Social Matter

Occasionally, the “manosphere” and some of the other parties on the alt-Right have a dust-up. (Sometimes hilarity ensues.) The critiques that the reactionary and the traditionalist rightists register against the manosphere during these dust-ups are generally valid ones. There is, for instance, no real defense of “pick-up artistry” from the standpoint of someone who takes the idea of community, much less the idea of morality, seriously. Trawling bars and nightclubs, plying young women with “cold openers” and drinks, securing one night stands and upping your “notch count”—these are empty and hedonistic pursuits. They’re disfiguring to the souls of everyone involved: the male on the hunt, the females he succeeds in catching, the bartenders and bouncers who have to watch these sad antics night after night after night. This sort of behavior, in Dante’s scheme, doesn’t land you in the lowest circles of Hell. But it does land you in Hell regardless.

Of course picking on the PUAs is picking on the lowest-common-denominator of manosphere thought. The movement as a whole is bigger than snake oil e-books and midget mestizo game coaches. It produces more serious thinkers, more sophisticated critiques as well. Jack Donovan comes to mind. There’s a lot of meat in The Way of Men. One of his central insights is, of course, not a particularly new one but an important one nonetheless and one effectively presented. It’s that the contemporary world is too safe, too stable, too rubberized really to suit men. And it’s hard to argue against that one. Most American boys spend their formative years logging in long hours of docile desk-sitting in school. They graduate to office jobs where it’s more docile desk-sitting, punctuated now by the occasional HR seminar on sexual harassment or racial sensitivity. Food is readily available. Physical conflict is a rarity, mortal danger even more so. And it’s not even that all these conditions are necessarily bad, just that they present few challenges that require any masculinity of men. Men get soft, bored, even depressed. They seek increasingly artificial outlets for their basic drives: video games, spectator sports, porn. (Donovan’s phrase “Bonobo Masturbation Society” alone is worth the price of the book.) In many senses, modernity offers very little to them.

Donovan is also eloquent on those basic drives. Perhaps the cleverest part of his scheme is how he posits masculinity as a sort of technology for survival in the uncertain, dangerous conditions that obtained for much of human history. He talks about the “tactical virtues” of masculinity. This move is profoundly anti-feminist (unlike one of those other misshapen scions of the manosphere, the MRAs, who are anti-feminist in only the thinnest and most trivial of senses). He’s arguing that masculine virtues like strength and courage are not just good but necessary, that they’re the means by which human tribes stake and maintain “perimeters” against the chaos beyond. (Another landmark work of his, “Violence is Golden,” outlines how stable Western societies still bank on the masculine ability to do violence and to do violence well, even though they require only a small portion of their overall male population to participate in it, which harmonizes his critique of a too-safe society and his insistence on the necessity of masculinity.) This is, of course, a more rhetorically effective and a more philosophically coherent rebuttal to the Hannah Rosins of the world than one can manage by whining about unfair feminism is or how it’s gone “too far” these days. It’s a legitimately reactionary stance.

Now one of the common criticisms of this kind of thinking is that it’s obvious. That any normal young man who was raised in a household with a respectable father understands both the real compromises that civilized life demands of men, as well as the enduring value of manhood. And that’s true. A lot of men raised under those circumstances do understand these ideas to one extent or another. But it’s somewhat fanciful to think that early twenty-first century America is producing an abundance of normal upbringings in two-parent homes for its sons in the first place. So you either leave those thousands, maybe millions, of mis-raised boys to their anomie, their disatisfactions, their constant bombardment by the lies that our schools and media tell about masculinity, or you give them some message not unlike Donovan’s: “There is a reason you feel out-of-place and underutilized. You were designed for more demanding pursuits. Your people have need of the sort of man you can become.”

This is all just to say, really, that there are babies in the manospherian bathwater. And that goes for many others beyond just Mr. Donovan. Even in the crassest forums of the PUAs you can occasionally see glimpses of impulses worth salvaging, worth encouraging even. There are people attracted to “game” simply because they are tired of being sadsack losers who have no control over their own fortunes, romantic or otherwise. You have young men groping for some sense of personal agency, of personal efficacy. That’s not an unworthy gesture. In fact, you could make the argument it’s a superior mentality to the lowest common denominators of other facets of the alt-Right, who produce a lot of lofty theorizing and loftier LARPing but very little personal exertion at all. It’s a good start.

Of course I believe that the West, that Christianity, that America has produced any number of masculine ideals that excel in every way the primeval man, that strong, brave, competent savage on the hunt for suitable mate. But that doesn’t mean the red-blooded primeval man ceases to exist in those more perfected models, only that his inclinations have been chastened or channeled or honed as necessary to cooperate with the greater project of civilization building. But a wan, etiolated Millennial is unsuitable for either of these things, for survival or for contributing to the health of his nation. Right now we are awash with specimens like that, and, despite some of its excesses and its embarrassments, the manosphere is interested in producing of these Millennials a crop of red-blooded men. I’d humbly suggest we focus more on graduating those post-process men to yet higher callings, rather than laboriously cataloging all the shortcomings of that process itself.