Atomic Dog: The Masculinity Crisis, Part 2

The current model ain't working and calls to go back to the old version are stupid.

In the first part of this series, I wrote about how we need a new model of masculinity, one that was defined more by biology than culture. Well, I oversimplified it a bit. True, I really wanted to call out certain outdated notions of masculinity formed by thousands of years of cultural influences, but biological influences don’t necessarily consider an important factor: choice.

Every boy/man has to, at some point, make a conscious decision when faced with overt cruelty and sexism. i.e., “toxic,” or as I prefer, “unevolved” masculinity. In the words of Charis Denison, a sex educator in the Bay Area: “At one time or another, every young man will get an admission to ‘dick school.’ The question is, will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?”

Too many young men, I fear, embrace the dick curriculum with particular ardor, proudly wearing their dick-school letter jackets, their mascot (an angry penis towering over a golden field of wheat?) proudly displayed on the sleeve.

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Come Back with Your Shield…or on It

My previous article alluded to how the Ancient Greeks and Romans had played a huge role in defining today’s masculinity. I don’t want to turn this into a continuing education course on Greco Roman history (not that I’m qualified, anyhow), but I need to point out when I think much of this shit started.

Think of me as a blond-haired, more amiable, and decidedly less omnipotent Q from Star Trek TNG who takes Captain Picard back 3.5 billion years to show him exactly when life began on Earth: “Everything you know, your entire civilization, it all begins right here in this little pond of goo.” Only in this case, we’re talking about masculinity instead of the whole of civilization and the pile of goo is a piece of brain on a Spartan’s sword.

Generally, the Greeks had a few competing philosophies silently debating each other in the forum of life. They had the Spartan model, the Stoic model, and the Athenian civic model.

The Spartans, of course, were professional soldiers. Courage and bravery took precedence over Athenian virtues such as wisdom, justice, piety, and moderation, and boy did the Spartans buy into it. The Greek philosopher Plutarch tells us that Spartan mothers would send their children off to battle with the following warning: Come back with your shield … or on it. (Dropping your shield in battle was an unforgiveable act of cowardice and if you got killed, you’d be carried home on it, thus making it the ultimate utility tool.)

The Athenians, however, were a bit more pragmatic, reasoning that if things looked bad, a shield was an easy thing to replace:

Oh, mighty Zeus, let not my feets fail me now.

If you need another example of how the Spartans were a little severe, there’s an oft-recounted story that describes the time a young Spartan captured a fox and hid it in his cloak. Being found out would, for some reason I can’t figure, bring him shame, so the boy continued to hold the fox tightly to his body, never crying out in pain, as it tried to eat his way through his body to escape.

Tis but a scratch.

The Stoics, however, looked at courage differently. They saw it, along with all virtues, as forms of knowledge. Courage was simply knowing what’s terrible, what’s not, and what’s neither. They thought the point of thinking was to learn how the world works so they could live in harmony with it and not be vulnerable to external disturbances. Things like wealth and reputation were beyond their control and therefore not essential to happiness.

Instead, happiness stemmed solely from the cultivation of virtue. Virtue had nothing to do with holding a fox to their torso as it fed on their liver.

Contrary to what you might have guessed, though, it was largely the Athenian model that won out and was tacitly embraced, at least for a while, by the bulk of Western civilization, but then some shit happened.

We Get the Masculinity Icons we Deserve

Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who studies Western masculinity, suggests that in the late 19^th century, the ideal man was compassionate, a caretaker, more Athenian. Think Abraham Lincoln, who’s widely remembered as having a warm and generous heart and being courteous to his opponents, e.g., the whole “Team of Rivals” thing.

Smiler writes that these qualities, however, lost luster when paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. Poor wages, poor working conditions, spoiled meat, and the stench of unwashed humanity tend to beat the stuffing out of compassion, it seems.

Hell, the Boy Scouts were founded in 1910 in the hopes that their friendliness, courtesy, and kindness could offset this dehumanizing trend but tragically, no merit badges were offered for softening the hearts of SOBs.

Then came WWI when women proved they could keep the economy churning just fine without men, thank you, thus earning them the vote. (Likewise, of course, women carried on the tradition in WWII.)

With a little coaxing, the late 19^th century man might have embraced this sociological transition, but not so the early 20^thcentury man. He started to get a little paranoid about losing power and dominion over all living things, including babes, and, as Smiler pointed out, these men doubled down on their supposedly inalienable right to this power, emphasizing men’s supposedly logical and less emotional nature as prerequisite for leadership.

Yeah. They started to go a little Spartan.

Zip along to the second half of the 20^th century and men began to see traditional paths to manhood – things like early marriage and breadwinning – begin to constrict, along with the positive traits associated with them. The seeds of women’s liberation started to grow, eventually taking off its stretchy bra and using it to catapult metaphoric tomatoes and rotten fruit at men’s heads, making them feel even less certain of their place in the world.

So, these befuzzled men started to question their identity, maybe not consciously, but deep down they felt a psychological fox gnawing on their liver and they weren’t sure if it was safe to complain.

What they wanted were masculinity role models and they found plenty of them in the movies. You know the ones I’m talking about, the Gary Coopers and John Waynes, followed later by the various isoforms of Stallone and Schwarzenegger and various other muscled, monosyllabic types.

Confused and impressionable men learned that it wasn’t manly to talk about feelings or emotions. Thus, they stayed emotionally infantile.

The only emotion that got plenty of exercise because it was acceptable to express was anger, only anger doesn’t seem to count among most men as a true emotion. They feel it gets a pass. (It's funny how a segment of society still regards women as the emotional sex, but that's only true if you exclude anger as an emotion.)

Anyhow, as these men "evolved," the certitude of their views about manliness became stratified. A man didn’t cry. A man was brave. He didn’t complain. He went toidy all by himself. Hell, he didn’t have emotions of any kind, except of course, anger.

That’s when neo-stoicism diffused into the culture. This new stoicism shared nothing with classic stoicism, though. Instead, it was based on the dictionary definition of the word stoic, which means not feeling anything, a person who can endure pain and hardship without complaint.

As author Aditi Murti points out in an essay on stoicism, look no further than Don Draper from “Madmen” if you seek an example of neo-stoicism in popular culture. Don was handsome, aggressive, and devoid of sentiment. Only he was an emotional basket case. While he was outwardly rational and indifferent to turmoil, everything in his personal life was fucked. He didn’t care about anyone. He was insensitive to all living things and he didn’t even clean up after picnics.

Sure, he was “all man,” but he was largely miserable, not to mention the presumed physical toll it took on his health, both mental and physical.

Even if he wanted to, Don Draper couldn’t have expressed his pain. For one, all those years of sucking it up had made him emotionally undeveloped. Secondly, expressing pain would have destroyed his image of a masculine man.

Sprinkle a little bit of Spartan ultra-bravery and militaristic attitude into this neo-stoicism and you’ve got modern masculinity, or at least what passes as its ideal. Men must be stoic and hide or suppress emotion and pain. They castigate those that are "weak" or those that don't conform to their perception of masculinity.

Ironically, this philosophical pastiche of neo-stoicism and Spartan ideals didn’t help men feel better about themselves or give them a workable construct with which they could navigate life. This is pretty much what today’s masculinity alarmists espouse (that men are getting more effeminate because they don’t let foxes chew through their innards).

All I can say about that is we get the masculinity icons we deserve.

Men? Who Needs ‘Em?

Things got much “worse” in the 21^st century. Women started to smash men academically. More and more of them ran corporations. More and more decided they didn’t need children to define themselves, and even if they did want to have children, they could certainly get around the inconvenience of finding a man. After, all what woman wants to be married to an emotionally stunted lump?

Besides, as science so rudely disclosed to men, they don’t even contribute much to the birth of a new human. Consider that the only thing they throw into the birth collection plate is less than 3.3 picograms of DNA. In fact, if you added up all the male DNA contributed to the human species since the first Homo sapiens was born about 107 billion babies ago, it’d add up to less than a pound of genetic material.

You know what else weighs a pound? A box of Cocoa Puffs. A salami. A few s’mores.

Even that comparatively pitiful contribution is at risk now. Let’s say that there really was a “New Founding Fathers of America” political party and they really did institute a purge like in the movie where you got to kill anybody you wanted without repercussions, only the guy who planned it confused it with an Indian wedding and it lasted 3 days, pretty much leading to the killing all of men.

It wouldn’t matter. There would be plenty of frozen sperm around, and the likelihood that the sperm gelato would get freezer burn from being stored too close to the frozen peas would be low.

And then there’s the final insult: Apparently, while the female part of the sexual reproduction, the egg, probably can’t be replaced or duplicated, the male part, the sperm, probably can.

Contrast all that with the views held in previous centuries when women were believed to just house the sperm of the male. That cum blob was the baby. If cooked at the right temperature, it would come out of the oven fully-formed and decidedly less spunky 9 months later. Who owned the uterus and what kind of wallpaper it had was entirely incidental.

That’s quite a comedown for men, thinking they were creators but finding out instead that they’re just the guys who run into the party store to buy Snapple and tampons for the true creators.

So yeah, no wonder men can’t figure out their place in the world or how they’re supposed to act or if they’re supposed to have feelings and who they can talk to (if they even knew how). Their almost universal response, however, is the default position, the one of culturally defined masculinity: toughness, emotional frigidity, and, if not truly present, at least the pretense of bravery.

I’ll throw out my two bits on how this is affecting young men in particular, along with a possible alternative for all men, in the next chapter of this series.

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References:

1. Connor, Sandra, et al. Perception and Interpretations of Contemporary Masculinities in Western Culture: A Systematic Review. American Journal of Men’s Health, Nov-Dec 2021.

2. London, Rose, Masculinity in Ancient Greece, courtauldian.com, February 2019.

3. McKay, Brett & Kate, The Ideal Man According to 7 Different Philosophers. The Art of Manliness, August 15, 2023.

4. Murti, Aditi, Stoicism Has Become a Masculine Ideal that Values Repression, Indifference. The Swaddle, Nov 21, 2020.

5. Orenstein, Peggy, The Miseducation of the American Boy. The Atlantic, January/February 2020.

6. Rubarth, Scott, Competing Constructions of Masculinity in Ancient Greece, Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts, Volume 1, Issue 1 – pages 21-32.