I, Robot - Or, a Story of Broken Masculinity

When a definition becomes a cage

Woof

*ding*

“Please fasten your seat belts. We’ll be arriving at our destination in four hours. Have a pleasant flight.” The flight map blinks alive. That’s it. That’s all you’ll stare at for the next four hours.

This is a recent social media trend called ‘raw dogging’ and it’s mostly young men who do it. They might say it’s about meditation or mindfulness, but would they be bragging about it on social media if it was? Brag is the keyword. It’s about mental toughness, (often wrongly interpreted) stoicism, and being ‘masculine’. Monk mode is a similar trend, and again, it’s mostly young men who participate. Monk mode means isolating yourself for a few months to grind and (usually) try to build a business. You know, efficiency, productivity, and optimization. How masculine, such detachment, such isolation. No wonder men are up to four times more likely than women to take their own lives — especially in the Western world.

I, man has become I, robot.

In previous posts, I’ve written about the (non-)existence of human ‘alpha males’ and the perceived absence of good men. Clearly, I’ve been thinking about masculinity and what it means. As a straight white man¹, I’m trying to figure out what ‘being a man’ is supposed to mean. I’m also getting very tired of the topic and the (often but not always) mindless and mudslinging discourse on it — you’ll understand my topical fatigue when you read the last sentences of this post.

So, my final public thoughts about it, the conclusion of my masculinity trilogy, will simply be an incomplete and fumbling attempt at a conceptual diagnosis. In short, I think two problems are pulling modern masculinity apart: it’s collectively overdefined and individually underdetermined².

Be all things

The first problem with modern masculinity is that it’s collectively overdefined. Everybody - men and women, manosphere and wokeland - is trying to tell us what masculinity should look like. Men are given dozens of contradictory checklists with traits they need to express to be ‘masculine’. We, collectively, are trying to pin down masculinity through too many, too rigid, and too contradictory definitions.

Be more emotional, but, you know, not too emotional. Be physically imposing but don’t be threatening. Ask women out, but don’t approach them. Don’t care about what others think, but mind-read women’s needs. Be honest and express your insecurities, but beware that male tears are the number one killer of female desire. Be tough and unyielding, but be kind and caring. Be a good guy and a bad boy. Be tall and handsome, but how dare you be shallow. Don’t push a woman into tradwifery, but be a trad husband. The masculine math ain’t mathin’. (Yes, those are extreme examples that lack nuance. That’s the point.)

Be this, be that, be everything, everywhere, all at once³.

In an almost decade-old Salon essay, Greta Christina already wrote,

I've been looking at our society's expectations of men, our very definitions of maleness. I've been looking at how rigid and narrow many of these expectations are, creating a razor-thin window of acceptable manly behavior that you'd have to be a professional tightrope walker to navigate… so many of these expectations are not only rigid, but totally contradictory, creating a vision of idealized manhood that's not just ridiculous but literally unattainable.

It’s not a new issue and it’s not an individual issue — I’m not at all saying that women, collectively or individually, burden their (aspiring) significant others with dozens of checklists. It’s a cultural, collective issue. More recently, Lane Anderson, in her essay ‘Patriarchy is bad for men and boys, too‘ (which I encourage you to read), refers to the work of sociologist Michael Kimmel to sketch how patriarchy provides an outline of manhood that few, if any, men fit into. In her words,

Kimmel writes that the modern American construction of masculinity is one that is impossible for the vast majority of men to live up to, much like beauty standards are constructed for women so that everyone is set up to fail and feel inadequate. “We have constructed the rules of manhood so that only the tiniest fraction of men can meet them,” he writes, and the result is that men feel constantly insecure.

Guess what happens when a young man, insecure and ready to take his first steps in the world, faces a deluge of contradictory rules and unattainable checkboxes? He looks for a strong voice that cuts through the noise. Say, someone who tells him with absolute certainty what a man is supposed to be. Someone who paints our young man as a hero in training, maidens waiting upon completion of his masculine quests. Preferably someone with either a veneer of intellectualism or flanked by fancy cars and half-naked women. Those guys, after all, seem to have it figured out. If anyone knows what masculinity is all about, surely it’s them?

Hello, manosphere influencers who - this stings - do one thing very well: they make masculinity simple. No more contradictions. Be strong, be tough, be an emotionally constipated bully who hides his insecurities by being an asshole. These are your masculine commandments. Amen, my brothers. It’s simple. It’s also intellectually and emotionally lazy. It’s a vacuous recipe for an empty shell of a life. Defining this caricature of masculinity as the diametrical opposite of femininity does a disservice to both — we connect through the overlap and the lucky (heterosexual) ones among us build a shared life with its roots in this common ground and a canopy that eclipses both femininity and masculinity.

The opposite of masculinity is ‘boys will be boys’. The opposite of masculinity is letting society (or, algorithms forbid, manfluencers) define what masculinity should be.

But defining it for yourself is so, so hard.

RE:DEFinition⁴

The second problem with modern masculinity is that it’s individually underdetermined — we don’t give young men enough credit to define it for themselves. Yes, find nuanced mentors and role models, but we can’t - shouldn’t - expect masculinity to be a cookie-cutter template that we can give young men. It’s an individual journey. A rite of passage, perhaps.

— — —

You are four years old and scrape your knee. Your bottom lip trembles. But it’s okay. You want to be a big boy, right? Big boys don’t cry. Suck it up. Don’t show you’re affected by pain, whether it’s physical or emotional.

By age ten, you figure out that men are allowed to display three emotions. Fortunately, they all start with ‘a’ — girls outperform boys in school, everybody tells you, so we best keep it simple, right? Anxiety, arrogance, and aggression (with the latter two often masking the first). That’s it. That is the full emotional range you can publicly express without attracting dismissive looks. Everything else you feel, the immense and beautiful and vastly emotional creature you are, is bound into submission by those three chains.

Now, you are fourteen years old, fueled by social media, energy drinks, and a sudden surge in testosterone. Your voice cracks and whiskers sprout on your cheeks. You are changing. It feels weird. You don’t know who to become. So you look around. The popular guys a few years older appear confident in themselves (oh, what a dream that is) and, surely(?), they are good role models. You look closer. The kind of masculinity they embody, you notice, is extractive. Men take. Men, real men, act like they are entitled to attention, to respect, even to female bodies, and too often, they get away with it. “Boys will be boys,” people say with a wink when those ‘men’ go too far. “Just don’t behave like that too publicly.”

This is the background against which you get to define masculinity. Add the constant clamor of the checklists and how can you even hear yourself think? Ha, think, that’s one thing we don’t regularly associate with masculinity, right? No, men are doers; optimized robots that strive for efficiency and productivity. Strive, conquer, and claw at any social status you can get your strong, masculine hands on. Interiority? Emotions? Puh, that’s for women.

You start to hear other voices, though. Voices that tell you to be kind, to be emotionally mature, to be funny, to be smart. You learn about the orgasm gap and that many women are, at least sometimes, silently in pain when having sex with men,⁵ which is symptomatic of a much larger issue. Yes, you want, crave, need, desire love and physical intimacy, but you don’t want to be one of those guys. And yet, if you don’t style yourself after them, you suddenly become invisible. Despite the common misconception, invisibility is not a superpower; it’s a black hole of pain that blooms in your chest and consumes you whole. Where do you stake your claim on this battleground of all possible masculinities? What you hear conflicts with what you see. It’s a mess. You’re a mess and if there’s one thing you know, it’s that being a mess isn’t masculine, never mind the alliteration. (But here you hear that words are the domain of women, so hide that verbal trickery and agile brain, young man.)

What if you’re looking in the wrong place? What if you decide instead of letting others force their decision on you? Yes, it’s difficult to do this. It takes work. Peer pressure from all sides will weigh on you until your shoulders crack. Hello, robot.

But then, at last, when you retrieve the pieces of yourself, you do the same with masculinity; you deconstruct it. You understand that it is a flexible constellation of traits, some physical (size, upper body strength, distribution of facial and body hair), some cultural (outgoing⁶, confident, assertive), and many a bit of both. No one trait is necessary and no one trait is sufficient. You start building your own constellation. Strength? Persistence? Sure, useful and on many traditional checklists. No one is going to hold those against you. Good. Your constellation isn’t finished, though. Introspection? Emotional maturity? Kindness? Intelligence? Humor? Oh, those are trickier. They’re on some masculinity checklists, but only on a minority. They’re on many femininity checklists too (not opposites, remember). What to do?

Here’s the beauty and the challenge. You decide. Become the ‘man’ you choose to be. Even better, even harder, become a person; an individual who has the strength and kindness to see others that way too, as individuals, regardless of their sex and gender.

You carefully pick up the shards of your self-destructed heart and reassemble them into a vessel that overflows. Something cracks. Not your shoulders; the chains binding you⁷.

— — —

I’m done with this topic.

I define what masculinity means to me.

For me, masculinity is strength and weakness. Masculinity is stepping into a bullet’s path and crumbling with insecurity. Masculinity is confidence and needing an embrace.

For me, masculinity is the capacity for boundless love.

Come at me, bros.

---

1. So that’s my bias. I welcome other perspectives.

2. For all my readers with a background in philosophy: I’m playing fast and loose with these terms here. Apologies for any heart attacks.

3. Great movie.

4. If you know the song without help from Google or another search engine, you are my people.

5. This is based on a preprint, so it’s not yet peer reviewed. It’s not a massive sample and it’s a specific population (277 Dutch female university students), but the numbers are concerning (emphasis mine):

The majority of participants (80%) reported to experience pain at least sometimes, and 15% reported to experience pain more than half of the time. Engaging in penile-vaginal intercourse despite experiencing pain was common, with 42% of participants indicating to do so always or most of the time and 65% at least sometimes when experiencing pain. Of the affected women, 41% did not communicate pain to their partners.

6. Hahahahaha.

7. None of this means that there is anything ‘wrong’ with traditionally masculine-associated traits. Still, tradition can be a straitjacket that prevents you from expressing yourself as much as it can be an outline for your identity. It’s a tricky balance and an individual journey.