Masculinity

 October 2, 2023

The topic of masculinity itself has aroused consternation as of late.  Three groups of commentators, those in Taiwan, those in the United States, and female commentators in the media have all brought their readers’ attention to the issue recently. 

Michael Turton wrote today in the Taipei Times about a political rally in May that drew crowds of mostly disaffected young men.  He points to three factors that may have led to this growing trend of male discontent: 1) loss of economic opportunity, 2) loss of socialization and vocational training opportunities, and 3) the overall trend of precarity in the economic outlook of young men. The concern is that some politician will take an authoritarian lesson from this stratum of society. 

Of course, this echoes the words of Saul Kaplan as early as 2011 when he wrote his piece “The Plight of Young Males” in the Harvard Business Review.  “We can and must recognize the unique challenges of young men and we had better start doing something about it now,” he said. 

Caitlin Flanagan contributed some counter-programming in this vein when in the pages of the Atlantic Magazine she wrote recently about “heroic” as opposed to “toxic” masculinity. 

Being a man is not easy, and men need to help each other become better men.  This is an age-old problem facing society now.  Of course, the solutions are simple once you hear them.  What we are looking for is behavior that promotes the betterment of society and not disharmony.  Man should exhibit the chivalric characteristics of humility, faith, integrity, justice, and courage.  

We live in hope that men can reach these chivalric ideals in common speech and action.  In the meantime, I have been reading Zizek on “courtly love,” a subject closely related to the masculinity debates.  I think the main point he makes in his essay on courtly love is that there is a displacement of the power dynamics between men onto the courtly image of a knight serving his Lady.  The now-apparent reality of male domination in historic chivalric romances also conceals the inequality between men, within which there is also the seed of the brotherhood of men.  If that was too fast for you to follow, you can at least agree that the chivalric romance as a genre was performative and signified something other than only the adoration of a knight toward his Lady.  What Zizek calls a “deadlock” in modern feminism presents what is perceived by some men as a missing ideal, toward which, to apply the lessons of the knightly tales of love and valor, results only in disappointment.  This creates a resentment out of which men are manipulated by political forces instead of being free.  The quiescent population desired by authoritarian regimes can have its origin in this. 

It may be counterintuitive to some, but “the patriarchy” is usually one of the first enemies of authoritarian regimes.  What is called “the patriarchy” represents the civilized norms of society that authoritarian regimes immediately try to supplant with their own twisted norms justifying their own power.  Often the first move of authoritarian regimes is to imprison intellectuals and thought leaders.  This happened during Taiwan’s White Terror period.  Several signers of the Declaration of Independence were captured and jailed by the British during the American Revolution.  Interestingly it is during periods of greatest upheaval that men most often come into their own.  During these “times that try mens’ souls” we find the most examples of men embodying chivalric ideals; during the times when great issues and ideas capture the public imagination, the chivalry of men gains the most approbation from their fellow-men.  We are living through times such as these now, with the only twist being that the revolutions capturing the minds of men are quieter.  

Climate change is one of these huge upheavals that is nonetheless a more subdued mental struggle, but the stakes in this have never been higher.  If we believe in this tendency of men to rise to the occasion, the crisis we face is only one of awareness.  The United Auto Workers strike of 2023 for a just transition to electric vehicles is one example of men taking control of their own destiny.  Workers across the world could tell you that there is no crisis of masculinity on the picket line. 

The politics of male resentment exploits only the lack of solidarity amongst men.  We can lay this charge at the feet of every authoritarian populist movement around the globe now, that they are only exploiting the feelings of isolation and alienation felt by men in this modern era.  The solution and antidote has always been at our fingertips: mutual self-help and solidarity. 

Since the dawn of time men have always coalesced around leaders, often for the wrong reasons.  There have always been two forces in the society of men: creation and destruction.  Ignorance and brutality has always preferred to destroy, and wisdom and insight has always preferred to create.  Men should always turn to the honor of creating things when the situation is in doubt.  Honor is something we can control as a society.  We can change the parameters of society to better honor the creative forces. 

Where are the concrete policies designed to honor those advancing the image of society as an information revolution powered by green energy?  We need those policies now, and we can get them, for the sake, at least, of saving positive masculinity from paralysis.  This will do more than any other policy to produce good male role models and save masculinity from itself.