Modern Manhood and its current backlash

With the election of Trump and the ascent of the far-right, there’s no denying what this is – a reaction by men. One can talk all they want about the groups that didn’t show up to vote for Harris, or that didn’t show up in droves, or that switched sides over to Trump, but the undisputable fact is that Trump won because of men. Based on averages, about 60% of white men, 25% of black men, and 50% of Hispanic men voted for Trump. What’s more surprising is that, according to Navigator Research, around 52% of men ages 18-44 voted for Trump. The election and emerging social movement we’re seeing is very much a male-centered reactionary movement, reacting to the decentering of men (specifically of white men) that we’ve seen over the last few decades.

There’s this belief that “men need to be men.” It’s a funny notion because most people wouldn’t know what Platonism is, yet when they say “men need to be men” they’re basically engaging in a type of Platonism. Platonic metaphysics teaches that there is a perfect form for everything. So when you see that beautiful tree, you know that tree is beautiful because in the intangible world of the forms exists the perfect form of “tree” and it’s been imprinted upon this world. Plato extended this thought to moral concepts, which is where moral objectivism – the belief that there are actual moral laws the same way there are natural physical laws (although even that is a misunderstanding) – gets a big boost.

Thus, the idea that “men need to be men” has the implicit idea that there’s some perfect form of “manhood” out there. But, of course, the idea of what it is to be a man changes with time and history. The rite of passage into adulthood, whatever a culture might see it as, is subjective to that culture and that time. A lot of men who think they are tough would be viewed as rather effeminate if you were to place them in a different time and place. Or they’d be viewed as barbarians and subsequently not eligible to be worthy of manhood since they weren’t even men to begin with.

There simply is no so universal concept known as “manhood” that can apply to everyone at every time in every place. You can argue there are cultural understandings of what it is to be a man, but what is “culture” in a nation of over three hundred million people? Having lived across the US, I can attest to the fact that even conservatives in different parts of the country have vastly different understandings of what it is to be a man. I moved from the South to the Northeast shortly before the 2016 election and was about to see Trump supporters in both settings. The men in both settings would have mocked the men in the other settings, yet both viewed themselves as “men” following in the manly thing by voting for Trump.

The point I’m making is that there is no universal definition on manhood because there can’t be some universal form of manhood. At the end of the day, each person who identifies as a man will have to define for himself what his manhood is – which isn’t too far from saying that each of us must determine our own meaning or own purpose. What we get, instead, are a bunch of assholes who are trying to defend their being an asshole by saying, “No, see, it’s actually called being a man.” Because there is no universal definition of manhood, because such a definition is impossible, any attempt to universalize manhood and masculinity is going to always promote some animalistic masculinity. Why? Because that’s easy, simple, and brutes are easy to control.

See, there’s an advantage that trans men have over cis men, and it’s that they’ve had to wrestle with their masculinity. They’ve had to sit there and think through it, think through why it is they’re actually a man. Most of the trans men I know have had to think through this since childhood. What I, a cis man, noticed in these discussions is that I was able to relate incredibly well, but in some different ways. My entire childhood and early adulthood was consumed with “am I a man” and “how will I know when I’m a man.” These questions were at the core of everything in an incredibly implicit, sometimes explicit way. It’s why the masculine pecking order that’s established early on in childhood, the jokes about penis size, the showing off in front of others, everything in early male development focuses on our identity as men.

Our culture is not unique in this regard, this hyperfocus on what it is to be a man isn’t some invention of American capitalism. It’s been at the core of almost every culture that we know of; almost every culture has had some coming-of-age ritual for men (sometimes even for women) that marks their journey from boyhood into manhood. As highly symbolic rituals for these things went out of style in some cultures, they kept the ritualistic markers – moving out, getting married, starting a family, going to war, getting a job, going to college, etc. All of these served as hallmarks of what it was to be a man.

But then the 1960s and 70s happened and everything changed. Rituals that used to primarily be the domain of (mostly white) men were being infiltrated by women. Moving out, getting married, starting a family, going to war, getting a job, going to college, etc. were no longer markers of being a man, they were markers of just being an adult. Women could do all these things too. When the power dynamic was that men were doing these things, there were other aspects of the “coming-of-age” culture that existed; dominating women, treating them how you wanted, harassing them, and doing all of this with little to no consequence. But once women became social equals, once a woman could be your boss, once a woman was going through the same rites and rituals as you to become an adult, she was an equal and you could no longer domineer over her.

As a child of the 80s, I can tell you something about all the dating advice I received from older men and how it helped – it didn’t. Their advice was horrible and always resulted in the girl wanting nothing to do with me. I took this to mean that things had changed and that I needed to step back and learn. Other men my age and younger have faced this situation (I know because I’ve talked  about it with more than one person), but in many cases they concluded, “Women are just worse nowadays.” As time has gone on, more and more men have watched as women have become equal. More white men have watched as their position of power is eaten away by non-white men and women of all races while they hold onto stories of their grandfathers of the “good old days.” Rather than rejecting those stories and times and choosing to adapt to the moment, they’ve lashed out and instead are trying to bring back those “good old days.”

But what we’re getting is an extremely deformed version of the old masculinity of the 40s and 50s. The WWII John Wayne is too goofy of a hero to be a real man. The masculinity and heroism of old operated under the guise of Christianity, thus while the man was the head he was only the head in the way that God is the head. Thus, he was still to be loving, compassionate, etc. That was, at least, the ideal (certainly not how it was or ever is practiced). The masculinity of today seems to just want brutality, and what’s scary is that makes sense.

The movie Fight Club gets its inevitable reference. I mean, I’m talking about masculinity in the modern era, so we all know this was making its way into the conversation. But the take I want to have here is one that I haven’t seen played out too often, mostly because I don’t think this was an intended moral in the story but it’s a point that’s been played out time and time again. As I pointed out earlier, every culture has had some type of ritual to signify what it is to be a man. Fight Club shows what happens when that ritual is taken away and a man is made a mere cog in a machine. No, he doesn’t go and start underground fight clubs and then blow up buildings, but he does lash out at society and attempts to destroy it by reverting to little more than a beast. What are we witnessing in Washington right now if not a bunch of Tyler Durdens running around blowing up important buildings? We can talk about all the ideologies that guide them and I’m sure they believe they’re guided by some higher purpose, but at the end of the day this is what it is in its essence; they didn’t get their ritual into manhood and so they’re lashing out at society for it.

Of course, it’s far more complicated than that. We could go into the sociology of Gamer Gate, of the slowly building male backlash, but instead I like to cut right to the chase and summarize. The thing is, the reaction was predictable because it wasn’t replaced with anything. For years there was some type of ritual for what it meant to be a man, some healthy and others unhealthy. But it existed. Even the boys of the 80s still had the “sow-your-wild-oats” mentality, though not to the extent of their fathers. But this was (rightfully) diminished and taken away. It was replaced with Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, men whose business-model relies on their listeners never actually solving their issues or becoming curious about the world because then they’d lose their listeners. And so instead of some new ritual of manhood, the far-right has redefined manhood into “just be a bully, the strongest survive.”

What, then, is the solution to all this madness? I honestly do not know. Typically, when societies reach this stage it requires a pretty hardcore collapse for the men to get knocked back into their senses and reminded that cooperation, empathy, and compassion are how we’ve evolved as a species. What we can do is try to be the men we want to be on an individual level. We can define our manhood for ourselves, one that centers around empathy and kindness, and try our best to live that way in this world. The time for wide-sweeping change has passed, and for now we can only rely on small acts of rebellion in the hopes that one day things will change.