“But what is a man?”

So much talk nowadays of manliness - toxic masculinity and the state of the young white male. 

CHRIS CRUCIAL: Why I HATE the 'beta male' attack

Trump appeals to twenty-something males as being a strong male, whereas I see him as an unmanly windbag.

Vincent DeWeese's “Boys Don’t Cry”: St. Gregory Palamas and Toxic Masculinity (Public Orthodoxy) argues Orthodox Christianity has within its tradition an argument against toxic masculinity.

Since the first lockdowns intended to protect the population against Covid-19, violence against women and femicide rates have significantly increased in both Greece and the “Western world.” Despite the statistical evidence on the matter and the way that the #metoo movement resonated with women around the globe, many, if not most, men are still in denial about the ways that women continue to suffer under patriarchy. In response, men will often protest that men suffer too. They dominate professions that are physically difficult and, even worse, men tend statistically to successfully commit suicide at a much higher rate than women. All too rarely, however, do men make the connection that violence against women and men’s mental health struggles have at least one common underlying cause: patriarchy. Contrary to popular misconception, patriarchy is not simply a word meaning “all men” but the nearly-universal way that boys are socialized into becoming men whose sense of masculine identity depends upon their ability to dominate women, employ violence against other men, and fundamentally violate their own existential integrity.

Visionary black feminist author bell hooks aptly described this socially-imposed sacrifice in her classic work The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love: “Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder.” [1] What we commonly call toxic masculinity is a Faustian bargain. If the boy will only sacrifice his desire to love and be loved, if he will only cut off his organic connection to his body and his emotions, and—most importantly—treat women as inferior human beings, then supposedly he will reap all manner of rewards: a place at the top of a hierarchical organization, money, power, sexual access to whomever he desires. The problem? Patriarchy only rarely pays off as promised. Except for a small elite group of men, most men pay the price of their soul and are compensated with misery, isolation, and an inability to love.

I do not recognize this socialization in my own upbringing, the exact opposite, but that may be my own bias. 

DeWeese continues:

According to Gregory, “Christ, the soul’s Healer, began His cure with… the appetitive [part of the soul].” [2] That is, our salvation begins with the healing of our human desires, not their extinguishing. The life of the hesychast is distinguished precisely by highly emotional states such as “blessed affections,” in which the believer “beholds within himself burning ever more fiercely sacred and impassible and divine eros.” [3] These excited, almost ecstatic, states are reflected in the body, too, something which scandalized rationalists like Barlaam and seems to have perturbed elements of Byzantine society that would have preferred a more formal, customary adherence to religion. According to Palamas, Barlaam’s stance would render invalid fundamental commandments: “[Barlaam] says that apatheia is the mortification of the passible part of the soul… yet by that power of the soul we love and we reject, we appropriate and we rebuke, and lovers of what is noble reorient this power but do not reduce it to a death-like condition.” [4] To crucify the passions is not to put to death entirely the passible part of the soul. For Palamas, this would be equivalent to God giving a commandment imposing a kind of suicide: soul murder, to use hooks’ haunting phrase.

Makes sense to me. 

Ethics makes character, and a man has ethics. I lost mine for a time, and I am trying to get them back. 

Men keep their word. Which is something Trump does not.

Men do not shy from strong women. Strong women enhance a man.

Men can dance:

And always give as good as you get:

On The Point Magazine, I found Over Man: On Nietzsche and our crisis of masculinity by Mat Messerschmidt.

What solutions does Nietzsche offer? As with so many other topics in his body of work, to distill his “vision of masculinity” into any static, systematic and coherent dogma would be to falsify his thought. Yet that very fact may make Nietzsche the perfect thinker on manhood for a time like ours, when good men can find themselves pulled in multiple contradictory directions, ethically compelled to listen to the demands of feminism, but in search of a male identity that modern gender paradigms do not seem ready to supply. The path out of outdated ways of living masculinity cannot be simply to keep telling men that their maleness is bad, and Nietzsche’s call to self-affirmation may have something to offer them as a corrective to that message. In his best moments, Nietzsche’s ideal of manly purposiveness is expressed as confident, focused, goal-directed action that is conducive to the building of a better world: “The active, aggressive, ambitious man is still a hundred paces closer to justice than the reactive one,” he tells us in Beyond Good and Evil. This purposiveness has an individualistic strain that could speak to the lonely, atomized modern male, but without inviting him to wallow in a tragic heroism of loneliness like Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista killer and self-identified incel, did. Nietzsche has Zarathustra tell his listeners that he is going “my way,” because “the way—does not exist!”—and yet Zarathustra takes the time, over and over again over hundreds of pages, to speak to men searching for meaning. Nietzsche consistently champions focus: “The formula for my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.” Yet the indefinite article (“a goal”) leaves open the question of what this striving should be for, or what values should inform it. Indeed, a critical element of this vision of striving seems to be that the man himself supplies the goal.  

***

Perhaps now it sounds as if the writings of Nietzsche place men in a bind similar to the one I experienced as a teenage boy: the need to “be a man,” and simultaneously the need to question manhood itself. The critical difference, I think, is that Nietzsche removes the guilt from this state of internal division, proceeding as if one can assertively do both at the same time. It took me a long time to consider this as a possibility, in Nietzsche’s thinking or in general. Masculinity cannot be an untroubled concept today—if it were untroubled, that would indicate that feminism had failed entirely. But men remain and need ways to understand themselves positively as men. As a teenager, I only heard Nietzsche saying, “Be a man!”, and as a young scholar, I abandoned my earlier way of reading him, hearing only, “But what is a man?” Now, as a teacher to male students who are strongly impacted by the first message, I have learned how to hear both together. 

Men should know when they are being jerks.

 Men should know that without women they are meaningless.

Try to do good. Try to be a good human being. Work on figuring out what is good and what is a good human being. I suggest starting with  Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and The Golden Rule.

Move over Andrew Tate, there’s a new brand of masculinity in town

Kamala Harris Wants to Redefine Masculinity—And Demolish Trump’s.

sch 8/21/24, 8/24/24, 8/28/24