I generally think of virtues as virtues, and not tied to one gender or another. I realize that many men have been raised to think of particular virtues as specifically manly and that it can cause an identity crisis when they no longer are, but I'm not sure what to do about that. I think dividing virtues and traits into "masculine" and "feminine" constrain people from understanding the whole of who they are and really developing their full potential as people—not just in some kind of fuzzy self-actualization way but in terms of how best they can contribute to their families and communities and the world.
That said, I think one specifically masculine virtue is to be conscious of one's physical strength and what one can do with it, for good and for ill, and to use it for good. (Yes, not all men are physically strong and a lot of women are, but this is one area where there really is a significant natural difference on the whole.) Similarly, it's a virtue to realize that pregnancy and childbearing take a toll on women in a way they don't on men, and do what one can to relieve that toll.
This is more or less where I’ve landed. We’ve got twin three-year-old boys, and I always think about how important it is for them to learn to not lash out physically when they’re angry. It’s bad for women to lash out physically too, but on the whole, men can do a lot more damage with their size and strength. I like your notion of learning to use that strength for good, too! I’ll have to keep that in mind as the boys get older.
I’ve also had to learn a lot as a man about my wife’s unique relationship to her body as a woman. Pregnancy, childbirth/postpartum stuff, lactation, menstruation—we’ve had plenty of conversations about these things, and there have been instances where I’ve had to say, “I’m happy to hear you out on this and do practical stuff to help, but we also should find another woman/mom to help talk you through the things where biology makes me completely unable to relate.”
I agree that virtues are appropriate to us as human beings, not as men or women, but I think the same virtues can be inflected in different ways by the different social roles we are called to perform. For example, consider courage—not a masculine virtue but a human virtue, indeed (as C. S. Lewis says) the form of every virtue at its testing point. Yet the situations in which men and women have typically been required to exercise courage differ. For a man, the classic or central situation of courage is war; for a woman, it is childbirth. I think of as characteristically masculine the courage to do or dare, and characteristically feminine the courage to suffer or endure. Men and women can excel in either kind of courage—think of Joan of Arc, Jesus—but they are more likely to need, and therefore more likely to be naturally disposed toward and culturally conditioned for, one than the other.
Similarly, both men and women are called to lay down their lives for the good of others, but the typical ways they do so look very different. Because of their reproductive role, women are likely to find themselves impinged upon by the needs of others in a daily, incessant, unavoidable way. Men, whose survival is not strictly and biologically necessary for the survival of their young children, are the more “disposable” sex, the appropriate community members to run risks and make sacrifices. It’s more appropriate to a man to go into a burning building to get one more person out, more appropriate to a woman to wait outside, comforting her children, steeling herself for agonizing years of caring and providing for them on her own if he doesn’t make it back. It’s the same call to lay down one’s life, but men are more likely than women to encounter it concentrated to a high pitch of intensity in moments of decision or crisis, as well as (not instead of!) in small, routine acts of love.
I’m toying with the idea that the most characteristically masculine aspect or “inflection” of the virtues is their greater degree of optionality. Fundamentally, to be a man is to be able to walk away from the consequences of sexual actions. Women are called to care for their offspring by moral law, natural affection, and biology they didn’t choose and can’t control; men are called to care for their offspring by the moral law. (Not to say that men don’t have affection for children! But a man can enjoy raising some of his children while not even knowing that others exist—moral considerations are the only reason not to end up in this situation.) In the use of violence, too, men have greater freedom for good and ill; as long as strength matters, women will encounter fewer conflicts in which inflicting physical harm on their enemies is a realistic possibility. I guess I’m proposing a sort of ethical “greater male variability hypothesis”—predicting that women’s behavior will cluster somewhat more tightly because certain bad actions less available to them, while men, who have more options to do horrific things, also have more opportunities to act virtuously just because it’s the right thing to do. Thus men and women are both called to the same virtues of self-sacrifice, tender care for others, meekness or forbearance in response to insult, self-restraint in temptation to lust or wrath—but women are somewhat more likely to exhibit those behaviors, because they are partially built into their biology, while fewer men will behave well, but their virtuous acts may involve greater intentionality or self-mastery, more of a conscious obedience to duty. Even exactly the same acts (rocking an infant to sleep, giving a gentle answer that turns away wrath) are inflected in a gendered way by the surrounding context of possibilities.
I mostly agree - I think that virtues and personality traits don't really differ according to gender, but there are more masculine and feminine manifestations of the same qualities. I think the much-vaunted example of physical strength differences among men and women is a good one. Of course, men in general tend to be more muscular than women, capable of lifting more and traveling faster. But women's bodies tend to literally last longer than men's do, and their immune responses tend to be stronger, and there's growing evidence that often do better at heavily endurance-based sports like ultra-long distance swimming. Those are all types of physical strength, in my opinion.
In the same way, many men cite their role as a provider as central to their masculinity - but what's the difference between a provider and a nurturer, really? Both involve working to give someone else what they need to survive and thrive, just in different flavors.
I get a little frustrated with the way people bring up the average strength difference in arguments about gender difference: sometimes it feels like the subtext is "you have to admit men are better in this way, or you're being delusional," like feminists need to lie to themselves to make the case for equality. And I think there are ways to acknowledge that masculine ways of being are real and valuable without giving into that old idea that masculinity = superiority.
Thanks for posting this! I recall reading and saving years ago. It is really excellent and touches, better than most, on certain universal male experiences. Itself quite an accomplishment.
I would perhaps not go quite so far. His conclusions strike me as necessary, but not quite sufficient. Perhaps there is too much shame lurking behind the humor. Sarcasm can be quite unfunny, after all.
For my part, I simply receive that God made me and that I am male, whatever that may mean. Excessive reflection here has only flummoxed me. And, if there is something to be done, why not do it well and have genuine fun while doing it? Here perhaps is an aspect of “maleness” we should recover: the genuine play instinct. Fewer rules, more tossing children high into the air (and catching them, of course). Perhaps that is what God made men for.
Thank you for linking that: it's a fantastic insight into what masculinity means and has meant for him.
I was particularly struck by this and the rest of the paragraph following it: "To put it simply: Every social encounter between men is potentially a fistfight." My husband has told me the same thing, and it struck me as sad, and such a waste. There must be a better use of one's energy than always being on guard, always needing to protect one's place in a hierarchy. But it doesn't sound to me like men can really opt out of that either, at least not unless they reach some kind of critical mass.
You are missing out on what makes men men. We like to be in a hierarchy with other men we trust, and a big part of that trust is developed by testing other men to see if they can fulfill their duties when things get hard.
I can show you what this looks like. Someone uploaded a video to Twitter of two boys in a fist fight. It may not make sense to you, but go all the way to the end and see how they embrace when they are done. Those boys are probably friends now.
I apologize for the account handle, but this is the extreme version of how men come to trust each other. It may not be obvious, but neither of those boys was trying to hurt each other seriously. There are elaborate, but usually unspoken rules about that.
There is a whole continuum of this kind of thing that goes on all the time, and it is absolutely necessary for brotherhood and masculinity.
I really believe that what this link shows absolutely must stop and as soon as possible. This is nothing by the bullying and excludes every boy that doesn’t respond to such behavior. This IS toxic! It’s poisoning the entire world.
My husband wasn't referring to play-fighting, or friends testing each other out, and I don't think Phil Christman was either. My husband was talking about day-to-day interactions with people he doesn't know. He was talking about knowing that as a man, he's always somewhere on a hierarchy of capability for physical violence, and that it's dangerous to be too low on that hierarchy because other men will see you as a target. He was talking about how getting older is changing his relationship with his masculinity because he knows he's lower on that hierarchy now.
Trust and brotherhood have nothing to do with any of that.
This is going to be a little hard, but I think it is important. Christman's essay specifically is written by a man who lacks masculine virtues, and is on the outside looking in. I cannot recommend what he wrote as an authentic reflection of what men in general experience, because I perceive him to be missing something very important.
It is absolutely true that men will size up random strangers upon walking into a room. We joke about this. In normal circumstances, this is not predatory at all.
There is the additional aspect of age to consider. It would not be a particularly good idea for me, as a middle-aged man, to pick a fight with young men like those I selected as examples. But I also do not need to, as a relative decrease in strength and speed is more than compensated by authority. Sometimes, it is not really the physical aspect that is lacking, but the authority that accrues from a successful transition into manhood.
Well-formed young men don't to fight me, because they want to be me. To prey upon the older, who are on average weaker, is a serious violation of honor. When this formation process is broken, you can indeed have problems. The solution I am suggesting is that more struggle, more hierarchy, and more fist fights between young men is part of restoring the brotherhood that allows these aggressive inclinations to be turned to good.
Apr 25, 2022·edited Apr 25, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
In general, I find things written about masculinity (especially from a Christian/Catholic perspective) to be predominantly or implicitly sexist. Though, I'd say the same of what is written about femininity, minus the recent writing initiatives such as Other Feminisms and thinkers like Abigail Favale.
I'd say the most mainstream thinker within the Church who clearly simply loves women as women and men as men and sees a symbiotic, life-giving and mutually affirming relationship between the two, is John Paul II. I think his writing can be a bit of a mire, because so many people have riffed on ToB in unhelpful or even unfaithful (to his thought) ways, and because it's so dang long. But he does have a concise treatment which is specifically from the viewpoint of what men contribute and how men should relate to women, called "A Meditation on Givenness." This is the only thing I've ever read about the gift of masculinity and what men give to women that made me feel totally affirmed as a woman. It offers an understanding of the gift of men as a gift to the Church in a special way to women, but that gift is -for- women in a manner that empowers and makes free, and not for patronizing/infantilizing reads of why women 'need' men. It's such a beautiful piece, I couldn't recommend it more.
Could you give a brief summary of his thought on this? I agree that a lot of what I call "pop TOB" is really unhelpful but I have found his actual work to be impenetrable.
It's certainly still a phenomenological rodeo, as a friend of mine might say. The main point is that women are a gift, given especially to men. That's probably obvious, since this is JPII we're talking about. And that's often said; what it means and how it's laid out is more polarizing. What does it mean that women are a gift? It does not mean that they are a possession or an object. It means they are good in themselves, and their goodness is something that is especially good for men.
If women are a gift (and this is the part that I find most incisive and helpful), that means the first responsibility of men in regard to women is to receive them. We hear a lot about how men are active and women are passive/receptive, that the feminine genius is about receptivity, etc. But JPII puts this on its head by re-describing complementarity as simply the mode in which each receives the other. So the question of 'what are men called to do w/r/t women' is in fact 'how ought men to receive women?'
He answers this by giving the male vocation a John-the-Baptist spin: men are not caretakers of overgrown children, or the stronger sex given the burden (even if cast in a noble light) of taking care of the weaker sex, who are pretty and nice, but essentially dependents. He recasts the commission to be provident as a commission to provide a space, to create an orbit in which women, especially the particular women given to you, can flourish. It is a commission to empower, to use strength in such a way that the priority is to decrease so that those who have been given to you may increase. In this way, he sees all men as living a sort of priestly vocation. This is often said, but it has lost its luster because we don't perceive priests correctly either. If men are strong, capable, given to provide and protect, all those things are not for their own sake. Those are descriptors which have their force because they mean providing for someone, protecting someone. They're for the sake of the ones who are to be provided for and protected. But what do we make provision for and protect? That which we hold most dear, because it is precious and excellent. So for those men who really do want to aspire to some Christian ideal, who in fact feel the impulse to be active and initiative (which I find is actually pretty rare in men as a group, but that's a point for another day), JPII says, the best way you can be the active/provident/etc one in these relationships is to receive the women in your life for who they are, to see they are good as God has made them and to take it upon yourself to carve out a space where they are free to be fully who God created them to be. When women are flourishing, that is the sign of a place where men are living their vocation well.
I also find this beautiful, and very on brand for JPII, because most Christians are preoccupied with the hiddenness of woman, and the 'mysterious' sex. JPII says the opposite. In a sense, men should be the invisible ones and they should be focused on building up women. By judging a community in that order, you can see its health. This is especially fitting because it's an address written to men. This is how men should think of it. (He's not suggesting women should think the world is all about them...) And by thinking of it in this way, we can see how it maps on to traditional gender roles in a manner which isn't dismissive or subjugating to either. Women should follows men's lead. And men should lead in loving – striving to love always first and more. It's not easy to love more quickly or more exhaustively than a woman. That's why it's a call that demands of a man his whole life. And it's easy to see that women who are loved and respected and empowered will quickly and naturally love and respect and empower.
(Some of this is a gloss on my part, and using counter tropes to throw into sharper relief JPII's message.)
Oh, wow! That is so so good. It resonates with the things I’ve been coming to believe, quietly (on my own, in a way), piece by piece. It really puts all the pieces together as I’ve not yet heard any Christian source do (at least, not so fully). And in a manner that fits so beautifully with the model of Christ himself as given in Eph 5 (and as He demonstrated in washing the disciples feet and in talking with them about what greatness truly means -- the one who is the greatest is the servant of all).
Elisabeth Elliot’s small book *The Measure of a Man* comes close to this view, and Larry Crabb’s book *The Silence of Adam* is a helpful companion to this view (though it is looking at manhood from a slightly different angle).
Thanks Katie! (I assume you are who I think you are.) I unfortunately haven't had a chance to study all this in the depth that I like, and because TOB has gotten so popular and fad-y I don't trust a lot of what's been written about it.
I'm interested in the "all men living a sort of priestly vocation" because John Paul wrote in Christifideles Laici (referring back to Vatican II, the document on the laity) about the common priesthood of all the baptized and how that's the foundation of the lay person's secular vocation. By "all men" do you mean "all male adults" or "all people"?
"one in these relationships is to receive the women in your life for who they are, to see they are good as God has made them and to take it upon yourself to carve out a space where they are free to be fully who God created them to be. When women are flourishing, that is the sign of a place where men are living their vocation well."
I love this. I've heard something like this before, I think from Edith Stein. I know some men who live this -- I've seen my husband step in as a kind of moderator for group conversations when some people were dominating. It's never like "let the poor children get a chance to say a thing we'll all smile at and ignore" but rather "this conversation's going down a rabbit trail, let's backtrack and get to that person who got interrupted, and maybe we'll go in a more productive direction." The quieter people get a chance to contribute, but they're not patronized. It's done with an underlying assumption that having a skill for dominating the conversation may but doesn't necessarily correlate with having something meaningful to say. This kind of thing would go a long way in, say, corporate meetings where women often get drowned out and then patronized. (Also in presidential debates, but that's for another day.)
Another thing: I often hear from the very traditional types that women doing mothering and homemaking is where women flourish and they're serving women by making that the norm. I know many women who DO flourish in this environment, and others who work full-time because they have to, but they'd rather spend their time mothering and homemaking. I also know many who don't flourish in that environment. And the personalist piece is important, if a husband can see his wife as an individual person and be able to ask, "is she, this particular individual, ACTUALLY flourishing in our present arrangement?" and then working to make a change if that answer is no.
"most Christians are preoccupied with the hiddenness of woman, and the 'mysterious' sex" Yes. Just because things *are* a certain way doesn't mean they *should be* this way. I found this meme on point:
Good distinction. When I say 'all men' for the priestly vocation I mean males. I certainly think all human beings live a priestly vocation, but that's not the immediate comparison for that thought. I think it's a fruitful avenue for exploration to reflect more on priests being joined to Christ insofar as he is bridegroom of the Church, and so how men should take on the same sort of commission in their relating to women as priests have to the Church, and vice versa, i.e. of loving service.
One of the things that I find the most baffling is the apparently widespread consensus among conservative/traditional groups that men are made for many different things but women are made for just one thing. How does that compute? How are all men fulfilled in different earthly vocations/professions, and really serving God in those things, but women can only be completed by mothering and homemaking? This isn't even to raise the question that throughout the entire history of the Church there's a long tradition of unmarried women. I also don't think the right answer to 'what is feminine flourishing' is just to re-describe everything you can possibly do as somehow being an expression of motherhood. And a robust feminist account isn't just "women can have babies and have jobs." That's too simplistic. Women are not boiled down to these two categories of activity. Flourishing is the whole person, a whole life.
Abigail Favale had a great insight on this in a recent article. Those who make the 'women belong in the home raising children' argument are defining women based on what they -do- rather than what they- are-.
If we're really receiving women, we're receiving individuals. It's deeply ironic that women, who do have the genius of really receiving and seeing the other for who they are – individual, unrepeatable, good in themselves – are received only as a class of people and have all of life circumscribed by being part of that class. Who I am as a person, the fact that I have particular gifts, defects, strengths, weaknesses, talents, desires, fears, etc. and that I am female is enough reason to say: "this is a true, excellent, invaluable expression of femininity." If God did not want femininity to be lived in the way that you as an individual shape it when you are at your best, you would not exist. It's that simple.
The Church needs to say, "there is a place for YOU in the Church" not "We have this opening, so if you want to be here you need to squeeze yourself in no matter how ill-fitting it is."
So, I am going to push back a little here. They use the language of duty, but without a very clear picture of what this concretely looks like. And in my observation BOTH good and bad men use duty language about being husbands and fathers. The difference is this:
Good men look at unwashed dishes and a sick, exhausted, and/or overwhelmed wife, and they do the dishes. Because they are dirty and need to be cleaned.
Bad men look at unwashed dishes and their sick, exhausted, and/or overwhelmed wife… and make her do the dishes.
Yet both will use language of duty about this, they each consider their actions to be making sure that the family had clean dishes! But one is about service and the other is about control / power.
This is a really good point — duty is important to most men, but like… what are the duties they believe that they have? And how does that impact virtue in these discussions?
At least in my family, the older generation (80+) seems to have adopted the earlier model of masculinity. They’re happy to help with “feminine” tasks because they’re secure in their identities as men and want to help.
In contrast, the Boomers lean a bit harder toward the latter (in varying degrees), and I can’t help but wonder why. The line between “duty” and “privilege” is much blurrier for them, and they don’t participate in household tasks with the same ease and humility as the generation above them. Is it something peculiar to religious / political conservatives that lived through the social upheavals of the 60’s-70’s? A need to like, stake out a specifically “masculine” identity by viewing “feminine” tasks as beneath them yet impossibly difficult? Or is it just my weird family? I don’t get it and don’t like it, and I just find it fascinating that the older generation is so much more chill and low-key progressive(ish) about duties men can take on.
Honestly, I have not discerned a pattern? I never thought of my dad as someone who would do the dishes, until my mom had cataract surgery and had a post op period where she couldn’t. But then that plausibly is a personality issue because my mom was always a “let me do it so it’s done right” kind of person.
Conversely I have a friend who left her abusive husband, and on a visit to me the adults were sitting around the table chatting and my husband just go up and started doing the dishes, and she had literally never seen a husband do that before.
Also: I completely forgot to post this initially, but I often find myself returning to a piece of advice my dad would give me when I was growing up — “a man should be able to do anything.” In other words, I should learn any and all skills that suit my inclinations, and there’s no pursuit that’s unmanly if a man’s the one pursuing it. I suspect he can credit his skills in cooking and the other “domestic arts” to his childhood as a latchkey kid and his time as a conscript in the Soviet army, and I choose to interpret it as an expansive, uncluttered view of masculinity from a man who’s otherwise quite traditional in his concept of gender in the world.
At the risk of being overly cute: Spending lots of time writing and thinking about what it means to be masculine doesn't necessarily strike me as particularly masculine, so I don't know that I necessarily have fruitful reading to suggest.
In terms of what I see as masculine, in no particular order:
- I think there is a masculine approach to conversation which is more problem solving oriented, in the sense that hearing a problem laid out seems like a request for a suggestion on how to solve it rather than a request for sympathy. I think it was Deborah Tannen that I heard define this difference, and it seems to fit with my experience in that I often have to mentally remind myself that just because someone tells me a problem does not mean they've asking me to solve it or even want me to suggest solutions.
- I think in general men are less inclined to give themselves permission to discuss or even experience their emotions. While this has downsides, to be honest as a guy I see it as mostly positive. I'd rather just silently deal with most emotions than have to discuss them.
- I think there's a masculine tendency to expect physical courage and ability of oneself. This seems like it's less required in modern society, though even so it seems to fall out pretty naturally that the male in a household ends up pushing the lawn mower, changing flat tires, dealing with insects and other pests around the house, etc. When I heard that another guy at work has asked his female employee to come in and dispose of a spider for him, I couldn't help thinking less of him permanently.
- I think that within a relationship there's a masculine tendency to define oneself as a provider, and that feeling like a failure as a provider hits male identity much harder.
I also found the Tannen books helpful as a younger person to understand that people often wanted different things out of conversations when it felt like they were talking past each other.
I'm the one very much on the "conversations are for *solving* problems... oh wait, you had *feelings*?" spectrum. I definitely recognize it as more *typically* masculine, without it worrying me about having this tendency as a woman.
Yeah. I recall you had a really good piece a while back where you talked about how just because some particular characteristic is more common among men or women doesn't mean that it's a problem when someone of the opposite sex has that same characterization.
I suppose it's an interesting question how it is that some things we think of as "I'm like that because I'm male" or even "I should be like that because I'm male" as opposed to simply, "I'm like that because that's the way I am." Some mix of innate tendency and cultural expectation with the lines between the two being hard to draw, I would assume.
I agree with you Brendan, I don't think there is a lot of writing specifically about masculinity that is any good because it cuts against the grain of masculinity itself. However, I might suggest that popular men's adventure novels might give you an idea of what men themselves find inspiring, and who they want to emulate.
You wrote "When I heard that another guy at work has asked his female employee to come in and dispose of a spider for him, I couldn't help thinking less of him permanently" and I'm not really sure what to make of it or what your intention was in offering it as an example.
I mean, fear of spiders is really common. One of my former boyfriends was afraid of spiders, and I am not, so I would always dispose of them when needed. Involving our genders in a scenario like this seems at best unnecessary and at worst overtly sexist. Are you meaning to say that it is in some way good or right that you think less of your male colleague because he didn't dispose of a spider for himself?
Eh, I actually would feel the same on a gut level about a woman that couldn’t get rid of a spider. Then I remind myself phobias are a thing and try not to be so awful
I meant that an element of how I think about masculinity is that I feel a certain duty not to pass on a task to someone else because I find it upsetting or disgusting. So, for instance, bugs and spiders do generally bother me (though I've gotten used to them more over the years) but they also bother my wife and kids, and so I figure that any time there's a pest to be dealt with, if they ask me to deal with it, it's my job to do so, not pass the buck. It's not that I would feel that I shouldn't let a woman deal with a spider. If she wanted to, I'd be grateful. But if she asked me to deal with it, I'd feel honor-bound to dispose of the spider rather than saying, "Those things really freak me out, could you deal with it."
There are absolutely women I know who are much more able to deal with some of the things that bother me, such as the sight of blood. So my point is not that men should be bothered by things less than women. So far as I can tell, what one finds scary is completely random. But I don't tend to associate masculinity with not being bothered by things. I'd associate it with doing tasks that do bother me if I'm asked to rather than begging off.
I imagine that men feel the same way about a lot of writing about femininity, but I often find writing about masculinity and femininity to be very alienating even when it is not sexist. Leah recommended "Three To Get Married" to me a while back; I started reading it expecting to find some wisdom even while knowing that some of the Catholic aspects wouldn't be applicable to me, but I was really surprised by just how inaccurate it felt with respect to my own experiences of love. Quotes like:
"Every woman instinctively realizes the difference between [love and sexual pleasure], but man comes to understand it more slowly through reason and prayer. Man is driven by pleasure; woman by the meaning of pleasure"
or
"Man lives more in the external world, because made from the earth and closest to it; it is his mission to rule over it and subject it. Woman lives more in the internal world, because she was created from an inner, human life"
just felt so starkly alien to my own experience. With respect to love and sexual pleasure, my fiancee was the one who appreciated these differences instinctively, while I was the one who had to be persuaded of them through reason (and a good amount of trial and error). And neither of us lives more in the "internal world" vs the "external world"--I mean, we're literally in the same profession. I think it's really hard to write about masculinity and femininity in contrast in a way that really applies universally, and I'm not even really sure if it's possible. It's okay for not every piece of writing to be applicable to every person, but I don't think I've ever come across a piece of writing about differences between men and women that actually feels like something I've observed from my own relationships.
This is very fair, and my husband and I also ran into some readings in our marriage prep, where we're like, well, this definitely describes two different tendencies, but we're backwards from what the text expects! (I *like* filing our taxes).
The best thing I got out of Three to Get Married was the sense of how marriage is *bigger* than just our relationship to each other. We want to approach our relationship in light of our relationship with God (and we want to be attentive about what God asks us to do, through our marriage, for others).
We also read through it by reading a chapter aloud together each Sunday, which let us sift through what we thought together.
Yes, and I hope that my comment came across as "wow, even this book recommended to me by the Other Feminisms author had a perspective on gender that I found uncomfortable, it shows that writing about this is really hard" and not "Leah you gave me a terrible recommendation" :-)
In some ways, it seems easier to write and talk about femininity since there is a clear dividing line of major life experiences (pregnancy, breastfeeding, menopause, etc.) that men literally cannot experience.
OK, apologies, this one is a wee bit self-promotional (my husband's the writer), but it is relevant to a notion of masculinity which connects to many of the things that get said on Other Feminisms about interdependence. It's a piece he wrote for Fathers' Day last year on dad jokes: https://grottonetwork.com/navigate-life/relationships/secret-behind-dad-joke/
I've been contemplating gender roles alot lately and often reduce this to "children and vulnerable people need to be cared for," so how do we order society to catch the margins? Put another way, a social structure that fails to catch the margins isn't worth much. Alas, I wonder if we think of men specifically in contrast to the vulnerabilities of women and children... So men are called to be physically able when women can't, especially around pregnancy and childbirth and nursing, men are called to care for other children during these times, to create paths for food and heat and shelter, whether that be buying or building or gathering . I know the roles men might/ should fill intimately because I run a womens and children's shelter and see what happens to women absent men, and it's a bad scene to be pregnant and parenting alone. I know we could say that another woman could serve as the gap filler for vulnerable women and young children , but after many attempts at trying new forms of family and community, it never seems to work well. I also know some authors have imagined society without men and I think some see utopia free of violence... I get a glimpse of this world in the lives of very poor women, and I can testify it's a world far from utopia.
I mean, my take on masculinity and femininity is decidedly… oppositional to pretty much everyone else’s in society today, because I think that grammatically I am a subject, not an object, therefore I convey my sex upon my behavior/attitudes/actions/etc. which is how that list of things acquires its gender. Everything I do is feminine because I am a female who is doing them, and everyone else has just got to deal.
I think for understandable reasons, we've overcorrected as a society away from the old virtues of manliness: strength, courage, building and tinkering, discipline, honor, endurance, provision, and aggression in service of protecting the weak. To be clear, society is right to have made some of its significant corrections from a pre-1950s-60s vision of gender; if and when our culture ever said or implied that women were incapable of these virtues, *or any less capable of them than men,* we were dead wrong, full stop. And to the extent that some men are very feminine (and that some women are very masculine) in how they present, our society's move to embrace people's individuality and stop bullying people for not fitting some cookie-cutter gender mold has been absolutely vital and correct. The overcorrection comes when we start implying, basically, that the male tribe cannot at all espouse any specific things as cultural aspirations or obsessions that are connected to male identity in specific and positive and uniquely masculine ways. The logic is that to do so inherently insults people who aren't men, but I don't think that needs to be so.
To make an analogy: I think it is fair to say that Italian culture is known for (among other things) cuisine, and many Italians are proud of Italian culinary arts. But that doesn't mean (and nobody seems worried that Italian culinary pride implies) that either every Italian is a chef or that the French, Japanese, Ethiopians, or any other nation, are not also very good at cuisine (and many of them famously so). Italian cuisine is unique—no other cuisine is quite like it—but it is also not the only amazing cuisine in the world. Somehow when it comes to nations, we are good at recognizing that a group of people can have special affinities for certain things, without meaning that every individual person in that group is interested in those things, or that people outside the group lack them. But in our hangover from the gender wars, we seem to forget this when it comes to gender, and we have to remember it here as well.
So I would say, it is okay for the tribe called men to have a special affinity for a set of things including strength, courage, building and tinkering, discipline, honor, endurance, provision, and aggression in service of protecting the weak. We don't have to mean (we shouldn't mean) some kind of (false) empirical assertion that that every man is oriented toward cultivating these things, nor that women lack them or don't cultivate them. It's just a part of mainstream male culture to pay lots of attention to these things and to appreciate them and to aspire to them in ways that are beautiful, nourishing, and uniquely flavored with masculinity. That can be true without casting aspersions to anyone, male or not, who doesn't fit it. I think that's the balance we men should seek to strike.
I would say, though, that it's important to make sure that the things you're asserting men have a special affinity for are actually rooted in reality, and be prepared to back up those claims. Is the average man really significantly more "disciplined" than the average woman? I have no idea.
Right, that post was about empirical reality. My comment is about male mythos/aspiration. I’m pointing out that these (mythos and empirics) are separate domains, and that’s okay! There *isn’t* any reason to assert anything empirically about men being more disciplined, and there doesn’t need to be in order to say that discipline is a masculine ideal. Cultural ideals and affinities for in-groups can exist without asserting any kind of superiority to those outside the group regarding them.
Thanks for including my tweet! After his contributions to the discussion that it sparked, I asked Creighton professor David McPherson to write an essay for us on this topic at PD. I’d be interested to hear what you/Other Feminisms readers think. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/02/80452/
I see this too, but I don't think he aligns with them. I think he sees himself in dialogue with the church on one hand and manosphere types on the other. He points out some of the same problems they do with the way the church forms and ministers to men because those problems are real, not because he shares their views on masculinity, women, dating, etc.
I personally don't love his style: it's a shade too brusque. However there are a few things I do really appreciate. For one, he seems totally honest -- I believe he really believes the things he's saying. He also tries to deal with the way things really are, not the way we want it to be or the way they would be in a perfect world -- he is harshly critical of the church because he sees that it's not doing it's job.
Ha. I've been lurking on this newsletter for a few weeks and did not think my first post would be defending Aaron Renn. C'est la vie.
On the contrary. Renn is quite critical of the manosphere where it is anti-Christian (particularly on questions of chastity). But he is able to analyze manospheric dogmas where those with extremely sensitive toxicity receptors immediately shut down. It is precisely his ability to deal with the manosphere intellectually and by way of a Christian ethos without going "prairie muffin" that makes his perspective so valuable.
Renn has seemed to me to hold some inaccurate/problematic views of women and an overly antagonistic attitude toward mainstream evangelical teaching on dating. But I think I would view the manosphere more negatively than you do, overall.
Elizabeth - I would appreciate it if you would spell out your argument here. I am an avid reader of both Leah and Aaron, and don’t recognize your characterization of Aaron’s views.
“Where do you find fruitful reading on masculinity?”
Funny you should ask this -- I just recently stumbled upon Jeff Perera, a Canadian voice on this exact topic. His blog “Higher UnLearning” (https://higherunlearning.com/about/ ) has links to his various articles, plus talks and presentations he has given.
I have also been following American actor Justin Baldoni and have been impressed with what I’ve heard from him so far (though I have to confess that I’m such a slow reader/listener, I haven’t listened yet to a lot of the meat of his work). He has a youtube series called Man Enough that’s on my listen-someday list. Season one is conversations with some of his male friends/colleagues where he dives into some of the difficult topics surrounding manhood.
It's one of a very few Christian male discussions on gender I've heard which feels, on one hand, very comfortably masculine, but, on the other hand, did not make me uncomfortable as a woman.
I generally think of virtues as virtues, and not tied to one gender or another. I realize that many men have been raised to think of particular virtues as specifically manly and that it can cause an identity crisis when they no longer are, but I'm not sure what to do about that. I think dividing virtues and traits into "masculine" and "feminine" constrain people from understanding the whole of who they are and really developing their full potential as people—not just in some kind of fuzzy self-actualization way but in terms of how best they can contribute to their families and communities and the world.
That said, I think one specifically masculine virtue is to be conscious of one's physical strength and what one can do with it, for good and for ill, and to use it for good. (Yes, not all men are physically strong and a lot of women are, but this is one area where there really is a significant natural difference on the whole.) Similarly, it's a virtue to realize that pregnancy and childbearing take a toll on women in a way they don't on men, and do what one can to relieve that toll.
This is more or less where I’ve landed. We’ve got twin three-year-old boys, and I always think about how important it is for them to learn to not lash out physically when they’re angry. It’s bad for women to lash out physically too, but on the whole, men can do a lot more damage with their size and strength. I like your notion of learning to use that strength for good, too! I’ll have to keep that in mind as the boys get older.
I’ve also had to learn a lot as a man about my wife’s unique relationship to her body as a woman. Pregnancy, childbirth/postpartum stuff, lactation, menstruation—we’ve had plenty of conversations about these things, and there have been instances where I’ve had to say, “I’m happy to hear you out on this and do practical stuff to help, but we also should find another woman/mom to help talk you through the things where biology makes me completely unable to relate.”
I agree that virtues are appropriate to us as human beings, not as men or women, but I think the same virtues can be inflected in different ways by the different social roles we are called to perform. For example, consider courage—not a masculine virtue but a human virtue, indeed (as C. S. Lewis says) the form of every virtue at its testing point. Yet the situations in which men and women have typically been required to exercise courage differ. For a man, the classic or central situation of courage is war; for a woman, it is childbirth. I think of as characteristically masculine the courage to do or dare, and characteristically feminine the courage to suffer or endure. Men and women can excel in either kind of courage—think of Joan of Arc, Jesus—but they are more likely to need, and therefore more likely to be naturally disposed toward and culturally conditioned for, one than the other.
Similarly, both men and women are called to lay down their lives for the good of others, but the typical ways they do so look very different. Because of their reproductive role, women are likely to find themselves impinged upon by the needs of others in a daily, incessant, unavoidable way. Men, whose survival is not strictly and biologically necessary for the survival of their young children, are the more “disposable” sex, the appropriate community members to run risks and make sacrifices. It’s more appropriate to a man to go into a burning building to get one more person out, more appropriate to a woman to wait outside, comforting her children, steeling herself for agonizing years of caring and providing for them on her own if he doesn’t make it back. It’s the same call to lay down one’s life, but men are more likely than women to encounter it concentrated to a high pitch of intensity in moments of decision or crisis, as well as (not instead of!) in small, routine acts of love.
I’m toying with the idea that the most characteristically masculine aspect or “inflection” of the virtues is their greater degree of optionality. Fundamentally, to be a man is to be able to walk away from the consequences of sexual actions. Women are called to care for their offspring by moral law, natural affection, and biology they didn’t choose and can’t control; men are called to care for their offspring by the moral law. (Not to say that men don’t have affection for children! But a man can enjoy raising some of his children while not even knowing that others exist—moral considerations are the only reason not to end up in this situation.) In the use of violence, too, men have greater freedom for good and ill; as long as strength matters, women will encounter fewer conflicts in which inflicting physical harm on their enemies is a realistic possibility. I guess I’m proposing a sort of ethical “greater male variability hypothesis”—predicting that women’s behavior will cluster somewhat more tightly because certain bad actions less available to them, while men, who have more options to do horrific things, also have more opportunities to act virtuously just because it’s the right thing to do. Thus men and women are both called to the same virtues of self-sacrifice, tender care for others, meekness or forbearance in response to insult, self-restraint in temptation to lust or wrath—but women are somewhat more likely to exhibit those behaviors, because they are partially built into their biology, while fewer men will behave well, but their virtuous acts may involve greater intentionality or self-mastery, more of a conscious obedience to duty. Even exactly the same acts (rocking an infant to sleep, giving a gentle answer that turns away wrath) are inflected in a gendered way by the surrounding context of possibilities.
I mostly agree - I think that virtues and personality traits don't really differ according to gender, but there are more masculine and feminine manifestations of the same qualities. I think the much-vaunted example of physical strength differences among men and women is a good one. Of course, men in general tend to be more muscular than women, capable of lifting more and traveling faster. But women's bodies tend to literally last longer than men's do, and their immune responses tend to be stronger, and there's growing evidence that often do better at heavily endurance-based sports like ultra-long distance swimming. Those are all types of physical strength, in my opinion.
In the same way, many men cite their role as a provider as central to their masculinity - but what's the difference between a provider and a nurturer, really? Both involve working to give someone else what they need to survive and thrive, just in different flavors.
I get a little frustrated with the way people bring up the average strength difference in arguments about gender difference: sometimes it feels like the subtext is "you have to admit men are better in this way, or you're being delusional," like feminists need to lie to themselves to make the case for equality. And I think there are ways to acknowledge that masculine ways of being are real and valuable without giving into that old idea that masculinity = superiority.
Phil Christman is, of course, essential on this (and the entirety of his recent book, which includes this essay, is self-recommending): https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/identitieswhat-are-they-good-for/articles/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-man
Thanks for posting this! I recall reading and saving years ago. It is really excellent and touches, better than most, on certain universal male experiences. Itself quite an accomplishment.
I would perhaps not go quite so far. His conclusions strike me as necessary, but not quite sufficient. Perhaps there is too much shame lurking behind the humor. Sarcasm can be quite unfunny, after all.
For my part, I simply receive that God made me and that I am male, whatever that may mean. Excessive reflection here has only flummoxed me. And, if there is something to be done, why not do it well and have genuine fun while doing it? Here perhaps is an aspect of “maleness” we should recover: the genuine play instinct. Fewer rules, more tossing children high into the air (and catching them, of course). Perhaps that is what God made men for.
Thank you for linking that: it's a fantastic insight into what masculinity means and has meant for him.
I was particularly struck by this and the rest of the paragraph following it: "To put it simply: Every social encounter between men is potentially a fistfight." My husband has told me the same thing, and it struck me as sad, and such a waste. There must be a better use of one's energy than always being on guard, always needing to protect one's place in a hierarchy. But it doesn't sound to me like men can really opt out of that either, at least not unless they reach some kind of critical mass.
You are missing out on what makes men men. We like to be in a hierarchy with other men we trust, and a big part of that trust is developed by testing other men to see if they can fulfill their duties when things get hard.
I can show you what this looks like. Someone uploaded a video to Twitter of two boys in a fist fight. It may not make sense to you, but go all the way to the end and see how they embrace when they are done. Those boys are probably friends now.
https://twitter.com/CuntFighting/status/1511851774998716419
I apologize for the account handle, but this is the extreme version of how men come to trust each other. It may not be obvious, but neither of those boys was trying to hurt each other seriously. There are elaborate, but usually unspoken rules about that.
There is a whole continuum of this kind of thing that goes on all the time, and it is absolutely necessary for brotherhood and masculinity.
I really believe that what this link shows absolutely must stop and as soon as possible. This is nothing by the bullying and excludes every boy that doesn’t respond to such behavior. This IS toxic! It’s poisoning the entire world.
My husband wasn't referring to play-fighting, or friends testing each other out, and I don't think Phil Christman was either. My husband was talking about day-to-day interactions with people he doesn't know. He was talking about knowing that as a man, he's always somewhere on a hierarchy of capability for physical violence, and that it's dangerous to be too low on that hierarchy because other men will see you as a target. He was talking about how getting older is changing his relationship with his masculinity because he knows he's lower on that hierarchy now.
Trust and brotherhood have nothing to do with any of that.
This is going to be a little hard, but I think it is important. Christman's essay specifically is written by a man who lacks masculine virtues, and is on the outside looking in. I cannot recommend what he wrote as an authentic reflection of what men in general experience, because I perceive him to be missing something very important.
It is absolutely true that men will size up random strangers upon walking into a room. We joke about this. In normal circumstances, this is not predatory at all.
There is the additional aspect of age to consider. It would not be a particularly good idea for me, as a middle-aged man, to pick a fight with young men like those I selected as examples. But I also do not need to, as a relative decrease in strength and speed is more than compensated by authority. Sometimes, it is not really the physical aspect that is lacking, but the authority that accrues from a successful transition into manhood.
Well-formed young men don't to fight me, because they want to be me. To prey upon the older, who are on average weaker, is a serious violation of honor. When this formation process is broken, you can indeed have problems. The solution I am suggesting is that more struggle, more hierarchy, and more fist fights between young men is part of restoring the brotherhood that allows these aggressive inclinations to be turned to good.
Phil has plenty of masculine virtues imo
In general, I find things written about masculinity (especially from a Christian/Catholic perspective) to be predominantly or implicitly sexist. Though, I'd say the same of what is written about femininity, minus the recent writing initiatives such as Other Feminisms and thinkers like Abigail Favale.
I'd say the most mainstream thinker within the Church who clearly simply loves women as women and men as men and sees a symbiotic, life-giving and mutually affirming relationship between the two, is John Paul II. I think his writing can be a bit of a mire, because so many people have riffed on ToB in unhelpful or even unfaithful (to his thought) ways, and because it's so dang long. But he does have a concise treatment which is specifically from the viewpoint of what men contribute and how men should relate to women, called "A Meditation on Givenness." This is the only thing I've ever read about the gift of masculinity and what men give to women that made me feel totally affirmed as a woman. It offers an understanding of the gift of men as a gift to the Church in a special way to women, but that gift is -for- women in a manner that empowers and makes free, and not for patronizing/infantilizing reads of why women 'need' men. It's such a beautiful piece, I couldn't recommend it more.
Could you give a brief summary of his thought on this? I agree that a lot of what I call "pop TOB" is really unhelpful but I have found his actual work to be impenetrable.
It's certainly still a phenomenological rodeo, as a friend of mine might say. The main point is that women are a gift, given especially to men. That's probably obvious, since this is JPII we're talking about. And that's often said; what it means and how it's laid out is more polarizing. What does it mean that women are a gift? It does not mean that they are a possession or an object. It means they are good in themselves, and their goodness is something that is especially good for men.
If women are a gift (and this is the part that I find most incisive and helpful), that means the first responsibility of men in regard to women is to receive them. We hear a lot about how men are active and women are passive/receptive, that the feminine genius is about receptivity, etc. But JPII puts this on its head by re-describing complementarity as simply the mode in which each receives the other. So the question of 'what are men called to do w/r/t women' is in fact 'how ought men to receive women?'
He answers this by giving the male vocation a John-the-Baptist spin: men are not caretakers of overgrown children, or the stronger sex given the burden (even if cast in a noble light) of taking care of the weaker sex, who are pretty and nice, but essentially dependents. He recasts the commission to be provident as a commission to provide a space, to create an orbit in which women, especially the particular women given to you, can flourish. It is a commission to empower, to use strength in such a way that the priority is to decrease so that those who have been given to you may increase. In this way, he sees all men as living a sort of priestly vocation. This is often said, but it has lost its luster because we don't perceive priests correctly either. If men are strong, capable, given to provide and protect, all those things are not for their own sake. Those are descriptors which have their force because they mean providing for someone, protecting someone. They're for the sake of the ones who are to be provided for and protected. But what do we make provision for and protect? That which we hold most dear, because it is precious and excellent. So for those men who really do want to aspire to some Christian ideal, who in fact feel the impulse to be active and initiative (which I find is actually pretty rare in men as a group, but that's a point for another day), JPII says, the best way you can be the active/provident/etc one in these relationships is to receive the women in your life for who they are, to see they are good as God has made them and to take it upon yourself to carve out a space where they are free to be fully who God created them to be. When women are flourishing, that is the sign of a place where men are living their vocation well.
I also find this beautiful, and very on brand for JPII, because most Christians are preoccupied with the hiddenness of woman, and the 'mysterious' sex. JPII says the opposite. In a sense, men should be the invisible ones and they should be focused on building up women. By judging a community in that order, you can see its health. This is especially fitting because it's an address written to men. This is how men should think of it. (He's not suggesting women should think the world is all about them...) And by thinking of it in this way, we can see how it maps on to traditional gender roles in a manner which isn't dismissive or subjugating to either. Women should follows men's lead. And men should lead in loving – striving to love always first and more. It's not easy to love more quickly or more exhaustively than a woman. That's why it's a call that demands of a man his whole life. And it's easy to see that women who are loved and respected and empowered will quickly and naturally love and respect and empower.
(Some of this is a gloss on my part, and using counter tropes to throw into sharper relief JPII's message.)
Oh, wow! That is so so good. It resonates with the things I’ve been coming to believe, quietly (on my own, in a way), piece by piece. It really puts all the pieces together as I’ve not yet heard any Christian source do (at least, not so fully). And in a manner that fits so beautifully with the model of Christ himself as given in Eph 5 (and as He demonstrated in washing the disciples feet and in talking with them about what greatness truly means -- the one who is the greatest is the servant of all).
Elisabeth Elliot’s small book *The Measure of a Man* comes close to this view, and Larry Crabb’s book *The Silence of Adam* is a helpful companion to this view (though it is looking at manhood from a slightly different angle).
Thanks Katie! (I assume you are who I think you are.) I unfortunately haven't had a chance to study all this in the depth that I like, and because TOB has gotten so popular and fad-y I don't trust a lot of what's been written about it.
I'm interested in the "all men living a sort of priestly vocation" because John Paul wrote in Christifideles Laici (referring back to Vatican II, the document on the laity) about the common priesthood of all the baptized and how that's the foundation of the lay person's secular vocation. By "all men" do you mean "all male adults" or "all people"?
"one in these relationships is to receive the women in your life for who they are, to see they are good as God has made them and to take it upon yourself to carve out a space where they are free to be fully who God created them to be. When women are flourishing, that is the sign of a place where men are living their vocation well."
I love this. I've heard something like this before, I think from Edith Stein. I know some men who live this -- I've seen my husband step in as a kind of moderator for group conversations when some people were dominating. It's never like "let the poor children get a chance to say a thing we'll all smile at and ignore" but rather "this conversation's going down a rabbit trail, let's backtrack and get to that person who got interrupted, and maybe we'll go in a more productive direction." The quieter people get a chance to contribute, but they're not patronized. It's done with an underlying assumption that having a skill for dominating the conversation may but doesn't necessarily correlate with having something meaningful to say. This kind of thing would go a long way in, say, corporate meetings where women often get drowned out and then patronized. (Also in presidential debates, but that's for another day.)
Another thing: I often hear from the very traditional types that women doing mothering and homemaking is where women flourish and they're serving women by making that the norm. I know many women who DO flourish in this environment, and others who work full-time because they have to, but they'd rather spend their time mothering and homemaking. I also know many who don't flourish in that environment. And the personalist piece is important, if a husband can see his wife as an individual person and be able to ask, "is she, this particular individual, ACTUALLY flourishing in our present arrangement?" and then working to make a change if that answer is no.
"most Christians are preoccupied with the hiddenness of woman, and the 'mysterious' sex" Yes. Just because things *are* a certain way doesn't mean they *should be* this way. I found this meme on point:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F7248049389551132%2F&psig=AOvVaw1A1cuM-A7vtI1DsjRjKh0Q&ust=1651518468464000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAwQjRxqFwoTCNjep_H_vvcCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
Good distinction. When I say 'all men' for the priestly vocation I mean males. I certainly think all human beings live a priestly vocation, but that's not the immediate comparison for that thought. I think it's a fruitful avenue for exploration to reflect more on priests being joined to Christ insofar as he is bridegroom of the Church, and so how men should take on the same sort of commission in their relating to women as priests have to the Church, and vice versa, i.e. of loving service.
One of the things that I find the most baffling is the apparently widespread consensus among conservative/traditional groups that men are made for many different things but women are made for just one thing. How does that compute? How are all men fulfilled in different earthly vocations/professions, and really serving God in those things, but women can only be completed by mothering and homemaking? This isn't even to raise the question that throughout the entire history of the Church there's a long tradition of unmarried women. I also don't think the right answer to 'what is feminine flourishing' is just to re-describe everything you can possibly do as somehow being an expression of motherhood. And a robust feminist account isn't just "women can have babies and have jobs." That's too simplistic. Women are not boiled down to these two categories of activity. Flourishing is the whole person, a whole life.
Abigail Favale had a great insight on this in a recent article. Those who make the 'women belong in the home raising children' argument are defining women based on what they -do- rather than what they- are-.
If we're really receiving women, we're receiving individuals. It's deeply ironic that women, who do have the genius of really receiving and seeing the other for who they are – individual, unrepeatable, good in themselves – are received only as a class of people and have all of life circumscribed by being part of that class. Who I am as a person, the fact that I have particular gifts, defects, strengths, weaknesses, talents, desires, fears, etc. and that I am female is enough reason to say: "this is a true, excellent, invaluable expression of femininity." If God did not want femininity to be lived in the way that you as an individual shape it when you are at your best, you would not exist. It's that simple.
The Church needs to say, "there is a place for YOU in the Church" not "We have this opening, so if you want to be here you need to squeeze yourself in no matter how ill-fitting it is."
So, I am going to push back a little here. They use the language of duty, but without a very clear picture of what this concretely looks like. And in my observation BOTH good and bad men use duty language about being husbands and fathers. The difference is this:
Good men look at unwashed dishes and a sick, exhausted, and/or overwhelmed wife, and they do the dishes. Because they are dirty and need to be cleaned.
Bad men look at unwashed dishes and their sick, exhausted, and/or overwhelmed wife… and make her do the dishes.
Yet both will use language of duty about this, they each consider their actions to be making sure that the family had clean dishes! But one is about service and the other is about control / power.
This is a really good point — duty is important to most men, but like… what are the duties they believe that they have? And how does that impact virtue in these discussions?
At least in my family, the older generation (80+) seems to have adopted the earlier model of masculinity. They’re happy to help with “feminine” tasks because they’re secure in their identities as men and want to help.
In contrast, the Boomers lean a bit harder toward the latter (in varying degrees), and I can’t help but wonder why. The line between “duty” and “privilege” is much blurrier for them, and they don’t participate in household tasks with the same ease and humility as the generation above them. Is it something peculiar to religious / political conservatives that lived through the social upheavals of the 60’s-70’s? A need to like, stake out a specifically “masculine” identity by viewing “feminine” tasks as beneath them yet impossibly difficult? Or is it just my weird family? I don’t get it and don’t like it, and I just find it fascinating that the older generation is so much more chill and low-key progressive(ish) about duties men can take on.
Honestly, I have not discerned a pattern? I never thought of my dad as someone who would do the dishes, until my mom had cataract surgery and had a post op period where she couldn’t. But then that plausibly is a personality issue because my mom was always a “let me do it so it’s done right” kind of person.
Conversely I have a friend who left her abusive husband, and on a visit to me the adults were sitting around the table chatting and my husband just go up and started doing the dishes, and she had literally never seen a husband do that before.
Also: I completely forgot to post this initially, but I often find myself returning to a piece of advice my dad would give me when I was growing up — “a man should be able to do anything.” In other words, I should learn any and all skills that suit my inclinations, and there’s no pursuit that’s unmanly if a man’s the one pursuing it. I suspect he can credit his skills in cooking and the other “domestic arts” to his childhood as a latchkey kid and his time as a conscript in the Soviet army, and I choose to interpret it as an expansive, uncluttered view of masculinity from a man who’s otherwise quite traditional in his concept of gender in the world.
At the risk of being overly cute: Spending lots of time writing and thinking about what it means to be masculine doesn't necessarily strike me as particularly masculine, so I don't know that I necessarily have fruitful reading to suggest.
In terms of what I see as masculine, in no particular order:
- I think there is a masculine approach to conversation which is more problem solving oriented, in the sense that hearing a problem laid out seems like a request for a suggestion on how to solve it rather than a request for sympathy. I think it was Deborah Tannen that I heard define this difference, and it seems to fit with my experience in that I often have to mentally remind myself that just because someone tells me a problem does not mean they've asking me to solve it or even want me to suggest solutions.
- I think in general men are less inclined to give themselves permission to discuss or even experience their emotions. While this has downsides, to be honest as a guy I see it as mostly positive. I'd rather just silently deal with most emotions than have to discuss them.
- I think there's a masculine tendency to expect physical courage and ability of oneself. This seems like it's less required in modern society, though even so it seems to fall out pretty naturally that the male in a household ends up pushing the lawn mower, changing flat tires, dealing with insects and other pests around the house, etc. When I heard that another guy at work has asked his female employee to come in and dispose of a spider for him, I couldn't help thinking less of him permanently.
- I think that within a relationship there's a masculine tendency to define oneself as a provider, and that feeling like a failure as a provider hits male identity much harder.
I also found the Tannen books helpful as a younger person to understand that people often wanted different things out of conversations when it felt like they were talking past each other.
I'm the one very much on the "conversations are for *solving* problems... oh wait, you had *feelings*?" spectrum. I definitely recognize it as more *typically* masculine, without it worrying me about having this tendency as a woman.
Yeah. I recall you had a really good piece a while back where you talked about how just because some particular characteristic is more common among men or women doesn't mean that it's a problem when someone of the opposite sex has that same characterization.
I suppose it's an interesting question how it is that some things we think of as "I'm like that because I'm male" or even "I should be like that because I'm male" as opposed to simply, "I'm like that because that's the way I am." Some mix of innate tendency and cultural expectation with the lines between the two being hard to draw, I would assume.
I agree with you Brendan, I don't think there is a lot of writing specifically about masculinity that is any good because it cuts against the grain of masculinity itself. However, I might suggest that popular men's adventure novels might give you an idea of what men themselves find inspiring, and who they want to emulate.
You wrote "When I heard that another guy at work has asked his female employee to come in and dispose of a spider for him, I couldn't help thinking less of him permanently" and I'm not really sure what to make of it or what your intention was in offering it as an example.
I mean, fear of spiders is really common. One of my former boyfriends was afraid of spiders, and I am not, so I would always dispose of them when needed. Involving our genders in a scenario like this seems at best unnecessary and at worst overtly sexist. Are you meaning to say that it is in some way good or right that you think less of your male colleague because he didn't dispose of a spider for himself?
Eh, I actually would feel the same on a gut level about a woman that couldn’t get rid of a spider. Then I remind myself phobias are a thing and try not to be so awful
I meant that an element of how I think about masculinity is that I feel a certain duty not to pass on a task to someone else because I find it upsetting or disgusting. So, for instance, bugs and spiders do generally bother me (though I've gotten used to them more over the years) but they also bother my wife and kids, and so I figure that any time there's a pest to be dealt with, if they ask me to deal with it, it's my job to do so, not pass the buck. It's not that I would feel that I shouldn't let a woman deal with a spider. If she wanted to, I'd be grateful. But if she asked me to deal with it, I'd feel honor-bound to dispose of the spider rather than saying, "Those things really freak me out, could you deal with it."
There are absolutely women I know who are much more able to deal with some of the things that bother me, such as the sight of blood. So my point is not that men should be bothered by things less than women. So far as I can tell, what one finds scary is completely random. But I don't tend to associate masculinity with not being bothered by things. I'd associate it with doing tasks that do bother me if I'm asked to rather than begging off.
I’m chucking at the problem solver thing, because that is definitely a personality thing and not a masculine/feminine thing.
Is *any* pattern of behavior fundamentally more attributable to sex than personality?
I imagine that men feel the same way about a lot of writing about femininity, but I often find writing about masculinity and femininity to be very alienating even when it is not sexist. Leah recommended "Three To Get Married" to me a while back; I started reading it expecting to find some wisdom even while knowing that some of the Catholic aspects wouldn't be applicable to me, but I was really surprised by just how inaccurate it felt with respect to my own experiences of love. Quotes like:
"Every woman instinctively realizes the difference between [love and sexual pleasure], but man comes to understand it more slowly through reason and prayer. Man is driven by pleasure; woman by the meaning of pleasure"
or
"Man lives more in the external world, because made from the earth and closest to it; it is his mission to rule over it and subject it. Woman lives more in the internal world, because she was created from an inner, human life"
just felt so starkly alien to my own experience. With respect to love and sexual pleasure, my fiancee was the one who appreciated these differences instinctively, while I was the one who had to be persuaded of them through reason (and a good amount of trial and error). And neither of us lives more in the "internal world" vs the "external world"--I mean, we're literally in the same profession. I think it's really hard to write about masculinity and femininity in contrast in a way that really applies universally, and I'm not even really sure if it's possible. It's okay for not every piece of writing to be applicable to every person, but I don't think I've ever come across a piece of writing about differences between men and women that actually feels like something I've observed from my own relationships.
This is very fair, and my husband and I also ran into some readings in our marriage prep, where we're like, well, this definitely describes two different tendencies, but we're backwards from what the text expects! (I *like* filing our taxes).
The best thing I got out of Three to Get Married was the sense of how marriage is *bigger* than just our relationship to each other. We want to approach our relationship in light of our relationship with God (and we want to be attentive about what God asks us to do, through our marriage, for others).
We also read through it by reading a chapter aloud together each Sunday, which let us sift through what we thought together.
Yes, and I hope that my comment came across as "wow, even this book recommended to me by the Other Feminisms author had a perspective on gender that I found uncomfortable, it shows that writing about this is really hard" and not "Leah you gave me a terrible recommendation" :-)
In some ways, it seems easier to write and talk about femininity since there is a clear dividing line of major life experiences (pregnancy, breastfeeding, menopause, etc.) that men literally cannot experience.
That last matches my own feelings, but I want to be careful about not having a blind spot about the unique gifts of men!
Perhaps the degree of "uniqueness" of our particular gifts is just another difference between men and women!
OK, apologies, this one is a wee bit self-promotional (my husband's the writer), but it is relevant to a notion of masculinity which connects to many of the things that get said on Other Feminisms about interdependence. It's a piece he wrote for Fathers' Day last year on dad jokes: https://grottonetwork.com/navigate-life/relationships/secret-behind-dad-joke/
Hee hee hee!
I've been contemplating gender roles alot lately and often reduce this to "children and vulnerable people need to be cared for," so how do we order society to catch the margins? Put another way, a social structure that fails to catch the margins isn't worth much. Alas, I wonder if we think of men specifically in contrast to the vulnerabilities of women and children... So men are called to be physically able when women can't, especially around pregnancy and childbirth and nursing, men are called to care for other children during these times, to create paths for food and heat and shelter, whether that be buying or building or gathering . I know the roles men might/ should fill intimately because I run a womens and children's shelter and see what happens to women absent men, and it's a bad scene to be pregnant and parenting alone. I know we could say that another woman could serve as the gap filler for vulnerable women and young children , but after many attempts at trying new forms of family and community, it never seems to work well. I also know some authors have imagined society without men and I think some see utopia free of violence... I get a glimpse of this world in the lives of very poor women, and I can testify it's a world far from utopia.
I mean, my take on masculinity and femininity is decidedly… oppositional to pretty much everyone else’s in society today, because I think that grammatically I am a subject, not an object, therefore I convey my sex upon my behavior/attitudes/actions/etc. which is how that list of things acquires its gender. Everything I do is feminine because I am a female who is doing them, and everyone else has just got to deal.
David French has written some helpful things on masculinity and boys in The Dispatch.
I think for understandable reasons, we've overcorrected as a society away from the old virtues of manliness: strength, courage, building and tinkering, discipline, honor, endurance, provision, and aggression in service of protecting the weak. To be clear, society is right to have made some of its significant corrections from a pre-1950s-60s vision of gender; if and when our culture ever said or implied that women were incapable of these virtues, *or any less capable of them than men,* we were dead wrong, full stop. And to the extent that some men are very feminine (and that some women are very masculine) in how they present, our society's move to embrace people's individuality and stop bullying people for not fitting some cookie-cutter gender mold has been absolutely vital and correct. The overcorrection comes when we start implying, basically, that the male tribe cannot at all espouse any specific things as cultural aspirations or obsessions that are connected to male identity in specific and positive and uniquely masculine ways. The logic is that to do so inherently insults people who aren't men, but I don't think that needs to be so.
To make an analogy: I think it is fair to say that Italian culture is known for (among other things) cuisine, and many Italians are proud of Italian culinary arts. But that doesn't mean (and nobody seems worried that Italian culinary pride implies) that either every Italian is a chef or that the French, Japanese, Ethiopians, or any other nation, are not also very good at cuisine (and many of them famously so). Italian cuisine is unique—no other cuisine is quite like it—but it is also not the only amazing cuisine in the world. Somehow when it comes to nations, we are good at recognizing that a group of people can have special affinities for certain things, without meaning that every individual person in that group is interested in those things, or that people outside the group lack them. But in our hangover from the gender wars, we seem to forget this when it comes to gender, and we have to remember it here as well.
So I would say, it is okay for the tribe called men to have a special affinity for a set of things including strength, courage, building and tinkering, discipline, honor, endurance, provision, and aggression in service of protecting the weak. We don't have to mean (we shouldn't mean) some kind of (false) empirical assertion that that every man is oriented toward cultivating these things, nor that women lack them or don't cultivate them. It's just a part of mainstream male culture to pay lots of attention to these things and to appreciate them and to aspire to them in ways that are beautiful, nourishing, and uniquely flavored with masculinity. That can be true without casting aspersions to anyone, male or not, who doesn't fit it. I think that's the balance we men should seek to strike.
Leah had a great post summarizing some evidence on sex-based personality differences a while back: https://otherfeminisms.substack.com/p/when-men-and-women-are-significantly?s=r
I would say, though, that it's important to make sure that the things you're asserting men have a special affinity for are actually rooted in reality, and be prepared to back up those claims. Is the average man really significantly more "disciplined" than the average woman? I have no idea.
Right, that post was about empirical reality. My comment is about male mythos/aspiration. I’m pointing out that these (mythos and empirics) are separate domains, and that’s okay! There *isn’t* any reason to assert anything empirically about men being more disciplined, and there doesn’t need to be in order to say that discipline is a masculine ideal. Cultural ideals and affinities for in-groups can exist without asserting any kind of superiority to those outside the group regarding them.
Thanks for including my tweet! After his contributions to the discussion that it sparked, I asked Creighton professor David McPherson to write an essay for us on this topic at PD. I’d be interested to hear what you/Other Feminisms readers think. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/02/80452/
Aaron Renn
Renn isn't always wrong, but to me he always felt like he's drawing from some unhealthy parts of the manosphere in a lot of his writing.
I see this too, but I don't think he aligns with them. I think he sees himself in dialogue with the church on one hand and manosphere types on the other. He points out some of the same problems they do with the way the church forms and ministers to men because those problems are real, not because he shares their views on masculinity, women, dating, etc.
I personally don't love his style: it's a shade too brusque. However there are a few things I do really appreciate. For one, he seems totally honest -- I believe he really believes the things he's saying. He also tries to deal with the way things really are, not the way we want it to be or the way they would be in a perfect world -- he is harshly critical of the church because he sees that it's not doing it's job.
Ha. I've been lurking on this newsletter for a few weeks and did not think my first post would be defending Aaron Renn. C'est la vie.
On the contrary. Renn is quite critical of the manosphere where it is anti-Christian (particularly on questions of chastity). But he is able to analyze manospheric dogmas where those with extremely sensitive toxicity receptors immediately shut down. It is precisely his ability to deal with the manosphere intellectually and by way of a Christian ethos without going "prairie muffin" that makes his perspective so valuable.
Renn has seemed to me to hold some inaccurate/problematic views of women and an overly antagonistic attitude toward mainstream evangelical teaching on dating. But I think I would view the manosphere more negatively than you do, overall.
Elizabeth - I would appreciate it if you would spell out your argument here. I am an avid reader of both Leah and Aaron, and don’t recognize your characterization of Aaron’s views.
“Where do you find fruitful reading on masculinity?”
Funny you should ask this -- I just recently stumbled upon Jeff Perera, a Canadian voice on this exact topic. His blog “Higher UnLearning” (https://higherunlearning.com/about/ ) has links to his various articles, plus talks and presentations he has given.
I have also been following American actor Justin Baldoni and have been impressed with what I’ve heard from him so far (though I have to confess that I’m such a slow reader/listener, I haven’t listened yet to a lot of the meat of his work). He has a youtube series called Man Enough that’s on my listen-someday list. Season one is conversations with some of his male friends/colleagues where he dives into some of the difficult topics surrounding manhood.
Here’s Baldoni’s 2017 TEDtalk -- https://www.ted.com/talks/justin_baldoni_why_i_m_done_trying_to_be_man_enough
I found this Southside Rabbi podcast on the manosphere/gender, from a male Protestant perspective, to be excellent: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0fCtHcPJX6KU9cKowG82G6?si=9injR_2xTcSdrhflTwqgog&utm_source=copy-link
It's one of a very few Christian male discussions on gender I've heard which feels, on one hand, very comfortably masculine, but, on the other hand, did not make me uncomfortable as a woman.