Previously: On Being Attracted1
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about gender and sexuality, but it is something I’ve spent time considering seriously at various times2.
Some of the ideas here are related to concepts explored in On Being Attracted, both that and this are reactions to incidental exposure to rationalist-adjacent folks who do spend a lot of time thinking about inner experiences of gender and/or relationships, chiefly Sympathetic Opposition and Jacob Falkovich, but also a smattering of others such as Elodes and Sundus—the idea for this came to me merely upon seeing the title of the latter’s "over the mysteries of female life, there is drawn a veil best left undisturbed", without even having read it yet.
I think I have a workable encapsulation of masculinity, and so this post will be about deciding if it’s a good one.
I think that the essence of modern masculinity is being ignored, and that everything else is the reaction to this. [Apologies in advance, a lot of this section is kinda cringe waffling on the idea.]
“Modern” is maybe an essential component for everything that follows; upon consideration there might be quite a bit of this that falls apart if you hypothesize around historical situations that are no longer common. There are parts of this idea that will fit, for example in the sense that ambition is a particular craving for attention, but it’s a poorer match for, say, tribal states. In a closer-to-state-of-nature world, gender roles tend to cascade naturally from the realities of sexual reproduction, where you’d have to contort quite a bit to get “being ignored” to fit. Plus, in insular tribal societies where everyone’s business is everyone else’s business it becomes harder to actually be ignored. The closer we get to social atomization the more this model will make sense. There’s maybe some Seeing Like a State parallels here in that some of the angst here speaks a language we don’t conventionally recognize.
Right away there’s also an obvious temptation to use this lens to say only that every man is a petulant attention seeker, a screaming child whose inclinations towards brutishness are tantrums against their own impotence. And I mean yeah, some of this is that, but also like let’s be real if that’s the only level of nuance you’re operating on this post isn’t really for you, is it. We might as well be saying all girls are sissy little hysterical flowers who need a big strong man to protect them.
What I’m gesturing at: the reality is more that many men will seek to impose their will on the world in some manner, but frequently this requires people be paying attention to them, either as receivers or inheritors of that will or as a means to an end. The factory doesn’t build itself3. But this framing also explains the introverted man happy in their seclusion, the scientist content in their lab. There are people and pursuits for which no attention is the preferred mode, and we can note the reciprocal case for introverted women—there are plenty of women, afflicted with attention they do not desire, who would prefer to be left the hell alone.
Perhaps I’m misstating something more properly general and obvious like “compelled to agency” or “victims of sexual dimorphism”4, but I’m more fond of my framing because it’s slightly more optimistic (or is trying to be). Some of this could be the consequences of testosterone hijacking one’s attention and given it over to women against everyone’s will.
The default as a dude is that you’ll have to struggle for others’ attention. I worry already that this is a stupid idea because it seems absurd to reduce gender dichotomy to “the one that naturally gets attention” versus “the one that doesn’t”, and yet there’s at least some explanatory power here. It matches the shape of the archetypical gendered problems: women having to deal with attention they may not want and men having to figure out how to correctly get the correct type of attention they need or desire.
Thus also I think being ignored is a tension that causes misbehavior in ways that pattern match for the failure modes of masculinity as a culture.
I’ve been catching up on Sardonicast and there’s a recent episode which includes discussion on Adolescence. There’s some handwringing on young boys and “manosphere” culture and it’s kind of tiresome. People get gloomy about Tate-style influencers and “youth incel culture”, just kind shrug and admit in a show of fear that they “don’t understand it”, but there isn’t really much there to understand. It’s all kayfabe, playing pretend for entertainment, it might as well be professional wrestling. People whine about all the horrible things Tate does but what’s easy to forget is that even in pro wrestling—back when it was trying to hide its scriptedness—the wrestlers were still athletes and celebrities, still abused drugs and behaved badly, lived and died by the sword. The more things change the more they stay the same; there’s an inevitable degree to which the performance artists buy into their own bullshit, there’s not really that much to understand. When you offload the responsibility for being a positive influence on your children’s lives you roll the dice on what picks up the slack. Yes, some people are going to see the stage play and think it’s real.
But, as much as I hate the phrase, it’s still fair to call that “toxic masculinity”.
For men, there’s no small amount of angst related to being ignored for basic intrinsic value5. I think some of this manifests as petty misogyny and transmisogyny on the social level, some of which is fairly reducible to straight jealousy. There’s a certain number of men who inescapably notice what they perceive to be disparities in social sanctions for meaningfulness and success and (rightly or wrongly) feel unfairly competed with. Why are women taking men’s jobs/social roles when their ticket to success is home stewardship and caring for the family—”jobs” that they (rightly or wrongly) see as both easy and as not open to them. I don’t really mean this uncharitably, but there is a natural temptation to wonder if what they want is a submissive cultural past that doesn’t exist, or is the underlying desire that they want to be the submissive?
It’s difficult to have that conversation, partly because it’s decidedly unmanly to admit you might want to be the other sex6, but also because the other side of the dialectic gets really weird about it too. For example, it’s risqué to note that the current state of gender change technology is a very hack-y half-measure, it’s unclean, and so for just that reason a lot of people are not okay with it. If anyone could walk into the magical gender switcheroo tube and come out the other side fairly pristine, this would be less of an issue aside from the gender warriors who would continue to screech about who was invading who's gendered spaces. The solution to incels might one day be “go trans” but that day is not yet today7.
I suppose despite the title I haven’t said much “on masculinity” per se. I don’t really have strong opinions on gender roles or thoughts that aren’t retreading the ancient left/right conflict. Strong traditional gender roles, like most conservative principles, make the most sense the closer a society is to a state of nature—or when it’s in danger of regressing to a state of nature where survival might depend on them, and so should never be jettisoned wholesale. However, the farther you get away from that, the more your technology places you in a society where the old bets are off, the less useful they are and the freer you are to adopt more convenient attitudes.
But these days I think metis favors still holding the old ways sacred, even (or maybe even especially) if you think you know better. I think you should still strive for convenience, but ensure that your failure modes are more graceful, which requires being mindful of what worked before.
I don’t see myself as especially masculine but I’m fortunate that my life doesn’t require me to be. In recognizing this, the penance is, in part, these meditations on what manhood could be as an evolution of what came before. Much of this boils down to complaining about testosterone.
Manhood is being ignored, and suffering in silence. The latter is a noble truth that I think we would like to forget and are maybe worse off for it. Petulance isn’t a manly virtue, it’s what you get when you’ve forgotten the responsibility for handling your own shit. Suffering is no virtue either, but its relief is a convenience8. The community can be there to help you pull but a man must be the one to pick up the rope—certainly paradoxical when one’s nature is to be ignored, which is why men have historically needed to responsibly cultivate the Other One that makes it easier to build the community.
In the wise words of the Lesbian of the Lake, “World cold and hard, tiddy soft and warm.”
I realized sometime later that the title image for On Being Attracted is a deep cut reference that probably needs explaining to make sense. That’s a piece of fanart from the 4chan Dark Souls general thread making fun of people sexualizing Snuggly—a reoccurring character who is an invisible bird—based entirely and only on the female voice.
On at least one axis, some of this is mild paraphilia; I spent a semi-embarrassing, quasi-spiritual part of my life experimenting with psychological concepts related to anima and animus. My naive reasoning was, given physical differences in male versus female psychosocial development but that the morphological divergence is dependent on fetal testosterone exposure, the blueprints for both must not be on the sex chromosomes. Basically, I was assuming that the male and female brains/psyche both coexist at the same time but the non-relevant parts are merely inactive or dormant. This is still kind of a compelling-sounding theory (albeit purely armchair), and there’s not a lot of evidence this wasn’t just some goofy tulpa-adjacent self-hypnosis, but anyways I kind of dropped it after I had a really weird moment where I thought I overheard my female inner persona wondering what it’s like to have a penis.
I thought frequently about deleting this footnote because it’s a lil whacky but it does weirdly become sort of vaguely relevant later.
I can’t recall where I first heard it but I’ve heard social status described as a function of how much others can afford to ignore you—social status is the social capital that can be levied to make movements, a sort of social feudalism.
tl;dr pretty much the instant the gametes diverge from being identical you’re doomed to sexual dimorphism and the sexes in each species optimizing for different things.
I suspect your perspective on whether people should be appreciated for their intrinsic value (versus judged for their productive outcomes) will inform how you feel about the people like I’m about to describe.
Come to think of it, perhaps another test of this framing for masculinity is whether FTM transexuals commonly note shifts in how they draw attention. Famously, they notice the ways in which testosterone is kind of debilitating, but I can’t recall if I’ve heard similar stories of experiencing a transition in how society treats men: as much more disposable.
That said, I do think a not-insubstantial amount of them are being funneled into doing that, which is how we get goofy stuff like “safe horny” etc etc, which is also another thing that’s sort of risqué to point out.
I want so badly for the next sentence to be [redacted to not ruin the joke] end here hit send, but alas I unfortunately pigeon-holed myself into a serious paragraph. Never mind we got there booya babeeeeee.