Progressives Don’t Understand Masculinity

The New York Times published a conversation this morning, a transcript of their Opinions podcast with the subject of masculinity and the framing of crisis. I have unlocked it for you all here:

Now I’ve listened to and read a lot of NYT content on men over the years, some of it all right, most of it pretty bad. There’s no particular reason I got especially fired up about today’s foray into the problems that plague (or are) boys and men, other than it struck me as such a pure distillation of all the ways progressives misunderstand masculinity and why that misunderstanding and frankly denigration means they’ll be fighting a very uphill battle to draw men back to the left. On a more personal note as a father of two boys living in a fairly progressive milieu I’m very tired of my copartisans throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to critiques of masculinity. I am very intentionally raising my boys to be good men, not just good people, and I have a clear idea of what that means - a conception that is almost 180 degrees from what I hear in this Times piece. So without further ado, here are the primary ways these folks get masculinity wrong:

The Measure of a Man

A common critique of the progressive view of men is that they’re portrayed more or less as defective women. The manifests most notably in the inability of progressive commentators to recognize anything distinctively good about men. That is to say, any positive masculine quality is immediately framed as being universal and something women have access to as well, and only negative aspects of masculinity such as anger and dominance are asserted as uniquely manly. To allow qualities such as ambition, assertiveness, strength, courage, and risk taking to be framed as distinctly masculine is seen as an implication that women can’t embody these aspects and thus verboten. Because you are never allowed to frame masculinity with these positive signifiers lest you offend the ladies you are stuck with a definition of masculinity that is purely negative. This constant negative framing of masculinity from the left is harmful insofar as it makes boys and men feel bad about themselves, but it also has the ill effect of removing masculinity as an aspirational quality.

There’s a saying that women are born and men are made. This statement has taken on a negative valence because it’s used by black pill incels to ascribe women’s value to the ability to bear children, but I think it’s fundamentally true in a different frame: girls can become recognized as fully realized women in American society simply by growing up. For boys to be recognized as fully realized men requires ticking quite a few more boxes. And when I say ‘recognized’ I mean treated as such by other men and straight women these being the two groups whose opinions guys care about. Those boxes include gainful employment with room to grow, some degree of physical prowess, demonstrated self respect, integrity, and moral courage, and the ability to attract, bed, and ultimately marry a woman, eventually having kids you financially support and actively parent. You don’t have to check off all of those line items and there are other ‘bonus’ masculinity signifiers like serving in the military, being really good at fixing stuff, or working a high risk, physical job like firefighting or roughnecking but it’s a pretty solid list of what makes a man a man in the eyes of most guys. If you show me a married man with a few kids at home, a solid job that requires some degree of special expertise, who is in good physical shape and trusted/respected by his friends and colleagues not many people are going to call him unmanly.

Now among other things you might notice that everything on that list requires years of hard work and personal development. They are aspirational goals. Achieving them is best facilitated by believing from a young age that they’re important and worthy goals. Inculcating that belief in turn requires both role models who embody those qualities and enmeshment in a culture that values them as touchstones for full membership in the community. Yet the left undermines those cultural scripts and elevation of those role models at every turn. In their unironically noble quest to widen the scope of women’s aspirations and make space in society for the dignity of those men who can’t or won’t conform to trad masculine ideals progressives have worked (mostly) unintentionally but tirelessly to destroy the cultural foundations of positive masculinity. The kind of high achieving, personally conservative family man who would in times past have served as a role model for boys in his community becomes the butt of every joke as the embodiment of cishet, capitalist patriarchy. The script that boys should better themselves via competition in school, sports, work, etc. becomes the method by which cruel dominance hierarchies are formed. The role models the left substitutes are generally women and non-gender conforming men that boys can’t easily relate to. The message that gets sent is to be more cooperative, more emotional, don’t try to stand out, let others take the limelight. Be less like a boy and more like a girl. These scripts do not, frankly, work for boys and young men. A young guy who doesn’t assert himself gets nothing, including the thing he craves most, the respect of his peers. A boy who is overly emotional is seen at best as ineffectual and overly sensitive. The progressive critique that things shouldn’t be this way, that boys should be socially rewarded for compliance and emotionality, ignores that that’s not how young men work or have ever worked. Yes, this is explicitly an argument from gender differences and has more than a little gender essentialism to it. That men tend to be more assertive, ambitious, risk taking/physically courageous, and comfortable with explicit hierarchies and respect those qualities in other men may be inconvenient for progressive attempts to refashion masculinity on gender neutral lines, but on the other hand it has the virtue of being reality. The alternative offered to a distinctively male positive vision of masculinity, a sort of nonbinary generic personal development, is incredibly weak sauce. To quote Whippman from the article:

I’d rather we’re just like, ‘OK, just be a person’… these are minimum standards and minimum qualities that we expect from every adult, and they don’t need to be different ones for men than for women.

This sort of rhetoric doesn’t proceed from a vacuum. It comes from a fundamental progressive misunderstanding of why men care about being and being perceived as masculine in the first place. Hint: it’s not about dominance or oppression.

The Respect of Men, the Love of Women, and the Comfort of Hierarchy

There are basically two reasons men care about being masculine and they boil down to the two groups whose opinions men value: other men (especially those above them in social hierarchies), and straight women.

A Man Among Men

Think of virtually any coming of age movie with a young, straight male protagonist (yes, Hollywood really used to make movies like that). What is that guy after? Well girls for sure, but I’ll get to that later. More fundamentally, and almost always preceding getting the girl, is earning the respect of other guys. Whether that’s the other guys on the team (Friday Night Lights, Remember the Titans), a rival (Never Back Down, The Karate Kid), or a man in a position of power and authority (Finding Forrester, Coach Carter). There is nothing more important to a young man than the respect of his peers and mentors. That respect is not only emotionally gratifying, it’s also connected to very concrete opportunities like being on the starting five, getting a recommendation that helps you get into Yale, or getting invited to a the party where you meet your future spouse. And how do men get respect? As detailed, they display excellence in the masculine virtues. They demonstrate skill, physical and emotional strength and courage, drive and ambition, the willingness to suffer in dogged pursuit of a goal, trustworthiness, loyalty and integrity, and the insistence on being respected and taken seriously. A huge driver of masculine development is wanting to be recognized as a man among men. Any theory of masculinity that does not fulfill this motivation is bound to fail.

Girls Only Want Boyfriends Who Have Great Skills

So in those coming of age movies a typical denouement is that having earned the respect of his peers the young man finally gets the girl. Why exactly does that work so well as an archetype? There are a few reasons. Firstly that narrative recognizes, correctly, that straight women are generally attracted to stereotypically masculine men. The guy has also established his status within the hierarchy of his peers, and women care a lot about men’s status relative to other men when deciding who to date and marry. That same status also makes it socially acceptable for her pair up with him as women also care a great deal what other women think of their romantic partners.

Men are not blind to these dynamics. They don’t actually have to watch 90s teen movies to understand that women are a lot less likely to be attracted to or date an effeminate, low status man. As such a major driver of masculinity paradigms is what straight women find attractive.

Now I can see the comments roll in ‘well what straight women say who want aren’t traditionally masculine men, they want men who are good communicators who are in touch with their emotions, checkmate LBD’. To which I say: sort of. Yes, women want men who can communicate emotionally once they’ve already established their masculine credentials. Effeminate men pay a heavy penalty in the dating market for emotional expression, especially early on in a relationship. And yes, they do want men who don’t suppress their emotions, but that doesn’t mean they want weepy boys. They actually want conscientious men who can regulate their own emotions. You’ll notice neither of those traits, which are especially desirable in long term partners, are in conflict with the masculinity checklist I gave earlier. Progressive efforts to redefine masculinity down to common denominator ‘good person’ traits robs men of developing the specific qualities that women as well as men respect and find attractive in them. I want to be clear that this isn’t just a softer sell of Andrew Tate style rhetoric. While women do like high status men they strongly prefer prestige (e.g. a man being recognized by his peers as a great artist) vs. dominance (a guy who gets in and wins bar fights). This also isn’t an insistence that all men must adopt a hyper-masculine persona to get a girlfriend. Timothee Chalamet is a relatively small and very pretty rather than classically masculine-faced man, but he’s not unmasculine at all in the way he speaks or carries himself and is obviously very high achieving and high status. There are many ways that masculine qualities can be expressed; the point is that the value of that expression is in their particularly masculine valence.

The Misunderstood Role of Hierarchy

You might have noticed that I mentioned hierarchy a few times up until now. There’s a good reason for that: hierarchy is both central to how men understand the world and their own masculinity and is deeply misrepresented in progressive discourse. The progressive line is that hierarchy is basically an oppressive thing, a vehicle for powerful men to dominate weaker men and women below them. It’s only something you want to destroy, inherently bereft of social value.

That is 99% wrong.

The 1% that is correct is that hierarchy can be used as a tool for illegitimate domination. There’s no doubt that superiors abuse their subordinates all the time in both formal and informal hierarchies. MeToo was a great example of widespread abuse of power differentials, things like cops beating up protesters, CEOs treating their subordinates in dehumanizing ways, and frat initiations are also examples of hierarchies being used to effectuate and even justify abuse. But if hierarchies are only bad, why are they so prevalent? And if they’re not all bad what purpose do they serve, especially in the way men understand themselves and develop their masculinity?

The best way to think about hierarchies with respect to masculinity is as the superstructure on which all the other traits depend. The competition for status that drives men to great achievements takes place within a hierarchy. The bonds of respect and admiration between coaches and players, teachers and students, officers and enlisted men exist within a hierarchy. As noted women are keen observers of male hierachies and strongly prefer men who have a respected place in them. A great deal of how men relate to one another and know how to behave towards each other is a function of hierarchy, and we’re really uncomfortable without it.

A side anecdote: I’ve spent 20 years in fight gyms. The most uncomfortable time in a gym, the time when you could cut the tension with a knife, is when someone new walks in who has clearly trained but no one knows how good they are. Why? Because you don’t know where they stand in the hierarchy and so you don’t know how to relate to them. Even 1-2 rounds of sparring, usually the top guy in the gym vs. the new guy, is enough to alleviate all the tension because now everyone knows where they stand again.

Placement in a male hierarchy, explicit or otherwise, is the mark of success in cultivating one’s masculinity. And here’s the thing progressives miss: being at the bottom is okay. In healthy male hierarchies everyone has a role to play and gets respect if they do it well. The guy riding the bench on the football team is still on the team. The only thing that’s unacceptable is being kept outside of the hierarchy entirely. That’s rejection of you as a man, not being accepted at the bottom. Progressive attempts to abolish hierarchies run counter to men’s instincts and also create structures in which men don’t know how to function. Decisions don’t get made, no one knows how to relate to one another, and the validation function of masculine hierarchies is eliminated. Are there destructive hierarchies that should be torn down? Sure. But as is often the case in progressive ideological crusades the need for putting in a gate has been misinterpreted as an imperative to rip up all the fences.

There Won’t Be a Progressive Joe Rogan

It’s fair at this point to ask how much any of this matters. After all if these masculine tendencies are innate what does it matter how progressives define masculinity? Won’t boys just grow into men competing and forming hierarchies and whatever else nature intended for men to do?

To a certain extent yes. No amount of rhetoric is going to change the nature of boys and men. But going back to the notion of masculinity as constructed, it really does matter which narratives we use to ground and cultivate masculinity. If progressives, who still enjoy outsized dominance of popular culture, are unable to put forth a positive vision of masculinity that directs men’s impulses in constructive ways those impulses will find outlets that might well be less healthy. That’s essentially the genesis of the manosphere and black pill ideology. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that civilization is shaped specifically to channel masculine energies in constructive rather than destructive ways. Men will find ways to compete and establish hierarchies; it’s much better if that’s something additive to society like who can write the best song or run the fastest mile or build the tallest building than who can sell the most drugs or pimp the most OnlyFans models ala the Tate brothers.

And on the political side the left can’t win without men. The gender division in political leanings is as high as its been in American history. Until the left can find a message for young men besides ‘you’re trash that bears the blame for historical misogyny’ it’s going to continue to lose them. Why would anyone join a coalition that openly and explicitly denigrates them and the things they value? Men are generally allergic to collective guilt framings and those remain dominant rhetorical paradigms on the left for discussing gender issues.

After Harris lost the 2024 election there were a series of calls to find a liberal Joe Rogan. But that’s not possible, because the core appeal of Joe Rogan is that he’s just a guy who unapologetically likes guy stuff. His whole appeal is ensconcing oneself for a few hours in uncomplicated masculinity.

At the end of the podcast the NYT panel is asked what one traditionally masculine quality they’d like to see their male family members exhibit. Joseph answers:

I think that a lot of men have been taught this personal manifest destiny, if you would. Like, the entire world belongs to you, and you’ve just got to go out and seize it. And I just want you to stop and listen to other people. Just stop. The only thing I think that you’re promised in this world is the person in the mirror and what you do with that. And so, you know, just stop and listen. Stop and listen.

Joseph actually does list a masculine quality, going out and trying to seize the world, and then immediately implies that actually that’s not such a great idea. As long as progressive commentators on the largest left wing platform in the world are unable to praise an actual traditionally masculine quality when directly asked the left will struggle to connect with any man who, like Joe Rogan, values masculinity without feeling the need to constantly interrogate its failings.