Patriarchy's dirty secret is that it sucks for men, too. There's been an ocean of ink spilled over "toxic masculinity" but until I read @phil_christman's "What It's Like to Be a Man" in the @hedgehogreview, I couldn't crisply define it.
hedgehogreview.com/issues/identit…
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hedgehogreview.com/issues/identit…
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For Christman, the essence of maleness is "chosen discomfort" - spend your life denying you care how you look while tormenting yourself with painful exercise you're not allowed to admit hurts, nor may you admit that you're doing it because you worry about your appearance.
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"I live out masculinity as perverse avoidance of comfort: refusal of good clothes, moisturizer, painkillers; hard physical training, pursued for its own sake, not because I enjoy it; a sense there is a set amount of physical pain/self-imposed discipline I owe the universe."
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Masculinity requires that you find "the costliest, least productive, most epic way of doing everything," combined with a masculine omerta, a prohibition on talking about any of this stuff.
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"Manhood resists straightforward discussion even as men stand accused—correctly, insofar as any accusation directed at such a broad target cannot fail to hit—of sucking the air from every other conversation."
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The masculinity conversation is driven by occultists like Jordan Peterson and "vitamin-hawking conspiracy theorists, rape apologists, and Nazis of YouTube."
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Even there, the contradiction is inescapable: "If you need a YouTube video to help you be a man, then in some essential sense simply BEING one is already off the table."
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What is "masculinity"? It's "an abstract rage to protect" -- but not "the actual useful things a man (or anyone else) may do for other people," rather, "activities that stem from a fear that simple usefulness is not enough."
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That is, larping out the prepper's fantasy of being spartan in grooming and habits, undertaking "defensive projects that have no connection to the actual day-to-day flourishing of the people one loves."
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"Men seem constantly on patrol, whether or not there’s anything to patrol against." From "securing your family's future," it's a short walk to the neo-Nazi's "fourteen words."
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Leading asshole thinkfluencer Harvey Mansfield accidentally nails it: "Honor is an asserted claim to protect someone, and the claim to protect is a claim to rule. How can I protect you properly if I can’t tell you what to do?"
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The contradiction of masculinity is that following Mansfield's prescription means you will always fail to live up to the standard it sets. Men fail to protect the people around them in two ways:
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i. "Many of us commit violence against women and each other, and the rest of us stand accused, with more or less justice depending on our individual circumstances, of letting those guys get away with it"
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ii. "We sit around too much" Women who work outside the home average 98h/week of work... "that’s presumably a lot of work we men are not doing."
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"Protectors always fail": "The world is the sort of place in which statistical probability reaches down like a giant and swats us and our loved ones away. You cannot be a protector any more than you can be a changeling or a fairy princess."
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Even by their own terms, men have "clearly failed women."
This is why men can't "disclose even a serious personal problem to another man, even in private conversation, without offering up a litany of the categories of human beings whose oppression is undoubtedly worse."
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This is why men can't "disclose even a serious personal problem to another man, even in private conversation, without offering up a litany of the categories of human beings whose oppression is undoubtedly worse."
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It's an apology for "claiming the human prerogative to hurt," and against it, a longing for "the dignity of having something real to worry about."
"We feel like a bad joke."
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"We feel like a bad joke."
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There aren't any great ways to prove you're not a joke: "turn sullen and grumpy, like people out of a Frank Miller comic" or "turn defensive" ("defensiveness has a well-known tendency to make us behave in ways that are laughable").
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The great irony of patriarchy is that it makes everyone miserable, including its notional beneficiaries. Of course, this is also our best hope: if no one actually likes this system, maybe, just maybe, we'll dismantle it.
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