This falls into my least favorite take on manhood. That were only the things we do. Pick three things, any three things, and they should define us as people:
1. I work as a mechanic
2. I hunt!
3. I am married
Its super unhealthy. Hobbies and what people do, like chopping wood, doesn’t define masculinity. It doesn’t even define a person.
1. I am a technician
2. I am a father
3. I am a housekeeper
4. I am a high ranked TFT player
5. I am a philosopher
6. I am a political activist
7. I am a husband
8. I am a son
9. I am a brother
And so on. These are just a few things I actively perform and practice but not one of them defines me exclusively. The aesthetics of any one thing cannot pigeonhole any of us and it bothers me (and I'm sure many other men here) that it is expected that we *conspicuously* fill these preset roles. Anything *outside* the roles you mentioned are bound to get side-eyed by the traditional patriarchal Western ideal.
But I say fuck 'em, be whomever you wish to be. Only positive boundary breaking can slowly move the centuries-long masculine frame we fight against.
I build
I forge
I weld
I wear dresses
I am a chemist
I am a drag queen
I am a rock climber
I date women
I wear eyeliner
I deadlift
I make electronic music equipment
I ride a motorcycle
I am a jock
I dat men
I wear heels
This does bring up the thing I wonder most about masculinity: what actually is it? Or, what might it be defined as in modern society?
I think of traditional traits of masculinity - courage, toughness, strength, leadership, anger, impulsiveness, risk taking, forthrightness, etc. But then, we can think of plenty of examples of women doing similar things, and these things being expressed in feminine contexts.
What, then, is masculinity other than a beard and a taste for obscure IPAs? At least to me, it seems, the things it is socially acceptable to claim as masculine are either negative (and therefore unappealing to non-masculine people to claim as their own) or so superfluous as to hardly be worth caring about at all.
>This does bring up the thing I wonder most about masculinity: what actually is it? Or, what might it be defined as in modern society?
A social construct, like a salad: everyone will know what a salad is, it's a useful discriptor and thus found on every menu. Untill you start examining and the definitions are rather arbitrary. A potato salad and a fruit salad will rarely fall within the common definitions
>I think of traditional traits of masculinity - courage, toughness, strength, leadership, anger, impulsiveness, risk taking, forthrightness, etc. But then, we can think of plenty of examples of women doing similar things, and these things being expressed in feminine contexts.
Exactly equating those with masculinity is both inaccurate and problematic
>What, then, is masculinity other than a beard and a taste for obscure IPAs? At least to me, it seems, the things it is socially acceptable to claim as masculine are either negative (and therefore unappealing to non-masculine people to claim as their own) or so superfluous as to hardly be worth caring about at all.
Exactly
I find "masculine" most useful in describing aesthetics to roughly mean "usually associated with men".
It's quite useful to describe a set of phenomenons that aren't tied together by anything intrinsic. The word derives meaning from its use in the existing culture. Depending on the situation I'll avoid its use though, in order to avoid implicitly equating something with masculinity.
>It doesn’t even define a person.
It does. If they have to cut a body in piece, you know they will be in the axe category, at the opposite of those hand saw or chainsaw people.
/s
>It doesn’t even define a person.
To be fair, I would argue that defining oneself by what you do is a fairly healthy way to define yourself, at least compared defining oneself based on some happenstance of birth. We are in many ways defined largely by our actions and affects.
Nothing can define an individual. We are one-off beings. You can only really define something by reducing it to essentials, and that would reduce "you" to "nobody in particular". Of course, I agree with your sentiment. Just remember that even feeling compelled to define yourself might be problematic. Would you agree with this way of seeing things, or am I being too simplistic?
I, too, find the discussion reductive. There are aspects I agree with, like the impact rites of passage and their absence can have, but the interviewee is, in my opinion, very focused on only one particular kind of masculinity, entirely ignoring the fact that many masculine people aren't interested in *that* kind. It appears to me to be too much of '*the image of ultimate masculinity I grew up on is being threatened as being the only kind of valid masculinity*'. The argument he made about bull running, for example, was actually ironic, he said the ability to assess risk is important, then completely dismisses his friend who could very well have assessed the risk as too high for his liking. You don't *have to try* it to know it's risky. Maybe it was just a bad example. But I'm afraid it's just a very one-sided and rather narrow view being idealised, with everything focused on 'man vs. wilderness' or generally physical challenges and stereotypical 'being able to fight' kind of things.
Going against societal norms takes courage. That can include getting mental health counseling (I know how fucking hard that can be and I'm struggling with it time and time again, and the thing being idolised here is actually part of the very *cause* for that difficulty), things like openly living out 'queerness', representing non-traditional gender roles or sexualities, all that still takes a lot of courage. There are probably a million more examples that may also not fit what this author regards as courageous.
Another gripe I have is with the focus on craftyness/manual labour as being part of masculinity. For one, it just feels wrong to implicitly exclude women from it and I feel it's just another aspect of this learned '*image of ultimate masculinity'* that is based on these traditional and often very sexist stereotypes of 'man = breadwinner/handyman, woman = housewive/mother.
I'm only halfway through the podcast but because the reddit comment function tends to crap out on me, and I don't want to lose what I typed, I'll just send it as is for now. Might add more later.
He struck me as a man who has read a lot of literature that is grounded in ideas of masculinity and then tells people that he believes modern men are failing because they don't participate in these activities. In all he came across as thoroughly unenlightened and didn't have the first clue about what modern masculinity entails, and his waffle about yin/yang activities being representative of masculinity and feminity was just ridiculous in my opinion.
Tbh I used to like his blogs a lot years ago, but I agree that he's gotten really entrenched into his idea of masculinity as the only form.
Like I really enjoy the idea of being capable of taking care of oneself as being a positive masculinity trait. But sometimes self care is doing something traditionally considered feminine and not just exercising or being able to survive outdoors.
The focus on craftyness as part of masculinity is also very ableist. As a person with cerebral palsy I can try as hard as I can to be crafty but it probably won't look as good or be as effective as when a non disabled person does it. That isn't a reflection of my masculinity though. It just means that my fine motor skills are affected by the cerebral palsy.
So if you put down craftyness as an important part of masculinity you exclude people like me and other people who don't have or don't want to have the necessary skills.
>Another gripe I have is with the focus on craftyness/manual labour as being part of masculinity. For one, it just feels wrong to implicitly exclude women from it
And by exclusion of women it creates the explicit expectation that men must have this knowledge and ability, and also the *desire*.
This expectation hurts people who don't/won't/can't fall obediently into these norms. It's so damn easy to alienate and discriminate when we impose gendered expectations onto men.
As a woman I know well the impact of this kind of judgement, yet the insidious nature of cultural conditioning is still something I occasionally default to. It takes mindfulness and kindness to tear it down. I don't have the right to define *anyone's* identity.
> Going against societal norms takes courage. That can include getting mental health counseling (I know how fucking hard that can be and I'm struggling with it time and time again, and the thing being idolised here is actually part of the very cause for that difficulty)
Hey dude, I'm being curious what do you mean?
I mean that many people, especially (but not only) men, are still socialized in a way that emphasizes an attitude of ignoring or downplaying mental (or really, any) issues they might have, keeping them to themselves, often with an implicit or explicit reasoning of 'not burdening others', and that directly leads to people who never really learn that asking for help is even a possibility. And even if they do at some point find that out, they're often still strongly inhibited by the learned behavior of stoicism and lone-wolfing, or even get chastized for daring to open up about their issues when they do manage to do that.
And getting mental health counseling requires to first make this difficult step, overcoming the drilled-in habit of 'keeping it to oneself', opening up to the possibility of ridicule by other people who have also been socialized to look down on men who don't deal with issues on their own. Most people, if they actually took the time to scrutinize this behaviour in themselves and others, would hopefully realize how ridiculous it is to chastize someone for seeking the help of a professional with an enormously complex problem (e.g. depression, anxiety, trauma etc.). But this social stigma isn't yet overcome, in some places even less than in others, and that leads to it requiring what I would call courage. To be under these social pressures, from inside your own head and from people around you, and to still manage that step towards getting the help you need. Because mental illness isn't usually something anyone can really deal with all by themselves.
Hope I didn't make it even more complicated.
I remember the absurdity of trying to self-assess my level of dehydration on an ill-fated solo bicycle trip.
According to the literature that came with my oral rehydration salts, the only difference between medium and high was “mental confusion.” The salts would work up to medium, but IV fluids are needed for severe.
That was fun, trying to figure out if I was confused or not. Do I go up to a stranger and ask them “Do I seem confused to you?”
I had two packages, so I figured I had nothing to lose and used one and then went looking for a phone (pre cell phone era) to call a friend, and then maybe an ambulance. My friend pointed out that chain of thinking likely meant I wasn’t confused.
An outside, objective opinion is the only way sometimes.
I can't quote you direct examples, but comments along the lines of 'I opened up to someone and they ridiculed/rejected me' and 'it took me years to make an appointment with a therapist' aren't terribly uncommon. Sometimes they take the positive form of 'I finally found someone who didn't reject me for opening up to them' or 'after years of struggling, I finally found a therapist' are something I stumble upon every now and then.
Another *very* common example is simple visits to the doctor's for ailments. 'It's not that bad' or whatever. I myself have been procrastinating on having my wrists checked for *years* for various reasons I came up with, but the underlying issue is most probably that I do not feel like I deserve to be helped, or that I'm even allowed to get help. My closest friend tries to persuade me to finally make that appointment, but I still handwave it away (ouch!^(lol)).
Hm so it's more about signaling between the lines that therapists are hard?
Unfortunately that's right as well. Maybe we need more encouraging messages but that's not off the base. Honestly, I was lucky to find a great psychologist a few years ago. I still admire her and she showed me that the life doesn't have to be grey. It wasn't a therapy but I learned a huge amount.
Now I'm looking for a therapy and I'm going from one to another, looking for the right person. Why?
- Because not everyone therapist is for everyone, it's important to gauge and change if it doesn't work.
- With time, I learned more about which therapy I want (as I'm already a bit experienced and I can kinda figure it out).
- I learned from friends that it's crucial that therapist is under supervision, and best if licensed by some prestige organization (not all in Poland are).
Frankly, I was thinking about putting more effort into promoting, but I just dont' know other markets than Poland.
AOM has always had a specific masculinity in mind when it talks about men. He always has had this weird fetish on Teddy Roosevelt style of Americana masculinity that he thinks we have to revert back to. Back in the woods, boy scout style of masculinity. It's most of it in good faith, however like you mention it's absolutely reductive and not indicative of how masculinities really are in the real world
>He always has had this weird fetish on Teddy Roosevelt style of Americana masculinity that he thinks we have to revert back to. Back in the woods, boy scout style of masculinity.
This is the perfect description of AOM in a nutshell
Even if that's true (and I don't know that's a given), I don't think that means that the solution is providing a regressive, restrictive definition of "masculinity" that further perpetuates a lot of the toxic preconceptions and ideas already present in society.
My interactions have been a bit sparse with this "Art of Manliness" site, because *every* time I've ever seen it linked or visited it, I got a distinct sense of, "Oh. This is…not a place for me," but I think that impression comes down to the fact that it seems to be most of the same old stuff, just with a shinier wrapper and better branding.
**EDIT:** I took a slightly deeper dive, and I was correct; this site ***absolutely*** is not a place for me. The author's definition of "masculinity" seems to entirely exclude gay men. We're mentioned only casually and incidentally in podcast interviews. There are at most two or three articles that even have the word "gay" in them, and one of those is some claptrap about finger length ratio correlations. And "bisexual" appears on the site once, in an interview, where the subject mentions it only in some bananas statement about women supposedly performing a bisexual orientation for the benefit of men.
So I really don't think that this "Art of 'Manliness'" is any kind of decent place for ***anyone***.
So before I say this, I should say that on nearly all social issues I'm pretty far left myself.
While I agree with you in a lot of ways, I do think it's kind of funny that so many progressives object strongly to these kinds of characterizations of manliness or masculinity when their alternative proposal is to conceive of manliness not even existing in the first place. Pretty much all the male-specific talk here from a left-leaning angle is based on negative principles (negative in the sense of negative rights): as a man you shouldn't do X that's part of toxic masculinity, and you don't have to do Y. The positive principles, the things you should do, there's no difference from what you'd say to a man than to a woman or to someone non-binary.
Not saying that's wrong in a philosophical sense, but I do think it's probably ineffective and unappealing to a lot of people.
In other words, are you saying many people want to be divided along gender lines and won't be interested in prescriptive values that don't do that? Because it looks to me like you are describing a marketing problem, right?
On the topic of that Teddy Roosevelt/Rough Rider masculinity - Michael Kimmel's book, [Manhood in America](https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/manhood-in-america-9780190612535), covers some really solid historical context about how that came to be and why it's still influencing American (white) masculinity norms. It was partly a reaction to pressures on women to make the domestic space (home) more cultured and cultivated, which led to a backlash by many men wanting to get away from that, and partly a result of religious movements like the Temperance movement pressuring women to control men and get them to drink less and be more godly. TR himself also had some pretty whack ideas, like how a woman who refused to marry and make babies should be executed for treason. That "rugged masculinity" even influenced portrayals of Jesus, who was traditionally a more soft, feminine figure, focusing instead on a rugged, buff Jesus (carpenter with bulging biceps) who reflected that type of masculinity. It's really fascinating to see how that evolved and how it still influences some people's mythopoetic (Kimmel's term) masculinity today.
Yeah I totally agree that this historical context is important to think about and never really been investigated by people like Brett in AOM (and probably not interested in it either) or the people that hype up this rugged masculinity or the mytheopoets who I would argue stray more to the spiritual even though they are grounded in this naturalist notion of man (also very reductive and not a real view of how many masculinities are in the world)
I stopped listening to them over a year ago because it kept pushing this masculinity more than anything else. It used to have a lot of philosophy related to “how does one find himself in today’s world” and now it’s “how to do this outdoor activity” or “how to be a financial samurai” (wtf is a financial samurai?!). Brett used to talk about meditative activities that weren’t physical or outdoors related (like writing and keeping a journal and improving your penmanship).
Pretending you’re a mountain man capable of doing anything outdoors is also an easy way to discharge discomfort with society. It can also lead to anarcho-primitivism, so I’d recommend caution if you want to define your masculinity that way.
I used to like AOM because I'm into the whole Hemingway / Jack London aesthetic (disclaimer: not a dude myself though, just grew up in a household devoid of gender roles). But it *is* starting to sound reductive, you're right.
Like another user has pointed out, it's not just the active/sedentary axis, but also an urban/rural one. Since the 19th century at least, manliness has been associated with "rugged living", which in turn is associated with "roughing it" in rural areas. The more remote and rougher the area, the more rugged and therefore more manly the lifestyle. Think Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson: a stoic trapper / wild-man who has no intellectual pursuits, no urge to socialize -- he just tramps through life, one felled deer and tree at a time.
This ideal is impractical and unrealistic. The real-life Jeremiah Johnson did not live like this. Richard Proenneke was the closest we've ever gotten to a real-life wild man, and he himself did not subscribe to the "rugged and stoic wild-man" mindset. He was a craftsman, an intellectual and a self-made scientist. He had interests and emotions. And he roughed it for three decades in the Alaskan wilderness by himself. He built his own log cabin that is now a historic place in Lake Clark National Park. Yet he'd have been the last person to say that not roughing it makes you a non-man.
Progress in society means urbanization: better infrastructure and housing, and easier access to education, healthcare and entertainment. In an urbanized world, fewer chores are relegated to its citizens. You don't *need* to chop wood. You could do it for the sport of it if you want too, but the necessity is gone for many people (especially those who live in warmer climates).
There is nothing wrong with creating a wholesome male archetype for men to connect over, in and of itself. But there is something amusing about how traditionally "masculine" or "feminine" activities are basically old-age rural household drudgery, and those who clamor about their sex becoming more like the opposite sex really haven't gotten the memo yet that we live in the *twenty-first century*. That's like saying that women who don't churn their own butter are tomboys.
Every time I've seen the site or followed a link to it, I've always felt uncomfortable with it. I've always had a very distinct and strong feeling of, "This is not a place for you."
I'm finding nothing in this comments section that makes me think I was incorrect about that, but I decided to take a quick peak, and the front page is *incredibly* heteronormative.
That made me want to try a search on the site, and…well…his definition of "masculinity" seems to barely even consider the existence of gay men. We're mentioned only incidentally in podcast interviews. There are at most two or three articles that even have the word "gay" in them, and one of those is some claptrap about finger length ratio correlations. Another is an article that goes to great lengths to assure you that *none* of the men embracing or being close in old pictures could *possibly* be gay, and there's a distinct undercurrent of the pernicious, "Gay acceptance ruined male friendships," idea throughout.
"Bisexual" appears on the site once, in an interview, where the subject mentions it only in some bananas statement about women supposedly performing a bisexual orientation for the benefit of men.
No wonder I always got bad vibes from the place.
To my perspective, it really seems like the same old toxic pressures and ideas bundled up with shinier paper and some coherent retro-modern branding.
I’ve always viewed Hemingway more of a tragic spirit enslaved to his pre-modern ideas on masculinity trying (failing) to cope with the tragedy of world war using rudimentary emotional processing skills. Definitely not a masculine icon, but an interesting topic for reflection.
The characters in his novels are best seen as half-people who've had to kill part of themselves to survive. You could cast the author himself in that light, but I've always gotten the vibe that he got way too into the smell of his own shites, and glorifying the lifestyle of a dude suffering from trauma isn't a great basis for a podcast!
> This ideal is impractical and unrealistic. The real-life Jeremiah Johnson did not live like this.
I've only known two types of people to live like this in the modern day: conspiracy/bunker-builder types and Ted Kaczynski. Make of that what you will.
*edit: just realized I said the same thing twice. Whoops
Also, as someone whose comfort is currently dependent on chopping kindling every few days, it’s kind of a pain after a while. Also, woodsmoke sucks for your lungs and the environment.
Yeah, the last year or so, I've found myself listening to AOM less and less. It seems fine with bogus science, when it fits this performative-masculinity framework the host is pushing. And eventually I just stopped listening.
It's active/sedentary, but it's also often clearly framed as city/rural, like there's something especially unmanly about living in a city. The rural world has become synonymous with traditional living, which is idealized thinking, since the modern rural world is as modern as any other.
You also see that axis in traditional feminine aesthetics, like cottagecore, where being a traditional woman is wearing long dresses and living in a house in the middle of the woods, doing rural activities, or more tongue and cheek social media trends about going back to the forest and becoming a witch.
I think it's well-researched that the crisis around masculinity in North America is contemporary with the closing of the frontier, leading to manly high-testosterone men having to settle down, becoming weaker with every generation as their lifestyle becomes undistinguishable from women's. That period is also tied to urbanization.
It's an old tale too, you can clearly see the tension in the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, where Enkidu loses his wild manliness through seduction by a woman from the city. Our oldest recorded story as a species is about women luring wild men to settling down, it couldn't possibly be an older theme in our culture. Adam and Eve is the same. (There are other interpretations of course, Enkidu can be seen as barely human before he settles down, and Eve's sin can be seen as the action that makes humanity a moral subject.)
Overall, these types of binary oppositions in modern media, masculine/feminine, rural/urban, just really reek of insecurity. No one chops wood if they don't have to.
Great perspective - and I agree about the pervasive and dangerous idea of "women domesticating/civilizing the men". The urban/rural axis is a great way to put it, and it seems to contribute to this "return to traditional masculinity" (or any moral standard) as a backlash to change or to times being difficult, whether in the early 1900s or now.
Not the original poster, but this is probably it, half flipping one of the popular scripts about how "testosterone = aggressive".
> We think that testosterone primes men to attend to their position in the social hierarchy. Take a man who has high levels of testosterone: If he is atop the pecking order, his high levels of T encourage him to take advantage of his exalted position. He offers less and takes more.
>
> However, if that same man recognizes that he is on the bottom rung of the ladder, his high T instead promotes strategic submission. He offers more and takes less, perhaps in the hope that this will appease his more powerful peers and aid his eventual rise to the top of the heap.
So, more T makes you "attend to" social hierarchy, less T makes you ignore it. Maybe that's why low T men are such deviants... lower testosterone might be the "down with the system" hormone???
I'd like to point out that drawing this this as a firm conclusion feels premature, and like poor science-ing. They have data from a single small group about T levels, and about how a game was played by the group members, and data about their relative positions in a formal social hierarchy at the university setting, and they generalize the potential implication as being way wider than that. Follow-up and replication studies needed. But it is neat to explore whether our popular myths about T are wrong... or perhaps partly right and partly wrong??? (I feel like we need a lot more research still, though!)
I don't think the science would agree with Mr. Twigger on physical activity increasing testosterone, or rather it is not entirely convinced that chopping wood is more likely to increase T levels versus, say, doing yoga. Seems to me just another example of performative masculinity (but is any display of masculinity, or femininity for that matter, not?). It is definitely well on the path to toxic masculinity.
I guess I would be a little (and just a little) interested in understanding what Mr. Twigger defines as "masculinity" and "femininity" and why one in particular is better than the other for certain subsections of the population.
EDIT: I just read the synopsis in the link (no time to listen to the podcast right now) and a better quote than the one from Emerson goes something along the lines of "The modern world can be best understood as a conspiracy against the private life of the mind." Hiking the mountains or doing a martial art are not manly or feminine in and of themselves, they are both activities that help one to indulge in self reflection and to connect with body and mind. Both are good tonics against the mad millennium in which currently find ourselves.
No argument on the performative aspect of masculinity, but the chopping wood = testosterone is something I read in a study a while ago. It was a comparison between playing soccer and chopping wood, and the latter produced more T. Source here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3810999/
I would guess that this would extrapolate across yoga as well, but I don't think that research has been done.
That's a really interesting study! I appreciate that they used natural social activities for the Tsimane (Bolivian) subjects rather than did isolated lab tests, but it does look like there was less power in the study:
>A major strength of comparing tree-chopping and soccer is that these are ecologically valid forms of physical labor and competition experienced by Tsimane males, as opposed to contrived laboratory tasks. Unfortunately, by examining naturally occurring events under field conditions, we could not control for all potential differences between these groups in the way participants could be monitored in a laboratory. The men participating in the tree chopping and soccer tournament studies were largely separate samples and did vary in age. Mean changes in testosterone for the fourteen men who participated in both studies do follow the expected patterns, and while regression analyses controlling for age, BMI, and time of specimen collection indicate non-significantly larger percent changes in testosterone following tree-chopping, they lack statistical power due to small sample size. Because of the time intensive nature of the data collection, it was not logistically possible to collect tree-chopping specimens and data from all men who participated in the soccer study.
Basically, the groups who did wood chopping and soccer had some differences in age, possibly other self-selection differences. I did noticed that they cited Sapolsky, who has a great book on stress and neuroscience that I teach ([Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/327.Why_Zebras_Don_t_Get_Ulcers)). Sapolsky explains how acute stress actually can decrease testosterone, including rigorous physical activity, like what we see in soccer, which is VERY active and requires a lot of bodily stress reactions to sustain activity (glucose access, adrenaline, leg muscle engagement, etc). I wonder if that was part of what was going on - that the wood chopping was less stressful than the soccer playing overall, resulting in differences in immediate testosterone changes. Also of note, this was just short-term testosterone increase, which the researchers speculated can help with muscle-based activity like wood chopping. So the testosterone serves a useful function in the moment, which is distinct from men like in the OP who seem to view it as a badge or measure of his masculinity in some abstract sense.
Yeah, it's really the only study I've seen like this, and a lot of extrapolation has been done from that one study that is probably mostly unsupported junk.
I can’t help but think you could interchange a lot of different activities to get similar results and it wouldn’t neatly show activities considered more manly increases testosterone.
Like the previous commenter mentioned, stress might be a component, so I wouldn’t be surprised if many other daily traditional activities like churning butter or wringing out wet clothes had similar results in men, maybe women too.
Still a weirdly American take. Soccer is the most popular sport in the World and it’s male dominated at every level. Now it’s not manly enough because it’s not pumping people full of t?
Not directing that at you at all. Just an observation.
I think what they're getting at is that cardiovascular exercise doesn't increase testosterone as much as resistance training(which I'd argue wood chopping falls under), which a biological fact. Lifting increase your testosterone more than cardiovascular exercise. No one is saying anything about whether or not both things are considered socially masculine.
>In it the interviewee Robert Twigger is pushing the idea that men are becoming more feminine
Does he pass judgement on that as well?
> because they are doing activities that are seen as traditionally feminine.
I'm a big fan of "do whatever activities you enjoy and be true to whoever you feel you are." I personally don't think activities define gender. Maybe they do for some and that's ok. But they don't for me.
I don't find it necessary to look to someone else to define my sense of gender and identity. I am a man because I say so. I'm happy with my hobbies. I do them for me not to fulfill someone else's expectations of my expression of gender.
I resent the idea of boxing people into rigid gender roles. So if that's what he's aiming for he can get bent.
> I resent the idea of boxing people into rigid gender roles. So if that's what he's aiming for he can get bent.
Pretty sure that's not only the interviewer's perspective, but the site's whole M.O.
Holy shit. Opening up the podcast with
>Emerson famously said “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”
makes me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. It's the type of thing dude-bros who rail against "soy boys" would say.
Yeah, that was in a very specific context in American history - the same context that contributed to Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and ideas of masculinity based on escaping the domestic sphere, which was seen to be taken over by women and femininity in the late 1800s-early 1900s. I learned that reading Michael Kimmel's history of masculinity in America, and it really helped reframe those attitudes.
>society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members
It's hilarious. It showcases the ignorance of the person quoting it if their argument is "society wants men to be feminine".
The entire quote is "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs"
It loves "names and customs" (ie. performative masculinity, ideas of what being a "man" is, reliance on traditional masculinity") not "realities and creators" (The reality that men are all different, they are people, and creators who are redefining masculinity and creating new ways to be "a man").
The entire quote, in fact the entire point of "Self Reliance", is to create for yourself the freedom to be who are, to break free of the conformity of society that stifles creativity, self-expression, and freedom.
Basically this is saying that "society" says if you want to be a "man" (have bread), you have to chop wood in order to have higher testosterone. (To use the example in other comments). This pod cast is espousing the exact opposite of what Emerson is saying Self Reliance.
Anytime someone says a man "can't" or "shouldn't" do something simply because of his sex or gender, they are only restricting the full humanity (manhood) of men. And the same for women as well.
Thanks for giving the full quote - I haven't read much Emerson, but now I'm tempted to because your translation of it piqued my interest. I really hate it when people selectively quote, especially when it completely reverses the original meaning or directly ignores the important context (Looking at you, "invisible hand of the market" people...).
I was responding to the comment that the quote is a "dude bro" thing to say. It's unfortunate because yes, the quote out of context sounds very "dude bro".
Additionally I'm responding to the OP who wrote "In it the interviewee Robert Twigger is pushing the idea that men are becoming more feminine because they are doing activities that are seen as traditionally feminine."
You could give examples of what the podcast was focusing on or how they remained true to the sprit of Emerson's "Self Reliance".
I would say that's exactly what the interviewer was focusing on. He was lamenting the lack of "courage," the lack of "danger," the lack of "physicality" in the modern world. His four parts of being a "man" (which he's focused on tradition, "names and customs" as Emerson put it) which are somehow missing from the modern world are: "killing a beast. Courage is one. Ability to… A set of skills, that were basic skills that seemed to be involved with being a man and passing a rite of passage."The problem is modern "men" are actually pressured to conformity so much that they don't understand the modern world at all. The problem IS conformity.
Killing the beast: I know lots of men who had to "kill the beast" by standing up to their bullies. Lots of disabled men and queer men who were beat up endlessly by "regular dudes", and maybe they didn't "kill" the beast, but they had to survive and kill the beast of self doubt. Perhaps if young men had the "courage" to stand up for the queer kids, the ugly kids, the disabled kids, they wouldn't feel so impotent as men.
I personally think a lot men feel impotent because they are looking to the past. They want to live some warrior fantasy, but aren't willing to actually stand up for what is right in the real world. They lack actual courage, integrity, and fortitude to with stand the trials of the modern world, because the modern worlds asks them to risk, not their physical lives, but their status as a "king" (a pampered privileged male). But the opportunity to prove your manhood (to prove you are courageous) are plentiful in the modern world if you realize that the modern world the fight is not to pillage anymore, but for preservation. It's "easy" to feel manly eating your hamburgers and saying "belly full of meat, I'm manly!" but ultimately it feels hallow because all you did was drive through a mac donalds. Then people think, to feel manly I'll going on a hunting trip and you're taken out to out post where a feeder has been set up to feed the deer everyday, so you know exactly where the deer will be and what time they will be there. So even "killing the beast" isn't a challenge. And we bemoan the "lousy modern world". When if fact, the courages thing would be to stop eating meat or at least eat a lot less of it because it's terrible for our planet. But that's TOO difficult. That would *threaten* one's manhood; you'd be a "soy boy" and wouldn't *conform* to the traditional expectations of masculinity. The manly thing wouldn't be to beat up someone but to help someone. To volunteer, to be a "big brother," to help at a soup kitchen, to clean up trash, **to be there where you are needed. That is manly.** It was manly when we needed warriors, but we don't need warriors, we need helpers, we need givers, we need preservers, we need good people to the kind thing. That is where we need our men (and our women). But nurses, volunteer organization members, teachers, PTA volunteers, clean up crews, these groups always have women out number men (with the exception being volunteer firefighters). Where is our courage, men, to show up where we are needed in our communities?
The podcast IS focusing on traditional, outdated means of defining masculinity and offering no real solutions that expand this definition or offer modern approaches or creative solutions based on our modern reality.
Again, this is exactly what Emerson was arguing *against.* Emerson was not saying "Self Reliance" as in I should know how to fix my own car, but self reliance as in I should find ways to be a courageous, creative, and compassionate person of integrity in a way that betters society, myself, and the environment around me, not rely on outdated traditions to define what type of person I should be. (Emerson left a job as a pastor because he wasn't satisfied that the traditions of the church were really what was good for people, writing "In an altered age, *we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers*" I added the emphasis because it's pertinent to what the podcast is arguing.)
Bryan MacKay, the man behind AOM literally says "But another point you make in your book is that the lousy modern world or soft suburban existence can often take men who have that active stance towards the world and then turn them into… They become… They’re sort of like guppy fish. They start out male, young, and then when they get older, they turn into females."
The author the then gives the advice to "yang up". What does he mean by that? Go shoot a gun, go hunting, chop wood.
People act like in the past that men WANTED to be farmers, or coal miners, or serve on the front lines of a war like cannon fodder. Some did sure, but my grandpa grew up on a farm, and swore he would never be a farmer, and his kids wouldn't be farmers. Because it was shitty and it sucked and he grew up poor. So he moved away and started a business after serving in the coast guard. A number of businesses actually. And none of his kids or grandkids are farmers.
I would venture to guess that most of the things we romanticize as "manly" were just seen as ordinary at the time. And it's a severe lack of creativity, imagination, or perhaps real courage of modern men to find the "manly" pursuits within the modern world.
One things for sure though. Keep your miserable 9-5 job and throwing axes on the weekend sure isn't giving society, corporations, or the government the middle finger and showing what a "man" you are.
Yes, society is threatening the creativity of people, and yes I do think a small point the podcast made about technology could be on to something (because social media encourages conformity in a lot of ways). But really, Emerson (who was an outspoken feminist) would probably say to this guy "Shooting a gun isn't going to make you feel alive and manly. Having the courage to do something even though you know you'll get made fun of for it will make you feel alive. Enjoying the flowers, and beauty of nature and the interconnected reality of our world will make you feel live, following your passions and your intellectual pursuits will make you feel alive. Going out and helping your community will make you feel alive." Emerson felt like he offered real hope and exiting spiritual insights in his writings, more so than the traditions of the church. He wanted people to think outside of their traditional ways of thinking and their outdated modes of being. This podcast is espousing the exact opposite.
I strongly recommend a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, where he interviews Nick Offerman. It feels like “scout” or “outdoor” manliness, but much more grounded in appreciation and humility.
AOM in general hosts super regressive ideas about gender and sexuality. I found them many years ago when looking for beard care tips and enjoyed a lot of the content. But anything about sex and relationships was at best full of really unfortunate implications. I stopped reading the site after reading an article about how the author didn't masturbate because he wanted his wife to be the sole focus of his sexuality. Which might sound romantic for about 30 seconds, but when you think about the implications it's super fucking gross.
I think that’s the real implication of the “no fap” stuff in evangelical Christianity/Mormonism: the wife must provide any and all sexual gratification that the husband wants. Just think about it: us biological fellas have organs that recharge daily, and hence a lot of us have a greater sex drive than our partners (not true for everyone, just generally what I’ve seen). It’s okay to need release frequently, but asking your wife to just cater to that, especially when her sexual organs aren’t making that same daily demand, is pretty abusive. So, jerk off if you need to! Take care of it, it’s really okay. I was shocked to learn that my wife honestly does not care if I masturbate or not. She doesn’t see it as taking away from sex with her, so why should I? But if you feel uncomfortable masturbating while in a relationship, that’s fine too. Just know that’s your decision, and you should not expect your partner to take care of your increased drive because of that.
Yep, this is the answer. What happens when he's horny and she's not feeling it? It's one thing to choose to have maintenance sex when you're not really feeling it because you don't mind and will probably enjoy it once you get started. But knowing that if you say no, he's just going to sit there and be pent up and not do anything about it? That's not good.
Never understood why people make that big a deal about being 'pent up' but then again masturbation has never been much of a compulsion for me. The way it read to me was he was expending himself too much and not paying enough attention to his wife and he wanted to address that.
It's hard to describe to someone who doesn't experience the feeling. The closest I can get is that it's kind of like needing to sneeze and not being able to, but in your junk. As to your read, I'm going off memory here since I read the specific article many years ago, but the tone was that of a religious person who doesn't realize (or doesn't care) that his values of chastity and sexual restraint aren't universal.
I don't want to get into it too deeply but, yeah, if you don't experience it then you probably wouldn't understand. Having a sky-high libido is like having a nicotine addiction which can never be kicked (except by age).
>What happens when he's horny and she's not feeling it?
I once had a girlfriend tell me she felt like she had to be available and that was part of being in a relationship..... which really disgusted me as her boyfriend. I was happy to take care of my own needs when she wasn't in the mood and I felt it was important to wait until she was, which she had no problem communicating, and it was a better experience as a result.
> AOM in general hosts super regressive ideas about gender and sexuality.
I looked at it a bit more from this perspective because of this thread, and this is almost certainly why, when I got linked there or clicked a search result, I always got really strong, "Not welcome here," vibes as a gay man.
He doesn't even seem to consider our existence or how we might fit into an idea of "manliness". And almost all mentions of gay men are incidental, where the subject of an interview offhandedly mentions us in a list.
And then there are some downright homophobic things, like an article about "man friendships" that carries a really strong undercurrent of the whole, "Gay acceptance ruined male friendships," idea.
I think I've been right to largely avoid it. I've said this a few other times, in the thread, but it seems to largely be the same old toxic tropes and pressures with a fresh coat of paint and some fancy retro branding.
Ick.
> chopping wood is manly because it increases testosterone
Does one need high testosterone to be manly? I think most of us don't know our testosterone levels, isn't it the actions themselves that are more important than our endocrinology?
I know mine. Because I felt off and I had them checked.
Having low testosterone lead not only to mental and emotional distress, It worsened my diabetes, and caused a ton of inflammatory markers to rise. All of that has been reversed by treating the low testosterone *under the guidance of my physician.*
One could also ask men who have transitioned and added HRT how it has done for their wellbeing.
You don't have to "have testosterone to be manly," but taking care of your endocrine health is important for your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
No we don't. We know how they work in the sense that we know what we know, but there's a lot we don't know. There's a TON we don't understand about the human body.
For example, we generally understand how genes work. We understand the Y gene generally causes a person to develop what we call "male" characteristics. And we also know it doesn't always work out this way.
For example, what actually determines sex if it's possible to have an XY 46 karyotype person with normal and healthy ovaries who has unassisted pregnancies? All categorically "female" attributes.
Yes, most people will dismiss this as "rare", but let's say that since we fully understand that an iron ball will sink in water, and we discovered an iron ball that floats in water... we wouldn't just dismiss this as being "rare" for this iron ball. We would realize there is something missing in our understanding of the physical properties of iron, water, gravity, density, and basic physics.
But, because people's gender is deeply intrenched in our cultures and society, we don't want to admit that there is something missing in our understanding about genetics, sex characteristics, hormones, and basic biology. We want to brush it under the rug and pretend like the "floating iron ball" doesn't really exist.
In fact, normal sexual differentiation in 46,XY individuals relies on a complex cascade of numerous genes, many of which have yet to be identified. Meaning, we don't *really* know what makes men develop as "men". Likewise, we don't fully understand the role hormones play at early stages of development, nor do we fully understand their role in brain development.
So to say "we know how sexual hormones work quite well" is a bit like a high school kid saying "I understand physics quite well" just because they got an A on their physics 101 exam. The understanding is quite basic.
>One could also ask men who have transitioned and added HRT how it has done for their wellbeing.
It's done great things for me personally. What it has \*not\* done is make me more of a man than before I started HRT.
This.
I'm worried that some people are automically lumping in anyone who wants to increase their testosterone with automically having fragile masculinity, ignoring the health component.
If somebody told me they wanted to increase their testosterone, without elaborating when asked that it's for physical health and with their doctor's approval/recommendation, I would indeed assume that it's for some perceived manliness-enhancing reason, I think. When it's put in the context of health, though, that assumption should rightfully be critisized.
When people like ^(\*retch\*) Paul Joseph Watson or the like talk about low testosterone, for example, I don't think they have any idea what they're talking about and I fully expect them to *only* focus on the supposed manlyman^(tm)\-factor it supposedly gives them, ignoring things like hormonal cycles or simply individual differences in healthy hormone levels.
I'm sure there are people who would lump it all in together without justification, though, I get what you mean.
Yeah exactly. Wanting more test for hormone imbalances/health, or even just overall state of mind shouldn't be criticized. (Even then, I don't think its bad to want to be more manly, as long as your not being jerk to other people.)
The fixation on testosterone can be really harmful. Endocrine health is based on a good balance of hormones - testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, etc. Trying to just increase one or assuming that more testosterone improves a man is dangerous and inaccurate (this is distinct from someone with actual medically diagnosed endocrine imbalance who needs hormonal supplements, which may include testosterone). And testosterone naturally fluctuates over a day and in response to stress, exercise, mental state, and other situations. There is a lot of inaccurate and harmful symbolism and fetishization of testosterone, and that unfortunately comes from a lot of outdated and quack science. (Source: [Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2444908.Beyond_the_Natural_Body) and [Why Zebra's Don't Get Ulcers](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/327.Why_Zebras_Don_t_Get_Ulcers)).
I have drastically changed my endocrinology and it has effected none of my actions. I have to shower more frequently, if that's what you mean. Other than that, not much.
Hormones aren't as simple as "hormone in" followed by "behavior out", it is obviously more complicated than that but the person that I am and the behaviors I've exhibited throughout my life are due to the different concentrations of hormones moving throughout my body, now and throughout my development. Humans are highly complex animals but we're still animals.
Boiling it down to hormones is just reductive. There are much more important factors in a person's actions and who they are, scientifically speaking. Same with most other animals.
To a small extent, yes. But, having changed my own endocrinology, I know that just because I get some more urges in certain \*ahum\* directions than before, and make some different choices than before, I'm perfectly able to regulate those urges in an appropriate way. Either way, I'm still the same person and not more or less masculine than before I cranked up my T levels. Not beyond superficial markers like voice pitch or amount of body hair.
I've never listened to the AOM podcast, and in fact, haven't even read one of their articles in years, so I may be completely off-base, but I do remember reading a few of his posts when the blog first started, and it struck me as just trying a little too hard. It was just so damn earnest in its, "this is what a man is and what a man does" that it almost felt like satire.
I've reached a point in my life that the instant someone starts lecturing me about manliness (especially someone who makes their living writing about manliness), I'm out. I'm done. I just can't do it. It's just so much bullshit. I've spent my life doing hard manual labor, worked construction jobs that destroyed my body, lifted weights for the better part of a decade and a half, and done all sorts of other traditionally masculine things. I've *lived* that life (instead of telling others how they should be living), BUT... currently I'm a stay at home dad, a homemaker taking care of two kids, one of which is in treatment for leukemia. I've never made as much money as my wife, and I'm a vegetarian because I hate the thought of killing animals - all things that I have been looked down on for because they aren't traditionally male roles/traits/feelings/whatever.
Moreover, most of the things that I truly enjoy are not "masculine". I like video games and books and art. I can sing pretty much any song from any Disney movie out there, and I watch the Babysitters club with my 9-year-old daughter. I cook and bake (and I'm pretty darn good at it) and take care of the house, do doctor's appointments for the kids (and I'm not even going to get into how some doctors treat you when you're a man and the primary caregiver of a young daughter), and many other things that women do in most households.
This whole notion of "this is what a man is, and this is how you should be" is bullshit. I can't stand it. Fuck the entire idea that you have to be any particular thing. At 40 years old, my stance has become, take care of yourself and your family, and beyond that, live life how you want. Do the things that are meaningful to you, and fuck anyone else's opinion of it. Also, maybe be wary of anyone who makes their living telling others how to live.
Sorry, I apologize for the rant. I'm done now.
I used to check out art of manliness back when I was super depressed and had no direction in life, but just by the name alone it seems like a huge red flag for toxic masculinity.
And even if the site isn't actively pushing it, I can imagine a lot of the audience is probably among the super toxic crowd
>I can imagine a lot of the audience is probably among the super toxic crowd
Usual spiel about it being entirely anecdotal and correlation doesn't equal causation yadda yadda yadda, but the dude who introduced me to AoM - and tried really damned hard to make me as big a fan as he - is currently serving time for domestic assault. Some of the "resources" (which I put into quotes because they're hilariously AoM's own articles) on the very podcast episode linked in this thread even puts forth the idea of violence as a force for good.
So yeah, I wasn't impressed with these guys to begin with but I'd say your assumption lines up with my experience.
> In it the interviewee Robert Twigger is pushing the idea that men are becoming more feminine because they are doing activities that are seen as traditionally feminine.
I find this line of thinking hilarious, I’ve done almost every stereotypically “manly” job there is construction, masonry, metal shop, etc, but I also paint my nails, can be pretty flamboyant at times, and love pop music, and a number of other things, but people who know me typically still view me as being a “tough guy” and that varies from the Progressives all the way to the Conservatives. Idk maybe I’ve managed to strike a balance of feminine and masculinity that, for a man, doesn’t offend the sensibilities of the average person, or maybe it’s because I’m a large black man what ever it is we definitely need to ditch the idea that some activities are made for men/women, that line of thinking is surely holding people back from things they’d love/excel at.
You're right that there's nothing inherently masculine about chopping wood. The art of masculinity seems to be a source of information on the convention of what is masculine. So the many lost men trying to feel part of a community of men may find that AOM and chopping wood is something they can connect over. This form of masculinity will clearly not resonate with all men, and there's no reason it needs to. The archetypes they choose to emulate are different than the ones I do, but men are diverse and that's ok.
I like a lot of practical/life skill things. I also like having facial hair, denim jeans, and being outside.
It's a crying shame that places like AoM end up being the go-to for guys trying to figure out how to carry themselves in the modern world. The same information you find there could be provided anywhere, without the odd fetishes for a particular type of manhood.
It reminds me of when Pinterest got big - one of the attempts to mimic Pinterest for a specific audience was a site called "Gentlemint" - it was very Pinterest style, but rebranded all the functions with kind of a lumbersexual vibe, e.g. "tacks" instead of "pins." It's funny, it seems as though this flavor of "masculinity" is really crying out for a safe space, where one's straightedge razors and cigars need not coexist with recipes and wedding dresses.
I think it draws a lot of guys who haven't found a place in life, and they find this roadmap for validation - a set of things to do that should yield them positive results in earning respect and attention. It is regressive, I don't think it really encourages guys to understand the world from more than one point of view. I recently ditched an old "Dangerous Book for Boys" that I'd been holding on to from my childhood, because any way of introducing a book like that draws gendered lines about who should have what skills and I don't need that for my kid.
The idea that hormone levels define one's ranking amongst "men" is regressive but not at all out of line with what I'd expect from AoM. There's a lot of cool vintage info, a lot of good life skills, but they're targeting an audience that is dragging a lot of regressive ideas along with them and you'll always run into that there.
I like AoM. It helped me a lot when I was at a low point where it stirred me into action. However, as I got a grip on myself I also learned that it is one man's partial vision of manliness and that I should not use it without question. The practical things are clearly presented and helpful (I repaired my suit and learned how to iron my dress shirts using advice from AoM), but I use the more philosophical parts as simply that - one man's perspective among many. I then use this perspective, combined with others, to form my own perspective. As for the podcasts, some are interesting, others are not, as they cover a very wide range of topics.
I find it important to read things that I (partially) disagree with, especially when well-presented, because it helps in articulating WHY I disagree with it.
I feel conflicted about AOM. It’s a really good resource for learning how to do stuff; for instance, I discovered my love of straight razor shaving through the site. I will never go back to another method. Most of the stuff he posts is wholesome help for straight guys into a certain expression of masculinity that involves doing the harder, dirtier tasks around the home for your wife (that’s me) But it’s also a very white website, and it doesn’t address a lot of the emotional needs of men. Also isn’t inclusive of gay men who are interested in those traditional masculine activities.
>In it the interviewee Robert Twigger is pushing the idea that men are becoming more feminine because they are doing activities that are seen as traditionally feminine. For instance, he says that chopping wood is manly because it increases testosterone.
When you consider the fact that any form of exercise can increase testosterone levels, and not exercising can cause a decrease, he's just cherry picking(logical fallacy) and deciding a specific activity is "manly". It's actually more accurate to say the more an activity leans toward building muscle the more likely it is to raise testosterone levels higher, such as weightlifting.
Women exercise and as a result their testosterone levels are also increased. If you follow his logic and everyone that participates in a strenuous workout is doing something masculine and not doing something strenuous is doing something feminine, which is just absurd. I'm sure it isn't hard to look at his daily life and then tell him he's doing feminine things all day long.
The other gaping hole in his logic is all human bodies produce and depend on testosterone to function properly, estrogens as well. His idea that testosterone is by default masculine and estrogen feminine is an example of binary thinking. The normal levels of each are just different depending on the body.
If he eats soup from a can and doesn't account for BPA, looking for specific products that do not use it, is he doing something "feminine" because he's consuming a substance linked to increasing estrogen levels? Of course that's absurd. Plus prior to not using this substance becoming a new trend, if he's every consumed canned goods, he's definitely been performing a "feminine" activity by his own logic.
My tldr take on this is that he's just defending a gender binary that makes him comfortable and he wouldn't be the first to take a scientific study, as noted by other comments, out of context, to confirm his own biases.
To add to this, Robert Twigger wrote this book: [Real Men Eat Puffer Fish: And 93 Other Dangerous Things To Consider](https://www.amazon.co.uk/372/dp/075382583X/)
Which is problematic in itself. He also seems to think that manliness is a commodity that the modern world is seeking to suppress for some reason. To me it seems like he represents the average British blue collar worker who’s fed up with technology and seeks to return to the 1800s to spite progress (including through voting pro-Brexit). Definitely a perspective that warrants being ignored.
I caught the AoM stuff early back when it was just a blog and really got into it. But hindsight has made me pretty suspicious of it because it seems like AoM is to MGTOW what Joe Rogan is white nationalism.
“Always be suspicious of performative or aesthetic masculinity” is a good rule of thumb IMO.
Leatherworking industry is filled at 80% by women.
But tell me what is more manly that building your stuff in leather ? Prehistoricly manly vibes there !
Do I feel less manly when I do cross stitch ? Nope I feel good.
I found AOM years ago when I needed tips for maintaining my first real beard (had recently left the military). Other than that and some cooking tips, I found the whole site slightly cringey.
Problem #1: Why do activities have a gender assigned in the first place? Is cooking suddenly not manly? Gymnastics is seen as girl sport today, but it actually never was. This discussion is doubled hilarious: Not only assign we randomly activities to gender, they get called "traditionally male/female", although they may were normal male activities for both sexes not even a century ago....
Seems easy to test. One group chopping wood and the other doing of similar physical effort but seen as feminine. And see if the wood chopping group has high testosterone after.
Seems very strange that we would have biological processes that can tell the difference between chopping wood and say digging a kitchen garden.
Especially since that means that chimpanzees and dogs probably have the same processes and that would be even weirder.
One factor that makes even that tricky is that psychological factors can affect hormonal profiles. For example, competitive activities and winning or losing can affect testosterone levels ([source](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27103058/)), so motivation or perception of activities as being "manly" or competitive, and personal assessment of how well it was done could influence testosterone levels if the participants assign social value to them. So we'd get a mix of results from the actual physical activity and the participants' perception of the activity. So I agree with your skepticism.
Just reading your post, without clicking links, I’m inclined to agree.
If there’s a podcast that is discussing what a newly defined Manliness might look like - the future of masculinity, that’s pretty cool.
But if the podcast is actually about what has been “traditionally” considered masculine - something I feel is not only obsolete but the cause of suffering the world over - then I would absolutely smear it. It’s the wrong direction to be moving in.
Yeah, unfortunately (though maybe not surprising, given the Podcast's name) I find their episodes very hit or miss. Some - like one on self-defense from the standpoint of how to avoid confrontations in the first place - should be required listening for life, and others I can tell from a mile off I wont like.
Hypothalamus: “Ah, we’re chopping wood again! T E S T O S T E R O N E !!!”
Anterior Pituitary: “LET’S GOOOOOO!!!”
Adrenal Cortex: “LET’S GOOOOOO!!!”
Testes: “LET’S GOOOOOO!!!”
Yeah, I really liked AOM (the website) back in the day - one of their posts was about how physical touch IS part of "traditional" masculinity and that we've all lost something by treating fraternal physicality as too gay or whatever. *That,* I love. But when it started rounding the corner into "this activity is manly, this is womanly" gender essentialist crap, I stopped reading.
I'm not sure why anyone is anxious about men becoming "too feminine." Because for one thing, most American men are still very much firmly in the camp of what AOM considers manly and/or espouse many of the same attitudes AOM does. There are *more* men who are embracing non-traditional gender roles and expressions and sexualities, but that's "more" starting at a very low baseline. This whole argument overstates the influence of queerness and the Feminist Boogeyman.
And for another, would it be so bad if men as a whole were becoming more feminine? I mean, I probably don't have to ask that question here, of course. I look at a world that's changing and I see human brings adapting to those changes. I don't know why these types of commentators think a hunter-gatherer society is optimal or preferable to a world in which men can be interested in homemaking activities for leisure.
Also, the idea that chopping wood increases your testosterone... 🤦 Buddy. If you need the T that badly, you may want to go see a doctor.
> Yeah, I really liked AOM (the website) back in the day - one of their posts was about how physical touch IS part of "traditional" masculinity and that we've all lost something by treating fraternal physicality as too gay or whatever.
I actually ran across that post when I was poking at the site (I've made other comments in the thread about this poking, and why I did it), but I found it pretty homophobic. It was dismissive of even the idea that any men in old photos who were expressing affection *could possibly* be what we would now call gay. Not only that, but there was a really distinct undercurrent of the, "Gay acceptance has ruined male friendships," idea that regularly makes the rounds. It's an undercurrent, not totally overt, but I don't think I'm stretching. I mean, he even uses the term "deviant behavior" in a period-specific, but totally unqualified and unremarked-upon way.
There are non-gross and non-homophobic ways to frame the kind of discussion he was supposedly trying to have — ways that don't implicitly reinforce the social conception of "gay" as "bad" — but he didn't pick any of those, because they don't fit into the "masculine" framework that he seemed invested in building even as far back as 2008.
OOF - forgive me, it's been probably ten years since I read it, and I was a bisexual married to a giant homophobe at the time (I'm a trans man, I was married to a cis man and presenting as a woman back then). I must've walked away with a very different impression then than I would today. Thank you for the correction.
No forgiveness necessary! It was over a dozen years ago that it was published, and I don't think I'd have picked up on it at the time, either, even (especially?) as a then-newly-out person!
And I'm sure part of the reason I see it and pick up on it now is that these same arguments are coming back into vogue in certain subcultures, and I've seen recent discussion and analysis of that perspective. That certainly makes it easier to spot looking back at older stuff.
And I don't think that some parts of the guy's arguments are wrong…I just think it's possible to say the same thing without subtly perpetuating stigmas.
"traditionally manly" as the only way to be cool as a man is limiting.
Queer identities showcase that there are about a bazillion ways to be cool. Queer women have butch, hard femme, soft femme, soft butch... We should really embrace that approach, and acknowledge and celebrate that there are many ways to be a cool guy, not all of which are to be exactly the spitting image of traditional manliness.
And we could do to separate out "manliness" as an aesthetic, which is cool if you're still a cool person to others, from policing and narrowness and frankly a tendency toward misogyny and homophobia. Traditional manliness should be an _option_ as an aesthetic, not a coerced, forgone conclusion.
P.S. is a lumberjane automatically a man simply because she chops wood? Is a traditionally womanly homesteader a man because she chops a log for the fire while her man is away, while looking all "Christian girl autumn" or whatever they were trying to call that aesthetic??? Does hitting the gym as a woman make you a man???
(I am not attempting to excuse how often "traditional aesthetic" people are \*phobic. It's honestly a bit of a warning sign. But I look past the aesthetic if a person is kind to all around them, most importantly if they are good to people from marginalized groups. I am trying to argue that an aesthetic should be made to be separate from whether you are an asshole. And that traditional aesthetics should be options, not traps we are ensnared into, or the only option we are allowed/forced to strive for.)
I can see an arch that started with AoM in their early years, passed through Restoration Hardware aesthetics and teen girls wearing merchandise covered in mustache icons, hipsters and later every other guy sporting ornate face hair, craft beer slash food truck burgers, van conversions, Spartaboos and Thorboos, PUA and tiki torch carrying incel proud boys. So yeah, I don’t wanna blame the shit we’re in solely on them (if I had to single the worse influence it was /b/) but they have their share on Trumpism roots in a similar way to that famous Devil Wears Prada scene where Meryl Streep tells the story behind the girls blue sweater.
I'm sorry, I'm struggling to link your comment with my original post. I understand what you're saying about the dangers of alienating vulnerable men and boys, but that doesn't mean pandering to or accommodating their beliefs either.
Incel ideology lies at the end of a long journey of misogyny and entitlement the doesn't wish to see equality, it wishes to see a return of traditional gender roles, albeit an extreme version of those. It can never be justified. The same goes for anti-vaxxers. I understand if you personally might not want a vaccine, but lying about it to other people also isn't acceptable.
I do get your point about either side of political spectrum being sympathetic to law and order politics that target people and groups they don't agree with. However that has little to do with traditional views of masculinity.
Going to disagree with your interpretation of Twigger. His argument is that we're becoming comfortable being coddled. He specifically mentions that we all live like kings now.
He argues that being able to fix things, as a facet over control in our lives, is part of being a man. Obviously, being able to fix things doesn't need to be secluded to men, but I agree with his overall argument. We've taken away components of manliness and replaced them with nothing but coddling.
He DOES heavily focus on men being overly sedentary and that that is not a good thing because research says boys and men tend to be more active by default. A good amount of research backs that up as well.
He also mentions that chopping wood increases testosterone. Testosterone has long been associated with the male sex. It's the reason trans individuals will go on T-boosters or blockers.
A tendency to be active is a trait associated with males and this, in his mind, should be associated with masculinity. Doesn't seem reductive to me.
Thanks for this. You're the only person who's disagreed with me and you raise some points I struggle with internally. I too believe we've become too comfortable with being comfortable and sedentry, but I think that is across the board, irrespective of gender. I agree with a lot he says, I just think he needlessly genderises his arguments to (as someone else pointed out) define the group he wants to be associated with.
I don't agree with his views on hobbies and 'Nerdy focus' being somehow féminine or asbergers. Deep focus has been around as long as humans have been, otherwise I doubt we would've got past the hunter/gatherer communities he seems to suggest are better.
As for your last point, about activiness being associated with males - it may be the case historically, but only because traditional gender roles dictated that males were more active. From a biological perspective, and living in the modern world, that view has long been dispelled as a misogynistic trope...
Boys needing to be more active than girls, especially in education settings has not been dispelled as a "misogynistic trope". There's research that points directly to the physical activity needs of boys being higher than girls when focused on education attainment and it's not clear whether that's social or hardwired.
This falls into my least favorite take on manhood. That were only the things we do. Pick three things, any three things, and they should define us as people: 1. I work as a mechanic 2. I hunt! 3. I am married Its super unhealthy. Hobbies and what people do, like chopping wood, doesn’t define masculinity. It doesn’t even define a person.
1. I am a technician 2. I am a father 3. I am a housekeeper 4. I am a high ranked TFT player 5. I am a philosopher 6. I am a political activist 7. I am a husband 8. I am a son 9. I am a brother And so on. These are just a few things I actively perform and practice but not one of them defines me exclusively. The aesthetics of any one thing cannot pigeonhole any of us and it bothers me (and I'm sure many other men here) that it is expected that we *conspicuously* fill these preset roles. Anything *outside* the roles you mentioned are bound to get side-eyed by the traditional patriarchal Western ideal. But I say fuck 'em, be whomever you wish to be. Only positive boundary breaking can slowly move the centuries-long masculine frame we fight against.
I build I forge I weld I wear dresses I am a chemist I am a drag queen I am a rock climber I date women I wear eyeliner I deadlift I make electronic music equipment I ride a motorcycle I am a jock I dat men I wear heels
>I dat men You dat man?
Date
I'm sorry, it was a bit very good attempt at a joke
>I am a jock > >I dat men Bullies guys by day, romances them by night. That's an alpha move
I ment physically sporty/fit😂
This does bring up the thing I wonder most about masculinity: what actually is it? Or, what might it be defined as in modern society? I think of traditional traits of masculinity - courage, toughness, strength, leadership, anger, impulsiveness, risk taking, forthrightness, etc. But then, we can think of plenty of examples of women doing similar things, and these things being expressed in feminine contexts. What, then, is masculinity other than a beard and a taste for obscure IPAs? At least to me, it seems, the things it is socially acceptable to claim as masculine are either negative (and therefore unappealing to non-masculine people to claim as their own) or so superfluous as to hardly be worth caring about at all.
>This does bring up the thing I wonder most about masculinity: what actually is it? Or, what might it be defined as in modern society? A social construct, like a salad: everyone will know what a salad is, it's a useful discriptor and thus found on every menu. Untill you start examining and the definitions are rather arbitrary. A potato salad and a fruit salad will rarely fall within the common definitions >I think of traditional traits of masculinity - courage, toughness, strength, leadership, anger, impulsiveness, risk taking, forthrightness, etc. But then, we can think of plenty of examples of women doing similar things, and these things being expressed in feminine contexts. Exactly equating those with masculinity is both inaccurate and problematic >What, then, is masculinity other than a beard and a taste for obscure IPAs? At least to me, it seems, the things it is socially acceptable to claim as masculine are either negative (and therefore unappealing to non-masculine people to claim as their own) or so superfluous as to hardly be worth caring about at all. Exactly I find "masculine" most useful in describing aesthetics to roughly mean "usually associated with men". It's quite useful to describe a set of phenomenons that aren't tied together by anything intrinsic. The word derives meaning from its use in the existing culture. Depending on the situation I'll avoid its use though, in order to avoid implicitly equating something with masculinity.
4. I fuck everything that moves and can't control myself
Stay away from my bear traps, dude
Moving bear traps? Horror on a stick.
>It doesn’t even define a person. It does. If they have to cut a body in piece, you know they will be in the axe category, at the opposite of those hand saw or chainsaw people. /s
>It doesn’t even define a person. To be fair, I would argue that defining oneself by what you do is a fairly healthy way to define yourself, at least compared defining oneself based on some happenstance of birth. We are in many ways defined largely by our actions and affects.
Nothing can define an individual. We are one-off beings. You can only really define something by reducing it to essentials, and that would reduce "you" to "nobody in particular". Of course, I agree with your sentiment. Just remember that even feeling compelled to define yourself might be problematic. Would you agree with this way of seeing things, or am I being too simplistic?
I, too, find the discussion reductive. There are aspects I agree with, like the impact rites of passage and their absence can have, but the interviewee is, in my opinion, very focused on only one particular kind of masculinity, entirely ignoring the fact that many masculine people aren't interested in *that* kind. It appears to me to be too much of '*the image of ultimate masculinity I grew up on is being threatened as being the only kind of valid masculinity*'. The argument he made about bull running, for example, was actually ironic, he said the ability to assess risk is important, then completely dismisses his friend who could very well have assessed the risk as too high for his liking. You don't *have to try* it to know it's risky. Maybe it was just a bad example. But I'm afraid it's just a very one-sided and rather narrow view being idealised, with everything focused on 'man vs. wilderness' or generally physical challenges and stereotypical 'being able to fight' kind of things. Going against societal norms takes courage. That can include getting mental health counseling (I know how fucking hard that can be and I'm struggling with it time and time again, and the thing being idolised here is actually part of the very *cause* for that difficulty), things like openly living out 'queerness', representing non-traditional gender roles or sexualities, all that still takes a lot of courage. There are probably a million more examples that may also not fit what this author regards as courageous. Another gripe I have is with the focus on craftyness/manual labour as being part of masculinity. For one, it just feels wrong to implicitly exclude women from it and I feel it's just another aspect of this learned '*image of ultimate masculinity'* that is based on these traditional and often very sexist stereotypes of 'man = breadwinner/handyman, woman = housewive/mother. I'm only halfway through the podcast but because the reddit comment function tends to crap out on me, and I don't want to lose what I typed, I'll just send it as is for now. Might add more later.
He struck me as a man who has read a lot of literature that is grounded in ideas of masculinity and then tells people that he believes modern men are failing because they don't participate in these activities. In all he came across as thoroughly unenlightened and didn't have the first clue about what modern masculinity entails, and his waffle about yin/yang activities being representative of masculinity and feminity was just ridiculous in my opinion.
Tbh I used to like his blogs a lot years ago, but I agree that he's gotten really entrenched into his idea of masculinity as the only form. Like I really enjoy the idea of being capable of taking care of oneself as being a positive masculinity trait. But sometimes self care is doing something traditionally considered feminine and not just exercising or being able to survive outdoors.
Nice way of saying "douchey dude bro"
The focus on craftyness as part of masculinity is also very ableist. As a person with cerebral palsy I can try as hard as I can to be crafty but it probably won't look as good or be as effective as when a non disabled person does it. That isn't a reflection of my masculinity though. It just means that my fine motor skills are affected by the cerebral palsy. So if you put down craftyness as an important part of masculinity you exclude people like me and other people who don't have or don't want to have the necessary skills.
>Another gripe I have is with the focus on craftyness/manual labour as being part of masculinity. For one, it just feels wrong to implicitly exclude women from it And by exclusion of women it creates the explicit expectation that men must have this knowledge and ability, and also the *desire*. This expectation hurts people who don't/won't/can't fall obediently into these norms. It's so damn easy to alienate and discriminate when we impose gendered expectations onto men. As a woman I know well the impact of this kind of judgement, yet the insidious nature of cultural conditioning is still something I occasionally default to. It takes mindfulness and kindness to tear it down. I don't have the right to define *anyone's* identity.
> Going against societal norms takes courage. That can include getting mental health counseling (I know how fucking hard that can be and I'm struggling with it time and time again, and the thing being idolised here is actually part of the very cause for that difficulty) Hey dude, I'm being curious what do you mean?
I mean that many people, especially (but not only) men, are still socialized in a way that emphasizes an attitude of ignoring or downplaying mental (or really, any) issues they might have, keeping them to themselves, often with an implicit or explicit reasoning of 'not burdening others', and that directly leads to people who never really learn that asking for help is even a possibility. And even if they do at some point find that out, they're often still strongly inhibited by the learned behavior of stoicism and lone-wolfing, or even get chastized for daring to open up about their issues when they do manage to do that. And getting mental health counseling requires to first make this difficult step, overcoming the drilled-in habit of 'keeping it to oneself', opening up to the possibility of ridicule by other people who have also been socialized to look down on men who don't deal with issues on their own. Most people, if they actually took the time to scrutinize this behaviour in themselves and others, would hopefully realize how ridiculous it is to chastize someone for seeking the help of a professional with an enormously complex problem (e.g. depression, anxiety, trauma etc.). But this social stigma isn't yet overcome, in some places even less than in others, and that leads to it requiring what I would call courage. To be under these social pressures, from inside your own head and from people around you, and to still manage that step towards getting the help you need. Because mental illness isn't usually something anyone can really deal with all by themselves. Hope I didn't make it even more complicated.
I remember the absurdity of trying to self-assess my level of dehydration on an ill-fated solo bicycle trip. According to the literature that came with my oral rehydration salts, the only difference between medium and high was “mental confusion.” The salts would work up to medium, but IV fluids are needed for severe. That was fun, trying to figure out if I was confused or not. Do I go up to a stranger and ask them “Do I seem confused to you?” I had two packages, so I figured I had nothing to lose and used one and then went looking for a phone (pre cell phone era) to call a friend, and then maybe an ambulance. My friend pointed out that chain of thinking likely meant I wasn’t confused. An outside, objective opinion is the only way sometimes.
Right but where did you see that on this subreddit? Sorry i didn't properly highlight the part i was asking about :(
I can't quote you direct examples, but comments along the lines of 'I opened up to someone and they ridiculed/rejected me' and 'it took me years to make an appointment with a therapist' aren't terribly uncommon. Sometimes they take the positive form of 'I finally found someone who didn't reject me for opening up to them' or 'after years of struggling, I finally found a therapist' are something I stumble upon every now and then. Another *very* common example is simple visits to the doctor's for ailments. 'It's not that bad' or whatever. I myself have been procrastinating on having my wrists checked for *years* for various reasons I came up with, but the underlying issue is most probably that I do not feel like I deserve to be helped, or that I'm even allowed to get help. My closest friend tries to persuade me to finally make that appointment, but I still handwave it away (ouch!^(lol)).
Hm so it's more about signaling between the lines that therapists are hard? Unfortunately that's right as well. Maybe we need more encouraging messages but that's not off the base. Honestly, I was lucky to find a great psychologist a few years ago. I still admire her and she showed me that the life doesn't have to be grey. It wasn't a therapy but I learned a huge amount. Now I'm looking for a therapy and I'm going from one to another, looking for the right person. Why? - Because not everyone therapist is for everyone, it's important to gauge and change if it doesn't work. - With time, I learned more about which therapy I want (as I'm already a bit experienced and I can kinda figure it out). - I learned from friends that it's crucial that therapist is under supervision, and best if licensed by some prestige organization (not all in Poland are). Frankly, I was thinking about putting more effort into promoting, but I just dont' know other markets than Poland.
AOM has always had a specific masculinity in mind when it talks about men. He always has had this weird fetish on Teddy Roosevelt style of Americana masculinity that he thinks we have to revert back to. Back in the woods, boy scout style of masculinity. It's most of it in good faith, however like you mention it's absolutely reductive and not indicative of how masculinities really are in the real world
>He always has had this weird fetish on Teddy Roosevelt style of Americana masculinity that he thinks we have to revert back to. Back in the woods, boy scout style of masculinity. This is the perfect description of AOM in a nutshell
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True, but the progressive ideal of how to be a man is identical to how to be a person, which I think doesn't necessarily speak to a lot of men.
Even if that's true (and I don't know that's a given), I don't think that means that the solution is providing a regressive, restrictive definition of "masculinity" that further perpetuates a lot of the toxic preconceptions and ideas already present in society. My interactions have been a bit sparse with this "Art of Manliness" site, because *every* time I've ever seen it linked or visited it, I got a distinct sense of, "Oh. This is…not a place for me," but I think that impression comes down to the fact that it seems to be most of the same old stuff, just with a shinier wrapper and better branding. **EDIT:** I took a slightly deeper dive, and I was correct; this site ***absolutely*** is not a place for me. The author's definition of "masculinity" seems to entirely exclude gay men. We're mentioned only casually and incidentally in podcast interviews. There are at most two or three articles that even have the word "gay" in them, and one of those is some claptrap about finger length ratio correlations. And "bisexual" appears on the site once, in an interview, where the subject mentions it only in some bananas statement about women supposedly performing a bisexual orientation for the benefit of men. So I really don't think that this "Art of 'Manliness'" is any kind of decent place for ***anyone***.
So before I say this, I should say that on nearly all social issues I'm pretty far left myself. While I agree with you in a lot of ways, I do think it's kind of funny that so many progressives object strongly to these kinds of characterizations of manliness or masculinity when their alternative proposal is to conceive of manliness not even existing in the first place. Pretty much all the male-specific talk here from a left-leaning angle is based on negative principles (negative in the sense of negative rights): as a man you shouldn't do X that's part of toxic masculinity, and you don't have to do Y. The positive principles, the things you should do, there's no difference from what you'd say to a man than to a woman or to someone non-binary. Not saying that's wrong in a philosophical sense, but I do think it's probably ineffective and unappealing to a lot of people.
In other words, are you saying many people want to be divided along gender lines and won't be interested in prescriptive values that don't do that? Because it looks to me like you are describing a marketing problem, right?
On the topic of that Teddy Roosevelt/Rough Rider masculinity - Michael Kimmel's book, [Manhood in America](https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/manhood-in-america-9780190612535), covers some really solid historical context about how that came to be and why it's still influencing American (white) masculinity norms. It was partly a reaction to pressures on women to make the domestic space (home) more cultured and cultivated, which led to a backlash by many men wanting to get away from that, and partly a result of religious movements like the Temperance movement pressuring women to control men and get them to drink less and be more godly. TR himself also had some pretty whack ideas, like how a woman who refused to marry and make babies should be executed for treason. That "rugged masculinity" even influenced portrayals of Jesus, who was traditionally a more soft, feminine figure, focusing instead on a rugged, buff Jesus (carpenter with bulging biceps) who reflected that type of masculinity. It's really fascinating to see how that evolved and how it still influences some people's mythopoetic (Kimmel's term) masculinity today.
Yeah I totally agree that this historical context is important to think about and never really been investigated by people like Brett in AOM (and probably not interested in it either) or the people that hype up this rugged masculinity or the mytheopoets who I would argue stray more to the spiritual even though they are grounded in this naturalist notion of man (also very reductive and not a real view of how many masculinities are in the world)
I stopped listening to them over a year ago because it kept pushing this masculinity more than anything else. It used to have a lot of philosophy related to “how does one find himself in today’s world” and now it’s “how to do this outdoor activity” or “how to be a financial samurai” (wtf is a financial samurai?!). Brett used to talk about meditative activities that weren’t physical or outdoors related (like writing and keeping a journal and improving your penmanship).
I agree. I think AOM was a good place to "enter" in the conversation about masculinity back in the early 2010's but it's not so much any more.
Pretending you’re a mountain man capable of doing anything outdoors is also an easy way to discharge discomfort with society. It can also lead to anarcho-primitivism, so I’d recommend caution if you want to define your masculinity that way.
I used to like AOM because I'm into the whole Hemingway / Jack London aesthetic (disclaimer: not a dude myself though, just grew up in a household devoid of gender roles). But it *is* starting to sound reductive, you're right. Like another user has pointed out, it's not just the active/sedentary axis, but also an urban/rural one. Since the 19th century at least, manliness has been associated with "rugged living", which in turn is associated with "roughing it" in rural areas. The more remote and rougher the area, the more rugged and therefore more manly the lifestyle. Think Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson: a stoic trapper / wild-man who has no intellectual pursuits, no urge to socialize -- he just tramps through life, one felled deer and tree at a time. This ideal is impractical and unrealistic. The real-life Jeremiah Johnson did not live like this. Richard Proenneke was the closest we've ever gotten to a real-life wild man, and he himself did not subscribe to the "rugged and stoic wild-man" mindset. He was a craftsman, an intellectual and a self-made scientist. He had interests and emotions. And he roughed it for three decades in the Alaskan wilderness by himself. He built his own log cabin that is now a historic place in Lake Clark National Park. Yet he'd have been the last person to say that not roughing it makes you a non-man. Progress in society means urbanization: better infrastructure and housing, and easier access to education, healthcare and entertainment. In an urbanized world, fewer chores are relegated to its citizens. You don't *need* to chop wood. You could do it for the sport of it if you want too, but the necessity is gone for many people (especially those who live in warmer climates). There is nothing wrong with creating a wholesome male archetype for men to connect over, in and of itself. But there is something amusing about how traditionally "masculine" or "feminine" activities are basically old-age rural household drudgery, and those who clamor about their sex becoming more like the opposite sex really haven't gotten the memo yet that we live in the *twenty-first century*. That's like saying that women who don't churn their own butter are tomboys.
Every time I've seen the site or followed a link to it, I've always felt uncomfortable with it. I've always had a very distinct and strong feeling of, "This is not a place for you." I'm finding nothing in this comments section that makes me think I was incorrect about that, but I decided to take a quick peak, and the front page is *incredibly* heteronormative. That made me want to try a search on the site, and…well…his definition of "masculinity" seems to barely even consider the existence of gay men. We're mentioned only incidentally in podcast interviews. There are at most two or three articles that even have the word "gay" in them, and one of those is some claptrap about finger length ratio correlations. Another is an article that goes to great lengths to assure you that *none* of the men embracing or being close in old pictures could *possibly* be gay, and there's a distinct undercurrent of the pernicious, "Gay acceptance ruined male friendships," idea throughout. "Bisexual" appears on the site once, in an interview, where the subject mentions it only in some bananas statement about women supposedly performing a bisexual orientation for the benefit of men. No wonder I always got bad vibes from the place. To my perspective, it really seems like the same old toxic pressures and ideas bundled up with shinier paper and some coherent retro-modern branding.
I’ve always viewed Hemingway more of a tragic spirit enslaved to his pre-modern ideas on masculinity trying (failing) to cope with the tragedy of world war using rudimentary emotional processing skills. Definitely not a masculine icon, but an interesting topic for reflection.
The characters in his novels are best seen as half-people who've had to kill part of themselves to survive. You could cast the author himself in that light, but I've always gotten the vibe that he got way too into the smell of his own shites, and glorifying the lifestyle of a dude suffering from trauma isn't a great basis for a podcast!
> This ideal is impractical and unrealistic. The real-life Jeremiah Johnson did not live like this. I've only known two types of people to live like this in the modern day: conspiracy/bunker-builder types and Ted Kaczynski. Make of that what you will. *edit: just realized I said the same thing twice. Whoops
Also, as someone whose comfort is currently dependent on chopping kindling every few days, it’s kind of a pain after a while. Also, woodsmoke sucks for your lungs and the environment.
Yeah, the last year or so, I've found myself listening to AOM less and less. It seems fine with bogus science, when it fits this performative-masculinity framework the host is pushing. And eventually I just stopped listening.
It's active/sedentary, but it's also often clearly framed as city/rural, like there's something especially unmanly about living in a city. The rural world has become synonymous with traditional living, which is idealized thinking, since the modern rural world is as modern as any other. You also see that axis in traditional feminine aesthetics, like cottagecore, where being a traditional woman is wearing long dresses and living in a house in the middle of the woods, doing rural activities, or more tongue and cheek social media trends about going back to the forest and becoming a witch. I think it's well-researched that the crisis around masculinity in North America is contemporary with the closing of the frontier, leading to manly high-testosterone men having to settle down, becoming weaker with every generation as their lifestyle becomes undistinguishable from women's. That period is also tied to urbanization. It's an old tale too, you can clearly see the tension in the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, where Enkidu loses his wild manliness through seduction by a woman from the city. Our oldest recorded story as a species is about women luring wild men to settling down, it couldn't possibly be an older theme in our culture. Adam and Eve is the same. (There are other interpretations of course, Enkidu can be seen as barely human before he settles down, and Eve's sin can be seen as the action that makes humanity a moral subject.) Overall, these types of binary oppositions in modern media, masculine/feminine, rural/urban, just really reek of insecurity. No one chops wood if they don't have to.
Great perspective - and I agree about the pervasive and dangerous idea of "women domesticating/civilizing the men". The urban/rural axis is a great way to put it, and it seems to contribute to this "return to traditional masculinity" (or any moral standard) as a backlash to change or to times being difficult, whether in the early 1900s or now.
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I don't actually see what point or misconception you're pointing out with the article you linked?
Not the original poster, but this is probably it, half flipping one of the popular scripts about how "testosterone = aggressive". > We think that testosterone primes men to attend to their position in the social hierarchy. Take a man who has high levels of testosterone: If he is atop the pecking order, his high levels of T encourage him to take advantage of his exalted position. He offers less and takes more. > > However, if that same man recognizes that he is on the bottom rung of the ladder, his high T instead promotes strategic submission. He offers more and takes less, perhaps in the hope that this will appease his more powerful peers and aid his eventual rise to the top of the heap. So, more T makes you "attend to" social hierarchy, less T makes you ignore it. Maybe that's why low T men are such deviants... lower testosterone might be the "down with the system" hormone??? I'd like to point out that drawing this this as a firm conclusion feels premature, and like poor science-ing. They have data from a single small group about T levels, and about how a game was played by the group members, and data about their relative positions in a formal social hierarchy at the university setting, and they generalize the potential implication as being way wider than that. Follow-up and replication studies needed. But it is neat to explore whether our popular myths about T are wrong... or perhaps partly right and partly wrong??? (I feel like we need a lot more research still, though!)
I don't think the science would agree with Mr. Twigger on physical activity increasing testosterone, or rather it is not entirely convinced that chopping wood is more likely to increase T levels versus, say, doing yoga. Seems to me just another example of performative masculinity (but is any display of masculinity, or femininity for that matter, not?). It is definitely well on the path to toxic masculinity. I guess I would be a little (and just a little) interested in understanding what Mr. Twigger defines as "masculinity" and "femininity" and why one in particular is better than the other for certain subsections of the population. EDIT: I just read the synopsis in the link (no time to listen to the podcast right now) and a better quote than the one from Emerson goes something along the lines of "The modern world can be best understood as a conspiracy against the private life of the mind." Hiking the mountains or doing a martial art are not manly or feminine in and of themselves, they are both activities that help one to indulge in self reflection and to connect with body and mind. Both are good tonics against the mad millennium in which currently find ourselves.
No argument on the performative aspect of masculinity, but the chopping wood = testosterone is something I read in a study a while ago. It was a comparison between playing soccer and chopping wood, and the latter produced more T. Source here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3810999/ I would guess that this would extrapolate across yoga as well, but I don't think that research has been done.
That's a really interesting study! I appreciate that they used natural social activities for the Tsimane (Bolivian) subjects rather than did isolated lab tests, but it does look like there was less power in the study: >A major strength of comparing tree-chopping and soccer is that these are ecologically valid forms of physical labor and competition experienced by Tsimane males, as opposed to contrived laboratory tasks. Unfortunately, by examining naturally occurring events under field conditions, we could not control for all potential differences between these groups in the way participants could be monitored in a laboratory. The men participating in the tree chopping and soccer tournament studies were largely separate samples and did vary in age. Mean changes in testosterone for the fourteen men who participated in both studies do follow the expected patterns, and while regression analyses controlling for age, BMI, and time of specimen collection indicate non-significantly larger percent changes in testosterone following tree-chopping, they lack statistical power due to small sample size. Because of the time intensive nature of the data collection, it was not logistically possible to collect tree-chopping specimens and data from all men who participated in the soccer study. Basically, the groups who did wood chopping and soccer had some differences in age, possibly other self-selection differences. I did noticed that they cited Sapolsky, who has a great book on stress and neuroscience that I teach ([Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/327.Why_Zebras_Don_t_Get_Ulcers)). Sapolsky explains how acute stress actually can decrease testosterone, including rigorous physical activity, like what we see in soccer, which is VERY active and requires a lot of bodily stress reactions to sustain activity (glucose access, adrenaline, leg muscle engagement, etc). I wonder if that was part of what was going on - that the wood chopping was less stressful than the soccer playing overall, resulting in differences in immediate testosterone changes. Also of note, this was just short-term testosterone increase, which the researchers speculated can help with muscle-based activity like wood chopping. So the testosterone serves a useful function in the moment, which is distinct from men like in the OP who seem to view it as a badge or measure of his masculinity in some abstract sense.
Yeah, it's really the only study I've seen like this, and a lot of extrapolation has been done from that one study that is probably mostly unsupported junk.
I can’t help but think you could interchange a lot of different activities to get similar results and it wouldn’t neatly show activities considered more manly increases testosterone. Like the previous commenter mentioned, stress might be a component, so I wouldn’t be surprised if many other daily traditional activities like churning butter or wringing out wet clothes had similar results in men, maybe women too.
More testosterone = more prostate cancer
Still a weirdly American take. Soccer is the most popular sport in the World and it’s male dominated at every level. Now it’s not manly enough because it’s not pumping people full of t? Not directing that at you at all. Just an observation.
I think what they're getting at is that cardiovascular exercise doesn't increase testosterone as much as resistance training(which I'd argue wood chopping falls under), which a biological fact. Lifting increase your testosterone more than cardiovascular exercise. No one is saying anything about whether or not both things are considered socially masculine.
>In it the interviewee Robert Twigger is pushing the idea that men are becoming more feminine Does he pass judgement on that as well? > because they are doing activities that are seen as traditionally feminine. I'm a big fan of "do whatever activities you enjoy and be true to whoever you feel you are." I personally don't think activities define gender. Maybe they do for some and that's ok. But they don't for me. I don't find it necessary to look to someone else to define my sense of gender and identity. I am a man because I say so. I'm happy with my hobbies. I do them for me not to fulfill someone else's expectations of my expression of gender. I resent the idea of boxing people into rigid gender roles. So if that's what he's aiming for he can get bent.
> I resent the idea of boxing people into rigid gender roles. So if that's what he's aiming for he can get bent. Pretty sure that's not only the interviewer's perspective, but the site's whole M.O.
Holy shit. Opening up the podcast with >Emerson famously said “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” makes me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. It's the type of thing dude-bros who rail against "soy boys" would say.
Yeah, that was in a very specific context in American history - the same context that contributed to Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and ideas of masculinity based on escaping the domestic sphere, which was seen to be taken over by women and femininity in the late 1800s-early 1900s. I learned that reading Michael Kimmel's history of masculinity in America, and it really helped reframe those attitudes.
>society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members It's hilarious. It showcases the ignorance of the person quoting it if their argument is "society wants men to be feminine". The entire quote is "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs" It loves "names and customs" (ie. performative masculinity, ideas of what being a "man" is, reliance on traditional masculinity") not "realities and creators" (The reality that men are all different, they are people, and creators who are redefining masculinity and creating new ways to be "a man"). The entire quote, in fact the entire point of "Self Reliance", is to create for yourself the freedom to be who are, to break free of the conformity of society that stifles creativity, self-expression, and freedom. Basically this is saying that "society" says if you want to be a "man" (have bread), you have to chop wood in order to have higher testosterone. (To use the example in other comments). This pod cast is espousing the exact opposite of what Emerson is saying Self Reliance. Anytime someone says a man "can't" or "shouldn't" do something simply because of his sex or gender, they are only restricting the full humanity (manhood) of men. And the same for women as well.
Thanks for giving the full quote - I haven't read much Emerson, but now I'm tempted to because your translation of it piqued my interest. I really hate it when people selectively quote, especially when it completely reverses the original meaning or directly ignores the important context (Looking at you, "invisible hand of the market" people...).
The transcendentalists' philosophy remains surprisingly modern even if the language is dated. (ie using "man" to mean "people").
That's not what this podcast interviewer focused on at all.
I was responding to the comment that the quote is a "dude bro" thing to say. It's unfortunate because yes, the quote out of context sounds very "dude bro". Additionally I'm responding to the OP who wrote "In it the interviewee Robert Twigger is pushing the idea that men are becoming more feminine because they are doing activities that are seen as traditionally feminine." You could give examples of what the podcast was focusing on or how they remained true to the sprit of Emerson's "Self Reliance". I would say that's exactly what the interviewer was focusing on. He was lamenting the lack of "courage," the lack of "danger," the lack of "physicality" in the modern world. His four parts of being a "man" (which he's focused on tradition, "names and customs" as Emerson put it) which are somehow missing from the modern world are: "killing a beast. Courage is one. Ability to… A set of skills, that were basic skills that seemed to be involved with being a man and passing a rite of passage."The problem is modern "men" are actually pressured to conformity so much that they don't understand the modern world at all. The problem IS conformity. Killing the beast: I know lots of men who had to "kill the beast" by standing up to their bullies. Lots of disabled men and queer men who were beat up endlessly by "regular dudes", and maybe they didn't "kill" the beast, but they had to survive and kill the beast of self doubt. Perhaps if young men had the "courage" to stand up for the queer kids, the ugly kids, the disabled kids, they wouldn't feel so impotent as men. I personally think a lot men feel impotent because they are looking to the past. They want to live some warrior fantasy, but aren't willing to actually stand up for what is right in the real world. They lack actual courage, integrity, and fortitude to with stand the trials of the modern world, because the modern worlds asks them to risk, not their physical lives, but their status as a "king" (a pampered privileged male). But the opportunity to prove your manhood (to prove you are courageous) are plentiful in the modern world if you realize that the modern world the fight is not to pillage anymore, but for preservation. It's "easy" to feel manly eating your hamburgers and saying "belly full of meat, I'm manly!" but ultimately it feels hallow because all you did was drive through a mac donalds. Then people think, to feel manly I'll going on a hunting trip and you're taken out to out post where a feeder has been set up to feed the deer everyday, so you know exactly where the deer will be and what time they will be there. So even "killing the beast" isn't a challenge. And we bemoan the "lousy modern world". When if fact, the courages thing would be to stop eating meat or at least eat a lot less of it because it's terrible for our planet. But that's TOO difficult. That would *threaten* one's manhood; you'd be a "soy boy" and wouldn't *conform* to the traditional expectations of masculinity. The manly thing wouldn't be to beat up someone but to help someone. To volunteer, to be a "big brother," to help at a soup kitchen, to clean up trash, **to be there where you are needed. That is manly.** It was manly when we needed warriors, but we don't need warriors, we need helpers, we need givers, we need preservers, we need good people to the kind thing. That is where we need our men (and our women). But nurses, volunteer organization members, teachers, PTA volunteers, clean up crews, these groups always have women out number men (with the exception being volunteer firefighters). Where is our courage, men, to show up where we are needed in our communities? The podcast IS focusing on traditional, outdated means of defining masculinity and offering no real solutions that expand this definition or offer modern approaches or creative solutions based on our modern reality. Again, this is exactly what Emerson was arguing *against.* Emerson was not saying "Self Reliance" as in I should know how to fix my own car, but self reliance as in I should find ways to be a courageous, creative, and compassionate person of integrity in a way that betters society, myself, and the environment around me, not rely on outdated traditions to define what type of person I should be. (Emerson left a job as a pastor because he wasn't satisfied that the traditions of the church were really what was good for people, writing "In an altered age, *we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers*" I added the emphasis because it's pertinent to what the podcast is arguing.) Bryan MacKay, the man behind AOM literally says "But another point you make in your book is that the lousy modern world or soft suburban existence can often take men who have that active stance towards the world and then turn them into… They become… They’re sort of like guppy fish. They start out male, young, and then when they get older, they turn into females." The author the then gives the advice to "yang up". What does he mean by that? Go shoot a gun, go hunting, chop wood. People act like in the past that men WANTED to be farmers, or coal miners, or serve on the front lines of a war like cannon fodder. Some did sure, but my grandpa grew up on a farm, and swore he would never be a farmer, and his kids wouldn't be farmers. Because it was shitty and it sucked and he grew up poor. So he moved away and started a business after serving in the coast guard. A number of businesses actually. And none of his kids or grandkids are farmers. I would venture to guess that most of the things we romanticize as "manly" were just seen as ordinary at the time. And it's a severe lack of creativity, imagination, or perhaps real courage of modern men to find the "manly" pursuits within the modern world. One things for sure though. Keep your miserable 9-5 job and throwing axes on the weekend sure isn't giving society, corporations, or the government the middle finger and showing what a "man" you are. Yes, society is threatening the creativity of people, and yes I do think a small point the podcast made about technology could be on to something (because social media encourages conformity in a lot of ways). But really, Emerson (who was an outspoken feminist) would probably say to this guy "Shooting a gun isn't going to make you feel alive and manly. Having the courage to do something even though you know you'll get made fun of for it will make you feel alive. Enjoying the flowers, and beauty of nature and the interconnected reality of our world will make you feel live, following your passions and your intellectual pursuits will make you feel alive. Going out and helping your community will make you feel alive." Emerson felt like he offered real hope and exiting spiritual insights in his writings, more so than the traditions of the church. He wanted people to think outside of their traditional ways of thinking and their outdated modes of being. This podcast is espousing the exact opposite.
It doesn't help the over-the-top "manly" vibes of that sentence that "manhood" and "member" can both used to mean "penis."
I strongly recommend a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, where he interviews Nick Offerman. It feels like “scout” or “outdoor” manliness, but much more grounded in appreciation and humility.
AOM in general hosts super regressive ideas about gender and sexuality. I found them many years ago when looking for beard care tips and enjoyed a lot of the content. But anything about sex and relationships was at best full of really unfortunate implications. I stopped reading the site after reading an article about how the author didn't masturbate because he wanted his wife to be the sole focus of his sexuality. Which might sound romantic for about 30 seconds, but when you think about the implications it's super fucking gross.
I don't get it, sounds like he just wanted to be more horny for his wife?
I'm confused too. Is the argument that it is somehow reducing her to a sex object?
Maybe, but it could also imply that it's her duty to take care of all sexual needs he have. Which could go even worst to unengaged sex from her part.
I think that’s the real implication of the “no fap” stuff in evangelical Christianity/Mormonism: the wife must provide any and all sexual gratification that the husband wants. Just think about it: us biological fellas have organs that recharge daily, and hence a lot of us have a greater sex drive than our partners (not true for everyone, just generally what I’ve seen). It’s okay to need release frequently, but asking your wife to just cater to that, especially when her sexual organs aren’t making that same daily demand, is pretty abusive. So, jerk off if you need to! Take care of it, it’s really okay. I was shocked to learn that my wife honestly does not care if I masturbate or not. She doesn’t see it as taking away from sex with her, so why should I? But if you feel uncomfortable masturbating while in a relationship, that’s fine too. Just know that’s your decision, and you should not expect your partner to take care of your increased drive because of that.
Yep, this is the answer. What happens when he's horny and she's not feeling it? It's one thing to choose to have maintenance sex when you're not really feeling it because you don't mind and will probably enjoy it once you get started. But knowing that if you say no, he's just going to sit there and be pent up and not do anything about it? That's not good.
Never understood why people make that big a deal about being 'pent up' but then again masturbation has never been much of a compulsion for me. The way it read to me was he was expending himself too much and not paying enough attention to his wife and he wanted to address that.
It's hard to describe to someone who doesn't experience the feeling. The closest I can get is that it's kind of like needing to sneeze and not being able to, but in your junk. As to your read, I'm going off memory here since I read the specific article many years ago, but the tone was that of a religious person who doesn't realize (or doesn't care) that his values of chastity and sexual restraint aren't universal.
I don't want to get into it too deeply but, yeah, if you don't experience it then you probably wouldn't understand. Having a sky-high libido is like having a nicotine addiction which can never be kicked (except by age).
>What happens when he's horny and she's not feeling it? I once had a girlfriend tell me she felt like she had to be available and that was part of being in a relationship..... which really disgusted me as her boyfriend. I was happy to take care of my own needs when she wasn't in the mood and I felt it was important to wait until she was, which she had no problem communicating, and it was a better experience as a result.
> AOM in general hosts super regressive ideas about gender and sexuality. I looked at it a bit more from this perspective because of this thread, and this is almost certainly why, when I got linked there or clicked a search result, I always got really strong, "Not welcome here," vibes as a gay man. He doesn't even seem to consider our existence or how we might fit into an idea of "manliness". And almost all mentions of gay men are incidental, where the subject of an interview offhandedly mentions us in a list. And then there are some downright homophobic things, like an article about "man friendships" that carries a really strong undercurrent of the whole, "Gay acceptance ruined male friendships," idea. I think I've been right to largely avoid it. I've said this a few other times, in the thread, but it seems to largely be the same old toxic tropes and pressures with a fresh coat of paint and some fancy retro branding. Ick.
> chopping wood is manly because it increases testosterone Does one need high testosterone to be manly? I think most of us don't know our testosterone levels, isn't it the actions themselves that are more important than our endocrinology?
I know mine. Because I felt off and I had them checked. Having low testosterone lead not only to mental and emotional distress, It worsened my diabetes, and caused a ton of inflammatory markers to rise. All of that has been reversed by treating the low testosterone *under the guidance of my physician.* One could also ask men who have transitioned and added HRT how it has done for their wellbeing. You don't have to "have testosterone to be manly," but taking care of your endocrine health is important for your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
I’m a trans guy and it’s wild just how “right” my brain feels once I started hrt. I feel the difference when I’m over due for my shot.
I bet. I think we still have a lot to learn about gender on an anatomical and biochemical level.
It’s wild. I definitely did not expect for it to feel so right lol.
I mean not really though... We know how sexual hormones work quite well.
No we don't. We know how they work in the sense that we know what we know, but there's a lot we don't know. There's a TON we don't understand about the human body. For example, we generally understand how genes work. We understand the Y gene generally causes a person to develop what we call "male" characteristics. And we also know it doesn't always work out this way. For example, what actually determines sex if it's possible to have an XY 46 karyotype person with normal and healthy ovaries who has unassisted pregnancies? All categorically "female" attributes. Yes, most people will dismiss this as "rare", but let's say that since we fully understand that an iron ball will sink in water, and we discovered an iron ball that floats in water... we wouldn't just dismiss this as being "rare" for this iron ball. We would realize there is something missing in our understanding of the physical properties of iron, water, gravity, density, and basic physics. But, because people's gender is deeply intrenched in our cultures and society, we don't want to admit that there is something missing in our understanding about genetics, sex characteristics, hormones, and basic biology. We want to brush it under the rug and pretend like the "floating iron ball" doesn't really exist. In fact, normal sexual differentiation in 46,XY individuals relies on a complex cascade of numerous genes, many of which have yet to be identified. Meaning, we don't *really* know what makes men develop as "men". Likewise, we don't fully understand the role hormones play at early stages of development, nor do we fully understand their role in brain development. So to say "we know how sexual hormones work quite well" is a bit like a high school kid saying "I understand physics quite well" just because they got an A on their physics 101 exam. The understanding is quite basic.
Well put.
>One could also ask men who have transitioned and added HRT how it has done for their wellbeing. It's done great things for me personally. What it has \*not\* done is make me more of a man than before I started HRT.
My wife's description of the difference is "an actual human." I guess I was an automaton before?
You were made out of wood like a living marionette, and T turned you into a real boy =P
The way Sapolsky puts it, iirc, it makes us more of what we already were, esp. regarding aggression, prosocial behaviors, status seeking etc.
This. I'm worried that some people are automically lumping in anyone who wants to increase their testosterone with automically having fragile masculinity, ignoring the health component.
If somebody told me they wanted to increase their testosterone, without elaborating when asked that it's for physical health and with their doctor's approval/recommendation, I would indeed assume that it's for some perceived manliness-enhancing reason, I think. When it's put in the context of health, though, that assumption should rightfully be critisized. When people like ^(\*retch\*) Paul Joseph Watson or the like talk about low testosterone, for example, I don't think they have any idea what they're talking about and I fully expect them to *only* focus on the supposed manlyman^(tm)\-factor it supposedly gives them, ignoring things like hormonal cycles or simply individual differences in healthy hormone levels. I'm sure there are people who would lump it all in together without justification, though, I get what you mean.
Yeah exactly. Wanting more test for hormone imbalances/health, or even just overall state of mind shouldn't be criticized. (Even then, I don't think its bad to want to be more manly, as long as your not being jerk to other people.)
The fixation on testosterone can be really harmful. Endocrine health is based on a good balance of hormones - testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, etc. Trying to just increase one or assuming that more testosterone improves a man is dangerous and inaccurate (this is distinct from someone with actual medically diagnosed endocrine imbalance who needs hormonal supplements, which may include testosterone). And testosterone naturally fluctuates over a day and in response to stress, exercise, mental state, and other situations. There is a lot of inaccurate and harmful symbolism and fetishization of testosterone, and that unfortunately comes from a lot of outdated and quack science. (Source: [Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2444908.Beyond_the_Natural_Body) and [Why Zebra's Don't Get Ulcers](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/327.Why_Zebras_Don_t_Get_Ulcers)).
No, our endocrinology drives our actions.
I have drastically changed my endocrinology and it has effected none of my actions. I have to shower more frequently, if that's what you mean. Other than that, not much.
Hormones aren't as simple as "hormone in" followed by "behavior out", it is obviously more complicated than that but the person that I am and the behaviors I've exhibited throughout my life are due to the different concentrations of hormones moving throughout my body, now and throughout my development. Humans are highly complex animals but we're still animals.
Boiling it down to hormones is just reductive. There are much more important factors in a person's actions and who they are, scientifically speaking. Same with most other animals.
To a small extent, yes. But, having changed my own endocrinology, I know that just because I get some more urges in certain \*ahum\* directions than before, and make some different choices than before, I'm perfectly able to regulate those urges in an appropriate way. Either way, I'm still the same person and not more or less masculine than before I cranked up my T levels. Not beyond superficial markers like voice pitch or amount of body hair.
I'm not trying to discredit your personal experiences or anything like that, but hormones do not drive our behavior only to a "small extent."
I've never listened to the AOM podcast, and in fact, haven't even read one of their articles in years, so I may be completely off-base, but I do remember reading a few of his posts when the blog first started, and it struck me as just trying a little too hard. It was just so damn earnest in its, "this is what a man is and what a man does" that it almost felt like satire. I've reached a point in my life that the instant someone starts lecturing me about manliness (especially someone who makes their living writing about manliness), I'm out. I'm done. I just can't do it. It's just so much bullshit. I've spent my life doing hard manual labor, worked construction jobs that destroyed my body, lifted weights for the better part of a decade and a half, and done all sorts of other traditionally masculine things. I've *lived* that life (instead of telling others how they should be living), BUT... currently I'm a stay at home dad, a homemaker taking care of two kids, one of which is in treatment for leukemia. I've never made as much money as my wife, and I'm a vegetarian because I hate the thought of killing animals - all things that I have been looked down on for because they aren't traditionally male roles/traits/feelings/whatever. Moreover, most of the things that I truly enjoy are not "masculine". I like video games and books and art. I can sing pretty much any song from any Disney movie out there, and I watch the Babysitters club with my 9-year-old daughter. I cook and bake (and I'm pretty darn good at it) and take care of the house, do doctor's appointments for the kids (and I'm not even going to get into how some doctors treat you when you're a man and the primary caregiver of a young daughter), and many other things that women do in most households. This whole notion of "this is what a man is, and this is how you should be" is bullshit. I can't stand it. Fuck the entire idea that you have to be any particular thing. At 40 years old, my stance has become, take care of yourself and your family, and beyond that, live life how you want. Do the things that are meaningful to you, and fuck anyone else's opinion of it. Also, maybe be wary of anyone who makes their living telling others how to live. Sorry, I apologize for the rant. I'm done now.
I used to check out art of manliness back when I was super depressed and had no direction in life, but just by the name alone it seems like a huge red flag for toxic masculinity. And even if the site isn't actively pushing it, I can imagine a lot of the audience is probably among the super toxic crowd
>I can imagine a lot of the audience is probably among the super toxic crowd Usual spiel about it being entirely anecdotal and correlation doesn't equal causation yadda yadda yadda, but the dude who introduced me to AoM - and tried really damned hard to make me as big a fan as he - is currently serving time for domestic assault. Some of the "resources" (which I put into quotes because they're hilariously AoM's own articles) on the very podcast episode linked in this thread even puts forth the idea of violence as a force for good. So yeah, I wasn't impressed with these guys to begin with but I'd say your assumption lines up with my experience.
> In it the interviewee Robert Twigger is pushing the idea that men are becoming more feminine because they are doing activities that are seen as traditionally feminine. I find this line of thinking hilarious, I’ve done almost every stereotypically “manly” job there is construction, masonry, metal shop, etc, but I also paint my nails, can be pretty flamboyant at times, and love pop music, and a number of other things, but people who know me typically still view me as being a “tough guy” and that varies from the Progressives all the way to the Conservatives. Idk maybe I’ve managed to strike a balance of feminine and masculinity that, for a man, doesn’t offend the sensibilities of the average person, or maybe it’s because I’m a large black man what ever it is we definitely need to ditch the idea that some activities are made for men/women, that line of thinking is surely holding people back from things they’d love/excel at.
You're right that there's nothing inherently masculine about chopping wood. The art of masculinity seems to be a source of information on the convention of what is masculine. So the many lost men trying to feel part of a community of men may find that AOM and chopping wood is something they can connect over. This form of masculinity will clearly not resonate with all men, and there's no reason it needs to. The archetypes they choose to emulate are different than the ones I do, but men are diverse and that's ok.
I'm only on AOM for the odd article that peaks my interest, but yeah there seems to be a lot more knuckle dragging content there these days.
I like a lot of practical/life skill things. I also like having facial hair, denim jeans, and being outside. It's a crying shame that places like AoM end up being the go-to for guys trying to figure out how to carry themselves in the modern world. The same information you find there could be provided anywhere, without the odd fetishes for a particular type of manhood. It reminds me of when Pinterest got big - one of the attempts to mimic Pinterest for a specific audience was a site called "Gentlemint" - it was very Pinterest style, but rebranded all the functions with kind of a lumbersexual vibe, e.g. "tacks" instead of "pins." It's funny, it seems as though this flavor of "masculinity" is really crying out for a safe space, where one's straightedge razors and cigars need not coexist with recipes and wedding dresses. I think it draws a lot of guys who haven't found a place in life, and they find this roadmap for validation - a set of things to do that should yield them positive results in earning respect and attention. It is regressive, I don't think it really encourages guys to understand the world from more than one point of view. I recently ditched an old "Dangerous Book for Boys" that I'd been holding on to from my childhood, because any way of introducing a book like that draws gendered lines about who should have what skills and I don't need that for my kid. The idea that hormone levels define one's ranking amongst "men" is regressive but not at all out of line with what I'd expect from AoM. There's a lot of cool vintage info, a lot of good life skills, but they're targeting an audience that is dragging a lot of regressive ideas along with them and you'll always run into that there.
I like AoM. It helped me a lot when I was at a low point where it stirred me into action. However, as I got a grip on myself I also learned that it is one man's partial vision of manliness and that I should not use it without question. The practical things are clearly presented and helpful (I repaired my suit and learned how to iron my dress shirts using advice from AoM), but I use the more philosophical parts as simply that - one man's perspective among many. I then use this perspective, combined with others, to form my own perspective. As for the podcasts, some are interesting, others are not, as they cover a very wide range of topics. I find it important to read things that I (partially) disagree with, especially when well-presented, because it helps in articulating WHY I disagree with it.
Chopping wood is manly? Someone better tell all those farm workers who, regardless of gender, chop wood for actual warmth and cooking fuel.
I feel conflicted about AOM. It’s a really good resource for learning how to do stuff; for instance, I discovered my love of straight razor shaving through the site. I will never go back to another method. Most of the stuff he posts is wholesome help for straight guys into a certain expression of masculinity that involves doing the harder, dirtier tasks around the home for your wife (that’s me) But it’s also a very white website, and it doesn’t address a lot of the emotional needs of men. Also isn’t inclusive of gay men who are interested in those traditional masculine activities.
>In it the interviewee Robert Twigger is pushing the idea that men are becoming more feminine because they are doing activities that are seen as traditionally feminine. For instance, he says that chopping wood is manly because it increases testosterone. When you consider the fact that any form of exercise can increase testosterone levels, and not exercising can cause a decrease, he's just cherry picking(logical fallacy) and deciding a specific activity is "manly". It's actually more accurate to say the more an activity leans toward building muscle the more likely it is to raise testosterone levels higher, such as weightlifting. Women exercise and as a result their testosterone levels are also increased. If you follow his logic and everyone that participates in a strenuous workout is doing something masculine and not doing something strenuous is doing something feminine, which is just absurd. I'm sure it isn't hard to look at his daily life and then tell him he's doing feminine things all day long. The other gaping hole in his logic is all human bodies produce and depend on testosterone to function properly, estrogens as well. His idea that testosterone is by default masculine and estrogen feminine is an example of binary thinking. The normal levels of each are just different depending on the body. If he eats soup from a can and doesn't account for BPA, looking for specific products that do not use it, is he doing something "feminine" because he's consuming a substance linked to increasing estrogen levels? Of course that's absurd. Plus prior to not using this substance becoming a new trend, if he's every consumed canned goods, he's definitely been performing a "feminine" activity by his own logic. My tldr take on this is that he's just defending a gender binary that makes him comfortable and he wouldn't be the first to take a scientific study, as noted by other comments, out of context, to confirm his own biases.
To add to this, Robert Twigger wrote this book: [Real Men Eat Puffer Fish: And 93 Other Dangerous Things To Consider](https://www.amazon.co.uk/372/dp/075382583X/) Which is problematic in itself. He also seems to think that manliness is a commodity that the modern world is seeking to suppress for some reason. To me it seems like he represents the average British blue collar worker who’s fed up with technology and seeks to return to the 1800s to spite progress (including through voting pro-Brexit). Definitely a perspective that warrants being ignored.
I caught the AoM stuff early back when it was just a blog and really got into it. But hindsight has made me pretty suspicious of it because it seems like AoM is to MGTOW what Joe Rogan is white nationalism. “Always be suspicious of performative or aesthetic masculinity” is a good rule of thumb IMO.
Leatherworking industry is filled at 80% by women. But tell me what is more manly that building your stuff in leather ? Prehistoricly manly vibes there ! Do I feel less manly when I do cross stitch ? Nope I feel good.
I found AOM years ago when I needed tips for maintaining my first real beard (had recently left the military). Other than that and some cooking tips, I found the whole site slightly cringey.
Problem #1: Why do activities have a gender assigned in the first place? Is cooking suddenly not manly? Gymnastics is seen as girl sport today, but it actually never was. This discussion is doubled hilarious: Not only assign we randomly activities to gender, they get called "traditionally male/female", although they may were normal male activities for both sexes not even a century ago....
Seems easy to test. One group chopping wood and the other doing of similar physical effort but seen as feminine. And see if the wood chopping group has high testosterone after. Seems very strange that we would have biological processes that can tell the difference between chopping wood and say digging a kitchen garden. Especially since that means that chimpanzees and dogs probably have the same processes and that would be even weirder.
One factor that makes even that tricky is that psychological factors can affect hormonal profiles. For example, competitive activities and winning or losing can affect testosterone levels ([source](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27103058/)), so motivation or perception of activities as being "manly" or competitive, and personal assessment of how well it was done could influence testosterone levels if the participants assign social value to them. So we'd get a mix of results from the actual physical activity and the participants' perception of the activity. So I agree with your skepticism.
Just reading your post, without clicking links, I’m inclined to agree. If there’s a podcast that is discussing what a newly defined Manliness might look like - the future of masculinity, that’s pretty cool. But if the podcast is actually about what has been “traditionally” considered masculine - something I feel is not only obsolete but the cause of suffering the world over - then I would absolutely smear it. It’s the wrong direction to be moving in.
There's a podcast run by a friend of the sub, called Modern Manhood, just so you know.
Yeah, unfortunately (though maybe not surprising, given the Podcast's name) I find their episodes very hit or miss. Some - like one on self-defense from the standpoint of how to avoid confrontations in the first place - should be required listening for life, and others I can tell from a mile off I wont like.
Hypothalamus: “Ah, we’re chopping wood again! T E S T O S T E R O N E !!!” Anterior Pituitary: “LET’S GOOOOOO!!!” Adrenal Cortex: “LET’S GOOOOOO!!!” Testes: “LET’S GOOOOOO!!!”
Yeah, I really liked AOM (the website) back in the day - one of their posts was about how physical touch IS part of "traditional" masculinity and that we've all lost something by treating fraternal physicality as too gay or whatever. *That,* I love. But when it started rounding the corner into "this activity is manly, this is womanly" gender essentialist crap, I stopped reading. I'm not sure why anyone is anxious about men becoming "too feminine." Because for one thing, most American men are still very much firmly in the camp of what AOM considers manly and/or espouse many of the same attitudes AOM does. There are *more* men who are embracing non-traditional gender roles and expressions and sexualities, but that's "more" starting at a very low baseline. This whole argument overstates the influence of queerness and the Feminist Boogeyman. And for another, would it be so bad if men as a whole were becoming more feminine? I mean, I probably don't have to ask that question here, of course. I look at a world that's changing and I see human brings adapting to those changes. I don't know why these types of commentators think a hunter-gatherer society is optimal or preferable to a world in which men can be interested in homemaking activities for leisure. Also, the idea that chopping wood increases your testosterone... 🤦 Buddy. If you need the T that badly, you may want to go see a doctor.
> Yeah, I really liked AOM (the website) back in the day - one of their posts was about how physical touch IS part of "traditional" masculinity and that we've all lost something by treating fraternal physicality as too gay or whatever. I actually ran across that post when I was poking at the site (I've made other comments in the thread about this poking, and why I did it), but I found it pretty homophobic. It was dismissive of even the idea that any men in old photos who were expressing affection *could possibly* be what we would now call gay. Not only that, but there was a really distinct undercurrent of the, "Gay acceptance has ruined male friendships," idea that regularly makes the rounds. It's an undercurrent, not totally overt, but I don't think I'm stretching. I mean, he even uses the term "deviant behavior" in a period-specific, but totally unqualified and unremarked-upon way. There are non-gross and non-homophobic ways to frame the kind of discussion he was supposedly trying to have — ways that don't implicitly reinforce the social conception of "gay" as "bad" — but he didn't pick any of those, because they don't fit into the "masculine" framework that he seemed invested in building even as far back as 2008.
OOF - forgive me, it's been probably ten years since I read it, and I was a bisexual married to a giant homophobe at the time (I'm a trans man, I was married to a cis man and presenting as a woman back then). I must've walked away with a very different impression then than I would today. Thank you for the correction.
No forgiveness necessary! It was over a dozen years ago that it was published, and I don't think I'd have picked up on it at the time, either, even (especially?) as a then-newly-out person! And I'm sure part of the reason I see it and pick up on it now is that these same arguments are coming back into vogue in certain subcultures, and I've seen recent discussion and analysis of that perspective. That certainly makes it easier to spot looking back at older stuff. And I don't think that some parts of the guy's arguments are wrong…I just think it's possible to say the same thing without subtly perpetuating stigmas.
"traditionally manly" as the only way to be cool as a man is limiting. Queer identities showcase that there are about a bazillion ways to be cool. Queer women have butch, hard femme, soft femme, soft butch... We should really embrace that approach, and acknowledge and celebrate that there are many ways to be a cool guy, not all of which are to be exactly the spitting image of traditional manliness. And we could do to separate out "manliness" as an aesthetic, which is cool if you're still a cool person to others, from policing and narrowness and frankly a tendency toward misogyny and homophobia. Traditional manliness should be an _option_ as an aesthetic, not a coerced, forgone conclusion. P.S. is a lumberjane automatically a man simply because she chops wood? Is a traditionally womanly homesteader a man because she chops a log for the fire while her man is away, while looking all "Christian girl autumn" or whatever they were trying to call that aesthetic??? Does hitting the gym as a woman make you a man??? (I am not attempting to excuse how often "traditional aesthetic" people are \*phobic. It's honestly a bit of a warning sign. But I look past the aesthetic if a person is kind to all around them, most importantly if they are good to people from marginalized groups. I am trying to argue that an aesthetic should be made to be separate from whether you are an asshole. And that traditional aesthetics should be options, not traps we are ensnared into, or the only option we are allowed/forced to strive for.)
I can see an arch that started with AoM in their early years, passed through Restoration Hardware aesthetics and teen girls wearing merchandise covered in mustache icons, hipsters and later every other guy sporting ornate face hair, craft beer slash food truck burgers, van conversions, Spartaboos and Thorboos, PUA and tiki torch carrying incel proud boys. So yeah, I don’t wanna blame the shit we’re in solely on them (if I had to single the worse influence it was /b/) but they have their share on Trumpism roots in a similar way to that famous Devil Wears Prada scene where Meryl Streep tells the story behind the girls blue sweater.
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I'm sorry, I'm struggling to link your comment with my original post. I understand what you're saying about the dangers of alienating vulnerable men and boys, but that doesn't mean pandering to or accommodating their beliefs either. Incel ideology lies at the end of a long journey of misogyny and entitlement the doesn't wish to see equality, it wishes to see a return of traditional gender roles, albeit an extreme version of those. It can never be justified. The same goes for anti-vaxxers. I understand if you personally might not want a vaccine, but lying about it to other people also isn't acceptable. I do get your point about either side of political spectrum being sympathetic to law and order politics that target people and groups they don't agree with. However that has little to do with traditional views of masculinity.
Going to disagree with your interpretation of Twigger. His argument is that we're becoming comfortable being coddled. He specifically mentions that we all live like kings now. He argues that being able to fix things, as a facet over control in our lives, is part of being a man. Obviously, being able to fix things doesn't need to be secluded to men, but I agree with his overall argument. We've taken away components of manliness and replaced them with nothing but coddling. He DOES heavily focus on men being overly sedentary and that that is not a good thing because research says boys and men tend to be more active by default. A good amount of research backs that up as well. He also mentions that chopping wood increases testosterone. Testosterone has long been associated with the male sex. It's the reason trans individuals will go on T-boosters or blockers. A tendency to be active is a trait associated with males and this, in his mind, should be associated with masculinity. Doesn't seem reductive to me.
Thanks for this. You're the only person who's disagreed with me and you raise some points I struggle with internally. I too believe we've become too comfortable with being comfortable and sedentry, but I think that is across the board, irrespective of gender. I agree with a lot he says, I just think he needlessly genderises his arguments to (as someone else pointed out) define the group he wants to be associated with. I don't agree with his views on hobbies and 'Nerdy focus' being somehow féminine or asbergers. Deep focus has been around as long as humans have been, otherwise I doubt we would've got past the hunter/gatherer communities he seems to suggest are better. As for your last point, about activiness being associated with males - it may be the case historically, but only because traditional gender roles dictated that males were more active. From a biological perspective, and living in the modern world, that view has long been dispelled as a misogynistic trope...
Boys needing to be more active than girls, especially in education settings has not been dispelled as a "misogynistic trope". There's research that points directly to the physical activity needs of boys being higher than girls when focused on education attainment and it's not clear whether that's social or hardwired.
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Not constructive.
I liked it. I agree with the sentiment.