Neither Beasts Nor Gods

Men shouldn’t deny their humanity in responding to the “masculinity crisis”

Stock Photo by An Kirillova / Getty Images

Happy holidays to all of my subscribers! I’d like to send a special message of gratitude to those of you who have become paying subscribers since I began dropping a paywall a couple of months ago. I know it’s annoying to be reading along and then get tripped up by a prompt to subscribe that also prevents you from continuing to read. But as I explained around the beginning of November, this Substack is my livelihood. I need to make enough money doing it to justify all the time it takes to write three posts per week. It’s a lot. A full-time job, actually. Thanks to each of you for making it possible these past seven months—and hopefully for many more months (and years) to come.

That said, in addition to the holidays coming up over the next week or so, I have an unusual amount of travel over the next month, some of which will prevent me from posting my usual three items per week. I’ve worked at coming up with a posting schedule that I wanted to share with you, so you never end up wondering “whatever happened to Linker?”

The week of December 26, I will publish once (probably on Tuesday morning).

The week of January 2, I will publish twice—a normal post on Monday and then an Ask Me Anything post on Friday.

The week of January 9 will be normal: 3 posts.

The week of January 16, I will skip Martin Luther King Day on Monday and publish 2 posts later in the week.

Finally, the week of January 23, I hope things will return to normal with 3 posts, though they may appear on different days than usual.

After that, my schedule will settle down again, enabling regular 3x/week posting to resume. Thanks again for supporting my writing at “Eyes on the Right.” Oh, and there’s no paywall today. Happy Holidays.

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A certain kind of American conservative has been decrying a “crisis in masculinity” for well over a century now. I don’t mean to imply that this impulse is a continuous, self-conscious tradition of right-wing social criticism handed down from one generation to the next. On the contrary, each generation announces its discovery of the crisis anew, from scratch, as if something in the ongoing egalitarian drift of modern social life inspires a kind of panic wherever cultural expectations happens to be found at any given moment of history.

Neither do I mean to imply, in calling it “conservative,” that the tendency to proclaim a masculinity crisis is an expression of the postwar conservative movement. As I’ve already noted, the supposed crisis began much earlier, around the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s strenuously masculine version of the Progressive movement, and with a parallel critique emerging among fundamentalist Christians over the next two decades. Subsequent waves of crisis-talk arose throughout the interwar period, during the early Cold War, and then even more powerfully with the reaction to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the feminist movements that flowed out of it.

Today’s masculinity crisis is therefore less novel than one might assume. Though as with every kind of activism in our time—from the “woke” left to the openly authoritarian and sometimes fasc-ish far right—it’s amped up by social media’s network effects, putting likeminded people at a multitude of locations in the real world in touch with one another, empowering them to organize for political action.

And here’s one final disclaimer on the subject: I don’t mean to imply that there’s no reason to worry about some kind of crisis involving men. The very ubiquity of anxiety around the subject of men and their place in modern social and economic life points to something real going on. Moreover, a wide array of statistical evidence—analyzed and interpreted with uncommon care and cogency in Richard Reeves’ recent book—suggest that boys really are falling behind relative to girls. There’s clearly something happening here. But, as the song put it decades ago, what this something is ain’t exactly clear.

When Girls Were Girls and Men Were Men

As usual for this Substack, I’m especially interested in how the right is responding to this mysterious “something.” I wrote a column on the subject at The Week back in March 2021. The occasion was a pair of essays on the Claremont Institute’s American Mind website in which authors (both right-wing women) lamented that there are so few females willing to play by the pre-feminist hierarchical rules of courtship, marriage, and childrearing that placed women in a subservient and submissive role.

That has left many young conservative men adrift, lacking prospects for settling down into family life. The more combative of the two essays went beyond blaming women for ruining marriage and also aimed fire at the “tragic feminization of men,” which is supposedly turning many women into lesbians or bisexuals who seek intimacy and fulfillment in the arms of other women rather than in building a life with unappealing beta men.  

The discussion of homosexuality might be relatively new, but the other themes aren’t at all—very much including the reactive moves of blaming women for wanting to become like men and blaming men for wanting to become like women.

It’s the latter of these options that most concerns me. I increasingly see men on the right turning the “Alpha Male” descriptor into a kind of totem. In one of its more absurd and debased forms, we get the Twitter account of an obsequious Trump supporter named “Nick Adams (Alpha Male),” who regularly regales his 459,000 followers with exhortations to attend church, shoot firearms, and visit Hooters restaurants with other Alpha Males while leaving their wives at home with the kids.

A Man Alone

Adjacent to Adams, though aspiring to something nobler, is a tweet that caught my eye a few days ago and has remained lodged in my mind ever since. Its author, “Eric,” a self-described “certified medical specialist in reproductive health,” has 1.1 million followers on Twitter and runs a consulting business (Amerix) that promises to help clients (mostly men) in their struggles with obesity and diabetes, and also to conquer addiction to pornography, masturbation, smoking, and alcohol.

Here is the memorable tweet:

Eric @amerix

Men, Don't be emotionally attached to your children, A teacher doesn't attach to his students, A leader doesn't attach to his followers, A man who is emotionally attached to his children will be manipulated by his wife. #MasculinitySaturday

I like this tweet because of its bluntness and honesty at following through on the assumptions behind the valorization of the “Alpha Male” ideal. The contrary ideal of egalitarian marriage and family life—which assumes a rough equality between the sexes—holds out the possibility of community, of partners sharing rule of the household and enjoying the intimacy that comes from mutuality. It seeks to replace the hierarchical arrangement of more traditional marriages, in which the man rules the family, with his wife serving an essential but ultimately obedient role overseeing the children and the household while her husband goes out into the world to earn a living, keeping distant in an elevated position somewhat outside of and above the household.

In the reactive caricature of this more traditional model of marriage contained in the tweet from “Eric,” we see something important about its telos or ultimate implication. Here the man isn’t merely somewhat outside of and above the family (above all, his children); he’s fundamentally separate and alienated from them, positively pledging to deny any “emotional attachment.”

Leave aside whether any teacher worthy of the name is similarly lacking in emotional attachment to his students, or a leader to his followers. I’m more stunned by the final justification “Eric” offers for his deliberate aloofness—that allowing emotional attachment to his children will make him more likely to be “manipulated by his wife.”  

Let’s also pass by without elaboration on the concern I emphasized in the Week column cited above—namely, that treating relationships this way will only exacerbate the loneliness of conservative men, since only (the small number of) very conservative women would even consider becoming involved with a person with such expectations.

What I really want to note are the negative psychological consequences for men and boys of affirming such an outlook.

Beasts, Gods, and Men

I won’t go so far as to say that my feelings of deep love for and emotional connection to my own children is more “natural” than feeling otherwise. But I do think that telling boys and men that they should deny and repress such feelings if they begin to experience them is grotesque. It’s grotesque because it associates such feelings with inferiority or weakness when in fact they serve to bind and connect us to others in our life.   

Do I leave myself vulnerable to being manipulated by my wife because I feel emotionally attached to my children? It’s actually truer to my experience to say that I feel emotionally attached to my wife and children—and that leaves me vulnerable, not to manipulation, but just vulnerable, full stop. I am not a social atom, isolated, hovering above the social world, looking down on it in the sense of feeling both superior to it and apart from it. On the contrary, I am profoundly here, in this place, in this house, with these people, who matter more to me than anyone else in the world—and not just matter more to me than others do, but also just plain matter to me in an intrinsic, unconditional way that’s categorically different than any other form of mattering. My love for other people, for my extended family, for my friends, for my neighbors, for my fellow citizens, for my fellow human beings—all of that is somehow a pale reflection of the love that flows spontaneously out of me in spending time with the members of my immediate family.

What “Eric” and many others on the right these days hold out as an ideal of masculine superiority sounds, in comparison, like a recipe for a life of icy inaccessibility and emotional desolation.

The ideal reminds me of a line in Aristotle about how someone who lives outside of or apart from “the city” (by which he means attachments to a political community) is either a beast or a god. “Eric” and others seem eager to encourage men to live as if they were gods, aloof from human familial attachments, but the consequence will almost certainly be to turn them into self-deluded beasts—angry, lonely, emotionally unfulfilled, and seeking consolation in an illusion of preeminence.

Put in less highfalutin terms, many on the right appear to be in the business of actively encouraging the creation of a generation of miserable, entitled assholes.

Men, no less than the people who love them, would be much better off following diametrically opposite advice and seeking fulfillment in deep emotional attachment to others. Down that road lies the promise of something far sweeter than the supposed certainty of one’s own superiority—nothing less than the promise of something that feels very much like … happiness.