Good and Bad Ideals of Masculinity (Essential Excerpts)
Players, frat boys, and how we can inspire more impressive behaviors by clarifying better models of masculinity.
Hello Bar-setters!
I’ve always found it interesting to watch people when they are trying to impress others.
In college, I noticed that many guys tried to show off for other guys by bragging that they “…don’t give a (expletive).” I distinctly remember a frat guy promoting his fraternity by repeatedly talking about how the thing about them was that they all just “didn’t give a…”
For the college male, the surest route to increasing status is to demonstrate a complete disregard for your own future and for any other norm or governing ideal.
But that ideal is pretty easy to deflate. If more people just named this behavior for what it was—a desperate attempt to look cool—it would quickly lose sway over most young men. If guys knew that other people would see through their act, they’d never take it on in the first place. There would be an appropriate level of shame and embarrassment associated with such behavior.
Imagine a twenty-year-old Spartan claiming that he didn’t care about anything. Throughout most times and places, nothing would have been so pathetic. But most young men today don’t have a clear sense of what they consider “pathetic,” because they don’t have a clear sense of what sort of person they should aspire to become. Our problems stem from our unwillingness to claim that there is a better way to live.
This reminds of a recent email conversation that I had with the headmaster of an impressive private school. He wrote:
I think the problem we have is very much a problem of "form" – what should a man (or woman) be? We are wary of being prescriptive, and I suspect a great deal of this comes from being Americans. "It's a free country!" therefore you're "free" to do or be anything, right? And of course all of our choices are as good/valid/right as anyone else's choices.
As a leader I am constantly working towards defining our telos, and sharing that as offensively ("boldly in your face") as possible: "Here's where our bus is going. Do you want to be on it?" Are we willing to build communities that say there is such a thing as a form of human flourishing? Or perhaps more accurately, a multiform of flourishing. Men can be Daniel or Joseph or David or Solomon or Peter or Paul or CS Lewis or Jim Elliot or... (I think of the many different kinds of men and women we meet in Dante's Paradiso. Monks, mystics, warriors, kings, poets, etc.) I sense that we are all far too "nice" and "civilized" to call spades, spades. We have forgotten that true love confronts death.
Brilliantly put.
I spoke a bit on Tuesday about the lack of solid male role models and how important role models are for men. As I’ve repeatedly said, the biggest problem in modern parenting and youth development is a lack of clarity in our ideal—in the type of person that we want to help our children become.
Absent that ideal, adult efforts are confused, inconsistent, and bend towards incessantly placating our children’s desires for instant gratification. Absent that ideal, our children are unlikely to aspire or to put anything ahead of the almighty self that modern society repeatedly tells us is all we need.
Next week, I will finally be ready to clarify that ideal—what I’ve called becoming a “certain kind of person.” For today, I want to poke holes in a couple common “masculine” archetypes and consider how they might be re-framed?
Re-Norming: Commitment is Essential to Real Masculinity
The current masculinity memes tell guys that alpha males are players. This is consistent with the notion of machismo common throughout Latin American history. But there are other ideals we could promote:
“In particular, it is said, that most masculine of men do not do well in marriage. It is argued that “a need for sexual conquest, female adulation, and illicit and risky liaisons seems to go along with drive, ambition, and confidence in the ‘alpha male.’” But Lipton argued that marriage was traditionally a place where males became truly masculine: “For most of Western history, the primary and most valued characteristic of manhood was self-mastery… A man who indulged in excessive eating, drinking, sleeping or sex—who failed to ‘rule himself’—was considered unfit to rule his household, much less a polity…”
Source: The Meaning of Marriage, Tim Keller
As Keller indicates, self-mastery should be part of our masculine (and feminine) ideal, as should an awareness of the the downstream effects of our actions on the world around us.
This reminds me of a scene from the new Top Gun…
Lessons From Maverick
In it, Maverick sneaks out the window of his love interest, Penny Benjamin (played by Jennifer Connelly), so that Benjamin’s daughter doesn’t know he’s been there. As he pops out of the second story window, he looks up and there is the high school daughter staring at him. She looks at Maverick and says: “Just don’t break her heart again.”
All at once, Maverick is smacked with the recognition of the real damage that he has wrought on this mother and her daughter. It is a moment of maturation, where Maverick realizes the costs of his past boyish irresponsibility and the need to become more of a man.
Freedom is intoxicating and important, to a degree. But commitment, responsibility, and sacrifice are the stuff of true men.
Thank you for reading! Please share with anyone you think will find this interesting!
Carry the fire!
Shane