The Masculinist #5: What Does It Mean to Be a Man?
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Aaron Renn <[email protected]> The Masculinist #5: What Does It Mean to Be a Man? Aaron M. Renn <[email protected]> Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 7:49 PM To: "Aaron M. Renn" <[email protected]> I was recently asked to write a review of the film The Red Pill, a documentary about the Men’s Rights Movement, for the Institute for Family Studies. You can read it on their site. With this review I got a large number of new subscribers to the Masculinist, so thanks everyone for joining. As I said, this is a monthly email list targeted at Christian men. Some of you aren’t that, but are welcome to stay as long as you keep that in mind. This is going to be much more aggressive that my urban writings, and I’m not going to take pains to avoid offense. So caveat emptor. If you know others you think might find this list valuable or interesting, they can subscribe by licking this link: http://www.urbanophile.com/masculinist/. Please do spread the word, because I need your help to make this a success. Thank you. Debate Happens in the Public Square I previously reviewed three of the guiding principles for my writing in this newsletter: live not by lies; build up, don’t just tear down; and skin in the game. To that end I alternate issues devoted to cultural criticism with those focused in practical, actionable improvement items that I myself personally do. The fourth of my guiding principles is: only critique people who are in the public square. If I take issue with someone’s teaching or beliefs, it will only be someone who is holding himself out as a public intellectual or who is a major national Christian figure. I’m not going to pick on an ordinary pastor doing the best job he can leading his congregation. I might highlight someone like that in a positive way, but not in a negative one. The Curious Case of David French In that light, let’s talk about David French. French, a Harvard Law grad, is a writer for the conservative National Review who was very active in the “Never Trump” movement. He’s also a public Evangelical Christian. His wife Nancy is an accomplished writer in her own right, having ghostwritten books for several conservative figures. French made headlines over the summer when other “Never Trump” conservatives recruited him to run for President as an independent. He declined, and they ended up with Evan McMullin instead. Like us, French is someone who has also been concerned about the problems with men in America today. In my first Masculinist newsletter I linked to his article about declining male grip strength. If you’re the average Millennial male, your dad is stronger than you are. In fact, you may not be stronger than the average Millennial female. You’re exactly the kind of person who in generations past had your milk money confiscated every day — who got swirlied in the middle-school bathroom. The very idea of manual labor is alien to you, and even if you were asked to help, say, build a back porch, the task would exhaust you to the point of uselessness. Welcome to the new, post-masculine reality. French dislikes Donald Trump for many reasons, but one is that he believes Trump is selling a “counterfeit masculinity”: Some Americans believe that Donald Trump is the answer to feminism. He’s the fearless man. He’s the strong man. He’s the man who laughs in the face of the social-justice warrior and demonstrates the appeal of pure, unadulterated aggression and virility. In reality, however, he’s a great gift to feminism: the man who will revive a failing ideology. … The masculinity of Trump is exactly the caricatured, counterfeit masculinity of the feminist fever dream. It takes the full energy of manhood and devotes it to sex, money, and power. It’s posturing masquerading as toughness and anger drained of bravery. (Is the man who recoils from Michelle Fields and obsesses over Megyn Kelly really going to take down ISIS?) Trump represents aggression channeled into greed. Apologies are for the weak, and self-sacrifice is for suckers. Trump is a kind of man that many people can recognize but none should emulate. He is the indefensible man. Like many of you, I was pretty taken aback when I first heard Trump’s campaign talk. I doubt you’ll disagree when I say that some of French’s criticisms of Trump are entirely fair. His history suggests someone who has indeed been obsessed with money, status, power, and sexual conquest – of which he’s openly boasted. But it’s worth taking a look at French too. How does he stack up in the masculinity department? About the same time he wrote that slam of Trump, he went on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross to complain that he was being “harassed on Twitter”: So the next thing was, you know, I'm a writer, my wife is a writer. So we both wrote a follow-up piece - or I wrote a follow-up piece; she wrote her own piece. She put it in The Washington Post. I put mine in National Review that highlighted just some of these terrible tweets and basically said, look, we're not going to be intimidated by this, but we want to expose it. We want to show people what's going on out there if you criticize the people - some of the people who are supporting Donald Trump or criticize some of Donald Trump's allies, particularly the alt-right. Well, then it just blew up after that. The number of tweets multiplied exponentially. It’s fair to say that some of the things tweeted at French were pretty bad, but they were just tweets. Taking a step back and looking at this, what did French really do here? It’s something we all experienced or saw when we were young: Other kids said mean things to him on the playground – and he ran and told the (female) teacher. Imagine yourself back in the high school locker room, eager to prove yourself as a man. Other kids snap you with a towel or starts teasing you. Would you have run away and told a female teacher about it? Is this how a man deals with trash talk? I don’t think so. I might be able to write this off if it were a one time thing, but a quick Google search reveals that this is not the first time French has whined like this. Men take care of their own problems. In most cases they don’t go whining to authority figures about them. You’re probably thinking there are exception cases. And of course you’re right, such dealing with real criminal activity. But not something as trivial as mean tweets. What Is Manhood? This prompts a consideration about what it is manhood and masculinity consist of. Brett McKay at Art of Manliness did a series on this a while back looking at how societies throughout the world and throughout history thought about what it means to be a man. He summarized the universal masculine distinctives as what he called the 3 Ps: Protect, Procreate, Provide. My condensed summary of his take: 1. Protect. Physical strength and endurance, skill in weapons and strategy, courage, physical and emotional stoicism, acceptance of one’s expendability, public demonstration of one’s aptitude as a protector. 2. Procreate. Initiating with women, virility and potency, ability to sexually satisfy a woman, fecundity and having as many children as possible. 3. Provide. Contributing the lion’s share of sustenance to one’s tribe/family, resourcefulness/cleverness (ability to maneuver around obstacles), becoming self-reliant, being generous He also lists various shared attributes that underpinned the 3 Ps’: Earned status – manhood must be earned Autonomy – “Autonomy involves the ‘absolute freedom of movement’ — ‘a mobility of action.’ It means being able to make your own decisions, call your own shots, create your own goals, set your own pace, carve your own path.” Energy – “A man is expected to overcome passivity, to always be up and doing, and to ceaselessly strive to achieve.” Danger and risk Competition Public affirmation – “When it comes to excellence in the 3 P’s — talk doesn’t matter, results do. You have to put your money where your mouth is, and thus competence in all the manly pursuits must be demonstrated in the public square and affirmed by others. You must be willing to sally forth into the fray, to compete with other men, and show how you stack up against them. A man must be ‘in the arena.’ For this reason a man who is a homebody, who avoids public contests, and desires to spend most of his time with wife and children is considered effeminate.” Create more/consume less If you are a man, these are the things human societies have always defined as your benchmarks. If we look at these historical manhood criteria, and rank Donald Trump and David French against them, it is immediately obvious that Trump vastly outclasses French. In fact, Trump scores extremely high on many of these criteria such as being “in the arena.” Where French – and all too many others – go astray is in conflating goodness (or godliness if you prefer) with manhood. McKay makes that distinction very clear: It is possible to be good at being a man, without also being a good man. For example a mob boss has a dangerous job, supports his family, and is highly resourceful.