Aging Capriciously

Six years ago, I wrote a piece arguing that machismo — the entitlement to dominate — was one of the most destructive forces in human behavior.  I still believe that.  If anything, the evidence has multiplied.  But something has changed, and it is not an improvement.

Machismo used to be a cultural expectation.  Now it is a commercial product.

You can subscribe to it, stream it, inject it, lift it, wear it, and vote for it.

We did not merely inherit a myth of masculinity.  We have industrialized it.

From Cultural Script to Sales Funnel

Masculinity today is no longer defined by responsibility, competence, or care for others.  It has been reduced to a performance: dominance, wealth display, sexual conquest, emotional numbness, and the ability to intimidate.

This performance is not accidental.  It is monetized.

First you are told that you are weak, that society has emasculated you, that you are a victim.  Then you are offered a solution: become a “real man.”  Buy the course.  Follow the influencer.  Take the supplement.  Join the tribe.  Hate the designated enemies.  In my early years, the comic books often contained stories about a bully kicking sand in the face of a guy on a beach blanket with his girlfriend.  When the guy did nothing, the girl went off with the bully.  The solution was to purchase a weightlifting program.  Within no time you could develop huge muscles that would help you to kick the bullies ass and get your sexy girl friend back.

Today it has become a business model but still built on male insecurity.

In quality management terms, we would call this a system that manufactures defects and then sells the repair kit.

The Algorithm of Anger

What has changed in the past decade is not human nature but amplification.  Social media does not reward nuance.  It rewards outrage, humiliation, and certainty.  A calm, thoughtful man receives no clicks.  A furious, aggrieved man receives millions.

So, the system produces what it rewards.

When dominance theater gets attention, dominance theater multiplies.  When empathy is mocked as weakness, empathy disappears.  When complexity is dismissed as “soft,” thinking becomes a liability.  Men are told that women don’t like soft men with brains.  Women want hard men with muscles.  A six pack abs has become the new key to sexual prominence.

Deming taught us that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.  If our culture produces angry, isolated, performative men, we should examine the system that is rewarding those outcomes.  It is a system in which the vast majority of men cannot live up to the stereotype.  Few men are John Wayne or Clint Eastwood tough.

The Pseudoscience of the “Alpha”

We are now told that human beings can be sorted into “alphas” and “betas,” as if we were barnyard animals.  This is not science.  It is mythology dressed in gym clothes.

Masculinity becomes a constant audition.  You must always prove yourself:

• stronger than someone
• richer than someone
• more dominant than someone
• less emotional than everyone

You are never allowed to arrive.  Only to compete.  A surrogate for competing is to watch every football game that tv offers.  Learn all the baseball stats.  Buy the hockey jerseys of your favorite enforcers.  Pretend that you are a big fan.  If your prowess on the field or court cannot be demonstrated than stand in front of a TV and scream at the umpires and referees.

These activities to not demonstrate strength.  They demonstrate a chronic insecurity that goes down to the soul of men today.  The irony is that a man who must constantly prove he is a man is not a free man.  He is trapped in a costume he cannot remove.  He is trapped in a performance that he cannot win.

The Estrogenic Culture

According to the new prophets of manhood — the ones broadcasting from leather chairs in rooms decorated like a bourbon advertisement — Western civilization is drowning in estrogen.

You will recognize these philosophers by their uniforms: tight T-shirts, studio microphones, and the haunted eyes of men who have turned their personalities into subscription services.

They inform us that men are weak because they cook, change diapers, express love for their children, and occasionally experience a human emotion not related to rage.  This, we are told, is how empires fall.

One of these digital Spartans I watched recently explained that reading books lowers testosterone.  This may be the first time in history that literacy has been classified as a hormone disorder.  Another one I watched introduced me to the concept of “Estrogenic” culture.  Karen even asked me what it was.  I had to look it up.  I now realized that I have been flooded by too much estrogen and it is making me soft and wimpy.  One solution is to buy more supplements.

The super macho purveyors of instant masculinity offer a  cure for this biochemical estrogenic catastrophe.  It is available online for $49.99 a month, plus shipping.  It involves waking at 4 a.m., lifting heavy objects, distrusting women, fearing vegetables, and referring to other men as “beta” — a term that functions primarily as a substitute for having an actual personality.

In this worldview, empathy is weakness, cooperation is surrender, and kindness is a sign that soy has finally conquered your bloodstream.

I have lived through wars, recessions, social upheavals, and the invention of disco.  Never once did I observe that the decisive factor in national survival was whether men felt comfortable discussing their feelings. The truly fragile masculinity is the one that cannot survive a salad, a conversation, or a competent woman.  If civilization can be destroyed by a man who knows how to do laundry, then civilization deserves to be replaced by a washing machine.

The Political Weaponization of Machismo

Hyper-masculinity is no longer just a personal identity.  It has become a political tool.  Strongman leadership, contempt for expertise, glorification of force, and the rejection of empathy are framed as “manly.”  We have a President who is a four time draft dodger, but who manages to position himself as a “tough” guy who takes no shit from the wimpy politicians and business-people who surround him.  His cadre of sycophants are infamous to the depths they will sink to.  Anything the Donald wants seems fair game if they can only stay in the Donald’s graces.  And they call this “masculinity.”

The world is turned upside down today.  Compromise becomes weakness.  Reflection becomes cowardice.  Care becomes softness.  Thinking becomes weakness.  Restraint becomes fearfulness.  We scale the same logic from the individual to the nation: domination over partnership, victory over cooperation, humiliation over understanding, bold strikes over careful deliberation.  Attacks over compromise.  Revenge over treaties.

We have seen where this leads.  History is not short of examples.  We have the disaster on two levels.  The first level is on the level of the individual.

The Hidden Cost to Men

Here is the irony.  The ideology that claims to defend men is one of the primary sources of male suffering.

• Men are more lonely than at any time in modern history.
• Men have higher suicide rates.
• Men are less likely to seek help.
• Men are taught emotional illiteracy and then punished for the consequences.

We tell boys not to cry and then wonder why men cannot express grief except through anger.

We call vulnerability weakness and then wonder why men die alone.

A system that forbids emotional expression produces emotional isolation.  That is not masculinity.  That is a design flaw.

The Damage to Relationships and Families

Hyper-masculinity not only impacts the man, it destroys relationships.  It does not produce strong families.  It produces hierarchy instead of partnership.  Control instead of cooperation.  Silence instead of communication.  The amount of domestic violence in our society is mute testimony to this phenomenon.

• 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe physical violence (e.g., beating, burning, strangling) by an intimate partner in their lifetime. (It is not only men who are injured by a society that endorses violence over compassion.)
• 1 in 7 women and 1 in 18 men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime to the point in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.
• On a typical day, there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide.

A man who cannot change a diaper, express affection, admit fear, or ask for help is not powerful.  He is dependent on a narrow script that collapses the moment life becomes complex — and life always becomes complex.

Strength is not domination.  Strength is reliability.

What Real Strength Looks Like

Real strength is:

• emotional regulation
• keeping your word
• protecting without controlling
• teaching without humiliating
• listening without needing to win
• stopping when stopping is the right thing to do

Real strength builds.  It does not perform.

The strongest men I have known were not the loudest men in the room.  They were the ones who could be trusted — by their partners, their children, their colleagues, and their communities.

They did not need an audience.

A Systems View of Masculinity

If we want healthier men, we need healthier systems.   Teach boys emotional vocabulary as deliberately as we teach them sports.  Think of creating the opposite of a Spartan society where violence and cruelty are rewarded.  What if we rewarded kindness and compassion instead of vengeance and retribution?

I have two strong memories of my father.  While living in NYC, I was about 8 years old, and I had a fight with a neighborhood bully.  Bigger than me and older than me, he hit me several times in the face.  I went home crying.  When I walked in the door, my dad asked me what was wrong.  I told him that I had gotten hit by the neighborhood bully.  He told me to get my ass out the door and don’t come back until I had gotten even with the bully.  I was more afraid of my dad than the bully.  I ran down the block to where the bully was yakking it up with some friends.  The bully asked me what I wanted.  I punched him in the stomach, when he bent over I brought my knee up into his face as hard as I could.  I laid him out cold.

The next time I had a challenge from my father was about five years later.  I had been playing football with some friends when an older guy and his two buddies took the ball from us.  I had four friends with me, and we all just looked at each other.  I reacted.  I lunged at the bully and tackled him to the ground.  I had him around the stomach and started punching him as hard as I could.  He raked my face with his hands leaving several bloody scratches and claw marks.  Fortunately for me, my four other friends jumped in, and we gave the guy a good beating while his buddies ran off.  I went back to my house with my friends to wash up.  When I walked in, my dad was sitting on the sofa.  He took one look at me and said, “What the hell happened to your face?”  I was about to say something, but my friends jumped in and told him how I had tackled this big guy by myself and that I had been instrumental in winning a fight with this bully.  My father looked at me and replied “Good, but next time you win a fight, look like you have won it.”

I did not exactly grow up in a Spartan society, but I grew up in a family system where crying was weakness and emotions were only something women exhibited.  These teachings would come back to devil me many times over the next years.  If we are going to eradicate violence in our society, violence against women, violence against children and violence against the world, it must start with being the changes that (as Gandhi so wisely said) we want to see in the world.

• Normalize caregiving as masculine.
• Reward cooperation, not just competition.
• Teach media literacy so young men understand how outrage is monetized.
• Create male friendships that are not limited to drinking beer, watching sports, and avoiding looking too intellectual

Conclusions:

Machismo has always promised certainty: certainty that you will be dominant, certainty that you will be respected, certainty that you will be feared, and certainty that you will never be vulnerable.  However, it has never delivered on these promises.  These are all phantoms or myths that are part of the machismo narrative so many of us have been taught.  What it has delivered is violence,  isolation, and perpetual insecurity.   Perhaps the most notorious image of a real man is depicted by John Wayne in his movie persona.  A persona that bore little reality to the real life John Wayne.

“Wayne emanated what historian Kristen Kobes du Mez calls in her compelling work Jesus and John Wayne, “cowboy masculinity.” On the screen, he depicted what many considered to be the archetypal American man — a self-reliant individualist who never shows his feelings and never apologizes.  The type of dude who forgoes reflection for action; doesn’t ask for permission; who knows he’s a good guy and knows how to spot — and annihilate — the bad guys.  Both on and off the screen, Wayne modeled a mode of American manhood based on imperialist ideals, the superiority of whites, and free-market capitalism.” —- The Reveler, April 5, 2021.  Does this remind you of anyone that we know today?  A leader who sets the standard for everything a real man is not.

We are not condemned to this script.   Masculinity is not a biological destiny.  It is a cultural story.  And stories can be rewritten.   The bravest man is not the one who shouts the loudest, lifts the most, or dominates the most.  The bravest man is the one who no longer needs to prove he is a man.  That man is free.  And a culture of free men — men who do not need to dominate in order to exist — would be a culture with far less violence, far less fear, and far more humanity.

That is a future worth building.