I had a nice little rant prepped because of a New York Times podcast originally entitled “What is the Point of Men in the 21st Century”. In the absence of a transcript at the time, the mere title annoyed me. However, that might have been the point; even the New York Times is not above the use of clickbait titles if it gets pageviews and ad impressions.
Having read the transcript, most of it is almost reasonable despite the involvement of Ross Douthat, a columnist I dislike for his milquetoast conservatism1 almost as much as I do David Brooks. Nevertheless, I’m going to present an expanded version of the rant I had originally submitted as a comment to the article, because I think it’s worth keeping even if the Times doesn’t have the balls to publish it.
The Rant
I did not volunteer for maleness.
I was conscripted.
Just as I was thrown into existence without my consent I was, as the kids say, “assigned male at birth”. I am both “AMAB” and also, amusingly enough, “ACAB” (assigned Catholic at birth) even though the latter acronym originally meant “all cops are bastards”. The fun part is that it’s especially true of those who would police other people’s gender expression.
What gender vigilantes don’t understand is that once maleness was imposed upon me it became my property to do with as I please. I am not obligated to conform to any other male’s ideal of maleness. Nor am I obliged to conform to any female’s notion of what it means to be male, whether that female is Kay Hymowitz or Valerie Solanas.
I am man regardless of your opinion, and if my contempt for your opinion makes me evil, then I will be evil.
What makes me man? What makes me a real man?
- I exist as a human being.
- I see myself as a man.
That is literally all it takes. That I happen to also possess XY chromosomes, a cock, and a set of balls is irrelevant.
If I had not accepted the gender I was assigned, I might be biologically male, but I would not be a man. Maleness and femaleness might be biological facts, but masculinity and femininity are roles best played by those who choose to play them with verve and elan instead of passively accepting roles assigned them by their parents and then reified by the wider society.
I would therefore submit that a transgender woman is closer to the platonic ideal of a “real woman” than her cisgender sister precisely because she had to work for it, defying both biology and society alike to become more truly herself. Likewise for transgender men and their cisgender brothers. If this offends you, you’re welcome.
I am not transgender myself, except insofar as I recognize that my masculinity is a habitual performance and a persona in the Jungian sense. There are lot of things I do that are not necessarily associated with traditional masculinity in the United States.
- I read.
- I write.
- I sing.
- I play instruments.
- I write fiction.
- I write verse.
- I have long hair.
- I’ve worn makeup.
- I’ve been insecure about my looks.
- I introspect (sometimes in public, as frequent visitors might attest).
- I dance.
- I laugh when amused.
- I love cats.
- I am kind to dogs and children.
- I cry when I’m hurt.
- I crave vengeance when I feel myself wronged.
- I work with computers.
- I work with my hands.
- I cook.
- I clean.
- I wash laundry.
- I cared for my wife when she had cancer.
- I helped care for my father as he died of cancer.
- I teach.
- I learn.
- I’ve worn lace.
- I’ve worn leather.
- I have led others at work.
- I have followed at work.
- I have been dominant in bed.
- I have been submissive in bed.
- I do more housework than my wife.
- I’ve kissed women.
- I have been kissed by men2.
- I have been sexually assaulted3.
From these specifics I think we can derive a general principle: if I see myself as a man, then anything I do is by virtue of my existence as a man something a “real man” does.
The converse is likewise true. If I saw myself as a woman, then anything I do is something a “real woman” does.
Why is this the case? Because these are all human activities, human emotions, and human experiences. Gender is just a mask we live in, primarily for the comfort and convenience of others. It gives other people the illusory sense of the existence of a script through which they can interact with me.
However, none of us are obligated to wear the masks we were given, let alone live in them. You gave me this mask, and I put it on, but did you ever think to ask yourself if I wear it when you’re gone?
Did it ever occur to you that the mask I was given wasn’t “one size fits all”, and that I might have tailored it to suit my preferences as I became more fully myself and learned to better understand my own mind and desires? That’s the funny thing about phantasms like gender: once you give it to me, it becomes mine to make my own to the extent that I can.
Thus I decide for myself what it means to be a man. Thus my manhood becomes my property. Thus I claim the right to reject all socially imposed definitions and models of masculinity that do not suit me.
It doesn’t really matter who you are. You could be my mother, Josh Hawley, Rob Halford, or Mother Earth Herself: You don’t get to tell me how to be a man, or what manhood should mean to me. This is especially the case if you’re a cisgender woman who has no idea what it’s like to live in Tony Porter’s “man box”.
Do I go around telling you how to be a woman? Of course not. Feminism is not some new trend that came out of social media. It has been a thing in the West4 since the late 1700s at the bare minimum, which was when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women. If you really want to stretch the history of feminism you might go back further and claim Hypatia as a feminist, or even Sappho. Being aware of this, I damn well know better than to tell women how to be women. How you choose to perform the femininity you were assigned or chose because masculinity didn’t fit is for you to decide.
Is it so unreasonable to demand the same courtesy in return? Then I shall be unreasonable, because it is not reasonable human beings who make history.
Furthermore, you do not get to tell me how I should go about being “relevant” in the 21st century. Not when the easiest way to become relevant in this country, even if only for fifteen minutes, is show up at a crowded public place with an AR-15 and commit a massacre. We live in a suicide society, and you expect me to adjust?
You think you’re well-adjusted to this Debordian spectacle? Spare me. Besides, who in all the unholy names of all the demons we ever worshiped made the likes of Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada, and Lydia Polgreen relevant, anyway? Who are these people, and what have they done for me that I should not summarily dismiss their opinions as arrant bullshit. Why should any man consider their opinions? What is the point of these people in the 21st century?
Commentary on the Rant Above
This will be a bit of a (possibly pseudointellectual) ramble. Buckle up, Buttercup!
Much of my thought about masculinity and manhood as something assigned to me that I have claimed as my own property comes from my attempts to read and understand The Ego and Its Own (originally Der Einzige und sein Eigentum) by Max Stirner. I was assisted in this endeavor by Jacob Blumenfeld’s All Things are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner, but Stirner was one of the Young Hegelians. No doubt he wrote mainly to be read by his fellow Young Hegelians, among them Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who responded to him in The German Ideology. As such, his work is most likely a slog even for people who do philosophy for a living and I may not fully understand Stirner’s egoism.
I have used “male” and “female” to denote biological sex and separate sex from gender, which I have come to understand as being a social reality rather than a biological or physical one. Nevertheless, because of my reading of Stirner I regard social realities as phantasms or spooks. Many of them try to assert squatters’ rights in my head, but if they don’t pay their rent on time I do my damnedest to kick them out. It is to rebel against the notion of my gender being a command performance for the benefit of those I consider my equals at most that I wrote this rant.
I may also owe a debt to what little understanding of French existentialist thought5 I picked up from reading translations of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. For a Christian, masculinity and femininity are roles ordained by God and their purpose is to serve and glorify God. However, since I don’t believe in God6 I cannot turn to the deity as a source of meaning or purpose.
Just as I must create the meaning of my own life in a Godless and insouciant universe, so must I also decide for myself what it means to be a man, assuming I care to be a man at all. In point of fact, I embraced manhood because I was used to it. It isn’t the most comfortable mask, but I’m used to wearing it from decades of habit. Nevertheless, I recognize manhood as a mask, a role I ultimately chose to adopt even though it was originally thrust upon me in the same manner that most biologically female people eventually take the role of womanhood that they were assigned at birth and make it their own.
There, to say that there are things that only men do and things that only women do is arrant bullshit in the vast majority of cases. One cannot even claim that giving birth is the exclusive work of women, because transgender men do in fact exist and most likely have done so throughout human history. It is for this reason that I have claimed that anything I do while living as a man is something a “real man” does.
Gender is bullshit. However, my gender is also my property, and what I do it is ultimately my choice. You may indeed have the power to punish me, to hurt me, and even to kill me if I do not perform my gender to your satisfaction, but I will die as my own man and not as your notion of a “good man” or a “real man”.
What then, is the point of men in the 21st century? I neither know nor care. One might as easily and as offensively inquire as to the point of women in the 21st century. For all any of us know, George Carlin was right and the only purpose humanity ever had was the creation of plastic. Well, we managed that in the 20th century, and since we’ve pretty much decided that space is best left to robots we all might as well just chill the fuck out and enjoy our lives while we can.
Furthermore, I have no interest in most of the models of manhood that my culture upholds as worthy of emulation. I have no more interest in molding myself on Elon Musk than I do on Andrew Tate. Unfortunately, as many reactionaries do, I must instead look to the past for archetypes from which I can create my own model of manhood. I found mine in Odysseus, the Homeric hero, the polytropos, the “complicated man” as Emily Wilson put it in her translation of the Odyssey. Likewise, Edmond Dantès from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo and Bren Cameron from C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner saga7.
These are all men of intellect and physical prowess, though to varying degrees. Bren Cameron leans hardest toward intellect, but he is hardly passive or effete. Though he prefers to fight without violence, finessing situations with persuasion he’s not above using a handgun or even fighting bare-handed against the indigenous people of his planet, who are not human and are head and shoulders taller than even the tallest humans.
However, it is Edmond Dantès in particular who outlines the proper relationship between an individual man and the society that mistakes him for their property:
“Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me – indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm – and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.”
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
I share the Count’s relatively low opinion of the society in which I live. It did not protect me when I needed it most, but happily makes demands of me when I have something it wants. I bear society no particular malice; Moloch can’t help being Moloch. However, I mean to take as much from society as society takes from me if society is not content to leave me alone and let me do my own thing so long as I allow others to do the same.
As I said, I did not volunteer for existence, let alone maleness or manhood. If I’m going to be a man, I’m damned well going to do it my way. It is my manhood, after all, and thus my property to do with as I wish. The society in which I live, of which I am allegedly a part when it suits others to remember my existence, is no less my property than my masculinity. I shall dispose of it, too, as I please within the extent of my power.
A moderate conservative is still a conservative, and thus believes in his heart that the law should protect but not bind the ingroup of which he is a member and bind but not protect everybody else. Such a despicable ideology makes Douthat and Brooks enablers of and fellow-travelers to fascists and neo-Nazis.↩︎
This kiss had not been consensual, and my perception of the experience at the time was colored by internalized homophobia. I had no idea if the man who had pressed me up against a wall and forced himself on me was gay, drunk, or had mistaken me for a woman (it’s the hair). Nevertheless, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if it had not been forced, and if I had felt safe enough to let myself enjoy it for what it was.↩︎
When I was thirteen, I was sexually assaulted by three girls my age. I will not name names because they know who they are and must live with what they did. Furthermore, even if the statute of limitations had not expired an attempt to prosecute these women over thirty years after the fact would not be justice, but a poor parody of it. It certainly wouldn’t make me whole. This is my choice; others who have experienced sexual assault may choose otherwise and deserve to be supported in their choice.↩︎
I am not conversant in the history of feminist thought outside of Europe and North America. There might be as rich a feminist tradition outside my own culture as there is within it, and I would be well-pleased to learn that this is in fact the case.↩︎
Much of this reading was research for my fiction, and not merely pretentious self-indulgence. I had wanted to find philosophical underpinnings for my characters’ worldviews that did not come directly from Christianity. Furthermore, many of these philosophers (like Marx and Engels themselves) were thinkers Ayn Rand had identified as opposed to her own ‘philosophy’ and I was determined to read them for myself instead of taking Rand’s opinions secondhand. I might have found her work appealing as a much younger man, but I only sipped the Koolaid; I didn’t chug it.↩︎
To me, God is dead in the Nietzschean sense, and it was with the sword of my skepticism that I committed deicide. I could no more believe in Yahweh than I could Zeus, Odin, Izanagi, Amon-Ra, and Marduk. Nor could I take Yahweh more seriously than I could Crom, Duke Arioch of the Seven Darks, or Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos.
All I knew of any of these gods was what I read in books. I could no more accept the Bible as a source of literal truth than I could Hesiod’s Theogeny, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Eddas, or the Enuma Elish. To me it was all mythology, not religion. Nor does what little scientific literacy I possess allow me to take seriously the notion of a personal, transcendant god without recourse to the 18th century Deist conception of a God who set everything in motion and then sat back to watch the show.↩︎
These are all fictional archetypes, but that is their advantage. I will never find out that, like all living people they are human, all too human, and thus possessed of flaws that might taint any admiration I once had for them. Of the three, Odysseus is the least admirable of the three if one is at least culturally Christian; he was not as faithful to his wife Penelope as she was to him, and he did not see his men safely home (though perhaps even he could not save his men from their own foolishness). Dantes’ willingness as a middle-aged man to accept the affections of an adolescent girl as anything but an infatuation he should gently discourage instead of exploiting is disquieting at the least. And Cameron has, at least in the early books in Cherryh’s saga, proved perhaps a little too willing to use the humans closest to him without consideration for their needs and feelings, all the while justifying this behavior as necessary to do his job as a translator and diplomat sent to mediate between his fellow humans and the atevi native to the world on which humanity landed.↩︎