The Folly of "Man"

So, I've been thinking a lot about the recent issue of toxic maculinity in teenage boys, namely the alleged phenomenon of looking to masculinity influencers such as Andrew Tate for guidance on how to be a man. I've put the whole phenomenon in a cube and have been taping things on it and stuffing things inside it as I build an understanding of the whole thing. Just as interesting as the phenomenon itself is the conversation around it.

Role Models

So, you can start by taking a look at today's teenagers and comparing them with previous generations of teenagers. Ask yourself, "where does a teenager learn the various details of being a man?" Details being the key word, here. Your family and community provide exposure to masculinity, but as a teenager, you want to understand your place in society at large, not just your neighborhood. You might get bits and pieces, sayings and backhanded comments, but it doesn't often build a complete enough picture to know what to do with yourself. So, you look to media to fill in the rest of the gaps. From the, let's say 1920s to 1990s, to be just broad enough to track the ripple effect but not so much as to lose focus, you'd look to movies, comics, novels, etc. to observe what a man is and what they act like. The archetypes come forth pretty readily: the hero, the rebel, the everyman.

Now, I want you to think about some fictional role models that would have been seen by a majority of kids in the 2000s and 2010s. If you thought of someone, congratulations! I can't really think of anyone. Hugh Jackman, maybe? Hollywood's been stuck on a masculinity ideal that is fundamentally impossible for anyone to achieve for more than a few months at a time, actors included. Couple that with the scattered media landscape of a dozen streaming services each with exclusives, and you end up with a pool of media experience that is only occasionally and briefly shared. The point is, there's not really easily accessibleh role models that boys can rally around at school, so they've settled for the only thing they all have access to and also happens to be matching what they're looking for: people like Andrew Tate.

I stopped really thinking about this after that conclusion until I read an interview with several professionals, including a psychologist that claimed that the attraction to Tate was a result of a media landscape that predominatly portrayed men as stupid, bumbling idiots that need to be saved by women. Other women in the interview concurred. I truly wish the interview could have name dropped some examples, because where the heck did this come from? I love animation, so I'm pretty well aware of all the popular kid's media out there of the time, the movies, the general stuff they would have been exposed to, and I just don't see it. What I see is a set of creatives that aren't interested in selling masculinity, and are more preoccupied with reflecting the diversity of the human experience that we see in our everyday lives. There's a greater variety of male characters out there. Written with more nuance, more depth. Selfish charlatans that find themselves caring about people. Sexist jerks that find friendship in femme fatales. Heroes that have suspicions about their duty. They are flanked by a cast of characters of various genders and ethnicities that come in all sorts of expressions.

To say that the primary issue here is the lack of role models for boys no longer felt adequate.

Revokeable Gender

I've been watching for years now the undulating, contorting, viscous liquid that is the definition of a man warp itself into a frenzy. If I were to oversimplify it, we started with the definition "passed the local rite of passage". For example, you were born as a boy, you go kill a boar or something on your own, and now you're a man. Done. Simple. Then it became more about your accomplishments. War decorations, business ventures, something to show off. Once all the big stuff was taken, it whittled down to have a family, earn income, own a home.

Now, under these various societies, a favorite pastime of men is to either tear down another man's status or uplift your own. Ranking is an inescapable human desire, regardless of gender. Interestingly, however, and I could be wrong about this, but women tend to go about this somewhat differently than men. A women loses rank by gaining labels such as "hag", "spinster", "slut", etc. But a woman is always a woman, because for many, what makes a woman is the ability to have a child. Even for women that can't, however, the guilt is punishment enough. As far as I know, women will not revoke the gender of their peers. (I'd like to apologise for leaving trans-ness aside for this conversation, as these thoughts center around a conversation that is obsessed with the narrow view of masculinity as it stands against the gender binary.) By contrast, among men, for as long as I've been alive, the go-to threat from your peers is to have your gender revoked. "You're not a real man if [insert arbitrary condition here]!" When you compare this with previous societies, it gets interesting. How easy is it to revoke a person's manhood? In my generation, daring to enjoy flavored alcohol alone was enough to have my claim to gender revoked. For others, take a man's home, their job, and/or their wife and suddenly they're not quite a man anymore. Take credit for their achivements or their dominance over others and they're not a man anymore either. You can't really take away passing the local rite of passage, though. Oh others might cast doubt, sure, but the best they can do is cast doubt on your gender. They can't fully revoke it. Today, the things we can own and accomplish become increasingly, vanishingly, small and insignificant, relative to our own heart's desires and our forebears.

So, without a formal rite of passage and without any reliable markers to hold on to, a man stands vulnerable. Previously, the attack vector was relatively small. Really, you only needed to worry about what your elders and a handful of influential peers thought of you. With the advent of the internet, and in particular social media, however, the attack vector is infinite. Anyone, at any moment can grab a cabal of people and threaten your claim to gender in front of everyone you know (and don't know). The consequences could be catastrophic (depending on how much you care about that sort of thing, of course). Without anything objective, discrete, or measurable left to defend your claim, what do you have left to defend yourself with? You can do what the sigma/alpha/omega whatever groups did and create your own definition of man with a more explicit hierarchy to find some peace, even if it puts you lower on the ladder. You can follow trend setters and keep up a public performance at all times, proving your worthiness (but don't forget to delete your old posts on a regular basis so past trends can never be used against you). You can latch onto the handful of what you may feel are the unshakeable, basic tenets of masculinity: muscles, dominance, and women and completely lose yourself.

It's no wonder the sphere's gone insane. If you think that anyone can steal your gender then of course you're going to keep looking over your shoulder. If you have no idea how to keep and grow one of the few pieces of identity you felt you were born with then yeah, why wouldn't you be lashing out?