RE: Why Are Men Like This?

Before condemning men for being what kyriarchal society made them to be, make sure you’re not part of the problem.

Lucio has a new post about how the utter failures of other men to meet basic standards makes him look better than he thinks he deserves, and he wants to know “why are men like this”? As evidence for the bar being in fucking Tartarus, he mentions being praised merely for cooking a meal for his date. Like me, he is apparently more enthusiastic than skilled when it comes to eating pussy (no muff too tough!), but apparently it doesn’t occur to most other guys to talk to their partners in bed?

Granted, my first consensual experience involved me going down on her while my clothes stayed on, so it was hardly a typical first time. Nevertheless, are fathers not teaching their sons that it’s important to show her a good time? Of course they aren’t, if Rosaria Delacroix’s response is indicative, which I suspect it is.

As Ms. Delacroix describes, too many men are like this because they were taught — or allowed to believe — that women are mere things or that some things are “women’s work” and that men should never intrude. Even if that means letting a woman in the grips of post-partum psychosis almost murder her children. I suspect that she grew up in one of those benighted regions of the USA where “sex ed” consists mainly of, Keep it in your pants until you’re married or you’ll have to answer to Big Gay Satan because you made Baby Jesus cry! The sort of misogyny she describes correlates heavily with purity culture and the fetishization of (female) virginity.

Of course, I can’t say I fared that much better. Where I grew up (in the 1980s and 1990s), “sex ed” consisted mainly of, Keep it in your pants until you’re married or you’ll become a teen parenthood statistic, get lots of nasty sexually-transmitted infections, and die screaming of AIDS. At least it was based on science and not religion. But there was nothing in there about consent. No means no wasn‘t really a thing until I was in college, at which point some edgelords rebelling against first-wave wokeness — which we called “political correctness” or PC in the late 1990s — would say or post shit like, No means yes! Yes means anal! Oh, wait. That was around 2010, and it got a Yale fraternity suspended for five years. Regardless, even if it was an egregiously stupid hazing ritual I doubt any of the participants were man enough to take so much as a finger in their asses, let alone a strap-on or an actual penis.

Likewise, dating or courtship. My parents tried, but their advice was decades out of date and worked in a time where there was still something resembling a standard social protocol for men to meet women. Let’s just say that the culture around me wasn’t helping much at the time and is even worse nowadays. We still put the onus on men to approach, while women are making it plain that they generally don’t want to be approached, but also don’t want to make the approach themselves — at least if bitter dudes bitching on Reddit are to be believed.

As for sexual pleasure? You’d better be joking. The following is not a joke or an exaggeration, Occasional Reader; it is the Devil’s honest truth: I had to learn about the clitoris (and the importance of not stampeding after it) from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life! The relevant scene actually offers some decent advice, like starting her off with a nice kiss.

tangent on foreplay being for women

This isn’t just about sex, of course. The incompetence of men seems to extend throughout the house, rather than being limited to the bedroom. Lucio writes about guys not being able to cook for themselves, or wash their own clothes. Presumably they see vacuum cleaners the way my mother used to see my dad’s stereo, as some outrageously complicated piece of machinery that they’d best not touch lest they break something.

Of course, it just gets worse. You should take both Cosmopolitan and TikTok with more than just a grain of salt, but apparently there are a non-zero number of men who think that only gay men wash their own assholes in the shower. And here’s another bit of clickbait from MEL Magazine about guys who won’t wipe their asses, with anecdotes culled from Reddit where women are supposedly asking for advice on how to tell their boyfriends that their asses are fucking skanky. The best quote is right at the top: It just seemed the norm to me. Skid marks were a part of life. Oh, and it just gets worse: At least one woman on Reddit claims that her skanky boyfriend leaves skid marks on his girlfriend’s white sheets.

Wait. What?! I honestly can’t remember the last time I left a skid mark on my underwear, let alone on bedsheets. How do guys grow up thinking it’s OK to leave the bathroom with shit clinging to their asses after taking a dump? Because I know when I haven’t done a thorough job. I can feel it. Especially if, instead of dropping a solid Brown Sabbath album, I released a Napalm Death production. You can bet your ass I wouldn’t go to bed like that, even if I was single; I’ve got my pride.

So, why in Crom’s name are men like this? It would be easy to blame the parents; if you let your boys grow up to become men who see women as mere things or think that it’s OK to be unable or unwilling to so much as wash a used plate after having a snack, then I’m gonna kidnap your younger selves with my time machine and have them sterilized right after I’ve made a point of showing Jesus Christ what sort of atrocities would be perpetrated in his name over the next 2,000 years before dropping him back off in Gethsemane.

Recondite and pretentious jokes aside, it isn’t just the parents. It isn’t just men not raising boys properly, because under capitalism kids tend to grow up fatherless in all but name because their fathers are working their asses off to provide for their children. Why do you think that godawful song by Harry Chapin, Cat’s in the Cradle still gets airplay on your local dad rock station? Of course, so are many of their mothers nowadays, so what we’re looking at is a generation of de facto orphans deprived of opportunities to learn from their parents by the demands of capital. These kids generally don’t have grandparents or aunts and uncles in the picture either, because people will leave their home towns to chase after better-paying jobs and because sometimes they figure out that they were raised by assholes and don’t want to put their own kids through that.

So, who raises these kids if the parents are too busy working? They learn what they can at school and from the wider culture. What they learn is that being a man means not being feminine. What do we consider feminine nowadays? Here’s a short list:

How does one write a man? It’s simple, really. You think of a woman, and then you take away reason and accountability. (If this joke seems familiar, it’s because I’m gender-bending a line from As Good As It Gets in which Jack Nicholson plays the misogynist to make it misandrist instead.)

Jokes aside, I am tempted to say that for boys the process of becoming a man is one of surviving systematic emotional neglect, but it’s worse than that. We actively punish boys when they engage in any behavior we have reserved for the feminine sphere. No wonder masculinity often seems toxic; contemporary masculinity is a trauma response, we punish boys and men for being fully human until they internalize it and start doing it to themselves and each other.

It gets even worse, though. Being a man means being subject to a double-bind. Unless you’ve made an effort to do and be better, our society seems determined to make you useless to women, if not outright repulsive. We are not taught to make ourselves attractive to women through fashion. We are not encouraged or taught to be pleasant company for each other, let alone for women. We don’t get taught to dance. We are deprived of opportunities for artistic expression by cuts to art and music education in school. We are expected to be purely functional and utilitarian, and to be narrowly specialized so that we can only do one or two things well — as if we were UNIX tools and not human beings. Society doesn’t seem to want us to be whole men. Worse, society seems to tell us that even though we have nothing to offer, we are not truly men without the very women who have no use for us.

We have movies like Mad Max: Fury Road where women rise up and demand recognition as fully human beings by proclaiming, We are not things!, and that is all to the good. But we still treat men like things. To too many of us, men are not ends in themselves but means to an end. Even our mostly performative concern about what’s wrong with men isn’t necessarily about the men themselves, but the inconvenience and outright harm they cause others as a result of their inability to deal with the processes of socialization that made them the men they are. As long as men suffer in silence and do what they’re told, nobody cares. A man only seems to matter if he rebels in a way that impacts others.

None of the above should be taken to imply that boys and men have no agency. However, when you’re a boy seeing your mother doing all of the housework while your father sits on his ass, possibly with help from your sisters but not you, taking that first step of offering to help might not be easy. Should you offer to help, but don’t perform a chore to your mother’s standards because you’ve never done it before and get berated because your good intentions have made things harder for her, what lesson are you likely to take besides no good deed goes unpunished? I didn’t have sisters. I was the firstborn son. My mother insisted on doing everything herself so that she could have it done her way, but I insisted on learning how to cook and clean because I knew I would eventually have a home of my own, and I did not want to have to depend on anybody else to avoid living in squalor. This stubbornness, as my mother saw it, served me in good stead; if our house isn’t a complete pigsty and my wife and I aren’t living on takeout and prepackaged meals it’s because I do at least 80% of the cooking and cleaning while also being the only person with a paying job. But exercising that sort of agency takes more than mere grit and determination; it takes a quality we don’t seem to encourage in most people: defiance.

If we want better men, we need a better society. If men are trash, we all helped make them that way. Ladies, before you bristle at the notion that you too might be complicit, examine your conscience. If you’ve ever been cruel to a boy or a man because his emotions were inconvenient to you, or because you thought he wasn’t masculine enough, then you are indeed part of the problem. If you’ve ever so much as told a boy not to cry, you carry a share of the responsibility.

As for us men, we need to get our shit together; this is not women’s work. It is too important to be left to women. It is something we must do ourselves, for ourselves, because if we don’t look out for ourselves then nobody will.

In fact, we should reject women as sources of emotional validation or proof of our manhood. A whole man, secure in himself, should not need a woman for either of these. Feminists used to say that a woman needs a man as much as a fish needs a bicycle, and it is time men earned the right to say the same about women.

We could start by teaching our sons, brothers, and nephews to wipe their fucking asses and wash their hands after taking a shit. You’d think that would be part of toilet training, but whatever. Then again, simply getting away from the notion that emotional neglect should be part of a boy’s journey to manhood and traumatizing that boy whenever he so much as sticks his nose outside of the “man box” would be a dramatic improvement. It would just make such men useless to those who profit by the perpetuation of patriarchy, including the resurgence of fascism and adjacent ideologies, but what have any those assholes done for any of us lately?

It would be better for men to be useless to church, state, and capital than it is for men to be useless to women as friends, lovers, or husbands and to each other as friends, brothers, or lovers. Too many of us don’t even make good pets. It’s one thing for little boys to depend on mommy, but growing up and becoming independent is as much a part of the journey to adulthood for men as it is for women.