My Unfinished List of Masculine Virtues

The New York Times recently had a humiliating discussion about masculinity.

Before I listened to it, and before I read a couple of great articles by LastBlueDog and Rohan Ghostwind responding to it, I was already very annoyed. It was hard not to be, you see, because I happen to be a man myself. I had seen articles with titles like “What I love about men”, where the authors, like the people who sunk to the occasion at the New York Times, took great pains to tilt their heads, squint, and come up with a couple of [obviously good] masculine-coded traits for which to give faint praise. Men invent stuff, usually. Analytical brains can be good, I guess.

But the disdain comes through clearly. And men are not idiots. They can tell when someone doesn’t like them. When they view them as intrinsically worse than women, the flawed half of humanity, somewhere between being no longer needed and needed only begrudgingly. But until people can just say that “men are good” and that “being a man is good” without adding 100 qualifiers, the New York Times and the people who read it will continue to wonder why young boys are being radicalized. Because, as Rohan points out, boys looking around will have exactly one viable option for manhood: the option of unchecked, self-indulgent masculinity that takes all it can and never apologizes. It’s an option that mostly repulses me, but at least it’s a coherent option.

Is there a third option, somewhere between treating women like shit and treating yourself like a potential monster to be subdued?

Masculine Virtues

Earlier this month I made a post, half in jest, about a list of masculine virtues:

I thought it was funny, but in truth I’ve been annoyed by this tendency, to refer to “feminine virtue” as “feminine virtue”, but to call “masculine virtue” simply “virtue.” It’s frustrating, especially because the truth is that both men and women should have some degree of both sets of virtues; that men have more of the masculine set, and that actually there is no issue with that.

And this isn’t really new ground, but if you view femininity and masculinity not as adversaries but as complements, your life instantly improves and you realize that any society you want to build necessarily needs both. That is, it needs to make room for both men and women. And not just some idealized, impossible-to-achieve man and perfect woman, but the vast majority of them.

In this pursuit of the idealized man, men are told all the time now what not to be. It begins with the new millennial boy-mom looking at her infant son and praying that he does not grow up to be a serial killer. It continues through various self-fulfilling instructions they receive about not harassing anyone (just keep to yourself), not looking at anyone (lest you hurt someone with your gaze), and not ever daring to lead anyone (never use your privilege). I believe this sort of messaging, received all the time now by young men, can only be interpreted in a dehumanizing way. Either the boy contains some sort of latent monster just under the surface desperate to get out, or the women everyone tells him he is so inclined to hurt are some sort of unagentic damsels that require a complicated protection scheme (from you and the other dangerous people like you).

My belief is that the conversation surrounding boys and young men needs a course-correction. It needs to start from a place of genuine appreciation for boys—to tell them they are good, that being male and becoming a man are good things. And then it needs to give a positive, tenable vision for what good masculinity looks like.

So I want to finish what I started, to make a list of the virtues that I see all the time in the men I respect and describe the way I often see them displayed. Insofar as women would like to claim these virtues too, I say “right on”, but today my target audience is men.

Virtues of Strength and Character

Strength is commonly listed as a masculine virtue and deserves discussion of its own. I think of strength not as a virtue itself, but as a necessary precursor for many virtues that are masculine in nature. Strength is a multiplier, and virtues of strength require it to be wielded well.

1. Restraint and Fortitude

Restraint is a virtue that can lie only within strength. To be able to hurt someone and choose not to; to be able to take something for yourself but instead leave it alone. The most significant part of adolescence for a boy is suddenly becoming bigger, taller, stronger than he used to be. And the boy has to learn quickly how to control his strength or he will hurt people around him and get himself in trouble.

Fortitude takes strength in the opposite direction. If restraint tells men when not to use their strength, fortitude tells men when they must, even if they don’t want to. Men are strong, and they should want to be stronger. Then they should put their strength to good use. Go to war to protect the people you love; jump into the lake to save the kid who fell in; work grueling hours in the sun to provide for your family.

A prerequisite to wielding strength well is being strong, so good men should be strong.

2. Withholding comfort to strengthen character

Part of me wishes I could give my children everything they want, to make it so they are never sad. But if consoling is a virtue (and it is), creating resilient children who do not need so much consoling is too. At the playground if I walk over to my daughter as she’s climbing a new object, I know she’ll throw herself backwards, trusting completely that I will catch her. I can’t blame her—it’s far easier to have me set her where she wants to go.

But I know I will not always be there to catch her and I don’t want her to have to rely on me, either. I want her to be strong, because I know that she can be; because I know that being strong will keep her safer.

The unconditional love of a mother is invaluable, but there is a place for the expectant, demanding love of a father too. There is a masculine urge to ask more of people than they want to give; to ask more of people, at times, than they even think is possible; and to ask more of them for their own sake. To help them be strong so that they can help others too. Knowing when to help and when your help is counterproductive is a masculine virtue, gained from experience and used to make people stronger.

3. Self-assurance

Self-assurance is maybe my favorite masculine trait. Having done their best, good men typically don’t worry too much about what people think of them. And they certainly don’t worry about the reaction of people whom they have no reason to respect. So if caring about making others happy is a virtue (and it is), the masculine counterpart of refusing to worry when there’s no benefit to doing so is a virtue too.

It may be unsurprising that often moderating between the feminine extreme and the masculine extreme is the right balance. Masculine self-assurance, like every other good trait, can be taken too far. Stoicism regarding one’s own actions and focusing only on what you can control is valuable, but taken to the extreme, you’ll find an uninteresting man who goes through life entirely unbothered. The truth is that life is only valuable if you let some people bother you. Like every virtue, there is a balance to be had, and the virtue of self-assurance pulls you to not let the worst, most hostile people be the people that bother you.

4. Duty to those under your care and responsibility for them

Given their outsized strength, good men have always had an outsized ability to protect the vulnerable. Men feel responsible to take care of the people they love, to provide for them. Taken too far, this can result in them bearing the weight of the world when they could have shared it, but at its heart the impulse is good. In addition to the clear virtue of wanting to provide for those in their care, men have long taken a different form of responsibility for them too. If your child destroys someone’s property, a good man neither shields the child entirely from the consequences, nor does he leave it entirely on the child’s shoulders to restore the property to those harmed.

The man works to restore the neighbor for a crime he did not commit, and promises him it will not happen again.

This paternal reaction to someone you love misbehaving is different from the maternal one, which is more protection-focused. Making your guilty child work alongside you to help repay their debts is the surest way to make sure the offense is not repeated.

Pairing action with consequences and action with restoration is a masculine virtue. Of course it can be painful, but justice sometimes is.

5. Honor, keeping promises, and doing things simply because they are right

Men often care deeply about legacy, about how they will be remembered. And often, they want to be remembered for being good, for doing the right thing; for being honorable. There is a masculine obsession with figuring out what the right thing is, for not taking the wisdom of the community at face value. This masculine desire to do right goes hand in hand with a tendency to hold yourself to your own high standards (as opposed to the high standards imposed on you by the people around you). It manifests today in philosophy and theology programs, where men still make up well over half of admissions and, from my experience, surely at least 99% of online discourse.

The result of this masculine desire to divine right from wrong and to do the honorable thing even at great expense to oneself is that civilization is possible. To build the world, there had to be trust between people and between groups. What we have today would not be possible but for men who kept their promises even when they had good reason to break them.

Virtues of Building and Creation

6. Being useful; plumbing

There’s a common saying that goes like this: women are born, men are made. Interestingly enough, a lot of women hate this saying, and a lot of boys do too. Women fairly point out that they have work to do to grow up, too. Young boys lament, though, saying life is unfair. But guess what the men told me while I was growing up? Life is unfair. That’s all it’s ever been, actually, and it won’t be anything different. Men have to swallow that pill, then they work to make themselves useful. And you know what? It’s good to be useful—of course it is. It doesn’t mean that being useful is all you should be, but honing skills, working hard, doing things that help people—of course it’s good. Men being useful has kept families fed and has led to all sorts of innovation. It’s why we have running water; it’s why food is no longer scarce; it’s why we have electricity, transportation, and skyscrapers.

If women are born and men are made, it could also be said that every boy has a mom who believes, unquestioningly, that they are great. It’s important that every boy also has a man in their life who knows that they can be great, that it takes work, and that the work is worth doing. But they do need both.

7. Optimization, tinkering, and the drive for improvement

Do you know how they perform a heart ablation? They run a catheter through your femoral artery, and guide it into your heart. Once there, they map the heart and then use an electric laser to destroy specific cell clusters. Now who do you think figured out how to do that? It’s actually a trick question, because the technology developed gradually over 100 years of (mostly men) tinkering with the human body and figuring out how stuff works.

There’s this impulse in some (but not even most) men to take things apart and see how they work. There’s a separate impulse in many men to see if they can improve things, to make them more efficient. And there’s a third impulse in many men to work obsessively on a problem until it’s done. These impulses together create the perfect recipe for the sort of scientific advancement that has become a bedrock of our civilization. And now, over 200k heart ablations are done each year in the US.

This obsessive drive to understand the world and improve it is responsible for basically every innovation ever. If making the world better is good, then men are good, too.

Virtues of Truth and Justice

8. Truth-seeking and cutting through bullshit

When someone is wronged, there are typically two reactions. The first is to comfort them, the second is to figure out what happened. Of these, finding out what happened is the more masculine response. In fact, the entire system of justice we have is set up to determine the truth. To determine what happened, if someone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, to make it so that the mob does not rule. There is a history in the US of witch-hunting. Most high-schoolers have read The Crucible, and its hero is John Proctor, a real man who in the 1600s who refused to go along with unfounded claims of witches. His goal was to cut through the bullshit and find out what was really happening in Salem, Massachusetts. This pursuit eventually led to his death, but he died a hero and a good man.

Witch-hunting has become a very popular phrase today in social media, and occasionally it is even justified. There are thousands of examples of people having the blunt hammer of mob justice dropped on them over sometimes-unproven, often minor offenses. But the courts, built over centuries largely by men, are not swayed by mobs. They pursue truth in service of justice.

The whole online gender conversation, at this point, is overwrought with bullshit – false dichotomies, sweeping generalizations, impossible standards, unproductive cruelty. It’s a masculine trait to figure out what is true and what is not. What criticisms are fair? What solutions are being proposed, and are those fair? If one camp says “believe all women” and the other camp says “don’t even bother to listen to women”, is there an obvious synthesis in the middle? Perhaps “listening to women” and “seeking the truth”?

This masculine pursuit of truth is good. And while we are talking about the truth, let me offer one more: The men who would benefit most greatly from grasping the good parts of feminism are the very men who will never listen unless the message comes from a man that they trust; a man who actually likes them.

9. Doing what has to be done, administering justice, and enforcing norms

Men are responsible for most crime, particularly violent crime. So who should we call when there is a dangerous criminal? Who should we bring in when there is a man out of his mind disturbing the peace at the train station? And how much disorder has been prevented simply by the implicit threat of the strong men in the room? Or back to the court system, do you think judges enjoy handing out long sentences to dangerous criminals? Because the world benefits greatly when someone does.

On a more trivial level—do you think all men enjoy being the ones who have to kill all the bugs in the house? Men just do it because they cannot let their house be overrun with cockroaches, and because if they look around, they know the responsibility should not fall to anyone else.

Good men do what needs to be done. There will always be bad men, too, but the people best able to combat the bad men are and will always be the good men. Men who understand that for goodness to prevail, some things just have to be done. The men who are willing to do them.

10. Courage and acting under uncertainty

Men have no reason to faint under pressure. If a marauding band came to their village, they had no choice but to act quickly. They fight or they flee, but they have to do something. Be courageous or die. The masculine impulse when things go crazy is to act and to involve yourself. To figure out where the danger is, to make a plan while in motion.

This ability to act courageously in face of danger and uncertainty leads to men who are willing to put themselves into hostile, physically dangerous environments—at times, recklessly, but at times showing true courage. It’s why most of our soldiers and most of our first responders are and will always be men. It’s a good trait, under pressure, to step into action and execute an ever-evolving plan.

This list is unfinished. It does not have every masculine virtue, it does not include the many great feminine virtues available to every man, and it does not include the host of virtues that are distributed much more evenly. It’s good when a dad nurtures his children, when he comforts them when they are in need. It’s good when a man is patient, kind, gentle, present, and loving. Moderation, a virtue available equally to all, teaches men that maximizing each “masculine” virtue is a trap. Better instead to see which ones you have and appreciate them; to see which ones you lack and work on those.

To make a good man, you do not have to start from scratch. You don’t have to shame him for who he is or to tell him to be more like a woman. The material of a good man already exists inside of every boy. It can be brought out and grown so long as the boy sees a good man in his life and decides he wants to be like him, too.

It’s good to be a man. It takes real work to be a good man, but it is far better.

Post credits: Jordan Call solves the gender war:

11. Knowing the exact right length to give a noogie to tell a boy you care about him without it being too mean

A Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, Reverent.

Scouting was created as a social technology to make boys into men. It’s now open to girls as well, but I think the core of these values has a lot to offer in pointing masculine instincts in a positive direction.