Masculinity is a religion. It is a compendium of saints: the vaunted patriarch, the taciturn cowboy, the errant knight, reluctant hero, gentle giant and omniscient father. Like scripture, each contains a story of implicit values. Fraternity, dominance, adamance, certitude — these are the commandments of male identity.
Maybe in societies deep through history, those qualities helped organize a world of chaos, but the antediluvian constructs of masculinity are easily weaponized in modern life. The virtue of strength invites abuse. Adamance enables intransigence. Restraint devolves to disengagement, and fraternity yields exclusion.
The veneration of those traits is poison to young men. It offers an easy escape from the necessary struggle of self-reflection and replaces the work of interior discovery with a menu of prefabricated identities.
· Will S. Hylton
What it comes down to, I guess, is that I am just not manly. Like Ernest Hemingway was manly. The beard and the guns and the wives and the little short sentences. [...] Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t.
· Ursula K. LeGuin
Dear Jack,
Here's something that goes unsaid on both ends of the political spectrum: If you can pass as a Standard Issue White Man in America, then there is a Ring of Power waiting for you, called the Patriarchy. You need only equip it, and you will be suddenly immune from all the anxiety and guilt and choice paralysis and work which goes along with an understanding of feminism and intersectionality and simply giving a shit about other people. This is what is called privilege. Imagine casting your eyes over the incredible injustices in this country, and blithely deciding to ignore them. The thought is monstrous. But it is also incredibly enticing.
Jack, I was worried when we found out you were a boy. In my nearly forty years I have not known many useful men, and that is because, to be useful, a man must develop the willpower to refuse what the Patriarchy offers. And, simply, most do not.
So why should you? Why take the red pill — as corrupted as that reference has become — and deal with all that work and suffering, when the Matrix can just tell you the “steak” is “delicious”. (I hope these references to a movie from 1999 still make sense in whatever year you’re reading this.)
I’ve written before about tikkun olam. And refusing privilege (or wielding it for good) is a part of that work. But it’s also about not causing more damage which must be repaired in the first place. Like quality assurance work, living a just life goes largely unnoticed because it is mostly about small quotidian acts. Don’t be a pest; Don’t hurt people; Don’t make things worse: These are the sums of such action, amounting to the opposite of so much noisy bullshit which draws our attention. And yet living well also means: Love; Persist; Learn; Ask, and be troubled by the answers.
Much of the Patriarchy’s appeal is in its simplicity. Like Hemingway’s short sentences. But these men only understand the world through hierarchies, and their tools are all some kind of violence. That is not strength. It takes true strength to discard the convenient for the real, and only from such a foundation can we do or build anything that matters.