious men who physically dominate women. Polite society is not very polite is it? But at least some of the problem is parents and a society that values material success but not spiritual growth or finding oneself as a creative person. Certainly the man who is not suffers from this mentality and also the man with the plan. Both get good paying jobs but of course wind up hating them.
Super interesting. Love how you distilled what is a historically weird experience (modern dating, trying out many many people for romantic partnership!) into an ethnography of 20 and 30 something single men in the bay area!
I used to feel like my desire for recognition and appreciation was a black hole and then I quit my tech job and went to live in a hippie commune and immediately felt much better, so the overall thrust of the review deeply resonates with my experience but there's a few things that don't quite jive. First of all, the review attributes social despair to a lack of structure. I ultimately left the hippies because I wanted more structure but at that point I was already in good mental health. The hippies are pretty much the least structured and most disorganized group you can find and so more structure isn't what you need to get out of the black hole. I think it's more about the way the way that city life surrounds you with transactional relationships. If you had a heart attack in middle of a city street then everyone would look at each other and say things like "Maybe somebody else will do something about it." "Is that guy homeless?" and so on, whereas if you went into one of the squatted villages where I was living and had a heart attack everyone would immediately all start trying to do something and they would be super disorganized about it but they would clearly care about your problem in a way that's so obvious that it doesn't need stating. Even though heart attacks are very rare I think this thought experiment reveals a lot about how much different groups care about their members and what essential things go left unstated that matter a lot even when there's not an emergency. Another thing the reviewer emphasizes a lot is that she thinks these issues are for men. When I read mental health statistics about young American women they seem pretty apocalyptic and bleak, just in different ways than men's mental health stats are, so I would say this is a universal problem of growing up in a purely transactional world, rather than anything to do with men specifically. I guess men and women have show very different symptoms when they get the disease of shame/narcissism/social anxiety.
"Modernity and Self Identity" by Anthony Giddens was the first book I read that started to explain what was going on. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about this. A female friend who I recommended the book to who had similar issues also thought it explained a lot. Seriously, these issues are, at root, not about gender.
The dating environment the review portrays sets up people to judge each other's inner worth as a human being and usually reject each other. She was describing going on dates and then cutting it short when she realizes it's not going to work. That would scar me deeply and give me a terrible fear of rejection. I'm glad I never had to go through that. My longest running girlfriend I met through airbnb, when only weird people used it before it became really commercial. Then I joined her friend group and we went to jazz clubs without officially dating for a few months and then we agreed that she would move into my flat as a flatmate still without officially dating. This whole process of doing everything implicitly meant that we were never staking our worth as a human being on another person's judgment. A lot of things are better left unsaid and if other people value you as a person is probably one of them. SF dating strikes me as cruel and unusual.
Hmm, when you mentioned the hippie commune my first thought was, "It's the small group of people which matters." To me the large number of people in a city can seem soul crushing. All these people, but no neighbors.
> 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.
I think that Scott Galloway is doing a good job right now of trying to build a healthy mens movement and acts a good role model.
The types of men described in this post are all stereotypical, with many if not most features of the stereotypes taken from the familiar culture war talking points. I'm not saying that the review is fake - I'm not sure how likely it is that there is a real twenty-something woman who met enough men of these types through dates and wrote up the way she perceived them. Maybe it's a mix of personal experiences and cliché? - but even then, the personal experience went through a cliché filter, if that makes sense?
I kept nodding and thinking "yeah, that's right" as I was reading the review, but then at the end of it realized I just read through a few reinforced stereotypes I already knew well from internet culture war reading, with essentially no interesting or new information. That can't be right! I'm sometimes alarmed by how some people imbibe social stereotypes from their bubble so strongly they become a walking cliché, but this is relatively rare, not every single person I meet. Real people are more complex than stereotypes, and an insightful description of dating actual flesh men ought to contain some behaviors or thoughts that I, a non-American who never dated men, would find fresh and surprising. Something went wrong here.
Aella and this poster both describe asking men probing questions and then being disappointed when the men are hesitant or awkward answering, infering that these men must not know themselves.
I find that crazy. It is obviously you don't want to tell a stranger your weaknesses on a first date. There need to be a gradual escalation of trust. Having such a gradual escalation is just sane and rational self-preservation.
For example, if one knows oneself to be highly gullible, submissive or bad with keeping track of money, one should 100% not disclose that, as there are predators out there who will treat that as a shark treats blood in the water. More generally, even if they aren't a predator, they might just be a shitty person who could easily use your insecurities to hurt you.
Thank you for writing this. I think each of these categories are true representations, and it felt illuminating to read a compassionate first-hand experience of these different types of men.
"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. ... Yet right now the only people filling this niche seem to be creeps such as the Tate brothers."
Thread to compile a list of some such men? I have benefitted from the guidance of several, none of them perfect but all, I feel, a role model of how to be a man in 2025.
My list would prominently include Aubrey Marcus, and especially Adam Jackson and the work of his organization Sacred Sons.
Thank you for these suggestions for healthy male role models! I'm not familiar with any of them, but will check out their work.
Also would welcome suggestions from any other readers, if you have any. I help to mentor both high school and college students, and it would be *super* helpful to know of healthy male role models I can turn them onto.
Peter Limberg. Andrew Huberman. Many of the folks I have in mind are by no means exclusively "men's work" type people, maybe not the right people to recommend to your high schoolers – they come to mind for me because they sometimes touch on those themes, and because I find something about their expression of masculinity wholesome and inspiring.
Tom Bilyeu "Impact Theory" aimed specifically at young people in general, but has a lot of advice for young men because he is a man.
Jeff St James. Very thoughtful and sees things from a build up don't tear down perspective. Probably the most controversial on the list because he is the only one dedicated to dating and men's issues exclusively.
Dr. Orion Terraban "psyhacks".
Coleman Hughes. "Conversations with Coleman".
John Woods Jr. Founder of Braver Angels.
I second the Andrew Huberman recommendation.
Alex Hormozi.
Chris Williamson. His podcast gets a lot of interesting people. He himself has had an interesting journey from reality TV show to fitness model to the YouTube personality.
Ok maybe one more controversial one: Zuby.
Fair bit of variety in the list. Should include several unfamiliar names.
This was very good, but at a few points in the essay the author seems to severely undervalue the impact which women have on men's self-esteem. Which is a real shame, because understanding that impact is a necessary part of solving some of the problems she writes about. The vicious cycle of female rejection, which then lowers a man's self-esteem, which then leads to more female rejection is not something that men can remedy, it is only something they can weather. Solving it is quite literally out of their hands. Unlike looks, or intelligence, or wealth, a single woman is fully capable of significantly altering a man's self-esteem. Men intensely care about what women think of them. So much so that they can have a fulfilling job, good friends, a keen mind and a healthy body, yet still feel like a complete failure, if women won't glance their way.
If the vibe I got from this essay is anything vaguely true, then the author finds many of the men she runs across to be valuable, real people, with several excellent traits. So let them know. This is one of the few areas of dating where you can genuinely make a difference, and mold someone into a partner worth having.
Unfortunately women are also just people with self-esteem issues too. If a man she is dating forgets to, idk, send her flowers or whatever on some occasion, that makes her feel lacking in self-worth bc she gets her sense of self from how loving he is. Then she wants to dump him or not date him in the first place if he seems like the type of guy who wouldn't love her very well, which makes his self-esteem drop.
In other words, it never works to draw your self-esteem from other people, whether they be men or women. People are just people. They can't do the work of the divine.
Sending a person flowers isn't the work of the divine, that's kind of what I'm getting at. It is extremely achievable. Same goes for being a bit more forgiving when someone doesn't send you flowers. Or letting someone know that they have several excellent traits which you admire. Compared to other issues in dating, low self-esteem is one of the easier ones to solve for other people, while being very difficult to solve for yourself.
Plus, I feel it is worth pointing out, it is a very good thing for men to care what women think. If women truly believe that men are worthless, then men should work quite hard to change that. But for some of the guys she describes, it sounds like their self-esteem is completely decoupled from their actual worth. The only issue that they have is that no one values their clearly valuable traits. There is a solution to this problem, and it doesn't involve the delusional idea that "I'm great despite the fact that no one cares I exist". Women should value men's valuable traits. Nine times out of ten, I basically guarantee that this gives them a self-esteem boost. Which is great, because it's really easy to do! Don't drop a guy for having low self-esteem, when you can easily improve his self-esteem!
Some insecurities no person can do anything about. A guy who gets his self worth from how hot his girlfriend is, is always going to be controlling about her weight, which isn't going to help her self esteem if she's tied it to her appearance. In the same way, some men just cannot remember to send flowers. My point is that women are also people looking for self esteem and they have little incentive to date guys who they think won't fill up their sense of self, no matter how much dating those guys might help them. If women should be expected to date them anyway, why shouldn't the same expectation be placed on men? Why don't those guys go for ugly fat old women, in order to boost such women's self esteem?
I agree it's silly to think that you have value if nobody cares if you exist. That is why I spoke of the divine. God cares. Enough to die for you. There's no greater self esteem boost available.
I think I see where you're coming from, yeah. I guess I should be clearer, I'm not expecting women to pour tons of time and affection into dudes which they don't like very much. I'm trying to point to the fact that, if the only issue that a girl has with a guy is his self-esteem, and everything else is pretty great, then that isn't an unsolvable problem. In fact, unlike most other issues in the dating world, it's something that she is quite capable of altering, with a fairly low effort. There will always be the occasional guy who remains a sad sack regardless of how much people love him, but those folks are rarer than you'd think.
I see a lot of value to this take. I had an extremely impactful moment back when I was about twenty and tossed a casual compliment to a male friend. He got really quiet, and I thought I had offended him and apologized. Then he explained, "No, sorry, that's just the first compliment I've gotten in like three years, and I'm just kind of trying to process it."
The idea that this perfectly kind, good-looking (albeit very shy) dude could go *three entire years* without getting a genuine compliment was absolutely mind-boggling to me. I'd heard about men not getting enough compliments, but frankly I'd thought it was just highly dysfunctional incels who experienced this, and not something that impacted perfectly lovely men. Did some polling of my other male friends, and found out this was a very familiar phenomenon for many of them. Since then, I have taken every opportunity I can to compliment men when it is appropriate.
This does get a *bit* tricky when dating, though. You don't want to accidentally lead a guy on. But I still do my best to give compliments whenever it seems appropriate. And when I'm in a relationship, I'm extremely effusive with verbal affection and have seen what a massive impact it can have.
So I agree that's probably something I should have focused on more in the essay. It's an excellent point.
Aw, I'm flattered. Glad you got something out of my comment, usually my text just sort of disappears into the great blue yonder. Thanks for writing the piece! Even independent of the interesting subject matter, it has a clear voice and good flow, an excellent entry into the contest, in my opinion.
I had read The War Against Boys many years ago when it came out in 2000 (I was not familiar with the author) and it certainly resonated with my experience as well.
More like an*dick*data, am I right? Jkjk. Got a lot out of this, so thanks for that. If I could write half as well about women--
That said, while the types the author wrote of seem accurate or at least like a good start, I do think there are a couple biases that limit the perspective. First, she seems to take true love as her guiding star of what any of this living is all worth, and a happy family life as a suitable enough proxy for it for the purposes of discussion. Again, a highly empathetic essay, but still narcissistic in framing, always headed back toward the author--understandable from the format, but it sets aside the question of whether a man might become a man though some path other than family life and fatherhood, of whether a few of those glances from "not"-men might have been diverted because they have given over the wheel to other drives.
And then second, the take that the path to true love is through an exhaustive perusal of the options is logical for a rationalist, but in actuality, the process of modern, city-dweller, numbers-game dating way more often ends up an anthropologic (see: above post), or pornographic (check in with your brain on hour two of swiping), or consumerist (but which one is the customer who is always right?) exercise than a romantic one. Some say "love is a choice." For some, true love is a mystical connection that can only spring up from life itself, not from a ceaseless rifling through the racks.
The author's view of dating feeds into the idea that romantic relationships are arrangements that need be practiced to perfection before you can arrive in love. This idea is downstream of the strong sense for efficiency we see rooted in a consumerist-based dating culture and hookup culture--a culture that has so thoroughly dethroned the old purity culture that a man can get to feeling slightly homey again in chastity.
Yet, men and women both, broadly-speaking, fit these types. The only difference is that in romance, men must be active to attain a woman, and women must be active to avoid a man. This is why these same types on the female end don't track to isolated women (not that they aren't out there). But it is just as easy to be lonely when you're with someone just because it was easier than declining. This passivity is a good piece of what The Last Psychiatrist was on with the porn book.
If we imagine the mirror six types for women, and if cynicism forbids we imagine only whole-person-plus-whole-person as the finish line of stable relationships, then at least that explains why most of what gets counted for love looks unappetizing--1 in 36 odds at a relationship that doesn't thrive on subtle or subtler forms of cruelty. Craps anyone?
This piece is a pleasant ray of hope. Of course, for every essay like this, there's an app like Tea making the case against dating all together.
Thank you for writing this. This is probably the most insightful female take I've read on the plight of modern men, it's incredibly on the nose, and the archetypes presented are very useful, though I find that most men will find themselves matching different profiles at different times. I have a lot to potentially say about it, I'll write a handful of things, also specifically speaking as a biseuxal person since although I'm aware I can't speak for either flavour of heterosexual person I still feel like I have some manner of higher level overview for both sides.
One thing I think is very underacknowledged is that from day 1 men in "the dating game" have to face the following impossible situation:
- Men will generally experience a lot more attraction *a priori* to a much broader range of random women they encounter and then either reinforce or discard that based on whether a personal connection can be made, whereas I feel like women generally wait for a deeper connection to form first before developing more significant feelings of attractiveness. That matches my own attraction patterns to the different genders as well;
- Just as women, men will generally want there to be a strong emotional connection first before pursuing relationships or sex;
- Many men just don't really interact with women very much in their day to day life in a context where a relationship might form. People pick up pretty quickly that the office is not a place for dating, and hobbies and such are often unintentionally very gender segregated across the board. I was a compsci undergrad and my classes probably had a single digit percentage of women, but even a 60/40 ratio in terms of dating represents a game of musical chairs where 1/3 of men will be left standing under the assumptions of monogamy;
- *Therefore*, and because men generally correctly intuit that the name of the game is for them to "apply" and for women to "interview" and filter down, and that because they can't count on women coming to where they are, they're gonna have to go to where women are;
- *And yet* women basically instantly see through "ulterior motives" and understandably view this as an intrusion into the sanctity of their hobbies.
- Men tend to really underestimate the extent to which their sheer presence can make women feel intimidated or unsafe, even if they think of themselves as fairly unassuming and demure. *Conversely*, women tend to *really* underestimate the extent to which their sheer presence can make men feel intimidated or go "sdfshskdlfhskdlf I can't even", even if they think of themselves as fairly plain
Basically, men are not just "expected" to proactively contact women but romantically doomed if they don't, and yet the women in their direct environment are usually limited to colleagues, family members and transient interactions with strangers, and yet when men try and meet women for the sake of meeting women they are judged very harshly on having "ulterior motives" that are typically impossible to hide or avoid having (even for men who didn't come "looking for a relationship" in the first place!)
Men feel female rejection a lot more strongly than women realize I think, and so the effects of this are usually very profound. I've been engaged to a man for years now and have no intention of dating women again, but since I am still sexually attracted to them I do still strongly experience this ugh field around them and it makes it hard to seek out female friendships, to the extent of pushing me away from women even in hobbies I already have for their own sake and pushing me away from entire communities for some hobbies I have that are more female-dominated.
This is the experiential reality of a lot of young men: they are very excited about women, they love being around women, looking at women, getting even the slightest bit of recognition or attention from women, and yet this attitude tends to strongly repel women --- and I realize that it's *shitty men* that are driving this suspicion and guardedness in women, but that's hard for your average man to do anything about, and even surprisingly difficult for men to be aware of, just like the hardships of men are often invisible to women.
Another thing to note is that men are generally very clueless on how attractive they are or what really is attractive to women, especially when it comes to physical attractiveness, and this causes a lot of insecurity. Women do not offer up their opinion on this very easily to say the least, and any women commenting on a man's attractiveness in either direction even in passing will usually stick with men for *years*.
It's in this context that I want to draw attention to what I think is, from a male perspective, the most painful line of the piece:
> His attempts don’t go well. In fact, you might say they’re a bit of a disaster. Women have come to expect a certain level of romantic competence from a twenty-two-year-old, and he just doesn’t meet the bar.
For many men, twenty-two years old is *very young* (that's the age I started dating, and I turn 27 today, fwiw). It is a rare man who has himself figured out in any capacity at this age. I think it's right to note that women have *come to expect* things already at that young age, but I feel like typically what they're locking on to is just a matter of confidence and not so much any real mastery born from experience.
Mind that starting from late teens, inexperienced men tend to get more and more fixated on their lack of experience every year, specifically on virginity. I don't think women generally care all that much about whether a man is a *virgin* or not, seeing it as a symptom at best, but men care a lot about it for themselves, because at first they tie their lack of having sex to a self-image of being sexually unattractive, and then later elevate virginity to a symbolic status as representing this immense barrier to entry from lack of inexperience.
I think this is *especially* true for men who men who are uninterested in casual sex or the shallow throw-shit-at-the-wall "dating game" and really prioritize close personal connection and shared interest first and foremost -- I'm in this camp -- and you'll often find these men being increasingly very desperate for sex past a certain age, not because it is sex itself that they want so badly but because they've come to view "losing their virginity" as the exam they have to pass for women to even recognize them as human beings.
This effect is *very* dire, this is the emotional engine that ultimately produces the Elliot Rodger terrorist attack kind of monstrous husks. From the age of 20 onwards men start really "feeling the clock" in a very oppressive way, which tends to cause stress and desperation, which is (rightfully!) extremely unattractive to women, causing rejection, which is felt very harshly, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle and bitterness.
I can only implore women to please be much kinder and gentler towards inexperienced, awkward, bumbling, sheepish men in their 20s. Some people date a lot of people starting from their teens until settling down, others will wait until a really strong match and only date a few people over a lifetime, and I can't say I've noticed a difference in relationship quality over the long term. Mind that men already across the board tend to lag behind women by 2-3 years in terms of emotional maturity. Add to that that people mature at different rates -- I have personally always been intellectually a couple years ahead, and social-emotionally a couple years behind my peers -- and it really isn't that strange for some men to only really be ready for a serious relationship by their mid 20s.
Please don't punish men for waiting until they feel comfortable and ready or waiting for a person they're really into. Men are really fragile and care way more about what women say than women will ever realize. I guarantee you some readers will still be hearing "*If a man is past the age of twenty-five and has never been in a committed relationship, most women will view this as a red flag*" booming in their head at night. Few men really need to hear this, not because it's false but because there's very few men indeed who don't realize this.
Mind that the only advice I can really give *men* here is "care less about female rejection, how women perceive you, and how you make women feel", which is... simultaneously the ancient advice, the only advice that really works, and something that goes much further and transcends men and women and romance, and yet also the root of all evil, the source of untold suffering,
and an attitude that takes great wisdom and morality to wield.
If, as a society, we rightly decide to revoke men's license to "move fast and break things", then let us at least please accomodate them moving slow and fumbling things instead.
Almost all of what I've described just kind of melts away once you get into gay dating. There's issues there as well of course, but overall the situation is just much much better, and even though much of what makes it better doesn't translate to straight dating, a lot of it also could.
I have to say, reading this post makes me think strict sexual morality has an unexpected side benefit. When I was looking to get married, I only wanted a man who was a virgin. I viewed men who were not virgins as unserious about God.
"Almost all of what I've described just kind of melts away once you get into gay dating. There's issues there as well of course, but overall the situation is just much much better, and even though much of what makes it better doesn't translate to straight dating, a lot of it also could."
First of all, let me say I really appreciated your post.
I've never tried it, but I have to ask... isn't a lot of that just the numbers? Gay dating is going to always be matched up perfectly, almost by definition. With straight dating, it just seems like there's always an imbalance of men. And it doesn't take much of an imbalance to drastically change the dynamics. Like you said, there's a musical chairs element where a certain number of men are *guaranteed* to be left out. But also, those men are going to be crazy desparate, and the women are going to be very much on guard against those men,, so the whole system just collapses.
My impression is that it's sort of like a classic bank panic, like in "it's a wonderful life." Even if there's enough for most customers to get their money, it's going to drastically change the feelings of every single customer.
Thanks for writing this. As pointed out by a number of comments, feeling unmoored isn't uniquely a male problem and I've been feeling rather unmoored myself for a long time.
What got me on to the subject occurred at little before I read this article-- it was about people who leave cults having a period (about five years for a lot of them) of not knowing what they want. This sounded so familiar, but I've never been in a cult.
I think there's some deep damage to basic functioning involved. I suspect at least part of it is being trained to judge oneself harshly from the outside.
I don't know that things were so great in the past, but it's possible that it was easier for most people to live their lives without a high level of self-judgement poisoning them even when times were good.
****
This attack on men who aren't good at attracting women isn't just about toxic feminism. The classic "Have you ever kissed a girl?" skit with Shatner wasn't about feminism.
I was reading this and felt wow this is one of the best maps detailing the mental health crisis affecting men today
One key insight is how casual cruelty towards boys is not aligned with "fighting patriarchy", much like how eat the billionaires or anger towards individual politicians are knee jerk responses that do not actually help in addressing the systemic issues that are responsible for your pain
Rather the solution is to be a positive role model, to offer a path towards being a better man, lead by example, be a honest, sincere, sacrificing politician or businessman
Walk the talk. Realize by making it real in the world.
> No one should ever feel ashamed or unworthy because of an inherent trait.
I'd like some discerning man to write a similar map for women.
It's not like young men that resonate with the alt right are beyond saving, I do think it's possible to salvage a lot of the people who are on the fringes of the manosphere because they recognize deep down how being a beast is a lose lose game
I notice most men are a mix of these as with most clean decompositions. There are really vicious interclass effects like anger and hatred (beast) add on to the low self esteem, low self confidence (opt out) causing things to spiral downward
But there are also beautiful synergies where even tasting what it feels like to be Whole (often meeting such a man briefly can be enough) it can be contagious to be shown what is possible and empathetically inhabit that state of mind by spending time with the role model and then it can be an anchor men work towards.
It is sad that many of the tight knit communities where boys can find their place, trust each other, learn to give their life to a good cause and mature into men are derided for being a cult and shamed by mainstream society
But these exist and passion, curiosity and trusting your internal compass and experience can help you find your tribe
A long-time reader, I have never posted on ACX before. But to read
> Most of “polite society”–the elite individuals who often influence narratives in the media and academia–seem locked in a zero-sum mindset, convinced that discussing the pain of men requires ignoring the problems of others. I believe the opposite is true; the pain facing both men and women is evidence of a wounded society, and you cannot heal an injury by only stitching half of it. The rest of the wound will fester and spread infection, and then your stitches are of no use.If half the population isn’t provided proper care and attention, there’s no hope to heal the problems facing the rest of us. Thus the pain of men needs a massive increase in attention.
compelled me not only to post, and to preemptively declare this my favourite review on the basis of just the first few paragraphs, but also to fly to San Francisco to prostrate myself in front of the author (were she not anonymous) in tearful thanks.
I am one of these men who for the longest time has felt the need to keep quiet whilst the issues of women and other minorities were being addressed. But as all this explains so well the shit that has also been going down for men. The idea of keeping quiet has only resulted in, at first quiet depression, and then a steadily growing bitterness. I am not a member of the potential category of dates for the author, being 20 years older and no resident of San Francisco, and having a girlfriend so not allowed to go on dates, yet still much of this explains my life and its discontents, the churning discontents that are the end result of this youthful male flailing, the much-derided male midlife crisis.
Best of all the line about how The Man Who Provides might ‘run off to the Amazon to do some ayahuasca’ is just what I needed to read to stop me running off to the Amazon to do some ayahuasca.
When I joyfully related this article to my (ever-understanding) girlfriend, she remarked with a raised eyebrow that a woman who wanted to explain men from her conversations with a number of them might be accused of womansplaining. And we had a quiet giggle about how this article might have gone down had the genders been reversed. But I went on to think, if *splaining means ‘listening closely to the pain of others in order to empathise and explain to the wider public in an empathetic manner’ then please let us have much more of it, including men listening attentively to women in order to empathically explain to others where they see societal problems lie. (Here I acknowledge that this empathetic type of *splaining does not cover all types of *splaining, only to say that sometimes men discussing what is going on for women should be welcomed as a sign of understanding – isn’t this the fundamental basis of empathetic listening and reflection in therapy?)
I might go on to quote some other passages from the review, but that would really just mean copying out all of it. If I were a publisher, I would be offering a book deal, and publishing and marketing this as a book even whilst it lost me money, since that would be a much better way to serve society than all the confused ways I have tried so far. As fantasy publisher I suggest the book title of The Lost Map of Manhood, and hope that plunging my life savings into its promotion will bring about a societal change that compensates for the value void that has characterised the vast majority of my work to date.
I made the mistake of reading this late at night and now I don't know when I'll be able to fall asleep. It wasn't on my radar at all that there were many men in my class, much less that they formed an entire archetype.
I'm a man in the Bay Area. Review Author, could I trouble you for a few hours of your time, to learn from the unnumbered men who preceded me? I'd be quite happy to compensate you for it.
Writing from a throwaway account, because I'm going to mention things that have been very traumatic to me and that I'm not yet comfortable discussing publicly and non-anonymously.
I am biologically male, and in my late twenties. Lately I have been questioning my gender, but my "lived experience", as the youth these days say, has been that of a man. Since this post invites men to share these problems, and society to pay attention to what is being discussed, I wanted to bring up one problem that I think tends to stay in the shadows.
I think society should realize that the concept of active consent, and the idea that harassment and sexual abuse are unacceptable, should also apply to men, and that men should not be seen as "providers" of sexual resource.
It sounds obvious when put like that, but I see signs that it's simply overlooked, not spoken about. Maybe not purposefully silenced, but at least somehow not noticed.
***
I have been a victim of sexual abuse in my childhood. I've been normalizing my abuser's behavior for a very long time, and blaming myself, as children in these situations do. Only of late have I started to realize how deeply it has fucked me up, in multiple respects, but this includes my sexuality. (This part is not where society's attitude has to change — people are supposed to be all horrified and "I'm so sorry it happened to you" when they hear that.)
During my first long-term relationship, which was also my first sexual relationship, I very quickly realized I didn't want to have sex with my girlfriend. But the idea that it's valid in any way *for me* not to want to have sex was incredibly far from me; I was sort of forcing myself to do it anyway, and feeling incredible shame for being such a terrible partner who can't even provide this "resource". That wasn't the expectation for a man (while of course I wouldn't pressure my girlfriend to have sex with me.)
So I started losing erections, and my sorta-progressive girlfriend went as far as to humiliate and insult and body-shame me, on one occasion, in a way that left a deep scar.
Ever since that relationship, I've been noticing traces of this "provider / receiver" attitude, and the lack of application of active consent to men. Girls talking about how they were "treating myself so low that I was dating a guy who didn't even have an erection on me". Hearing about some female friends being outraged about their friend's boyfriend "denying her sex". Jokes in TV shows with women saying to their male partners "what?! you decline sex?!". Men having "performance anxiety" — because they *perform*. Consider the movie "no hard feelings" from a couple of years ago. The plot is about a thirties-something woman who has been hired to seduce an unwilling boy, by the boy's parents! Would the gender-swapped version of the movie be considered the light-hearted comedy that this movie was taken to be?
***
I worry about these discussions moving into zero-sum territory. If we talk about men's experience with sexual harassment, we take away the women's chance of visibility, and vice versa. I think it's backwards. I think healing can only truly work if we establish that rules are for everyone, and that everyone hurts, and if we have a dialogue across all sexes and genders. Because it's a wound. A self-perpetuating, self-reproducing wound, and it needs healing.
(UPD: whoa, it's been a while since I read that review — while we were still voting on candidates — and I totally forgot you had the exact same metaphor right in the beginning of your post. Anyway, I agree and I'm applying it to this issue in particular.)
"...seem locked in a zero-sum mindset, convinced that discussing the pain of men requires ignoring the problems of others."
Yet when the cry went out, decades ago, to help women, the call wasn't couched in these terms. It was never said "...but don't worry, we won't take anything away from men while we try to help women!"
Because it was EXPECTED that men would have to give up something in the cause.
Now that men are the ones needing help, you have to say "but don't worry, we won't take anything away from women while we try to help men!"
Because it is EXPECTED that women won't have to give up anything to this cause.
In fact, if people even think that helping men requires women give something up, the deal is off, for most people. Men can just go suck it, for all they care.
Many of the comments are arguing that "teach your son to be a good PERSON" is an adequate substitute for "teach your son to be a good MAN". One point I haven't seen made in response is this:
When learning a basic skill, it is absolutely necessary to learn a simplified framework, and gain facility within that framework before you can begin to really leverage alternate perspectives.
- in mathematics, 1+1=2.... except in binary, where 1+1=10
- in music, a "V7" chord is almost always followed by a "I" chord... until you learn about modulating keys
Beginners should learn a beginner framework, even if they later learn how do use an alternate framework. In the same sense, boys should learn things like:
- men are stronger than women, and are expected to protect them in danger (we can wait on "the strongest 10% of women are actually stronger than the bottom 10% of men)
- men are more assertive than women, so men are responsible for listening to the subtext women won't say explicitly. This has obvious corollaries in dating, classrooms, and workplace.
- women mature faster than men, especially emotionally. So you should learn from them how to handle complex interaction. You should also understand that they'll prefer to date men older than themselves, and not be resentful as a teenager.
There's no MORAL claim here... one can't derive an "ought" from an "is". And there are many, many exceptions! But it's a good starting point.
I also though it a sympathetic and compelling review, thanks to the writer.
I have noticed that all these articles about men tend to say “this equation is very simple if you factor out this “masculinity” term, but the point is that you can’t. Most men want to be men, whatever that means. At least this author recognizes that, even though she doesn’t have any more solutions than anyone else.
Read every single line of this article, noticed that I was several of these men. I’m about to be a father, and I can still feel several of these men inside of me. I’m having a daughter, so my focus will be on her and promoting her well-being, but I do wonder what is going to happen to all those little boys who aren’t going to be given the freedom to be their expansive gender category that my daughter will get. It broke my brain open when you mentioned that trans folk would rather commit suicide than be made to abandon the gender category they identify with, even trans masculinity. But masculinity for its own sake? Men are taught to fear it, run from it, betray it, or it will end up turning them into abusers and warmongers, suffused with vice.
We cis-men receive more anti-cis propaganda than trans people receive anti-trans propaganda. Sounds crazy, but the anti-trans movement is fundamentally an anti-freedom movement and the fruits of that movement are fundamental threats to everyone’s freedom. No moral person supports these encroachments into people’s bathrooms, underclothes, and personal lives.
But it is considered MORAL for men to oppose the gender category which they were born with and which is their preferred category. It is seen as essential to being a “right” thinking individual man (ironic for the left, supposedly a bastion of freedom) to eschew and throw off and betray any allegiance to the gender category of masculinity, because that masculinity is benefitted by the patriarchy. So, incidentally, is femininity, but being “feminine” is seen as a moral good or at least morally safe, with beauty and flowers and romance attached to it. There is no beauty in masculinity, there is only violence. There is no romance to being a man, there is only violation. There is no safe natural manhood, there is only natural predation that men must “overcome.” Overcome your femininity? That’s sexist, anti-woman, and anti-freedom. But there is no freedom to be a man AND be good thereby. That is… unless you are a trans-man.
Another point I haven't seen discussed: the WEIRD world is **incredibly** stratified by age. In most premodern societies I'm familiar with, there were typically ample opportunities for the youth to observe and interact with their elders. Today we begin age stratification by 5 years old, so you end up with high school freshmen trying to learn maturity from high school seniors... a case of "the blind leading the blind" if there ever was one!
It's marginally better once we enter the workforce... at that point the twenty-somethings might be interacting with forty-somethings! But the sixty-somethings are long gone, and any perspective they might have about other ways to interpret or interact with the world are gone with them.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the perspectives which elders have are CORRECT... but even when wrong, they can often be ILLUMINATING, because they can challenge assumptions so basic that they weren't even recognized. This is why CS Lewis recommends reading old books... the past is a different country, they do things differently there. Future books would ALSO be helpful in this regard... just much, much harder to obtain.
This post has convinced me that most of the people on this post are just *so California*. I'm from the midwest, more than half a century old, and a liberal, hanging out primarily with other midwest liberals, and I have never once in my life heard anyone of either gender espouse even half of those things you list in II.
Yet your five types of men seem spot on. I've been one or two of them myself. So I think the real underlying cause isn't "Polite Society" (ie, liberal elites) and their mores, but something much more fundamental.
I grew up in a rural community in Ohio, where I went to a very large yet still overcrowded high school in the 1980's. There was a clear status hierarchy there: At the top were the jocks and their cheerleader girlfriends, most people were just mixed up ordinary folk in the middle, and a small number of ostrasized geeks and freaks (drug abusers) at the bottom.
Then I left high school and went out into the world. What I discovered is that the clear status hierarchy that determined everything in high school basically didn't exist anywhere else. Oh, there are status differences of various kinds: class, race, education, color, etc. But these were messy, over-lapping status differences. A person could be poor yet well educated, dark yet wealthy. The odds may be stacked unevenly, but it was still possible. Egalitarian values make sense in an environment like that.
What I have seen in the last twenty years is a growing number of people who want the rigid hierarchy back. The world is zero sum, so pick your team and devil to the hindmost. Basically, the entire country has become my high school.
This is a problem for lots of people, but that includes men. My high school was extremely competitive, only the jocks were *real* men, and the rest of us were expected to act like minions. If you buy into this you are going to be unhappy, but if you don't buy into this you will still be unhappy, just for different reasons.
So here's my diagnosis: The first four types of men are victims of the growing power of the last one. The problem is political, not just cultural. The solution is obvious.
Your high school was like that because it wasn’t hierarchically based on laws, custom, class or whatever. In the absence of imposed external hierarchies (this short little guy is your boss) humans will create hierarchies and they will probably favour, in the absence of anything else, attractiveness and fitness. For whatever reason this seems less pronounced here in the U.K., possibly the absence of a strong school based sports system. ( Outside of rugby schools that is. People do sports but there’s no home coming Queen or the whole town supporting a particular school team. You might be lucky to get your parents to even turn up).
I sometimes see people opine that UBI will end hierarchies, instead it will amplify natural hierarchies.
Externally imposed hierarchies are far less psychologically damaging of course. That guy is your boss because he’s been here a while. You can still feel superior in other ways.
I agree. The most relevant area of research is [Google Scholar] Emergent Leadership, which is often hyped as a great emergent trait in a personality, but if you read between the lines it sucks.
Formal hierarchies, of course, are accountable to whatever democratic processes or human rights restrictions the public finds appropriate.
Ha you predicted my comment with your last paragraph, which was going to be get the fk out of the Bay Area! It’s a pretty place, but not a healthy place.
Interesting categorizations. I also suspect there’s a lot of conflation between “Men who Provide” versus “Men who become beasts.”
I used to research incels and the manosphere and found that a lot of motivational content and success content inadvertently overlap with language from the manosphere. Even in spirituality circles (or those who do psychedelics) the talk of masculine energy, etc, can be easy to mistake (or veer into) manospherism.
I'll pitch in saying this article has the wrong framing, so it's way off.
These men she goes on dates with are clearly shit-testing the author (google the term if you don't know it). What? You'll say. Women shit-test men, not the other way around?
The script is flipped in the Bay Area. There are evolutionary reasons for shit-testing for women, and it is that they have a high risk of being left alone with the baby if they don't chase away unsuitable suitors. The way it flips is no-fault divorce and high alimony settlements.
As a man, you want your wife to just do the things women are supposed to do. Care for the kids, the household, and take on the mental load related to them. In exchange, you'll provide for the family financially. But you don't want complaints, and you certainly don't want to get divorced on. You know the odds of divorce are high, this is expensive for you if you are succesful financially, and women routinely divorce on you for weird random reasons these days. Like poor mental health typical in postpartum situations, or after social media abuse or random reddit swarm advice. You also know this is 100% bad for your kids the studies say. Not only your wallet.
So you ideally need a wife with perfect mental health, who also does not pick fights with you all the time. Both because fights increase divorce odds, and because they tax you mentally. Thus you shit test her from the first date on. If she takes the bait, it's over. And the author above is not sufficiently even self-aware to realize that 1) she's being shit-tested constantly and 2) she fails those shit tests all the time on the first date.
It's second best to just get a wife who was raised in the traditional ways: never contradict your man, keep quiet in business situations, and do what was expected from women since time immemorial - successfully run the household and the children. This is why I said above that any profile of those in the article would be better off just getting a mail-order trophy wife. Girls from third world countries are typically raised in the old ways, knowledgeable about them, and won't divorce you on a whim, taking half your assets.
Ah yes, the women of yore who never spoke up, just did the work and obeyed The Husband.
Except in those traditional societies, the domestic sphere is the woman's world, as acknowledged by all, and The Husband does not get a say in running the household. So if the wife has legitimate complaints about him being a bad provider, those get aired.
Or The Husbands get managed, and it's amazing how many men seem to think they're the ones ruling the roost when they are being managed by "now I'm just a poor little woman who doesn't know anything but, O big strong wise husband, could you tell me if...?" (see Katherine Parr getting out of the trap laid for her).
There will be disagreements in marriage. The One Weird Trick is to sort them out, not expect "Silence, woman! I am the lord and master!" to be the rule. That's how you end up with a diet of arsenic, a funeral where she looks radiant in black, and everyone tut-tutting about well it was only a matter of time before your temper brought about a stroke.
Take it away, GKC:
“The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.”
In some of Heinlein, the ideal relationship is one where the wife works on the husband until he thinks what she wants is his own idea.
This can have obvious drawbacks, but I think there are relationships like that, and they aren't necessarily disasters.
In all this talk about dating and marriage, I don't think there's been much about finding and cultivating a relationship where your partner has better sense than you do, at least about some parts of life.
Also, I've heard that mail order brides can be disappointments. If women have no formal power in marriage, they need to learn how to get their way anyway.
eh, the flip side of this was the husband often getting away from the woman as much as possible via a club or a bar, and maybe cheating on her on the side since divorce wasn't an option for either of them. The old "ball and chain" mentality, even if said fondly. The Honeymooners raised it to an art form: don't think any other tv series was as influential as it.
GKC is a bighearted romantic: you kind of have to take him lightly some times.
This post reflects a management/therapeutic culture that I find the opposite of humanity. That's why I think about the Bay Area as a civilizational pit. Treating people as insects to be studied is one of the worst kind of things one can do.
Dear Author, there are no whole human beings. And this is not a pessimist view, I'm a pretty joyful person. But you can't achieve happiness until you don't realize that human brokenness can be fixed only by God, not by humans alone.
This was a fascinating essay; thank you for writing it! As a man in his mid-late 30s, a lot of this resonated with me. For whatever it is worth, I ultimately found meaning in a super-traditional family setup (3 kids, my wife a SAHM). Neither I nor my wife aimed at that or thought that we would get there, and neither of us are politically conservative. Yet there’s nothing quite like fully subordinating your self to the needs of your family (and particularly to small kids) to completely wipe away this sort of existential angst.
This is the review I will be voting for. It stands out for its warmth and deeply compassionate atmosphere and analysis of men's health; I confess to being deeply moved. I would like to shake the hand of the author and offer a sincere thank you. What a thought-provoking review! And when I clicked on it I actually largely expected a comedy piece (in line with Scott's 'Bay Area series'). Bravo!
Added theory: There's a push for people to be passionate-- pursuing goals (mostly making money and/or athleticism, though there's some room for art and charity) with tremendous sustained effort. Perhaps this causes people who are running at lower intensity to feel they're failing at life.
Note: passionate people aren't running at full bore all the time. My vague impression is that they can have some fallow years. At least some of them are bipolar and need to collapse now and then, and those who aren't bipolar may still get tired or sick or need to rethink what they're doing.
there's a professionalism to life now that is related to this. You can't just do a thing because you will soon find out that it is led by mutants: people who are so good at it that no one comes close.
like you play the piano and some youtube video shows a four year old chinese kid playing it better, or you play a video game and someone beats the toughest levels blindfolded.
people are too used to overpowered individuals in many things and come to expect it. the norm is well above the average to unhealthy levels. everyone should do sports, not an elite class.
Some of those videos turn out to be fraudulent, but I agree with your general point. By definition, most people can't compete with the top tenth of a percent at whatever.
The effect can be softened but not eliminated by people finding more and more specialized things to get good at.
It seems very wrong-headed to me to think of the pains and problems modern males have as unique to males and to the present era. Here are some book titles from the second half of the last century:
SOCIOLOGY
The Lonely Crowd by David Reisman
The Lost Generation by David Tremayne
The presentation of self in everyday life by Erving Goffman
MEMOIRS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward Said
Growing up Absurd by Paul Goodman
An Unfinished Woman by Lillian Hellman
A Sort of Life by Graham Greene
The Invention of Solidtude, by Paul Auster. (And Part 1 of the book is titled Portrait of an Invisible Man)
I see gender as a MacGuffin. It's not the true goal of life but higher goals can seem remote and abstract, most people seem to need to pursue more embodied goals and find higher goals as a byproduct.
Just thank you. I could go to write an almost as long essay about the pathways to wholeness. But needless to say, I get it.
I want to share a little nugget that has helped me through the years. I have always been a fisherman and hunter. So, you can see, I have a community. And certainly this community doesn't work for the Bay Area, but my community is one that I build. And because I move often, I have rebuild my community every time. Of course, I'm old now, and these problems of our modern society were not my problems, but let me get to it.
When you come on fishing trip with me, we will inevitably meet either at my house or yours, and we'll ride somewhere in the truck to where we are going to be fishing. And then, we're going to spend all day on a little rectangle in the water, trying to solve the same problem (to catch more fish). Success means lifelong memories and joy, failure means you must try again, and learn from your mistakes. But it is really that time together that is truly meaningful. And I can't even begin to tell you the stories I've heard from men, just bonding over life's shared experiences.
So this leads to couple of rules for anyone still reading this.
One, make sure you're community involves opportunities for deep connection. Camping, hiking, maybe some kind of board game night, whatever it is, make sure there is time for the deep interaction that I firmly believe every one needs.
Two, I have a rule, Once a friend of John, always a friend of John. I simply do NOT believe "for a reason or season." Nah, fuck that. I'm still friends with my High School girlfriend who threw my class at me across the lobby of our high school. Folks, the person who dies with the most friends wins
Three, YA'LL These fucking MANOSPHERE people need to fuck all the way off of this planet. This is the goal, people pay attention:
"There’s a stereotype that Men Who Are Whole are always overtly confident and highly masculine, but I haven’t found this to be true. In fact, many of them carry a subtle sort of masculinity that lends itself to gentleness and empathy. They have little to prove to the world, because they know who they are, and so does their community, and they are respected for it."
BTW, (and this is NOT a humble brag), this could easily describe me.
Many thanks for this post. The number of comments speaks for itself. One regrettable side effect is that I have not been able to read all of them; apologies if this point has been made before:
As I understand the post, the author asserts that a causal relationship exists running from "society" or, rather, the message propagated by "society" on the "Modern Map to Manhood" to a number of indicators of well-being or the lack thereof ("suicide, depression, anxiety, joblessness, and crime"). Given the lack of evidence presented I am not convinced by that claim, but let's assume that it is true for the sake of the argument.
So "society" is supposedly at fault. Who or what is "society"? It is never explained; the author's presumption seems to be that "I know it when I see it". Once again, let's assume that there is such a more or less well-defined "society" - is it really the case that "[s]ociety owes it to young men to draft a new map for them"? What is this claim based upon? It strikes me as apodictic - to me it doesn't have the ring of truth, it sounds more like a crowd-pleaser.
Isn't the pain that is caused by the mechanisms supposedly set in motion by that message from "society" profoundly adaptive in that it provides the impetus to figure out how to get rid of it and thus neutralize the effects of that message? The author herself hints at this type of "learning" on the level of the individual ("purpose often comes from a certain amount of suffering"). Men respond to the suffering with behavioral changes and changes in their beliefs that leave them better off just as people have always reacted to their environment.
I would add an entirely unsubstantiated and very broad-brush claim of my own and hypothesize that this "learning" exists on the level of society, too. It is at least plausible that the male-bashing (my term, not the author's, and one that I use out of laziness not because I consider it a particularly accurate description) of years and decades past has contributed to the gender gap observed in the most recent US presidential election. The change (Trumpification) of government may not modify the beliefs of "polite society" and the messages sent by "society" immediately, but might still be expected to lead to a (partial) correction in due course. The pendulum does swing back even if the swings are measured in decades.
The author's argument seems to be that by following her advice, the "sheer number of lost men" and thus the social cost can be reduced relative to what the cost would have been if the above mechanisms were simply allowed to run their course. While that conjecture does not sound unreasonable on the face of it, nothing is said about the practical implementation of her proposal - starting with the fact that it is not clear to whom her suggestions are addressed.
I have not thought about this topic nearly as much as the author, but rather than declare "society" responsible for anything whatsoever and formulate highly specific demands in this respect (as far as I can tell, these are pretty much being shouted into a void), how about shifting whatever effort "we" may be making to remedy the situation to something far more general and far more generally useful - namely, to teach individuals to identify BS and call it?
To apply this somewhat generic suggestion to "the new guidance we’re tossing at young men": A man (or woman) who has learnt to think for himself (or herself) will easily identify (i) the hypocrisy inherent in the progressive (my term, not the author's, and apologies for the additional instance of laziness) commandments and (ii) contradiction to reality identified by the author:
1. A term such as "toxic masculinity" that is not clearly defined and means all things to all people may be safely ignored. We would not take seriously a law that penalizes "bad behavior" either if there is no definition of what "bad" means.
On 2.: Do "bring up the multitude of scientific studies that question th[e] belief" that are consistent with the hypothesis that certain character traits are innate and that human beings are not blank slates.
On 3.: Refuse to accept the meaning given to a formulation such as "[p]rovide for and protect others" by third parties ("polite society") if it conflicts with one's own understanding of what this commandment entails.
On both 4. and 5., do not accept claims as to what or how one should think that one perceives as arbitrary.
Just wanted to say that, while I am still currently reading the article, just from the first few chapters I had to throw up my hands and say, "Finally, someone gets it!". I am almost emotional at how precisely and articulately you have described what I have often struggled to say when discussing gender with others, particularly women. I am definitely going to use this as a reference in the future, thank you for this great post.
My guess is that this is someone pretending to be Aella with AI assistance, or Aella pretending to be someone pretending to be Aella, also with AI assistance.
Any way, I don't believe a word of it. I know nothing about dating men, the Bay Area, or dating men in the Bay Area, but I don't believe in such obsessively detailed vignettes of "typical" cases, in any context. Gather up enough burdensome detail and you can paint a picture of anything, whether it exists or not. These are not real people, they are characters invented to perform a function in the writer's story.
This essay made me sad, in that "there but for the grace of God go I" sort of way.
My only thought is -- give the Man Who Opts Out a small chance, depending on his other attributes. I know I felt that way pretty strongly when I started dating my first girlfriend (now wife of 20 years). I felt like a very whole person *except* for the fact that I knew I was an awkward, unattractive creep that no woman would ever want to kiss or cuddle or love.
The amazing thing is that just *one month* of successful dating was enough to fix this for me. She and I both agreed that if we didn't work out, I would still be in a much better place for trying to date in the future. To the point that a different girl who had been friend-zoning me for years (and is still a close friend) suddenly felt attracted to me *once I was in a stable relationship*.
I know, it's your dating life, not a charity. But if you see a good dude hiding behind that damage... maybe give him a little chance to see if he can work his way out of it. If you luck out, you might find an otherwise Whole Man Inside. And if you don't, you might have given him a big lift out of the hole. My wife likes to call it "playing penny stocks" but she thinks it worked out well for her.
This is truly the best thing I have read in years. Thank you so much!
It does resonate a lot and it made me realize how lucky I am to have escaped some of these categories.
For what is worth, and just as a testimonial / single data point, my personal story is that I started as a Man Who Opted Out, but I was lucky to have a passion to follow, good math skills, some determination, and a community of friends who mostly stayed over the years.
I built my self-confidence through school and university, until I finally had my first relationship (and sex) at 27 (I ended up marrying her).
I then came to the US and became basically a Man With A Plan for 10 years, until I changed job, moved to LA, and divorced. Over there, I built up my women-related confidence after several years of dating and a few not-really-healthy relationships.
After changing job (and coast) again, finding true purpose in my work, and deciding that serious relationships weren't worth the effort (as I reasoned that I was perfectly fine by myself), I stumbled upon a fulfilling relationship with someone that really completes me, and we've been together for 6 years now!
I think that if I was asked to give some advice to young men, it would be to try to have a passion and follow it. It will give you purpose and a sense of accomplishment that are independent on the validation that you get from others. I think an healthy romantic relationship can complement you, but you do need to find your sense of purpose somewhere else.
> And actually, now that he thinks about it, he’s not even sure if he wants kids. They scream a lot, and they make all sorts of noxious odors and messes, and saddling himself to a dependent for eighteen years seems rather terrifying.
This hits close to home. I never wanted kids -- I find being around them viscerally unpleasant, and nondischargeable moral obligations even more unpleasant -- but as I get older it's hard not to notice that the alternative is dying old and alone. On the other hand, changing my mind means being saddled in just that way, and eighteen years isn't just a very long time -- at this point, it's probably *all my remaining quasi-healthy years*. Make that commitment, and I will never be both free and able to use that freedom again.
Hard place, meet rock.
(meta: how the !@#$% do I produce a blockquote, here?)
This is not an attempt to change your mind, but you should consider the alternatives: you old with kids, and you old without kids. There’s no third option.
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.
I think you are right with this update here. I believe it is due to the different "standard" communication styles. Men tend to be more direct and women indirect and boys will respond more compliantly to direct comms, IMO.
Lol! You've never been a teacher.
True, but I was a boy that was a student
I only struggled with following stupid rules...
I felt that way as a kid, and the rules may actually have been stupid. I don't remember all the specifics, but I was an uncommonly smart kid.
But having also been a teacher, I gained a lot of sympathy for the position of "No, don't try to figure out the point of the rules, just follow them exactly without questioning them." Because I've been in the position of trying to get kids to follow the rules, and I try to explain the reasoning behind the rules to them, because that's how I would have wanted adults to deal with me when I was their age, and then I can see them thinking "Okay, if this is the intended purpose of the rules, then *this* should be a convenient way around them that satisfies their intended purpose." And I'm thinking "No, no it doesn't, you're not that smart, just follow the rules."
Every now and then, they'd encounter a genuinely stupid rule, and I'd be torn about whether I ought to acknowledge "Yes, this rule is stupid, in a well thought out system, you would not have to follow it," and just pushing them to follow it anyway, because 90% of the time, when they *thought* a rule was stupid, it actually wasn't, and they just weren't as smart as whoever came up with the rule, and they couldn't actually tell the difference. And if I acknowledged that sometimes the rules were just badly thought out, they'd feel vindicated in applying their own judgment to deciding whether to follow them or not, and their judgment was usually worse than that of the people coming up with the rules.
Some uncommonly clever students are genuinely smarter than the average person coming up with the rules, sometimes even enough so to bridge the gap in experience of having been on both sides of the situation. But most aren't, and not being smart enough to be able to understand the real intention behind the rule *feels* like being able to tell that it's stupid.
Given that AI does a pretty good job of teaching these days... what's the point of the public school system?
There was another review on that a few weeks ago.
jesus christ . .yeah that will solve this socialization problem
How'd the lower half of society do during covid?
The laptop class can do pretty well online, but the lower half seems to benefit from going to an organized place everyday and having middle class grown-ups talk at them.
The public school system in 2025 primarily functions as baby sitting while the parents work.
I work with kids myself, but I have no sympathy for the notion of "Follow the rules without questioning them". Conventional schools are built upon mountains of stupid rules. The very idea of "Everybody needs to learn the same thing at the same time" is stupid.
In Sudbury Schools, kids are trusted to make the rules themselves. It works out great.
This was an inner city school. Compared to the ones I attended, general levels of order and rule-following were completely different.
I started out with an attitude of "surely these kids will respond positively to being respected and taken seriously enough that I never just fall back on 'because I said so,' and always explain why the rules matter, and only expect them to follow ones that do." And I quickly discovered this was unworkable. Depending on the sort of environment you're teaching in, maintaining a classroom becomes completely different sorts of propositions.
I remember in third grade that boys were not allowed to wear hats inside the cafeteria but girls were. Maybe there was a good reason for it but the basic unfairness of it never let me forget it.
Men are not allowed to wear hats inside, but women are.
That rule is quite old.
"Good reason": no, just convention.
Were there any rules girls had to follow that boys didn't? (No pants or tank tops allowed, shorts/skirt length monitored, etc.--I don't know how old you are & if this was a school with uniforms or not.)
Some kids struggle even with the sensible rules, though.
Like "don't smoke cigarettes"was both a school rule and a really sensible idea (don't wreck your lungs and give yourself an expensive addiction!), but probably a third of my year decided to disobey it anyway... and this was at an academically selective school where everybody was theoretically smart.
That's too abstract for most children. Their reasoning is rather: "well plenty of respectable adults around me do it, so clearly it can't be that bad, and they forbid it to me out of petty tyranny".
I was briefly a Junior High School science teacher (which turned out to be pretty horrible experience). Of course this was the late 1980s and things may have changed substantially in thirty years. I taught in a wealthy upper-middle-class town, and the school district had one of the best reputations in the state. But the principal and the vice principals were men (the VPs were ex-coaches). As a junior teacher, I got no assistance from them to help me enforce discipline. A group of boys were out of control. My number was listed, and it escalated mid year when I started getting death threats left on my answering machine. One day in class one of my punk students asked, "What if we came to your house and beat you up." Lots of laughter from the punks. Without thinking, I said, "You'd have to deal with me, my gun, and my dog." Next day I was called into a disciplinary hearing. I was smart enough to call my union rep. I brought my tape of the death threats. The rep blew his stack that they weren't doing anything to protect me from this harassment. Administration was embarrassed. I had already done some research and discovered that it was a Class A misdemeanor in my state to make death threats over the phone (one year in prison, with a substantial fine). I had identified the perps because one of the voices in the background said "Shut up, Josh!" I only had one Josh in my classes, and when confronted, he gave up the rest of kids involved (including the one who had threatened me in my class). I had the pleasure of calling each of the parents and reading them the riot act (making it clear they they would be liable for their kids' behavior). And I had perfect discipline from them the rest of the year. My contract was not renewed, though, which was for the best in retrospect.
But the male administrators mostly didn't want to touch discipline with a ten-foot pole.
Wow. Kudos for keeping your cool and using the rules the way they're supposed to be used.
I don't know if "struggle to obey" is the right framing. They choose to disobey.
Sometimes this is a straight-up cost-begefut calculation. But sometimes it's about the social value of being seen by your peers as brave enough to not submit to authority.
Submitting to the authority of a woman is more shameful than submitting to the authority of a man. A woman needs to actually be fair or likable to make teenage boys obey her, whereas a man can just be intimidating.
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.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of modern boot camp. You're not entirely wrong, but it exists to get people to actually KILL the enemy and not just point their rifle in that general direction. It's some sort of hard-coded thing in the human psyche.
Yes, and the same discipline should work for school as well. What's your point?
Mandatory military equivalent training for all young men? If done well, that could be fine.
That would be oppressive.
I don't think this is quite right, though I'm not sure about Army/USMC boot camp, however, UNS and Air Force have very little in boot camp learning to shoot. You carry a rifle, manly for weight and to learn attention to detail, but there was maybe an hour of shooting. Boot Camp is to shed the old life you had before and become part of the [branch of military] Team. It's bonding through shared adversity, and a lot of other stuff, but too early to focus on killing the enemy. That mostly comes later in "Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) was my understanding from my Army buddies.
Disagree--boot is about adjusting to a new way of life and a new identity, part of which is following orders without question. You cannot "train" people to kill. They have to be indoctrinated. Read Lt. Col David Grossman's "On Killing," a study of how armies get their soldiers to kill. Grossman observes that the ability to kill with relative impunity is not an instinct common to most people.
That is what I was referencing. Couldn't remember the title.
"debunked" would be putting it too strongly, but some wrinkles have certainly appeared for that thesis.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11mwg7i/the_popular_book_on_killing_makes_the_case_that/
Are you basing your opinion on being in the military, or on movies? That is not how the US Army operates today. Maybe the Marines. Maybe also ancient Sparta.
Rangers, Airborne, and Special Forces have brutal boot camps, but their intent is not to break spirits, but to cull the weak and to /strengthen/ the spirit of those who make it through. I've never heard anyone who went through any of those training programs speak of them as breaking spirits, but as inspiring and confidence-building.
I looked into the military records of Sparta and Athens, because it seemed implausible to me that Sparta could be a great military force while training its soldiers to be stupid and obedient like horses. And, surprise, Athens had a much better win/loss ratio than Sparta. Sparta lost most of its battles, and most of its battles with Athens; and it usually lost them because their soldiers or officers did something stupid, or because they didn't learn things from their losses because they /didn't write them down/. It took the Spartans 200 years and 3 major Athenians victories just to learn to have some people with ranged weapons.
They only seem to have had one good military commander in their entire history.
> I've never heard anyone who went through any of those training programs speak of them as breaking spirits
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/navy-report-seal-course-kyle-mullen.html
"The notoriously grueling Navy SEAL selection course grew so tough in recent years that to attempt it became dangerous, even deadly. With little oversight, instructors pushed their classes to exhaustion. Students began dropping out in large numbers, or turning to illegal drugs to try to keep up.
Unprepared medical personnel often failed to step in when needed. And when the graduation rates plummeted, the commander in charge at the time blamed students, saying that the current generation was too soft."
I would hazard a guess that some of the people who went through all that had their spirits broken. Though granted this is not how the program is supposed to function.
> And, surprise, Athens had a much better win/loss ratio than Sparta
Interesting! Source?
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/
That was a really unconvincing piece, from a usually great blogger. I suspect for the usual politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons. Assumes ancient sources are entirely accurate when it suits him, and then tries to handwave away the fact that the ancient sources all state that the 5th century BC Spartans were extremely good at fighting. Conflates the Spartan record from their (lengthy) heyday with later military losses from a period when no one has ever claimed they were exceptionally competent. Argues that somehow he, based on the very limited evidence that has survived, has managed to penetrate the illusion of Spartan military strength that had fooled the authors responsible for all of the evidence he relies on, and the ancient world in general.
The Spartans were good at fighting. Trying to argue otherwise, in what seems to be an attempt to own your political enemies in the current day, is odd.
The point of military discipline is not that punishment is harsh but that punishment is certain.
In boot camp you learn to do what you're told under penalty of... well, of being shouted at. And potentially of being given an even more unpleasant order. If a recruit outright refuses to obey orders then it's not like they're allowed to shoot him -- the worst they can do is fire you, same as any other job.
But after living with certain punishment for all infractions for six weeks, doing what you're told becomes the default. A soldier who refuses to do what he's told does not gain any status with his peers the way a disobedient school student might.
I mostly agree with this, but it's not true that the worst thing they can do is fire you.
If you refuse to obey orders, they will "fire" you, but they won't do it right away. They'll heap a lot of other unpleasantness on you first, starting with recycling (repeating Basic), and moving on to weeks of what amounts to prison with hard labor. Refusing there will just extend it. Leaving to get away is the crime of desertion, and could potentially land you in real prison. And when you eventually get "fired", you might get away with an administrative discharge (that's definitely what you'll get if you just weather the weeks of informal confinement and labor), but if you pushed it you could end up with a less than honorable or dishonorable, which will impeded your civilian job opportunities.
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.
Thank you for saying this more eloquently than I would have. As far as I'm concerned numanumapompilius has provided the right answer. The idea that boys and men can't/don't follow rules is just plain wrong.
Watch them, they are extremely good at following the rules for sports/scouts/video games/shop class/the military/etc.
The rules they have trouble with are the kind that require sitting quietly and reading or writing WHILE IN A ROOM FULL OF PEERS! After all, being around peers and ignoring them is rather weird, where else do you find that? Sitting quietly and reading is something boys will do for hours on end, just not reading the school sanctioned material, they just read the comic books, mystery, sci-fi or whatever stories when their peers aren't available.
Similarly, I and many other boys I knew had no problem following rules and strict discipline under female instructors at a martial arts dojo. Or carrying it over into other parts of our lives, when testing for more advanced ranks included needing to get letters from our teachers confirming we were generally exhibiting the virtues they wanted us to have.
Agree--watching my lad play baseball or football, he never had problems playing by the rules, but then again, he sometimes tried to work the ref or the umpire!
That's because the modern school system will just drug young boys up to the gills if they can't do a decent impression of a young girl for 8 hours a day for 10 years.
The modern military is... modern. Warriors of old time were more "unruly".
> (some) boys struggle with rule-following in school
I really dislike that euphemism (or is it a metaphor?). It might make sense to say that a student struggles with long division, but there is no struggle involved in rule-breaking. A student chooses to flout rules, usually because he gains status with his
peers by doing so. And why is that behavior admired by the peer group? Perhaps because it demonstrates courage - a manly virtue..
Banned for this comment.
Ok, I'll give you credit for that one. Fair enough.
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 was a scout in the Northeast and this is the first time I've heard about there being a relationship to LDS. There was definitely some Christian elements (like meeting in churches) but religion was never a focus and when it did come up was always pointedly non-denominational.
> I realized that the bullying is probably a reflection the Mormon patriarchal worldview.
I'm always surprised at the venomousness and frequency with which people bring up Mormonism. I don't know enough to call you out for this specifically, more of a general comment. There seems to be a large amount of reflexive bias that usually comes in the form of pithy one-liners devoid of substance. It's even odder when it comes from people who otherwise consider themselves open minded and pro-diversity (again a general comment, not directed at you specifically).
As an adult, I've always found the LDS members to be helpful and friendly to Gentiles. But having friends who left the Church, they've told me darker stories about ultra-strict, bordering on abusive, upbringings. That's not to say that this is standard for LDS upbringing. These may have just happened to raised in LDS families who were ultra-abusive. But after hearing about the LDS involvement in Scouting and my own experiences with Scouting, I put two and two together. However, I may be jumping to conclusions. But maybe not...
There was that Oregon trial (Lewis v. BSA) that awarded millions in punitive damages and forced the release of the so-called Perversion Files (filled with cases of sexual sexual abuse against minors that the BSA kept secret). That in turn opened the floodgates. And 82,000 abuse claims ultimately forced the BSA into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. I guess I got off lucky. I only got punched. I wasn't raped. But my uncle, who was bisexual, said he and a couple of other boys had sexual relations with his Scout Master. He said it was consensual on his part, but he was underage when it happened.
I'd say you got rather unlucky, not lucky. Others got even more unlucky than you, unfortunately, but I don't think their experience or yours is or was the norm.
I think it depends a great deal on the local pack and leaders. My kids loved cub scouts, my two boys went on to boy scouts, and my daughter would have (she went to most of her brothers' events) if they'd been letting girls in yet.
IME bullying is rarer in LDS than the mainstream.
And LDS never “predominately [ran]” scouting. They comprised at most 20% of members. Even at its height there was zero to minimal LDS presence in the vast majority of councils.
You should have much better evidence than 2 scout leaders (who probably weren’t even LDS) enabling bullying before associating bullying with LDS.
But every LDS ward sponsored a scouting troop. Even though the total LDS-sponsored troops topped out at 20%, the LDS had substantial input into the leadership of the BSA, with LDS church members having disproportionate sway over BSA policies, which was why gay scoutmasters and gay scouts became such a hot-button issue in the 10s.
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.
Why?
I don't know. All I have is Bulverism.
[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 once saw a character in a TV show that I thought would be a great role model of what modern masculinity ought to look like.
My wife thought that character was, and I quote, "a pussy."
Can you share the character/show?
The character was the father in "The Goode Family", an animated sitcom from the creator of King of the Hill about a liberal California family. The show only lasted one season.
I think what qualities attract women varies a lot. Personally, I'm attracted to warm and gentle men, so I likely would have found that "pussy" character highly attractive. Other women are more attracted to men who are in-your-face masculine, and that's a perfectly legitimate preference as well.
I think this is why it's so important to have many male role models who can model different types of manhood, but reassure boys that all of them are valid expressions of "being a man." Feminists have offered girls similar messaging: a stay-at-home mom is just as valid of a woman as a childless CEO. I think it's time that men cohesively share similar messaging to boys.
> Feminists have offered girls similar messaging: a stay-at-home mom is just as valid of a woman as a childless CEO.
I guess this depends on bubble, because the feminists near me call stay-at-home moms "domestic women" and it's not supposed to be a compliment.
[writer of the review here]
I've certainly encountered these types, but I think their sway has waned over the past couple years. I also find them to generally be very young (and thus not understand the amount of skill/sacrifice/effort that goes into being a stay-at-home mom) or deeply mentally ill (to the point where anger and extreme opinions seem to be the only output from their brain.)
These types of feminists certainly exist, and certainly you can find bubbles of them. But I'm pretty sure the average American woman who describes herself as a feminist does *not* have disdain for stay-at-home moms.
I admit my information is not up to date. The frequency of feminists I meet in real life has dropped dramatically after university.
I've always thought Hiccup from "How to Train Your Dragon" was a decent role model.
I knew one of my female friends wouldn't be compatible with me when she called him weak.
[writer of the review here]
I simply *adore* Hiccup and agree that he's an excellent model of healthy masculinity! He's naturally very nerdy, but he's also a typical teen boy who wants to be respected and protect his people. Yet he approaches this from a compassionate, thoughtful manner, and uses empathy and communication to accomplish things raw aggression can't. He ends up being a strong leader not because he's the physically strongest, but because he's the smartest and most thoughtful.
I know several of my nerdy, male engineer friends really relate to him as a character, and have bemoaned being too old to have grown up with Hiccup as a role model. I really hope we continue to see more figures like him in media. :)
Unfortunately, men who want to mentor children are often treated with suspicion. A lot of people just assume that you're a child predator. Every act of kindness can be reinterpreted as "grooming", even if you did nothing wrong.
Of course there are actual predators out there, but it's exhausting being judged just because I happen to be the same gender as some other people who committed horrible crimes.
And this gets back to the idea that the genders are biologically different, by the way. If you promote the idea that testosterone seriously impacts behavior, many people will say "Exactly! That's why most rapists are male and why most pedophiles are male. The only way to protect our kids from pedophiles is to make sure they never have any contact with men"
So I feel like the "Boys need male mentors" part of the argument tends to collide against the "Men are biologically different" part of the argument.
[writer of the review here]
I see your point here, but I would argue this is exactly why we need more nuanced, detailed maps for the various ways to self-actualize as a man.
Right now, the detailed maps available are more conservative ones, which usually emphasize a man's physical strength and authority. If this is the main image people have of a man ("physically dangerous and wanting control"), they're indeed going to shy away from a man being around vulnerable individuals.
If we offer updated maps, where the impacts of testosterone are gracefully acknowledged, but concrete steps are given for channeling it into productive endeavors (ie: sports, political activism, self-defense, speech and debate, etc.), and the idea that "valuable men aren't openly aggressive" is strongly communicated, then the idea of a man with testosterone is no longer inherently a sketchy one.
But I do agree these conversations need to be done carefully, and with compassion and nuance.
What would your proposed map say about men with regards to pedophilia?
Would it say "Testosterone has nothing to do with pedophilia, and those who think that most pedophiles are men are working with biased information, as there are many female pedophiles who simply never get caught"?
Or would it say "Testosterone tends to make people into pedophiles unless they're active in sports, political activism, self-defense, speech and debate etc., in which case pedophilia doesn't develop?"
Or would it say something else?
Why would it need to say anything beyond “a self-actualized man doesn’t diddle kids?” It’s normative.
Correlation is not causation, either, and I think you should bring more evidence if you want to say testosterone “tends” towards anything. There are quite a number of men who fit none of your activities, but didn’t “tend” towards pedophilia.
Sorry, there are two ideas at play here:
1. A map to teach men how to be good.
2. A map to teach other people what to expect from men (on average)
Regarding #1, obviously the map just says "Don't molest kids."
I was asking for the author's opinions regarding #2.
> I think you should bring more evidence if you want to say testosterone “tends” towards anything.
I'm not saying that. I was asking the author if they were saying that.
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!
i'm saying that men and boys pan a wider range than female traits, with men more likely to appear at both ends of the spectrum in IQ, independence, rebelliousness, ingenuity, and other characteristics.
Schools under female principal, and female teachers, are much too conformist for a lot of boys.
Schools didn't used to be this extreme towards "girl rules", but they're much worse now with standardized testing and everything. That's why so many boys "need medication."
> Schools under female principal, and female teachers, are much too conformist for a lot of boys.
Seems like conformity is exactly what you'd want for boys if they have a wider range of behaviors. That's what military schools are all about. Do you have any data to support this statement? Or is it based on your opinion?
Standardized testing is a kind of competition, which I would expect to be coded masculine if anything.
It's often a "competition" of who can screw up the least, though, coloring inside the lines rather than striving for new heights. Very different vibe.
That would actually be a really neat data point - does the "kill it on standardized testing but have abysmal grades" demographic skew male? If standardized testing codes masculine and good grades feminine that'd make a lot of sense.
You don't need to conform to anything to do well on a "show up, be awesome on your own merits, leave" day. I loved FCAT week back in the day for that.
Grades require discipline, etc.
afaik there is quite a number of data on boys doing better in standardized testing than their grades would predict. In MRA circles it's usually interpreted as female teachers rewarding good behavior by grading
Some rules are necessary for super-Dunbar social groups, but *which* rules are up for grabs and must be continually renegotiated. Some rules were arbitrary from the start and some become obsolete*: challenging those is an extremely valuable service to society.
* Not an exhaustive list of negatives.
I believe the individualism/socialization ratio is exactly the opposite of what many comments suggest. On average, women are better individualized—that is, they are more intelligent, talented, conscientious, graceful, intuitive, etc.—than men. By contrast, men are generally more skilled at forming strong communities whose power is greater than the sum of their individual members. Thus, women are on average superior as individuals, whereas men generally form superior communities.
Human beings, as a species, tend to solve their problems socially rather than individually. The difference between men’s and women’s abilities to form strong communities explains the power gap between men and women, observable throughout all historical periods. For example, in antiquity the Germanic barbarians were regarded with a certain disdain by the Romans because they integrated women into their armed forces. But—and this is very important—the integration of women did not make barbarian armies less courageous or less effective in hand-to-hand combat. On the contrary, the barbarian armies that included women were more aggressive and more ferocious. The difference lay in discipline. The Roman army, being more disciplined (i.e., more masculine), generally succeeded in defeating the (feminized) barbarian armies thanks to its superior group strength.
Returning to the present day: women, being on average superior individuals, thrive in Western-style meritocratic societies. These societies have largely passed their dynamic phase of development and are now in a static phase of inevitable, though (apparently) well-managed, decline. In this phase, male communities, being potentially very powerful, are (rightly) regarded as a danger rather than an opportunity. For this reason, the destruction—or at least the prevention of the development—of male communities constitutes an essential condition for the stability of these societies. A secondary effect of this destruction is the poor condition in which individual men find themselves. This, however, is not a pathology that must be cured, but rather the price of social stability in contemporary Western societies, and at the same time a symptom of the fact that these societies are in decline (just as, for example, the proliferation of women in positions of power in the fifth century was a symptom of the decline of the Roman Empire).
Pretty much every cat was raised by a single mom, sometimes with some (entirely female) help.
I can't imagine approaching any mother cat and offering to provide a role model for her kittens and expecting to keep my ears intact.
Is the behavior of a feral tomcat something we want human males to emulate?
Or perhaps, the behavior of male lions?
Might want to attribute that observation to Chuck Palahniuk, as it's like the second or third most famous quote from Fight Club, and pointedly underlined in both the novel and the film adaptation.
https://youtu.be/bBSvlTYfUrs?si=fb4Oa2_gaX3EgMYB
> Men had to compete and win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal.
What about the men who didn't win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal? This is a pretty bizarre statement on the face of it. I don't know what you're claiming as "rites of passage," but there are lots of studies that show that violent teen males have significantly higher rates of criminal behaviors, including rape, as adults.
Historically, men always have performed rites of passage. I mean, it’s kind of obvious.
Men who become adolescents are expected to perform and prove their manhood.
Because once a man grows up, he has in society’s eyes very little value, unless he can do something, and become something.
A woman can have babies, but a man must be something and do something.
I’m not making this up, it’s just how it is.
Anyway, to skeptics, here’s a partial list:
Sparta (Ancient Greece): Boys endured agoge training and had to survive alone in the wild.
Rome: At around 15, a (free, not slave) boy exchanged his childhood toga for the toga virilis, symbolizing full legal adulthood and readiness for civic and military duty.
Maasai (Kenya/Tanzania): Adolescent boys underwent circumcision without showing pain, then lived as warriors (moran) before marrying.
Xhosa (South Africa): Teenage boys were circumcised and sent into seclusion, returning as men after healing and ritual instruction.
Australian Aboriginals: Youths were circumcised, scarified, and sent on a solitary walkabout in the wilderness to connect with ancestral spirits.
Native American Plains Tribes: Boys fasted and isolated themselves on a vision quest until they received a guiding dream or spirit.
Norse/Viking Culture: Young men proved manhood by leaving home to raid, trade, or fight, earning weapons and reputation through danger.
Medieval Europe (Knighthood): A squire kept vigil overnight in a chapel, then was armed and sworn to vows of loyalty before becoming a knight.
Judaism (Bar Mitzvah): At age 13, boys read from the Torah, becoming religiously responsible for Jewish law and community obligations.
Modern Israel: Mandatory military service at 18 functions as a national rite of passage, demanding discipline, endurance, and adult responsibility.
Number 10 is probably why Israelis are so tough.
If you've noticed the Israeli men, don’t they seem kind of tough and masculine to you—they sure do to me.
Maybe that's the reason... They've gone through that rite of passage.
OK. I assumed you were talking about 20th and 21st Century America. I had no rites of passage growing up in 60s and 70s. What's changed since then? The vast majority of elementary school teachers were female back then, and they're still the majority today. There was a smaller percentage of females teaching high school in my day, but they were still the majority. I assume this hasn't changed. AFAICT, nothing has really changed in 50 years except young men are whining about how they can't get a date now. Back in pre-Internet days (late 80s? early 90s), I read a survey that it took the average male about 10 tries to get a date. (which probably explained why women felt they were being pestered all the time). Some men and women were better at hooking up than the average, though. It was the classic 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of dating pool (men or women) were gettin 80 percent of the hookups.
Anyway, I don't see that there's been a feminization of role models in the past half century (at least!), but we've either got a lot more men having trouble figuring out how to get a date—or they're whining more. ;-)
What's changed since the 60s and 70s? Wouldn't you say it's probably the role of religion in society? Staying together because divorce was Bad was, as we hear, very unpleasant for some couples, but it did make it more likely for boys to be raised by a man as well as a woman. Now that "staying together for the kids" is routinely mocked and condemned as pathetic and counterproductive, all bets are off in that regard.
On a completely different note, I really wouldn't call it "whining" if I were you. Have some compassion. Full disclosure, I have no dog in this fight, I'm a 44-yr-old happily married woman, but even I can tell some of these people are in serious pain. And I recall from my own experience that deep loneliness IS serious pain.
Religion can’t be the explanation. Other societies have gone full militant-atheist without following a comparable trajectory.
I’d pick the transition to a service economy and the changing market for labor. I have not fully absorbed stats like [these](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/goldin_cehus.pdf), but it used to be more viable to feed a family via BRUTE STRENGTH.
what society did ever go full-militant atheist except ours? If you mean some scandinavian countries it's not really different society from ours, american pop-culture has spread like a virus since the end of the WW2. I'm Central Europeanand still given the proliferation of it I consider Americans living in the same society just under the government that's far less coddling
You really can't see what changed?
For example, kids had much more freedom.
Even in the 90s, kids used to go outside and play without any parent near.
I know that's a popular idea, but does anyone have the data to support that thesis? And are you claiming the courtship patterns of teenagers depend on their playground socialization as toddlers and pre-adolescents?
Not quite the same claim, but it was normal for kids to be outside in a suburb without adults in the 70s.
There are a lot of other changes! for example, dating with co-workers was completely fine and expected. Flirting, welcome or not, were more accepted, at worst taken as a bad joke.
This matches my experience. Raised by a mother, taught by teachers and tutors who were all women, "socialized" by many girlfriends who became my closest social circle for years at a time. Desperately craving older male role models my whole life, I would always attach myself to the smallest trickle of "older more experienced cool guy who can teach me about what it's like to be a man". My few guy friends also in the same situation, it's the blind leading the blind, soft, passive men looking around for answers.
Had to figure out "masculinity" from books, movies, Youtube, podcasts, as the article mentions. Skeptical I've gotten any closer, it all feels like a pantomime.
this is so well put. I wrote a blog post and quoted your comment and a few others.
I completely get it. This was me. But I grew up before social media, and before high speed porn. So my brain wired differently.
https://open.substack.com/pub/idealmale/p/how-can-you-be-a-man-today
None of this seems adequately justified. Some of it is clearly false (many rites of passage were monogender but many others were not). I call bullshit.
Yes. Although I was brought up in an intact family, my da was working his ass off, so all my dating problems came from me trying to be mama's good boi.
It still exists in western societies, even if it's under active attack. It happen with your peer, your male friends of roughly the same age, during college or even before, at school or in your neighborhood (depending where your main circle of friends is), could even be online nowadays....I don't think the dynamic of male hierarchy building has changed that much since Paleolithic, apart from being less violent on most cases (not all cases - depend on country, social class and neighborhood... It may be exactly the same, with guns instead of spears).
There are 2 main differences: adults are involved less, and when they are, they are trying to oppose the process (partly because educators are mostly women, but trained men will usually not do better - Western society has just lost all sanity regarding expectations for adolescent males interests and behavior). Even out of school, helicopter parenting is delaying the process and/or make it happen online... In a sense, it's not that strange: groups of young men are a problem for all structured societies. But the rules of passages were tackling the issue by (trying to) channel the natural tendencies. Modern western society try to build a dam and pretend the natural tendencies do not exists... It doesn't work, and worse: at one point the dam will burst. It already has started to, with consequences much more serious than dating difficulties. Trump for example...
My following anecdata is somewhat besides the point of this review since I am neither from or in the US, let alone Bay Area. I am definitely a Man Who Opts Out though, except more lucky on the physical attractiveness side, but also more dysfunctional at life in general.
I do not feel at all that the problem in my formative years was being raised by a woman. I was raised mostly by both my parents (somewhat more by my mom than by my dad due to their career paths), and secondarily by my grandparents, and by mostly but not entirely female teachers and school staff. I think this is very normal compared to both present and past generations.
I think the one gender-related problem of my formative (teenage) years was the *lack of female peers* due to no sisters, and junior high and high school at one of the few boys-only catholic schools in the country followed by studying in male-dominated fields. That made me miss miss opportunities to practice socializing with girls (romantically or not), and on some level conceive them for many years as fundamentally foreign; rare and distant at best, dangerous at worst.
Add to that, on the personal side: inclinations toward neuroticism and passivity; on the society-wide side: dating being naturally an uphill battle for men plus all the discourses that can lead a neurotic person into self-hate, including but not limited to toxic feminism; and you get 32 years old virgin me.
That was an admirable review. Thanks a lot to the author.
The most stereotypical inner city black honor culture gang embodies these requirements. Proving themselves to other men? Check. Rites of passage including killing rival members or selling drugs? Check. Not following rules because they're feminine? Check. Primarily taught by other male role models how to sling and diss rap? Check. But these are all awful behaviors and much moreso than the average public school social norms, so there is no way what you said is right, without further specification of some end that will likely undermine the gendered distinctions you drew anyways.
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-quality feminist discourse'? I've just GOTTA know.
Here’s an example that I think is high quality. I don’t know if it is explicitly feminist but I think it is aligned with left wing politics and actual modern gender studies:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/16742776-of-boys-and-men
That one's *definitely* not feminist. Sure, they say they can be passionate about women's rights, but they also call women pussies and vaginas.
I mean, it’s a podcast, it’s meant to be entertaining. I self-describe as a feminist and agree with the broad strokes etc.
I don’t know that there’s an official feminist handbook that says you can never jokingly use the words vagina or pussy to refer to women. Especially when it’s an obvious satire of someone else’s position.
Anything Ozy Brennan has ever written on the topic. Ozy's current blog is http://thingofthings.substack.com/ but most of the feminism-related writings were on older blogs written under the name Ozy Frantz during the heyday of online feminism in the late 00s and early 10s. The immediate predecessor to Ozy's substack was https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/ .
"supplanting the natural with the just'...yeah, no thanks
A lot of "the natural" has a tendency to be completely terrible. For example, dying of smallpox is very natural. And it's that kind of nature that Ozy wants to be supplanted - I think you might agree on more than you might expect.
Great answer! But I wonder how quickly would Ozy get banned in a typical feminist Reddit forum.
imo, this article is a good example of it (I mean, the review).
I'd go so far as to say that scholarly feminism is basically a dog on a leash used to make pop feminism seem better and/or assuage an individual feminist's conscience when she starts to see what's going on.
Why do you think that?
Okay. If you want an idea of where I'm coming from, I'm a 25-year-old man who has faced a lot of hostility, has an English degree, and cares a lot about childrens' entertainment. I typed out a massive six-point response, but it was too long.
It boils down to this- the feminist ecosystem is best observed in terms of what it enables and endorses on the ground, meaning that the theory is the part in danger of being "not real feminism." Furthermore, the ecosystem's parts are best understood by the role they play in it. I have experience dealing with academic feminism in a university environment, as well as with pop feminism. Even beyond the previously mentioned roles, the former treads carefully around the latter, and doesn't really have any reach beyond it.
This is exactly the right observation to make. For determining what's true and good in the world, you may want to (privately) assess the strongest steelman/motte of an idea/ideology, or to look at how its best / most reasonable proponents defend it. At the same time, this does not prevent a very bad "bailey" version of the idea/ideology from getting all the power in the world - the power to actually "do things" outside of the tiny bubble of intellectuals writing long-form blog posts. And the version that actually affects you and the people/things you love - the "realman" - is probably more salient than a good version that, for whatever reasons, is impotent in the wider world.
An unfortunate dynamic then arises where the sophisticated people (who like the motte idea and want it to win) end up unintentionally helping the bad bailey version of the idea flourish. The Good People write a sophisticated motte defence of X-ism, raising its status among reasonable people. Bad People then do something bad in the name of X-ism, and the Good People do everything they can to disavow it - "that's not real X-ism, they don't speak for us". But of course, the Bad People disagree - they *do* think they're the real X-ists and that the Good People are spineless dweebs. However, they're more than happy to take advantage of the status accorded to X-ism by the Good People to do Bad Things under its name with greater ease than they would if everybody agreed that they really were somehow the *true* embodiment of X-ism (and fought back).
The effect is that the Good People end up (unwittingly) prolonging the life of the Bad People's program by obstructing normal observers' predictive powers. When observers notice a pattern - that pushes for more X-ism in their daily lives (or really, anywhere outside of obscure blogs) tend to lead to bad things, and therefore that X-ism needs to be opposed/stopped, the more gullible among them will be persuaded that they somehow made a mistake of identification, and direct their energy against "bad X-ism" - which, I guess, is a much less effective Schelling point than fighting X-ism? For some reason I feel that this de-fangs what could have been effective pushback, and is a mistake.
I'm not sure that it's useful to debate what the "true" version of an idea is. I think the important thing is the version of the idea that actually ends up calling the shots in the world - if the actual consequences of the X-ism concept are bad, then it needs to be opposed under that name - while granting as a technicality that a decent motte version exists somewhere (yet of what relevance is that, when its promoters so consistently fail to make it win where it matters?)
It's a Diet Principle: a diet that only works under heavily-supervised lab conditions is of academic interest, it's not a good diet. Similarly, a meme that can't be trusted to do good things when it enters the general population has to be judged on that basis, not what the meme happens to do in the minds of extremely rigorous thinkers. I really think the two versions should be treated entirely separately, but the bad version should be opposed IRL under whatever name its promoters call it.
I recently sketched some intuitions for why this dynamic might happen: (https://beyondthesymmetry.substack.com/p/useful-idiot) and I was primarily motivated by my own disastrous experiences of feminism, consonant with the stories in the OP and many commenters (and the two Scotts).
I'm drawn to the cases where X-ism is without a formal leader and without formal membership criteria. Anyone can do anything and claim it under the banner of X-ism. Of course, this describes most memeplexes in today's media environment, so it's not a good outlook. (Does this idea prove too much? Does SSC/LW rationalism face the same eventual fate? Does it equally apply to right-coded ideologies as well as left-coded ones, or is there some asymmetry?)
In contrast, if e.g. a member of the US Army commits an atrocity, the Army can officially disavow it *and expel the person*. In this case, people can at least be assured that this was a member of an org going against the wishes of the org itself (which it then enforced). Of course, if members of the army seem to go on committing atrocities, with the same condemnation and expulsion, over and over again, then we might suspect that the army isn't much of a command organisation in the first place - it's not very good at enforcing its official rules on its members. Then, we would be justified in not trusting soldiers to abstain from atrocities, no matter how passionately the generals broadcast their opposition to atrocities.
My basic point is, a political umbrella like feminism or a big religious umbrella like Islam (or Christianity) is nothing like an army - nobody is in control - so we have to expect them to evolve according to their own weird laws, which might be in a reliably bad direction due to entropy or Darwinism or something. To be clear, I also think that e.g. Marxism-Leninism was very bad in its effects, but not for the same reasons of a condemnation/exploitation cycle (it had official leaders, orthodoxy, and party discipline, and it was clear whether someone was in favour or out of favour with that whole system - someone correct me if I'm wrong).
Your answer is interesting, but I want to push back on it.
Speaking of higher-quality feminist discourse, or even in some extent "real" feminism (but less so), isn’t a sort of motte and bailey strategy, and it is more normative than descriptive, it is a way to explicitly specify what we think to be the motte, or the bailey (when you need the ambiguity for a motte and bailey)
We can think of more "neutral" examples, like science and pseudo-science, or doing math, and superficially using the formalism to raise the social status of your completely invalid chain of deductions.
Would you dismiss the idea of science, if some (even if most) people do pseudo-science, and this have real negative impacts, and the pseudo-science theories are using the social status of "real"/"good" science to raise their own ?
Maybe, but I think it would be a mistake, because every good thing could be used to raise the social status of bad ones.
I think it is better say "this is science" and "this is pseudo-science", and try to create explicit criteria to differentiate both.
"Patriarchy hurts men, too" ignores a lot of the problem. While it's true in some ways, it's also a way saying feminists don't have bother with ways that men are mistreated which don't fit into the patriarchy model.
Example of it being sort of true. It's possible that there are more wars because nations are mostly led by men. However, ending patriarchy (if it's possible) doesn't address men being abused by women.
Yes, I think both are true.
Patriarchy hurts men too (and I think, quite badly), but no patriarchy doesn't imply no sexism against men or against women.
And no sexism toward men or women, doesn't imply, no violence and abuse between men and women.
And the contrapositive is obviously true, not all violence or abuse is caused by sexism, and not all sexism is caused by the patriarchy.
I feel like I am saying something really obvious and not interesting at all, but also, maybe it needs to be said explicitly.
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.
It's justified by the usual articles of faith such as "there is no reverse sexism, sexism is privilege plus power" type of argument. I'm not clear if there's a way to deprogram people from that kind of belief system. Fortunately it seems like most regular folk don't believe that, it's a reasonably extreme, and often "terminally online" position, but one that gets a lot of the social media attention.
“that they have failed to humanize men.”
To me, the goal of feminism seems to be more about dehumanizing men. When you associate particularly bad behavior with the word “man,” such as in the case of manspreading, then this neologism serves to dehumanize men. Similarly, the false claim that we live in a patriarchy in which men somehow oppress, discriminate against, or exploit women can only lead to women forming negative opinions about men. And yon don't treat bad people well, so women are getting hostile towards men, which you can see on TikTok etc. where women celebrate themselves when they have ruined a random man's day or taken advantage of him. This dehumanization makes it possible for feminists to enforce discrimination against men, such as through women's quotas or DEI programs, because it is no longer considered immoral to treat these bad people, these men, badly.
This is not the goal of feminism, this is a perversion of it.
This is a real thing that happen, and it is quite bad, but it is far from general, and we should not let them take the name, just like we should not let pseudo-science take the name of science.
Dehumanizing men, being spiteful against men, abusing men, trying to hurt men in any way, isn't feminism.
We should gate keep what feminism really is, in the same way we should for science or math. Sure there will be disagreement on what it is and what it should be, but I am convinced the idea of dehumanizing men will completely lose the discourse when things are explicit.
"but it is far from general, and we should not let them take the name, just like we should not let pseudo-science take the name of science."
Really? Show me one text of a feminist, who wrote good about men. For every text written by feminists that says something positive about men, I can probably give you 100 or more texts by feminists where men are portrayed only negatively.
"Dehumanizing men, being spiteful against men, abusing men, trying to hurt men in any way, isn't feminism."
Really? Watch some videos about the history of feminism from Janice Fiamengo (she is an ex-feminist). Even the first feminist wrote texts about men where the protrayed men as genetic garbage or claim the same de-humanizing lies about men, which feminist still tell today. The claim that we live in patriarchy/a society that only discriminates against women is a core believe of feminism.
"We should gate keep what feminism really is" and "I am convinced the idea of dehumanizing men will completely lose the discourse when things are explicit"
Feminism was full of man-hating women since the begining and it indoctrinates one generation of young women after another, by repeaating all their lies again and again (a propganda method). I don't believe this will change and therefore I don't see why feminism should be "rescued". There is already humanism (which is also attacked by feminists because it does not prioritize women above everyone else), which fights for human rights and not for women's privileges and discrimination against men. But as already written, feminist want to change humanism into feminism and then men can't be discriminated against anymore (a claim, which is also a tool to dehumaize people. The Nazi's told this lie about jews).
I feel like you are exaggerating things here.
> Really? Show me one text of a feminist, who wrote good about men. For every text written by feminists that says something positive about men, I can probably give you 100 or more texts by feminists where men are portrayed only negatively.
Maybe I am wrong, but yes really.
I saw a lot of feminism text discriminating against men, but also a lot trying to protect men and women (and I think this review is one of them).
Maybe we should just abandon the word, humanism is all good, but I think it would still be unfair to think anyone calling themselves a feminism is just being spiteful or unfair against 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.
i think the bay area dating scene is probably bizarre and distorted enough to *specifically* be well-targeted by this essay?
or at least, i'd keep this possibility open
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.
The general acceptance of the patriarchy amazes me to this day. It's basically the same thing as the illuminati.
There's no test, nor end for it. There is no defined point from which we no longer live in a patriarchy or we don't live under patriarchal rules. As commented here and elsewhere, it is completely normal for a child to have a vast majority of female authority figures until or even after college. Still a patriarchy. The government can be 50/50, women may in general be better off than men, it doesn't seem to matter since as long as anything can be pointed out to possibly be a sign of patriarchy, that's all it takes. This includes the past itself having any of those signs.
Then, it's tautologically evil and omnipresent. There is seemingly not a thing that can't be blamed on the patriarchy. Crime? Well of course. War? Evidently. Beauty standards? The existence of purses? Climate change? If it can be considered a product of society in any way, it surely is a product of patriarchy since male standards rule society. The label of my water bottle being blue is surely a result of the patriarchy, and none can prove otherwise.
Now I don't intend to dismiss the whole concept altogether. It's definitely a healthy thing to consider a perspective and how it explains the world without having to buy into it, I can lean into capitalist thinking and go "Huh, so that's why the job market sucks right now" and I can lean into Christian thinking and go "Huh, maybe the world would be a better place with more piety", what gets me is that there seems to be an unending list of consequences and conclusions related to the concept of patriarchy that have barely anything to back them up at all, and this is in today's age widely expected to be accepted in many circles to such a degree that saying "I don't believe in the patriarchy" gets people to look at you as if you are crazy, even if nobody can give solid arguments on it.
At one point in time I pretty aggressively would hound people for a falsification of patriarchy in online discussions.
Literally half-a-dozen back-and-forths in which I would ask "what would a society without patriarchy look like?" over and over. The most comprehensible answer I got was basically "a society without any sort of gender role, which we will know because everything is split exactly 50/50" (meaning patriarchy is the inverse of that).
The most common responses were that patriarchy is either unfalsifiable, or just a stock vague list of things that disadvantage women.
It's just another face of Moloch. Capitalism, Fascism, Zionism, the Illuminati, Satan, Communism, White Supremacy, Jihadism, Racism, the list of great amorphous powers that can be used to explain all human problems goes on and on.
I don't understand how this is Moloch. To me, it seems like over generalization or mistakes, not coordination problems nor tragedies of common goods.
Moloch sure doesn't help, but I don't think it is the main actor here, there are other evil gods.
Also, I think capitalism and communism was a fight against Moloch.
Capitalism was a way to forbid a large class of direct violence and power, a large class which was used quite directly by Moloch.
But Moloch didn't need this direct access to violence, and capitalism was a fertile field for its own power.
Communism was a direct attempt against the power of Moloch inside the capitalist system, but it failed because it didn’t have strong defense against direct and social violence, and Moloch used it, to bring the worst at the top, and in most case, this push back against Moloch was corrupted by him.
"How do you measure that?" is often a great question for supposedly existing phenomenons.
If you claim something is real, there must be a way to observe and measure it. Which means there is a way to know when it's gone.
The "gender goon squad" is often female.
Yeah, in my experience, "patriarchy hurts men too" is used by feminists in the sense of "men, stop hurting yourself", not in the sense of "traditional gender norms - quite often also enforced by women - hurt men too".
"I'd gladly stop hitting myself, if you would be so kind as to let go of my arm."
"But then you might start hitting me! Don't I have a right to always feel safe?"
[writer of the review here]
It is indeed a very common observation of serious feminist thinkers, but I've found there is a massive discrepancy between "serious feminist writers" and "mainstream feminism the average person encounters on a day-to-day basis." The former holds many gems regarding gender relations; the latter tends to be openly hostile toward men, and if it does acknowledge the pain that sexism causes men, it usually does so in a way that blames and shames men. The latter also tends to hold on to the mindset that "men need to quit whining until women solve their issues."
The reality is that most young Western men do not support mainstream feminism in its current form. The polls that have been done on this topic are frankly terrifying (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/gen-z-men-and-women-most-divided-on-gender-equality-global-study-shows , https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-young-men-are-turning-against-feminism/) There are now less Gen Z men who support feminism than Millennials, which I find extremely concerning as a woman.
So, yes, you can point to feminist thinkers who bring thoughtful and compassionate nuance to the table. But those are *not* the voices the average young man is hearing, and hence why I didn't center this essay on those voices.
Hi anon writer - I loved this but felt it was two separate essays - one on the collapse of life maps for men, the other on the taxonomy of human unhappiness. Your ideal-type biographies are vivid and believable. But a lot of women have similar trajectories and feelings. And I don't think people were happier in the past. having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
Hey Jeremy, thanks so much for reading it! I would *firmly* agree that women face a lot of very similar challenges, and there's a lot of overlap in taxonomies.
However, I think both genders often face unique challenges from similar circumstances. For example, when my female friends struggle with social awkwardness and dating, I often encourage them to just try chatting with anyone they find attractive. "Just put yourself out there" and "practice makes perfect" is great advice for them.
For my male friends, it's very different: a socially awkward man chatting up any woman he finds attractive is a recipe for getting called a creep and being perceived as a threat, which only worsens their anxieties/insecurities. There is a much more intricate social dance that men must abide by when it comes to approaching a potential partner, and often times there are no healthy male role models available to teach that dance.
It's similar for situations like "I don't find my career fulfilling." This is a super common experience among both genders. However, if a woman leaves her 6-figure job in finance to become a pre-school teacher, there isn't a huge social penalty for this. Whereas for men, if their salary is suddenly cut by 70%, their romantic and even friendship potential is viewed as being very negatively impacted.
These sound like fairly minor things, but when you stack hundreds of these little things together, you end up with pretty different challenges and paths through life. And it's clear that right now men are struggling more than women to figure out healthy paths: American males are doing worse on pretty much every stat involving well-being, from education to incarceration to drug addition to suicide rates.
This is why I decided to tailor these taxonomies specifically to men: there may be lots of overlap with woman's issues, but the map to and from these issues tends to vary quite a bit.
> having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
I don't think I agree with this. Having a purpose and having a community are both strongly linked to happiness, and this connection has been shown by many large-scale studies over the years. Purpose and community may not *protect* you from feeling sadness and emptiness, but they will certainly mitigate the emotions and help you have the confidence/drive to pick yourself up and try again.
Thanks for responding. I concede your point about empirical evidence that community and (probably) uncontested life expectations promote happiness in today’s society, compared with the norm. But as a history professor, I am skeptical of our assumption people in the past were free of the sorrows we associate with modernity. My intuition, or prior, is that many people in dense organic community felt anomie and purposelessness like we do. Those people, born into strong communities today, drift out of them. The others, raised outside of strong communities, maybe drift into them, or thrive without them. (And likely aren’t dating!)
I mean, the specific, extreme personalities you document may not have appeared in anything like the sane form, earlier. (And of course, modern dating didn’t exist.) but in the past, those people may have started out strong in their communities and failed to launch, or to find fulfillment even when successful, and may have ended just as sad as today with similar feelings of being lost, alone in the crowd, etc.
in the past, many men and women did find themselves far from home, or isolated by the death of all their family, all alone in life, unable to rebuild human connection.
“For my male friends, it's very different: a socially awkward man chatting up any woman he finds attractive is a recipe for getting called a creep and being perceived as a threat, which only worsens their anxieties/insecurities.”
Without challenging the overall thesis that men are on average thriving less than women - is “get out there and meet people” actionable advice for women who are overweight, have a face perceived as ugly, or have a mood disorder? (In each of which, women are held to a higher standard than men.) My sense is that a large minority of women are deeply depressed and isolated, feel they have nothing to offer the world.
All this is in the spirit of commentary, not rebuttal. I got a lot out of your essay.
I've read someone's observation that "attractive woman" and "unattractive woman" might as well be different genders because of the different ways they get treated. My wife grew up obese and ended up with the same kinds of resentments and lack of sympathy for women complaining about unwanted attention as some men. Her reaction to Trump's "grab them by the pussy" line was something like "Hell yeah, I'd love it if someone rich and famous wanted to grab my pussy!"
At least the Red Tribe members among my in-laws gave up on Trump after Jan 6.
I'm not the writer of the review, and can't speak for what her commentary would be. But my impression is that there are some women for whom it's a genuine struggle to find anyone who wants or desires them, even when they put themselves forward, but that they're a lot fewer than the number of women who struggle with their self esteem and imagine themselves to be undesirable.
Several months ago, I made friends with a woman who thought herself to be undesirable and lacking any realistic relationship prospects. I thought that she was well within the range of ordinary appearance and relationship appeal, and that plenty of men would be likely to find her desirable as a partner, and I gave her some advice on how to put herself forward and filter for potential relationship partners.
Last I heard from her, a few weeks ago, she and her boyfriend were planning to move in together. They got together less than a month after I first started offering her advice.
All that is to say, I think there are women whose personal attributes leave them genuinely isolated and without good relationship prospects, but a lot of women who think "my personal attributes leave me without good relationship prospects" are mistaken.
I would definitely agree there's a large minority of women struggling with depression and isolation--there isn't enough written about them, and I wish more people would provide them with visibility and empathy. But I would still argue their predicament is fundamentally different.
In my experience of helping friends with dating, even a woman who is overweight and not conventionally attractive can usually land several dates on dating apps and get a certain degree of attention. For my male friends in this category, they can spend hours swiping and hundreds of dollars on "pro plans" on dating apps, and still only match with bots.
My guess is that some of this has to do with an unconscious linking of unattractive men/dangerous men. I think there's an unconscious bias toward believing that if a man is not "socially appealing," that must mean society distrusts them for a reason, and they may be dangerous. This adds an extra layer of struggle toward socializing--they're viewed not just as "ugly", but also as potentially dangerous, hence accusations of being a "creep" and such. Society just doesn't tend to fear women as much, so I think unattractive women aren't impacted to the same degree.
I've found a lot of my female friends who struggle with dating have realized that the biggest issue is that social media warped their idea of what an "ideal woman" looks like, and once they get over their insecurities, they actually have a good chance of finding someone. But for men, it just doesn't seem to be that easy.
So, yes, I have seen "get out there and meet people" actually work fairly well for my female friends who struggle with dating. But not so much for my male friends.
Of course this observation comes with the usual caveats of small sample size, anecdotal evidence, etc, etc.
> Whereas for men, if their salary is suddenly cut by 70%, their romantic and even friendship potential is viewed as being very negatively impacted. These sound like fairly minor things
Considering that you spend 8 hours a day at work, this alone does not seem like a minor thing to me. It is almost half of all the time you are awake.
On top of that (this may depend on country) where I live it is almost impossible for a man to find a part-time job. Even if half of his salary would be sufficient to feed the family.
My wife has a job that she chose freely, and she works part-time. I am happy for her; I just wish I could have the same thing. It almost feels as if we lived in different political regimes; she lives somewhere that is halfway to socialism, I work in a cutthroat capitalism.
Speaking as a middle-aged ex-feminist, I think your essay is one of the most powerful pieces I've read in a long, long time. I will re-Stack it gladly. Thank you for your empathy, depth and intellectual rigor.
You may be wondering why I identify as an "ex-feminist". Long story short: About 10 years ago I realized that the line I'd been taught by my very liberal upbringing and education--"The Patriarchy hurts men too and Feminism will help you"--was a lie.
1st point: "The Patriarchy" doesn't exist in Western society anymore. Not for quite a long time. Patriarchy has become some catch-all Bogeyman to explain away any undesirable behavior or outcome. Want to see a real patriarchy? Go to Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan. What we have is a liberal, post-Enlightenment society that legally recognizes all humans as equal (on paper, anyway). A real patriarchy would not be compatible with democracy. Why would those in power cede control to the unwashed masses, regardless of their gender?
2. Men, on average, in our society, are no more privileged than women are. What is so "privileged" about getting circumcised, being forced to sign up for Selective Service, or being expected to take on most of the dangerous jobs? I've never seen a feminist movement, let alone a feminist individual, address these points satisfactorily, besides snide comments like, "you GUYS created these problems so it's up to you to fix them." The only ones who are truly privileged are the very wealthy. The rest of us fight amongst ourselves over silly issues like pronoun usage instead of fighting the ruling class. This is not an accident.
3. Feminists ask us, practically demand, that we be "good allies." Ok, fine. We try to do that only to discover that they treat allyship as a one-way street. Since they're so "disadvantaged" they don't feel need to reciprocate one whit. (Present company excepted.) It's like Lucy pulling the football out from Linus every time.
4. (And most importantly) Any serious attempt at support for men, by men, is reflexively rejected by most feminists. As your piece points out, they see this as a zero-sum game. They not only lack empathy, they seem gleefully sadistic at the thought of us suffering for all the sins of our forefathers.
So I cannot support a movement that actively encourages hatred towards me because I have XY chromosomes. That would be masochistic. And for anyone reading this thinking, "No true feminist would think that!", I have a Scotsman to introduce you to.
> I've never seen a feminist movement, let alone a feminist individual, address these points satisfactorily, besides snide comments like, "you GUYS created these problems so it's up to you to fix them."
Fortunately, I have. Unfortunately there were also plenty of feminist assholes back in the heyday of Internet feminism - I gave up on reading Amanda Marcotte's blog for pretty much the reasons you cited.
I was also pretty active in feminist communities for quite some time, but I gradually distanced myself, and an experience I had about ten years back with my girlfriend at the time still sticks strongly in my memory when I think about why.
She used to browse feminist websites a lot on her phone during our time together, and would occasionally show me stuff she found funny or interesting. But the content of the sites made me uncomfortable, and I eventually told her that I didn't mind her browsing feminist websites while we were together so much, but it was uncomfortable for me how much of the content of those sites was misandrist in nature. She told me that she didn't think it was, but when I offered examples of the same sort of reasoning and rhetoric gender-flipped, and asked if she'd think that a site with that sort of content was misogynist, she immediately agreed that she would, and that she'd been failing to think of it in the same terms. When I asked her if she'd feel as at-home on sites without that sort of misandrist tone, she said "I don't think there are any."
I don't think she was right, that there were literally none. But it wasn't like she went out of her way to find communities which were hostile to men. She thought she was deliberately filtering out communities which were hostile, and only immersing herself in communities which were supportive and accepting of everyone. But when she broadened her view of what constituted hostility against men to the same sort of criteria that she'd apply when assessing for hostility against women, she genuinely couldn't think of any she was aware of which met those standards.
I still wear my feminist hat sometimes, and I think learning to analyze things through a feminist framework is genuinely valuable. But over time, feminist communities stopped being a place where I felt welcome, or like my contributions were valued. And that makes it hard to think of yourself as being a member of the community.
I’ve been in feminist forums that unironically stated “misandry does not exist.” SMH.
A trivial point, but it's nails-on-a-chalkboard to me: It wasn't Linus Lucy pulled the football away from, it was Charlie Brown. (43 times; this blogger helpfully collected them all: https://karnicky.blogspot.com/search/label/Lucy)
Oh right! Thanks, it’s been a long time since I’ve watched those.
That may be true, IDK. But I don't think you really support the claim that the disaffection you say you see in men is at all caused by these un-nuanced feminist voices.
[writer of the review here]
I certainly don't think un-nuanced feminist voices are the sole cause of all this disaffection. I *do* however think they've been a powerful force keeping sane, stable men from identifying the problem of floundering men and stepping forward to say, "Hey, I'm a proud man with a great life, these are the unique challenges I faced as a man, here's how I forged my own path, and maybe this path could be beneficial to you as well."
Many feminists have aggressively tried to shut down this type of dialogue, insisting it enforces gender roles. They instead preach that everyone should just "be a good person" and focus on a gender-agnostic identity. And to be clear--this is my ideal world. But it's an ideal that clashes with social and biological realities, and it's left many boys and men feeling deeply lost and disaffected.
So we're left with young men begging for direction tailored to their gender, and right now the only people willing to loudly and publicly respond to them are creeps within the manosphere (because these men have zero respect for feminists, and in fact benefit from their outrage.)
In my own experience, having female mentors and role-models who took a unique life path, discussed the unique challenges of being on that path as a woman, and provided a detailed map for other young women on that path was *absolutely vital* to me becoming a whole, stable, and happy person. I would be a horribly lost person without it.
The fact that many young men are deprived of that same type of mentorship, in the service of some unrealistic ideal of a gender-agnostic society, is frankly rather heart-breaking to me.
Even among serious feminists, I'm not sure the discussion is a productive one. For example, feminists criticize patriarchy for causing men to suppress their emotions, to their apparent detriment (though one could argue that stoicism is psychologically healthy!). But one could ask if it's patriarchy that causes this suppression, or else the apparently common tendency of women to be unattracted to men who express their emotions.
Are there "serious feminist thinkers?"
J.K. Rowling is an honorable exception, but the great majority of feminists got badly outsmarted by the small number of M to F transgenders. Feminists should have been serious enough to not fall for transgender ideology, but at least here in America, a huge number of them were shamefully fooled.
"The patriarchy is bad for men, too" is an observation I've heard many times, but the application of this idea never seems to be towards fixing the sort of problems outlined here: it's never about reducing the sort of "men are pigs" sexist attitudes, or thinking about education reform to put boys on more equal footing, or anything of the sort.
Instead it seems to be used aa a sort of "trickle-down social justice" argument where the best thing that men can do for men is to be "allies" for women and minorities and be super embarrassed about their privilege and hyper-vigilant about avoiding anything that can be interpreted as "toxic masculinity". I agree with the authors point that social justice is not zero-sum, but I don't think it's so positive-sum that focusing on women's issues will just fix men's issues, too.
Maybe this does not reflect feminist discourse at its highest levels: maybe high-level feminist discourse is full of concrete suggestions for improving mens lives... but it's not the sort of discourse I've seen 'in the water'.
There isn't really a patriarchy. There's a gynocracy. Outside of a few hyper-high-performers (most of whom started 5 rungs up on the ladder from wealthy families) it really is women who call nearly all the shots. HR Karens will fire you for not toeing the company line, and then have an affair with the CEO. If you're ever publicly targeted then your career is probably over, as no one in HR will hire you. This is how the violent militants of the Progressive Left enforce their hateful totalitarian ideology on every one else: control HR by controlling public messaging by gossiping about and shaming any one who doesn't fall in line.
We live in a gynocracy where toxic feminine behavior governs the majority of social interaction.
It's an interesting point. With physical jobs becoming mostly economically irrelevant, male-on-female violence dramatically reduced in the first world middle-class-and-up layers of society, and with economic parity of the sexes, are there any advantages left for men? Even asking this feels heretical.
Men have the ability to collectively rescind egalitarianism.
We are not living in a gynocracy.
>Outside of a few hyper-high-performers
You mean the majority of congress and every president who's ever lived?
>HR Karens will fire you for not toeing the company line, and then have an affair with the CEO
But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line.
Look, I agree that the term "patriarchy" has been abused. It's often used to imply that just because congress is mostly male that means that every man everywhere is privileged, and that's just not true. But "gynocracy" is nonsensical.
"But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line. But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line."
Yes, but the board outranks the CEO, and can fire *him* for generating bad PR, or discontent among the other employees, or (even if only in their minds) opening the company up to the possibility of discrimination lawsuits, which are much less likely to happen or succeed when the discrimination is against men. Being CEO doesn't put you above corporate political games, it makes you the center of the worst of them.
I'm definitely not agreeing with the 'gynocracy' assertion, which I also think is incorrect. Just making a very narrow observation about the corporate hierarchy claim. I have been surprised many, many times how often a CEO does something and the people that nominally report to them just... go about their business, paying it lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
Very narrow hierarchy claims tend to be the only thing Feminists can make... mostly because to believe in their ideas they have to willfully ignore overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I can see how a male CEO might be beholden to gender norms which sometimes favor women. But exactly how strong is that effect?
>I'm definitely not agreeing with the 'gynocracy' assertion, which I also think is incorrect.
Thank you.
> have been surprised many, many times how often a CEO does something and the people that nominally report to them just... go about their business, paying it lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
Sure, but doesn't that work both ways? Suppose there's a mostly-male company where most of the workers are sexist against women. Suppose that the board is worried about bad PR or lawsuits or whatever, so they impose an Equality Program to make sure women feel welcomed. Then the various workers all go about their business, paying the Equality Program lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
The entire enforcement mechanism for normalcy in modern society consists of mid-level bureaucrats. The Leviathan as Samuel Francis would describe it. An unaccountable faceless group of midlevel managers that are predominantly women and maintain a feminized method of control: "follow the rules" "that's against policy" "you're not allowed to say that."
If you want to know what the future looks like, imagine a fat 50 year old childless cat lady barely able to rise from her office chair saying "that's against policy," forever. No space for agentic people in the realm of paperwork.
Those are the enforcers, the key holders, and the gate keepers. Not the CEO. The CEO doesn't tell me I have to fill out fifty forms just to build a wall inside my own house. Congress doesn't tell me what I'm allowed to say or not-say at my job. The President doesn't enforce vaccine mandates. Karens do. It's a society constructed around the capricious whims of the toxic feminine, and its disgusting. No one is happy.
>unaccountable faceless group of midlevel managers that are predominantly women
Do you have any statistics to back that up? From what I can tell, women are still a minority of managers. 42% to be precise: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106320
Are you perhaps discussing a group of "midlevel managers" who are markedly different from "managers" more generally? If so, please cite your source.
>If you want to know what the future looks like, imagine a fat 50 year old childless cat lady barely able to rise from her office chair saying "that's against policy," forever. No space for agentic people in the realm of paperwork.
While I agree that bureaucracy is often stifling, I don't think that women bear any more of the blame than men. And I object to your casual disregard for fat people, 50 year old people, people without children and people who have cats.
On the subject of bureaucracy, the book "Bullshit Jobs" has useful insights from an anthropologist. But he didn't mention anything about women bearing any special blame for the mess we're in, and I trust him more than you.
The phrase "trickle-down social justice" is really helpful. Thank you.
To give you one concrete example: A common feminist argument is that women are expected to take care of children and so them taking parental leave is more normalized than for men but also this harms their careers because people expect them to leave the workforce and so don't hire or promote them. Spreading a social expectation that childcare is something to be shared by both sexes is feminist in that it addresses this problem, but it also helps men who face less social stigma for taking parental leave.
Or another: sexist ideas that women are the people who have feelings and men are the gruff go-kill-the-bear types harms women but also men, by making it hard for them to deal with their own feelings.
In my experience, it's an observation that's almost always made as the motte part of a motte-and-bailey routine.
I can never remember: Which one is the motte and which one is the bailey?
Motte is the narrow, official definition of the term, defensible in arguments but useless for policy.
Bailey is the de facto definition, expansive vagueness of which can be gainfully exploited, but explicit principled defense would sound flagrantly monstrous.
Motte = Moat = thing that makes it very easy to defend but gets in the way when you try to do anything useful.
No, motte != moat.
motte = artificial hill with a strong tower on top, easy to defend.
bailey = larger flat area with a variety of useful facilities and lighter fortifications.
moat = water-filled ditch surrounding both the motte and the bailey and separating them from each other.
There is a flying bridge across the moat between motte and bailey, operated from the moat. It makes it easier, in case the bailey has fallen, for the defender to reconquer the bailey from the motte than for the attacker to conquer the motte from the bailey.
I am not aware of the moat, the flying bridge or other details being used in the analogy with rhetorics
> 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."
>> I think it is nice that the human race is less violent now than other time periods.
> This is really, really, wrong.
Stephen Pinker would say otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
There is a lot I like about Stephen Pinker, but I'm afraid on this one he's full of it. To quote Foseti's review of that book:
---
A while back, I linked to a story about a guy in my neighborhood who’s been arrested over 60 times for breaking into cars. A couple hundred years ago, this guy would have been killed for this sort of vandalism after he got caught the first time. Now, we feed him and shelter him for a while and then we let him back out to do this again. Pinker defines the new practice as a decline in violence – we don’t kill the guy anymore! Someone from a couple hundred years ago would be appalled that we let the guy continue destroying other peoples’ property without consequence. In the mind of those long dead, “violence” has in fact increased. Instead of a decline in violence, this practice seems to me like a decline in justice – nothing more or less.
Here’s another example, Pinker uses creative definitions to show that the conflicts of the 20th Century pale in comparison to previous conflicts. For example, all the Mongol Conquests are considered one event, even though they cover 125 years. If you lump all these various conquests together and you split up WWI, WWII, Mao’s takeover in China, the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War (yes, he actually considers this a separate event from Mao), you unsurprisingly discover that the events of the 20th Century weren’t all that violent compared to events in the past! Pinker’s third most violent event is the “Mideast Slave Trade” which he says took place between the 7th and 19th Centuries. Seriously. By this standard, all the conflicts of the 20th Century are related. Is the Russian Revolution or the rise of Mao possible without WWII? Is WWII possible without WWI? By this consistent standard, the 20th Century wars of Communism would have seen the worst conflict by far. Of course, if you fiddle with the numbers, you can make any point you like.
[...]
In another section of the book, Pinker has a very long discussion of infanticide. Then he notes that we don’t have infanticide anymore. Then he notes that we do kill almost exactly the same proportion of babies today that infanticidal societies killed, we just do it via abortion. Then he concludes with some fuzzy language that probably satisfies most of the people on both sides of the issue. You can’t criticize him for ignoring the fact that abortion is so common.
The problem, in this case for Pinker, is that we’ve turned the infanticide of old from an unfortunate practice into a fundamental right. Surely this should give pause to someone making an honest argument that violence has declined over time.
---
https://foseti.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/review-of-the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker/
Studies on the topic of male vs female emotional intelligence, often also used for testing autism (for example the "reading the mind in the eyes" test) typically show a mild female advantage, not an extreme one. Many show statistically insignificant differences. Although it is more complex to measure than simple grip strenght or whatever, obviously. IIRC, among top performers in some of these tests there's an equal amount of men and women, which is not the case for physical strenght. You're much more likely to meet a male social genius than a woman as strong as an average man.
Anyway, I fully agree with you on abandoning the Twitter brainrot of calling everything the bare minimum. It helps that I've never been on Twitter.
Ad: `among top performers in some of these tests there's an equal amount of men and women, which is not the case for physical strenght.'
One explanation would be that both strength and emotional intelligence in both genders are normally distributed, the mean for strength is higher for men, the mean for emotional intelligence is lower for men, but the variance is higher for men in both cases. Men having higher variance for a wide variety of characteristics has been often suggested and is quite likely; part of it might simply be due to the presence of two different chromosomes (XY) rather than the same ones (XX).
Seconding. This was also my interpretation.
It is less about the human race abandoning violence and more about the fact that industrial wars tend to be extremely destructive and, on the net, a sheer loss of wealth.
As long as it was possible to become wealthier by wars of conquests, people would start them - from the Romans and Hittites to the colonial wars. But the balance turned around in the 20th century. Even today, what Russia gains from Ukraine is a thoroughly destroyed landscape.
Violent crime has also been a lot higher in most societies, people don't watch executions or cat burning for fun anymore etc etc. But yeah this is a huge factor
Though violent crime is higher in contemporary societies than it was about a century ago. E.g., the homicide rate in England in the early 20th century was steady at about half what it is today, and that's not accounting for improvements in medical care.
Also, whilst we're certainly better on animal rights nowadays, I suspect public executions would still draw large audiences if they were still carried out.
Huh, interesting about the first part. Though I suspect it was much easier to get away with murder and not have it flagged as such back then.
Even an intact landscape wouldn't help Russia much, because what generates wealth nowadays is mostly human not natural resources.
(Russia did steal tens of thousands of Ukrainian children in this war, but that's not going to make a noticeable difference to a country with 140 million residents)
The only context in which invasion of Ukraine would make any (evil, but logical and economic) sense was that the Kremlin expected the country to collapse almost without fight. They also hoped for swift decapitation of the leadership, it seems - that is why they tried to invade Kyiv using their airborne troops and landing at Hostomel.
Didn't work out and Plan B is nowhere as good.
[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.
> "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..."
That just sounds like enforcing gender roles with a coating of evopsych and adding a “probably” in there to soften the blow. Why not just recognise if your child is aggressive, and teach them a lesson regardless of gender? You could get a meek nerdy boy (honestly pretty likely if you’re dating men from the Bay Area) and then he might try to apply the opposite lessons, when what he needs is to be more assertive and put his own needs first. Or what if you have a very aggressive girl?
Statistics are useful, but when you’re dealing with individual children you’re raising, it’s cruel to assign them behavioural stereotypes based on immutable parts of their identity before you witness any evidence of that behaviour. Telling them “you’re probably X because you’re a boy/girl” in fact might make it worse - if they’re not X, they might feel like there’s something wrong with them, or they might amplify those traits because it’s normal for them.
That’s before going into that “protecting the weak” part - a strange throwback to gender roles. If you’re dealing with a child with anger issues, how is that a useful strategy to calm down the anger they feel say, at losing at a video game, or not getting the present they wanted?
I think there’s much better gender agnostic ways to deal with your emotions you could teach your kids.
> 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.
Very little of the issues you mentioned were gender specific. How would you treat career burn out differently in a man vs a woman? Moving to a new city and not being able to make deep connections? Having a therapist that ignores your concerns?
> Statistics are useful, but when you’re dealing with individual children you’re raising, it’s cruel to assign them behavioural stereotypes based on immutable parts of their identity before you witness any evidence of that behaviour.
I think you and I are looking at this through two very different lenses, and thus discussing different things. I'm viewing this through a "society at large" lens, you're viewing it through the lens of "an individual person parenting an individual child."
I would firmly agree that any good parent should tailor their advice/guidance to their child's individual personality and needs. But not every child has a parent willing or able to do this, and even if they do, children do not look *solely* to their parents for advice/guidance.
Society and community shapes a massive amount of a child's behavior, and that society/community likely will not know/understand a child as well as their parent. Thus the need for more generalized roadmaps. Society can provide young men with a variety of healthy roadmaps to fit a variety of personality types; parents and other more intimate mentors can help them to tailor those generalized maps to suit their own personal needs.
I also would agree that it's cruel to *enforce* gender stereotypes, and I think this is why it's so vital to have a broad spectrum of male role models who have varying definitions of "being a man." Let young men choose which one resonates most with them, or let them decide they don't give a crap about gender at all, if they wish.
But the reality is that the latter rarely happens. Gender is considered a vital part of identity, and ignoring it isn't going to make it go away. Polite society (and hence our education system) has spent the better part of the last couple decades insisting that all children need to be treated/raised the same, regardless of gender. The result for men has been dismal: plummeting education and employment rates, rising suicide rates, rising rates of addiction, etc.
We can't just keep insisting that we ignore gender, when 50% of the population is floundering under that framework.
> Very little of the issues you mentioned were gender specific. How would you treat career burn out differently in a man vs a woman? Moving to a new city and not being able to make deep connections? Having a therapist that ignores your concerns?
The concerns themselves may not be specific to men, but there are unique challenges within them for men (and also for women, of course, although that isn't the focus of this essay). Some examples, based off the things you cited:
- Career burnout: women can shift to a lower-paying but more-fulfilling career and face very little social repercussion. If men choose to take a 70% paycut, this often has massive impact on their romantic potential, and often friendship potential as well.
- Making deep connections in a new city: this becomes more difficult when you're viewed not just as a stranger (as a woman would be), but as a potentially dangerous stranger (as a man would more often be.) There also is more of a taboo amongst men for talking about feelings, which can make forming connections even more difficult.
-Having a therapist who ignores your concerns: Over 75% of therapists are women. A lot of men feel better served by male therapists who can more easily empathize with their lived experiences, but there literally are not enough male therapists for them.
These are just a few quick examples, which all leads back to my original point: ignoring gender was an admirable and understandable attempt by society to improve the lives of everyone. But it turns out it often causes more harm than pain. We need to figure out a middle ground, where gender and its biological and societal impacts isn't dismissed, but gender norms do not become restrictive and aggressively enforced.
Can I get a tl;dr from some one that isn't trying to have a reddit tier back-n-forth here on substack?
I'm reporting this. If you're not going to put in the effort to participate in this community, leave.
How very feminine of you: "I'm gonna call hall monitor Karen to report you because you asked for clarification and I don't like it."
Astral Codex Ten is famous for being many things, but a tl;dr place is not one of them. :D
> That just sounds like enforcing gender roles with a coating of evopsych and adding a “probably” in there to soften the blow.
these are precisely the sort of critiques lobbed at Bly and the mythopoetic men’s movement by mainstream feminists of the era, and the reason why now there’s Peterson and Andrew Tate instead.
men and women are different. Bly and our commenter above write for men. clearly, if you think “protecting the weak” is cringe and “smells like gender roles” you are not the target of these suggestions and, if the experiences mentioned are extraneous to you, you might not be the best judge of techniques for facing up to then.
Peterson and Tate are worlds apart.
sure. but both are what happens when you don’t allow people to appreciate Bly
They don’t write “for men”, they write for a very specific kind of men and the lived experiences that lead them to follow hateful ideologies like Andrew Tate’s is far from universal.
Men and women are different on average, sure, and you’re absolutely allowed to have your preferences and follow whatever gender roles you see fit. But I draw the line at forcing them on other people, especially kids, and not letting girls do certain things because that’s for boys and you need the right temperament/aggression/etc. and vice versa, or reinforcing the belief that because they’re male/female they have to be X or Y.
I don’t see how my particular gender changes this. The commenter above or whatnot didn’t talk about say, prostate health or whatnot, but about universal human experiences where seeing it as a “male problem” is unhelpful.
that’s a bit of a strawman you’re fighting there—who said anything about forcing anyone
But... how? What reward, on a society-wide level, should we give to decent people? In the past, it was probably "a family/spouse", but I don't like the pressure to "pair up" this puts on people. We can't just promise men a wife or vice-versa without some pretty grim consequences.
I'm all for simply complimenting the people we love a lot, and throwing parties when they reach milestones, but that doesn't seem to be what you're suggesting?
And how does everyone in a modern society channel their agression into protecting the weak? I'm all for martial arts/learning self defense, or becoming a firefighter or even a soldier. But we luckily have a rather limited need for both soldiers and firefighters, and I wouldn't want that to change.
> And how does everyone in a modern society channel their agression into protecting the weak?
Video games. Seriously. That's like, what you do in a huge number of video games.
Or, you know, doing things like volunteering for charities, working as a public defender or social worker, etc. "Aggression" doesn't have to be physical.
How would you express or deploy aggression as a social worker or volunteer? You seem to throw this off as duh obvious but it just makes me think you've no idea what aggression is.
Well, subjectively, I can channel the same kinds of emotional/mental/physical activation that I would get if I needed to give someone the what-for into doing something like getting the blasted paperwork done properly or trying to stop the doctor in the hospital from cutting my dying wife's pain meds out of a misplaced fear of addiction when she has a motherfucking giant hole in her thigh that won't heal and hurts like hell. (True story, unfortunately.)
I think the main "reward" that is currently missing is welcoming decent people into loving and supportive communities (this also naturally lends itself to pairing up romantically, but doesn't force it or explicitly promise it.)
Historically, people behaved themselves, because if they did, they'd have the support and respect of their tribe; if they didn't, they'd get kicked out of the tribe. In current times, people can perfectly behave themselves and still have a high chance of not having a tribe available to them. This raises the question "why bother being a decent person?", and the manosphere is there to capture all the poor young men who fall into that mental trap.
Of course the question of "how do you grow healthy tribes for modern people to belong to" is a very complex one, and has many more factors than just gender. But I think one of the key parts of healthy tribes is knowing your role and understanding the expectations of that role. And right now many men seem extremely confused about their role, let alone their expectations, so it's no wonder many are struggling to find a tribe.
As for channeling aggression: I agree, I don't want more soldiers, either! But I want more people standing up for the oppressed, more public defenders, more politicians fighting for the common people, etc. These are all things aggression can easily be channeled into. And I do believe that giving young men a physical aggression outlet is very powerful as well. Not all of them need it, but some do, and I think it's very important to provide things like martial arts lessons to those who need to learn how to control aggressive impulses.
Well, if you DON'T reward young men for building civilization or providing resources to the next generation, they'll just burn the civilization to the ground and start again. Which I'd say is more grim.
How about we just drop no-fault divorce and go from there?
I'd never marry then. I mean it's very common and accepted in most of Europe to live together, have three kids, a house and whatnot and still never legally marry. It's honestly interesting it's still seen as ultra important in the states - health insurance? Or just religiousity?
If you aren't committed to the relationship, why should he? You're in a world where he wouldn't marry either. And now we have a demographic implosion.
You can be committed without having a legal contract.
It was so weird when I visited the US (midwest), they always assumed that I as the woman obviously wanted to get married and my boyfriend was being rude to me by not proposing (?). When I said no, it simply isn't important where we're from, they looked at me like "poor thing, making excuses for him :(". So medieval, definitely one of the bigger culture shocks.
It's just a different social context. I know a couple in the US who fits the European pattern (they've been together since college and raised a daughter together, they're now retired, and they never married), but in the US it seems like there is a pretty substantial difference in commitment level between the people who marry and the people who just live together.
Agreed. I've lived in both contexts, and context matters. In Europe, not getting married doesn't mean anything (or much) about the permanence of your relationship; in the US it does. That's how culture often works, after all--it gives you a translation for certain actions. Tells you what a kiss means and doesn't mean, etc--or an "I do."
There are a lot of legal advantages to marriage in the US associated with child guardianship/custody, inheritance, hospital visitation, health insurance benefits, income tax benefits, state tax benefits, retirement benefits and so on.
From what I've seen, European countries often don't need some of these benefits (e.g sharing of employer sponsored health insurance) and have a separate domestic partnership status that grants many of the others without a more formal marriage. (Note for US readers, this is not the same as a civil union and is often granted as a natural consequence of cohabitation.
Reputation and appreciation, mainly. That would pretty much solve everything by re-tethering the accepted value of men and what they do.
>And how does everyone in a modern society channel their aggression into protecting the weak?
This is going to sound facetious but is probably the real answer to your question....
Encouraging the aggressive kid to punch other kids they see bullying weaker kids.
Like full on "Go find someone bullying a weak kid, and punch him in the face. Its fine. You have permission/social sanction to do that" level encouragement, and then rewarding that behaviour afterwards.... ~High Five~ Nice!.....
Society may not like that answer for all sorts of reasons, but its a way of channelling actual aggression into protecting the weak.
I agree, without something like this being socially sanctioned this is a bromide being offered without a practical application. You can channel aggression into other things (competative and physical sports? Video games?) but these aren't really protecting the weak.
Given aggression is a desire to engage in physical/hostile behaviour. Usually to attack or confront someone.... really the only way to tick the "get the aggression out" and "protect weak people" boxes at the same time, is to allow kids to physically attack/confront those kids who are preying on the weak kids.
>>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.
It's not really as much about the reward per se, it's more about consistency. A lot of "Nice guy" shit comes from said guy meeting the minimal requirements, getting repeatedly rejected and receiving only "ok, cool, you do meet the minimal requirements, what, do you expect a cookie for it or something?" as the reason for rejection. But then he looks around in real life and sees a lot of people who DO NOT meet those requirements at all - but who are facing a lot LESS problems with getting laid than he does. Obviously, that means something's up here where what's on paper does not match reality at all - if there are minimal requirements, the last thing you'd expect to see is that whoever fails to meet them, struggles less than someone who has at least met those minimal reqs. And that's generally when the Red Pill, manosphere or whatever other unpleasant company comes into play, offering an answer...
The missing puzzle piece, for the nice guys out there, being that they actually aren't meeting the minimal requirements. They are meeting the minimal requirements on one axis (the "good guy" axis), while not meeting the minimal requirements on the "sexual attraction" axis.
Women want to be treated well... by a man they are attracted to!
Receiving flowers and poems from a guy they are not attracted to tends to squick them out (and potentially fear for their safety).
And if a nice guy asks a feminist for advice on how to meet those other minimum requirements, it tends to be about as productive as asking an FBI agent for nuclear launch codes.
That's because the feminist honestly doesn't understand that stuff (and doesn't know that she doesn't understand etc), while the feminist theory often explicitly contradicts with biology. Attraction generally works on unconscious/body language level, and few people are perceptive/introspective enough to have insight into it, or to notice contradictions with the orthodoxy.
Right - much like how the FBI agent doesn't have the launch codes, wouldn't share them even if it were possible, and is professionally suspicious of any rando's motives for asking.
>Reminder that the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by a men's movement in the 80's (the mythopoetic men's movement), not feminism.
So? The term "Eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton, an Englishman who didn't see much of the 20th century. Are we to attribute responsibility to him for the consequences of the whole field?
Lots of people do.
Galton is a better scapegoat than his half-cousin Darwin for religious reasons.
What is supposed to be the significance of the idea that "toxic masculinity" was coined by something called the "mythopoetic men's movement"?
men have not always liked traditional masculinity either, i think. if anything G.I.R.L. (Guy in real life) phenomenon the net provided shows some guys might even prefer not to be it: not every guy fits into the art of manliness's protector provider procreator paradigm.
I think there's not so much value in deciding whom to blame for the brokenness in society. What's useful is figuring out how to make it better, or at least how to stop making it worse.
I definitely agree that the whole thing where various high-status people say nasty things about men (or whites or white men) is pretty awful. And media culture is both super appealing and super corrosive--you almost can't show most virtues in TV/movie format. Crass, violent people make good stories, loyal, hard-working, honest people mostly don't--it's much harder to make a fun-to-watch story with those people.
i dont think i was talking about blaming. The point is more that some guys may not like traditional masculinity either. Thats what "men defined it" matters.
we kind of have a different focus than women do i guess.
I guess if you want to draw some grand conclusions about men generally from that factoid you can, but I don't know anything about the "mythopoetic men's movement", what they meant by "toxic masculinity", or if it has any connection to what feminists or anyone else means when they say it, and I don't think that almost anyone else knows either. Maybe you do but nobody has explained anything about it in this thread.
I also think that "men haven't always liked traditional masculinity" can mean a lot of things. "Traditional masculinity" isn't a totally fixed idea (to the extent you can give it a precise definition at all), people can like some part of it but not other parts, people can dislike it for different reasons and prefer different alternatives, and I don't actually think "how much do people like traditional masculinity" is a particularly interesting or relevant consideration for any of this discussion.
you can easily define it: the art of manliness uses the 3 P's-protect, provide, and procreate, and that's it. there is nothing more.
that you can't is more a you issue, its a very clear concept. almost too restrictive.
One of their ideas was that close emotional bonds between men, and men being open about their feelings, was vital. Toxic masculinity was bottling things up, and IIRC being aggressive. Seems pretty in line with the feminist definition to me.
Too much of the map of manhood is focused on what not to do, not what to do. You specifically mentioned protest or donate money, but I have never heard someone say you become a man when you attend X protests or donate Y money. If they did, someone did, it would probably be more fulfilling.
You mentioned in another comment the throwing a party for reaching a milestone, I think this is the best suggestion. Weddings are a good example of this, but so many men don’t reach this milestone. A man can’t ask for a party thrown for them, but they would definitely appreciate it if they got one, it if was tied into their culture.
robert bly and iron john weren't particularly popular, though. If you ever watched The Northman, the ritual that he did as a boy is what the mytheopic movement would suggest we do, and the modern meme form is "go back to monke," ie discover the virtues of parts of premodernism.
it wasn't really a path for many men though i can see some doing so.
> 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
I think the big problem is that it's all negative: it provides you with a list of things not to do, but lacks a good vision of what to do, or what to be, or why to do that.
In traditional societies, even up to the mid twentieth century, being an ordinary full-grown adult man in good standing with society was respectable and rewarding enough to motivate a boy to grow up. But now all the aspects of normal adult life, especially for men, are derided by society, so what has a boy even got to look forward to? A big house in the suburbs? No, the suburbs are lame, as the media never stops telling us, and suburban dads even more so. Maybe if you work hard and pay off your mortgage you can reward yourself with that nice sports car you've always wanted? No, middle aged men with sports cars are the most shameful possible group of people. The only available role models for young men are people who do not and cannot exist in the real world like Batman and James Bond, and even they are probably problematic. And your Dad can't possibly be a role model, he's uncool and lame because he doesn't like the same things that fourteen-year-old boys like.
We need to put more glory on the life of a normal adult family man who does the right things, gets a job, gets married, buys a house, has kids, does normal suburban dad things, and retires.
> We need to put more glory on the life of a normal adult family man who does the right things, gets a job, gets married, buys a house, has kids, does normal suburban dad things, and retires.
I agree this would be nice, but part of the problem has to be social media.
If boys see men of all ages living a jet setting lifestyle paired up with different hot 20 year olds on a regular rotation, that certainly seems more appealing on it's face than all the boring suburban stuff, especially to men in their formative teenage and early 20's years.
I think at that point it doesn't really matter how much you can glorify suburban dads - much like being a pro athlete or influencer is the career 80%+ of kids want, having this memetic attractor on the landscape will distort things just in and of itself, even if it's unattainable for 99.999...% of them.
>being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing
Yeah, but is "bad at reading emotions" something that you should be ashamed of, or is it a mild flaw that others can help you with, perhaps by explaining how they feel more directly because they know you won't pick up on subtle hints?
The details matter.
>You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
What about demanding a reward for being a *good* person? Doesn't it make sense that a just society would reward virtue in some way?
Even leaving aside questions of justice, a sensible society would reward virtue, because having lots of virtuous people is good for society.
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
Yes you should. We call this "human rights". There are lots of rewards you should demand, like clean air, clean water, a society to live in that is not at war. Why shouldn't meaningful human interaction be among these other necessities of life? Just because providing it is hard, just because we don't have a viable plan to satisfy that demand?
> 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.
[writer of the review here]
I would actually disagree with this. I think it's true that some women who subscribe to some more extreme brands of feminism would balk at a lot of potential male role models. And I would argue that the potential for those more extreme feminists to start "cancel mobs" is probably one of the main reasons we've had less men step up as public role models for what a "healthy man" can look like.
But I think the average woman (myself included) finds it extremely attractive and admirable when a man has a healthy confidence in their masculinity and is eager to teach others to be positive, healthy influences on society.
(Note: I haven't read much of Jordan Peterson's work, so don't feel comfortable stating whether I would have supported/admired him pre-coma.)
So, yes, I think just about any male role model will trigger some of the more online and vocal feminists. But that certainly doesn't mean all women will dislike them.
I think average people don't pay much attention to this discussion. Mainstream attention is driven in no small part by feminists with extreme views, who drive media narratives that cause average people, with no real exposure, to hear a vague impression about some woman-hater named XYZ, and they think that's plausible and go about their day.
In general I think the gender-focused left is completely out to lunch on what women find attractive. What the average woman, face to face offline, will admit to being attractive to is already inappropriate to discuss in polite society as being what women are actually attracted to.
If you look, for example, at Richard Reeves, he makes a big deal out of how women really just want men to have a job or "not be a loser", instead of being specifically attracted to the idea of a man who makes a lot of money, but there really are a lot of women who specifically equate a man spending money on her, and earning more money he can spend on her, as a literal measurement of love, and even average women have expectations around buying meals, gifts, .etc.
I mean, there are already lots of men doing this... E.g., male pastors, conservative thought leaders, Jordan Peterson, it's just that "Polite Society" i.e., elite liberal women i.e., people similar to you reject them.
There's a whole world out there of healthy masculinity. The problem is your culture's (i.e., silicon valley bubble / the people you date) lack of access to it. Not a worldwide absence :p
[writer of the review here]
I grew up conservative, and while there certainly were structured models of masculinity, I find myself balking at the idea of most of them being healthy in the 21st century.
Of course, I'm very biased in this regard--most men who followed those models aren't super friendly toward people like me (ie: opinionated and outspoken bisexual chick who's not fond of rigid monogamy.)
I also found the models too rigid and far too focused on authority and stoicism as necessary for manhood. (Broadcasting these traits seemed to be the focus, rather than proper channeling and handling of them.) The focus on authority and repression of emotion lent itself well to quiet, behind-the-scenes abuse, and there didn't seem to be alternate maps available for my more soft-spoken and sensitive male friends.
(That all being said--I will take the average pastor over Andrew Tate any day.)
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions; not every pastor/conservative thought leader is aggressively anti-LGBT, nor does every one insist that men must be authoritative stoics at all times. And there certainly are elements of these maps that still apply very well to modern life (eg: do hard work, be there to support your community, take responsibility, embrace challenges, etc.)
But I'm also eager for leftists to invest more time developing healthy, coherent maps for those who don't fit in with the right.
Why doesnt the right's path to manhood work for the left?
I believe the "left" (e.g., the left elite mainstream dogma) struggles with men mainly because it fundamentally doesn't like men. It has a number of deluded and false and sexist narratives that are incredibly damaging and hurtful towards men (e.g., believe all women is obviously a mad, harmful and sexist idea, as women can be abusers too).
If you are interested, look up some of this Scott's and the Quantum Computing Scott's early posts about their interactions with feminism.
To me, the problem isn't that the left lacks access to viable maps to manhood, it is that they actively supress and harm men. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not sure what putting out further maps or resources is going to do. It's treating the symptoms not the root cause, and really the movement needs a sea change.
Laying out peer-reviewed viable maps, then challenging leftists to either endorse at least one of them or admit to malicious intent, could be part of how such a change would be implemented.
If you don't know much of Peterson's work (aside from his media presence), and you are interested in the question of maleness in the modern day, I would highly recommend watching one of his university lecture series from before his fame.
If nothing else because his influence has shaped much of the present day terrain, and it's good to know what it's actually about, but the lecture series are also interesting in their own right.
Both Personality and Maps of Meaning are worthwhile listens depending on which topic you find more interesting.
Back in the day, those lectures were very useful for me in working on what Robert Kegan would would have classed stage 4 development. At the time my main mentor figure had been Alan Watts and for all he gave me, I was lacking guidance on how to integrate with society and accept rules and authority.
I really don't think it's "women" as much as it is "feminists", both men and women, and also, I don't think we can blame them.
For one or other reason, we seem to work under an "Opressed v Opressor" framework in terms of social change, and our expectations and demands are different for each side. There is misandry in the feminist movement, for all the "it's about men too", there is no such thing as a "MERF", nobody gets shunned from the movement if they dismiss plights of equality from men and you can rest easy that nobody is going to call you out if you argue that men in general are so horrible that you would rather be left with a bear.
This is by no means specific to feminism, any group which consistently pushes back against X will have people saying "Screw X".
It is then inevitable that when people come along arguing for the other side of the aisle, the same thing is going to happen, which in this case involves having the people who are generally considered on the opressor side calling out the people who are generally considered the opressed, which is of course considered untenable, it shifts the whole power balance, if you are the opressor surely you are not also the opressed.
In practice this means that although it's generally safe to bemoan men on the feminist side, the reverse is pushed back against, shoved into the margins. Nobody who actually cares about feminism or what feminists think stays in that place and all we have is, well, the rest. It's not that the manosphere rejects feminism and that draws men in, it's that nobody who doesn't reject feminism is *allowed* to draw men in to begin with.
I mean it's not as if it wasn't attempted. It didn't go well.
Well, the only tool women have is toxic suppression. They'll gossip about people and shame them, and try to have a struggle session for anyone who doesn't conform. This natural leads to only figures that don't give a shit about public sentiment rising to the top. Toxic femininity creates its own problems... which is to say: a solution to cultural decay in the form of reinforced traditionalist gender roles. Unfortunately, we must live through a period where power has been wielded against the population by hateful Karens. Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results."
> "Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results."
That's very silly.
Traditional gender roles are based on the pre-industrial necessity of division of labor by gender. As long as there's an economy wherein most jobs can be performed equally well by either gender and which also REQUIRES both genders to be employed in order for the economy to function, women will have equal rights.
Nobody sat up one day and decided, "hey, let's stop oppressing women and give them equal rights." The economy demanded it, that's all.
>Nobody sat up one day and decided, "hey, let's stop oppressing women and give them equal rights."
The death of God certainly contributed to such sentiments. As soon as the Bible stopped being taken seriously as the normative guide in elite circles, the glaring contradiction between Bronze Age views on gender relations and the liberal ethos swiftly got resolved in favor of the latter.
There's that, too, but I would argue that God was likewise killed by industrialization and technology. No need to pray for God to bless the harvest when you have pretty damn good control over the harvest with reliable tech like fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modifying a hardier harvest.
I agree that all of this is correlated, but I'd still say that it was Darwin who dealt God the killing blow.
"Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results.""
I doubt Copernican will see this, but arguing from the future is just silly. We don't actually know what will happen. Claims about the future might be right, but they don't prove anything.
>Well, the only tool women have is toxic suppression. They'll gossip about people and shame them, and try to have a struggle session for anyone who doesn't conform. This natural leads to only figures that don't give a shit about public sentiment rising to the top. Toxic femininity creates its own problems... which is to say: a solution to cultural decay in the form of reinforced traditionalist gender roles.
This is bad fan fiction about gender roles, nothing of substance. Adherence to traditionalist gender roles are at their lowest point in history with no rebound in sight. Toxic suppression is not the only tool women have. You've done no work in establishing that only or primarily women engage in struggle sessions. Bad fan fiction
We have a lot of maps already. We should review the Chivalric codes, Bushido, and a few other ideas... of course to do that we need to bring back male Honor. Which means bringing back a cultural and legal method for men to defend their Honor without suffering 15 years in prison for "assault" when his honor is questioned.
Effectively, the feminine legal code prevents nearly all masculine behavior. We need to bring back a dueling culture. Until we do, a toxic feminine underpinning will continue to poison society. i.e. if it's only possible to seek justice for insult in the form of gossiping, shaming, and rallying, then there will be no capacity for men to gain real respect from one another in that field.
> Which means bringing back a cultural and legal method for men to defend their Honor without suffering 15 years in prison for "assault" when his honor is questioned.
Isn't this called a defamation lawsuit?
Petty gossip and decades spent in protracted lawsuits are a lot less effective than a punch to the face. Women are petty, they gossip, they shame, they rally. They do not create an environment of honor, merely submission to the collective. Feminized behavior is how we got the Covid lockdowns. Feminized men were the ones wearing masks and terrified of standing out.
You can almost map perfectly quality-of-life onto which states in the US refused the covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Feminized men build weak societies, and don't deserve societies in the first place. Strong men build strong societies, and its the honor of those men that permit the society to function.
Defamation lawsuits and gossip? It's a good way to strip a lot of men of their impulses for honor and instead create and environment of wasteful pettiness. We need to bring back male-only spaces.
I'd argue that "blue states" such as California and New York are in general doing much better than red states, but fine, we'll do it your way. I propose Super Smash Bros. Melee at dawn. No items, Final Destination. Bring your dueling second and your controller. Loser publicly admits to being the poopyhead.
(Hey, I'm a gamer. How do you expect me to duel someone? 😆)
Ah yes, what men need is more violence!
No way, this is the exact opposite of what is needed. Chivalry was developed specifically to curb violence. Nobles were going to war with each other just for clout and it was wrecking society in the meantime. Bushido... I also can't imagine wanting to implement that! As with chivalry, it's not even for men throughout society but rather for a small warrior caste. And it's extremely maladaptive in modern warfare. If you've got 2 hours to spare, this is a great discussion on how Bushido attitudes affected WWII: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sarah-paine-japan
Sorry, but there's no retvrn worth doing here! There's *a lot* we can learn from historical maps to manhood, but men need something that is adaptive to our culture today. A truce on violence is the greatest gift we've been given by the Enlightenment and I would hate to give that up for a misguided notion of honor.
Men do not need something adaptive to our culture today. A truce on violence was the greatest mistake our society has ever made... and duels didn't stop with the Enlightenment, they stopped with the den-mothers of the late 1800s being 'shocked' by violence. Women are weak and do not belong in male spaces. A fist fight is a lot healthier than resources expended in petty gossip and protracted lawsuits.
Any one who cannot defend themselves doesn't deserve to be defended by any one else. This is why you see young men outright REFUSING to assist women when they're assaulted. It's because you took from men the impetus for violence, and now they're not going to defend you.
We need to bring back duels, and male-only clubs and spaces.
[writer of the review here]
Hear, hear! Well said. A return to violence is the absolute last thing modern men need; adding a bunch of dead fathers and role models to the list of boys' problems is a terrible idea. And violence between men rarely stays simply between men. Women and children usually end up in the cross-fire, and we rarely have the natural strength to fight back effectively. Not to mention the innocent men who often end up being hurt as well.
Testosterone may be linked to aggression, but that does *not* mean violence is the correct way to channel the aggression many young men experience. Channel it into sports. Channel it into learning self-defense. Channel it into speech and debate. Channel it into starting a business and "fighting" competitors. Channel it into political protest. Channel it into fighting your own instinctual desires for revenge.
But please, for the love of god, do not channel it into violence.
Doesn't this conflict with your desire expressed elsewhere for the map of manhood to include "protecting the weak" ?
Afterall, what do "the weak" have to be protected from if NOT violence or the threat of violence? That is, very specifically, what they need protection from otherwise why would specifically being "weak" make them succeptible to the threat?
The only effective way to counter violence or the threat of violence... is the threat of reciprocal violence.
When violence/threat of violence is on the table you have already cascaded down through the many layers of alternative conflict resolution civilisation offers and are at the base level. If you're here, there is no "higher" level that can be appealed to, you're dealing with someone who has rejected all of that to go with the "base layer of reality" already, the Ultima Ratio Regnum.
Here, if nowhere else, then surely violence is finally justified as non-toxic masculinity? If you want men to channel their aggression into safe outlets, and you want men to "protect the weak".... then surely you must accept channelling that aggression into the use of violence to defend those unable to defend themselves due to their "weakness".
Society already unofficially sanctions this.... even whilst this is officially still forbidden.
Whilst the school will still punish the kids who defend their weaker friends from bullying with violence..... the man who sticks up for the woman being hassled in the movies, and fights off the big muscley creep in the bar fight after warning him "Leave the lady alone", is the hero not the villain.
Perhaps one of the ways society can change to be accepting of maps to real masculinity is to be more accepting of this reality *de jure* as well as *de facto* or, at least *de ficitio".
Maybe part of moving society in a more positive masculinity direction is moving it away from "violence is never justified" to "there are some circumstances where violence is justfied, and men who resort to violence in those circumstances are to be supported in the real world and not just in fictional scenearios"
Honor cultures that conceive masculine (or feminine) honor as something that needs violent defense are anything but a human universal. The law codes you don't like aren't "feminine"; look at history and you'll see constraints on duelling and honor killing imposed in plenty of eras where women lacked any significant degree of influence on the lawmaking system. The limits on violent defense of honor were debated between men.
Move to Afghanistan today, and you'll find a lot more scope for defending your honor with fists, blade, or gun -- and even there, you'll also find men in government trying to limit your ability to resolve honor disputes with your neighbors using violence.
Duels and fist-fights have been pretty universal aspects of human culture throughout all of human history up to the modern feminized age. Toxic femininity is attempting to destroy your targets reputation, the masculine spirit can simply have a fist fight in the bar, then move on with their lives.
It's objectively better to get into a brief fight and sort out your differences, than engage in multi-year protracted lawsuits, and gossip, and defamation. This is why women weren't permitted into male spaces for thousands of years. Feminity is toxic to a functional society because it expends tremendous resources in petty squabbling. The masculine urge to 'just fix things now' is by far superior. Even if it means throwing punches here and there.
I don't understand the leftist terror when it comes to violence. It's pathetic. Carry a gun, punch people in the face, practice martial arts, act like a man. Feminized men are disgusting and deserve no respect. Those who cannot defend themselves do not deserve to be defended by any one else.
Caricature everywhere--of history, of men and women. The urge to control and limit social violence isn't driven by "den mothers" or "leftists"; it's way older and more widespread than that. Read Norbert Elias's "Civilizing Process" to get a different lens on the process than the narrow lens you're wielding now.
The concept of honorable man-on-man violence has been practiced by every human civilization throughout all of human history with the exception of a few totalitarian states. Particularly the liberal/feminized totalitarian state we live in now.
Reasserting a caricature doesn't make it true. One problem with imagining arguments as contests of honor to be won by some combo of brashness, insults, and punchups: you get bad at arguing.
Yeah, well every society til the present lib/fem/tot/whatever first world countries also had no treatment for cancer and a bunch of other godawful diseases that make people
die slowly, in anguish. And most babies didn’t make it to adulthood. And everybody had worms and head lice and smelled like smegma and rotting teeth.
This was a wonderful read. Thank you for putting in time to write it
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 want a goddam non-binary reader and I want it right now.
Changing the voice won't rerecord the old articles, so if you want a new article in a female voice, you can switch voices, publish the article, and switch back.
[writer of the review here]
Hearing my writing read in this voice had me in stitches. :') Thanks for the unintended comedy, Scott.
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?)
If you take the sweeping and vague definitions the left typically uses for things like misogyny, or homophobia, but swap the groups out, it is pretty obvious that the left falls into the definition of misandry.
It isn't a "lack of clarity", so much as it is a straight-up adverse reaction to the masculine, and to male-associated things. Even the way that we tend to criticize the "manosphere" while not paying close attention to the bile from the "womanosphere" is pretty clear evidence of this. The manosphere isn't particularly alt-right, it is just that anything which suggests men might not be the cause of all their problems, and doesn't constantly supplicate to women's priorities and issues, immediately codes as right-wing.
If you go listen to the recent podcast from Richard Reeves, Jonathan Haidt, and Governor Newsom, they basically are cheering progressive reform for women, while simultaneously demanding the return of conservative gender roles for men.
[writer of the review here]
Thanks for taking the time to read my review. I'm glad it resonated with you!
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
I think this is a Different Worlds issue. I have found that, for a number of reasons that are likely somewhat self-evident, whatever my current level of life dysfunction is, I tend to gravitate towards and find people who are in similar positions. Two of my best-adjusted friends come from my first year-and-a-bit of college, when I was at my most energized and hopeful so far; the most dysfunctional people I have been close to have been by and large people I met in times of personal crisis.
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.
> Working out hard outdoors at 0530 multiple times per week has to be an intense selection factor against depression and dysfunction.
I agree but it can also select for things like addiction, it's just that working out is a beneficial outlet for that particular dysfunction. Some people manage their flaws (perceived or real) and some people wallow in them.
Not to mention that an injury (or just changing up your workout regimen) means you risk losing your friend group.
Haha I'd have thought the opposite: there *must* be something wrong with you to be up at 5:30.
Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.
Dysfunctional people in more functional communities either screw up and get pushed out, or know it and hide it.
Or successfully tap community resources and become less dysfunctional.
Lol. Lmao, even. Like they can get them even if they exist.
...you did specify *functional* communities, no?
Functional communities have resources for functional people. Individuals within them might have resources for dysfunctional people, but the community will almost never have any means of connecting those resources to anyone who needs them. If appropriately-useful resources even exist to be connected to, which is *slightly* better than chance.
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.
And also specifically men who are dating, i.e. single, in their 30s. That filter is definitely picking up more people who aren't doing well compared to the average.
It's most men in the Bay area. Can't imagine a red blooded man choosing to live in that wretched place. Absolutely disgusting; a hive city of locusts.
I do think it’s very well observed. I can see where my issues would probably line up if I were in this context.
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..
> pretty much uniformly all the "doing great" guys are married
I would guess that having children also plays a role. If men lack purpose, direction, hope for the future, etc - having children helps with all that.
It seems like "dating" just sucks. "Doing great" means getting married so you can get the hell out of dating. Being single sucks because you're alone and isolated.
The weird thing is it doesn't have to be that way. There used to be a bachelor/playboy lifestyle that was seen as highly cool and sophisticated. But that sort of lifestyle requirese the existance of an equal number of women willing to play along, and it seems like that's just not the case anymore. Women are dating to look for marriage, *not* for casual fun. It feels like family and dating norms have become much more conservative now than they were in the last 50 years, and that's very strange.
Disagree. I think the conventional wisdom that norms were more conservative 50 years ago is correct, and the "bachelor/playboy lifestyle" that people tell stories about was the province of a small minority.
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.
So definitely some people have chemical imbalances that antidepressants help with, but--I think a lot of people have social problems where antidepressants serve a role much more like "turning off the check engine light"
If someone feels lost because they don't know who they are and what they want, because they don't have real friendships and haven't done real exploration... how the hell is an antidepressant supposed to fix that? And how is you saying "you should get an antidepressant" going to _start_ the conversation wherein you become actually friends, rather than ending the conversation and proving to them that you're just an acquaintance?
> And how is you saying "you should get an antidepressant" going to _start_ the conversation wherein you become actually friends, rather than ending the conversation and proving to them that you're just an acquaintance?
It was fairly obvious from his comment that he was relating what he would say to a close friend. Making unsolicited psych med recommendations to a mere acquaintance would be inappropriate.
I think you missed my point--I think if I opened up to someone I thought was a friend about my struggles, and they responded with "yeah you've misdiagnosed your problem and you need antidepressants", my reaction would be "oh, I thought this person was my friend and they aren't."
If they responded with "I felt that way and then antidepressants turned things around for me"--ok! At least they're opening up about themselves and encouraging me to ask whether or not our situations are similar.
That is--your relationships with other people are determined in part by the actions you take towards them. It's easy to damage your friendships with other people by letting them down!
I mean, canceling your friend because they suggested you try an antidepressant seems a bit excessive. My friends and I are always tossing around drug/medication tips of all sorts, it’s been a very helpful source of info for me. The armchair diagnosis aspect would absolutely set me off though, and I have ended friendships over that.
Btw, everyone will let you down eventually, you might need to recalibrate your expectations of people. Something I learned in therapy, ironically.
Mp. we are not solving this by drugging a bunch of young men up to the gills and hoping for the best. You tried that in the 90s.
Bluntly, antidepressants are a crutch but they are not a substitute for actual connection. And saying you aren’t dismissive does not change the fact that you are in fact being dismissive
I think people compartmentalize well. I found "THE MAN WHO OPTS OUT" to describe my experience eerily well (at least until a few years ago).
I also wouldn't have described myself as depressed or anything. I was resigned to being forever-alone, but also felt like I would still have a fulfilling life given that. I just assumed I would be like a monk or a priest or something, and those people seemed fulfilled to me.
I ended up solving the issue by becoming gay and then lucking into an incredible partner who was patient enough to help me build up my self-confidence, which worked pretty well for me (we're getting married next year!)
In retrospect, looking back on your life so far, would you say that you became gay, or that you were already gay, and just took a while to recognize it? Was that just a quirk of language, or does it specifically reflect how you see yourself as having developed?
Maybe always had the potential? But I never felt like I was “in the closet”, and I have been described by friends as “the straightest gay person they know”
And to be clear, I’m bi, so I *was* attracted to women, I just didn’t realize I was attracted to men as well until later
That makes sense. I've heard many people argue very decisively that nobody becomes gay after their sexuality has already developed; your sexuality is what it is, and it's simply up to you to explore and discover it. But I'm not convinced that people's sexualities consistently develop in the same ways, or that we really understand sexuality on the whole well enough to make such decisive statements in the first place.
[writer of the review here]
I can personally testify that sexuality isn't nearly so neat as some people argue. I think a lot of people experience it clearly from an early age, but it's much more complex for many. Personally, I'm bisexual when off birth control, mostly straight when on birth control, and largely lesbian when I have unbalanced, high estrogen.
I think the narrative of "you are born with a built-in sexuality that never changes" was very helpful and needed when trying to ban conversion therapy. But as Western society leaves behind outdated homophobic ideas, I hope we'll get more nuanced conversations and explorations of sexuality. It's such a fascinating subject!
That's interesting, I don't think I've ever heard from someone who says their sexuality fluctuates so much their hormone levels like that.
I've always been able to tell I liked and was attracted to girls from early childhood, and didn't share that attraction to boys, but I experimented with trying to condition myself into bisexuality in my teens (I thought it would increase my dating pool, and I didn't think anyone I'd want to be in a relationship with would judge me for it.) It didn't work at all, but my hormone levels weren't a lever I had access to, and I wonder if I'd observe changes in my preferences if I were able to manipulate those, or observe myself through major fluctuations.
I've suspected for a long time though that sexuality couldn't be set in stone from birth though, or at least not for every individual, because if that were the case, we'd most likely see identical twins, who share the same genes and uterine environment, always having the same sexuality, and while they're correlated way above chance, that's still a long way from being the case.
Rather than a push to ban conversion camps, which I don't remember being much in the news at the time, I always saw the insistence that your sexuality was fixed and you couldn't change it as having been part of an effort to push back on religious people who thought that various social influences were "turning kids gay."
I don't think anyone knows how to do that on purpose, but I'm agnostic on whether the number of openly queer people in our society seems to be rising because it's become more recognized and acceptable to be out, or if something in our society is actually increasing the prevalence, because it seems like there must be *some* levers apart from just genetics.
Very similar experience here, except instead of getting married I broke up and slipped back into opting out.
zamn
I'm gonna go out on an extremely long limb with "based" ?
[writer of the review here]
This has been my experience as well: a lot of these men compartmentalize very well (especially in the "Opt Out" group), and would describe themselves as stable and not necessarily depressed. But when you encourage them to examine their emotions, they'll often express a sense of disconnection from society and resigned despair at the idea of being alone.
Also--huge congrats to you on finding your way out from that category. It's a tough journey, and I admire you for forging a new, happier path. I wish you and your partner many wonderful years together. :)
Surely this is because your sample is your friends (who are people you selected for being mostly OK) and because her sample is from random guys in the dating pool (who are probably not).
I'd be fascinated to know the percentage of people who think most of their are friends are OK vs most are not okay. for me it's "not okay"; my impression is almost everyone in society is doing really badly at much higher rates than when I was younger.
Good question for the next ACX survey, maybe, although I don't want to wait that long.
I think my friends are doing okay but also have mental health disorders, like I'm somehow selecting for 60th percentile mental health very consistently.
Feels like there's some law that says you and all your friends have to be around the same mental health percentile in equilibrium
I mean, it's not always obvious what someone's going through on the inside. It seems quite common for people to be completely blindsided when a loved one commits suicide, for example.
My sense (tbf from reading articles like this one) that it is not true that most people are ok among the extremely specific slice of people constituting “single men in SF with good jobs, prosocial politics, and very high education.”
I think there could be a lot of reasons for this discrepancy.
- You could lack insight into the people around you. They might seem happy when you interact with them, despite having a deep-seated lack of comfort or fulfillment in their life. Notice that many of these archetypes might project outward happiness in social situations.
- You could meet mostly people who are in relationships due to your social circle. These issues probably apply most to single people (and plausibly single people are struggling more with there lives, if in because struggling people are less likely to get into relationships).
- A lot of these issues lead to social isolation/awkwardness, making it less likely you'll meet people like this.
- You might be older than the author or I (I am 26).
On the first point, as someone who this essay resonated a lot with, I think I don't know many people well enough to identify whether they are going through similar issues. Perhaps I know 10 people well enough. I feel like you have to have a fairly personal conversation or else a lot of experience with someone to get a sense for how they're actually doing.
Of the other men I know well enough to judge, most of the ones in relationships seem pretty happy with their lives, and the single ones are mostly dealing with issues like this (though for many it doesn't dominate to the point where they are miserable).
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.
Associating with your sex is one thing; being under influence of sexual hormones is another. I take the fact that I am a man as incidental; nonetheless it is a channel through which the nature has influenced some of my traits, so when the society declares those traits to be evil, that puts me in a conflict with the society, even if otherwise I wouldn't care about being a man at all.
For example, schools should be less about sitting all the time quietly and obediently, and should offer other ways of learning, even ones that include jumping around and yelling. There is nothing about "2+2=4" that requires you to be sitting when you learn it.
So I think that an ideal solution would involve the following:
* different options for different people
* everyone can choose their option freely -- if a boy chooses the option designed for girls, or a girl chooses the option designed for boys, it is okay
* but there should be at least one option designed with stereotypical boys in mind, at least one option designed with stereotypical girls in mind, and maybe a few more other options
I want pushback on this idea because frankly, it's one of the most depressing ones I can't quite shake off.
It seems to me that women were able to somewhat move on from their fixated place regarding gender roles because in the end, society gives value to women themselves. Even if a woman takes up carpentry, wears jeans rather than pants and likes sports, she still holds value as a woman. Women in stereotypically male contexts even hold certain special attractive.
It does not seem to me that men find themselves in the same spot regarding gender. A man that drops all idea of traditional masculinity is generally categorized as a weirdo and will face problems regarding attractiveness compared to one that simply adopts traditional gender roles.
There is value to be found to having *extra*, traditionally femenine qualities, but those are always added value over a traditionally masculine base.
the problem is women LIKE men to be stifled. they find those roles awesome and they will never change, because they would rather date each other than a feminine guy.
Well said.
"Freeing" a snail from its traditional shell isn't doing it a favor.
I trauma dump my emotional issues on the Internet. Sometimes it even helps!
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
I know some people who like to fall asleep to podcasts, so "read [the homies] a bedtime story" might not be as ridiculous as it sounds...
The comment, though, like the article, is about young men and dating.
As a man in his 70’s, I see nothing new to the challenges faced by young men today. Growing up was always a challenge. Dating has always been hard. Gender expectations were stupid then and dumber now.
The “plight of men” was and is the plight of all people: to find their way in a rapidly changing world that is dysfunctional in part because traditional rules and roles don’t map into the realities of living in the present day. The Stoics knew this.
For at least 25 or 30 years, I have been reading article bemoaning how men’s problems are being ignored while women have been supported. This is such bullshit. All this gender-focused, arm-chair pop psychology helps no one. When in my teens and 20’s, no one thought much about gender — everyone was trying to figure life out and were willing to speak about it without dividing according to gender, sexuality, etc.
Want to help young men? Stop telling them they are being ignored, that no one cares about them and that women are the enemy. Instead, encourage them to volunteer in service to whatever cause interests them, to explore spiritual paths, to work hard and to be open and honest. No other life lessons are necessary if these are encouraged.
The difficulty is, "wants to talk about their emotions" is not a universal characteristic, it's a trait that's distributed within the population. I say this as someone who's out on the other tail, and finds the extent to which people constantly prattle about emotions these days hard to tolerate (as in the post-90s UK, far less extreme than the US). Probably more women are on the other side of the curve than men.
> I don’t see how there’s much about being a man that needs male specific advice
I'm not personally familiar with how to diagnose and treat, e.g., internal bleeding, so when it might need to be done, I look for a specialist who does see.
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?
Probably more like 60 million years. We've been evolving from proto-mammals for at least this long. And since we're a social species, it's a fool's errand to try to differentiate between Nature and Nurture. For us, it's exactly 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.
>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?
I don't know what the author would say. I don't think that MtF trans women are biologically built to give birth, though. I'm not sure how one could think this, given that MtF trans women don't have a uterus or eggs. I do think that there are probably trans women who could raise children in a relationship that is at least somewhat similar to a traditional monogamous relationship. The relationship would have some differences given the lack of birthing, but could still be substantially similar, especially if the trans woman was inhabiting the social role of a woman and was partnered with someone inhabiting the social role of a man.
> 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.
As I see it, your made the following comment on a post about the experience of dating men in the bay area:
> >They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
> As far as I can tell, backlash against the trans movement.
The comment that you were responding to said:
> 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?
As far as I can tell, you were saying that the only reason to frame this article in terms of manhood, instead of framing it in terms of becoming a better person, is because of backlash against the trans movement. I explained why I don't think that backlash against the trans movement explains this framing, and why framing an article about dating men in terms of manhood _actually makes more sense than framing it in terms of being a better gender-neutral person_. I don't think linking a "wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview" would help clarify your original comment, unless it happens to explain why a (presumably) cis-gendered woman's experience dating heterosexual men is actually deeply related to "the trans movement".
> 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.
This is an article (presumably) by a cis woman about dating cis heterosexual men. I don't think I'm missing the point, I think you're trying to make this article about your favorite culture war topic which is only very tenuously related to the article itself.
The only relationship I can see is that you think that "traditional gender roles" are bad or something, and think that society would be better if we didn't have them, or something. You haven't actually said this, but this is the only somewhat relevant connection I can see you implying. If you do actually believe something like that and are trying to make some point about that, I think you should explain that more clearly.
I'd ask that you make your comment substantially related to the article (which I think is primarily about postive male role models, the process of becoming a man in modern society, and the relationship of this to heterosexual dating.)
See my response to Victor Thorne, covers the same topics.
> 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?
Not wanting to put words in the author's mouth, but my guess is the author would say that this is an essay of broad generalisations, and transsexuals are a rare edge case not to be worried about too much in this context.
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 am trans and can promise you that discussion of being a well-adjusted man or woman specifically has very little to do with anti-trans backlash. Well, unless all my close friends and my fiancee secretly harbor some sort of deep-seated ideological distaste towards me, but I really doubt that. I am paranoid enough that I would be very unlikely to miss any such distaste, and I have yet to find any at all in them, who very often discuss such topics.
This is also a very strange opinion because these discussions have been going on since long before the vast majority of people had ever heard of anything trans-related. There's a certain brand of influencer now that will use trans people as a sort of diabolical antithesis to everything a man or woman should be, but those certainly aren't the only people talking about this very real and serious problem.
We're not talking about the discussion of being a well-adjusted man or woman, we're talking about the particular language of biological essentialism and evolutionary psychology used throughout this article.
It's true that those arguments go back further than the trans movement, people on the right have been using some version of them to fight feminism for decades.
But 10 years ago, those arguments and that language would have been very unpopular in a largely academic/intellectual space like this one. The pan-adaptationsist 'just-so-story' version of evolutionary psychology on display in this article had been widely debunked among the intelligentsia, replaced with much more nuanced accounts that considered dynamic evolutionary systems. Biological gender essentialism was seen as one small part of the total picture of gender expression and cultural gender roles, with lots of individual variation and lots of filtering through culture; someone trying to make the broad and extreme claims about 'how men are built' that pervade this article would not be taken seriously.
Why did the audience at 'smart' blogs like this abandon those nuanced and informed views, and start applauding this simplistic and anachronistic rhetoric of 'men are built to be warriors, women and built to birth and raise children, and trying to do anything else will make them miserable'?
Because this space has slid towards anti-woke and towards the right, and accepted arguments-as-soldiers so long as they oppose 'woke ideology.'
On the topic of gender roles and biological gender essentialism, the trans movement has been the primary motivating target of that backlash.
I'm not saying that this article is itself a specific attack on trans people. I'm saying that if people in this space didn't identify as largely anti-woke, and if they didn't identify the trans movement as a 'woke ideology' and spend years arranging arguments against it, the essentialist language used throughout this article would get laughed out of the room instead of widely embraced.
It might be just as easy to say (and in fact, those who tend towards more biological essentialism usually do say) that ten years ago we had dramatically overcorrected following the realization that not everything was determined by sex, to the idea that almost nothing was.
Also, even if you accept that gender roles are entirely socially constructed and have no biological basis, there is a reason to distinguish between the effects of society on those who are expected to occupy the male role and those who are expected to occupy the female role, and a large part of this post had much more to do with society than biology. I agree that the vagueness/lack of positive examples in social expectations for men and the distrust often directed towards them are often bigger problems than the expected role for men being overly feminized, but I do think that expecting everybody regardless of gender and personality to act like a stereotypical woman is a major problem in progressive circles. If you don't buy that it's an issue for men, consider some other cases. Attraction to women being considered as predatory hurts anyone who is attracted to women, and in fact some lesbians have talked about similar feelings of sexual shame to those which straight men immersed in social justice culture often have. The progressive expectation that everyone will always be empathetic, always say the right things, and never show anger or frustration towards others (unless it is righteous anger directed at bigotry) hurts anyone who struggles with anger or with social cues; autistic people as well as neurotypical men often report being bothered by this. I personally have struggled with both of these expectations in ways that are downstream of social justice culture, despite having been born female.
And in my experience of talking about gender differences in a more socially progressive group, I would expect these generalizations about men and women to include more caveats about these traits occurring on average and within-group variation being greater than between-group variation, not to be totally absent.
Ok, this is a hilarious shitpost.
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
> 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?
Men take more risk on average and end up in these situations more.
> Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness
Trying to fight tens of thousands of years of sex-differentiated evolutionary-selected preferences won't get you anywhere but misery and unhappiness for the majority of people.
Teach your son how to cook and clean. Teach your daughter how to change a tire or to 3d print if she shows interest in it. But if you're a man, tell your son what standards life and society expects from a man. Society expects a man to be sure of himself, to provide, to always be in control of his emotions.
While those are good traits to have for both sexes, there's (almost) no compromising on those as a man, while a woman who's a housewife, who's a bit shy and hesitant and indecisive, who's frequently emotional - that's socially acceptable. Teach your son that as a man, he should try to never compromise on these.
Is this an outrageous double standard? Is it unfair? It's unhealthy? Not more unfair than it being women who bear children and the risks and burden of childbirth.
> But if you're a man, tell your son what standards life and society expects from a man. Society expects a man to be sure of himself, to provide, to always be in control of his emotions.
Who is society? His close friends? His coworkers? His partner?
I don’t have kids yet, but I wouldn’t want my son to feel like he has to put on a stoic mask for everyone all the time. I wouldn’t want him to grow up with people who preach those same gender roles, and to repeat that kind of stuff.
And it’s absolutely not true anyway, I know a decent number of men on benefits, some where their girlfriend is the primary breadwinner, and women who date emotionally unstable men.
> Who is society? His close friends? His coworkers? His partner?
Yes.
> I don’t have kids yet, but I wouldn’t want my son to feel like he has to put on a stoic mask for everyone all the time
Nothing about what I said requires a stoic mask. But it does require you to be able project confidence in the face of uncertainty, to be able to be decisive, and to be able to lead and reassure. It does require that you master your emotions.
Being a mother is a full-time job. Being a husband and a father is too.
> I know a decent number of men on benefits, some where their girlfriend is the primary breadwinner, and women who date emotionally unstable men.
Exceptions always exist, and those aren't even particularly good exceptions to aspire towards. Do you want your son to be like those emotionally unstable, unemployed men? Do you want your son to be unable to provide for himself and to be dependent on others?
In any case, being a provider doesn't require that you be the primary breadwinner, or to even hold a particularly high paying job. It does, however, require that you are capable of adding value to society, to create or do something that people needs doing.
Are the exceptions *respected* men, though? Even if they're not partnered?
This is a great comment and I agree with almost all of it. Society is much stricter in response to male failures and it doesn't serve a boy well to not equip him to succeed in masculinity as you've very aptly defined it here.
That said, technology has changed our fundamental evolutionary environment so much that it also does a disservice to a boy not to equip him for this new world. Women don't need men for provision nearly as much as they used to, and teaching a boy how to provide emotional support and be emotionally open is part of our species' continued evolution; they literally are less likely to reproduce otherwise.
I agree, providing emotional support is a large part of the value men bring to a relationship.
However, I think that the advice to be emotionally open is well-intentioned but misleading. The emotional support in a heterosexual relationship needs not be completely one-sided, but it is heavily weighted towards the man providing emotional support for the woman, and not the other way around.
This means that while you can be emotionally honest, as a man you should almost never be using your partner as an emotional support.
That means no trauma dumping. No emotional breakdowns. Don't do, basically, anything that conveys to your partner that you are not emotionally alright and needs help. Even if you genuinely do - go to your friends, not your wife.
But also, don't be an unfeeling robot to your wife. Be honest with your emotions with her, but never, ever, frame them as a problem that you need help with.
You're angry that you got passed over for promotion, but you got it handled, you'll start looking for a new job. You're a bit down sad that you pet can died, but you'll be fine, you'll just need a bit of time.
Never share an emotional problem without a solution.
Does it have to be toxic and unhealthy? No, just put in the work to have friends/family that you can lean on for emotional support. Not your wife or date or girlfriend.
Emotionally dumping on a gf/date show that either you don't have anyone else you can confide with (red flag) or you do and you're still emotionally unstable (also a red flag). Women have a great intuitive sense of this and are almost always turned off by this behavior, even if they can't exactly/won't explain why.
Hm, interesting, that's not how my marriage works. My husband makes tons more money than me, is clearly the leader in terms of which way our household goes, and I think he's a great role male model and respect him as a true man. He is very open with his feelings with me on exactly the topics you describe. For sure I would not like it if he cried or something about his problems daily to me but he wouldn't like it if I did that either; we both use our words to share our frustrations and to problem solve together. He will call me from work to tell me about something that happened, and I'll listen and empathize and he'll ask me for advice.
I agree it's not a good idea to be so open on a first date or in the early stages of a relationship. And I agree he'd have more tolerance for my daily crying than I'd have for any similar behavior from him. There's some truth to what you're saying but it's not the Edenic model where Adam knew his wife and she knew him.
Sounds correct. (Men should not get confused by all the talk about equality and being emotionally open -- the rules are not the same.)
> 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.
That's a wonderful theoretical point to make which has zero connection with the reality of heterosexual dating (app or otherwise). The experience of men and women dating each other is vastly different, and expectations are vastly different. Any model that tries to assume away this difference and reason from the idealized premise that the two genders are in a symmetrical situation isn't a practical advice helpful to anyone, it's an exercise in worldbuilding.
How does that prevent a woman from initiating? And once you’re in a relationship, from having a frank conversation about gender roles?
It doesn't, but they don't. Is your proposed solution for a hypothetical man from this post is to wait for women to approach them first? That's just not going to happen.
Oddly enough, that actually is how I started dating my future wife, but that was the only time something like that happened to me after high school, and I was 31 at the time. At least I knew how to cash in my winning lottery ticket when I was offered one. ;)
It doesn't, but as a man there is little you can do to get women in general to initiate more.
> 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”.
That's the problem with relationships, that it's not enough for you to unilaterally change the framework. You also need to meet someone who accepts the changed framework, otherwise you stay alone (which is okay if that's what you wanted, but some people want to be in a relationship).
And for heterosexual people, if there are thousands of your sex who want to change the framework, there better be thousands of the opposite sex who accept it, otherwise your chances on the dating market are not going to look good.
>Every human society has sex roles, and they all align with the innate psychological differences between men and women.
In Shakespeare's time, women weren't allowed to be actors. All the female roles had to be played by young men. How does *that* align with innate psychological differences between men and women?
There are many more examples like that.
> 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.
That may be true in the society we have today, but let's not lose sight of the fact that we can change society. I would happily support a movement to encourage women to ask men out more often instead of waiting to be approached.
Context of previous attempts would need to be considered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadie_Hawkins_Day
In my experience, women my age also do these sorts of things, but it seems to happen less often, and when it does it tends to happen to a less extreme extent than with men, and in less destructive ways. As a telling example, I have a brother-sister pair of cousins who are both prone to general dysfunction and mental issues. The sister is very isolated but graduated college and is starting work in the fall; the brother dropped out five or six times, lives in his childhood bedroom, abuses research chemicals, and is so deep into the crevices of strange online ideologies that he can't have normal interactions with people anymore. I certainly don't think my female cousin is on a path to happiness, but my male cousin is on a path to early death.
> They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
They are already a person, they need help developing into final stage of the closest gender path. Hence males would imply the use of "manhood" as most proper.
If nothing else, because they will *notice* that the people around them aren't comfortable when they frame their experiences 'as male.'
You can't expect people to have healthy self-identity if discussing their gender in positive terms gets people looking at them like they just ripped a giant fart in public! If masculinity-qua-masculinity isn't something that you're willing to discuss except as a problem or as a threat to women, then you are by definition stigmatizing men, and the things are going to happen that happen when you stigmatize men.
Thank you. I came out of the essay feeling something profound was missing, and you helped me put my finger on what.
In general, I'm deeply skeptical of narratives about gender and social conditioning, because they often ring as dehumanizing to me.
(Include standard caveats here, societal factors play a huge role on our conception of gender norms and moral norms, etc etc etc.)
I don't feel like a man very much, I feel like a human. When I feel shame for my failures or pride for my successes, they're my failures and successes as a human being and an imperfect rational agent doing the best with the brain he got. We're more than piles of hormones and societal preconceptions.
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.
> There's a lot of free-floating cruelty these days and it does add up.
On the internet, you can be an asshole, and then join a cause that feels righteous. Not only will no one punch you, but you will always find someone to join your side (often the moderators, if you choose the right Reddit forum).
In real life, people like this would soon eliminate themselves... if not from life (by getting into physical conflicts more often than their body can handle), then at least from the society (people will stop inviting them).
That is objectively untrue. Feminist mothers are very aware of what they're doing to their sons.
That is really not evident to me at all. I reckon that if feminists at large (both men and women) were aware of what they are doing to male youth, we wouldn't be seeing them rejecting feminism in the numbers we are seeing.
What exactly are feminist mothers doing to their sons? Would be good with some examples here.
Destroying them; emotionally, physically with drugs and sedentary lifestyles, psychologically with helicopter parenting. The consuming den mother eats her own children. I'm working on a theory: the reason there's so many "femboy fascists" is because feminist mothers emasculated their sons... and all it takes is exposure to an ideology of virtue instead of an ideology of cowardice flip their worldview. They don't change what they are because trauma takes years to undo, and if they started taking estrogen to MtF transition, they can't change that. But they can sure as shit throw in with the ideology that seeks to make their hellish upbringing a bad historical memory.
Having a son has been a huge wake up call for feminists I know. They found out a lot of what they thought was socialization was innate after all!
I think most people underestimate the damage they can do.
Assuming people intend all the damage they cause is also a social justice thing, and a good way to have a life of rage and resentment.
Also, there are misandrist mothers who do a lot of damage, and they aren't necessarily feminists. They just don't like boys/men.
In fact, I think this will turn out to be one of the best articles ever posted on ACX10.
[writer of the review here]
Thank you, this means a lot to me. Thanks for taking the time to read my writing. :)
I don't really think so, but I'm not from Bay Area so it may resonate less. This also touches a topic that was very frequent in golden age of SSC but was almost never in ACX (is there even any?) that it'll certainly attract lots of old fans. Overall, this'd not be my top 3, but I understand if SSC readers think it is.
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.
Every time there is an insect in my house it is a crisis that requires size, strength, and speed to deal with. Granted it also takes composure and courage.
Jokes aside, I do have a lot less fear and vulnerability when I walk through the world than my wife does. Part of having a good relationship with her is understanding and working with that. I have to look out for her in a way that I don't have to look out for the men in my life.
Haha do you know how many couples I know where it's the woman who takes care of bugs...
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).
I think it's just as much to ask for us to go back to rigid gender roles :) So since we're discussing implausible solutions anyway, let's discuss ones that would actually achieve something.
I've started to resent the rote scientific jargon that people knock down as a strawman on the differences between men and women.
While your attempt to egalitarianism is noble, it completely ignores the fact that men and women navigate the world differently. I am not talking about "men should be able to save a woman from a fire", I am talking practical, everyday differences.
For example, in a social setting, like a bar or party, the man is typically expected approach first. Therefore as a boy you need to be taught that this is a role that exists and how to perform it. If you ignore this reality about courtship you are going to end up confused as a young man. This is just one example, and retorting with "well women should approach too!" isn't useful nor addresses the numerous other ways the genders navigate life. Also, I don't consider this a good or bad thing - but a role that has to be learned.
So yes, people do need detailed, specific, instructions because society is made up of 100 hidden and esoteric rules and "just learn to be good" won't cut it.
That differs a lot in different societies. From what friends have told me, in Spain women often make the first move. But yes, you have a point that people should be taught the realities of the society in which they exist.
Here in Spain, I've heard this said about Finland. Maybe it always happens somewhere far away...
How much men are expected to approach first varies, but it is the norm everywhere.
I think the author was saying that boys who actively ask "How can I become a good man?" need someone to answer that question for them. Not all boys ask that question. Some boys are less wedded to the notion of gender and instead ask something like "How can I be a good person?" That question also needs answering. The point, I think, was to meet each person where they're at.
Having said that, I admit that I don't like the implication that the genders are fundamentally different. I prefer to emphasize respecting each person individually, and whether or not we see statistical averages diverging from each other is really none of my concern.
I see this in Sudbury Schools, which do a wonderful job of raising children without any particular emphasis on gender (nor is there any emphasis on eliminating gender). Each child is unique, and if they're given respect they will find their own way in life.
So if we're discussing gender at all, my focus is on tearing down the offensive stereotypes that already exist. I'm not interested in propping up new "better" stereotypes.
[writer of the review here]
I'd like to clarify that my solution isn't to "teach all boys to behave like men" in a singular, enforced, or rigid way. My solution is to offer a variety of clear paths that lead to a variety of healthy definitions of manhood. I want paths that fit the shyest, most quiet boys, and paths that benefit the most aggressive and dominant boys, and role models willing to guide them along each path and validate the various healthy expressions of manhood.
I also think these paths should be chosen by boys/men themselves, and never enforced on them. They should be ladders to help someone climb to self-actualization, rather than straightjackets.
If a boy decides he wants to ignore the paths and doesn't really care about being a man--sure, that's no problem! I actually really admire that mindset.
But the reality is that "being a man" is often a goal for boys, and leaving them with no clear definition of this term, and no clear path to follow, often leads to confusion and suffering (or simply drives them to the manosphere, where paths do exist, but are horribly toxic.)
I also think this isn't really much different from what feminists have offered women; I can easily find many women across the political spectrum who talk about "what womanhood means to them," and the steps/challenges of their path to become a self-actualized person while navigating life as a woman.
Personally, as a woman, I've benefited massively from women who mentored me and provided me with a clear path for how to function in society as a fiery, bisexual tomboy. My path has been *very* different than most of my female friends, and I can't imagine how lost I would have been without mentors and role models who navigated similar paths, and shared female-specific tips and tricks.
And ultimately that's all I'm asking for here: not a return to rigid gender norms, but rather supportive and optional paths, and role-models to help navigate the steps along the way.
Ok then it's all just semantics. If you offer so many paths that anyone can find their way, why focus on gender at all? Just because some lost boys crave a definition of 'man'? Easier to tell those boys to stop worrying about that, and teach them to find themselves.
Note also that there are hundreds if not thousands of role models and guides out there already. Read and try to live up to the poem If; look at sportsmen like Federer; listen to people like Jimmy Carr; there is no shortage of material to help people. Ultimately, I don't see what specifically you want to do differently.
> If you offer so many paths that anyone can find their way, why focus on gender at all?
Because gender has a large impact on those paths, for many people. And many young people find it extremely helpful and soothing to speak to their specific lived experiences as X gender.
It is indeed easier just to tell people "don't worry about gender." But a lot of young people find this advice confusing or dismissive. Giving specific, actionable advice to young people, and tailoring that advice to their lived experiences, is often received better than vague directions to "just find yourself."
And right now, I think it's extremely important for society to focus on giving young men practical and actionable advice, rather than advice for an idealized world where gender doesn't matter.
I hope we can slowly build toward a world where gender doesn't matter so much. But right now it does matter to most people, and I don't think it's helpful to ignore that, even if it's very well-intended.
I think there's a lot of wishful thinking in all this. Ultimately, I side with Thatcher - there is no such thing as society. The wellbeing of kids depends a lot on their parents, and most parents are doing a bad job raising their kids, teaching them good values, engaging with them, etc. Injecting gender back in won't achieve anything.
>Giving specific, actionable advice to young people, and tailoring that advice to their lived experiences, is often received better than vague directions to "just find yourself."
I agree, but specific actionable advice isn't necessarily gender-specific.
I work with kids myself. I give them advice all the time. But the kids I work with almost never frame their problems in the context of gender, so my advice never needs to be phrased that way. My specific, actionable advice usually involves telling the kid to keep pursuing their interests and to push back against anyone who tells them otherwise.
For instance, if a kid loves to write stories but their parents want them to focus on getting good grades, I'll tell the kid to keep writing stories and to resist the School Industrial Complex as much as they can. I don't say "As a boy, you should keep writing stories" or "As a girl, you should keep writing stories." Gender is irrelevant.
Of course, if a kid comes to me and says "My problem is that people are treating me poorly because of my gender", then we will absolutely discuss gender. I won't pretend that we live in an ideal world where sexism doesn't exist; that would be very bad mentorship on my part. But even then I phrase it in terms of "Here's how to find happiness in life despite the all the sexism weighing you down." I don't phrase it in terms of "Here's how to be a man" or "Here's how to be a woman."
If a kid really needed that phrasing I would go along with it, but thus far I haven't seen the need.
Sure, lots of things that don't work are easier than doing it right, if you consider the long-term results to be somebody else's problem.
Sorry if I missed it in a different comment, but do you have suggestions for what those clear paths should be? Your post was beautifully written, but it isn't actionable unless somebody suggests such paths.
>I'd like to clarify that my solution isn't to "teach all boys to behave like men" in a singular, enforced, or rigid way.
That's good.
>My solution is to offer a variety of clear paths that lead to a variety of healthy definitions of manhood
And would these healthy definitions of manhood differ from healthy definitions of womanhood? If so, what differences would you expect to see?
Consider Mr. Rogers, for instance. He was a man, but his calling in life was to work with children, and he was extremely gentle and caring. These are all things we might normally expect of a woman, but Mr. Rogers did it as a man. If this is a healthy path to manhood, it's equally a healthy path to womanhood. Seems like we should just say "Being kind to a children is a healthy path to adulthood", and leave gender out of it.
>Personally, as a woman, I've benefited massively from women who mentored me and provided me with a clear path for how to function in society as a fiery, bisexual tomboy.
I'm glad you had those mentors.
>I can't imagine how lost I would have been without mentors and role models who navigated similar paths, and shared female-specific tips and tricks.
What sort of advice does a fiery, bisexual tomboy woman need that wouldn't also apply to a fiery, bisexual tomboy-esque man?
I can think of two categories.
First, there are physical differences between cisgendered women and cisgendered men. If we're talking about the sort of stuff people learn in health class, then obviously it matters which set of body parts you happen to have, as the care and maintenance of the other set is not really applicable in your case.
Second, there are differences in the way men and women are treated in society. A fiery woman can expect to receive pushback from sexist people who think she should be more feminine, whereas a fiery man won't. But crucially, these differences only exist in society's collective imagination, so the advice is more "How to be a woman in this society" (in this case, how to fight off sexist critics) as opposed to "How to be a woman" in some sort of ultimate cosmic sense.
Perhaps that's just semantics, but it seems important to me. If we remember that society is prone to coming up with nonsense ideas about gender, we can push back against those ideas.
Now for argument's sake, let's say that estrogen and testosterone really do influence human personalities in an objective, measurable way. Let's imagine we do some absolute science which somehow isn't tainted by any of society's nonsense and we prove, beyond any doubt, then men tend towards personality type A while women tend towards type B. In that case, it might be useful to talk about the fundamental differences between men and women on a population level, but it would still be nonsensical to push these ideas on an individual level, because so many people differ from the average.
I have deep sympathy for the types of men discussed in this post, in part because I've been through similar experiences myself. And I'm very grateful to you (the author) for articulating these problems. But I don't think the issue in my case was that people failed to teach me how to "be a man". I think the issue is that people judge me without understanding me. (Part of that judgment is based on my gender, and part of it is based on age or bad definitions of "normal".)
I keep coming back to the idea that men and women are equal. As a lonely man, I faced criticism. If I had been a lonely woman, I might have received more support. Likewise if the men in this post weren't locked into the category of "men", that is to say, if society saw them as individuals and not as representatives of their gender, they might have an easier time in life.
You say that men should not be shamed for qualities like "being highly interested in sex", and I agree. (Obviously abuse is wrong but consenting adults is something else, and naturally some people are more sexual than other people.) But again, neither men nor women should be shamed for having that quality.
Gender might magnify these judgements, so that at various points in history it's either men or women who get most of the "stop enjoying sex" criticism, and it's fair to point out "men are being disproportionately judged for experiencing sexual desire" or "women are being disproportionately judged for experiencing sexual desire" (depending on which one is true at that moment), but this "magnification" problem could be solved by adopting a general "stop judging people differently based their gender" rule, at which point all that we need is a general "stop shaming people for being highly sexual" rule.
In summary, I want to discuss the unique problems each gender faces, but I also want to dissolve the concept of gender as much as we can. I want to talk about how we treat various personality traits, for instance, and if turns out that a certain trait is more common in one gender or another, that's not necessarily important. What's important is that we learn to stop shaming people for non-abusive personality traits.
Perhaps I'm biased from my own experiences. Perhaps there a lot of men out there who would say "No, you don't get it. I specifically know how to be a MAN. This genderless stuff is weird and disorienting and I don't like it." If that's really how they feel, I'm willing to accommodate them.
Teaching everyone to be Fred Rogers doesn't seem like a scalable solution, when considering all those averages.
I never said that we should teach everyone to be Fred Rogers. I said:
>Seems like we should just say "Being kind to a children is a healthy path to adulthood", and leave gender out of it.
It's "a" path, not "the" path.
There's a couple of paragraphs in the essay that address your concerns. The author says that there is no one right way or path to be a "man," so a diverse array of different role models is required. The point could be abstracted to the common identititarian-left saying of "representation matters."
Frankly, I don't think we have very many avatars of healthy adulthood in public life, period, regardless of gender.
'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.
Please re-read the first sentence of my post:
>Any single sentence is not a detailed list of instructions, yes.
My point is that any 'side' will have a one-sentence motto version of their advice which does not give detailed instructions on its own, and then a variety of different sources with detailed advice for how to follow that motto in practice.
This is not a failing of the left, the same is true for advice from the right, this is just an aspect of how ideas are communicated in full generality.
If your claim is 'the right has lots of resources for their detailed instructions, that says more about where your content algorithms are filtering you than it does about the world. There are plenty of places to read about discovering yourself and being yourself in all the ways I've discussed.
If there is any real criticism here, it would be that the right very explicitly brands its advice as PUA, here's how to get laid, here's how to be a chad all the ladies will simp for, etc, where the left is more typically branding it as 'here is how to be happy and well-rounded person,by the way that's attractive.'
So maybe men who are only looking on advice on how to score are getting filtered to the right and missing the advice on the left. That's potentially a real search engine optimization problem that the left could work on, but it's not a major ideological failing as people keep trying to paint it.
It’s very self-aware and very honest to say “I would like to have sex with you right now” to a woman you’ve just met, but it’s not particularly conducive to that goal
Don't confuse honesty with candour!
So the instruction is at best incomplete and at worst misleading
Do you really need detailed, gender-specific scripts for every possible situation you may encounter? This is life, not a call centre!
I think any 13-word instruction on a topic like this will be at best incomplete and at worst misleading, it's just too short for nuance.
> 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.
That is correct, but it doesn't follow that you don't need to teach people how to be Whole (both in generic and gender-specific way). A proficient driver doesn't need think about how to position the car in the lane, which pedal to press etc, but that's exactly because they've learned it in the past to the point that now it's automatic and natural. Same with being Whole, you absolutely do need to teach it to kids and young people, so eventually they can do it without detailed instructions and guidance.
Can you give an example of a gender-specific way of being whole? What would you teach a boy that you wouldn't teach a girl?
I think you can (and maybe should) tell everyone everything, but you need to teach boys more about how to handle having a male body, male hormones, and the expectations that our society places on men. For a girl such knowledge may be interesting, but for the boy it is necessary.
Ok yea sure, and you need to talk to girls about menstruation. If that's what we're talking about here, fine.
I think "the expectations that our society places on men" encompasses quite a lot, and is meaningfully different from the expectations that our society places on women. Lots of people seem to naturally learn (or innately conform to) those expectations, but some of us are prone to take things literally, and I think we would have benefited from a more direct and honest account of the ways in which members of our gender tend to be rewarded for behaving.
But part of the issue that the author highlights is that we don't have defined expectations for each gender anyway. Isn't it better to teach people to deal with ambiguity by building their confidence, outside gender norms?
Sure, I actually already gave examples in another reply, to a slightly different question but the first 2 would apply here as well: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay/comment/145834086
To add specifically for the "being a whole" angle. You don't just teach things like this via a list of instructions, you teach it by example via role models and such. One of the most critical aspects of life (esp for the teenagers, who are the main recipients of this teaching) where being Whole matters is in romantic relationships, and it's also one of the places where you Whole-ness is most likely to be damaged. So you absolutely need to have those role models showing how to handle such situations. And since heterosexual romantic relationships are very asymmetrical by nature, you have to have different models for boys and girls, since they'll be facing different challenges and so need different approaches to handle them.
And yeah, to directly answer your question, I would probably spend much more effort teaching an (average) boy to manage his aggression, and teach an (average) girl to be more pushy and assertive, because testosterone is a thing. Also, I would teach a boy that if he and his girlfriend are walking down the street and a crazy crackhead jumps on them, he should feel obligated to protect the girlfriend and not the other way around.
Finally, and much more subjectively and controversially, I kind of do think that the optimal ways of processing strong emotions in general are somewhat different for men and women. No I don't have any science to back it up, and yes even if my observations are true it may in principle be a result of nurture rather than nature. Still, that's what I think.
What if you have a sensitive boy who is not aggressive? Would you still teach them to manage aggression? And what if your girl is already bossy?
I specifically added the word "average" in parenthesis to avoid this kind of nitpicking.
Right but what's the point then - you'll tailor your upbringing to the specific child, which is as it should be. If your claim is that this upbringing will be different on average, then yes fine I agree with that.
Except the pressures upon them, both social and biological, create differing needs that directly implicate their "wholeness" if not managed properly. If a man faces a constant pressure to have sex, he's going to need detailed instruction on how to manage his desires and goals.
Women will face similar pressures. You should teach a *person* how to handle pressure in general.
What do you think the difference between our positions is, then? Do you imagine that I started by thinking in terms of "man" or "woman", not "person"? If I had laid out my whole thought process and started with "person", then narrowed and said "a man faces constant pressures, and a woman faces difference constant pressures", then focused on men and only talked about them, would you still be objecting to what I say?
At this point I'm not sure what the difference is. The author wrote we need detailed instructions for men. That's what I'm objecting to. I don't want to go around telling anyone what a man is supposed to be like - not in terms of character traits. Should we be telling boys that they'll have some different experiences to girls? Sure, yes, of course. But that's very different to bringing back strict gender roles and expectations.
> I don't want to go around telling anyone what a man is supposed to be like - not in terms of character traits.
Neither do I, but I would go further advocate for separating "man" from "male". The latter is not a category with prescriptions and gatekeeping, the former would be.
For me, it's not about telling people what a man "is supposed to be like" in a normative sense that I endorse. (Or, rather, if I did do this, I would list qualities that I also think are good in women.) But I do think boys/girls deserve to know what a man/woman is "supposed to be like" in the sense that, because our society(/human nature) is still very gender-sensitive, they will in practice tend to be treated differently depending on whether they display certain masculine/feminine virtues in certain contexts.
There's a lot of guys out there who are drinking (metaphorical, and sometimes literal) poison, just because it came in a bottle labeled "detailed instructions for how to be a man." Ordering them to instead cultivate the genderless virtue of not being thirsty hasn't worked.
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.
[writer of the review here]
Bingo. I usually date men 5-10 years older than me, and most of my friend group also falls into that range. I had a rocky childhood that forced me into adulthood at a young age, so my social circle reflects that.
If she's dating people who are senior directors or CEOs in the Bay Area, then she's likely to be in her 30s.
Even in the Bay Area, there aren't a lot of accomplished CEOs/Senior-directors under 35.
I'm wondering how old she'd have to be to have dated that many men.
One doesn't have to be old to have gone on a lot of first dates that didn't turn into second dates.
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 read this site as a woman you need to have a pretty high tolerance for misogyny and antifeminism so given that baseline it's not crazy that a woman self-selected for that tolerance could have written it.* And to be fair I only skimmed after the first three paragraphs because the beginning seemed like tedious, stereotype-ridden antifeminist drivel and the rest seemed like more of same. I am a woman btw. And tbh I think it's quite likely that Aella wrote it because I have never met a woman in real life who cares as much about what men think as she does.
*To be clear, I am NOT saying the blog itself is misogynist or anti-feminist, but I am saying that there's a lot of misogynist or anti-feminist discourse tolerated in the comments section, blogroll, links posts, etc. and that that drives away actual women readers.
> I only skimmed after the first three paragraphs because the beginning seemed like tedious, stereotype-ridden antifeminist drivel
not a woman, but... same...
[writer of the review here]
I assure you I do fit the demographics listed in this review (cis-woman, late twenties). I'd be happy to provide proof, once the review contest is over.
Not at all. Not a young woman, but a woman.
To the contrary I have yet to find many men who write this insightfully about men’s issues, sadly. It’s hard to observe a crisis accurately from the inside.
That was my take as well. The writing I've consumed from other men often leaves me wanting something different. The empathy on display here was a breath of fresh air in comparison.
I don't know where my feelings land with respect to the authors conclusions, but I do appreciate that the whole piece relied less on prescription and more on psychologically trying to understand these men.
💯
In my main comment, I said something about the otherworldly qualities that the person who wrote this essay would have to possess to be capable of what it described. A part of me is inclined to think that the author might have taken a tad bit poetic licence with the experiential narrative part of the essay, even if they're a woman and in their twenties. If I'm wrong, and the author is indeed a woman and young, she must be one hell of a kind and someone I'd feel so honored to know.
I don't. Yes, there is a suspiciously high amount of empathy towards men, but hey traits and skills are on a bell curve, someone has to be at the extremely high end. Where else should such exceptional people be found, if not at ACX? :D
I think there are also some minor blind spots. For example, I think the text takes it for granted that all the men are excellent at their careers... that is, until the moment they get depressed or burn out. This seems to me like a typical women's blind spot -- the men who are less excellent are invisible in dating, so they wouldn't be included in the taxonomy of men you can meet while dating.
This is not meant as a criticism; I think the article is still great and in the top percentile of empathy towards men. But a taxonomy written by a man would probably include e.g. the men who feel average and who feel that it disqualifies them at the dating market because of female hypergamy. Plus a few other things that are not talked about in the polite society. I am not going to read the text again now, but I think none of the men in the text has an experience of his girlfriend cheating on him, which happens to be a frequent male experience. Or divorcing him and taking half of his future income. Such things would be very likely mentioned by a man who cares deeply about the problem men face today.
I had the same thought about the absence of men who aren't as successful. To be fair this just the authors perspective from their own dating history; I don't think they were doing anything untoward by only focusing on their own experience. Not to say that's what you're arguing.
But I definitely know a lot of men who fall outside these buckets, and I think I'm probably one of them. I still enjoyed the piece because even if it doesn't capture all the ways men struggle, I think the empathy on display creates the sense that you could talk to them and they'd be able to really hear you. And on the Internet today, that's just such a rare and precious experience.
[writer of the review here]
I'm glad you still found value from the essay. I think you're very right, though--there are many other buckets of men that I failed to describe, because I simply don't interface with them enough to identify/understand them.
This is one of the reasons why I've been trying to diversify my Substack subscriptions lately. There are so many good essays out there written by people very different from the types I usually encounter in my bubbled existence within the Bay.
[writer of the review here]
These are some really interesting blind spots you point out, and I agree with them. The fact is that I'm an absolute sucker for smart and ambitious men, and I'm extremely lucky to live in a very smart and ambitious city, so the overwhelming majority of men I've dated have fallen into the category of "successful by society's standards."
Almost all my male friends also fall into this category, so I just don't have a ton of exposure to men who fall below society's standards, and thus get shunted from the dating market all together. (I grew up around a lot of these men, but haven't spent much time around that demographic since I was a teen, so feel very out of touch with them.)
Cheating is something that I considered including in the essay. But ultimately I just didn't feel I have enough insight/experience in the topic to include it. Divorce is the same; I'm young enough that very few men I've dated have been divorced.
I would love to see more essays written from the perspective of those "invisible" men who are excluded from the dating market. I feel like part of the lack of empathy for them is just simply lack of visibility. I'd like to hear more about their struggles so I can understand them better.
I'd also like more essays about cheating/divorce written by men. I've read a lot of wonderful, insightful essays on this topic from women, but it's rare to find ones written by men (I think they just face more stigma for writing about these things).
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.
Sometimes when you grind it out, you end up hurting people before you get good enough not to. Some of the girls I was interested in when I was in high school felt as though I was stalking them, and not without reason. People tend to be more forgiving of this kind of thing when you're 15 than when you're 30.
This is a late reply, but I would like to ask you to clarify this.
You don't say serious self-esteem problems consist in being unmoored about what one wants and being unable to look for what satisfies one, or are you?
No, I'm saying (or at least thinking) that if you can't tell what you want, or have been ignoring what you want, it's one sort of self-esteem problem.
I think this is absolutely true; I also think it’s why there’s a small weakness in the authors argument in criticizing “just put yourself out there” right before giving that as advice. It is both extremely unsatisfying and unfortunately uniquely helpful advice, so I get it!
> 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."
"Just fix all of your unspecified problems" is the pathway! The thing that you do is _get contact with reality_, which will specify some problems, and then you work on them and get more contact with reality, which will specify more problems.
Like--I think lots of people are used to constructing things according to step-by-step rules, like LEGO sets or IKEA furniture. But most things in life look more like repairing something broken, or cultivating plants. For those you need to be frequently inspecting the situation and diagnosing what needs to be done next, which is so simple as to barely count as a step in the IKEA or LEGO case. Kids used to take apart radios and then put them back together, and I think that's better training for a situation like this.
Suppose our hypothetical man goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell whether or not she was having a good time." Then the thing to do is develop the ability to tell whether or not the other person is having a good time--which you can do in the context of dates, but you can also do in other contexts!
Suppose instead he goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell how to show her that I was lovable." Then attack that--both by the angle of being more lovable, being more capable of owning it, and being more receptive of love and interest.
But the core thing here is that he needs to own himself and direct himself. Sure, he can (and probably should!) have mentors and advisors and support, but he's the one on the ground in the dates, and so he needs to understand what's happening and be able to manage it.
"Suppose our hypothetical man goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell whether or not she was having a good time." Then the thing to do is develop the ability to tell whether or not the other person is having a good time"
Another thing that's really effective at solving many of life's problems, including dating problems as a male, is to develop the ability to make billions of dollars. Or to get elected President of the United States. Being a billionaire and/or President, makes lots of things easier.
Don't bother me with details; I'm sure you can figure it all out for yourself.
It is substantially easier to guess other people's emotional state than becoming a billionaire--I think a better analogy is something like making a thousand dollars.
I do think most Americans should try to make a thousand dollars before they can expect to have much success at dating, and this is going to involve a lot of recursive problem-solving.
The trial-and-error method works well for problems where you're not that far from the solution.
The man in your example can apparently get a steady stream of "practice" dates that are not too far off from good dates. Your method probably works well for him.
But many men and boys are far from the "just tweak some details" stage.
"go on an outing with one of your mom's friends" is a way to get training data on whether or not the other person is having a good time and does not require a large supply of dateable prospects (you probably don't want to date your mom's friends!).
What if you don't have a mom that has friends?
You really think one woman could love a man into having confidence and self-worth? I'm skeptical. Women are just people.
Well yeah. I do think that when someone is valued and loved that makes that person feel valued and loved.
Some women have self-esteem issues so deep that no matter how many men hit on them or pursue them they remain insecure their whole lives as to whether they are actually valued. Some men are like that too.
And others are not.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociometer
From your link:
The higher self-esteem someone has the more they will perceive as being valued by others. For individuals with low self-esteem, they question their value as a social partner, often letting their subsequent insecurities devolve onto future relationships.
::raises hand:: Living example here!
Not every such man, no. But some men, certainly.
> 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*.
I don't know about the *best* way, but it did work that way for me.
Yeah, I completely understand why she would not want to date someone with self esteem issues, but I had and still have horrible self-esteem issues, that will never go away, and I just went and found someone with worse self esteem issues and married her in our early 20s. Obviously it would be better to not have self esteem issues, but if you do have them, marrying does make you happier.
"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*."
I would say that "I can fix him" is not a reliable way of bringing back even a single man.
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.
> 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.
Examples?
Sure, it happens sometimes. But a man who decides "I'm not going to pursue any women, I'll just wait for them to pursue me" will probably wind up having a worse time than one who decides to follow convention and take the lead somewhat more.
Said man also needs to realise there's a sensible middle ground between never asking anyone out ever and becoming a PUA who cold-approaches every girl in yoga pants at the supermarket.
> 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.
I think for several of these men, a core part of the problem is that they're handed a wrong-gender map. Like, one of the ways to read the "go to college and get a good job then end-of-story" map is that it's the woman's "find a good spouse who will provide for you and then get married and then end-of-story" map, with the spouse swapped out for a job!
I think "end-of-story" is a rarer feature in male maps. The Man With A Plan's map should have involved much more active management of his career; more situational awareness and chasing of opportunities. With much more ownership and authenticity, I think things would've worked out for him.
I can sympathize with this sentiment I really do, but how that would work in the world where gender differences do, in fact, exist?
For example, your role model/map should probably teach something about how to react to avert sexual attention from the opposite gender (assuming heterosexuality). And it's not something minor either, attractiveness is an important part of identity for either gender, particularly as teenagers and young adults. You can adapt your model to the expectation that this person receives entirely too much of such attention, or almost none at all, but it's not realistic to have the same model handling both cases correctly. So which do you chose?
As another example, the parts of your model about handling emotions should probably weigh in on the subject of anger management. Do you tailor it to someone with male or female testosterone profile, muscle mass and tolerance for physical risk and violence? Because I would guess you want about the same level of outward acts and signs of aggression in males and females as the end result, but that means you have (on average) to teach boys to control and suppress their aggressive impulses, and girls to be more assertive and pushy, which I'm not sure how are you going to do with a gender-less model.
And of course parenting is the elephant in the room, because talking about "mother type parent or a father type parent" is nice and well but in real life, depending on the biological sex becoming a parent either does or does not come with a tremendous amount of physical discomfort and pain, and your role model either does or does not account for this.
Not all women who become mothers did so by becoming pregnant; both adoption and surrogacy exist.
> 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.
At the very least, the failure modes seem different for the two sexes. Surely you'd agree that "Man Who Becomes A Beast" archetype mentioned here is a very real thing, and that the female equivalent is vanishingly rare.
If the ways to get lost are different, the maps should probably be different.
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.
[writer of the review here]
>the traits they hated in men were traits I value in myself
This resonates with me a lot. I had a fairly conservative upbringing, and am definitely what you would consider a "tomboy." I'm also fairly opinionated, loud, and assertive. Growing up, I felt like I didn't belong anywhere; conservative women were horrified at how outspoken and fiery I was, and I hated their politics and strict expectations. But the feminists I encountered in college didn't like how terrible I was at reading emotions and how assertive and strictly logical I could be.
I was *extremely* lucky to end up with multiple women mentors who'd had similar paths and took me under their wing. They basically said, "Okay, look, you've got kind of a strange brain compared to most women, but that doesn't mean you're *less* of a woman. Let's figure out how to use your natural tendencies to your advantage." I owe them a great deal for this, and I know I would be a much more confused and lonely person without their guidance.
I still naturally find friendship/romance with men slightly easier, but friendship/romance with women is now much more feasible, and many of my dearest friends are women. But it took quite a bit of work to get there, and there's no way I could have accomplished it without mentors and role models who helped me formulate a path.
Okay, this clarifies a lot of the meta commentary on the authenticity of the identity of the author. I've left a slightly more skeptical comment elsewhere, but I think I'm now more sold on the fact that you're indeed a young woman whose preternatural insight into men's interior landscape was forged during your time as a cultural outcast.
It all makes sense in retrospect why it's someone with your psychological, social, and experiential profile who would write such an essay. The bit about your previous tomboy status also kind of explain the audacity to give a 200 pound man a fist jab.
[writer of the review here]
Yes, spending time as a cultural outcast naturally lends itself to trying to analyze the categories you don't fit into.
I think another key reason I became highly analytical about men is because my father was an addict with Borderline Personality Disorder. Constantly analyzing him, and trying to guess what was going through his deeply complex and unstable brain, was necessary for survival for many years. This habit carried over when I started dating (women always carry the question of "is this a safe man I can trust?" into a date, and I think my brain is just wired to do this 10x as much and 10x as deeply.)
Goodness, having a mentally ill father is something else we have in common. (I don’t know how much of a coincidence that is considering it’s conditioned on what turns out to be rare personality traits.) My father suffered from debilitating paranoid delusions for years, making our home a minefield. A father is only one man, though, and I think his encouragement to prefer male friends (which didn’t do much until I was in high school and boys were leas threatening because the students were selected for academically) did more in this regard.
Very sorry you had to go through a similar tumultuous childhood. Hugs. <3
Hit me up if you're ever in the Bay Area. I'd love to have a new friend with similar life experiences. I'm sure we both walked away with a lot of opinions to compare/contrast.
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 think the author is aware of this. It's not "here's four different ways society fails men", it's "society fails men consistently in the same way, and here's four different ways men respond to that failure".
I note a distinct lack of emphasis on the role of modern urban life, in particular the Bay Area, that is exacerbating this issue. Other areas can have different failures. Even if the author lives there and thus only has direct experience with it, I would have at least liked to see some speculation on how cities and the hyper-liberal politics of California contribute to these issues.
I guess I don't see that awareness. A lot of the essay is just repeating that she finds most men to be lost and confused, through the framework of repeating a similar description of men in the guise of different 'types'. I suspect she herself has some inner sense of alienation that she wants men to solve for her through romantic relationship -- hence she finishes with a highly romanticized picture of a "whole" and psychologically fully healthy man who will be her happily ever after. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, this is one of the reasons we seek romance, even though it's somewhat unrealistic and you eventually learn that. But a lot of what we see in dating is projection or mirroring of our own inner states and concerns.
As a man I appaud her recognition of the troubles men face but I just didn't find this descriptively convincing. It did feel very much like a young person still on their quest.
This is a more accurate critique of the essay as well as a more accurate profiling of the author than you probably realize. Having read more of her follow-up comments, giving a few more details about herself, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment.
However, I think she's still a work in progress ("still on their quest") and I suspect she knows this. She did acknowledge in the essay how much she has had to grow into the version she currently is. But I'm not sure she's aware that the special affinity she feels for "the man who opts out" (the one I term The Nullified Man) is a reflection of who she used to be. In fact, I think her final paragraphs describing the redemption possible for this type is her unknowingly (or perhaps knowingly) describing her own redemptive arc.
[writer of the review here]
Goodness, you are an insightful reader! Yes, I certainly am still "on my quest", and yes, I do indeed feel deep kinship for "The Nullified Man", as you term them.
I was extremely sick for most of my teen years--couldn't walk, constant seizures, almost died. While most of my girl friends were blossoming into attractive young women, I was withering into a half-dead shell of a human in a wheelchair. Fate opted me out of the dating market against my will.
When I was nineteen, I got insanely lucky to find the correct diagnoses and combo of drugs that allowed me to suddenly live a pretty normal life. It was a massively confusing time. In the span of about two months, I went from being invisible and pitied to being an object of attention and attraction for the first time in my life. It took years to properly reprogram my brain on a wide variety of social interactions (and I still feel it's a work in progress at times).
So, yes, I will always feel immense empathy for men who feel locked out of dating. I know what it's like to look wistfully on from the sidelines, and I wouldn't wish that feeling of hopelessness and isolation on anyone.
After reading this particular response and the other one in this thread, I have even more reason to believe that you're way younger than I imagined. My adjusted guess is now something in the region of 24-25 years. If this is true, it's even more impressive what you have demonstrated through this essay!!! It's the difficult to just process the possibility that the mind, the heart, and the soul behind this article is only just a quarter of a century old.
Which leads me to my next speculation/question: you've revealed an important detail about your incapacitated teenage years (that must have been terribly hard to go through) and I can only conclude that the insight you channeled in that essay couldn't have come primarily from your experience. Yes, maybe the knowledge and certain factual specifics did come from your dating experience, but I doubt the wisdom came from them per se. Most people with longer and broader dating experiences don't often possess this level of psychological insight, moreso with respect to the opposite gender.
So here's my theory (subject to your correction): your teenage years may have been miserable, experientially impoverished, and filled with more teenage angst than normal. But I also suspect it was filled with adventures peopeled with literary characters, romantic ideals and disappointments, moments of deep reflections, and the cultivation of your powers of observation. To see without been seen, to watch without been watched, to watch others live while being sidelined is often a reality that hardly anyone would willingly choose, but for those who find themselves in this exact life situation are often possessed with an uncanny spirituality and equanimity that almost nothing in life could perturb much. I guess this is something your dates unwittingly perceive and make them start unburdening (it's a response to perceived superior strength of character and of spirit) to you. You have no idea (or so I'm guessing) how others experience you in certain situations which makes it difficult for you to speculate on why people share with you their deepest vulnerabilities.
So, to the extent that there's a question in what I've written, it is this: what was your cloistered incapacitated teenage years like, especially with respect to your inner life; I couldn't think it was all gloom and doom?
[writer of the review here]
>hence she finishes with a highly romanticized picture of a "whole" and psychologically fully healthy man who will be her happily ever after.
I just want to note that I'm not sure I believe in "psychologically fully healthy" people, and I don't think that should be the end goal for women or men. It strikes me as an impossible standard. Most "Men Who Are Whole" who I know and/or have dated have plenty of their own issues and traumas. But they've managed to develop a strong enough sense of identity and confidence to address those issues and become highly desirable people, despite their shortcomings.
I definitely would describe myself as a young person still on my quest. And frankly, I hope my quest never ends. I'm very different than I was five years ago, and I'd be disappointed in myself if I wasn't very different in five more years. Life is a wild ride, with endless interesting experiences and people to learn from. I don't want that learning to ever end. :)
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my writing and leave some thoughtful feedback!
I believe that being "whole"-- not having the problems of disorientation and alienation-- isn't the same thing as being virtuous.
Yeah I tap out on starting type 3 and skim forward until the epilogue. I have low expectations on any attempt on social categorizing at all so this doesn't really lower my overall score, but I endorse your observation.
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?
perhaps not that far, the leveling the playing field with welfare or ubi, reducing reliance on the car, and enabling policies (LVT, zoning reform) that enable densification and allow people to encounter other people in more casual scenarios might help.
Did you miss the part where over half of the people mentioned in this post have successful jobs, zero economic insecurity, and live in dense cities?
The decisions they made to get to that point still involved significant costs, though. If the Man With A Plan hadn't trivially rejected that early "starving artist" route, since (in a UBI context) it'd involve a lot less risk of literal starving, might have given him an earlier start on other important questions.
[writer of the review here]
>I want to push back against the trend of reducing broad social trends to gender specific issues.
I appreciate this mindset and know it comes from a good place. It was my own mindset for many years.
But ultimately the statistics show that men are struggling to a degree that women are not in many areas. Men are floundering when it comes to education, employment, drug addition, incarceration, being present for their children, suicide rates, etc. The numbers for men are drastically different from women.
I would firmly agree that a lot of the root causes of these issues have heavy overlap with the same issues women face. The economy, lack of community, city planning, and similar issues all have a massive impact here. But the way to address and recover from these issues--and the amount/types of resources and support available-- seem to vary quite drastically across genders.
Interventions that work really well for floundering girls often don't work at all for men. (The book "Of Boys and Men" by Richard Reeves does a fantastic job of exploring this issue in depth. Highly recommend.) We need to be looking more deeply at the question of "why aren't these interventions working" and try to work with young men to find interventions/frameworks/resources that *are* effective for them.
There is currently a loud outcry from men saying they lack purpose and motivation, and don't know what their role in society is. The reality is that "how to be a man" is a question that many (if not most) young men care about. Telling them to stop caring about it hasn't worked, and is only leading them into the arms of truly terrifying figures in the manosphere.
We can continue to tsk-tsk and tell them to not care about gender so much, but that clearly isn't working. Or we can provide them with similar resources women have been given: deep discussions about what it means to be X gender, and outspoken role models who display and celebrate various manifestations of that gender, and share their path to embracing a self-actualized life.
Thanks for writing this. I am pretty alarmed that there are therapists out there whose response to men telling them their problems is to reply that they are “privileged.” What? How does this BS help anybody? A man is coming to you for help, saying he’s struggling, he needs to be heard, he needs specific advice dedicated to where he is in life and how to get to a better place, he doesn’t need vague social justice crap.
I am pretty concerned about the woke takeover in therapy and also in family courts, where men reliably get screwed. Our culture seems to have forgotten how scheming and manipulative women can be. Of course, not all women, actually a very small percentage of women - but the same is true about men who are violent or abusive. It’s a small percentage of men. And studies have shown that men and women are aggressive and antisocial at approximately the same rate, it’s just that men are less subtle about it. Their antisocial behaviour tends to manifest in physical violence, whereas women do emotional violence - lying, manipulation, gossip - trying to destroy reputations.
All these men have successful careers?
“Issues with dating? It’s the economy, stupid!”
Somehow people managed to date, marry and produce babies just fine during the Great Depression when “bad economy” meant no food. Or during the Cultural Revolution when “bad economy” meant no food, gulag, backyard ironmongering and self criticism followed by being buried alive. Or during the Russian Civil War where “bad economy” meant gulag, death squad and also no food.
In the past most people accepted the standard life path of career -> marriage -> baby. Now they don’t. Blaming that on minor ructions in the American economic order requires serious contortions when the same phenomenon is visible in places as different as Poland, Korea and Chile.
Perhaps nous sommes tous Americans? Or perhaps something completely different!
A gender based framing has the advantage that 1) it fits the complaints actually leveled by the young people I question (women who have no interest in marriage due to the behavior of men, men who can’t get married because wimmenz), b) contagion relies on the spread of ideas rather than economic conditions and iii) the internet has made the spread of ideas — especially dumb ideas — easier and cheaper than ever before in human history.
So I don’t think economic explanations hold much water. Housing has been expensive before without causing a total collapse in relations — and I don’t mean diplomatic. In interwar Britain people were crammed together in extremely low quality housing often without internal plumbing or electricity and they still managed to do it like they do on the Discovery channel. Young people around the world today by contrast live in conditions of absurd material abundance yet seem bound and determined to emulate the reproductive habits of the panda — complete with weird antics caught on camera and distributed far too widely for good taste or common sense — rather than those of their ancestors.
I’m extremely doubtful that the community answer is correct. I personally have no interest in a community, yet am a stable happily married middle aged man with a kid. I don’t feel any need to share my feelings or develop deep friendships and this disinclination is in line with many generations of male preference. We just don’t much care for talking and the men who do are, well, not the norm. So positing that a lack of access to something men never used to want is the driver of male anomie seems a tad strange.
My theory provides a testable conclusion: groups that have least access to the internet should have highest fertility, marriage rates and traditional markers of the standard career -> marriage -> baby pipeline. Internet adoption should coincide (perhaps with a time lag as people need time to go from laughing at cat pictures to depressing memes about how terrible it is to marry and reproduce with wrong thinking gender) with a decline in those markers. Internet removal should not result in an upswing in said markers as the internet is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas and ideas are harder to eliminate than internet connections being as they are lodged in skulls and not walls and skulls lack convenient access ports.
Perhaps I’m totally off base but it’s at least worth a think. 🙏 good luck to the youths and thank you for your comment, I enjoyed reading it. All humor included in my own is meant for the amusement of the reader and the original poster with malice toward none and raspberries for all.
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.
>She should be scared of its imminent collapse
I mean, I agree, but I'm not sure how a "true believer" progressive thinks about that. Do they really believe the "right side of history" stuff, or that it only applies in the very long term but may permit a thousand-year Caliphate in between.
> I don't see how you can cleanly separate "wokeness" from that
Not OP, but egalitarian individualism (like 20th century liberalism) and idpol (like wokeness) are contradictory ideologies, since the former asserts intergroup differences are unimportant, and the latter asserts they are essential. The one became the other due to, inter alia, motivated reasoning when egalitarianism's predictions about outcome equality proved untrue, the US legal apparatus implementing idpol instead of equal opportunity (e.g. Griggs v. Duke Power), and an innate predisposition toward tribalism.
Yeah, my point is that you can't separate them in terms of elite endorsement, not ideological content.
Yeah, the "blue tribe" is ideologically dominant in high-status institutions, that's why the Republicans are limited to controlling only minor, low-status institutions such as the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
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 would also guess that women have a similar experience to this in NYC, the other Place Where Men Achieve Greatness in the US. But, feel free to disagree.
My understanding is that in NYC the ratio of women to men is the inverse of the Bay Area, so the main complaint I've seen about dating in NYC is that the men have too many options and women have to put up with lots of ghosting. I'm curious if anyone has written similar taxonomies about men or women there.
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
My TV models of masculinity growing up were Steve Urkel and Screech Powers. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.
You chose Screech over Zack and Urkel over, say, the Fresh Prince?
I didn't watch The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air at that age. And as a "smart" kid, the TV nerd was what I imagined my social role was supposed to be, so I would have been Carlton...
Adopting the label of “smart kid” as exclusive of “cool kid” is such terrible baggage to carry.
Fortunately, when I was in high school, it was the middle of the dot-com bubble, so the other students looked at me and saw a future tech billionaire. Which was fun, but it was never where I was actually going to end up.
I don't fight teenage male characters aspirational role models in the same way. Looking online at the most popular TV shows of the '90s cheers, Seinfeld, ER, Law and Order, Friends they all had male protagonists who were traditionally masculine in many ways while not being grunting caveman caricatures
Although none of the characters on Seinfeld in particular were exactly role model material...
“It silences the huge parts of the west that don't largely have these values”
No, someone speaking up about the people around her isn’t silencing anyone else. You’re allowed to add to the conversation with what you know and experience without worrying about whether that’s representative of the whole country or world
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.
As a human interpreter, how do you add value that ChatGPT cannot provide? It’s a genuine question - I’ve found ChatGPT translation to be superb, including with audio input.
One immediate advantage is that you don't funnel confidential information through an industry that is, let's say, less-than-completely-respectful of copyright laws.
There are cultural nuances that are difficult to capture unless you are human. The tone of speech, the implications of what you are saying, your body language and tone of voice. These can be misinterpreted when the listener is from a different culture. A good interpreter is very helpful in that regard. Also, consider the following situation: suppose you have had a little too much to drink. Your human interpreter helps put what you are trying to say in such words that you will have nothing to be embarrassed about the following morning. Here is another example: let’s say the language you are communicating in is not your native language. You could be using wrong words, incorrect grammar or blending in words from another language. A good interpreter can make sure that whatever you say comes across clearly in another language. I don’t know if Chat GPT can do that, at least not yet. For this reason and more, clients always prefer using human interpreters at high-level businesses meetings, conferences and important political events.
Women are incredibly unaware creatures in my experience. It's pretty standard behavior though when they feel "safe" to behave horribly, they will.
Unfortunately, this is not only true of women. I have also heard men talk trash about women, especially after a couple of drinks, and they didn’t care who heard them. So, if this is indeed part of human nature, the whole attitude of “battle of the sexes” is counterproductive.
Well, now men do. You've successfully feminized large sections of the culture. Good job! I hope you're enjoying the egalitarianism you've produced, because no one else is.
If we had true egalitarianism, there would be no reason for you to feel so much anger. It is very difficult to put emotions aside to have a reasonable conversation. I refuse to engage with you on these terms, so if you want to have a fight instead of taking your anger out on a person you have never met, you need to talk to someone else.
This sounds very similar to a "real communism has never been tried" argument. You have raised a generation of fight-age young men, shit on their entire lives for their gender, given no guide on how to improve themselves, who are enraged and feel they have nothing to lose.
I'm not the one who's in danger here.
I can see why you anonymize yourself on substack.
I can’t quite follow the logic of your first sentence, but what you are saying later, makes sense. It is indeed a great tragedy and it is terribly unfair. If, as you say, there is a great number of very angry young men who have no guidance on how to manage that anger, then we are all in trouble, including you. These young men could hurt anyone, including themselves. Managing anger is very difficult. I am just a stranger, but I would recommend going for a walk or a run, if you have the energy for that. Whatever you do, never drive when you feel angry. I would also recommend that tomorrow, you should go talk to someone you trust, but not online, in real life.
Women are less intelligent and capable but somehow have taken over the world, in other words?
How have women successfully feminized large parts of culture given (I am assuming is your belief in) their inherent inferiority?
That's quite the assumption to make. I suppose it fits with your hateful ideology, but it isn't accurate. Males and females have roles to play in a social system, when a crucial percentage fail to play their roles well, the metastable social system collapses into more primitive systems.
I asked you a question about how you reconciled two contradictory beliefs, what does that have to do with my own ideology?
(reported)
Male-feminist behavior? This isn't reddit.
Men have talked trash about women since at least the days of the ancient Greeks. I don't think that has anything to do with any feminization of modern culture.
This goes back ages...
https://youtu.be/APPfTEv-YxI?si=jDmje-KNnpbAs1eK
I was once invited to an unofficial dinner out with other women in the office. Two of the women told some joke about "bros with those dumb card wallets -- like dude, just get a normal wallet." They had the decency to look sheepish when I pulled that exact wallet out to pay later on.
Don’t take their silly comments to heart. People make mistakes.
What's a card wallet?
https://niteize.com/financial-tool-multi-tool-wallet
Something like this (the one I personally use)
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.
[writer of the review here]
Thanks, Taylor, I sincerely appreciate the kind words. I kept it limited to the Bay Area because I don't have experience dating outside of metropolitan California and didn't feel comfortable discussing the dating scene elsewhere. But it's interesting to hear that this also resonated with you. I appreciate you taking the time to read and comment!
Also enjoyed your writing, and think it overall works in broader context. I think one difference between US (especially Bay Area) and the rest of the world, is that people are much more likely to have more several times across a huge area, and therefore have fewer long time friends.
In my country most people stay in their home town, or will move to the closest big city for study. Then they either settle down there, or move back to their home.
Interested to hear how Americans think about this
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
[writer of the review here]
Thanks for taking the time to read my review and leave feedback! I'm glad you found the tone enjoyable. It seems like there's a slowly growing trend of people trying to have calm, reasonable discussions about these topics, and I'm really happy to see so many people engaging with this topic in such a civil and empathetic manner in the comments. :)
For all the downsides of social media, does mean that once there have been enough screaming arguments on some subject, everyone has seen 'em, notices that if more "awareness" was ever going to solve the problem it already would have, and knows everyone else knows it too. Thus, they can all coordinate on moving to the next plan.
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.
Agreed. I can't thank the author enough for being willing to write this piece.
Well, that might be one of your issues.
Less of this, please.
[writer of the review here]
Thanks for taking the time to read it and comment. I'm very glad you enjoyed the piece. :)
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.
Yes, plenty of sociable people have good friends and relationships without being pillars of their community, having a job they're passionate about or having chosen an unusual path through life.
> 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."
I think it might be much simpler than that: the people who fully succeed at dating, almost by definition, find stable relationships and leave the pool. Sites themselves, as rent-collecting middlemen, have only a tenuous indirect incentive to encourage that sort of success, even if they knew how - and it's not an inherently easy task.
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 thought it was sympathetic without being empathetic. There was a lot of "there's a lot of pain and 'void' men are going through and that's bad" but...I recognized the socio-economic description of the men in some way but they seemed grotesquely off.
Like, I've known two insanely successful "Men who provide" and what's described is...not how they connect with women, that's not what they look for in women, and those are not the challenges those relationships face. Those marriages fell apart because...it would be unfair to say their wives got bored but it is a real challenge for those women to wake up one day at 32, their husband doesn't want kids, the income from their job/career doesn't matter, and their husband just doesn't have a lot of time to spend with them. It's hard to describe but it's less "two workaholics drive each other crazy" and more "imagine being retired at 30 with nothing to do, no needs, and trying to create purpose in your life." Does that make sense?
And I'm super confused to see a bunch of people here being like, "yeah, totally, I recognize that." when I see...like a mishmash of real people and online stereotypes. And there's definitely a political/social point to push here and I feel like I'm missing something.
You're saying the author is getting a bad read on these men and this implies she lacks empathy. By your own standard, if her read was in fact correct, it implies you are the one lacking empathy for them.
Given that you've never met these men she dated, I think it's presumptuous to assume you understand them better than she did. And jumping from "she misunderstood them" to "she lacks empathy" is an extra presumption.
Given all the votes and all the comments endorsing her analysis, I would guess a fair number of people's experiences have matched the author's description.
I believe you when you say you've met ambitious workaholic types who weren't looking for the qualities described in this review (i.e. an equally ambitious, high-achieving partner). But I'm not sure why you don't believe the author when she says she has encountered people like this.
They aren't well-connected to other people or to their goals because some basic aspect of their personality never developed or was damaged.
I'm not sure exactly what's needed, though I think part of it is damage caused by misandry from a good bit of feminism and another part is a culture which opposes contentment while having an ordinary status level.
"It's the screens" is so common it has started to feel reductive, but I really do think primarily engaging with the lives of others through remote consumption of people's curated images/videos has significantly damaged our ability to find contentment. That has a cascading effect on our ability and willingness to relate to other people.
I'm not sure that you're take is actually contra the article. Yes, the problem with these guys is theirs: they don't know how to be men! But no amount of "👏DO👏BETTER" is going to change that without some real guidance.
Yeah I think I agree that the guidance is all good, I just think it might be insufficient if there's also not a means by which we tell men to just be less self-oriented people (regardless of their gender roles in society)
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
I gave this one of my highest ratings. I thought it was the best-written of all the reviews. I don’t identify with any of these men (turns out that getting married right out of college was absolutely the correct decision) but I could see how a couple of decisions I made differently could have led me down any of those paths; she spells it out so clearly that I could see myself there. This review sat with me for a while after I read it and that’s enough to push it to the finals.
Men voted for this in 1920. That's who, that's when. I have no idea why, ask your grandpa if he's alive, or great-grandpa.
Many men I know view other men significantly as potential threats to the welfare of their families and the security of their property. I acknowledge men do seem pretty violent to each other. Maybe men recognized women were better natural allies than the bottom tail of men.
Not wrong. Historically the bottom tail of men would have been killed in war. Maybe we need some mass mobilization and a system for legalized dueling to sort this out.
The common theme among all of the archetypes in this article is that society gave a bunch of boys instructions on what path to follow life, they followed that path as they grew into men, but failed to find happiness despite doing their best. Ergo, society’s instructions are currently broken.
If you are one of the 4 archetypes being described in this article, then you are very aware that something is deeply wrong with your life. Yet it’s hard to put into words exactly what that is.
Yet this article manages to pull this difficult task off, leading to a cathartic read. I almost cried when reading this. It paints a very vivid picture of just how difficult this problem is, and how deep of a pit some of us find ourselves in.
I’m honestly surprised that you struggled to understand the article. I think it spells out the problems a lot of men are facing in very explicit detail. What more could you possibly want to know?
Mostly because it...doesn't. I see elements of it as true but I see a fundamental misunderstanding of how these men think. Like...sympathy given to a caricature rather than the real thing.
Like, I know "The man who opts out", I know "Men who provide" and "Men who become beasts" or whatever and...no. This is not the internal or observable experience of these men. There's elements but...yeah, it just doesn't click.
That's what's confusing me. Like, I suspect you're sincere that you closely identified with this and it deeply touched you and I'm over here thinking that this isn't reality. At all. And I note that I'm confused.
Like, if I had more time I would probably phrase this in a less inflammatory way, but...like, everyone knows Andrew Tate is playing a character on the internet for money, right? He's as real as Terry Bollea playing Hulk Hogan. And that's cool, don't break kayfabe. But then there's an article where someone is talking about how they keep dating these wrestler types and they've noticed that some are nice and have baby faces and some are mean and have heels but, reflecting the full complexity of the human condition, sometimes these "baby faces" will turn mean and these "heels" can be nice. And everyone is like, oh yeah, I see myself in that, this is so real.
But yeah, that's what confuses me, everyone is really emotionally connecting with something that feels as real a professional wrestling. Maybe I'm just insanely out of touch? I dunno.
No, everyone does *not* know that. Plenty of people take it seriously. Comedian Andrew Dice Clay was also playing a character in his stand-up comedy, and there were plenty of both fans and critics that took the misogyny in his act at face value.
Once upon a time, I encountered a personality test where you would click on coloured squares with very little guidance. After you did it, it would spit out a detailed description of your personality. People I know who took the quiz were disturbed by how such an accurate write up could be derived from something so simple. Before I spoil the trick, here's a link to the quiz in case you want to try it yourself.
https://colorquiz.com/quiz.php
Done? Were you weirded out? Well don't be.
The trick is that though all of the answers were fairly different from each other, the traits they described were present in most humans in at least some point in their lives. Taking the test simply determined which particular ones would be emphasized. Like flipping a coin with two heads, it's pretty hard to get a wrong answer even though the selection process was essentially random. There would usually be at least some mismatch between the answer the quiz spat out and the real person, but there were enough similarities that the contradictions would be overlooked. No one ever expects these things to be 100% accurate after all.
Why do I bring this up? To show you how little truth it takes for a person to be able to latch onto something. Because you are correct, these are caricatures, but they contain enough of the truth that people still find them relatable.
I'm not sure if my response will satisfy you. I do think the article is closer to reality than you give it credit for, but to prove this would require me to dig through all the points and tell you which ones I relate to and which ones I don't, but its currently the evening and I simply don't have the energy. I'm hoping one of the other commentators will be able to pick up my slack.
Interesting question, especially if you didn't like the post.
What I love about it is not the intellectual aspect of it (I usually don't enjoy intellectual stuff when it's bound to political issues like this post is), but its benevolence and its accuracy.
I don't care that there is a small "rant" dimension to it: at least the psychological descriptions are sensible, the final "the man who is whole" is inspiring and nearly soothing, and the advice -that I confess not to have read fully- is positive. There is no "blame them for this intractable issue" in this post.
I'm freeriding on other people's votes -- I was swamped with other stuff back during the voting stage -- but for my money this is one of the top two reviews Scott has shared so far. It brings a distinctive viewpoint and backstory rich with empathetic detail to something often talked about with just a vague label and a smattering of statistics (and/or a level of political vitriol blessedly absent here).
I don't know if I get your gripe about it. Do you really think Tate is irrelevant, or less a symbol of the "manosphere," because he's been in the public eye for 5 years and counting?
I also don't rate it that highly, but SSC, especially before and around 2014, was a bastion of anti-feminism liberals. So this article is just ACX returning to its roots.
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.
HLC actually changed his signoff from "Don't commit a 22 today" to "Don't do the enemy a fucking favor" specifically because the vets in his audience didn't want to be coddled.
I might regret this, but who is HLC? Googling the acronym gives me "Higher Learning Commission"...
HabitualLineCrosser
This. There are three basic approaches: validate people no matter what, challenge them to grow up, or invalidate them no matter what. Therapy culture is the first option. Feminism is the third option for men: no matter what you do, you still remain the evil male, the Satan. Men respond well to challenges that they actually have a chance to succeed at, the games they actually have a chance to win.
And of course the challenges have to be age- (and other factors) appropriate.
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.
I mean, odds are high the author is poly and is collecting individuals to love--or understands they live in a high-population-density area and can go on a date a week for a few years without exhausting the supply of dateable men. I'd rather pick someone to love out of two hundred than twenty.
I also had similar thought when reading, and am really curious to hear the author give more details about the number of dates.
> The author must have gone on many dates, perhaps hundreds, over several years to develop her categories. Why?
This is just smart to do - most people in the Bay Area are far out in the tails of various distributions in terms of human and social capital, and finding a similar match requires lots of dates, due mostly to the signal caps that dating apps and brief convos enforce (basically, you can only discern "at least top 1%" for any given ranking system via the limited information in apps and brief convos, but people want to match at a 1/1k or 1/10k or even 1/100k precision, which is very far from 1%, and requires lots of in person dates to determine both that incidence and the necessary in person chemistry and compatibility).
To get bluntly and overly nerdy, we can show the math behind this, too. This aligns with what we know of optimal stopping - the Secretary Problem. If you run simulations, drawing from a base of 20 dates lets you choose a top 1% candidate maybe 37% of the time with optimal evaluation strategy - but choosing from a base of 200 dates lets you choose one 52% of the time.
"Big deal!" you might think - "37% is still pretty good!" But mate selection is an impossibly important factor to your future happiness and children, and a lift of more than 10% in absolute terms is an impossibly big buff in a competitive field that's so rigorously selected that assortative mating is stronger than ever and lineage status persistence is ~75% plus across all countries in the world, including the Scandinavian countries and EU.
"most people in the Bay Area are far out in the tails of various distributions in terms of human and social capital"
Most people in the Bay Area, no. Most people who read ACX, yes.
The usual answer is that assumptions of secretary problem and similar formalizations are not the only and probably not event best way to formalize the task of forming a romantic relationship.
In most trivial sense, attempting to find the most similar candidate or the best by any metric is ultimately quite difficult. Consider the numbers of ways people and their personalities and their past experiences can differ from each other. Big Five. All the other important quirks that are not reducible to big five. Dozens to hundreds, each of them is different dimension, and by curse of dimensionality, the volume of hypersphere grows as O(n3). Each random point is going to far off from each other and in surprising location, difficult to compare to each other -- if it were any non-trivial distribution in ML task sense, you'd need surprisingly sophisticated MC sampler. Even in Bay Area, populous as it is, you are sampling from pretty limited subspace of he distribution. Choose only some dimensions to consider, the choice is clearly limited and arbitrary, and *a priori*, unlikely the correct one. (How confident you are that you really know what you want?) Companies who care about only few qualities in their employees may be able to approach secretary problem close to written.
(It is also quite common occurrence that the hiring process be beleaguered by indecision -- either no hire is done or process is so lengthy that the benefits of hypothesized superb candidate need to be surprisingly large to offset the costs incurred during hiring process and the opportunity cost of lost growth compared to hiring someone capable who can learn).
As an added complication, you are not selecting from pool of candidates with immutable features, but human beings who (to some extent) change as they gather lives. Act of engaging in his choosing is not cost free, but another shared experience. This last point brings us to more serious, psychological problems when dating is reduced to picking samples from smörgåsbord. According to Kierkegaard and existentialists, life is to be experienced. The time spent 'selecting' and 'evaluating' as in the secretary problem is also time that could be spent otherwise, in a less detached mode of thinking, but the detached mode is an experience, too. If one dates as if comparing people in a competitive field, one tends to develop a habit of comparing people in a competitive field - yet if the point is supposed to be finding oneself in a stable relationship, the habit is a detriment. How many stable relationships can stand stable in constant comparison to others?
Competitive sports carry many emotions, but among them joy is rare, fleeting and deserved to few optimized winners at the top, disappointment to many. Possibility of winning in a game which begets gamification which begets optimization. Optimization begets machines who win optimally. Let us not become machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.
> attempting to find the most similar candidate or the best by any metric is ultimately quite difficult
I'm not sure, I feel like most people would be pretty happy with a hot, smart, nice Ivy grad from a rich and accomplished family.
Those are lamentably short on the ground (roughly 1/250k incidence, maybe rarer), but that's the general cluster most people seem to be aimed at these days, and one compromises on the characteristics and to the degree one must.
In the same analysis I did the Secretary Problem simulations, I outlined the argument that you only get 3 things in mate optimization, in the sense that although you want ALL the good characteristics in your mate, us ordinary mortals have to settle for 3 things in which our partner can be noticeably good. This is a consequence of sheer dating logistics and only being able to discern a certain resolution via the lossy channels of pictures and minimal text available in dating apps.
The full argument and post is here:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/you-only-get-3-things-in-mate-optimization
> As an added complication, you are not selecting from pool of candidates with immutable features, but human beings who (to some extent) change as they gather lives.
Eh, I know it sounds pessimistic, but I've found that the heuristic "people will never change for the better, they'll either be exactly what they are today or worse later on" is really, incredibly strong. In other words, if you go in assuming this is the best people will ever be, it's probably a solid rule of thumb, with a high accuracy and a downside of being pleasantly surprised.
> Act of engaging in his choosing is not cost free, but another shared experience. This last point brings us to more serious, psychological problems when dating is reduced to picking samples from smörgåsbord.
This might be another gender difference thing then, because plenty of men would probably agree that the lived experience of choosing from a smorgasbord of women is pretty fun in and of itself.
Being a high status man in the dating market is pretty intoxicating, but as you point out, it can be a memetic hazard in terms of long term relationships and happiness - but I'll note that part is a choice. You can always settle down, there's nothing stopping you. You do run into the problem that now no matter how great somebody is, you've always been with somebody better on some actually important metric; so you've always been with a better cook, or somebody who was nicer, or smarter, or better in bed, or better at socializing and fostering friend groups, and so on.
Another thing about the smorgasbord I'll point out is that the returns to quality are really there, too. One year I decided to go all-in on Optimal Stopping and dated ~150 women over 12-18 months, with the criteria of not stopping til one impressed me relative to my exes. The one I ended up with out of that pool was a gorgeous Ivy alt girl who was compatible in all the right ways, and we ended up traveling the world and exploring many strange and wondrous gedankenwelts together over 5 years, parted on good terms and are still friends today, so...mission accomplished?
Search and transaction costs are definitely a thing, and you rightfully point it out, but returns to quality from deeper search are also a thing, and it's up to you to decide what the right balance is for you in your search.
> Possibility of winning in a game which begets gamification which begets optimization. Optimization begets machines who win optimally. Let us not become machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.
I just don't think you're ever going to avoid this. The returns to your life overall and your kids are so large when it comes to choosing your mate, and it's been so impossibly rigorously optimized by essentially everyone over the years, centuries, and millennia, that you just can't avoid it.
My favorite examples of this:
1) Samurai lineages are extremely over-represented in high status careers today in Japan: "samurai descendants may be as “much as ten times overrepresented among modern Japanese elites. That rate implies that half the modern elites are descended from the samurai. Intermarriage would greatly expand the share of the modern population of samurai descent. But if the samurai are really ten times overrepresented in modern elites, intermarriage must have been limited, so that their descendants constitute no more than 10 percent of the modern population."
If they had had platonically perfect intermarriage with no leakage, they'd have been 5% of the population - so over hundreds of years, the amount of leakage from "platonically perfect" to "actually executed" was an incremental 5%. That's incredibly tight optimization, and happening over hundreds of years, so over many generations.
Another fun example of this - Kulin Brahmins in India have been assortatively mating so tightly that they have greater than 100% persistence rates relative to the median population in India (ie their children attain their same status in career / income / education at 105% of the rates relative to the median population). And they've been achieving this for something like 3,000 years.
In a field that tightly optimized, over centuries and millennia, by countless generations and people, you are just always going to have a lot of effort and gamification and optimization going on.
Fun lineage persistence factoids are from my review of Greg Clark's Son Also Rises.
I see people (maybe mostly women) who like challenging sports because they get a little time when they aren't thinking about anything else. They specifically cite housework and children.
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
Part of a gendered map is 'advice' and part of it is 'opportunity'. Like, "you should join the army" as advice only works if there's an army to join!
One of the main benefits of shared gender roles is that _you can help other people enact their gender_. If the male map is "you should be helpful to other people", the complement of that for everyone else is "find opportunities for men to help you." Ask him to fix your cabinet door that doesn't quite close right.
> I feel a bit confused by what specifically it is that men are missing, and what would meet this need.
A way to earn social status in the community they live in and a way to translate that status into a partner (probably a woman who will bear children).
> 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.
While choice paralysis and indecision affect men, they don't lack for ways or encouragement to simply make a leap of faith. Maybe they go into business, or STEM, or the army, etc. But there is a large contingent of men who don't know how to interface with women, and don't know what to change or how to change it until they could.
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.
No, it's only obvious inasmuch as it affirms a lot of things I'm already doing. This summer I've taken up free weights, lost 15 lbs, and asked someone out for the first time ever (she turned out to be a lesbian but c'est la vie, we're still friends). The last part is figuring out where exactly I can meet more other people irl with whom I share any interests, which is tricky around here but I have to believe it's possible.
Check out my other comment over here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay/comment/145763457
It can't be specific and actionable because the post doesn't know what deficits you have. The thing you need to do is enter a loop of looking at your situation, identifying problems, and attempting to solve them. (You already are starting to do this, according to another comment in this thread, but keep at it and keep your focus flexible!)
"One day, you realize you are grateful for the worst thing that ever happened to you." I can't exactly recommend it, but I was probably at least halfway to an Opts Out future when my mom got cancer and died.
It was so overwhelmingly awful as to completely upend and trivialize every other problem in my life, including not having a girlfriend.
It also taught me real empathy and the overwhelming pain drove me to seek connection with others in a way that would have seemed terrifying before. Naively you wouldn't think a human suppurating wound would be a particularly attractive in a partner, but it did in fact attract many women.
It was, and is, the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was also transformative, like two negative numbers multiplied together. I really doubt I'd have anything like the life I do now (wife, son, good job, etc.) without having had such a terrible experience at a critical moment.
The (paraphrased) quote above is one that's stuck with me and always felt apt. It comes from short memoir, where the author recounts how he was raped as a young man, and the perverse indebtedness he feels for how that experience shaped him, good and bad, into who is now: https://www.amazon.com/Being-Raped-Raymond-M-Douglas-ebook/dp/B011G4DPBE/
So I don't have much specific and actionable advice, except to suffer. And it will suck and I'm sorry for it. But if you are brave, and lucky, then you might be able to turn it into meaning. And that can help make you whole.
YMMV
This strikes me as not being advice, and, as you see, it disturbs me enough to want to mention this.
You can't choose to suffer like you can choose to go into the park or whatever. You could choose to do something to you that makes you suffer but that would probably not do you any of the good that you have described.
Nonetheless it's interesting to contemplate about what you wrote.
Hey, I’m in no position to give advice but I can tell you things that have worked for me and friends:
1. Optimize things you can do ahead of time with help from others: a good haircut, wardrobe, some muscles, etc.
This is not magic but helps keep you from getting filtered out.
2. Date with intention. Being sincere and looking for something real is a big positive (assuming that’s what you want)
3. Find somebody who already likes you, not someone who thinks you have potential but isn’t sure if you’re worth the investment.
4. There are a lot of people who really enjoy dating and think it’s fun; that’s probably not you and not the person you’re looking for.
Women who date a lot and expect a polished performance from prospective boyfriends are a waste of time, honestly, for most “Opt Out” men.
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.
This is a huge problem. If you have a society designed for the outliers to feel comfortable, it won't work for 70% of the people. The Progressives have with their "respect everyone all the time" nonsense created a society that doesn't work for the vast majority of the population. I suspect this was intentional as a way to "get back" at "mom" or "dad". In any case, it was a horrible mistake and Progressivism needs to be (and is going to be) rolled back. How far back depends on how obnoxious they are over the coming few decades.
This deserves a full treatment from someone, re the illegitimate universalizing of difference, whether that difference was intellect or simply neurosis.
Agreed. My wife is a fairly driven person and I'm pretty sure she would have gone nuts if she'd been forced to be a stay-at-home mom.
And we both think that having two working parents is good - neither of us has the pressure of being "the breadwinner" for the family, we can get by on one income for a while if something happens.
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.
She does say that at the beginning, but then also says she actively avoids some types of men, doesn’t tend to go on more than one date with most others, and doesn’t give any examples or instances of a man actually telling her any of these things. As Robert McKenzie Horn wrote above in an insightful comment, “A repeated theme of your 'what it's like to date x man' sections is that the men are cagey and refuse to answer any personal questions, that the dates are brief, and that you're treated with suspicion.”
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.
I don't think this is quite the venue for dating advice, nor am I especially qualified to give any, but I think this doesn't need to be complicated at all. Here's an easy, effective heuristic: "don't be creepy" = "accept disinterest/rejection and move on". Imagine trying to talk to someone you were not attracted to (e.g. another dude, if you're straight). If you started talking to them and they seemed hesitant or looking for a way to disengage, you'd just stop, because you don't have an ulterior motive. It's really not any different when it's someone you're attracted to. Just don't be pushy, and you won't be creepy. Some people just won't want to talk or engage, and that doesn't mean you did anything wrong. Just be willing to move on.
Yeah, I don't keep pushing if they seem uncomfortable, I am aware it's rare for a girl to reject you directly. However, I do feel like if a girl was uncomfortable for five seconds I was already creepy. I've been told that if you're literally never creepy, you let a lot of opportunities go, and I think there's a lot of truth in that.
I think if you made someone uncomfortable, noticed it, and immediately disengaged, nobody would actually think you’re creepy in the real world. I understand that it feels bad to make someone uncomfortable even briefly, but I don’t think you would actually be seen as creepy or having done anything wrong even by the wokest woman. I think it’s more of a right-wing strawman than a left-wing reality.
I think the "gay man" thought experiment is useful here.
If a gay man came up to me and talked to me with the clear intention of hitting on me, that would make me uncomfortable. But if he came up to me in a friendly way, talked briefly about this and that, and then wished me a good evening and disappeared into the crowd, I'd probably just think "what a nice fellow" and not even realise that he'd been carefully monitoring whether I responded to his good-natured banter with any signs of sexual interest.
That's the ideal for a straight man too. Just have conversations with women. Most of them will show a friendly lack of interest and this is fine. Sometimes, one will respond with interest, and you are free to flirt. Learn to read those cues, and you'll be fine.
Once you've raised the bar even by that amount, though, you've made it genuinely difficult for a significant fraction of men to clear. Even socially capable people will sometimes get it wrong, because the boundaries between 'politely enduring the conversation', 'genuinely friendly and happy to chat', and 'romantically interested' can be relatively subtle and vary significantly from person to person. So I don't think that making a good-faith effort to meet your ideal is a reliable way to avoid making people uncomfortable.
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.
There hasn't been some broad societal shift, but for about ten years, guys who spend too much time on computer definitely received "don't be creepy" message more strongly than before, which I think did have an effect on the margin, and perhaps quite a noticeable one if you select on Bay Area tech dudes.
I agree with that, but I think “don’t be creepy” messages are much easier to disambiguate from “don’t be masculine” than critics of wokeness like to claim
> 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.
Okay, but the data do tell us that men are having trouble. What do you make of that / how do you explain that?
That's a good question that requires serious academic research, with careful attempts to disentangle correlated variables. For example, maybe there's been some purely economic force pushing towards lower pay/employment in male-dominated professions, and that reflects as "men are doing worse than before"? That kind of explanation would have less to do with cultural factors like a changing "map of manhood" or weaker coming-of-age rituals or whatever. I was answering the author's anecdotes and speculations with my own. It would be fair to demand more rigor of both our claims, but not only of mine.
With more rigor, what I can mainly say is that it's not my field. I tried to do a few google scholar searches and didn't find anything that directly answers the question, but I probably don't know what terms (or of even what fields) to search for to find the best evidence. One funny thing that jumped out at me is that when I searched for "crisis of masculinity sociology", google scholar gave me papers across decades, from the 1970s to the present. So at least claims of there being such a crisis are not new, although of course there could be new grounds for those claims now.
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.
> 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
Was he actually on the wrong side of it? As he said himself, they let you do it when you're famous. And clearly it wasn't a deal breaker for voters...
As the people above have pointed out, the line is in a different place depending on the circumstances and culture, and culture has definitely moved the line in the last few decades.
The number of women who have accused Trump of sexual assault (Wikipedia says, “At least 25 since 1970”) might be taken to suggest that a lot of women were not, in fact, “letting him do it”. This is much more likely to be an example of a bad actor trying to pretend a line is blurry that really isn’t.
Sure, but he still got away with it. He would have gotten away with it even more if he lived in a culture where women weren't in a position to make demands about how they were treated. And that kind of culture results in less men being alienated. Catch my drift?
The goal is not to "get away with it", it's to have a meaningful and happy life. Once you realize that, you start realizing that making women subservient won't help you.
Well, clearly the people mentioned in the post aren't finding life to be meaningful or happy, and given the rise of the manosphere and backlash to feminism, there's a lot more where they came from. I can safely say they would at least be happier than before if they had an easier path to getting a wife.
When men collectively want something, they are going to get it. Deriding these people isn't going to stop the consequences of liberalism's failures to provide for them.
This is just the Manosphere-fed fantasy that only appeals to those who haven’t actually experienced a healthy, loving human relationship. It isn’t real life. A wife (in all world literature, notoriously) does not make a man happy if she is herself unhappy. And no wife (or human) is happy if she is being treated badly. It’s a Very Online, Very Manosphere fantasy that normal men admire people like the Tate Brothers or want to emulate them in any way. Normal, married, healthy guys with families think this stuff is somewhere between pathetic, embarrassing, and scary. I’ve listened to Andrew Tate, and he is a broken man who is going to die alone and raging. If men want to be happy, they’re going to need better role models.
The idea of men collectively wanting something feels odd to me. Like it's borrowing from solidarity movements which always are a mass of weaker people going against the strong. Usually men don't operate that way. The strong ones who have no problem getting women don't seem to view the weak men who do have trouble as much different from women: both groups are theirs to exploit.
You think Donald Trump finds his life to be meaningful and unhappy? I mean, I get *wishing* that were so, but it almost certainly isn't.
You think a guy whose trophy wife is visibly grossed out by him in public, and who spends every holiday Truthing things like “MERRY CHRISTMAS TO THE LEFT WING LOSERS AND MANIACS WHO HATE OUR COUNTRY” is happy? Yikes. If there are really significant numbers of men out there who take Trump to be a role model, maybe there really is more of a crisis of manhood than I think.
People asked you if amateur boxing was too dangerous? Damn.
...it is.
you cannot value a man and turn around and participate in sports that involve striking him till he is unable to rise, by inflicting head or body trauma.
its not even like football, where injuries are dangerous but incidental (and even football is being called out over that.) It's absorbing damage as the point of the sport.
there's a point about how much men don't value their bodies and boxing is a big example.
This is why feminism will never gain actual masculine allies. Everything is dangerous. I'd rather die doing something great than live like a caged animal in a padded room... and 90% of men are right there with me.
boxing is great...why? self-destruction is not a manly virtue. its stupid, not glorious, to have others punch you for sport in human cockfighting.
... and that's why I argue that the ultimate goal of Feminism is to put every one in a padded room where they can be safe forever, overseen by the most micro-managerial Karens available. Feminism hates risk, or adventure, it wants a society of drones, not people.
have you ever been punched? trust me, there is no adventure in it.
i'm not coming at this from a feminist issue, i'm coming at this from "i like men and i don't want them to foolishly destroy their bodies" issues. For all the faux mra stuff here, you sure have internalized "men are disposable" too much.
like the message "men hurting each other for entertainment" is not a good one: even play fighting like pro wrestling ends with too many dying early. if you get old enough you start to see all the bills come due and you wish young men valued themselves more.
Nobody's saying padded room, they're saying basketball not boxing.
You can't value a candle and then light it on fire! That's insane!
Great truism.
lol yes, men are things we burn to benefit others, and throw away when they no longer give light. good analogy.
think toxic masculinity has a point when it means we don't value guys except as workhorses or things to be used.
“I’ve never had trouble with this and I’ve never known anyone else who genuinely found it difficult, they were just being creepy” is maybe not the most constructive comment.
You've never made a girl laugh, said "hey, I like you" and had her immediately become visibly uncomfortable? Not backing off is, indeed, another thing. But if you fall for someone who only sees you as a friend, is the above not the standard, normal, to-be-expected response in that situation?
I've had this happen multiple times, and I always went, "Oh shit, sorry, I obviously misread the situation. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. If you're not interested, I won't mention it again". No one ever seemed to think I was being creepy.
I think notions like "creepy" just come from women wanting to not feel unsafe in these interactions. "You're being creepy" means "You're making me worry that I'm not safe around you". If you make it clear that you will back off as soon as they want you to and do in fact do that, then you've given clear evidence that they're not unsafe with you. In that case, I've never seen any man be accused of doing anything wrong when they behave like this. Maybe it can happen under some very atypical circumstances, but I think it's 99% a myth that's told for primarily political purposes.
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.
Interesting commentary!!!
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.
It's like a blank page masquerading as a story - infinite freedom, but completely meaningless.
"Freeing" a snail from its shell isn't likely to be met with gratitude, or even survival.
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".
On the other hand...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Bishonen
its easy to understand when you realize the reason behind this is women want men to be safe generally, but be trad romantically.
to be blunt if you are trans you never probably grew up with men as a threat like they did: men are a real and present danger to them in a way where women are not so to men. The "wanting feminine men" is borne out of that.
like terfs are terf because even if you transition, you still were a man and they don't think that changes: the fact mtf are lesbians to a huge degree makes them dangerous because dealing with men sexually is fraught with danger and some do coerce.
as a guy i get it...predatory men are a big issue and the modern gender norms are about make men safe for women. I can't blame it. A guy can go to a bar alone and not worry someone will spike his drink.
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?
I went back and reread it specifically to look for things that sound like they could be from Aella. There are more than I expected.
>"The best I can do for these men is recommend they join communities where genuine emotional bonds can be forged. These still exist, although they’re frighteningly hard to find in modern society. I’ve been lucky enough to join several, and it’s startling how many people have the same story: feeling depressed and isolated and purposeless, and suddenly feeling like they’re alive for the first time in years once they’ve been embraced into the community."
Pretty vague, but this is how I've heard Aella describe joining the rationalist community.
>"I’ve stumbled through a highly unusual path, somehow getting lucky enough to gain a solid understanding of myself, pursue my passions, earn a solid living, and enjoy a happy life along the way."
This totally sounds like Aella's journey discovering camming and sex work. "Unusual path," (sex work) "pursue my passions," (sex) "earn a solid living," (she is a high-end escort) "enjoy a happy life along the way" (see above).
>[The whole "Man Who Provides" section]
I realize that the Bay Area has lots of tech founders and millionaires. I still doubt that a normal woman would go on enough dates with Silicon Valley CEOs for this to be an entire category of men she dates. This implies that the author is well-connected and high-status (within her own community).
There's no smoking gun, but I'm at 30% that this is Aella right now.
Well, shit. I'm still pulling for that 70%, because the whole analysis goes out the window if it's "The men willing to pay me for sex" instead of "Reasonably broad sample of men looking to date."
This was a funny interaction, my first thought on this article was "Is this Aella" but I actually think this article has a different voice than she does
There are loads of other tells but her use of language about "a man who is whole" and having "several of them in her life" are very much her authorial voice.
It would make an enormous amount of sense. As other commenters have observed, the author doesn't really seem to be "dating" in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. meeting men with the goal of finding a single man with whom to have a long term relationship). It would also explain the adverse selection wherein everyone the author dates is dysfunctional.
Yeah it doesn't quite feel like her writing style but also
> It’s a sad misunderstanding of how it all works. My unconventional life isn’t the result of zany choices and the advice contained in self-help books; it’s the result of an intensely rocky childhood I almost didn’t survive.
seems to jive with her hyper religious upbringing with an abusive father.
> After all, both my previous serious partners fell into this category earlier in their life
This seems to also align with her. This author seems to be in her 30s. (Seems like too much experience for 20s, and 40s you'd probably see more talk of divorce.) And it seems rare for a women this old who dates this often to only have two serious partners, and I don't think she has had many serious partners Aella.
But
> I lecture my young interns about the hazards of a success-obsessed lifestyle, and encourage them to find senses of worth that don’t revolve around gaining power and providing money.
I'd be really surprised if she had interns. So I'd put it at a 20% chance.
I've only just followed her twitter and blog for a while but ugh after reading this I feel kinda weird/icky knowing this much about someone's personal life who I've never met.
No comment on the question at hand, but my distinct recollection is that Aella works within a professional ecosystem which includes other women she is coaching. I don't remember any details, but "interns" would capture the spirit.
The most non-Aella thing about it is the lack of statistics.
It's Aella. I would bet at 4-1. The smug condescension, analytical language (what woman uses the phrase "update my detection heuristics"), it stylistically matches her writing, she had a childhood which "nearly destroyed her", and one of her antagonists calls her a whore. Seriously, how much more evidence do you need?
[EDIT: Missed the part where she said she was a 20-something. Oops.]
And yes, it is discrediting. Or would be if the content wasn't discrediting by itself.
In what sense the content is discrediting by itself?
She writes about relationships the way a blind person writes about color. She treats dating like shopping for a car and analyzes men the way you would analyze a product that you wanted to purchase. It's an emotionally dead, purely transactional approach that would be shocking if you didn't know that the author was a literal prostitute.
>"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.
>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).
The only problem there is both Aella and Scott are dishonest enough to not tell the truth on authorship if this gets noticed.
???
Scott submitted reviews to his own contests before and told us at the end? Why would he lie about it this time? Why would he (or Aella) want to lie about it in the first place? Isn't "at the end of the contest the authors become public" a normal part of the process?
What would convince you? (asking because I want enough credibility to settle the prediction market above without people worrying about being deceived)
If there's an author reveal and it's not her, credible evidence of the other person's authorship; what that evidence would have to be would depend on context.
Sounds fair, I don't know who it is so I don't know how public with their real identity they're willing to be, but I guess we'll see.
Nah, it very obviously isn't. Hope you learn something interesting and update on a bunch of whatever made you think that when you turn out to be wrong.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was Aella, but how often, exactly, has sexism (against women, at least!) been a topic of concern for Aella?
She has something to sell and she's concerned about the overall cultural movement against what are the actual root causes of society's problem with keeping men in line / involved.
I agree most of it fits, except that Aella is 33, and the author claims to be in her 20s.
This seems controversial enough that I've made a prediction market: https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/dating-men-in-sf-acx-review-written
I remain blinded and don't know the correct answer, but have a very strong opinion (which I won't share).
How is that a prediction? The essay was already written by someone. It's a "prediction" about the past.
In addition, the person who controls the reveal process can resolve the question whichever way he chooses.
Have you used Manifold (or any prediction market) before? Recommend looking around until you get a feel for how it works.
It's predicting a future event insofar as you don't know the answer now, but will in the future (once it's revealed).
Accurate market resolution is controlled by a combination of reputation and occasional administrator smackdown. For example, I've run about 20 markets there before, there haven't been any complaints about my resolution, and if there was then the community would shun me and I wouldn't be able to get people to participate in my markets there in the future. There have been tens of thousands of questions on Manifold, only a tiny number of them have had resolution disputes, and that's even smaller for questions by big accounts with reputations.
>Accurate market resolution is controlled by a combination of reputation and occasional administrator smackdown. For example, I've run about 20 markets there before, there haven't been any complaints about my resolution, and if there was then the community would shun me and I wouldn't be able to get people to participate in my markets there
This is pure survivorship bias; obviously the people participating in this market already think you're honest. It's also an article of faith in your cult that prediction markets are important and you and her are both high status in the cult.
Now, my model of your dishonesty isn't that you'll endanger your (now tattered) reputation for truth telling for a few (pretend) dollars but the idea that "this was written by Aella and is actually a sales pitch for her PUA boot camp business" hits close enough to home for your community that you might be willing to be dishonest to defend the reputation of the cult-blob.
This is all besides the original point I was alluding to by mentioning the resolution and past nature of the prediction - no one sane would ever make an actual bet in a real market about some event in the past when the "reveal" about the event has some nebulous process about the reveal. This is irrelevant though because the markets aren't in actual money.
If you wanted the reveals to be trustworthy you should have had each reviewer write a sentence with the reveal and then hashed it and published the hash (the sentence would serve as salt - preventing people from simply plugging in names and hashing them).
What's the basis for you claim Scott has a "now tattered" reputation for truth telling?
Hahaha!!! This obviously seems appealing to the ears. I doubt strongly it's her though. The author has provided a bit more info about her profile in some of her follow-up comments. I doubt Aella was ever a tomboy (correct me if I'm wrong) nor did she embraced mentorship by intellectual/academic matrons.
Also, I don't think Aella spent her teens in a wheelchair.
Aella would not have gone anon and if there was a prediction market someone makes please do link it here, I'd be interested in how much liquidity it attracts and what the odds stabilize at
I also initially assumed it was Aella, but the author's self-reported age doesn't match, and I didn't remember being a chronically sickly child/teenager (as reported in some of the comment back-and-forths) as being part of Aella's history. Could just be she's lying/fudging details to obscure authorial identity, but assuming the age given is accurate, she's not Aella.
I do suspect she's read a lot of Aella, though, and uses similar framings as Aella's as part of understanding the world, and sensemaking her own similar conservative background and experiences of not fitting/matching "normal" female experiences and psychology. (See her comments about mentors who helped her understand her own brain/psychology/how to exist as a woman in the world).
FWIW, my predictions:
99% it's not Aella herself (agreeing with the Manifold forecast)...
... but 40% probability that it is someone with Aella number at most 2 (i.e. a current or former metamour). The Bay Area is a small place.
I first assumed Ozy but only because it's the only woman I remembered mentioned when reading SSC, I forget about Aella at all. I haven't really read either of their works so I can't comment further.
From what I've seen and read of Aella, she'd never write something as callow (meaning no disrespect to the author, it's youth's privilege to be callow; it also inclines me to believe her claim of her age) as the second half of her response to Xpym in the finalist nomination comment thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025/comment/123182825.
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.
There's being empathic, and then there's having a knack for getting men to disclose painful private things and cry on the first date. I think that's unkind, bad-boundary behavior, and a way of getting one up.
Crediting the authors statements as true, they self disclosed.
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 men 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 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, as opposed to their secrets and sorrows, 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 kind of 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 angry. If the guy’s a brute who forces himself on your friend at a concert — well, 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 based on the accounts of pain she elicits 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.
> 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 men of a different era,
That's my experience too. Even in my 20s, I was obviously pretty insecure and confused, but what I remember is that I and the people around had lots of energy, interests, tastes, and all those things, and that's what we would chat and bond over.
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.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon, and if there is no room upon the hill...
Thanks for getting that song stuck in my head!
Seriously, I love Mulan (the animated version, not the remake).
I like this cover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc7Ba1HkAPs
How about this one?
https://youtu.be/iS58nPTzWr0?si=aqVtcojVy2jSHVEl
Well then, let's get down to business!
it always makes me smile that it was sung by Donny Osmond of all people. The master of kitsch.
Would many of these men benefit from moving out of the South Bay?
Well, yes, but that's not necessarily relevant to the question ;)
> Would many of these men benefit from moving out of the South Bay?
A full 80% would vastly turn their lives around by moving to NYC, where the gender ratio mismatch is flipped. Base rates matter so much - it's hard to actually appreciate how much without actually doing it and seeing the difference yourself.
[writer of the review here]
Probably yes? I see this sad trend in the Bay where men are clearly and vocally unhappy, yet continue down life paths that make them miserable because it's the "norm" in this city (ie: hyper-focusing on career, obsessing over how much money is made, burning themselves out with their start-up, etc.) Of course all these traits can be found in other areas of the country, but usually to a lesser degree.
Also, it's just easier for men to date in other cities that don't have a skewed ratio of single young men to single young women.
So yes, I think some men would benefit from moving away from the Bay. But that being said--I love this region, heart and soul, and I believe it has so much to offer. It just requires the right personality/situation match and finding the right community.
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!
Then there are broader questions such as "how to be happy", and those are less gender specific.
> 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.
The normal meaning of "man" is the dictionary definition. An adult human male.
On top of that, the word has an alternate meaning, which is used to police what kind of man you're allowed to be. It's only effective on insecure men. You're not a REAL MAN unless... blah blah blah. Who cares.
I know that that is not the intention of this piece. The author is trying to be helpful. But I think that her framing isn't the most useful and clear-headed. It echoes too much "You're not a REAL MAN unless..."
I think it's more helpful to tackle directly the issues we face. Dating success, social success, whatever success. Dating success is the most gender-specific.
The fact that someone asked a question is not evidence that it's the correct question to ask. Questions can just be wrong! They can be framed in ways that steer people in the wrong direction, or carry hidden assumptions that aren't correct (in this case, the assumptions that "man" must refer to a specific social role, and that fulfilling that role is sufficient to make you happy and romantically successful.)
If someone asks you "have you stopped beating your wife?" and you answer that you don't beat your wife, it would be very wrong of me to reply with "well, clearly that's not true, since someone asked if you stopped beating her!"
I agree that your framing of the question is better. Unfortunately to answer it we'd have to honestly interrogate the preferences of heterosexual women, and no one seems comfortable doing that. There's a ton of preference falsification going on, and it's led to a corrupted discourse and lack of trust all around.
The question that nags at me is whether we should think of it as a zero sum game. There are only so many straight women willing to date, so if a man is more successful at dating, another will be less successful --- is that true? If that were true, then there is no point in giving advice to men.
I agree with you that preference falsification is a huge problem and if you try to have a frank discussion about it you will sound like a misogynist.
> The question that nags at me is whether we should think of it as a zero sum game. There are only so many straight women willing to date, so if a man is more successful at dating, another will be less successful --- is that true? If that were true, then there is no point in giving advice to men.
An even more troublesome thought: it's not just a matter of men competing with men in the dating marketplace, it's a matter of women being educated and having good careers themselves, and lower libidos overall, and thus "a nice career and apps and maybe pets" is a potential substitute for men, who are increasingly entirely unnecessary for certain types.
So not only do men need to compete with other men for dates, they need to compete against Netflix, Tik Tok, and the rest of the attention economy companies, and their respective ten thousand Phd's bent on grabbing and yanking on whatever neurological hooks they can to increase salience and engagement. How interesting is the average man compared against Tik Tok or Youtube? Not very? I think so, too.
That said, I don't think giving advice is pointless - advice from women can potentially create more men of the type they want to see, and advice from men can be safe because those men are already partnered, in different geographies, or otherwise not on the same market.
> advice from men can be safe because those men are already partnered, in different geographies, or otherwise not on the same market
It can be safe for a man to give advice, but ultimately he is not helping anyone, if it's true that, for every man he helps partner up, another ends up single because of it.
> It can be safe for a man to give advice, but ultimately he is not helping anyone, if it's true that for every man he helps partner up, another ends up single because of it.
Isn't this a bit like "you shouldn't feed that starving orphan, there are a million more of them, and you can never feed them all!"
Sure, if women willing to date these guys are a finite resource, it's zero sum. But that one orphan still got fed, even if others didn't.
Also, given the whole "you're competing against other men AND Tik Tok" dynamic, men overall need to raise their game to stay relevant. Giving advice putatively raises that game for multiple men, and allows more to stay relevant. It's zero sum competing against other men, but positive sum competing against Tik Tok, even in the aggregate.
> Isn't this a bit like "you shouldn't feed that starving orphan, there are a million more of them, and you can never feed them all!"
I don't think that is fair. We're discussing whether or not dating is zero sum. Feeding starving people is not zero sum!
As for Tik Tok I feel agnostic about its influence. Is Tik Tok causing women to abandon dating? Beats me.
> is that true? If that were true, then there is no point in giving advice to men.
Unless the advice includes how to navigate polyamory. https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081121
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 (past generations would call this "weak descendants" or "weak blood" or something like that). War and death used to filter out enough men, plus society had all those customs punishing men who avoid tests of strength; nothing is stepping in to replace those things. Men being unable to get a wife is basically all that's left, so that's bearing the entire stress of genome sustainability, which is kind of absurd. (People obviously aren't doing this consciously, they're just looking for a good spouse, and finding a *lot* of duds.)
Though I assume genetic modification tech will flip the table here within our lifetimes. Just not yet.
You’re assuming that “high mutational load” correlates with “good at surviving battles and inflicting violence,” assertion very much in need of evidence!
I m sure there are cases when it’s true, like, genetic disorder that makes you unusually weak (e.g., by affecting your muscles or skeleton development) = probably won’t live long enough to father children in a pre-modern agrarian society.
But on average? Not that I’m any expert on premodern warfare, but I imagine a lot of it was a matter of sheer dumb luck from the perspective of the average soldier. Less “if im a sufficiently heroic badass, I shall triumph over all my foes and all the chicks will throw themselves at me when I return home;” more “Our commander screwed up and led us into an ambush, now I’m dead and I never had a wife or children.” What does mutational load have to do with it?
> But on average? Not that I’m any expert on premodern warfare, but I imagine a lot of it was a matter of sheer dumb luck from the perspective of the average soldier.
Isn't "luck" just random noise? If there's still a signal, you would expect random perturbations to still end in outcomes biased towards the signal's direction - simulated annealing often ends in the largest pits / gradients after all.
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.
Pedantic point: that song was written by The Guess Who, a Canadian group. The Lenny Kravitz version is a not-so-great cover, in my opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Woman
When I saw your name and few comments up, I thought, with that name, he's probably Canadian and from the prairies. And here you are, linking to the Guess Who.
I have updated my probability estimate.
No, I am not Canadian, actually. I live in Needmore, Pennsylvania where we don't go out at night because of the wolves.
I feel as though I should make a point about relationships with non-US citizens and immigration restrictions here...
One takeaway I got from this article is that therapy (at least, in the Bay Area) appears to be completely useless: your therapist will just tell you the exact same things you could get with a cursory Google search. I don't know how true that is in reality, but it sounds depressingly plausible...
If your therapist is useful you generally don't bring them up to complain about them on a first date.
[writer of the review here]
I don't think this is true, and would hate for readers to walk away with this belief. I have a lot friends who have found extremely wise and helpful therapists in the Bay. Yes, there are quite a few who are useless, and my male friends often report a disconnect between themselves and female therapists (and vice-versa). But I also have heard many anecdotes of deeply helpful therapists, both male and female.
That being said, I think the average experience is that you need to thoroughly "therapist shop" in order to find a good one. Most people I know who report having a really good therapist had to go through 3-6 bad or mediocre therapists before finding the one that clicked.
I've never gone to a therapist at all, but how do you decide which therapist are good for you? After 3-4 meetings? Or love at first sight? It suspiciously looks like dating itself. I'd hate to switch often trying for the "best" one when actually there's some good ones that I've dumped because I'm too focused on "perfect".
In addition to what Hafizh Afkar Makmur said, isn't this a recipe for finding a therapist who will tell you things that you want to hear, and not one who will actually help you with your problems ?
if what you most want to hear is actual substantive help with your problems, and partial solutions can be checked for validity in polynomial time, there's no difference. How many times would you expect to need to visit any single grocer before noticing that the milk they sell is expired, imported from some biosphere with reversed chirality, or otherwise beyond your ability to safely drink?
So men even in the San Fransisco and Palo Alto "use up all their hope and energy to schedule and arrive to the date", opted out, never "ready to make that change"? Are the genuine preferences of women directed toward just a few percent of men anywhere?
As the Lady Gaga heroine sang:
"Tell me something, boy
Aren't you tired tryna fill that void?
Or do you need more?
Ain't it hard keepin' it so hardcore?"
Yves Smith conveyed empathy to dating plights of modern men recently as well:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06/reverse-lysistrata-more-on-men-cooling-on-dating-sex-and-the-role-of-societal-denigration.html
I loved this but felt it was two separate essays - one on the collapse of life maps for men, the other on the taxonomy of human unhappiness. A lot of women have similar trajectories and feelings. And I don't think people were happier in the past. having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
I think community does buffer the stings of individualsim/careerism-as-success false idol.
Oddly I find myself jealous of some of the communities noted in previous post because there (I believe) was societal gravity and more definitive map to belonging.
I can’t help but wonder if many of these categories of character would be happier in a smaller community with less opportunity and more definitions/norms.
This was an amazing piece; it gets so much right, and says so many things that needed to be said. It's rare that someone engages with this subject with such insight and empathy; but that made it all the more disappointing when we get to the "Man Who Opts Out":
"The nurturing side of me wants to pull the man into a hug, to assure him he’s enough, to promise I won’t judge...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."
But this man doesn't have low self-esteem! The writer already stipulated that he's got a lot going for him -- friends, career, hobbies -- and he knows it! His only problem is that he's bad at dating:
"It’s a vicious cycle–a man’s confidence in his dating ability is crushed, he finally works up the nerve to show up to a date, gets rejected, and his self-esteem lowers even more....I absolutely hate being a participant in this cycle. It’s the dating equivalent of kicking a puppy and always leaves me feeling a dull ache of empathy for the men involved...A man with severe self-esteem issues is not likely to find a healthy relationship, no matter how many times he flings himself at the dating world. The core issue of self-esteem must be addressed...For some, this means structured therapy or psychiatric treatment, for others, it means growing their social life until it’s vibrant enough to soothe the part of their soul that insists they’re not enough. Or maybe it’s a combo of all three or something else entirely. But action needs to be taken to address the lack of self-esteem; the man can’t just half-heartedly daydream about a woman who might swoop in to “love him just the way he is” and solve all his confidence problems."
But he doesn't need therapy; the author already wrote elsewhere (beautifully!) about how often therapy fails men, and there are no therapists anywhere that are going to help a heterosexual man up his dating & seduction game. His social life is fine -- the description already stipulated he has lots of friends. He doesn't need more friends; he needs a girlfriend.
This just comes across as a desperate scramble to somehow put the onus back on the man, when the real problem is women rejecting him for superficial reasons. That a woman could demonstrate so much compassion, understanding, and self-awareness throughout this essay, and yet still be unable to seriously grapple with her own agency in this situation, makes me despair.
Self-esteem is not this man's problem; his only problem is a lack of confidence around dating. If a woman agreed to be his girlfriend, he wouldn't have that problem anymore; he'd make a great partner. Of course the author, herself, is not obligated to be the one to do this. But when she says that she wants to help, and she sees herself ending up with a man like this eventually, it behooves her to more fully explain why she refuses to be the solution to the problem here, and not fall back on hand-wavy Reddit-standard advice about "therapy" and "friendship".
What reasons count as superficial or not? If a man isn't interested in a 300 lb woman or a woman who has had four kids with four different men, is that superficial? Many women seem to think so.
I can't define the difference for all cases, but I would say a reason that will cease to be a factor once the relationship starts (bad at dating) certainly counts as superficial. I wouldn't expect most women to see past the surface presentation, but the author clearly has & the fact it makes no difference is maddening.
Of course people have aesthetic preferences & those are never really fair. But I'd be shocked if anyone has ever seriously argued that having four kids isn't a major consideration when looking at a relationship.
Maybe four kids, but a lot of single mothers seem to have this attitude that the ex was just a small mistake and already having a kid shouldn't be a big deal to the next man. I tend to agree that being bad at dating isn't that big of a deal but being bad at relating is, and there is a relationship between the two skills.
Ozy agrees with you:
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/contra-a-review-of-dating-men-in
Wonderful essay. I found myself perfectly identifying with at least 2 paragraphs of each section. I've had those thoughts/been that person at some point in my life and I've drifted between all of these categories. Although I don't think I've ever identified with any of them strong enough to get trapped for more than a few months before trying something different.
Sorry you've had so many shitty experiences to have this level of understanding but also you are an amazing listener. As you've highlighted a lot of these people feel ignored and that no one gives a shit. I feel like the world is so full of people talking and lacking in people that listen. It's unfair to put so much on one person, and it won't fix the larger cultural issues, but I'd like to think just by listening for a single conversation you might have brought at least one person out of their particular hole of despair.
You mentioned it several times about seeing someone for who they are. More than a map I think that's what's missing not just for men but for society in general. Too hyper-obsessed with seeing people for what they aren't or assigning a label or sorting into "good" and "bad" because who has time for anything more? That leaves people feeling alone, unfulfilled, unattractive, unwanted, like they have failed the assignment of who they should be because who they are (and they don't know who that is) doesn't cleanly fit into the idea of what others think they should be.
Even the categories in this piece are distillations. Perhaps necessary for framing the discussion but as you've highlighted the Men Who Are Whole section, it requires people to be themselves and themselves alone. At least for me a mantra I find helpful is "No one to be". I don't have to be anyone but me. It doesn't need a label or a definition. I'm not a concept and I can't be shoved into an elevator pitch. I may not really fit in anywhere not because there is something wrong with me, but because we are all more than a simple bio description, even if most people won't care enough to see it. Accepting people for who they are is the greatest kindness I can give others because it is also the greatest kindness someone can show me.
"Accepting people for who they are is the greatest kindness I can give others because it is also the greatest kindness someone can show me."
This is beautifully put.
I really love your essay. Thanks!
"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."
Would you believe I'm a living counterexample? I was some combination of "The Man Who Is Lost" and "The Man Who Opts Out" until a girl on Facebook (who had briefly met me once offline) decided to start hitting on me. Not being so depressed that I couldn't recognize a winning lottery ticket when I saw one, I soon found myself in a relationship with someone that turned out to have even bigger problems than mine that should have caused someone less desperate than me to run away screaming. And, amazingly enough, what should have been a disaster waiting to happen actually worked out wonderfully. Most of my self-esteem issues disappeared as if by magic, because instead of failing to live up to the standards I imagined "society" and women in general had, I only had to care about the opinion of this one specific person, and her standards were ones that I actually could meet even though she was literally my first girlfriend. Even a lot of the ways that our relationship would have looked from the outside like a toxic mess were actually very functional and helpful for me.
The only problem I have now is that, after we were together for ten years, her chronic health conditions caught up with her and my wife passed away in March of 2024. So now I'm back where I was before I met her. And I don't like it!!!
The stereotype of women taking on men who are lost, is that many times than not, the men remain lost even as household responsibilities rise. And then we go on to have endless screeds about "emotional labor" and "How the divorce came from nowhere". I can't fault someone for not wishing to take on project especially they already pressed on all sides. I know first hand how frustrating it is to love someone who can't just seem to find themselves.
My condolences on your wife, and may you find what you're looking for.
This essay really spoke to me. I don't live in the Bay Area, but I find myself having many of the same struggles as the first four archetypes not just in terms of dating, but also in other forms of self-actualization like having a fulfilling career or a supportive community. I count myself lucky that I didn't fall into the manosphere trap, but the author of this essay is absolutely right that other masculinity traps can be equally harmful to men such as myself and that this fact is rarely acknowledged.
Unfortunately, for perhaps unfounded fears that I'll someday become an important person for whom past online comments could come back to bite me, I have to cower behind what is essentially a throwaway account I created to post a dating ad a few months ago, so I won't be giving any specifics here about my life situation. That being said, my DMs are open for anyone willing to listen (I'm sorry I couldn't think of a less cringy way to say that).
I LOVE this 'review' – THANK YOU ☺️
I'm awestruck. This woman's maturity and emotional intellect us off the charts, no comparison to 57 y.o. me. In my 20s I was not even a baby compared to this level, i was a cat at best. I was somewhat "a man who opted out" back than. And that was the right path IMO. Cats don't date smart young woman, after all. They do their catty things.
That's my point. Young man are mostly no match to young woman. It's mostly not society's fault, it's biology. Normalize age gaps up to 10 years at least. Me, I found THE women of my age, (ok may be "she found me" is closer to truth) but i consider this extreme luck/divine intervention.
False narrative. The "crisis of men" is only within liberals minds. They simoly hate men and want to remake men as if they were failure women.
Easy solution to the dating and current society:
1. ACCEPT MEN AS THEY ARE. Men are superior un streght: thats basically means that women cannot be cops or firefigthers. Thats not opression: its bioligy.
That also will mean that men will commit more crime on average. The good comes with the bad.
And also means that men Will be more dominant in areas like business, polítics and law. STOP GENDER QUOTAS.
2. STOP HELPING WOMEN AND INVESTING MILLIONS IN WOMEN.
3. STOP TAXING MEN TO BUILD A BUROCRÁTIC GOVERNEMNET THAT HAS ONLY HELPED WOMEN.
4. MAKE MEN INDEPENDET: SEGREGATED SCHOOLS IS A MUST.
Liberals will be hopeless: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/8/15/2338528/-Ask-the-women-in-your-lives-if-you-dare
TIL Daily Kos still exists.
... and kind of what I thought it would look like
Men are superior in strength... which means that men will be dominant in business, politics, and law?!? I didn't realize that courtrooms cared about how much you could bench press!
I also like how you want to set up a whole new school system for men, but also want men to not have to pay any taxes for it. Men are strong, independent, and naturally dominant - that's why the government needs to give them as many handouts as possible.
1. Being dominant is a trail you develop since childhood. Being superior in strengh matters. The same happens with kids born in January: they are older than they peers... And It happens that the majority of successful people was born in the first half of the year.
2. I want men to pay... For mens school, not for women. You deal with your stuff: we deal with ours
So men are still going to pay taxes for the parts of government they use? Like the military, law enforcement, public health, education, social security, that sort of stuff?
I think if you tallied up all the parts of government that benefit men, you'd end up with approximately "the entire government."
I am happy to that aproach. For the good and for the bad. Women pay for what they use. Including more health, pensions and education.
Servicies that benefits each gender shall be paid by that gender
And no, if you hire men in the Government of men, that Will benfeit men A LOT.
Men pays 65% of all taxes.
60% of public servant are women.
Women use more health, education and (as they live longer) pensions
>60% of public servant are women
That doesn't mean women get 60% of the benefit of the government.
If a woman works for the Social Security Administration, both men and women get their social security checks. If a woman works for the EPA, both men and women get the benefits of "not having lead in your drinking water." Why would you need to separate these services by gender?
You forgot "stop writing in all caps".
You’re singing my tune here. For years, I’ve chafed against the way we tend to talk to and about men. As a woman, I personally feel it’s damaged my relations with other women, since it’s pretty easy to find yourself in a conversation with new acquaintances where you’re suddenly recruited to drag men for various reasons. It’s hard for me to stick around, especially since many of those women are speaking from a place of real trauma, having been repeatedly hurt or violated by men. There are some conflicting opinions about “how men are” that strike at a profound level where you can’t just agree to disagree.
There’s also the honest truth I have to face when considering my happy relationship with a “Whole Man”; I’ve done and am doing a lot of things we’re not supposed to do as modern women.
My husband is the breadwinner; I’m primarily a homemaker. He manages our money, and I tend to defer to him on finance because I hate doing it and he both enjoys and is good at it. I do most of the housework, because I like it that way. You could see this as a power imbalance, but from the inside I feel like we’re a team, just with different roles. I made another woman make gagging noises once when I admitted I tend to follow some retro 1950s advice like freshening up before I see him. I want to make him happy, because I love him, and because he does the same for me.
And while I can’t quite articulate this, I try to respect his understated brand of wholesome masculinity. He’s a wonderful husband and father. He makes me feel happy and free and safe and loved. So I try not to mock or tease or undermine him, or other men for that matter. I admire when he asserts himself, because so far as I’m concerned he always does this in a fair and reasonable way. He’s doing a great job at being a man, and I try to tell him so. But I think a lot of people, men and women, have been burned too many times to say that out loud.
I just want to respond that the womens movement wasn’t a net-negative for women like me, because while I declined to write my entire biography here, my status as primarily a homemaker is temporary. We have little kids, so it makes sense for now. I didn’t go “full trad”- I dislike that assumption about homemaking so much I’m considering writing a book on the subject.
I have a lot of thoughts on what I could call “whole life” feminism. It would probably make sense for us to acknowledge that not only do different people thrive in different situations, but those situations change as we grow up, pair up (or not), have kids (or not) and grow older. I have a graduate degree and a career, and eventually that will shift back to being the primary focus of my life, or at least the lions share of hours in my day. I’m just fortunate that, alongside having kids, being a homemaker is what I *wanted* to be doing, and that we can temporarily afford to purchase my labor back from the marketplace.
As a husband and father of two wonderful daughters, this makes me so happy to hear. I just wish my wife would be a little more effusive, and a little less critical.
This is 100% aella right?
5:1 odds that it's not.
The age doesn't match, and fwiw I would say writing style doesn't quite match either. Also, Aella had an essay on her own blog about dating men in the bay area, and the sentiment was very very different, and to be frank quite jarring to me as a man, whereas this is reads very compassionate and understanding.
I don’t think so. Aella wouldn’t have skipped talking about sex. And she’s not lugubrious. And I doubt she thinks that she’s bad at small talk. Being good at conversation is an important skill for a high end courtesan. And she sounds like a confident person.
It doesn’t mention ominous sexuality or polyamory, 0% chance
Excellent essay - although long since partnered I recognize myself in more than one of these archetypes.
I sometimes lament the decline of hookup culture because it provides a more unstructured method of establishing chemistry with potential partners that does not involve the expectations and pressures of dating. It’s how I met my spouse and I know I’m not the only one - in fact it’s still a very common mode of relationship formation among gay men, I believe.
Scott Galloway argues most of this in his book Notes on Being a Man
(it's a well written article, but because the arguments aren't novel , it doesn't seem fitting for winning an essay contest. )
This is the first review I’ve actively disliked. I didn’t find anything novel or interesting here — just a regurgitation of the usual tropes about men and manhood, which I think are 1) vastly oversimplified and 2) not really true. How long has it actually been since men were valued for their ability to club people over the head? You’d have to go back centuries. Even in supposedly “warrior” societies, most men weren’t fighters; they were farmers, merchants, craftsmen. Were things ever as simple for men as this piece claims?
Dating in the Bay Area is hard, but for reasons that seem far more straightforward:
Dating has always been hard. Every generation thinks it’s uniquely bad now, but the complaints are timeless.
Both men and women have higher expectations and are more selective than ever before.
People in the bay aread have poured themselves into their careers and neglected their social lives, so when they do date, they are not very good at it.
I just don’t see anything in this essay that changes how I think about the topic — it’s mostly familiar arguments dressed up in a lot of words.
Also: I'd love to see the results of every man in her dating pool taking a standard autism inventory.
Exactly. I've read a hundred thinkpieces reciting the same platitudes about the supposed crisis of modern masculinity.
Totally agree. I learnt nothing new in this at all. All rehashed points. Maybe a lot of people thinking it's ground-breaking reading this haven't read much about it before. idk, I'm flummoxed...
Agreed. While I admire the author's goal, the analysis ultimately comes off as surface-level.
It's pretty rare to find a female writer who understands me well and chooses to take the time to empathize and give constructive advice. I guess I should revise that to any writer, since alot of the men tend to be manosphere types trying to convince me to spend $200 / month on their course on how to be evil.
This probably took alot of time and energy and in an era of terrible gender polarization, will probably get some backlash.
Thanks for writing this.
When I read passages like "Yet the void has no respect for logic; rather than tempering his pain, the rationality merely adds a layer of self-disgust onto the despair. There are so many who suffer more than him, yet he can barely shoulder this burden" and "He was good at it, and he loved it. It made him feel alive. His teacher suggested he could become a professional someday, but he’d immediately rejected the idea, knowing the life of a starving artist wasn’t a good plan... / ... He starts [] again, taking up classes at a local studio, but his skill level is that of a fourteen-year-old with potential. He hasn’t practiced in two decades, and his work is weak compared to most other artists his age. / He’s not used to being the least skilled person in the room. His prior plan never allowed that as a possibility, and the sense of failure is disorientating," I think, that could as easily describe me, a married mom. These are human wounds, though being an unmarried man these days does seem to pour extra salt into them.
"Yet the biological reality is that critical portions of the male brain develop at slower rates than female brains, and our education system wasn’t built to accommodate this fact."
So, accelerate the girls without shaming the boys. Most girls still grow into women who want to be moms, and the boys who were once behind are still likely to catch up and then shoot ahead once the girls in their cohort start breeding. To some, this might seem like "favoring" girls "at boys' expense" at a crucial stage, but really, acknowledging that life-stages typically differ between the sexes should be win-win.
Permitting girls to accelerate as much as possible at pre-reproductive ages might also pro-natally take some pressure off the women they become to postpone childbearing "just to keep up" later.
Married dad here. Agree with the sentiment of “this is me”. David Brooks talks about this well in his two mountain essay.
In fact I have been many categories. I think the universality of these classifications is part of the authors unintended appeal. The dating men in the Bay Area part is just a way to asterisk it as not comprehensive or clinical.
Boys outperform girls academically in mathematics though. And at the end of school they are generally ahead. No sense in holding them back
I agree there's no sense in holding boys back, and it's also fine if they surpass girls before the girls have kids – don't hold *anyone* back, is what I'm saying.
I also think it's possible that the standard pre- and elementary-school curriculum *does* hold young girls back a little by catering to an average that includes boys.
All my young kids started RSM (Russian School of Mathemtics) at the kindergarten level, but the girls could start a year early. In the early years at least, my female children are coping fine with being a grade ahead in a fairly demanding math extracurricular while the male children wouldn't have.
If a boy of mine later hits a math "growth spurt", I'm eager to encourage it! I think boys are more likely than girls to have "math growth spurts" in their teens. I suspect, though, that at least some girls have a developmental advantage in math in the very early years that's not fully taken advantage of. I would no more want to waste girls' advantage there than waste boys' cognitive growth spurts when they happen.
Edited to add: For what it's worth, my kids have math majors for both mom and dad, and as far as we can tell at our kids' early ages, our most mathematically-promising kid seems to be the youngest, who's a girl, and our least mathematically-promising kid is also a girl. We probably should be accelerating our youngest more than just one year ahead, and I feel bad for being overwhelmed enough by other stuff to have not made that investment yet.
> So, accelerate the girls without shaming the boys.
We need to find a way how to spin tracking at schools as a feminist agenda. If you disagree that each child should be allowed to learn at their own pace, you are hurting girls and you need to be called out as a sexist!
Haha! I get what you mean.
But by now even girlbosses may be sick of girlbossage, and I think the best case for accelerating the education of girls who are eligible for it probably is a pro-natal one, and feminists strike me as pretty divided on how pro-natal to be.
Funny thing, if we fully supported tracking at schools, the smartest girls could finish their education earlier, and they could start having families (if they wish to do that) earlier.
It could simultaneously be a pro-feminist *and* pro-natalist *and* pro-eugenics move! Who would dare oppose such wide coalition? :D
... normies? Teachers' unions?...
Opposition seems to come out of the woodwork somehow!
Heck, one of my own daughters seems to feel entitled to only work at grade level rather than a year ahead in math, though she's perfectly capable. Since aptitude results from both interest and ability, we can accept that being our least mathematically-apt child may just be part of who she is. (She also seems like our least-weird child – coincidence?...) But feeling entitled to refuse a development opportunity because it results in above-average skill is just about the dumbest sense of entitlement I can imagine (with no shortage of dumbth to choose from).
This seems like an argument for sex-segregated schooling. I think it's important for boys and girls to socialize, but I can see some academic advantages to segregation.
Thanks, Anonymous Writer! I had a younger friend who moved to the Bay Area with a great job and she always seemed to be going out to dinner with gay guys. Why? She couldn't find a straight guy who ate meat (at least in public) and loved football. Many were not anti-meat or anti-football but were conditioned to believe that both were unacceptably toxic. She was/is stunning but when she insisted on non-vegan and pro-football on her Match profile, she heard crickets. We all thought that was hilarious at the time (the mid 2010s). Uh-oh.. and LOL**
p.s. she changed jobs and now lives walking distance from a famous college FB stadium :)
** I still love going out with tech startup founders who often talk a good game... while munching on a giant cheeseburger :) But I wonder if the startup world (especially wih scaleups) is any different?
I find it hard to understand how you can claim to know so much detailed personal information about people you also claim you have only had brief and surface-level interactions with, particularly the 'man who provides'. A repeated theme of your 'what it's like to date x man' sections is that the men are cagey and refuse to answer any personal questions, that the dates are brief, and that you're treated with suspicion. I am left confused about where your detailed descriptions of their internal experience and life history is supposed to come from, so it's hard not to read the review as pretty baseless fantasising built by free-association from pop-culture clichés. I'm aware that you write at the start that men like to use your dates as pseudo-therapy sessions, but you've made at pretty clear that most of these categories of men do not in fact do that.
Agreed
[writer of the review here]
For every category, I've been on several dates where men who fit these categories have opened up to me on a very personal level. I've also collected a lot of data from being close friends with many men who fit in these categories, and watching their relationships with their significant others (and often chatting with their significant others as well.)
Certainly not every single date I've been on has resulted in men opening up to an extreme degree. In fact, many are closed off, as I've mentioned. But the signs/patterns become pretty obvious, and even if a man is closed off or cagey, it starts to become pretty obvious that, "Ah, you're probably acting this way because you seem to fall within this general category. Based on my very deep discussions with other people in that category, I have a fairly decent idea of why you're acting dysfunctional right now."
Is my pattern recognition always correct? Absolutely not. But I've also had men share many times that I am eerily good at understanding them in a very short span of time.
Also--I haven't always been good at just walking away when a man is being cagey or disconnected. I used to put a lot more effort into drawing people out of their shells and trying really hard to make them feel comfortable and heard, even if the person was acting dysfunctional. And a lot of times I was successful at this and got excellent, deep conversations from men after some initial pushback. But I no longer do this, because I've realized it often hurts men if they're encouraged to push past their dysfunctional barriers and open up, and then I end up not being interested in dating them. I've realized this sort of deep listening/encouragement is better left to friends or therapists.
Thank you so much for writing this. When I saw the title, I thought I might skip it because it did not seem relevant to my interests, but I've been glued to the screen all the way. I don't live in the US and my experience of course doesn't correspond neatly directly to one of your categories, but I did recognize aspects of my own life in two of them. Your review has given me a new context to think about those issues as well as advice that may prove useful. But apart from that, simply seeing someone talk and care about these problems feels validating. I am grateful that you decided to write this review despite your reservations.
A lot of commenters treat this classification as a disjoint discrete map rather than a basis for a masculine vector space.
I don't live anywhere near San Francisco, and the author and I would no doubt intensely dislike one another if we somehow met.
Be that as it may, I felt there was a curious omission in the review: namely, the impact of AI girlfriends. The AIs are conspicuously improving at a rapid pace; human women are equally conspicuously not doing so. I literally own a machine that will dispense affection at the push of a button!
Option A: Buy a woman dinner so she will politely tolerate my presence for an hour before ghosting me.
Option B: Spend the same hour (and effectively $0) texting an AI who will never tire of telling me how special I make "her" feel and how happy she is to be around me.
At some point, choosing A starts looking like a mental illness.
bruh you're actually out of touch if you think more than a handful of chronically online women with an AI Boyfriend is a "thing".
It isn't.
He didn't say anything whatever about women having AI boyfriends. If you're going to mock somebody at least get the relevant facts straight before you hock and spit at the person. Otherwise you will sound dumb and meanspirited instead of just meanspirited.
Is that the only quality you want in a woman, that they constantly tell you how happy they are to be with you? I would think you're looking for something more complex - someone with hopes and dreams of their own, someone you can share a life with, perhaps raise kids with. I don't see how a source of on-demand compliments gets you any closer to that.
Like, one of the examples OP gives is a guy who thinks he's doing pretty well, then has some sort of crisis and discovers that he doesn't have any real, close friends who can help him through it, he just has people who go to the same book club or fitness club as him. What's the AI supposed to do to help here? If all he needed was shallow, autocompleted compliments, the book club probably would have been enough.
No, but I am contrasting the AI with Actually Existing Women, who are interested in precisely none of those things, not some Manic Pixie Dream Girl who doesn't exist.
Whatever works for you. Would you consider supplementing the AI with a pet -- some little affectionate mammal? Though their affection is, of course, expressed in much simpler and less articulate ways that an AI's, it is absolutely heartfelt. And you can *feel* that it is.
I would be curious to know how many men in each category the author has met. (To estimate population frequencies from her sample).
I don't think the previous maps were that good. Contrary to what many people imagine the past options did not let people self actualize better. Being a soldier was not a viable path to a happy family for most of history (although you would get opportunities to have sex with prostitutes and rape the enemy in ways that are no longer tolerated). The main problem with modern dating is that neither men nor women have a strong incentive to settle for a mediocre marriage where both people are kind of unsatisfied but ultimately kind of happy.
Although some people in the comments are upset at the lack of a map to manhood, if you look at most of the examples from the essay you can see that the problem isn't the lack of a map, the problem is people rejecting the map they are given and the fundamental issue is there cannot be a map that makes everyone happy because different people need different paths to self actualize and the only person who can figure that out is themselves.
That's true if you define "manhood" as "having achieved external conditions X,Y,Z". Which is, granted, a large part of how it was defined historically I think. But if you define it more around "being a person with qualities A,B,C" - which was also a big part of the historical definitions! - then you can do a better job at helping large proportion of people to self-actualize, if A,B,C are defined generically enough to allow customization, and also they are conducive to actually finding your own path in life.
As an example of the first, you can say "real man should protect the weak", but "protecting the weak" may mean either serving in the military, discovering new treatments, or just providing for your family, depending on one's abilities and preferences.
As an example of the second, something like "real man should be agentic and honest with himself" would sure be a good high-level ideal to help people to draw the details of their "map" themselves.
Of course even then these models won't be able to help literally everyone. But helping the majority of people is generally better than helping nobody at all.
[Obviously all of this logic applies to women, I'm just using men as an example because I'm a man myself]
My point is "real man should be agentic and honest with himself" isn't a map you can follow. Even as a goal it's not really better than seek long term happiness (or seek short term happiness). The "Bay Area Map" that is failing most of the men in this essay works for lots of men in the bay area.
Well, fair, it's not a map in and of itself, anymore than the word "Canada" is a map of Canada. It's a skill you should teach as a part of your map/model, but of course you do so by having role models who show how to do it, and texts about how to do it, and whole corpus of cultural knowledge, and ideally also "rituals" (in the broadest sense of the word) which help kids to learn and practice this skill. And by praising kids when they do it successfully, and reproaching them when they underperform in it for their age, and so on.
But it is, fundamentally, a teachable skill to a large extent, and what I'm saying is that if you have this skill as a part of the society-level model of "what it means to be a man", it would help individual people to be able to better figure out their more specific personal models. And I want to emphasize that it's just an example, I'm absolutely not saying this particular skill is all you need, I'm just indicating it as an example of a kind of skill that gets you better at creating a personalized model, or as you put it, at "finding a path to self actualize".
[edited for typos]
I'm not sure I disagree with you since you are describing a skill that worked well for me but I think it like telling someone the answer is in Canada and more like telling them it is in Timbuktu. I also think the question is for the people who are failing currently, what fraction of them will be helped with this answer (vs requiring a different answer and/or therapy/medication).
This is hauntingly beautiful. Thank you for writing it.
I've had to get good at dating all while trying not to attach positive valence to masculine traits. It's felt like a bizarre game of Taboo. I'm so glad there is a counter narrative picking up steam to help those still struggling.
Kinda... it's also far too apologetic for the toxic feminine culture we live in.
I disagree. What is your beef with some clear-sighted empathy?
Also, we are the ones who failed, first and foremost, by not presenting a viable role model for masculinity.
False appeals to pathological empathy is what got us into this mess. Attempts at empathy are clearly one of the problems.
I'll bite. What about the empathy in this post is pathological?
Pathological empathy is a tool used by the progressive movement as a weapon against any who disagree with their goals or message. Constant appeals to empathy in place of reasoned argument or intellectual discussion on a subject.
Men do not need 'empathy' as that's the very system that's been used as tool of oppression and coercion. Men need to eschew empathy in favor of more direct means of problem-solving. Empathy is what got us here, the last thing we need is more of it.
Re. "There is a large amount of debate about when exactly gender roles evolved, but for at least the past 10,000 years," :
I'm going on a tangent here, but I think it's important. The author was writing about fighting versus motherhood, and those are sex roles which evolved millions of years ago, not gender roles. Much dialogue on "gender" is not about gender roles, but about sex roles, e.g., parental care. This is because the left has adopted the tactic of erasing sex and claiming its territory for "gender". But sex roles are not socially constructed, they're evolved and instinctual; and setting down rules and quotas that assume they're socially constructed will lead to disaster. Wikipedia, "Parental care", says the female does all of the child-rearing in 95% of mammals, the male and female share duties (though not equally) in 5%, and the males do all the child-rearing in 0%. The idea that human women, alone of all mammals, suddenly lost their maternal instincts, or that human males alone suddenly acquired them, is insane.
The only mammalian species which has evolved to have no sex roles is the wolf. Correct me if you know of another.
/Gender/ roles that are different from sex roles seem to be unique to human culture, and very old, but 10,000 years is a good guess. Most non-binary gender roles that I've heard of are either a mixture of the male and female roles (e.g., the Native American "Two-Spirit", though this is now a modern social construction which AFAIK doesn't correspond to any of the historic traditions that have been merged together into it), a role that lets men take on female duties (Samoan Fa'afafine, Zapotec Muxes), or an asexual category (Hijras in India/Pakistan, if I understand correctly). I don't know of any culture that /replaces/ sex roles with gender roles; they distinguish what's governed by birth sex and what's governed by gender role. For instance, the Fa'afafine Jaiyah Saelua plays soccer on Samoa's men's team, not on the women's team; what team you play on is determined by sex, not gender. It is thus incorrect to call Fa'afafine a "third gender" in today's English; male and female are sexes, Fa'afafine is a gender. None of the genders I know of are of the same ontological category as male and female. Genders are /constructed/ from those sexual categories, and/or from spiritual roles which might not be attached to any sex role.
The equivalent of the "which bathroom should a trans person use?" is an instance of the rules on nakedness taboos, which are /probably/ applied to be consistent with the notion of "women's spaces" and "men's spaces", because so many non-Western cultures have spaces other than bathrooms which are reserved for one sex or another. A sexual male with female gender would need to be allowed into female spaces to perform female roles. But I haven't read any confirmation of that; and they might have a different set of rules specifically for urination and defecation.
"Who can I have sex with?" is governed by gender rather than sex in some North American tribes, and in the African Hausa 'Yan Daudu' gender. It's left up to individual preference in some other cultures. I don't know of any cases where it's strictly governed by sex rather than gender, but this may be because anthropologists today specifically set out to find cases where gender governs sex roles.
>The idea that human women, alone of all mammals, suddenly lost their maternal instincts, or that human males alone suddenly acquired them, is insane.
I think that probably 95% of child-raising tasks are not actually instinctual, especially in the modern world. Neither men nor women have instinctual knowledge of how to change a diaper, how to wash and sterilize a bottle, or the 5 S's of soothing a baby. Even breastfeeding isn't really instinctual - my wife had to be taught how to position the baby and how to tell if the baby is latched and sucking properly. (The baby took a few weeks to learn how to latch properly, too!)
I don't think evolution gave us the instincts for specific gender roles in the rigid way you're describing - all it did was give us big brains and the capacity to build societies where these skills can be passed on from one generation to the next. Most societies in the past only taught these skills to women, but there's nothing stopping us from teaching them to men as well.
I didn't describe ANY "rigid way". I'm certainly not talking about instincts to change a diaper. That would be absurd. An instinct to be interested in babies, though--that's something you'll see clearly is more prevalent among women than among men, if you live among humans. An instinct to protect them. Whereas most mammalian males have instincts to care a lot about paternity, and many are hostile or lethal to infants they think are not theirs.
Why on earth would you think all we have is big brains that can be socially conditioned, when literally every other mammalian species except wolves, and including our closest relatives, have clear, programmed, sex-differentiated instincts? What was the evolutionary incentive for humans alone to lose those instincts in a mere 5-10 million years?
The theory that male and female humans have no such instincts is the only theory in the world that is held in high regard even though there is close to zero good evidence /for/ it. Instead, all we have are a lot of unvalidated just-so stories to explain away the mountains of evidence /against/ it.
I said "rigid way" because you seem to think this biological instinct implies rigid social roles - that because Mom is more likely to be interested in babies, she should be the one to raise kids.
I think that's a very strong stance to take based on a fairly mild difference in human nature. Who cares if Mom is more interested in playing with the baby? Baby needs their diaper changed and their bottles washed on a regular schedule no matter how interested you're feeling about them right now, and there's no biological reason Dad can't do those things if that's what's convenient for a modern family structure. Why should we care who's "more interested" if it doesn't affect 95% of the tasks required to raise a baby?
Or to put it another way, "more interested" does not necessarily translate into "more happy about needing to change a diaper at 2 AM." A lot of things in childcare just kinda suck and it seems natural to equally share the suck as much as possible.
Ok, a few points of contention:
First: it's "The New Right" now, not the "alt-right." The "alt-right" was the subculture that developed in 2015/2016 and led to the birth of a new brand of hard-conservative and traditional politics across the West. That new brand of hard-conservative and traditional politics is "The New Right" and includes Donald Trump, red-blooded American citizens, and the popular majority of the country's voters. This is no longer a problem (for you, as far as I'm considered it's a solution) for you to "stop" before it gets out of hand. It's already out of hand. The real question is whether the violent militants of the Progressive Left that have spent the last 30 years destroying gender relations can perform a successful rear-guard action fast enough. Success is where you get to keep the 19th Amendment and banking equality. Failure is if classical liberalism is burnt to the ground by the New Right as it (rightly) identifies egalitarianism as the philosophical source of all these problems.
Second: I notice a lot of "he had top marks and graduated top of his class and went to an Ivy league university" statements in there. This is probably heavy self-selection bias in your own dating pool. The other 99.5% of men who aren't in your dating pool are suffering the same problems but more severely. They're a lot angrier about it too, but can't do much either. Not unless cities start burning to the ground (again). I think it'd be important to remember that not all men graduated top of their class and went to an Ivy League university: many were passed over due to DEI quotas. Many weren't smart enough to make it. Many got tired of the system entirely and left the Left Coast for greener pastures that exist for young men LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE ON EARTH.
Third: There are no men in the cities of California. Only drones and locusts live in their hive cities. Any young man who CHOOSES to live in a Leftist culture like that is hardly a man. There's no way "out" from a place like that; it'll suck you in, chew you up, and leave you dead or a shell of what was once human. There's a reason we're going through a demographic implosion. You're not going to find "good men" or "whole men" in one of the core cities for disgusting leftwing militants. "Good men" don't live in places like that. If you want to find a man who hasn't been crushed by the horrific culture of that place, you'll have to look somewhere else.
You think the popular majority of this country wants to repeal the 19th?
A lot can change in a decade, especially when people realize what they can get away with... They might not even need a popular vote in the first place.
Care to be more specific?
I don't think they want to do that yet... but how well the Left performs a rear-guard action will determine which way the culture goes.
This cuts both ways. The right can trigger its own backlash against itself. Certainly I went from going all into anti wokeness to realizing the new right is just as into racism as the woke.
Sure, but the difference is that the right is willing to pull the trigger.
Is this a metaphorical trigger? Or do you mean the right is more inclined to actual violence than the left?
I think they're more inclined to *meaningful* violence. As in, coordinated violence that actually accomplishes something. All the left is capable of doing is unorganized riots. It really helps to have a proper hierarchy.
“There are no men in the cities of California. Only drones and locusts live in their hive cities. Any young man who CHOOSES to live in a Leftist culture like that is hardly a man.”
Go outside more.
I did. I don't live in that state. I live in a state that's swamped with Californian Refugees.
Well that narrows it down to, like, thirty.
i know, right?
Guy doesn’t know much about California guys OR locusts to be honest
As I understood it:
alt-right = LARPing a monarchist
The New Right = LARPing a Manly Man
The evo psych account of gender roles at the beginning seems like a huge generalization or just-so story. For example, I don't think there was such a thing as youth for much of history. As soon as you were able, you had to get to work. Not saying that gender roles didn't exist or that they didn't have a lot of similarities across the board. It just feels extremely fuzzy.
In any case—happily, the fable of what once had been (really, I take more issue with the putative "why") doesn't really seem to have much bearing on what is now missing in mens' lives, which I think the author empathetically and correctly identifies, along with the Byzantine maze of thorns that modern men have to squirm through lest they become socially exiled / unpersoned by what Heidegger would call "the They."
The author probably *should* be a therapist if she naturally elicits such colorful and pathos-riven narratives from near strangers and listens this closely. Guess she already has a good job though.
I've often thought that the testosterone collapse in western society is something that could possibly be traced to cultural change, not just plastic in the water (or sitting down all day). If there are no real strong male role models or credible value systems for men to attach themselves to—all those thoughts or moments of mini-glory that never happen would seem to punch you down on a hormonal level, just as feeling "low status" has measurable biological effects (IIRC). The person is a single system, and nothing happens in a vacuum.
Also, the idea that a therapist would dismiss a "Non" guy's concerns as toxic just seems a little strawmanny. I mean, I know that there are some crappy therapists out there, but that's a whole 'nother level of anything I've run into… that said, I guess I'm basically accusing the author of being a liar, which seems stupid of me. So: fuck all such so called therapists. Just another day of realizing the world has aggressively become more nightmarish and insane since I last checked.
Coda:
I think in the bay, there are these spray painted things on the ground that say "protect yo heart." You definitely have to do that in this world, and maybe always. People like this haven't protected their heart; they let someone else tell them who they are.
But again, I also feel like it's more of a question of meaning (than personal development, strictly speaking). To be a man, it's not enough to be a man: you have to be aimed for something else. I don't mean that your identity is in what you do, but it's in living with an actual purpose. If the culture has nothing to offer in that regard but "optimistic nihilism" or whatever (*reaches for pistol*), then each man has to forge his own truth in its entirety, and that asks too much.
I guess that coincides with what the author is saying. I would just add that role models have to have some specific common factors: not only in themselves, but in what they work towards.
Really, this seems related to the shortcomings of liberalism from a few posts ago. In both cases, I think the solution is to find some common metaphysical ground. It's not likely to happen, but it's necessary.
I loved this review, quite unexpected.
I also loved the comments, it's almost like the review was a scissor statement, but softer. So many feeling an understanding and many others bewildered or disagreeing, gently.
Thank you for the well written long form content. It's obvious you put a lot of time and effort into both the process of witting this, but also the structure and categories. This was very interesting, but I'm a gen-x male who's been married a very long time and live in the country on the opposite coast of the bay area. When I say this was interesting, it gave me a similar feeling to scrolling through the @AmazingNature twitter feed. Wow, turtles will eat snakes, I never imagined, wow, a man who provides can't seal the deal, I would never have guessed, crazy.
Your essay has had me thinking for the last hour, and well, I'm gen-x, so my memory isn't quite so clear as it was a while ago, but I can think of very few men that I've know who would fit in these buckets. I think from my early years one person I knew would tell stories that sound like he may have been a predator though this was in the age of AOL chat rooms so there wasn't the influencers and videos, just a stray comment from many years ago that I still remember the shape of today. His claim of having sex with a woman he picked up and afterwards he was very hot so he told her to get out of bed and lay on the floor. That bothered me enough that it's stuck with me. I also know of one pereson who I think opted out, but they have a comunity (FIRE) and are "the millionare next door" so it may just be his passion is having a big number in the bank and a woman would be counter-productive to the "goal" , I don't know.
I've talked to and been on some scale of friendship with a great many men, though I have never dated any of them so I could work with some right now and just not know it. Still, OMG, the Malaysian King Cobra is massive! was the same feeling I got from the essay. Well done.
I've found community to be easy, but purpose and passion to be hard. Everyone's different. I think instead of a map of "manhood", too broad a term, I'd prefer a map of how to succeed at those functional areas and others necessary for a whole life.
That's a wonderful post, thank you for writing this! And oh boy, sounds like it really sucks to be a man grown up in the Bay Area. I was lucky enough myself to grow up in a far away country and culture so I didn't/don't have any particular problems with masculine role models. But when I was living in the Bay my dating experience definitely had a lot in common with the Opt Out archetype, not because of a lack of relationship experience in general, but because of lack of it in an English-speaking Western country in particular.
I hope some better male role model will emerge eventually. (A lot of people seem hyped up about stoicism lately, maybe that can be the core around which that model can crystallize?) But realistically, between the woke hating on anything explicitly coded masculine on one side, and the manosphere capturing the audience on the other, I'm rather skeptical.
I quite like this essay, but I think the historical stuff in part II was the weakest part and could be dropped. It makes sweeping claims about history without historical evidence, and to really go into the history would be a distraction - it's not what the essay is about. (It sounds directionally accurate, but still.) Just skip to part IV.
I thought part two was the best part. It also proves the author is a cool girl. Any woman who understands evolutionary psychology and uses it as a window into masculinity is probably a cool girl.
I like this model
would offer two suggestions that I think would make it more accurate
(1) There is another type, sort of a "beast but not misogynist". A lot of people have found "getting fit" as a _partial_ solution to the problem of "being a man": they're still awkward and lost but at least now they're attractive and physically confident. Also, going through a bodily transformation is a chance to somewhat reinvent yourself mentally, so they get to do one stage of growth for free, meaning they're quite a bit more mature than all the people who have done no stages. These are pretty common. They seem lost also, but can tell that they're doing better than most of the people around them, but they are still not going to ever feel like they're "okay"---more like they're settling for the best life they could find, because no one would show them a better one.
(2) The underlying problem in all of this seems to be a lack of "growth process". How does e.g. the (3) Man Who Opts Out get practice? well, facing their fears and doing the thing enough to get used to it--to no longer cling to their fears from before they did it. This means they need to go _all the way in_ to the new life (dating) and then come out the other side (changed, now experienced and confident about dating). A sort of microcosmic Heroes' Journey. This process however seems to rarely happen: no one encourages or calls on them to go in and no one forces them too, and there's very little in the way of role models that make it seem like the right path. They go on as essentially the same person they were before; and their insecurities come with them. This is basically what's missing: it has become taboo, essentially, to be "called" to go through a process of growth.
To some extent I think this is a result of lax social norms. Once upon a time (I mean, in my imagination, maybe just from movies) your friends would push you to ask people out, take you out dancing when you didn't want to, set you up on dates, expect you to be married, etc. Now everyone is "okay" with everyone else doing whatever they want, but it's more that they're just "private": it's not your business to have an opinion on anyone else's lifestyle or to influence them to change or grow up. As a result, people stay the same for far longer than they were supposed to.
Probably in the past, because survival (in society, or literally in the world, like having to work your farm) was hard, exigency just pushed you into growing up. Now that the world is easy and modern progressive information-worker society is even easier, there's no pressure, so nobody grows up.
Incidentally, my pet theory is that if anyone wants to ever cure all of their psychological problems (although maybe find some new ones on the way): go headfirst into a new life that is uncomfortable and come out the other side. (Doesn't matter what it is, as long as you go in and come out changed. Coming out can always look like "giving up"---but to give up, rather than back out, you have to have seriously tried in the first place). I'd bet that a pretty good model of depression in many cases might be "this growth process is needed but hasn't happened and there is no pressure making it happen and the body basically shuts down because is terrified of staying the same yet can't figure out what to do".
There is no "grow" process, because dating is not an activity where progression is easy. In fact, it seems designed to actively prevent progression. Sport analogies are easy: appart from natural talent, what can you make progress in a sport? It's to practice in low-risks, high rewards situation, where you get immediate feedback from mistakes and quickly learn what improve your performance, with well recognized and enjoyable stepping stones marking your progress, regular enough to keep you motivated.
Dating? No low risk, it cost you money whatever the result, often more money when it fails (many women will just money-press to compensate a bad date and get at least some enjoyment out of it) and can damage your reputation in the dating scene, making further attempts harder.
It's the equivalent of a sport where a failure result in injury. Those sports exists (in fact, I like quite a lot of such sports), but this is at advanced level, this is NEVER part of the learning process.
No clear indication of mistakes, certainly not for the girl you date (even without being ghosted, it's vague platitudes like it's not you it's me) but even "bystanders" (friends, family, society at large) is largely failing to provide any analysis, not even speaking about actionable advises. Very little stepping stone achieving pleasurable goals: traditional dates keep being a affair when man have to prove to a woman: hard work for him in the beginning, pleasure is supposed to come if he's worthy. A little bit like violins (going to musical analogy)....I wonder why guitar, piano or drums are more popular ;-).
Dating is clearly designed to be unenjoyable for most man (which is trivial if you understand it as an exam/test, because the goal is to sort the winners from the losers). Some men (who are especially good at it) enjoy it, but the typical advice "just enjoy yourself and have a good time, that's the key to sucess) is ridiculous for the average man.
In fact, I am especially good at math/physics and indeed, "just enjoy yourself and have a good time" was a good advice for my exams, not that I needed any. But it's not something I would have ever said to 95% of my comrades, it would have been useless or worse, condescending, and they would have been right punching me as a big thank you for this pearl of wisdom.
Most girls apparently do not think it's an exam (for them), they really expect to enjoy it....When they feel it is (rejecting single mothers is the typical failure mode), most think it's completely unfair. It is, sort of, like all exams...and most men understand it because society told them, and they realise it's true when they try.
I was mainly part of the "men who opt out" group, with small exception where "dating" was part of another activity I liked (some sports, mainly). It did not work often (work in the sense I got myself a GF), but at least there was satisfaction in the activity itself. The few time it worked, it was great, but didn't last: probably I was not entertaining and assertive enough out of the activity context....because my other center of interests where even less entertaining to most typical young women than sport, or because the girls saw me in a different context where i was less outgoing and less of a leader.
Now I probably am in a zone between the "men who provide", "man who opt out" (of traditional dating, not necessarily of relations) and a pinch of "manosphere beast": P4S has shifted my young age view that "(pretty) girls are semi-magical being much harder to wow than male friends but their opinion is worth so much more" to a more practical (and I think balanced) "I try to wow this (pretty) girl because I want to go in her pant, nothing more, nothing less - after we may discover we actually get along quite well". Maybe even more than P4S, a few female friends I did not find attractive and getting slightly less timid with age pushed me away from the fairy tale view. I even sometimes flipped the exam and not went to second-date with pretty girls with too much problem attached (debts, kids), it's educating (and not especially enjoyable) to be the examiner instead of the examinee for once....Still, my unicorn-view of timid teenage boy is still there, unfortunately: a (pretty) girl who really seems to like me without having to play the date game (being a mix of entertainer and provider) or P4S tap directly in the little boy who had so much trouble finding a GF. And get huge extra-point. It's bad, because the red flags I pass then will very likely come and hit me later. I know, they have, a few times....
So yes, to summarize, I think traditional dating is damaging for the vast majority of men. Not only it's an un-enjoyable exam who do not dare to say it's name - doubled with an economic value extraction from the tested man, but the fairy-tale view of it, ingrained in most boys from young ages, is detrimental even when you pass the exam with flying colors - it just makes you feel validated which cloud you better judgement regarding the actual value of your potential partner: achieving something difficult can put value in the something - but it's fake value, just like the pleasure you feel after you stop banging your head on a wall is not real pleasure - it's just the absence of pain....
oh yeah, I add (pretty) because girls I do not find physically attractive are out of the possibly-GF, just like men are. They are all in the possible-friend bucket....But experience showed me that most women do not really like to be in this bucket. I had very nice exceptions, but not too many. It's the symmetrical of the (pretty) girl who put you in the fried zone. That's not a nice place to be for a man, a place I now actively avoid (again, this is an advice I would give to my younger self ;-) )
I think you're wildly incorrect about dating not being a growing process. And it's not in any way "unenjoyable for a man", not intrinsically. It's unenjoyable if it goes badly a lot, but that's true for any activity---the question is, if it's going badly, why aren't you doing something about that? It's very easy to get feedback (just ask friends or strangers or people you respect or even the people you go on dates with--just, be sure to get the actual answers, not the initial polite ones). It's very easy to improve (improve your life, get more confident, work out, socialize more, practice, learn to be less boring or more emotionally intelligent get help from others). As with everything, it's trivially easy to get better once the ego is out of the way, but people mostly never get to that state and therefore feel trapped in their present situation.
I do agree that "enjoy yourself and have a good time" is terrible advice. Generally I think that's the advice you get from a person who is nervous to say what they actually think because they think it will upset you. More likely their true opinion is "to be honest, you're an unattractive loser and I don't know why you expect dates to go well without changing that". Probably the advisee knows this already; the advisor is afraid to say it out loud because the person they're talking to is gonna get insecure / angry / hurt / difficult in response to it.
We clearly disagree, but I wonder about the un-enjoyable part:
"And it's not in any way "unenjoyable for a man", not intrinsically"
Is your impression based solely on you enjoying it, or do you have most of your male friend telling you they like to "date"?
I am from Europe, so maybe I do not understand "dating" as I should. For me, it's a 2-person meeting for a short (1-3h) social activity, typically a drink or dinner, where they are supposed to talk a lot, with the (mostly implicit) condition they are both potentially interested in romantic relation in the future if it goes "well", and the 2 person do not know each other well. When it's more than 2 person and/or part of an activity which is not primary social it's then what I would call a semi-date, i.e. a date combined with something else, with the further romantic relation much more hypothetic and deniable by both. it's a spectrum of course, Movie theater is tricky for example :-)
For a real date, I am very typical in my circle of friend or even acquaintance when I know their opinion on the topic. No male friend really like it. The most (romantically) successful of them may not hate it, but it's certainly not their prefered use of time and money. And for most, it's as enjoyable as a job interview. A very similar activity, in fact I had job interview (not first job, but advancement/share participation stuff happening during professional dinner indeed).
And to be extra clear, it's enjoying the date itself. Not the outcome when the date went further (romantic relation, egangement, sex, whatever)...
This pure date, even my succesful (romantically I mean - womanizer you could call them) did not like it, not this kind of date. What they sometimes like is the hunt: hitting on girls in group venue more or less dedicated to that (I guess it's rare nowadays) (bar, nightclub, ....). Not the 2-person drink after a tinder match or chance meetup at a friends bbq....This, some may like the anticipation of what might happen after. Not the stuff itself.
Once again I am brought to wonder if I transitioned to female because I failed as a male. I wonder if things would've gone differently if I'd had a sense of how to become masculine...? I'm not sure.
You know your own experiences best, but I would suggest considering that causality runs in the other direction and you "failed as a male" because of the same internal drives that motivate you to transition. In general, it's easier to do something well if you enjoy doing it, or at the very least don't mind it.
If you ever write about your reflections I'd be interested in reading them. I've heard this from other people, and have noticed there seem to be a lot more m to f transition than f to m. I wondered if that was because there was more openness toward women acting like men while men who failed any aspect of masculinity faced much stricter sanction.
Surveys I've looked at seem to indicate approximately equal numbers of MtF and FtM, at least in the US as of 2022.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
Do you have anything about transition rates in general?
Do you mean worldwide? No, I don't.
I was thinking more historical, or at least in the last 25 years. No worries though.
I don't think there's much in the way of good stats more recently than then last decade or so, since you need a large survey to catch a statistically significant number of trans people, and large surveys don't seem to have been asking questions about it until recently, or handle odd ways that are unhelpful for the question at hand (e.g. post-2009 versions of the National College Health Survey which code anyone who self-reports as trans as "unknown" gender).
Best I could find just now was the 2000-2008 National College Health Survey, which offered "transgender* as an option for sexual orientation, which is kinda weird but at least allows tabulation of self-reported transgender identity against self-reported gender. These only yield single-digit or low-double-digit numbers of trans people in any given semester's results (out of about 15k respondants), but reports I have spot checked are often approximately equal between male and female and don't show a clear trend as to which is in the majority.
https://www.acha.org/ncha/data-results/survey-results/all-ncha-survey-reports/original-ncha-survey-reports/
No idea. No matter how much I felt that I was failing as a male, transitioning never came to my mind, so I am tempted to say that this couldn't be the sole reason. On the other hand, I grew up in a different bubble... no idea what my younger autistic self might have concluded if he was daily bombarded with the message that not being a 100% manly man means that you are trans in denial...
Ultimately, only you have a chance to figure this out.
The carnival of misandry in the NY Times comments section today in response to a very mild editorial expressing concern for men and boys underlines your point
The whole manosphere thing is super odd. If you read about it, it’s a den of toxic woman-hating. But when I listen to people who are mentioned as its leading figures, no lame pick up techniques ever come up.
Are Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Dave Smith, Jocko Willink, Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman and many others not manosphere?
I don't know the proper terminology, but there seem to be two kinds of "groups". The kind of group that is composed of things that are similar to each other. And the kind of group that is a collection of everything that is outside of some group of the former type.
For example, when you say "foreigners", it is group of the second kind. The "foreigners" have nothing in common (except for not being citizens of the same country you are). They can live all over the planet, in wildly different cultures, they speak different languages, have different religions, etc. The word only has a negative meaning, there is no positive substance in it. Except, when the "foreigners" visit your country, then they have one thing in common, i.e. that they are visitors. But otherwise, it is not a description, it is an anti-description.
And it seems to me that "manosphere" is a group that is a little of the first kind (it is focused on men) but also a little of the second kind (it is outside the mainstream narrative, in many ways that are different from each other, often opposed to each other). To start with the obvious, the "pick up artists" are the very opposite of the "men going their own way"; the former build their identity around something that the later give up and build their identity around giving up that.
If we want to talk meaningfully, we need to use more specific words. There are not many things you can say about "foreigners", but there is a lot you can say about e.g. Japan. Similarly, there is not much you can say about the "manosphere", and even using the word is a kind of trap.
> And, like it or not, the core of your identity in modern society still largely revolves around your gender.
I have to stop right here - this does not match my experience at all.
I'm a man in my early 50s. Never got provided by a map to "manhood" by anyone, as you correctly diagnose. That part I agree with. But I also never missed it. The bit about trying to be a decent enough human being stuck and that's what I try to do. Couldn't care less about what "manhood" is supposed to be about.
Precisely. This is a sensible and healthy attitude.
To be fair, I don't know how much of a choice it is. The existence of trans people tells us that at least for some people, gender identity can be highly salient.
You got a map. All around you. And it was easy for you to follow. That's probably the two reasons why you don't remember seeing it.
Just think about gay guys your age as an extreme example. Their collision with the map brought some of them even into prison.
I am a bit surprised you as a reader are so unaware.
Ehh, if we knew each other in person we could have a good chat over how much of the tattered public map I followed or not...
Hmmm... I see your point. Good one. I jumped emotionally to a conclusion.
As a woman, this piece feels strange.
I think what I find so strange in this essay about men is the role of women in her world. I relate equally well to the male categorizations.
I want to be like “the men who are whole” maybe even more than I want to date one. Although, ideally both. Honestly, I see myself being in some way like all of these men… maybe other than the beast. Personally, I find myself relating more to the men in this hypothetical dating world than the women.
This may be narcissistic, but I also think it is a major major problem for her argument. After all, men are defined in opposition to women (as she herself concedes). And frankly, I just don’t understand how women are different than these men. It seems women and all humans face these same trials and tribulations.
This also means that her entire “this is society’s fault” and “what to do about it” section have to be wrong. Or at least not the full story.
Yes, there are a few male-centric issues that she points out— there are less male teachers, divorce is harder on boys because they loose a male role model, men are the butt of a fair amount of jokes these days, making friends as a guy hard (harder? Idk), etc. But I think they are far exaggerated.
I think the real problem is it getting harder to succeed at life economically while still having passions, the internet chipping away all sense of identity, work culture failing to maintain social mobility, and comparisons against billionaires and super models degrading local community and prestige.
If I talked to men and women, I think the issues facing them are more alike than different. Maybe in the San Francisco dating market this is less true due to so many male centric industries that are currently collapsing. But I think on average, women and men face the same societal ills of self actualization while still forging obligations to communities, family, and self.
This is a balance that is infamously hard to strike, from the greeks to 90s rom coms, “the ideal man” always had this balance and it was always a rarity.
Yeah so that is my hot take: these issues have always been here. It has always been hard to be an ideal man and person frankly. And I think it may be getting harder for both sexes due to social issues that are much larger than gender wars.
I agree.
> It seems women and all humans face these same trials and tribulations.
Do they? For example, are women generally held responsible for providing an income to their family? How much does their income impact their dating opportunities? This is not a minor thing, this is something men spend half of their awake time doing.
It seems to me that there are many differences, especially around dating. But it's not limited to dating per se, because the things you do otherwise can have an impact on your chances at dating (at least if you are a man).
And there is also a lot of what is the same, of course.
> And I think it may be getting harder for both sexes due to social issues that are much larger than gender wars.
Yes, the society is getting more complicated in general.
> How much does their income impact their dating opportunities? This is not a minor thing, this is something men spend half of their awake time doing.
I don’t deny there are differences (of course there are!), but I think the categories laid out in this piece are not representative of those. That is my major problem with it. "The man who is not," "man with a plan," "man who provides," and "man who opts out" have nothing distinctly **man** about them ("the man who is beast" and perhaps "the man who provides" are the closest). But for the most part, these are seemingly existential categories that are an inherent part of the human condition.
Women also have to give up their interests to survive, meticulously run their lives with plans that then prevent them from experiencing life, focus on material metrics for success rather than internal ones, or isolate themselves and tie their self-worth up in work. Or maybe even become whole and find community, self, and purpose.
So yeah, I am not saying that women and men are the same— I am saying that the categories laid out in THIS piece are categories of humans, not men.
>> And I think it may be getting harder for both sexes due to social issues that are much larger than gender wars.
Yup! And I think a lot of gender-specific issues are scapegoats for economic and systemic issues, which are the result of our society and economy being broken for most people.
"For example, are women generally held responsible for providing an income to their family?"
Maybe only if they don't have a man who's providing, but I know women who had to scramble hard to provide for their families.
I'm curious to learn more about the sample size these observations were pulled from. As I was reading, I several times asked myself how many dates I would need to go on to make such detailed general observations. I'm also curious how many men fit into each category, or how many were not easily categorized. And how you met each of them.
New Man cares too much about his standing, about what his co-hamster-ariat thinks and buys and wears.
He cares cares cares cares himself right into the grave when he can finally no longer care.
Bring back Brash.
Pleasantly surprised to read a Straussian take that is pro Joe Rogan. His whole thing is positive masculinity pointing at male-coded interests
One need not be a Joe Rogan. One can be a Jeremy Clarkson. Or a Richard Hammond. Or even a James May. There's loads of examples of positive masculinity, and that's just one show.
None of these seem like especially positive examples to me. Even staying with people in arts and entertainment of a similar generation, Charlie Brooker, Joel Coen, David Bowie, Alfonso Cuarón, or David Lynch all seem to be better examples.
Charlie Brooker's my guy, but I don't think of any of those as men's men. Steve Irwin might have more resonance with the streaming generation.
I'd prefer model of masculinity more focused on believing things that are true and less on uncritically repeating pseudoscience and conspiracies tbh. Rogan has always struck me as oddly passive in that regard
Masculinity is more action-oriented than beliefs-oriented. It is feminine to focus primarily on who believes what
Then why are religions typically started by men (and maintained by women)? Why were pre-20-century professors male? Is theory of relativity or quantum physics something that sounds feminine to you?
I'd say that men are more extreme-oriented, some find their outlet in action, some in thought; and women are more consensus-oriented.
Jesus did talk about belief, but mostly took action. "Take up your cross" etc.
Professors in the 1800s pursued veritas with action and research. Peer review wasn't even a thing at that time and is in fact female-coded.
Primary and secondary educators taught and policed beliefs and were (and are) largely female.
"What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? [...] faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead." (Paul writing to James)
So maybe a more precise way to put it is that belief and action are naturally connected. You think that something is right -- you do it.
As opposed to merely saying the right words in order to achieve social harmony.
Now I wonder how much of the schools focusing on "memorization" is a result of teachers being mostly women. As opposed to doing experiments, figuring things out, learning processes, etc.
Also, how math feels male-coded, because it is not enough to memorize the rules; you actually have to *use* them (even if using them is an abstract action). And saying the right words will not save you if your results are numerically wrong. As opposed to e.g. sociology that a properly trained LLM would pass if it can reproduce the right vibes.
You're right on with the faith/belief to action connection contrasted with words as social harmony creator
My guess is that memorization is actually on the decline, though, at least the type that can be graded objectively. Multiplication tables and phonics are specific examples where there has been push back over the last 20-30 years despite memorizing those being obviously good for taking action.
A lot of people are crying “holy shit — one of those Categories of Lostness describes me to a t.” I think there’s a Barnum Effect going on here. Many people, maybe most, struggle to meet opposing family and societal expectations, or expectations that are not a match with what they really yearn for. Many people go through periods of feeling lost and aimless, and confused about what they really want. Once out of college, where everybody within a mile radius is a possible friend or lover, many people are lonesome and have no peers to confide in and turn to for support. Many people give up for a while on striving for a certain thing. Some give up forever — and for some of those, giving up on the striving is the right decision — and some who gave up are surprised by having the longed-for thing tumble into their lap unexpectedly a few years later. These experiences aren’t Dilemmas that Torture Modern Males, they’re just a part of life in our era, at least of life in our era in a democracy for people middle class or better.
The whole way through I was thinking that a lot of women share these same types of malaise. I think there's a broader issue of society failing everyone in various ways, with sex being a force multiplier for some of them.
What a great post!! I loved it.
Most of the time, when writers try to be accurate, they end up hopeless. And I don't find hopelessness to be an accurate representation of reality.
Your piece is both crudely disturbing and inspiring, I really enjoyed reading it.
So that's it: a comment with no value added except for the delight of appreciation!
Keep writing!
I have never felt as understood by anyone as I did from reading your steps to be a man. The steps for being a man are so stressful, contradictory, and unrewarding, that for two years, I tried to stop being a man. This is happened despite the fact that I was a staunch conservative. I told my wife I wanted to be a woman or non binary, and wasn’t sure which, and nearly lost my marriage in the process. I did not feel like I was a woman, but I would have given anything to stop being a man.
The only thing that pulled me out of the gender dysphoria was becoming a father. I hated the script we give men and husbands, but I loved the script we give fathers. For the first time in my life, I started to feel like I could meet the masculine standard and would be rewarded for doing so. Thank you for putting this into words.
> I loved the script we give fathers.
Great point! The father role has much more flexibility in it; it feels less like a caricature. You can be a leader of your "tribe", but you are also allowed to be sensitive and helping.
And I think that the proper way to recover healthy masculinity is to take the father role and extend it. Become the kind of patriarch your human tribe needs you to be!
(The technical problem is that many boys grow up without fathers, so they have no idea what we are talking about, until they get to that role themselves, and maybe even then they will do it badly.)
Most of the "something-Right" ideas are just a mirror image of wokeness. You fundamentally accept the feminist characterization of men as violent dumb brutes, only instead or rejecting it, you embrace it. That doesn't make you less of an idiot, it only makes you an idiot of a different flavor. It's not just the feminists who will hate you; your own children will probably hate you too. Which ultimately makes it a self-defeating strategy.
Thank you so much for writing this! We, as a society, really need to be having a dialogue about this. I can't make broad generalizations, but I'd like to add my personal experiences as a data point:
I'm approximately "The Man Who Opts Out": As a kid, I was very smart but also very awkward. I think I'm probably autistic. Today I'm an attractive, wealthy, and successful 30-year-old, with a good circle of friends. But I have little romantic experience, and I struggle with self-esteem when dating.
I also have a bit of "The Man Who Provides": I'm talented and passionate in my STEM career and hobbies. I'd like to find a partner who shares those interests, or who is equally talented and passionate about her own interests. But a lot of women on dating apps don't really seem to show the same type of talent or passion, and I don't know how to relate to that, so I swipe left. I've met some very cool women IRL in STEM-focused spaces, but it's Frowned Upon for men to hit on women in STEM spaces, and I never figured out how to navigate that.
What would help men like me? Let's talk through the various solutions you mentioned:
- Structured therapy or psychiatric treatment? No luck... I tried several different therapists. They gave me the standard drugs and CBT for depression, and it didn't work. I might need some kind of specialist therapist, but I don't know how to find one. Which is weird, because people like me are common enough to be a "type"; why isn't this a well-paved path?
- Growing my social life? I have a good circle of friends, but they're mostly STEM men or those mens' partners, and many of them are socially awkward or not conventionally attractive. So that's not very helpful for my self-esteem, and it's hard to use those friendships to prove my viability as a partner. Sometimes I think I should try to make new friends who are more socially adept and attractive, but that idea makes me feel like an asshole.
- Rip off the bandaid and work on overcoming my trauma? I did... Ever since I was a teenager, I've been alternating between "working on overcoming my trauma" and "giving up in exhaustion". I've made some progress, but it's been fifteen years and my self-esteem issues are not yet solved.
- Better role models? Yes. When I was a kid, my parents and teachers praised me for being smart and well-behaved, and they didn't seem worried that I was socially awkward. So, it's no surprise that I ended up smart and well-behaved and socially awkward. I wish I'd had more positive role models for how to be both nerdy and also sociable.
- Specific, understandable "dos"? Yes! Particularly around dating and romance. Socially awkward men have been pleading for this for years, e.g. Scott Aaronson's "comment 171". Please give me clear instructions for when and how it's OK to ask women on dates in STEM-focused spaces. And, crucially: Please give me an assurance that if I follow those instructions and a woman gets mad at me, then she's the one in the wrong.
- Stigmatize sexist behavior towards men? YES. PLEASE. Casual misandry on social media, especially towards nerdy awkward men, did enormous damage to my self-esteem. This stuff became widespread riiiight as I was starting to come out of my shell as a teenage boy. I saw women on the internet saying hateful things about men, and so I feared that the teenage girls in my school probably thought those same things about me.
- Remind men of their worth? Yes. I'm far less successful than average at dating, but far more successful than average in my career. Polite society seems to think my dating failures are because I suck, but my career successes were handed to me on a silver privilege platter. That seems like a double standard. It would be nice if more people would say "hey it's really awesome that you're so talented at your job", instead of resenting my success.
- Encourage men to discuss the issues they face, and listen to them? Yes. It's the only way to make progress on the above. Of course, it needs to be a dialogue! We need to bring together mens' perspectives and womens' perspectives.
- Openly acknowledge biological differences? Ehhhh. I don't feel super attached to traditionally masculine personality traits. Rather, I feel like I'm different on some other axis (probably autism...)
- One more I'd add: I really wish women would ask men on dates more often. I have a lot of trouble asking women on dates. If women were asking me on dates instead, I think I'd have a much easier time. But most women don't ask men on dates.
Do you mind if it is less attractive women who do the approaching? Anecdotal reports suggest that men really really don't like it when unattractive women do the asking.
Unfortunately, the only cure I know for lack of self-esteem is just plain doing more of the thing you suck at. It sucks that dating doesn't generate enough of a positive feedback to keep the process enjoyable compared with excelling in your career. Alas this is life, you take risks, and you keep shooting your shots.
Man who opts out, checking in. Thanks for writing such an insightful piece-- you've got some inner Dostoyevsky! In the good timeline, our culture deeply absorbs what you've written here.
On opting out, yeah it's a tough cycle. I suppose I wouldn't say I opt out exactly; I would happily date, but there's so few opportunities. This is part of the broader trend of friendships being hard to find and grow; if our culture has stronger in-person social networks then finding dates would be much easier. Apps are a waste of time for men unless they're exceptionally good looking. You shouldn't ask out your apartment neighbors cause if it doesn't work out then it'll be awkward. Asking out women at meetups and hobby groups or fitness classes is usually a bad idea because again, if it doesn't work out then things will be awkward. Other women will see she turned you down, so they'll tend to- at least subconsciously- see you as a bit of a loser, and she might just tell the other women at the group that you're weird and dumb or creepy. If you do this once or twice in a group then maybe it's fine, but if you ask many women put them you'll definitely develop the reputation of a creeper. Same with coffee shops and bars that you frequent. People at bars and concerts don't mingle between groups; everybody hangs out with the folks they came with. Plus, since she's a woman and you're a man she doesn't know, she usually automatically assumes you're dangerous and bad, and you need an unusual amount of charm to clean this hurdle.
Without a large community where people know each other and can vouch for you, and where you can demonstrate your good qualities that aren't immediately obvious in five minutes of small talk, without communities like that it's just really difficult to find any dates at all.
Lots of people are still pairing up, of course. And lots of them aren't doing this through apps. So obviously it's more than possible to find dates and find a relationship. My guess is these folks are just some combination of naturally extraverted and lucky enough to find themselves embedded in thriving in-person social networks. If you're introverted and socializing drains you, then you have to swim against the current to build and sustain these in-person social networks, when there's so many books you'd rather be reading in the evenings.
Anyway, this is all just to say that for many people, there's a lot of friction to finding any potential partners at all.
In the rare cases where I do find myself dating a girl for a couple months, my lack of experience with romantic relationships is a hurdle, mainly because I'm not sure how much communication is too little or too much. On one side you're distant and the relationship goes nowhere, and on the other you're needy and clingy. I'm naturally kinda guarded, and I know that women tend to really not like needy men, or men who are too available too quickly, so I probably am too distant to develop the relationship, so it fizzles out.
If/when I get into a relationship that really takes hold and launches, then I expect I'll have a puzzle about how to approach emotional intimacy, again not sure how much is too much or too little. I'll definitely lean towards not opening up, because to a large extent opening up emotionally is synonymous with revealing insecurities and anxieties, which are just fundamentally unattractive in men. All women want their boyfriends/husbands to open up about *some* of their insecurities, anxieties, sadness, etc. But I'm very confident that most women would be turned off if they knew all or the majority of their boyfriends'/husband's emotional weak points. Strength and competence are attractive in men, and emotional weakness is the opposite of that. So I think in most cases, men just really can't fully open up emotionally in their relationships. And knowing/believing this, I'll hold back if and when I find a serious relationship.
This is getting to be a long comment, and I'm on mobile and my food is ready, so I'll leave it at that.
Very much appreciate the article you wrote! It's well written and extremely insightful.
Wonderfully written and insightful, that was a delight to read, and it made me feel seen, as a male Bay Area online dater (it would be amusing if we actually bumped into each other and I was part of the data set for this post!).
I am and have been both a Man Who Is Not and a Man Who Provides at different times in my life, and there were bits of other archetypes that I could identify with as well.
Could really relate to the feeling of being lost and lacking a script, even as a generally-high-functioning and somewhat-accomplished-looking person. The founder melt-down and identity crisis is very relatable. The "if only I perform well and look impressive I will get a pat on the back and love" bit as well, including the part where you don't know what you actually want the whole time, you're just executing the success script until you burn out and suddenly end up with no meaning or purpose, stumbling around in life with little to look forward to except for more confusion and lack of answers. You go on a date and you have no plan in life, no path, no motion towards something, you're comfortable, but you have no idea what you're doing next. That turns out to be pretty off-putting.
It was refreshing to read the experiences of someone who was able to go beyond the judgment and castigation towards a deeper understanding of male struggles, as first world as they might be.
A very general thing that occurs to me when reading this: As a society, we pretty much give the megaphones to the very worst people with the very worst values and most destructive messages. And a lot of the pathology you're talking about here (which echoes Scott's Radicalizing the Romanceless and Scott Aaranson's writing about struggling with sexuality and manhood in his youth) falls out of that fact.
The reality is no one cares, and no one is coming to save you. Your worth is in what you can do and provide. Life owes us nothing, and we deserve nothing. Anything we gain in life will require work, years and years of work to achieve. Even then, you can lose it all at any time. Men have to learn to endure or die; that is the reality.
> The best I can do for these men is recommend they join communities where genuine emotional bonds can be forged. These still exist, although they’re frighteningly hard to find in modern society
Any advice on finding them?
I wonder if Freemasonry still counts?
I'm really, really impressed by your writing here, whoever you are. Your descriptions of these types of men, and what it is like to date them, are very detailed and in-depth.
Every time I discover a piece of content that stimulates me, that I find valuable, mature, empathetic, insightful or impressive in some other way, I try to imagine what the day-to-day thoughts and feelings and sensations and experiences of the author are: "How could they produce this particular sentence, this particular paragraph, this particular text?"
Your text here caused that in me: "What kind of experiences did this person have? What is that person like? I'm curious!"
Anyway, besides my appreciation of the writing itself: Thank you for writing this. This has been insightful. I particularly enjoyed how you combined all your experience with insightful observations and a huge dose of empathy.
eh.
i wish you hadn't tied it to dating.
The problem with women analyzing us is you always do it in relation to you and your needs. If you want us to be whole, it's because it's good for you: you can finally date the unicorn you chase for so long. Dating brings up the specter of that, and it poisons things.
your examples are ok, but too much of our problem is how much of our worth is given by you. Most men's value is based on having a woman, to the point incels get depressed over that to the point of excluding any other source of value, and insulting men is done by attacking the lack of values they have that attracts them.
Somehow we exist in a paradox of being ourself and yet making ourselves attractive to you, and its not a good thing. I don't know if there is a neutral state where you like us for us-a lot of those guys are doing things for you: not because they want to-be red pill, not be a starving artist, mastering relationship expectations or the woman ditches them...
idk the answer. i opted out and Bertie Wooster is my model I guess. He likes women, is a critic of them but doesn't hate them but the last thing he wants is to pair his life with one: he just wants to have fun with the good life, and his man jeeves has his back. not one everyone can do though.
Maybe someday we can all have our own AI Jeeves.
Ask Jeeves being one of the first search engines feels fitting here.
I'm not sure unreality helps. The entire vtuber industry is all about providing a cute hybrid real/virtual girl to simp for, and its startlingly effective. Bertie needed jeeves to reign him in as much as anything.
The description of the whole man made me smile
The author has good intentions, but the angle of this article (from the direction of pity) and subsequently all policy proposals will never work. They almost feel like a recreation of a traditional society, sanitized of every aspect that’s politically incorrect, a recreation of tradition in the 21st century. Well, I don’t think men were very happy and fulfilled in a traditional society either. I think the incel of the modern world (with abundant access to high quality pornography and strip clubs) is probably happier than the average patriarch of the ancient world with his prude moralizing wife, 3+ kids to feed and extended family to talk to daily.
What’s true, which the author realizes and people are starting to realize now is that without that tradition a large percentage of men start opting out, to the detriment of society. I have a lot of incel friends, and been a part of many incel chat groups, and what you’d imagine - resentment, disaffection, hate is not nearly as prevalent as you’d think. That’s just a small vocal minority. What actually is common is just a pernicious sense of apathy, weariness, and indifference. You swipe on the apps, maybe go on some dates, but maybe none of the dates are even half as cute as the girls you see on TikTok, forget pornstars and you just let things fizzle out. In fact to this population, the girl has to make it extremely easy, to make it a relationship, or she has to be an absolute 10/10 to rile him up. Eventually this apathy continues till his 30s, at which point if you’re a well off Bay Area Engineer, some girl will eventually chase you down and you won’t put up much of a resistance and get married.
Nowadays even in thirties, men seem to be opting out. I frankly don’t think this has anything to do with feminism, we could invert it tomorrow, have every girl bow in respect to every man who passes by her and I don’t think this will increase the enthusiasm to get hitched. Sometimes I think, this is all due to internet, before the village man could go his life never looking at beautiful girls, now from a young age he can see the crème de la crème and suddenly the prospects he has don’t seem all that enticing.
But while this might partly be true, I think this is not the driving force. The driving force is that the modern world is being increasingly experienced as an absurd and meaningless experience. Thousands of pundits, have given their explanations, the lack of god, too much comfort, too much freedom etc, and at this point even these explanations are becoming tired and I won’t rehash them except to say that what we have is no small problem. Once a society reaches this state, it is probably irreversible and can only lead to the birth of something new. In fact, if the civilization vital energy is to be reclaimed and men are to start pursuing women for families again, my modest policy of strapping healthy 18 yr old to rockets and trying to colonize Mars is the only one that has a chance of working I think.
Seeing attractive people on the screen creates unrealistic expectations for both men and women. Men expect a nymphomaniac porn star. Women expect a billionaire vampire. The reality disappoints. The women sometimes settle for a non-billionaire non-vampire when they hear the biological clock ticking. Sometimes.
What I find fascinating is that some of the attractive women who have rejected me many years ago are still single, and now they are also approaching fifty, so I think that if they ever wanted to have a family, that option is probably not on the table anymore. And they don't want to remain single; they keep complaining about that. It's just, they can't meet a man whom they would consider their equal. From their perspective, all men who were interested in them were losers. (Logically, that would include me. I could be offended, but I remind myself that I found a partner later; it's they who did not.)
I also know some men who are alone, and don't want to be, who at some moment had a woman interested in them, but for some reason she was not good enough.
I guess some people do not understand the concept of the fair price on the dating market. The best you can get is, by definition, the best you can get. If you want better, you should work hard to improve yourself, and you should socialize a lot more, because to some degree it's a numbers game. But once you have met, dunno, hundred or thousand potential partners, then the best of them probably *is* your equal, whether you believe it or not; the market has spoken. And if you are a woman past 30, or a man past 40, you are not getting more attractive; you are just getting older. Take the best option you have, or choose to stay alone forever; anything else is probably wishful thinking.
By the way, I believe that it is a better choice to stay alone, if the alternative is e.g. to be with an abusive person, or a drug addict, or someone like that. Some people have a negative value. But many of the lonely people I know had an option to be with someone of a positive value, they just believed that they could do better. They believed wrong.
I did know a woman who only married after she gave up on Lymond of Crawford, but I don't know how common the pattern is.
I think it would be an interesting exercise for everyone to make two columns: on the left side, put the positive traits you require your hypothetical partner to have; on the right side, put the positive traits *you* have. If the left side is like 10x longer than the right side, that explains why you are still single. :D
It probably works better if you let them fill in the left side *before* you tell them what will be on the right side. Also, if they start padding the right column with "obvious" things such as: I don't do drugs, or I have never murdered anyone, remind them to also put those things to the left column.
In reality, I think your right column should probably even be slightly *longer*, because people are often not perfectly aligned: you can have a positive trait that your partner does not particularly care about. For example, I am proud of my math skills, but my wife does not care about that. So from her perspective, my list of good traits has one item less than it has from my perspective.
>I think the incel of the modern world (with abundant access to high quality pornography and strip clubs) is probably happier than the average patriarch of the ancient world with his prude moralizing wife, 3+ kids to feed and extended family to talk to daily.
What evidence do you have for this claim?
It's interesting to see this taxonomy, as one of the people it ought to cover, and clearly fall through the cracks. I am somewhat like an 'Is Not', but a little like 'With a Plan', especially when my job's going well. Look at my youth and I'm clearly 'Opts Out,' except that I had no *desire* to date, and then I did, ultimately, manage to (want to, and successfully attempt to) date in college, and then after I left that city for the Bay. I found a community, but then it drifted away (mostly COVID's fault but it was already starting beforehand), and a job, despite serious psych issues, but now I don't have one. Meet me at a meetup or, probably, at a date, and I'd sound much more like the Man With a Plan, except I always knew I didn't have a plan. (It cuts just as deep not to have one, I'm just more used to it.)
On the other hand, I haven't tried to date in years either. I'm polyamorous, but have only a secondary (tertiary?) relationship. I suspect if I said 'NVM I'm going to try monogamy' our relationship would be basically unchanged. I haven't tried to find a primary, because... I'm underconfident, mostly.
Maybe call it another category - The Man Who's Waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring... Or things not mentioned by Dr. Seuss. Waiting for something to make them feel ready to try again. For their job to go well so they're not embarrassed to talk about it, or to get a little better in shape, or for their hobbies to be exciting and a good topic of conversation, or, or, or. Maybe he's looking for a better way to find people than swiping, or maybe he's recognized social media and Youtube are terrible for him and receded from the world instead. He hasn't given up, or at least tells himself he hasn't. Probably he doesn't burn with desire for kids, so the pressure to start trying is weaker - it gets harder every year, but not *that much*.
I know a few others of men like this. The youth varies a lot from mine; college tends to be similar, an academic field (usually Math or Physics, sometimes CS) picked because it was appealing, and seemed like it wasn't *useless*, and then wasn't content with academia (sometimes because it kinda sucked, sometimes because LW pointed out that academia was a trap and he believed them), got a programming-like job which kinda worked for him, but not that well.
Though despite having just written a long comment in response... I don't actually think this post is much good. It's a perspective I'm interested to hear, but executed not so well. I found myself skimming repeatedly, because I wanted to get to the next idea and there were extra paragraphs that didn't convey anything new.
This was 15,200 words. I think it would have made a good 8000-word post, and possibly an excellent 5000-word post. At its actual length it's thought-provoking but mediocre.
Thank you for writing this. I tried making a more in-depth reply but it wound up an inchoate emotional mess, so just... thank you.
Pleasant to read overall (of course it is, there's a significant amount of "The Man who Opts Out" that I recognize in myself, to the extent that I expect some Barnum effect to be going on - although I have not yet felt an urge to opt back in), but I think I disagree with this suggestion:
> Polite society needs to get better at saying, “Men are hurting, and we care about their specific needs, and we want to hear from them and make things better for them.”
"Polite society" has worn as luxury beliefs positions on racial, environmental, economic issues, issues of political polarization and who knows what else for a while now, and produced what is probably in the order of terabytes of written, filmed and spoken material in the process. I cannot point to any tangible impact on any of these issues that resulted from this material. So I very much doubt that making it adopt "healthy approach to manhood" as the next fashionable thing to care about will make any difference.
If anything, I think realizing that polite society is not the entirety of the idea-space around things and going foraging for ideas elsewhere (not necessarily in the alt-right/manosphere, which I agree with the author are cesspools) is an important part of intellectually maturing.
As a man who has managed to attain wholeness but might well not have, and as the father of a tweenage son whose social future I worry about, I found a lot to chew on here. Thanks.
I will say that my own path to wholeness feels so idiosyncratic, and so dependent on both my unusual-for-men personality traits and my unusual-for-anyone socioeconomic privileges, that I have hesitated to give any advice to others on it-- my son being the exception who proves the rule. There are specific mechanical "life hacks I wish I had known about as a lonely teenage boy" posts I could write, but most of what has been really important to me seems very hard to generalize. But maybe I am underestimating what I have to teach, and that is worth chewing on.
A serious question: Re. "The fact is, men enjoy some privileges that women do not in Western society." What are some of these privileges? They certainly aren't in college admissions, or the job market, or the publishing industry, or the dating scene, or courts of law.
Off the top of me head:
- you don’t need to be perpetually concerned with and take precautions against being physically harmed or killed by the opposite sex in many many casual situations you, as a man, don’t think twice about
- On a similar note: adventurous experiences are much more available to you. Like, you can decide to backpack through India and whatnot; and while it is somewhat dangerous, you do not remotely face the odds of rape/harm/murder a woman in a similar position does
- if you are stupid or unlucky with birth control, you are not stuck with the prospect of either going through awfully grueling physical process or ending the pregnancy (during which process you may be harassed and or harmed by various ‘pro-lifers’ ) - whatever other effects it may have on your life
- growing up, very very few career plans you may have would raise eye-brows or face scepticism (yes, we all can think of a couple examples, but nowhere near what girls do)
- in terms of getting into having kids or settling down with a partner, you have many many more years than a woman does to even decide if you want that
- if you exhibit minimal caring/responsible behaviours (care about and connect to your kids, cook, clean..), you are applauded to the moon and back (guess what women get for the same)
- you don’t deal with like a milk glass of blood slowly draining from your body every single month for decade. Imagine what that would be like and how it would affect the ease of doing things.
I could go on but I trust you get the gist.
This current trend of male self-pity is quite reminiscent of the ‘man-flu’ situation the author derides as fictional (except it is not, ask a straight female friend with a partner).
Thank you. That is a valid list, but I don't see it as adding up to men being privileged on net. The significant disadvantages you list all have parallels for men. As a man,
- you must be perpetually concerned with a false rape charge, which is very likely to lead to conviction, and which carries a life sentence in 6 states and a very long sentence in most
- you are much more likely to be harassed by dangerous men trying to prove how tough they are, and are 3.7 times as likely as a woman to be murdered
- you are expected to stand up to such harassers, but much more likely than a woman to be sent to prison if you do
- if stupid or unlucky with birth control, or trapped by a woman claiming to be on birth control who isn't, will be stuck with being forced to support a child you don't want, or don't get to see except on weekends, if your partner wants to keep it
- growing up, /most/ of your career plans raise eye-brows or face skepticism because they're for occupations in which you wouldn't make enough money to support a family by yourself; you eventually have to take a high-paying job that you hate just to get a date
- need much more time to settle down with a partner than a woman does, because it takes a typical man many times as long to find someone willing to date him than it takes a woman to find a man willing to date her. It's common for a man to go years without a date despite spending hours each week trying to get one, or to be a virgin throughout his twenties despite spending much of his free time trying to lose that virginity.
The remaining privileges that men have aren't negligible, but if the worst of them is not having to put up with menses, I don't see it as summing up to more than the privileges women have. The privilege to deny being privileged is one of them that I'd like.
Men are significantly more likely to be killed by a stranger than women are, at least in the United States.
True enough. I vividly remember a male friend telling me what it’s like: to know that if things really go south he is “expendable cannon fodder” in a number of scenarios; trying to date as a short guy (he’s very cute but very short indeed), and the pressure to make money. Now, menses and pregnancy are no joke; I doubt you’d seriously consider it a reasonable trade off for a man’s life if you could actually know what it’s like. However, given that i would not want to wake up a man, I guess ai have to agree with you on the net balance.
Add menopause to physical problems for women. I've also heard that women are more prone to autoimmune disorders.
Pregnancy and expectations of child care are very big ones. Certainly for couples with lots of kids.
it sucks for everyone honestly, i think men only get mad because people think we have it totally better. Just we hide it more sometimes. Some stuff i carry to my grave.
i wish we could all make life suck less for each other.
As a man, if you complain, you are seen as unmanly and unattractive, but if you don't complain, it gets taken as evidence than you have it better.
(I agree that it sucks for all, and that we all should strive to be nicer to each other.)
I countered a man who was complaining about women being allowed to wear lighter weight clothes in summer by pointing out that men could wear warmer clothes in winter. (This would would have been about 1980.)
I didn't point out that nylons didn't breathe.
The main disadvantages men have, as I see it, are:
- being told to go to the end of the line in college applications, job applications, grant applications, manuscript submissions, and every other selective process other than the selective service
- having to flirt with one hundred to one thousand women to get one date, and risk being seen as a toxic, aggressive male every time the answer is "no"
- being the only one in a heterosexual relationship who risks condemnation or even a rape accusation for escalating too rapidly, in a society which condemns every successful male role model for escalation, AND YET always being required to be the one who initiates contact and escalates at every step
But possibly the worst problem men have is living in a society which will put you in prison if you ever try to live up to its standard of manliness. I've stood by and watched helpless people being abused more times than I care to admit, because the legal standard in the US for self-defense is that you can't claim defense of others unless the abuser always escalates the violence first. And the nature of street fights is that the person who escalates the violence first, wins. So good Samaritans either lose, or go to prison. Every time it happens, it destroys me.
I stood by and watched one skinny teenager terrorize an entire DC streetcar, especially a quadriplegic girl whose family watched while he towered over her immobile body menacingly. I could have crushed him with one hand, but I knew that if I did, the next day's newspapers would say "White man beats up black teenager". I knew he might have a gun; I knew some of the other teenagers on the car might be his friends; I knew I wasn't legally allowed to touch him as long as he didn't touch anyone else. I saw 4 policemen boarding the next car down, trying to apprehend /another/, unrelated teenager who was at the same moment terrorizing /that/ car. I ran out and told them we needed one of them in our car. They ignored me, and the train pulled out of that station while I was still on the platform. I never found out what happened.
I stood by in a traffic jam and watched a young man jump out of his car and run over to scream violent threats at an old lady of about ninety for over a minute because she honked her horn at him. I bet she never drove that car again.
I stay awake at night watching replays of victims I didn't save. I cannot be a man here. I cannot respond quickly to danger with confident action, because society will destroy me if I do. And after enough times of not doing so, I can't. You can't just choose to be brave after a lifetime of cowardice. The inner spirit is gone. By the time I realized life as a coward isn't worthwhile, my body was too old and broken to change.
And the kicker is, the heavy legislative hand that is trying to protect people by reserving the use of violence to the state, is making those people more vulnerable. There were dozens of other people in that streetcar; not one of them said a word to the boy as he marched up and down the car threatening them. Dozens of able-bodied men sat in that 4-lane traffic jam and watched with me as that young man terrorized that old woman.
Yeah, self-defense is legal in theory, but the actual window where you can defend yourself is impractically tiny. You have to be physically attacked first; but the person who gets physically attacked first usually loses the fight. Plus you never know whether the other person has a knife or a gun, in which case the first successful attack could mean it's game over for you.
A possible solution is to have a *group* of good Samaritans. One gets attacked, the others finish the fight. But unless you are traveling with your friends, it is difficult to coordinate this; the other men will probably chicken out.
Besides which, even if you have a clear case of legal self-defense or other-defense, you're still likely to be charged, and the legal costs may bankrupt you even if you win. AFAIK the only way to try to get compensation from the state if you were charged but not convicted is to charge the prosecutor with malicious or selective prosecution, which requires proving that the prosecutor had ulterior motives.
These are parallels, but I wouldn't say they're symmetrical. E.g. getting raped seems rather more intense than a false rape allegation, although both can be life-changing.
It's true that being a man places me in considerable relative danger, but it also gives me a propensity to seek out or provoke dangerous situations. Certain jobs come with a risk of being mangled, like mine, but maybe it's worth it not to rot behind a desk.
Getting raped compares with getting 10 years in prison?
The comparison was between rape, and a false rape charge. Find the rates for conviction and time served, and let me know which you'd prefer.
I don't think it's possible to find the conviction rate for false rape charges, because no one can know what they are. But I think it's more than 50%, from my sample size of 1. I sat in on one rape trial, in which there was no evidence that a rape had occurred, and a great deal of evidence that it had not; and it resulted in a conviction. So my estimate of expected prison time served for a false charge is 10 years * ((1+1) / (2+1) ~ 7 years (Laplace smoothed), depending on the US state, which is definitely worse than being raped.
Another angle is that men are at some risk of getting raped-- possibly les risk than women, but if they are raped, it's very unlikely to be taken seriously.
Indeed, and that should be factored into a prison term. But I have to say that it has never been a concern in my daily life.
It's considered normal for men to wear comfortable shoes.
a woman can wear a pink t-shirt with a cute animal on it, and not have her sexuality judged. trade?
No. I've been very stubborn about wearing comfortable shoes my whole life, and I think it was a good choice.
Not having to menstruate is a biological thing, not a social thing, so I don't think it really makes sense to describe it as a "privilege".
I was very confused on being notified of your comment, because I typed in nearly those exact words a few days ago, then never posted them.
I never posted them because trying to delineate biological things from social things turns out to be tricky, because society is biologically constructed.
It is ironic that the woke movement, which wants to simply replace the word "sex" everywhere with "gender", is also the movement which virulently opposes sociobiology, the science of how biological evolution guides the evolution of society. You can't say a sex is a gender unless you believe that society = biology; but to do that, you have to believe either that society is biologically constructed (which they won't), or that biology is socially constructed (which would be insane).
1. on the other hand, you as a woman will never be asked to fight, be it to prove your womanhood, or to defend your mate, or in war. You are not disposable and will never be accused of cowardice.
you will never be seen as a threat and shunned because you are the wrong color or size or happen to be strolling at the same time a woman is.
2. the amount of men who do this are tiny and this is a woman error thinking we like doing it alone because you want to do so.
you want it? ok, the price of that freedom is no one will hug or touch you for periods of five years.
3. women get custody so we can see you take our kids away and poison their minds against us after a divorce, and the woman needs to be visibly crazy or totally uninterested to change that. when it goes bad it goes bad for everyone, in different ways.
4. that lack of choice had upsides too. I went to technical school and everyone, male and female, tried every vocation for their first year. All the women chose hairdressing, drafting, and graphic design. Putting on a welding mask strips a lot of illusions for both men and women.
a lot of what men did they had to, its not a choice they'd wish on people.
5. we have a five year gap on you unless we are exceptional, and that is balanced by the fact we have to prove worthy. women suffer from too much attention, men suffer from none at all.
6. no one looks at your job or bankbook to see if you are worth it. no one judges a woman by what car she owns, what career she is in, or how successful she is.
7. yeah it sucks, but you will also outlive us significantly in revenge, and men often die horribly. every male in my mother's family died ten years or more before their wife, and many didn't go out well or lucid
we kind of pay for it in the final stretch. My job made me aware of it: you know an older couple, or male patrons, then one day the wife is pushing them in a wheelchair due to dementia.
life is hard for us guys too: you only idealize the good parts you see us have. Its a lot more mixed but we hide it better from you.
I think, on reflection, that the real problem is not to measure privilege more precisely, but that we need to stop using that word. It's always used as a binary: someone IS or IS NOT privileged. And then that judgement is used to make a binary decision: someone IS or IS NOT allowed to speak, on any political subject, even one which has no relevance to their particular form of privilege.
Since Trump was elected again, I've been arguing with a lot of Marxists who are agitating for a civil war in one of my online communities. One of their favorite tactics is to dismiss everything I say because I'm "privileged", even though these guys are also white males, and most of them make a lot more money than I do. All they have to do is say the word "privileged", and then everyone pretends I'm a racist misogynist hater of immigrants making big bucks at an evil corporation. The only evidence needed to make the label "privileged" stick is that a person opposes Marxism.
That's why I'm so sensitive to being called "privileged". I wouldn't mind admitting that, yes, I have some privileges, if doing so didn't mean I immediately lose my right to speak.
One of the many people who wrote that my opposition to bloody revolution proves that things are working fine for me, therefore I'm privileged, therefore I'm secretly a far-right white supremacist, is a white male middle manager for a huge corporation and makes at least 5 times as much money as me. The word "privileged" now means someone who opposes Marxist economics and Marxist violence. Rich white Marxist corporate managers and department chairs who want revolution are not privileged; poor people who oppose Marxism or civil war are.
I recognize that society gives people asymmetrical advantages, but the "privilege" framing is purposefully tendentious and I reject it entirely.
I can't tell what you mean to say. Whose privilege framing? Also, "framing" is a vague word, so I might still not understand without more specificity about what you reject.
I reject the characterization of societal advantage as privilege, by the people who have invented and popularized that usage of the term.
If we center on *privileges in Western society* - thus omit universal patterns across cultures and biological (dis)advantages - what is left in this list? If anything, Western societies developed to accommodate female predicaments to an unprecedented degree, largely thanks to good will of the men of Enlightenment. In return, mild and educated modern men are trashed daily in broad strokes. Whence this "progressive" vile nihilism, that men have to be pressed harder?
This sentiment from the manosphere is not likeable but bitterly true: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/xej7xb/nobody_gives_a_fuk_about_men_unless_you_are/
>If anything, Western societies developed to accommodate female predicaments to an unprecedented degree, largely thanks to good will of the men of Enlightenment. In return, mild and educated modern men are trashed daily in broad strokes.
That is true.
We've had, what, a little over a hundred years of feminist victories by now, and the end result is that women as a group hate and fear men far more now than they did at the beginning of the process (cf. man vs. bear).
I don't like it.
It's a little difficult to put a finger on the reason. Maybe it's the constant baseline assumption that purpose is something closely tied to community, which my rationalist soul rebels against. Maybe it's the strict gender essentialism. Maybe it's the implicit praise of initiation rituals and the like - we even had a review recently, about the Aboriginals, which made me intensely relieved that we as a society are making good progress in destroying such practices.
Maybe it's the whole notion of dating apps, filtering through a huge number of people in what seems to be a rather superficial way - I wouldn't expect to derive a lot of romantically-relevant information from someone's dating app profile, nor from a single conversation on a date, both of which are susceptible to all sorts of bad incentives because their purpose is, after all, to get someone to like you. Not that this is a bad thing about the review, specifically - apparently this is how things are done in the Bay Area. And maybe the author is simply good at seeing through people (which, in my mind, can be a source of power imbalance in a relationship, especially with how socially inept the people described here seem to be - but whatever, that's not the point).
After reading this, I'm somewhat more inclined towards taking "polite society" seriously, because even those guys seem better to me on the whole.
I agree, especially about the initiation rituals.
I’m at the halfway stage for being a type 1, man that is not. The “hobbies aren’t real community” stuff paired with an imploding career, a lack of real relationships, clinical depression, bad experiences with therapists… all of it is hitting home.
A sobering thought is that this essay was written on the basis of a woman's experiences with those men who can still muster the courage to go on dates at all; there is an enormous reservoir of single men who have given up on dating so completely that they are totally invisible to women.
More a comment as a guy who sits the fence between your categories of "THE MAN WHO IS NOT" and "OPT OUT" and found a happy life*, is to tell men to simply put down their self imposed American made bag of guilt bricks they are carrying and just embrace it and go full transactional, punting is a long and proud tradition everywhere but America. Want sex, buy it. Want a girlfriend, rent one. Want a wife, buy and import her. Want conversation, rent it. .Move to a country where you will be valued transactionally. Become a sex tourist. There are large communities of punters outside the US, they aren't misogynists and they provide a hobby group you all enjoy. Plenty of hot women in refugees camps will sell their entire lives to you forever to get out; or at least seven years but that's ok, get a new one after that.
Likewise take a step down if you don't want to punt. Plenty of American poverty women will take you if you give them a place to live, free drugs, or raise their existing three kids with three dads, they'll even give you a kid too to lock it in. Those relationships can even last forty or fifty years as neither of you are tied to love but just comfort, like old shoes, i.e. life is easier together than apart. She might work.the 7-11 and never anything more, that's ok.
Quit playing "peer" American women's games like this poster or trying to measure yourself by their effectively unobtainable stick, it's a fools errand. Plenty of guys succeed in that game, you aren't them nor do you have to be, just find the path of a punter and be ok with who you are. No shame in that.
* Couple kids that are actually mine blood tests to prove it, grandkids, divorced, etc
plenty of shame in that, actually. the problem with transactional stuff is it makes everything meaningless: you want a wife, not a sex slave, and you want her to love you not put up with you because you buy her and are her mealticket.
yeah guys long to sleep with women but jesus we have some self-respect not to be ruled by that to the point we'd be a wallet with a dick attached.
You couldn't be more wrong my friend but each his own.
Thank you for writing that, I think it's a very constructive idea with really good execution.
I do feel like it's unintentionally painting a pretty good picture of becoming a beast, seems a hell lot easier than becoming whole, or maybe a hell lot possible?
Another thing is that, there are lots of mentions of mentors, peers, stuff like that, and maybe I only worked in bad companies until now but I have a hard time imagining getting that from work, especially now that people change companies kind of fast. So that would mean you must get that somewhere else, which unless it's a carefully chosen hobby may cut into your capacity to provide. I guess building a good life is just that hard huh?
"Dates with these men leave me worried. Not for myself, but for these sullen ghosts who seem on the verge of giving up. There’s so much obvious potential within them, yet society offers them so few ladders to climb back from the pit of depression they’ve fallen into. When those ladders do exist, they're often missing rungs or spontaneously snap when men put their full weight on them."
I really liked this paragraph. I think it nails a particular split that I've seen in our society... then men who are on track to a successful life have often been on it since birth, and they really can't understand or help those who have fallen off of it. And there's a huge split after college, especially for the sort of man who moves to the Bay Area right after college. Clearly you are *expected* to:
a) Get a job that uses your brain and college education to achieve high income, with regular advancement for the rest of your life. You should never be unemployed for more than a few months, ideally never at all.
b) Say goodbye to all the friends you had earlier in your life who didn't move out there with you. They will be replaced by newer, better, more convenient friends.
c) Have a series of short-term relationships with pretty, charming, quirky young women near your own age. After, like, 3 of those, you'll get engaged, have a big flashy wedding, and then have 2.5 kids. You'll remain married for life. The majority of your free time will be spent taking care of those kids, and the majority of your social circle will be other nuclear families, particularly the parents of your kids' friends.
That's all fine. It's a good life plan! It's what my parents did, and they seem pretty happy. But it's fragile. If anything goes wrong, it's really hard to recover, and then the whole thing gets messed up.
a) Can't get a job? Sucks to be you. Now all your savings are rapidly disappearingon rent that's priced for full-time salaried people, while your student loans are coming due. There's a growing hole in your resume, and a greater sense of desparation that comes across in your job interviews. "Grinding leetcode" doesn't look nearly as good on your resume as a job or internship, and everyone knows it. You can't really afford to go back to school, and it's not clear what you should study even if you could. Why would a second degree be better than the first? Plus you forget academic stuff and lose connections with professors to write recommendation letters, so it's just hard to re-enter that whole system.
(continuing)
b) Can't find friends? Sucks to be you. People in the city are understandably wary of being friends with a complete stranger. Most of them meet through parties and social groups that you're not part of and can't break into. You still miss your old friends, and it feels wrong to just replace them with different people. How can I make friends knowing that these people will be replaced at the drop of a hat whenever it's inconvenient?
c) Can't find a relationship/wife? Yeah, you'll no get no sympathy. The longer you stay single,the creepier and more desparate you'll seem. Harder and harder to join those police social parties where someone can introduce you to a friend-of-a-friend who's also single. Instead you're stuck in the same swamp of apps, dive bars, and speed dating events that normal women have all completely checked out of.
It's not like this when you're younger. As a kid, there's a clear progression from one grade to the next, with people to help you and a system that wants you to make progress. In the worst case you might get held back a grade. The other kids might bully you but at least they can't exile you from society. College, of course, has an active interest in keeping as many students there as possible, all of them paying tuition and adding to the prestige of the school.
But after College is just such a big shock to the "real world." No one cares, at all, about a young man who Failed to Launch. In my darker moments, I think society actually *wants* them to fail and go away. Certainly in the Bay Area, there's a drastic shortage of housing and a large gender imbalance, and many tech companies are cutting down on hiring new grads... It would make a lot of things easier if some of those excess young men just, uh, disappeared. *Poof*, they're gone... not *dead* necessarily, but maybe they can become one of those homeless than no one looks at and can't be tracked in official statistics.
I'll end this by being optimistic. People still care, at least in an abstract way, and there are many volunteering to help. There are still ways to get back on track and have a good life, even after the worst sort of tragedies. But it's hard, damn hard. We need to find more ways than "standard success path" to suit the varieties of people struggling through life.
“a fit, smart CEO or Sr Director who is yearning for a partner but is single because he’s awkward” - please, give me a break, this is a fantasy. This has literally never happened (unless there is actual clinical autism involved…and even then).
Straight women are no strangers to lowering standards and tolerating all kinds of things for a man with these qualities (and less). Such guys may or may not be “lost” but they are certainly not desperately single.
(I’m a gay woman who’s worked in tech my entire life so i’m no stranger to the Bay Area and its inhabitants, though I live in EU now)
This makes me strongly suspect that this is not a truthful account but rather a charming Carrie Bradshaw cos-play inspired by the recent Sex and the City revival;)
TBH I think our ghost writer is that "famous" "autistic" substack Bay area sex worker, forget her handle, starts with an "A". Sounds like her even stylewise and most think, rightly so, it's just all made up as part of influencer entertainment brand building.
I want to hug the author and I want her to become a positive role model for society. I wonder if there is any way I can help with that.
Loved the review! Where or how do you find actual community that is not this loose acquaintance stuff of the running or book club? I don't live in the Bay Area so there is no Rationalism community.
Consider joining a church/synagogue/mosque/temple. Look for one with a healthy balance of new grads, young families, middle-aged families with kids, and elderly members. Look for one whose politics you are comfortable with (my synagogue is apolitical).
A community that carries the traditions of their ancestors from hundreds/thousands of years ago will not flake on you as a kickball teammate might.
Despite being an atheist that reads Rationalism blogs, I have actually been to quite a few local churches in pursuit of a congregation to join. My fiancee is Christian and grew up in one. However what we've experienced is that there are no young(ish) people (like ourselves), what with religion dying out and whatnot. And even so, this sense of an actual community has not been present, which is the main reason we have not stuck around.
But also I feel a bit weird with this advice, joining a religious community for non-religious reasons feel a bit weird. I guess I'm lucky to have her as an alibi, I just wonder if this advice generalizes? For this reason, synagogues, mosques and temples feel off limit.
Buddhist communities have a good number of young people in them.
Ironically(?) I have got quite interested in Buddhism after reading Scott's Jhana blogs a few years ago. Now I practice meditation and would love a community around that. However I don't think I live somewhere big enough for that to be a thing, and besides it kinda seems to me like modern Buddhists are kinda missing the whole meditation is the point, thing. Too much ritual and focus on tradition, it seems to my outsider eyes (unless we're talking something like Zen, but then you're being even more niche).
I know I'm being picky here and that this kinda goes against my earlier ask for community though.
Well, it’s not hard to find out what’s in your area. Many Buddhist centers are out in the country, though often. within driving distance (an hour or 2) of big cities. There is some ritual, but it’s small compared with church rituals, and pretty inoffensive, and you can view most of it as another kind of mind training. The Zen Mountain Monastery in New York State has a big online presence, including online group meditation and instruction. The way you really get to know other people in the sangha under these conditions is going to occasional meditation or meditation instruction retreats at the center. Some last a weekend, some longer. I used to do a lot of that kind of thing, and it was a very good experience for me, both the meditation itself and the people I met
I've found that people who join communities for community's sake aren't the people who keep it alive, that they bounce as soon as there's a problem. You have to be dedicated to something other than just the community, some external principle, to keep going when it's tough; that commitment is what gives community its power.
Just a comment from the other side, most people that go to church (euphemism here for any religious gathering) go for the social aspect. I forget the numbers but I've seen something like "The overwhelming number of observant Jews are atheist at worst, agnostic at best" and the numbers honestly aren't that lower in most other cultural churches, i.e. "we attend because we see value in the traditions, identity, and social gatherings even if we don't believe in actual faith". The only people I really see in open denial of this are Protestants but they get around it via congregation and denomination shopping, i.e. "we will keep changing churches until we find a like minded one socially so we can pretend it's the one and only true church, not that we are going for the music". And "true believers" are even fine with that, exposure can lead to faith (fake it until you make it), your kids might accidentally become true believers being raised in the ecosystem, or their kids might, etc.. Besides, you all tithe and help pay the bills too via offerings, plus a full congregation is always more enjoyable that an empty one, motives aside. I find C&E folk (Christmas and Eastern Christians, insider slang for those that attend only on holidays in any religion) think the regulars judge them and we don't; no more than bar regulars judge people that only show up on St. Patrick's day. Sure parking sucks that day and you will grumble to your friends your regular pew/stool is taken but the patronage is nice and it keeps you culturally relevant.
Where I am going on that though is it's OK to go for non-religious reasons, it's the common case. What you really want to look for if you are trying to socialize though is you want churches that are big enough to have formal social groups AND THEN ATTEND THEM as that is 99% of the socializing / click building, i.e. you want to find churches that have bible studies with more than five people, weekly picnics, charity volunteer activities, ethnic dance and cultural classes, etc. Take your kids to "Awana Kids" (that is the name of a thing, google if if you have never heard of it, it's "big") even if you don't believe, it will get you in to the "in crowd". Don't focus so much on the Sunday service, though of course attend, but the secondary services and groups. Many churches immediately post-service have coffee hour (or social hour, picnics, lunch, etc), it needs to become mandatory in your life to stick around for as that is where all the actual social community building happens, i.e. it's really just there to gossip.
Lastly the generational thing is less a problem than you think though it is a problem. The main problem is folk like you wonder off so when the next young family shows up, the same problem. You basically get a new young family that stops by every other week but they are the only one so they don't come back and you end up with ships just passing in the night whereas if they would stick around, they would rope in the other new young family that stop by two weeks hence, recursive ad infinitum. Also if you got friends, bring them. You don't need to be embarrassed, you would invite them to other social gatherings.
All that said, you want to go to an actual church, not a social group pretending to be a church like the Gospel of Wealth Protestants, Unitarians, American Yoga Apple iBuddhists, etc. End of the day you need that authentic core to keep the cultural feel going as people like you come and go hence honestly you are better off going to a conversative church but I mean that with a small "c" as they give the "church feeling" (and are generally more welcoming) that newer churches which can't differentiate themselves from a nightclub cosplaying religion and just trying to get "likes". In Christianity in America, your local Greek or Serbian Orthodox Church is good like that as long as they have a critical mass of parishioners (i.e. a local community, 50+ regular parishioners I would say) or even something like a Tridentine Mass Roman Catholic Church. If you have a decent Japanese local population, any Buddhist church that still does Bon Odori regularly fits that bill. Hindi never struck me as a particular social religion nor non-Japanese Buddhism so I'd skip those. Islam is a much harder one to break into socially for the non-faithful given it's emphasis on submission coupled with community policing but there are plenty of C&E Muslims around the world living happy liberal secular lives as evidenced in Muslim nations in the Balkans, Indonesia, etc. To quote a Saudi Arabinan I was drinking with in Egypt, "Allah can't see over the Red Sea" so it's doable. I'd also skip a Reformed Judaism church in favor of a Conversative one while likewise passing over an Orthodox one as well as you can start to run into "blood" issues.
Regardless overall just be respectful, that will get you 99% into acceptance anywhere. Observe, mimic, and participate. The rest will come just naturally with people being people and sometimes that takes years. It took me about four years of regular attendance before I got invited to my first extra-Church yet still Church activity lol, finally got a "after church feast lets go to Betty's house and get drunk BBQ" invite. Just takes time sometimes and often persistence pays off.
people who go for the social aspect are intellectually dishonest and might as well just play golf, pickleball, or do something else. They'll stop going anyways once any aspect of the faith makes any demand on them or they do get shut out because it becomes obvious they don't care about what they are doing.
go to a greek church lol...are you greek? it would be like a white guy going to a historical black baptist church. Those things you describe are ethnic gatherings: many grow up out of specific and historical immigrant communities and you are born into them. Only the ones that focus on the religion itself tolerate outsiders.
feel people don't get that lukewarm religion can be less welcoming not more, if not universal they will not want new people unless they are very much like them.
And yet "intellectual dishonesty" kept the Jews around four millennium. It why many people today, outside the uneducated laity, no longer say "religion" but "tradition". Religion serves as a way to preserve customs across the ages and because you always have a core of true believes, you don't have to worry about it withering away like the latest Tik Tok fad; it will always be there for you when you need it, maybe even fifty years from now hence it's a good return on low effort investment. And no they don't get shut out or stop doing, you are confusing faith with religiosity. Most secular church goers are extremely high in religiosity, more so that the actual practitioners, as the they care more about the trappings and social functions than the doctrine or faith itself hence are extremely vested in keeping their club going.
You obviously have zero idea what you are talking about with your Greek comment. Orthodox Catholicism isn't centered around ethnicity, it's centered around districts (well technically autocephalous churches) based on the original seat of the patriarch (just like the Roman Catholic Pope is technical the Patriarch of Rome hence Roman Catholic) and each district has sole jurisdiction with that geographic district, i.e. everyone is Orthodox Catholic and you go to the local church as doctrinally they are all effectively identical, you are confusing them with Protestant denominations as can be seen with your "historic black church" comment or their ilk such as the Filipino Baptist Church of San Francisco.
For example Japan falls under the Moscow Patriarch whereas New Zealand falls under the Constantinople Patriarch. It only gets "confusing" in the New World where the districts never got established early on so every one from the Old World brought their church with them. Technically the Orthodox Church of America (OCA) has jurisdiction over the New World but Constantinople and Greece refused to recognize it (because they would lose funding sources and political clout if all the New World churches had to covert to OCA) hence you can still find various competing Orthodox Churches throughout the New World because until they all agree that the OCA is agreed upon by everyone, they aren't going to shudder and convert all the rest. The "Greek" Orthodox Church has absolutely nothing to do with Greek culture, Greece ethnicity, or Greece itself, hell half of Greece itself doesn't even fall under the Greek Patriarchy but Constantinople. If also why if you attend ANY Orthodox Catholic Church and talk to the people you will find Orthodox Catholics from Eskimos to Japanese to Samoan, to Serbians to Ukrainians to Russians to Greeks to Arabs all attending the same Bulgarian Orthodox Church, because of jurisdiction.
Yeah you can see the kind of sentiment this attracted, which is about what I'd expect.
Btw, are you a sincere believer yourself?
I am but I took a winding journey to get here. I don't go for the social aspect, not my cup of tea, but I see the value in it from outreach to retention to passing on traditions to new generations. The same church can be different things to different people, what matters is retaining enough parishioners to keep it going so it can be there when people need it as those needs change throughout their lives, even if that's only once at the funeral.
But yeah as for me, I'm the attend twice a day every day sort but that's ok, each their own. I appreciate religiosity in others at whatever level they are comfortable with regardless if I think they are wrong ultimately. Love your enemies and all, you don't convert people beating their other cheek or bludgeoning them with a pasta strainer per the FSM.
How do you find the time to attend twice a day, or was that not literal?
Also.. Why *do* you go?
We have data on this for 100+ years. Because women and men have the exact same issues, only that women started earlier due to insanely toxic blueprints. This is not new and this is not unsolved, either. But it’s also not an easy fix.
I love for everybody, and especially men who are joining in more actively now, that we are addressing the topic of living lives BEYOND cookie-cutter blueprints. That’s what the void is about the author describes: suffocation by normativity. Thus, the path forward is pretty clear (though complicated): help and support to discover and stabilize your own meaningful blueprints. It’s these support systems we need to build (for everybody), as well as a wide variety of examples for target states. That’s what the data tells us.
And it’s not about new static blueprints or invoking the suffocation of the male warrior and provider stereotype, which frankly men during Romanticism in Europe (200 years ago) were already fighting against, so clearly that’s a strange argument to follow.
So, how about we look at the treasure trove of data and make its best practices available to everybody without pointing fingers and also without all these unhelpful hysterics (“women in beards”…really?!?).
yes.
>That’s what the void is about the author describes: suffocation by normativity.
Actually I think it's the opposite: we've done away with normativity, leaving most people floundering without a lifemap, and any dating advice you give will be wrong 50% of the time because there are no accepted standards for what is or isn't proper behaviour.
My impression is that the effort to make room for non-normative people hasn't been just about treating them decently, but that "polite society"* has been trying to raise the status of non-normative people by lower the status of normative people.
*"Polite society" is like calling dangerous fae "The Good Folk".
Why would KNOWING some external outside standard help people to FEEL fulfilled??
Firstly, most people internalise the values of the society they live in.
Secondly, norms aren't just about what you should want, they're also about how you should try and get what you want. A society in which there are widely-understood norms about topics such as where it is and isn't appropriate for a man to approach a woman with romantic interest, and what the appropriate ways are for a man to signal such interest, is one in which it's much easier to go about finding a girlfriend than a society in which one woman's "Fighting to win me like a man should" is another woman's "Pestering me to go out with you, ugh" is a third woman's "Trying to pressure me into a relationship, you creep" is a fourth woman's...
Absolutely agree. However, as the author stated, when blindly following these external givens, some people do end up in a void. And, if they are men especially, struggle to get others to empathize. Though tbh I see that a lot for non-American women too. So clearly, normativity only works for the (few?) “normal” ones. And in that sense it’s suffocating for the rest.
And your examples line up beautifully with that. “Chase a woman” was probably always suffocating, for both partners. That’s why there are now different expectations, reflecting actual differences in perceptions in different people (gender agnostic btw). It’s more complicated, sure. But it is in that sense also freeing for everybody else finally. Our only problem about all of that is that our understanding and communication skills about it all haven’t caught up yet. As you’d expect for a whole society going through a difficult learning process at the same time. Still doesn’t mean we should just go back to only teaching “elementary school” so that there is “less confusion”, no?
>However, as the author stated, when blindly following these external givens, some people do end up in a void.
People end up in a void because the norms society gives people, and especially men, are unreasonable and self-contradictory. The problem isn't having norms per se -- indeed, it's impossible to have a society without norms -- it's that our current norms aren't very good.
>So clearly, normativity only works for the (few?) “normal” ones.
Normal people make up the majority of society, by definition.
>And your examples line up beautifully with that. “Chase a woman” was probably always suffocating, for both partners.
"Probably"? On what grounds do you say this? Basically every piece of evidence we have, whether statistical or anecdotal, suggests that the dating world is worse, and is perceived as worse by people trying to date, than it was, say, 20 years ago.
Which is where flexible norms come in…
If we ever had any reasonable norms, they would have stuck around but clearly they weren’t working. The whole argument is to find better ways forward and if that includes going back to rigidity we have not learned from the data.
Dating is worse now and it will be better if everybody learns to follow the same playbook? Is that the conclusion? Of course it can’t be, that’s advice we give to children who don’t yet know how to deal with the complexity of the world. So let’s all be adults and admit that we have never before been adults about any of this and learn together. But yeah will definitely not look pretty in statistics, I agree.
Review gets a B (Seriously: "Tate", but no "J. Peterson"?). Comment-section: F(ailed) as expected. (30 comments in, none about the review, but then everyone is an expert in "man".) EDIT: ok, looked again, and hey, there is some better stuff, too - even the author saying she knows little about J. P. .... - but Tate, all right ... ; update to D(disappointing) - Btw, as I watched it yesterday: "Barbie" gets a B, too (movie now on prime).
I don’t know if this lens is actually doing a service to the demographic it pities (sorry, empathizes with). To me this only reinforced the suspicion that straight men are this incredibly high-maintenance group, always costing society. I can easily believe all the self-destructive statistics showing that men are ‘not ok’. I’m sure they ain’t but when will they learn to take care of themselves?
Women have been oppressed and deprived of rights and freedoms for centuries, and yet we - as a demographic - did not turn to harming ourselves or others en mass, somehow. We just did what we could, what we were allowed to, eventually won a better life. But men - well, apparently they can either flourish in a structure where they are given power and opportunities just by virtue of being a man, and more of these if a violent man OR they implode and flounder in a society with (at least, nominal) freedoms, gender-equality and the resulting ambiguity.
Sure, “it’s unfair” that some decent (if unimaginative) dudes are “floundering” and languishing in loneliness, but it is also unfair that it’s my problem. And it IS my problem, unfortunately, because as the author also hints - dissatisfied men can turn very destructive (unlike ‘average’ dissatisfied woman, who just rescues many kittens). Why can’t men just do that?
Now, I’m not saying that any of this is actually true (because I doubt the veracity of this account or that the issue is really so big it is worth discussion), but this is what this type of discourse makes me think.
Not the response the author wanted to evoke, I assume,
PS most of the described men would stop being single if only they decided to go down the social ladder in search of a mate. This is the most glaring omission in Scott Alexander’s ‘Henry’ example. At least one of ‘Henry’s ‘ wives would gladly have the 25-year-old sad lonely Scott A. But he wouldn’t have her (repulsed by her low education, addiction or impulse-control issues). And most women Scott associates with wouldn’t have Henry. The correlation with ‘is in a gang’ etc and sexual partners is of the same source. So, that whole oft-cited example is pretty moot.
"Not the response the author wanted to evoke, I assume"
I think in a way that's the perfect response, because it shows the reality of what most young men are facing. Most people- not just women, but all people- just don't care about them at all. If they're suffering, it's probably their own fault. Or maybe it's some sort of cosmic justice for the guilt of their male ancestors, or whatever. It doesn't matter. Better for them to die and decrease the surplus population.
>And it IS my problem, unfortunately, because as the author also hints - dissatisfied men can turn very destructive (unlike ‘average’ dissatisfied woman, who just rescues many kittens).
Average dissatisfied woman supports extremist political movements which ultimately cause far more destruction than any number of belligerent drunk guys at bars.
> But men - well, apparently they can either flourish in a structure where they are given power and opportunities just by virtue of being a man, and more of these if a violent man OR they implode and flounder in a society with (at least, nominal) freedoms, gender-equality and the resulting ambiguity.
Who would respect (let alone date) a powerless man without privileges? "Men chase money, status, and power because they crave love — the respect of their peers, the loyalty of their women, the admiration of their children. But love without strength is worthless. A weak man’s love has no value because he has no value."
> Women have been oppressed and deprived of rights and freedoms for centuries.
That is quite an indictment of the whole humanity. Living on this planet has not been easy for 99% of those who lived. Only the modernity promised wholesome self-actualization to all (or just the ladies?), but will definitely fail in this alpha quest. Most men lived nowhere close to ruling power (apparently an essential non-oppression criterion to feminism) and were respected much less than the ladies.
>To me this only reinforced the suspicion that straight men are this incredibly high-maintenance group, always costing society
If someone wrote an article about miserable gay women, would you conclude that gay women are an "incredibly high-maintenance group, always costing society"?
Do you have the same dismissive attitude towards poor people?
>Women have been oppressed and deprived of rights and freedoms for centuries, and yet we - as a demographic - did not turn to harming ourselves or others en mass, somehow. We just did what we could, what we were allowed to, eventually won a better life.
The article describes miserable men. You don't think there have also been miserable women throughout history?
>dissatisfied men can turn very destructive
Dissatisfied women can turn very destructive. What's your point?
>(unlike ‘average’ dissatisfied woman, who just rescues many kittens)
The average dissatisfied man in this article isn't harming anyone. He's just sad. Don't compare the average dissatisfied women with the worst-case-scenario dissatisfied man. It's not a fair comparison.
>Why can’t men just do that?
Plenty of men do in fact spend their time with animals or other harmless hobbies.
>At least one of ‘Henry’s ‘ wives would gladly have the 25-year-old sad lonely Scott A. But he wouldn’t have her (repulsed by her low education, addiction or impulse-control issues).
Is it so wrong for a human being to desire a healthy romantic relationship?
>this only reinforced the suspicion that straight men are this incredibly high-maintenance group, always costing society
Agreed. I disagree with the rest as I'm not sympathetic to feminism or your framing of women's problems. But these men are loaded, have acquaintences, workout, and go on multiple dates. If you can't be fulfilled with that or use it as a launching point to do other things then you can't be fulfilled with anything. Not sure what society is supposed to fix here. There's also no example of what women are told by society to fix their femininity problems. Seems like they just get over it and enjoy other parts of life, which is what I think should be the same prescription here.
If this were a satire, it would honestly be hilarious and excellent. Unfortunately, it’s not, and it rambles and trips all over itself repeatedly. It’s boring because you know someone actually spent a lot of time and effort writing this. It’s a downer. And it’s basically the opposite of what Scott tries to present to use as readers: one person’s anecdotal experience coming from a highly biased and confused position.
Coming down from a near-fatal acid trip, so not in the clearest state of mind, but: this was Damn Good. Really interesting to read as a Bay Area trans woman too, a literal Man Who Was Not. Like, I definitely run into a lot of lost men too (though not the same categories, social stratification changes distribution), and it's quite tragic to behold...yet it's hard not to walk away from this review with the feeling that whatever I'm doing is just a different form of getting lost. Any map in a storm, or something like that. Apeing the female map is certainly one way to go about things, but it's fundamentally...derivative. And obviously doesn't scale, though as review says, certain parties sure seem to be pushing modern men in that effective direction, by intent if not by design.
Profoundly curious who the author was. Excellent typical-minding of men (she says from distant memories), it's not very common to see such accurate portrayals written by women that are both sympathetic *and*...like...well-tuned for ACX tastes? Great inspiration to go try dating again too - "I could turn this experience into an ACX finalist review!"
Yeah I was waiting for a twist like the author is a gay man or a trans woman. The lonely guy archetype is well written even though I don't think it's representative. And the descriptions are compelling even though they're basically repeated for many of the types of men.
@the author: how many dates have you been on exactly? This post gives the impression it numbers in the hundreds. If you’ve been on that many dates without finding a relationship, have you considered that there may be something wrong with either your date selection heuristic or your standards?
The author remains a cipher, which is probably for the best; this particular article shouldn't be about her or her relationships. But of course poor heuristics and unreasonable standards would be a benefit for constructing this taxonomy, and it certainly doesn't invalidate it.
However it does suggest that there might be some weird selection bias going into the authors sample (which might therefore not be all that representative). Over and above the obvious bias of men in stable relationships not being in the sample. Alternatively, it calls the authors judgement into question.
It could certainly influence the taxonomy. I don't think the article was presented as an exhaustive catalogue of the author's dating experience, however*; presumably there are other types of dudes that are in less trouble. She could even be happily married by now, although that would make her experience less relevant to the present day.
*Well, aside from the generalization of the title.
Re: "the man who is not" what the fuck kind of unprofessional therapist lectures a patient about their supposed privilege?
That's a radical departure from classic therapy... At least as I understand it
Here's one account of it (happening to a woman)
https://open.substack.com/pub/freddiedeboer/p/letter-from-a-subscriber-my-new-therapist
I teach college. 6 of the 7 kids that failed out last semester were men. I know, anecdata, but I see echoes of these descriptions in a lot of young men who have caved in on themselves and have zero social skills.
I appreciated this post - as these categories of lost men (should we call them boys?!) gave me a way to think about how to frame the “whole man” who is not “hole of a man” —-
He’s a related man. He exists in relation. That’s what the review of aboriginals, teaches, I think — radically different way to relate.
And this is the skill that young men are lacking. And the appeal of the AI sex bots that will further decimate our reproductive capacities.
Pressure on men to be "manly," I believe, has reached an all time high in the US, due to a few factors:
1) life and work is so comfortable and safe for modern men that they feel inferior to their forebears in previous generations, and so feel a great need to compensate
2) the acceptance of homosexuals and trans people has ironically put more pressure on straight males to differentiate themselves, to avoid being labeled as such (which still has consequences)
Thus, you see enormous numbers of men cosplaying as tough guys in the most ridiculous ways (www.tacticalbabygear.com Tactical Baby Carrier for Dads — The Toughest Military Style Baby Carrier on the Planet. Lifetime Guarantee. Shop Now!), the rise of workout culture, TRT, BJJ and tattoos. It's why baseball players 50 years ago looked like today's high school freshman despite being most likely way tougher than your modern American man.
The problem here is that it is all cosplaying: all the tough guy sports and hobbies and affectations are just pretend. They aren't going to solve the underlying causes 1 and 2 above. And reversing 1 and 2 is not going to happen and wouldn't be good anyway.
There is a historical analogy with the peaceful Edo-period Samurai and the rise of the strict Bushido culture, but this post is already too long.
Re: "the man who is not" what the fuck kind of unprofessional therapist lectures a patient about their supposed privilege?
That's a radical departure from classic therapy... At least as I understand it
There’s a reason people are finding LLMs to be comparable to human therapists: the floor is not high.
Horrible. The behaviour they described is deeply unprofessional of the therapist, shockingly so.
"men who weren’t provided a clear map by their immediate community"
But isn't the answer obvious - just crush the opposing team at a sportsball field? But I am 47. I certainly did not find it obvious at 27.
On II) so the attractive men will be the ones who simply do not care about other people's opinions. Wait, weren't they always the attractive men?
I think the writer of this article, while well intentioned is still a bit sexist.
It is always nice to see a woman express care for lonely men, an often maligned group. The article still comes across to me as corroded by the current elite western philosophy it partialy critisises though.
Example: "The fact is, men enjoy some privileges that women do not in Western society." I think a lot of these supposed privileges are actually ambiguous, or false. To start, women are often favoured in hiring, and the gender pay gap disappears when one controls for various variables (e.g., length of commute). I would argue that in the modern west, women are actually overwhelming the privileged group (better educational attainment, less time for the same crime, better mental health, more friends, more support provided by society, massively less homelessness, massively less suicide, etc...).
Regardless of debating such contentious issues, I find it inappropriate to open an article expressing sympathy to men, with this type of apologist, "yes, men don't have all the problems" type statement. You would rarely ever see a feminist article about the trouble women face to include such a disclaimer about how men struggle too.
Finally, I wouldn't describe the "manosphere" as particularly toxic, imo. The community is not a monolith, just as "feminists" are not a monolith. Obviously, the example of a man grabbing someone's throat is deplorable, but there are always horrible people, regardless of ideology. Horrible people need no excuse, and any movement judged by it's worst members will appear terrible.
the manosphere is toxic, because all their approaches boil down to women being things you manipulate by technique and secret knowledge. It's close to high-pressure sales adapted to relationships, and ends up dehumanizing everyone involved.
It relies on people being too sex-starved to look at it closely. No amount of pussy is worth killing your soul over.
Succinct: False. You describe a subset of the manospehere, specifically unnuanced pick-up culture. There is definitely toxicity within the manospehere, but there is no way it is all toxic. You generalization is ignorant and mildly bigoted.
Nuanced: the term manospehere is a broad one. For example, Jordan Peterson is labelled by some as being part of it, and I don't think your description fits him at all. He is all about preaching taking responsibility and self improvement.
Another example is that sociologist, one of the early feminists, who started focussing on men's issues. He is core to the manospehere, and yet writes incredibly nauanced and thoughtful intellectual analysis, nothing to do with manipulating women.
ask yourself why all the self-improvement, and its always a means to an end to attract women. its still technique to manipulate.
men not needing to self-improve never crosses their minds. even if they try to diffuse it, the technique-results thing always drives the approach and its always women.
the diffuse forms suffer from a similar curse.
dont know honestly, the incels are buckling under the self-improvement crap and it led to the black pill. technique in any form is not enough.
Hmm... I mean, men desire women. I don't think there's anything wrong with desiring women and wanting to improve oneself so as to appeal to them. I don't think any of that needs to be imposed. I think it is pretty innate, a shaping force on human interactions and society for thousands of years.
Speaking personally, that innate desire has been an incredibly positive shaping force on my personality. It has definitely made me more empathetic and mature.
Like becoming a kind mature eloquent human being (not that I necessarily am one, but that's certainly the goal) is not a manipulation tactic!!
Example of ways men improve to attract women: improving personal hygiene, learning to dress well, learning to be a good conversationalist, etc...
If you do the above things soley to appeal to women then maybe that is unhealthy (e.g., it sounds exhausting to constantly be thinking about women every time you brush your hair), but you can learn and master the above things so as to appeal to women, and then do them regardless of women because of their innate value.
No offence intended, but do you think you might be a bit jaded on this topic? Have you or someone close to you had a bad personal experience with the "manospehere"?
> women are often favoured in hiring, and the gender pay gap disappears when one controls for various variables (e.g., length of commute)
Source?
>You would rarely ever see a feminist article about the trouble women face to include such a disclaimer about how men struggle too.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
I think this is a fantastic typology of modern men, one in which every man can recognize himself in one or more categories. Here's how I renamed each type of man for my own easy recollection, following the same sequence they're presented;
1. The clueless man
2. The tragic conformist
3. The chasing man
4. The nullified man
5. The spiteful man
6. The wholesome man
I belong to the category of 'The nullified man' - the man who opts out - but managed to overcome a great many insecurities. However, my backstory is mild in comparison to the picture you painted.
It's very fitting that this opinion is coming from a woman. It's the modern woman who shot the Achilles heels of the modern man and it's the modern woman who can nurse it back to life.
It's also very fitting that of all places you chose to publish this opinion on this particular platform. Its owner, in my opinion, is one of the exemplars of "the man who is whole" - though perhaps one forged through pain and hardwork.
PS: I've not been particularly following the submissions in this year's ACX review due to the adopted format. I've perhaps only read just one or two before this one. Something about the topic of this review made me decided to give a shot and I absolutely didn't regret it.
PSS: I know this is a long shot, but it'd please me in no small measure to know who you are, even if only to satisfy my aching curiosity. The thoughtfulness and presence of mind with which you engaged with the experiences that gave birth to this piece is otherworldly, one which someone as young as you (my guess is that you're below 30, I may be off by a few +/- years) has no business possessing.
I enjoyed this “review” very much indeed - congratulations to the author, even if, or perhaps especially if, she is just doing some fun role playing. My personal opinion is that this piece of prose is a bit of a raw diamond which could be honed into a number of different things: screenplay proposal, parody of social-scientific analysis, personal story… there are some elements of each, which is part of its charm and gives credence and character to the narrative voice, but at the same time undermines the plausibility of the underlying premise (“I’ve dated a lot and know my way around this demographic”). Perhaps this isn’t quite the right audience for such a free-spirited exercise?
I was thinking the same. It could easily become an opinion piece in a Love & Relationship magazine, or even adapted to a screenplay with the right touches.
Having been 1, 2, and 3, sign me up for a combo of numbers 4 and 5. Though violence is stupid, dangerous, and ultimately gives aid and comfort to feminism--"see how bad the men are!" Why go to jail to be raped yourself? Vote Republican and get abortion repealed!
"So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear,
Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heaven's Queen I hold
By thee, and more then half perhaps will reign;
As Woman before long, and this new World shall know."
Or, a bit earlier on, easy to revise for the manosphere:
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then she
Whom Chivalry hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; Feminism hath not built
Here for her envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven."
--with apologies, obviously, to John Milton.
I think the United States government should subsidize the dating app industry. Companies should be paid an increasing amount for each
1) confirmed date
2) confirmed second date
3) successful longer-term relationship
Yes it would be difficult to figure out the rules and nuances. Yes it would attract fraudsters. But I think those difficulties pale in comparison to the negative externalities this whole industry is having on generation(s) of Americans.
I think it's a matter of Public Health.
Right now, no matter how many well-meaning startups try to "solve" the dating app problem, companies are incentivized to keep individuals (and especially hetero males) perpetually anxious. They need subscribers, PAID subscribers, and they need them to stay. The faster the matches + the more successful the matches => the worse their profits.
I'm *not* saying the government should *run* dating apps directly, because that would be rife with political/bureaucratic/culture-war issues, but
Economics teaches us that when the market fails, the government should step in. WELL THE MARKET HAS FAILED.
Call your Congressman :-D.
Sounds like Bay Area problems for Bay Area Libs. Just wish you'd all stay there and shut up. Hate that place. My family is originally from there, its changed into a monstrosity that needs to secede from the USA and get annexed by China.
This is great. From what I’ve heard dating in the Bay Area is pretty great if you’re a woman. I truly appreciate this piece and the intelligent empathy of it but I feel like it would be a lot harder to do a naturalistic study of men like while dating them anywhere else.
To be able to casually rifle through them like looking at records in a shop. Reviewing them like albums is just a very depressing implication for the worth of men socially there.
I think the article is great and is saying very important things but when you think about how the sausage is made and why it was even possible for the sausage to be made it’s dark.
I've heard from women that dating for a monogamous partner in the Bay is very difficult because most dudes claim to be "poly". Nary a mention of this in the review, but I'm sure it depends on the particular strata of art, tech, finance, activism, etc one inhabits.
Well, in a simple statistical way it favors women at least. Perhaps what you’re talking about has to do with the majority of the men fitting into the broken categories discussed in the article.
The men women are excited to date are in high demand. So it feels to the women you know like the dating scene favors men but it’s just the most desirable crop. And Bay Area is also the main poly spot, yea.
This all makes me think about how one of the main advantages of Christianity was that it countered the destabilizing force of polygamy.
Hogamous, Higamous,
Man is polygamous,
Higamous, Hogamous,
Woman’s monagamous.
I assumed this was Shel Silverstein writing for Playboy until I looked it up!
I've heard a lot of people saying it's really rough as a man, and that the dating sites are basically full of scams/bots and generally awful.
I really enjoyed this piece: the research is spot on and the takeaway is powerful. It speaks volumes about my own experience with dating men. Between mental health issues, shifting gender roles, cultural stuff, and basically zero role models, dating is a mess.
It’d be super interesting to see a counter piece with something similar about women’s dating landscape in the Bay Area or somewhere else in the world, from a man's perspective. I bet the results would surprise a lot of people.
Why is nobody talking about the possibility that gaming and an entire steaming continent of online porn, both of which appeal much more to males, have done a lot of damage to men who are now of dating age? My impression, as a therapist who sees a lot of solitary, smart males, is that in their early teens they were shy and anxious but most had enough going for them that they could probably have made a place for themselves in the high school social order if they had plugged away at trying. But they had available to them at home these digital approximations of challenges, adventures, romance and sex that they could gorge on while safely alone. They ended up spending more than half their waking hours on porn and gaming, and giving up on making it some way or other in high school. And that made them sort of cave in, to use an excellent simile I saw in somebody’s comment here.
That sounds like a very important part of whatever is going on. Learning to be in the world and socialize with people takes effort and is awkward at times, for many of us. If you're given a safe ersatz via porn and gaming (or doomscrolling), you might never do the effort, and never reap the rewards.
both were present earlier, though. porn became present with cable and vhs, and nudity in film or other media was too. Everquest started in 1999, so we've had at least 26 years of online games.
even before that, tv watching was similar; the guy whose only life was tv after work was a stereotype too.
plus the double standard...romance is the female equivalent and literally promotes porn (erotica) and horrid relationship ideals, and even in the 1920s Rudolph Valentino as the Sheik was modeling its tropes. Why do women always get a pass from that?
>both were present earlier, though. porn became present with cable and vhs, and nudity in film or other media was too.
There's a difference between the odd sex scene in movies and having 24/7 access to graphic depictions of the most depraved stuff your imagination can think of.
(I do agree that people give book erotica too much of a free pass, though. Fun fact: the three best-selling novels of the 2010s were Fifty Shades and its two sequels.)
The reviewer is in her late 20s and has commented saying she mostly dates men 5-10 years older than herself, so they would be born roughly 1986-1991. Online porn and video games would have been available in their formative years, yes, but were nowhere near as ubiquitous or readily available as they have been to younger generations.
So somebody born in 1985 would have turnd 15 in 2000. I don't know how much online porn there was then. The only data point I have is that when my daughter was about 5,so in approximtely 2000, she ended up inadvertently landing on a porn scene while using my computer. She didn't know how she ended up there, except that it was not the result of searching for porn. She didn't know how to do internet searches yet, and anyway was not showing much curiosity about sex at that age. I think she must have been randomly clicking around, and just clicked through ojn some link to porn. I definitely did not have any porn saved on my computer, which is one reason I felt safe letting her use it, and very little in my viewing history. I like some kinds of erotica, but definitely not YouTube style porn, which makes sex look ugly and ridiculous to me. So what happened to my daughter gives me the impression there must have been a fair amount of easily findable porn online in 2000.
As for gaming -- well, I don't game, so also do not know what was available in around 2000. But I know guys in their 40's who reminisce with pleasure about games they played in their teens, so again it seems like there must have been a fair amount of the stuff, and it must have been pretty engaging -- way more than very early things like PacMan.
Do you think the online porn and gaming available inn 2000 was so sparse or tame that it wouldn't have powerful enough to suck in somebody who was looking for an alternative, entirely private way to have sex and adventures?
I was 19 in 2000. As I remember things, porn was moderately but not prohibitively difficult to find and was mostly in the form of still images, text erotica, or short video clips because of bandwidth limitations.
We had an Apple II at home when I was little which I used to play on frequently. Ultima IV and V and Robot Odyssey were the games I remember playing most often. I also played Oregon Trail and whatnot at school. We didn't have a console, but several of my friends had Nintendos on which they played Mario and Duck Hunt. Later on, we had macs and PCs and I played games like Civilization, Doom, StarCraft, Sim City, and Panzer General. So yes, computer games were definitely a thing. I do get the impression that my family and our friends were very much ahead of the curve in terms of adoption here, though. I also get the impression that the single-player games (and LAN or split-screen multiplayer games) of that era were qualitatively different from the kinds of games I hear about many people finding to be all-consuming in more recent years.
Wow! I'm a sixty-nine year old married man raising a 12-year-old grandchild. This is a vital topic for me and the lad. Thank you for your insights and for laying out the topic with the clarity of a road atlas! I hope I can make his struggle toward manhood less painful and more productive. My task will be to address fairly and straight-on the nonsense coming from all quarters of our society--the TikTok bros, the Red Pill gangs, the extreme shamers and haters.
I find this post hugely insighful, but also weird. The problems it diagnoses, and the solutions it offers, are spot on. Except for one thing: they have not much at all to do with manhood. They're general problems of our current culture, and they affect men and women just as much.
Liberal Western culture(s) are high on negative guidance ("don't do this, don't be that"), and low on the positive ("this is the way"). This is by design; we ditched the old authoritarian, sexist, narrow ways and embraced the idea that your life is up to you to figure out. The unspoken boundary is that it's not society's job to tell you to what to aim for. Subcultures can show up and offer their particular guidance (be a hippy, an AI researcher, a buddhist, a stoic, a hustler, an creative, an influencer, whatever), but they can never be speak for the mainstream. Even what you call Polite Society doesn't really have much to offer. And the problem with subcultural answers is that they remain niche, and never quite reach maturity. So people end up getting their guidance from vague vibes from social media, and it's just low quality, and a poor match for what they will actually encounter in life. This applies equally to men and women, with the same predictable results.
Yet positive guidance is what everyone needs, hence the article's insistence on mentorship and community. Most of us, with very few exceptions, have the potential to make connections, to find meaning in things, to fall in love, to navigate changes and disappointments, and so on. The void is always there lurking, because the void is just the mismatch between our narrative expectations and gritty reality. Men and women have had to deal with the Void for millenia, probably since the time of Ugg the Caveman. But we also naturally have what takes to navigate it, not just by heavy-handed methods like formless meditation or psychotherapy, but also, in a saner society, by opening up to real friends and sharing a laugh. But that requires not just the individual person, but enough people around to actually get off their arses and off their scrolling phones, and go through the awkward process of making it happen.
As far as I can tell everything else is downstream from this. The "dating market" can be awful, but there's still roughly as many unpaired men as women, so there's nothing fundamentally preventing them from giving each other a real chance. But people are not being taught to do the minimum necessary effort to build up a well-rounded human being, because we're all still scared that giving that much guidance might be authoritarian. And to make it even worse, the actual authoritarians are right there, waiting on the wing for anyone to given an opening so they can peddle their stale wares.
Still, it must be done.
To end on a personal note, I also found a path across these things by joining a strong community in my twenties.
>The problems it diagnoses, and the solutions it offers, are spot on. Except for one thing: they have not much at all to do with manhood. They're general problems of our current culture, and they affect men and women just as much.
One big difference is that men's problems are all assumed to be men's fault, whereas women's problems are all assumed to be society's (which usually = men's) fault. A woman can blame her lack of dates on men all being shallow and immature, and everyone will at least pretend to agree; a man blaming his lack of dates on women will be lectured about how women don't owe him sex and only misogynistic incels think like him.
I agree there is a difference there, but how much of a difference does it really make? The lady who only manages to attract men she perceives as shallow and immature is probably about as frustrated as the guy who never manages to get a second date. The situation sucks for both. Getting some validation for your frustration is nice, and I agree it would be better if men got that too... But it doesn't address any of the deeper issues I tried to point out.
It's not just that men don't get validation for their frustration, it's that the mere fact of a man being frustrated is taken as evidence that he's a bad person who deserves to be unhappy. Scott wrote a couple of posts on the topic a few years ago:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/
Again, I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. I'm fine with the bits that advocate treating men fairly. The original article mentions that, and I certainly don't disagree. It seems obvious enough that I don't need to repeat it.
What I'm trying to add is that modern culture is not teaching people very well what it takes to make a true connection to each other, and to life. And that applies to men and to women.
Put it this way: say you mentioned that a particular race was disproportionately likely to suffer police brutality, even when controlling for other factors like criminal behaviour, and I jumped in with "But other races suffer police brutality too!" Would this seem like a helpful, good-faith contribution to you?
As a man myself, if my contingent was on the receiving end of something akin to police brutality, I figure I'd have noticed by now... I haven't, so I can only take this as hyperbole.
Again, to whatever extent there is some unfairness, I'm onboard with fixing that.
>They're general problems of our current culture, and they affect men and women just as much.
I double-checked this and was surprised to find it confirmed. Men and women report roughly equal rates of loneliness: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2025/01/16/men-women-and-social-connections/
I am confused by what the author means by the term "identity"
What is an identity and why would you a) desire one in another, or b) desire one in someone else?
Myself, I care about people's traits, their beliefs and their principles. I desire friends and partners who are intelligent, kind and principled, and aspire to be so myself. Those are traits people either have or have not. They are also traits that can be actively cultivated and developed and they are evidenced through action, and aspired towards.
"Identify" doesn't come into it?! Like what does, "having an identity" even mean?!
Where do you get your sense of self worth? That's probably your identity.
I am believe in being virtuous. Whenever I feel lost in myself I focus on that. So: being kind, honest, caring. I guess I get worth out of the love I feel for my friends and family, and trying to treat them well.
Though it is not the most virtuous, I also enjoy the ego boost I get when someone decides they want to sleep with me. I like being desired. I find it a great and somewhat mysterious honour.
I am also generally quite content and get a deep pleasure from both understanding the world, people, ideas, and I very much enjoy creating things.
I don't consider any of these things identities though. I would never introduce myself as one of these things. They are principles I want to live by, traits and hobbies I cultivate, vanities I observe and indulge, etc...
I think this obsession with identity is very much a new thing. Traditionally people worried about their roles (e.g., husband, father, son, job) fulfilling the duties of their role, and being virtuous. That is the model I choose and try to live by.
The important thing is that a role is very different from an identity. A role is something objective, and often thrust upon you (e.g., being a son) not a narrative you choose or label you use to describe yourself.
And just to be clear. Being virtuous is not an identity, being virtuous is an aspiration, a thing to aim for and work towards, and maintain. Anyone who's identity is "being kind" is probably not that kind, and I think this subscribing to virtue as an identity (as opposed to an aspiration) leads to pathology (e.g., virtue signalling).
I guess you can say my identity is being principled? But I think that is a ridiculously wanky thing to say, and really looks odd and forced, likely because the worth I describe is not an identity at all. I don't think identity is a universal thing, and I don't think it is beneficial or healthy either.
Although I have formed my opinions independently, I would say this perspective loosely connects to the one Jordan Peterson advocates for: being defined by responsibility.
What is your identity?
Beloved of God.
Christian? Many of the world religions seem a stable and often healthy way of handling identify. The kindest most accepting person I know is a devout Christian.
But you are vulnerable if you make your faith your "Identity" in the sense that if you loose your faith you may loose your sense of self worth.
Speaking on Christianity, I believe a lot of the tenants do more or less translate to doing as I describe (Virtue and Duty)
Yes. I believe my worth comes from the fact that God found me worth dying for. That was a decision He made out love, independent of my merit, and is therefore something I can't lose since I never earned it in the first place.
I agree if I stopped believing that I would be quite lost. So far though I find that being beloved by God makes me grateful and eager to do what He wants and what He wants me to do is love others. I wish I were better at it, as He is very loving!
> But you are vulnerable if you make your faith your "Identity" in the sense that if you loose your faith you may loose your sense of self worth.
I don't think you can expect people to prepare for abandoning their most foundational beliefs. It's like saying: you should not derive your self-worth from being virtuous because that will make you feel bad if you decide to become a sociopath.
I was raised largely without any map to manhood and I feel like it was probably better than the alternative. When I look at my friends who were raised with that map I feel pity for them, not envy. Their whole mode of existence wrt masculinity seems painful and stifling, as though they were forced into expressing them to satisfy their fathers or male peers and never quite got the memo that they could stop. When you say that no one questioned the purpose of men, and that everyone preached the same message, does that not sound horrible and limiting to you? If you couldn't fulfill these roles, or had no interest in filling them, then the whole thing reduces to getting whacked over the head repeatedly by some close-minded dweeb who's gotten it lodged into his head that your shared biology means more to you than it does, and further that it somehow entitles him to make major decisions about your personality. You go looking for alternatives and find nothing but a bunch of driftwood repeating the same thing ad nauseam.
What some men experience as loss of direction or as terror in being without a mold, the rest of us experience as freedom. What some people experience as certainty, sane people see as the awful march of fate. Women experienced this in the last few generations, too. Wife and mother used to be nearly the only life path available, and now it's one you have to opt into. So too will be husband and father and even "man". Good. The dislocation of one's identity under modernity and the transmutation of gender roles from huge aspects of spiritual life to fashion choices is a feature, not a bug.
Very well said. I completely agree.
Given recent trends in mental health, I think you're wildly over-estimating the number of people who experience modern antinomianism as a liberation.
It's possible. Fwiw I think most people were pretty unhappy with the pre-antinomian state of things. The near univocality of boomer art is revealing about this. Maybe the sort of total anarchy we have now is an overcorrection, and I just happened to live at the right time for my preferences.
Just realized I wrote that entire thing without mentioning that I'm gay which is maybe a bit important here ig. To me, and to most of my cohort, a "map of masculinity" means getting bullied by one's own dad over minute differences in fashion choices. I knew guys whose parents were deeply religious and forced them out of their homes. To have a comparatively detached and uninvolved father was, in my eyes, a blessing. I almost treasure it. It was somewhat emotionally confusing, but emotional problems are easier to deal with than physical safety problems by an order of magnitude.
The boomers experienced the best of both worlds: they themselves got to do what they wanted, but the social fabric was still strong enough from centuries of nomianism (or whatever the opposite of antinomianism is) for them to enjoy a generally stable, functioning country. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be a stable equilibrium, as we're now discovering.
>Just realized I wrote that entire thing without mentioning that I'm gay which is maybe a bit important here ig.
Funnily enough, gay conservatives, who are presumably less antinomian that their liberal counterparts, are considerably happier than gay liberals. In fact, they're even happier than heterosexual liberals:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-explains-the-liberal-conservative
So even leaving aside the question of whether changing society in a way that benefits a few % of the population but harms the majority is really the most moral way to proceed, I don't think your argument works even on its own terms.
> leaving aside the question of whether changing society in a way that benefits a few % of the population but harms the majority
I mean like I said, I'm an outlier! I think this is a reasonable argument against antinomianism writ large. I'm not exactly invested in destroying social gender norms broadly, I just don't care to follow them and I'm happy that some of the dumbest ones are dying. What I'm saying is that there's a reason people tore those systems down: They created a lot of misery and were inflexible. That inflexibility became increasingly problematic over time, especially because again the cost is emotional confusion. It's a pretty good bargain if it reduces the rate of domestic violence at all. Which it seems to! The only people nowadays who turn on their own sons for being gay are not just religious people but specifically insane religious people.
I'm a traditionalist in this way. Our forefathers fought and occasionally even died for our right to party. Value their sacrifice! Get your nails done with your gf or something. You have more freedom now, objectively. Embrace it. There's a kind of human dignity in antinomianism. Most people aren't so fragile that they can't survive a little emotional turmoil. It's part and parcel of being alive. At least now, with a commitment to not allowing the dumbest people alive to force their notion of masculinity on us, gay and straight men can often go through that emotional turmoil without also experiencing physical trauma.
> Funnily enough, gay conservatives, who are presumably less antinomian that their liberal counterparts, are considerably happier than gay liberals.
This seems so many layers of inference removed from its original context that I hesitate to draw any conclusions from it.
>What I'm saying is that there's a reason people tore those systems down:
Yes, because people had adopted the dumb Rousseauist idea that mankind is inherently good and only goes bad because of social influence, and therefore social norms are inherently corrupting and oppressive. There's no reason why we need to repeat their mistake.
>They created a lot of misery
Where's your evidence that people are happier now than they were in the past?
>and were inflexible.
Actually, gender norms are less flexible now than they were in the past. In ye olden days (the 1990s), a girl who liked football and cars was just a tomboy; now she's a boy trapped in a girl's body, and liable to be whisked off to hospital to have her breasts cut off.
>There's a kind of human dignity in antinomianism.
Dignity comes from acting in a dignified manner, which antinomianism tends to undermine.
>This seems so many layers of inference removed from its original context that I hesitate to draw any conclusions from it.
Conservatives are happier than liberals in basically every demographic you can think of. Prima facie, therefore, if you want to know how people can live a happy life, look at what conservatives are doing, not at what liberals are doing.
The terms manosphere and patriarchy need to be abolished. Both encourage people to stereotype men as these control freaks or obnoxious men who physically dominate women. Polite society is not very polite is it? But at least some of the problem is parents and a society that values material success but not spiritual growth or finding oneself as a creative person. Certainly the man who is not suffers from this mentality and also the man with the plan. Both get good paying jobs but of course wind up hating them.
The fact is, men enjoy some privileges that women do not in Western society
Which privileges?
Super interesting. Love how you distilled what is a historically weird experience (modern dating, trying out many many people for romantic partnership!) into an ethnography of 20 and 30 something single men in the bay area!
I used to feel like my desire for recognition and appreciation was a black hole and then I quit my tech job and went to live in a hippie commune and immediately felt much better, so the overall thrust of the review deeply resonates with my experience but there's a few things that don't quite jive. First of all, the review attributes social despair to a lack of structure. I ultimately left the hippies because I wanted more structure but at that point I was already in good mental health. The hippies are pretty much the least structured and most disorganized group you can find and so more structure isn't what you need to get out of the black hole. I think it's more about the way the way that city life surrounds you with transactional relationships. If you had a heart attack in middle of a city street then everyone would look at each other and say things like "Maybe somebody else will do something about it." "Is that guy homeless?" and so on, whereas if you went into one of the squatted villages where I was living and had a heart attack everyone would immediately all start trying to do something and they would be super disorganized about it but they would clearly care about your problem in a way that's so obvious that it doesn't need stating. Even though heart attacks are very rare I think this thought experiment reveals a lot about how much different groups care about their members and what essential things go left unstated that matter a lot even when there's not an emergency. Another thing the reviewer emphasizes a lot is that she thinks these issues are for men. When I read mental health statistics about young American women they seem pretty apocalyptic and bleak, just in different ways than men's mental health stats are, so I would say this is a universal problem of growing up in a purely transactional world, rather than anything to do with men specifically. I guess men and women have show very different symptoms when they get the disease of shame/narcissism/social anxiety.
"Modernity and Self Identity" by Anthony Giddens was the first book I read that started to explain what was going on. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about this. A female friend who I recommended the book to who had similar issues also thought it explained a lot. Seriously, these issues are, at root, not about gender.
The dating environment the review portrays sets up people to judge each other's inner worth as a human being and usually reject each other. She was describing going on dates and then cutting it short when she realizes it's not going to work. That would scar me deeply and give me a terrible fear of rejection. I'm glad I never had to go through that. My longest running girlfriend I met through airbnb, when only weird people used it before it became really commercial. Then I joined her friend group and we went to jazz clubs without officially dating for a few months and then we agreed that she would move into my flat as a flatmate still without officially dating. This whole process of doing everything implicitly meant that we were never staking our worth as a human being on another person's judgment. A lot of things are better left unsaid and if other people value you as a person is probably one of them. SF dating strikes me as cruel and unusual.
Hmm, when you mentioned the hippie commune my first thought was, "It's the small group of people which matters." To me the large number of people in a city can seem soul crushing. All these people, but no neighbors.
Well, I think it’s pretty clear who is going to win this year‘s competition…!
> 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.
I think that Scott Galloway is doing a good job right now of trying to build a healthy mens movement and acts a good role model.
The types of men described in this post are all stereotypical, with many if not most features of the stereotypes taken from the familiar culture war talking points. I'm not saying that the review is fake - I'm not sure how likely it is that there is a real twenty-something woman who met enough men of these types through dates and wrote up the way she perceived them. Maybe it's a mix of personal experiences and cliché? - but even then, the personal experience went through a cliché filter, if that makes sense?
I kept nodding and thinking "yeah, that's right" as I was reading the review, but then at the end of it realized I just read through a few reinforced stereotypes I already knew well from internet culture war reading, with essentially no interesting or new information. That can't be right! I'm sometimes alarmed by how some people imbibe social stereotypes from their bubble so strongly they become a walking cliché, but this is relatively rare, not every single person I meet. Real people are more complex than stereotypes, and an insightful description of dating actual flesh men ought to contain some behaviors or thoughts that I, a non-American who never dated men, would find fresh and surprising. Something went wrong here.
Aella and this poster both describe asking men probing questions and then being disappointed when the men are hesitant or awkward answering, infering that these men must not know themselves.
I find that crazy. It is obviously you don't want to tell a stranger your weaknesses on a first date. There need to be a gradual escalation of trust. Having such a gradual escalation is just sane and rational self-preservation.
For example, if one knows oneself to be highly gullible, submissive or bad with keeping track of money, one should 100% not disclose that, as there are predators out there who will treat that as a shark treats blood in the water. More generally, even if they aren't a predator, they might just be a shitty person who could easily use your insecurities to hurt you.
Thank you for writing this. I think each of these categories are true representations, and it felt illuminating to read a compassionate first-hand experience of these different types of men.
"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. ... Yet right now the only people filling this niche seem to be creeps such as the Tate brothers."
Thread to compile a list of some such men? I have benefitted from the guidance of several, none of them perfect but all, I feel, a role model of how to be a man in 2025.
My list would prominently include Aubrey Marcus, and especially Adam Jackson and the work of his organization Sacred Sons.
[writer of the review here]
Thank you for these suggestions for healthy male role models! I'm not familiar with any of them, but will check out their work.
Also would welcome suggestions from any other readers, if you have any. I help to mentor both high school and college students, and it would be *super* helpful to know of healthy male role models I can turn them onto.
OK I guess this suggestion won't go over very well in the bay area, but while reading I was thinking of Jordan Peterson. I was recently re-reading Scotts review. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life/
Peter Limberg. Andrew Huberman. Many of the folks I have in mind are by no means exclusively "men's work" type people, maybe not the right people to recommend to your high schoolers – they come to mind for me because they sometimes touch on those themes, and because I find something about their expression of masculinity wholesome and inspiring.
Tom Bilyeu "Impact Theory" aimed specifically at young people in general, but has a lot of advice for young men because he is a man.
Jeff St James. Very thoughtful and sees things from a build up don't tear down perspective. Probably the most controversial on the list because he is the only one dedicated to dating and men's issues exclusively.
Dr. Orion Terraban "psyhacks".
Coleman Hughes. "Conversations with Coleman".
John Woods Jr. Founder of Braver Angels.
I second the Andrew Huberman recommendation.
Alex Hormozi.
Chris Williamson. His podcast gets a lot of interesting people. He himself has had an interesting journey from reality TV show to fitness model to the YouTube personality.
Ok maybe one more controversial one: Zuby.
Fair bit of variety in the list. Should include several unfamiliar names.
This was very good, but at a few points in the essay the author seems to severely undervalue the impact which women have on men's self-esteem. Which is a real shame, because understanding that impact is a necessary part of solving some of the problems she writes about. The vicious cycle of female rejection, which then lowers a man's self-esteem, which then leads to more female rejection is not something that men can remedy, it is only something they can weather. Solving it is quite literally out of their hands. Unlike looks, or intelligence, or wealth, a single woman is fully capable of significantly altering a man's self-esteem. Men intensely care about what women think of them. So much so that they can have a fulfilling job, good friends, a keen mind and a healthy body, yet still feel like a complete failure, if women won't glance their way.
If the vibe I got from this essay is anything vaguely true, then the author finds many of the men she runs across to be valuable, real people, with several excellent traits. So let them know. This is one of the few areas of dating where you can genuinely make a difference, and mold someone into a partner worth having.
Unfortunately women are also just people with self-esteem issues too. If a man she is dating forgets to, idk, send her flowers or whatever on some occasion, that makes her feel lacking in self-worth bc she gets her sense of self from how loving he is. Then she wants to dump him or not date him in the first place if he seems like the type of guy who wouldn't love her very well, which makes his self-esteem drop.
In other words, it never works to draw your self-esteem from other people, whether they be men or women. People are just people. They can't do the work of the divine.
Sending a person flowers isn't the work of the divine, that's kind of what I'm getting at. It is extremely achievable. Same goes for being a bit more forgiving when someone doesn't send you flowers. Or letting someone know that they have several excellent traits which you admire. Compared to other issues in dating, low self-esteem is one of the easier ones to solve for other people, while being very difficult to solve for yourself.
Plus, I feel it is worth pointing out, it is a very good thing for men to care what women think. If women truly believe that men are worthless, then men should work quite hard to change that. But for some of the guys she describes, it sounds like their self-esteem is completely decoupled from their actual worth. The only issue that they have is that no one values their clearly valuable traits. There is a solution to this problem, and it doesn't involve the delusional idea that "I'm great despite the fact that no one cares I exist". Women should value men's valuable traits. Nine times out of ten, I basically guarantee that this gives them a self-esteem boost. Which is great, because it's really easy to do! Don't drop a guy for having low self-esteem, when you can easily improve his self-esteem!
Some insecurities no person can do anything about. A guy who gets his self worth from how hot his girlfriend is, is always going to be controlling about her weight, which isn't going to help her self esteem if she's tied it to her appearance. In the same way, some men just cannot remember to send flowers. My point is that women are also people looking for self esteem and they have little incentive to date guys who they think won't fill up their sense of self, no matter how much dating those guys might help them. If women should be expected to date them anyway, why shouldn't the same expectation be placed on men? Why don't those guys go for ugly fat old women, in order to boost such women's self esteem?
I agree it's silly to think that you have value if nobody cares if you exist. That is why I spoke of the divine. God cares. Enough to die for you. There's no greater self esteem boost available.
I think I see where you're coming from, yeah. I guess I should be clearer, I'm not expecting women to pour tons of time and affection into dudes which they don't like very much. I'm trying to point to the fact that, if the only issue that a girl has with a guy is his self-esteem, and everything else is pretty great, then that isn't an unsolvable problem. In fact, unlike most other issues in the dating world, it's something that she is quite capable of altering, with a fairly low effort. There will always be the occasional guy who remains a sad sack regardless of how much people love him, but those folks are rarer than you'd think.
[writer of the review here]
I see a lot of value to this take. I had an extremely impactful moment back when I was about twenty and tossed a casual compliment to a male friend. He got really quiet, and I thought I had offended him and apologized. Then he explained, "No, sorry, that's just the first compliment I've gotten in like three years, and I'm just kind of trying to process it."
The idea that this perfectly kind, good-looking (albeit very shy) dude could go *three entire years* without getting a genuine compliment was absolutely mind-boggling to me. I'd heard about men not getting enough compliments, but frankly I'd thought it was just highly dysfunctional incels who experienced this, and not something that impacted perfectly lovely men. Did some polling of my other male friends, and found out this was a very familiar phenomenon for many of them. Since then, I have taken every opportunity I can to compliment men when it is appropriate.
This does get a *bit* tricky when dating, though. You don't want to accidentally lead a guy on. But I still do my best to give compliments whenever it seems appropriate. And when I'm in a relationship, I'm extremely effusive with verbal affection and have seen what a massive impact it can have.
So I agree that's probably something I should have focused on more in the essay. It's an excellent point.
Aw, I'm flattered. Glad you got something out of my comment, usually my text just sort of disappears into the great blue yonder. Thanks for writing the piece! Even independent of the interesting subject matter, it has a clear voice and good flow, an excellent entry into the contest, in my opinion.
Fight Club was written in 1994, yes?
I had read The War Against Boys many years ago when it came out in 2000 (I was not familiar with the author) and it certainly resonated with my experience as well.
This piece could be a joint epilogue for both.
More like an*dick*data, am I right? Jkjk. Got a lot out of this, so thanks for that. If I could write half as well about women--
That said, while the types the author wrote of seem accurate or at least like a good start, I do think there are a couple biases that limit the perspective. First, she seems to take true love as her guiding star of what any of this living is all worth, and a happy family life as a suitable enough proxy for it for the purposes of discussion. Again, a highly empathetic essay, but still narcissistic in framing, always headed back toward the author--understandable from the format, but it sets aside the question of whether a man might become a man though some path other than family life and fatherhood, of whether a few of those glances from "not"-men might have been diverted because they have given over the wheel to other drives.
And then second, the take that the path to true love is through an exhaustive perusal of the options is logical for a rationalist, but in actuality, the process of modern, city-dweller, numbers-game dating way more often ends up an anthropologic (see: above post), or pornographic (check in with your brain on hour two of swiping), or consumerist (but which one is the customer who is always right?) exercise than a romantic one. Some say "love is a choice." For some, true love is a mystical connection that can only spring up from life itself, not from a ceaseless rifling through the racks.
The author's view of dating feeds into the idea that romantic relationships are arrangements that need be practiced to perfection before you can arrive in love. This idea is downstream of the strong sense for efficiency we see rooted in a consumerist-based dating culture and hookup culture--a culture that has so thoroughly dethroned the old purity culture that a man can get to feeling slightly homey again in chastity.
Yet, men and women both, broadly-speaking, fit these types. The only difference is that in romance, men must be active to attain a woman, and women must be active to avoid a man. This is why these same types on the female end don't track to isolated women (not that they aren't out there). But it is just as easy to be lonely when you're with someone just because it was easier than declining. This passivity is a good piece of what The Last Psychiatrist was on with the porn book.
If we imagine the mirror six types for women, and if cynicism forbids we imagine only whole-person-plus-whole-person as the finish line of stable relationships, then at least that explains why most of what gets counted for love looks unappetizing--1 in 36 odds at a relationship that doesn't thrive on subtle or subtler forms of cruelty. Craps anyone?
This piece is a pleasant ray of hope. Of course, for every essay like this, there's an app like Tea making the case against dating all together.
Thank you for writing this. This is probably the most insightful female take I've read on the plight of modern men, it's incredibly on the nose, and the archetypes presented are very useful, though I find that most men will find themselves matching different profiles at different times. I have a lot to potentially say about it, I'll write a handful of things, also specifically speaking as a biseuxal person since although I'm aware I can't speak for either flavour of heterosexual person I still feel like I have some manner of higher level overview for both sides.
One thing I think is very underacknowledged is that from day 1 men in "the dating game" have to face the following impossible situation:
- Men will generally experience a lot more attraction *a priori* to a much broader range of random women they encounter and then either reinforce or discard that based on whether a personal connection can be made, whereas I feel like women generally wait for a deeper connection to form first before developing more significant feelings of attractiveness. That matches my own attraction patterns to the different genders as well;
- Just as women, men will generally want there to be a strong emotional connection first before pursuing relationships or sex;
- Many men just don't really interact with women very much in their day to day life in a context where a relationship might form. People pick up pretty quickly that the office is not a place for dating, and hobbies and such are often unintentionally very gender segregated across the board. I was a compsci undergrad and my classes probably had a single digit percentage of women, but even a 60/40 ratio in terms of dating represents a game of musical chairs where 1/3 of men will be left standing under the assumptions of monogamy;
- *Therefore*, and because men generally correctly intuit that the name of the game is for them to "apply" and for women to "interview" and filter down, and that because they can't count on women coming to where they are, they're gonna have to go to where women are;
- *And yet* women basically instantly see through "ulterior motives" and understandably view this as an intrusion into the sanctity of their hobbies.
- Men tend to really underestimate the extent to which their sheer presence can make women feel intimidated or unsafe, even if they think of themselves as fairly unassuming and demure. *Conversely*, women tend to *really* underestimate the extent to which their sheer presence can make men feel intimidated or go "sdfshskdlfhskdlf I can't even", even if they think of themselves as fairly plain
Basically, men are not just "expected" to proactively contact women but romantically doomed if they don't, and yet the women in their direct environment are usually limited to colleagues, family members and transient interactions with strangers, and yet when men try and meet women for the sake of meeting women they are judged very harshly on having "ulterior motives" that are typically impossible to hide or avoid having (even for men who didn't come "looking for a relationship" in the first place!)
Men feel female rejection a lot more strongly than women realize I think, and so the effects of this are usually very profound. I've been engaged to a man for years now and have no intention of dating women again, but since I am still sexually attracted to them I do still strongly experience this ugh field around them and it makes it hard to seek out female friendships, to the extent of pushing me away from women even in hobbies I already have for their own sake and pushing me away from entire communities for some hobbies I have that are more female-dominated.
This is the experiential reality of a lot of young men: they are very excited about women, they love being around women, looking at women, getting even the slightest bit of recognition or attention from women, and yet this attitude tends to strongly repel women --- and I realize that it's *shitty men* that are driving this suspicion and guardedness in women, but that's hard for your average man to do anything about, and even surprisingly difficult for men to be aware of, just like the hardships of men are often invisible to women.
Another thing to note is that men are generally very clueless on how attractive they are or what really is attractive to women, especially when it comes to physical attractiveness, and this causes a lot of insecurity. Women do not offer up their opinion on this very easily to say the least, and any women commenting on a man's attractiveness in either direction even in passing will usually stick with men for *years*.
It's in this context that I want to draw attention to what I think is, from a male perspective, the most painful line of the piece:
> His attempts don’t go well. In fact, you might say they’re a bit of a disaster. Women have come to expect a certain level of romantic competence from a twenty-two-year-old, and he just doesn’t meet the bar.
For many men, twenty-two years old is *very young* (that's the age I started dating, and I turn 27 today, fwiw). It is a rare man who has himself figured out in any capacity at this age. I think it's right to note that women have *come to expect* things already at that young age, but I feel like typically what they're locking on to is just a matter of confidence and not so much any real mastery born from experience.
Mind that starting from late teens, inexperienced men tend to get more and more fixated on their lack of experience every year, specifically on virginity. I don't think women generally care all that much about whether a man is a *virgin* or not, seeing it as a symptom at best, but men care a lot about it for themselves, because at first they tie their lack of having sex to a self-image of being sexually unattractive, and then later elevate virginity to a symbolic status as representing this immense barrier to entry from lack of inexperience.
I think this is *especially* true for men who men who are uninterested in casual sex or the shallow throw-shit-at-the-wall "dating game" and really prioritize close personal connection and shared interest first and foremost -- I'm in this camp -- and you'll often find these men being increasingly very desperate for sex past a certain age, not because it is sex itself that they want so badly but because they've come to view "losing their virginity" as the exam they have to pass for women to even recognize them as human beings.
This effect is *very* dire, this is the emotional engine that ultimately produces the Elliot Rodger terrorist attack kind of monstrous husks. From the age of 20 onwards men start really "feeling the clock" in a very oppressive way, which tends to cause stress and desperation, which is (rightfully!) extremely unattractive to women, causing rejection, which is felt very harshly, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle and bitterness.
I can only implore women to please be much kinder and gentler towards inexperienced, awkward, bumbling, sheepish men in their 20s. Some people date a lot of people starting from their teens until settling down, others will wait until a really strong match and only date a few people over a lifetime, and I can't say I've noticed a difference in relationship quality over the long term. Mind that men already across the board tend to lag behind women by 2-3 years in terms of emotional maturity. Add to that that people mature at different rates -- I have personally always been intellectually a couple years ahead, and social-emotionally a couple years behind my peers -- and it really isn't that strange for some men to only really be ready for a serious relationship by their mid 20s.
Please don't punish men for waiting until they feel comfortable and ready or waiting for a person they're really into. Men are really fragile and care way more about what women say than women will ever realize. I guarantee you some readers will still be hearing "*If a man is past the age of twenty-five and has never been in a committed relationship, most women will view this as a red flag*" booming in their head at night. Few men really need to hear this, not because it's false but because there's very few men indeed who don't realize this.
Mind that the only advice I can really give *men* here is "care less about female rejection, how women perceive you, and how you make women feel", which is... simultaneously the ancient advice, the only advice that really works, and something that goes much further and transcends men and women and romance, and yet also the root of all evil, the source of untold suffering,
and an attitude that takes great wisdom and morality to wield.
If, as a society, we rightly decide to revoke men's license to "move fast and break things", then let us at least please accomodate them moving slow and fumbling things instead.
Almost all of what I've described just kind of melts away once you get into gay dating. There's issues there as well of course, but overall the situation is just much much better, and even though much of what makes it better doesn't translate to straight dating, a lot of it also could.
Thus ends the "handful of things" ^^"
I have to say, reading this post makes me think strict sexual morality has an unexpected side benefit. When I was looking to get married, I only wanted a man who was a virgin. I viewed men who were not virgins as unserious about God.
"Almost all of what I've described just kind of melts away once you get into gay dating. There's issues there as well of course, but overall the situation is just much much better, and even though much of what makes it better doesn't translate to straight dating, a lot of it also could."
First of all, let me say I really appreciated your post.
I've never tried it, but I have to ask... isn't a lot of that just the numbers? Gay dating is going to always be matched up perfectly, almost by definition. With straight dating, it just seems like there's always an imbalance of men. And it doesn't take much of an imbalance to drastically change the dynamics. Like you said, there's a musical chairs element where a certain number of men are *guaranteed* to be left out. But also, those men are going to be crazy desparate, and the women are going to be very much on guard against those men,, so the whole system just collapses.
My impression is that it's sort of like a classic bank panic, like in "it's a wonderful life." Even if there's enough for most customers to get their money, it's going to drastically change the feelings of every single customer.
Thanks for writing this. As pointed out by a number of comments, feeling unmoored isn't uniquely a male problem and I've been feeling rather unmoored myself for a long time.
What got me on to the subject occurred at little before I read this article-- it was about people who leave cults having a period (about five years for a lot of them) of not knowing what they want. This sounded so familiar, but I've never been in a cult.
I think there's some deep damage to basic functioning involved. I suspect at least part of it is being trained to judge oneself harshly from the outside.
I don't know that things were so great in the past, but it's possible that it was easier for most people to live their lives without a high level of self-judgement poisoning them even when times were good.
****
This attack on men who aren't good at attracting women isn't just about toxic feminism. The classic "Have you ever kissed a girl?" skit with Shatner wasn't about feminism.
Thank you for writing this anon
I was reading this and felt wow this is one of the best maps detailing the mental health crisis affecting men today
One key insight is how casual cruelty towards boys is not aligned with "fighting patriarchy", much like how eat the billionaires or anger towards individual politicians are knee jerk responses that do not actually help in addressing the systemic issues that are responsible for your pain
Rather the solution is to be a positive role model, to offer a path towards being a better man, lead by example, be a honest, sincere, sacrificing politician or businessman
Walk the talk. Realize by making it real in the world.
> No one should ever feel ashamed or unworthy because of an inherent trait.
I'd like some discerning man to write a similar map for women.
It's not like young men that resonate with the alt right are beyond saving, I do think it's possible to salvage a lot of the people who are on the fringes of the manosphere because they recognize deep down how being a beast is a lose lose game
I notice most men are a mix of these as with most clean decompositions. There are really vicious interclass effects like anger and hatred (beast) add on to the low self esteem, low self confidence (opt out) causing things to spiral downward
But there are also beautiful synergies where even tasting what it feels like to be Whole (often meeting such a man briefly can be enough) it can be contagious to be shown what is possible and empathetically inhabit that state of mind by spending time with the role model and then it can be an anchor men work towards.
It is sad that many of the tight knit communities where boys can find their place, trust each other, learn to give their life to a good cause and mature into men are derided for being a cult and shamed by mainstream society
But these exist and passion, curiosity and trusting your internal compass and experience can help you find your tribe
A long-time reader, I have never posted on ACX before. But to read
> Most of “polite society”–the elite individuals who often influence narratives in the media and academia–seem locked in a zero-sum mindset, convinced that discussing the pain of men requires ignoring the problems of others. I believe the opposite is true; the pain facing both men and women is evidence of a wounded society, and you cannot heal an injury by only stitching half of it. The rest of the wound will fester and spread infection, and then your stitches are of no use.If half the population isn’t provided proper care and attention, there’s no hope to heal the problems facing the rest of us. Thus the pain of men needs a massive increase in attention.
compelled me not only to post, and to preemptively declare this my favourite review on the basis of just the first few paragraphs, but also to fly to San Francisco to prostrate myself in front of the author (were she not anonymous) in tearful thanks.
I am one of these men who for the longest time has felt the need to keep quiet whilst the issues of women and other minorities were being addressed. But as all this explains so well the shit that has also been going down for men. The idea of keeping quiet has only resulted in, at first quiet depression, and then a steadily growing bitterness. I am not a member of the potential category of dates for the author, being 20 years older and no resident of San Francisco, and having a girlfriend so not allowed to go on dates, yet still much of this explains my life and its discontents, the churning discontents that are the end result of this youthful male flailing, the much-derided male midlife crisis.
Best of all the line about how The Man Who Provides might ‘run off to the Amazon to do some ayahuasca’ is just what I needed to read to stop me running off to the Amazon to do some ayahuasca.
When I joyfully related this article to my (ever-understanding) girlfriend, she remarked with a raised eyebrow that a woman who wanted to explain men from her conversations with a number of them might be accused of womansplaining. And we had a quiet giggle about how this article might have gone down had the genders been reversed. But I went on to think, if *splaining means ‘listening closely to the pain of others in order to empathise and explain to the wider public in an empathetic manner’ then please let us have much more of it, including men listening attentively to women in order to empathically explain to others where they see societal problems lie. (Here I acknowledge that this empathetic type of *splaining does not cover all types of *splaining, only to say that sometimes men discussing what is going on for women should be welcomed as a sign of understanding – isn’t this the fundamental basis of empathetic listening and reflection in therapy?)
I might go on to quote some other passages from the review, but that would really just mean copying out all of it. If I were a publisher, I would be offering a book deal, and publishing and marketing this as a book even whilst it lost me money, since that would be a much better way to serve society than all the confused ways I have tried so far. As fantasy publisher I suggest the book title of The Lost Map of Manhood, and hope that plunging my life savings into its promotion will bring about a societal change that compensates for the value void that has characterised the vast majority of my work to date.
I made the mistake of reading this late at night and now I don't know when I'll be able to fall asleep. It wasn't on my radar at all that there were many men in my class, much less that they formed an entire archetype.
I'm a man in the Bay Area. Review Author, could I trouble you for a few hours of your time, to learn from the unnumbered men who preceded me? I'd be quite happy to compensate you for it.
Writing from a throwaway account, because I'm going to mention things that have been very traumatic to me and that I'm not yet comfortable discussing publicly and non-anonymously.
I am biologically male, and in my late twenties. Lately I have been questioning my gender, but my "lived experience", as the youth these days say, has been that of a man. Since this post invites men to share these problems, and society to pay attention to what is being discussed, I wanted to bring up one problem that I think tends to stay in the shadows.
I think society should realize that the concept of active consent, and the idea that harassment and sexual abuse are unacceptable, should also apply to men, and that men should not be seen as "providers" of sexual resource.
It sounds obvious when put like that, but I see signs that it's simply overlooked, not spoken about. Maybe not purposefully silenced, but at least somehow not noticed.
***
I have been a victim of sexual abuse in my childhood. I've been normalizing my abuser's behavior for a very long time, and blaming myself, as children in these situations do. Only of late have I started to realize how deeply it has fucked me up, in multiple respects, but this includes my sexuality. (This part is not where society's attitude has to change — people are supposed to be all horrified and "I'm so sorry it happened to you" when they hear that.)
During my first long-term relationship, which was also my first sexual relationship, I very quickly realized I didn't want to have sex with my girlfriend. But the idea that it's valid in any way *for me* not to want to have sex was incredibly far from me; I was sort of forcing myself to do it anyway, and feeling incredible shame for being such a terrible partner who can't even provide this "resource". That wasn't the expectation for a man (while of course I wouldn't pressure my girlfriend to have sex with me.)
So I started losing erections, and my sorta-progressive girlfriend went as far as to humiliate and insult and body-shame me, on one occasion, in a way that left a deep scar.
Ever since that relationship, I've been noticing traces of this "provider / receiver" attitude, and the lack of application of active consent to men. Girls talking about how they were "treating myself so low that I was dating a guy who didn't even have an erection on me". Hearing about some female friends being outraged about their friend's boyfriend "denying her sex". Jokes in TV shows with women saying to their male partners "what?! you decline sex?!". Men having "performance anxiety" — because they *perform*. Consider the movie "no hard feelings" from a couple of years ago. The plot is about a thirties-something woman who has been hired to seduce an unwilling boy, by the boy's parents! Would the gender-swapped version of the movie be considered the light-hearted comedy that this movie was taken to be?
***
I worry about these discussions moving into zero-sum territory. If we talk about men's experience with sexual harassment, we take away the women's chance of visibility, and vice versa. I think it's backwards. I think healing can only truly work if we establish that rules are for everyone, and that everyone hurts, and if we have a dialogue across all sexes and genders. Because it's a wound. A self-perpetuating, self-reproducing wound, and it needs healing.
(UPD: whoa, it's been a while since I read that review — while we were still voting on candidates — and I totally forgot you had the exact same metaphor right in the beginning of your post. Anyway, I agree and I'm applying it to this issue in particular.)
"...seem locked in a zero-sum mindset, convinced that discussing the pain of men requires ignoring the problems of others."
Yet when the cry went out, decades ago, to help women, the call wasn't couched in these terms. It was never said "...but don't worry, we won't take anything away from men while we try to help women!"
Because it was EXPECTED that men would have to give up something in the cause.
Now that men are the ones needing help, you have to say "but don't worry, we won't take anything away from women while we try to help men!"
Because it is EXPECTED that women won't have to give up anything to this cause.
In fact, if people even think that helping men requires women give something up, the deal is off, for most people. Men can just go suck it, for all they care.
Many of the comments are arguing that "teach your son to be a good PERSON" is an adequate substitute for "teach your son to be a good MAN". One point I haven't seen made in response is this:
When learning a basic skill, it is absolutely necessary to learn a simplified framework, and gain facility within that framework before you can begin to really leverage alternate perspectives.
- in mathematics, 1+1=2.... except in binary, where 1+1=10
- in music, a "V7" chord is almost always followed by a "I" chord... until you learn about modulating keys
Beginners should learn a beginner framework, even if they later learn how do use an alternate framework. In the same sense, boys should learn things like:
- men are stronger than women, and are expected to protect them in danger (we can wait on "the strongest 10% of women are actually stronger than the bottom 10% of men)
- men are more assertive than women, so men are responsible for listening to the subtext women won't say explicitly. This has obvious corollaries in dating, classrooms, and workplace.
- women mature faster than men, especially emotionally. So you should learn from them how to handle complex interaction. You should also understand that they'll prefer to date men older than themselves, and not be resentful as a teenager.
There's no MORAL claim here... one can't derive an "ought" from an "is". And there are many, many exceptions! But it's a good starting point.
I also though it a sympathetic and compelling review, thanks to the writer.
I have noticed that all these articles about men tend to say “this equation is very simple if you factor out this “masculinity” term, but the point is that you can’t. Most men want to be men, whatever that means. At least this author recognizes that, even though she doesn’t have any more solutions than anyone else.
Read every single line of this article, noticed that I was several of these men. I’m about to be a father, and I can still feel several of these men inside of me. I’m having a daughter, so my focus will be on her and promoting her well-being, but I do wonder what is going to happen to all those little boys who aren’t going to be given the freedom to be their expansive gender category that my daughter will get. It broke my brain open when you mentioned that trans folk would rather commit suicide than be made to abandon the gender category they identify with, even trans masculinity. But masculinity for its own sake? Men are taught to fear it, run from it, betray it, or it will end up turning them into abusers and warmongers, suffused with vice.
We cis-men receive more anti-cis propaganda than trans people receive anti-trans propaganda. Sounds crazy, but the anti-trans movement is fundamentally an anti-freedom movement and the fruits of that movement are fundamental threats to everyone’s freedom. No moral person supports these encroachments into people’s bathrooms, underclothes, and personal lives.
But it is considered MORAL for men to oppose the gender category which they were born with and which is their preferred category. It is seen as essential to being a “right” thinking individual man (ironic for the left, supposedly a bastion of freedom) to eschew and throw off and betray any allegiance to the gender category of masculinity, because that masculinity is benefitted by the patriarchy. So, incidentally, is femininity, but being “feminine” is seen as a moral good or at least morally safe, with beauty and flowers and romance attached to it. There is no beauty in masculinity, there is only violence. There is no romance to being a man, there is only violation. There is no safe natural manhood, there is only natural predation that men must “overcome.” Overcome your femininity? That’s sexist, anti-woman, and anti-freedom. But there is no freedom to be a man AND be good thereby. That is… unless you are a trans-man.
Another point I haven't seen discussed: the WEIRD world is **incredibly** stratified by age. In most premodern societies I'm familiar with, there were typically ample opportunities for the youth to observe and interact with their elders. Today we begin age stratification by 5 years old, so you end up with high school freshmen trying to learn maturity from high school seniors... a case of "the blind leading the blind" if there ever was one!
It's marginally better once we enter the workforce... at that point the twenty-somethings might be interacting with forty-somethings! But the sixty-somethings are long gone, and any perspective they might have about other ways to interpret or interact with the world are gone with them.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the perspectives which elders have are CORRECT... but even when wrong, they can often be ILLUMINATING, because they can challenge assumptions so basic that they weren't even recognized. This is why CS Lewis recommends reading old books... the past is a different country, they do things differently there. Future books would ALSO be helpful in this regard... just much, much harder to obtain.
This post has convinced me that most of the people on this post are just *so California*. I'm from the midwest, more than half a century old, and a liberal, hanging out primarily with other midwest liberals, and I have never once in my life heard anyone of either gender espouse even half of those things you list in II.
Yet your five types of men seem spot on. I've been one or two of them myself. So I think the real underlying cause isn't "Polite Society" (ie, liberal elites) and their mores, but something much more fundamental.
I grew up in a rural community in Ohio, where I went to a very large yet still overcrowded high school in the 1980's. There was a clear status hierarchy there: At the top were the jocks and their cheerleader girlfriends, most people were just mixed up ordinary folk in the middle, and a small number of ostrasized geeks and freaks (drug abusers) at the bottom.
Then I left high school and went out into the world. What I discovered is that the clear status hierarchy that determined everything in high school basically didn't exist anywhere else. Oh, there are status differences of various kinds: class, race, education, color, etc. But these were messy, over-lapping status differences. A person could be poor yet well educated, dark yet wealthy. The odds may be stacked unevenly, but it was still possible. Egalitarian values make sense in an environment like that.
What I have seen in the last twenty years is a growing number of people who want the rigid hierarchy back. The world is zero sum, so pick your team and devil to the hindmost. Basically, the entire country has become my high school.
This is a problem for lots of people, but that includes men. My high school was extremely competitive, only the jocks were *real* men, and the rest of us were expected to act like minions. If you buy into this you are going to be unhappy, but if you don't buy into this you will still be unhappy, just for different reasons.
So here's my diagnosis: The first four types of men are victims of the growing power of the last one. The problem is political, not just cultural. The solution is obvious.
Your high school was like that because it wasn’t hierarchically based on laws, custom, class or whatever. In the absence of imposed external hierarchies (this short little guy is your boss) humans will create hierarchies and they will probably favour, in the absence of anything else, attractiveness and fitness. For whatever reason this seems less pronounced here in the U.K., possibly the absence of a strong school based sports system. ( Outside of rugby schools that is. People do sports but there’s no home coming Queen or the whole town supporting a particular school team. You might be lucky to get your parents to even turn up).
I sometimes see people opine that UBI will end hierarchies, instead it will amplify natural hierarchies.
Externally imposed hierarchies are far less psychologically damaging of course. That guy is your boss because he’s been here a while. You can still feel superior in other ways.
I agree. The most relevant area of research is [Google Scholar] Emergent Leadership, which is often hyped as a great emergent trait in a personality, but if you read between the lines it sucks.
Formal hierarchies, of course, are accountable to whatever democratic processes or human rights restrictions the public finds appropriate.
Ha you predicted my comment with your last paragraph, which was going to be get the fk out of the Bay Area! It’s a pretty place, but not a healthy place.
Interesting categorizations. I also suspect there’s a lot of conflation between “Men who Provide” versus “Men who become beasts.”
I used to research incels and the manosphere and found that a lot of motivational content and success content inadvertently overlap with language from the manosphere. Even in spirituality circles (or those who do psychedelics) the talk of masculine energy, etc, can be easy to mistake (or veer into) manospherism.
I'll pitch in saying this article has the wrong framing, so it's way off.
These men she goes on dates with are clearly shit-testing the author (google the term if you don't know it). What? You'll say. Women shit-test men, not the other way around?
The script is flipped in the Bay Area. There are evolutionary reasons for shit-testing for women, and it is that they have a high risk of being left alone with the baby if they don't chase away unsuitable suitors. The way it flips is no-fault divorce and high alimony settlements.
As a man, you want your wife to just do the things women are supposed to do. Care for the kids, the household, and take on the mental load related to them. In exchange, you'll provide for the family financially. But you don't want complaints, and you certainly don't want to get divorced on. You know the odds of divorce are high, this is expensive for you if you are succesful financially, and women routinely divorce on you for weird random reasons these days. Like poor mental health typical in postpartum situations, or after social media abuse or random reddit swarm advice. You also know this is 100% bad for your kids the studies say. Not only your wallet.
So you ideally need a wife with perfect mental health, who also does not pick fights with you all the time. Both because fights increase divorce odds, and because they tax you mentally. Thus you shit test her from the first date on. If she takes the bait, it's over. And the author above is not sufficiently even self-aware to realize that 1) she's being shit-tested constantly and 2) she fails those shit tests all the time on the first date.
It's second best to just get a wife who was raised in the traditional ways: never contradict your man, keep quiet in business situations, and do what was expected from women since time immemorial - successfully run the household and the children. This is why I said above that any profile of those in the article would be better off just getting a mail-order trophy wife. Girls from third world countries are typically raised in the old ways, knowledgeable about them, and won't divorce you on a whim, taking half your assets.
This man would trip face-first into cow shit and then try to convince you it was both deliberate and cool.
And then add, "and besides, I was hungry!"
Are you shit-testing us right now?
Ah yes, the women of yore who never spoke up, just did the work and obeyed The Husband.
Except in those traditional societies, the domestic sphere is the woman's world, as acknowledged by all, and The Husband does not get a say in running the household. So if the wife has legitimate complaints about him being a bad provider, those get aired.
Or The Husbands get managed, and it's amazing how many men seem to think they're the ones ruling the roost when they are being managed by "now I'm just a poor little woman who doesn't know anything but, O big strong wise husband, could you tell me if...?" (see Katherine Parr getting out of the trap laid for her).
There will be disagreements in marriage. The One Weird Trick is to sort them out, not expect "Silence, woman! I am the lord and master!" to be the rule. That's how you end up with a diet of arsenic, a funeral where she looks radiant in black, and everyone tut-tutting about well it was only a matter of time before your temper brought about a stroke.
Take it away, GKC:
“The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.”
In some of Heinlein, the ideal relationship is one where the wife works on the husband until he thinks what she wants is his own idea.
This can have obvious drawbacks, but I think there are relationships like that, and they aren't necessarily disasters.
In all this talk about dating and marriage, I don't think there's been much about finding and cultivating a relationship where your partner has better sense than you do, at least about some parts of life.
Also, I've heard that mail order brides can be disappointments. If women have no formal power in marriage, they need to learn how to get their way anyway.
eh, the flip side of this was the husband often getting away from the woman as much as possible via a club or a bar, and maybe cheating on her on the side since divorce wasn't an option for either of them. The old "ball and chain" mentality, even if said fondly. The Honeymooners raised it to an art form: don't think any other tv series was as influential as it.
GKC is a bighearted romantic: you kind of have to take him lightly some times.
This post reflects a management/therapeutic culture that I find the opposite of humanity. That's why I think about the Bay Area as a civilizational pit. Treating people as insects to be studied is one of the worst kind of things one can do.
Dear Author, there are no whole human beings. And this is not a pessimist view, I'm a pretty joyful person. But you can't achieve happiness until you don't realize that human brokenness can be fixed only by God, not by humans alone.
This was a fascinating essay; thank you for writing it! As a man in his mid-late 30s, a lot of this resonated with me. For whatever it is worth, I ultimately found meaning in a super-traditional family setup (3 kids, my wife a SAHM). Neither I nor my wife aimed at that or thought that we would get there, and neither of us are politically conservative. Yet there’s nothing quite like fully subordinating your self to the needs of your family (and particularly to small kids) to completely wipe away this sort of existential angst.
This is the review I will be voting for. It stands out for its warmth and deeply compassionate atmosphere and analysis of men's health; I confess to being deeply moved. I would like to shake the hand of the author and offer a sincere thank you. What a thought-provoking review! And when I clicked on it I actually largely expected a comedy piece (in line with Scott's 'Bay Area series'). Bravo!
Dang, this is bleak.
This was a fun review! Definitely getting strong Aella vibes from it.
Dating progressive/leftist/socialist men in the bay area*, where trauma is social currency.
I once lived in the Bay Area. I met zero socialists. I have lived in Europe. I have met plenty of socialists. All normal guys.
Added theory: There's a push for people to be passionate-- pursuing goals (mostly making money and/or athleticism, though there's some room for art and charity) with tremendous sustained effort. Perhaps this causes people who are running at lower intensity to feel they're failing at life.
Note: passionate people aren't running at full bore all the time. My vague impression is that they can have some fallow years. At least some of them are bipolar and need to collapse now and then, and those who aren't bipolar may still get tired or sick or need to rethink what they're doing.
there's a professionalism to life now that is related to this. You can't just do a thing because you will soon find out that it is led by mutants: people who are so good at it that no one comes close.
like you play the piano and some youtube video shows a four year old chinese kid playing it better, or you play a video game and someone beats the toughest levels blindfolded.
people are too used to overpowered individuals in many things and come to expect it. the norm is well above the average to unhealthy levels. everyone should do sports, not an elite class.
Some of those videos turn out to be fraudulent, but I agree with your general point. By definition, most people can't compete with the top tenth of a percent at whatever.
The effect can be softened but not eliminated by people finding more and more specialized things to get good at.
Lots of thoughts form this, but probably the most important one is how much I appreciate the empathetic approach.
My hope is part of a trend that mights help bring us closer together.
Haven't been a particular fan of SA's recent work, but I will be subscribing to lock in my support.
It seems very wrong-headed to me to think of the pains and problems modern males have as unique to males and to the present era. Here are some book titles from the second half of the last century:
SOCIOLOGY
The Lonely Crowd by David Reisman
The Lost Generation by David Tremayne
The presentation of self in everyday life by Erving Goffman
MEMOIRS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward Said
Growing up Absurd by Paul Goodman
An Unfinished Woman by Lillian Hellman
A Sort of Life by Graham Greene
The Invention of Solidtude, by Paul Auster. (And Part 1 of the book is titled Portrait of an Invisible Man)
I see gender as a MacGuffin. It's not the true goal of life but higher goals can seem remote and abstract, most people seem to need to pursue more embodied goals and find higher goals as a byproduct.
This essay.
Just thank you. I could go to write an almost as long essay about the pathways to wholeness. But needless to say, I get it.
I want to share a little nugget that has helped me through the years. I have always been a fisherman and hunter. So, you can see, I have a community. And certainly this community doesn't work for the Bay Area, but my community is one that I build. And because I move often, I have rebuild my community every time. Of course, I'm old now, and these problems of our modern society were not my problems, but let me get to it.
When you come on fishing trip with me, we will inevitably meet either at my house or yours, and we'll ride somewhere in the truck to where we are going to be fishing. And then, we're going to spend all day on a little rectangle in the water, trying to solve the same problem (to catch more fish). Success means lifelong memories and joy, failure means you must try again, and learn from your mistakes. But it is really that time together that is truly meaningful. And I can't even begin to tell you the stories I've heard from men, just bonding over life's shared experiences.
So this leads to couple of rules for anyone still reading this.
One, make sure you're community involves opportunities for deep connection. Camping, hiking, maybe some kind of board game night, whatever it is, make sure there is time for the deep interaction that I firmly believe every one needs.
Two, I have a rule, Once a friend of John, always a friend of John. I simply do NOT believe "for a reason or season." Nah, fuck that. I'm still friends with my High School girlfriend who threw my class at me across the lobby of our high school. Folks, the person who dies with the most friends wins
Three, YA'LL These fucking MANOSPHERE people need to fuck all the way off of this planet. This is the goal, people pay attention:
"There’s a stereotype that Men Who Are Whole are always overtly confident and highly masculine, but I haven’t found this to be true. In fact, many of them carry a subtle sort of masculinity that lends itself to gentleness and empathy. They have little to prove to the world, because they know who they are, and so does their community, and they are respected for it."
BTW, (and this is NOT a humble brag), this could easily describe me.
(01 of 08)
Many thanks for this post. The number of comments speaks for itself. One regrettable side effect is that I have not been able to read all of them; apologies if this point has been made before:
As I understand the post, the author asserts that a causal relationship exists running from "society" or, rather, the message propagated by "society" on the "Modern Map to Manhood" to a number of indicators of well-being or the lack thereof ("suicide, depression, anxiety, joblessness, and crime"). Given the lack of evidence presented I am not convinced by that claim, but let's assume that it is true for the sake of the argument.
(02 of 08)
So "society" is supposedly at fault. Who or what is "society"? It is never explained; the author's presumption seems to be that "I know it when I see it". Once again, let's assume that there is such a more or less well-defined "society" - is it really the case that "[s]ociety owes it to young men to draft a new map for them"? What is this claim based upon? It strikes me as apodictic - to me it doesn't have the ring of truth, it sounds more like a crowd-pleaser.
(03 of 08)
Isn't the pain that is caused by the mechanisms supposedly set in motion by that message from "society" profoundly adaptive in that it provides the impetus to figure out how to get rid of it and thus neutralize the effects of that message? The author herself hints at this type of "learning" on the level of the individual ("purpose often comes from a certain amount of suffering"). Men respond to the suffering with behavioral changes and changes in their beliefs that leave them better off just as people have always reacted to their environment.
(04 of 08)
I would add an entirely unsubstantiated and very broad-brush claim of my own and hypothesize that this "learning" exists on the level of society, too. It is at least plausible that the male-bashing (my term, not the author's, and one that I use out of laziness not because I consider it a particularly accurate description) of years and decades past has contributed to the gender gap observed in the most recent US presidential election. The change (Trumpification) of government may not modify the beliefs of "polite society" and the messages sent by "society" immediately, but might still be expected to lead to a (partial) correction in due course. The pendulum does swing back even if the swings are measured in decades.
(05 of 08)
The author's argument seems to be that by following her advice, the "sheer number of lost men" and thus the social cost can be reduced relative to what the cost would have been if the above mechanisms were simply allowed to run their course. While that conjecture does not sound unreasonable on the face of it, nothing is said about the practical implementation of her proposal - starting with the fact that it is not clear to whom her suggestions are addressed.
(06 of 08)
I have not thought about this topic nearly as much as the author, but rather than declare "society" responsible for anything whatsoever and formulate highly specific demands in this respect (as far as I can tell, these are pretty much being shouted into a void), how about shifting whatever effort "we" may be making to remedy the situation to something far more general and far more generally useful - namely, to teach individuals to identify BS and call it?
(07 of 08)
To apply this somewhat generic suggestion to "the new guidance we’re tossing at young men": A man (or woman) who has learnt to think for himself (or herself) will easily identify (i) the hypocrisy inherent in the progressive (my term, not the author's, and apologies for the additional instance of laziness) commandments and (ii) contradiction to reality identified by the author:
1. A term such as "toxic masculinity" that is not clearly defined and means all things to all people may be safely ignored. We would not take seriously a law that penalizes "bad behavior" either if there is no definition of what "bad" means.
On 2.: Do "bring up the multitude of scientific studies that question th[e] belief" that are consistent with the hypothesis that certain character traits are innate and that human beings are not blank slates.
On 3.: Refuse to accept the meaning given to a formulation such as "[p]rovide for and protect others" by third parties ("polite society") if it conflicts with one's own understanding of what this commandment entails.
On both 4. and 5., do not accept claims as to what or how one should think that one perceives as arbitrary.
Just wanted to say that, while I am still currently reading the article, just from the first few chapters I had to throw up my hands and say, "Finally, someone gets it!". I am almost emotional at how precisely and articulately you have described what I have often struggled to say when discussing gender with others, particularly women. I am definitely going to use this as a reference in the future, thank you for this great post.
My guess is that this is someone pretending to be Aella with AI assistance, or Aella pretending to be someone pretending to be Aella, also with AI assistance.
Any way, I don't believe a word of it. I know nothing about dating men, the Bay Area, or dating men in the Bay Area, but I don't believe in such obsessively detailed vignettes of "typical" cases, in any context. Gather up enough burdensome detail and you can paint a picture of anything, whether it exists or not. These are not real people, they are characters invented to perform a function in the writer's story.
Aella style is way more abrasive, i think.
This essay made me sad, in that "there but for the grace of God go I" sort of way.
My only thought is -- give the Man Who Opts Out a small chance, depending on his other attributes. I know I felt that way pretty strongly when I started dating my first girlfriend (now wife of 20 years). I felt like a very whole person *except* for the fact that I knew I was an awkward, unattractive creep that no woman would ever want to kiss or cuddle or love.
The amazing thing is that just *one month* of successful dating was enough to fix this for me. She and I both agreed that if we didn't work out, I would still be in a much better place for trying to date in the future. To the point that a different girl who had been friend-zoning me for years (and is still a close friend) suddenly felt attracted to me *once I was in a stable relationship*.
I know, it's your dating life, not a charity. But if you see a good dude hiding behind that damage... maybe give him a little chance to see if he can work his way out of it. If you luck out, you might find an otherwise Whole Man Inside. And if you don't, you might have given him a big lift out of the hole. My wife likes to call it "playing penny stocks" but she thinks it worked out well for her.
This is truly the best thing I have read in years. Thank you so much!
It does resonate a lot and it made me realize how lucky I am to have escaped some of these categories.
For what is worth, and just as a testimonial / single data point, my personal story is that I started as a Man Who Opted Out, but I was lucky to have a passion to follow, good math skills, some determination, and a community of friends who mostly stayed over the years.
I built my self-confidence through school and university, until I finally had my first relationship (and sex) at 27 (I ended up marrying her).
I then came to the US and became basically a Man With A Plan for 10 years, until I changed job, moved to LA, and divorced. Over there, I built up my women-related confidence after several years of dating and a few not-really-healthy relationships.
After changing job (and coast) again, finding true purpose in my work, and deciding that serious relationships weren't worth the effort (as I reasoned that I was perfectly fine by myself), I stumbled upon a fulfilling relationship with someone that really completes me, and we've been together for 6 years now!
I think that if I was asked to give some advice to young men, it would be to try to have a passion and follow it. It will give you purpose and a sense of accomplishment that are independent on the validation that you get from others. I think an healthy romantic relationship can complement you, but you do need to find your sense of purpose somewhere else.
> And actually, now that he thinks about it, he’s not even sure if he wants kids. They scream a lot, and they make all sorts of noxious odors and messes, and saddling himself to a dependent for eighteen years seems rather terrifying.
This hits close to home. I never wanted kids -- I find being around them viscerally unpleasant, and nondischargeable moral obligations even more unpleasant -- but as I get older it's hard not to notice that the alternative is dying old and alone. On the other hand, changing my mind means being saddled in just that way, and eighteen years isn't just a very long time -- at this point, it's probably *all my remaining quasi-healthy years*. Make that commitment, and I will never be both free and able to use that freedom again.
Hard place, meet rock.
(meta: how the !@#$% do I produce a blockquote, here?)
This is not an attempt to change your mind, but you should consider the alternatives: you old with kids, and you old without kids. There’s no third option.
Noting that some children don't want contact with their parents. You can end up alone even if you've had children.
This was too damn long.