In Defence of Men

The rewards and sorrows of life as a success object

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Men, eh? Manspreading manchilds with manflu who require constant mankeeping and when you try to train them they just manterrupt and mansplain. They’re the embodiment of an outdated set of values we call ‘masculinity’ that is toxic. Men are violent, misogynistic, sex-assaulting bullies who objectify, disbelieve, belittle, assault, and kill women, and patronise, ignore and cheat them in the workplace. Their socially-constructed masculinity prevents them from being vulnerable and sharing their emotions, so they drink themselves to death and commit suicide, and then expect us to feel sorry for them. Men! No wonder we’re all sick of them. Well it’s time for the pale-male-stales to step back, sit down and shut up. They belong to the past. Print it on your t-shirt and wear it with pride: the future is female.

Thankfully, I don’t know anyone in my real life who actually thinks this way (okay, maybe I know one). But, over the last two decades, I’ve developed the heavy sense that this is what we in the west have somehow concluded about my gender. It’s a view that seeps out of the things that commentators write and politicians preach and reporters report and hot-takers tweet and academics publish in papers and pop-stars write about in songs and the heavy-handed messages that are delivered in essays, novels, magazines, films, ads and TV shows. Engage with modern mainstream culture as a male and there’s a good chance you’ll emerge spattered by a phlegm of bitter, angry contempt.

We’re all used to powerful voices deconstructing masculinity and telling us what’s wrong with it. I wonder, then, if I might be allowed to suggest a quality of masculinity that’s good? I ask cautiously because, when I described this theory to one of my more woke-sympathetic friends over dinner, his cheeks paled and I had to sit there as he spluttered and scrambled for arguments as to why I must be wrong, and how “harmful” it would be for me to spread this idea. He kept glancing nervously at the couple at the next door table, as if one of them might rear up and glass me. What was the instance of heretical manpraising that had panicked him so? It was this: I believe a central component of masculinity is competence. Simply put, it is very important for men to feel that they’re good at something. A lot of the male-typical behaviour we criticise is downstream of this deep desire to feel skilled, expert, knowledgable or useful.

Because we live in phlegmy times, I must make abundantly clear what many readers already know: when we talk about ‘differences’ between men and women, we’re talking about average differences found in statistical analyses across large numbers of people. We’re definitely not saying men care about competence and women don’t. We’re not even saying that all men care a bit more about competence than all women. We’re saying that men, as an averaged-out group, have a greater concern with perceptions of their own competence than women, as an averaged-out group. To tentatively put some numbers on this, one UK survey looked at differences in ‘work centrality’ to a person’s identity. A quarter of women were found to be ‘work centred’, whilst just over half of men were. This is a large difference, and helps demonstrate how important a sense of personal competence is to huge numbers of men. But it tells us nothing about any individual woman or man, whilst also indicating that a great many women also have competence as a core part of their identity.

We can say the same in the opposite direction. Women are often praised for being more empathetic, socially responsible and better at social relationships than men. They’re also more egalitarian, having less tolerance for hierarchy. But no serious person believes all women possess these traits, and that no men do.

These gender differences are sometimes described in terms of ‘communion’ and ‘agency’. Women (as a cohort) are more group-coded, and tend towards communal traits such as “selflessness, concern with others, and a desire to be at one with others.” Communion “focuses on the self in relation to others and emphasises social connection and cooperation.” Men (as a cohort) are more individual-coded, and have an emphasis on agentic traits such as “self-assertion, self-expansion, and the urge to master.” Agency is about seeing the self “as separate from others” and emphasises “the individual’s own goals and mastery of skills”; it is associated with traits including “achievement” and “competence”.

Why might this be? The answer, for many experts, lies in history. The mammalian norm is for females to carry and birth offspring, and suckle their infants. Humans reproduce more rapidly than other great apes and our young are more helpless, requiring greater levels of care for a longer period of time. This means that, during the long period of our evolution, women relied on help from allies to raise their young – ‘it takes a village’ is true. In order for their children to survive, and their genes to propagate, women had to become expert in a style of social status game that fostered community-building, favouring empathy, egalitarianism and emotional intelligence. For psychologist Joyce Benenson, whilst men played for status in part through “skills”, women did so through developing “friendships within the larger female community. Female friends prohibit competition by one another and other acquaintances by punishing superiority, requiring reciprocity and exhibiting a low threshold for dissolving relationships when conflicts arise.” Female status competition was more likely to take the form of social aggression (such as ostracisation and reputation assault) than physical aggression, in order to avoid harm to their bodies. Their competition would also feature ”demands for equality within the female community”, so threats to their own status were diminished.

Whilst women sought to be at the centre of the circle, men fought to be at the top of the tree. Ambitious males would play status games orientated towards some competence-based goal. They’d strive to become a better hunter, a better sorcerer, a better warrior, a better storyteller; the more successful they became, the more social and material resources they’d accrue. When choosing mates, women would prefer these high status men, because of the security and resources they brought with them. Men, meanwhile, would be more likely to select mates on the basis of appearance, preferring women who were prettier and younger. This created powerful pressures for men to pursue competence-based status, and for women to care about beauty.

If all this is sounding offensively sexist to you, I can only say – yes it is. The past is sexist. The present is sexist too. Despite huge advances in gender equality, it remains the case that men (and women) often treat women as ‘sex objects’, whilst women (and men) often treat men as ‘success objects’. One classic survey of 37 diverse cultures found, in all but one, women valued ‘good financial prospects’ in potential partners more than men, whilst in 34 of them – 92 percent of the sample – women valued ‘ambition-industriousness’ more than men. In every culture, men valued ‘good looks’ more than women, and had a greater preference for younger partners.

Humans are obsessively interested in status, which is an essential social nutrient required for psychological survival. We’re also profoundly interested in maximising our potential for attracting high-value mates. It stands to reason, then, that the particular strategies each gender has for achieving these ends significantly impacts their beliefs, behaviours and identities – and even their biology. Major studies looking at gender differences in personality find men score higher in agentic traits such as “assertiveness” whilst women score higher in communal traits such as “tendermindedness.” Male employees have been estimated to work an average of 400 hours more per year than their female colleagues; 80 percent of those who work 48 hours per week or more are men. The male skew towards competence also manifests in modern definitions of masculinity, such that it involves striving for ‘success and achievement’ and the principle that a ‘real man’ must be a ‘winner’. All this has been an incalculable blessing for men in many ways. It has likewise been catastrophic for women. The feminist project has been partly focussed on unwinding male domination of competence-based status games.

But being a success object is by no means an unalloyed good. Comedian Chris Rock has described how it can feel:

“Only women, children and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is only loved under the condition that he provides something. I’ve never heard a woman in my life say, ‘You know, after he got laid off we got so much closer’. I once heard my Grandmother say, ‘A broke man is like a broke hand. Can’t do nothing with it’. What kind of gangsta shit is that? That’s right… a man is only loved under the condition that he provides something. Fellas, when you meet a new girl, what do your friends ask you? “What does she look like?” Ladies, when you meet a new guy, what do your friends ask you? “What does he do?” What the fuck does that n– do that can help you out? Can this motherfucker facilitate a dream or not?”

It’s instructive to read some of the most-liked comments under this bit’s appearance on YouTube:

“Meant to be funny but as men we know this is one of the saddest parts of reality.”

“This is not funny. It’s true as hell. And it is not funny.”

“I thought comedians are supposed to make you laugh? Not cry.”

“Coming to the comment section and realizing that I am not the only male going through depression. I have no job no real savings no respect but hopefully things will get better.”

“The only time a man gets flowers in his life is at his funeral.”

Rock is more right than he might know. He’s also close to agreeing with feminists who talk, often contemptuously, about ‘fragile masculinity’. A fundamental difference between masculinity and femininity is the convention that manhood is not a birthright, but a status that must be earned. The anthropological record writhes with accounts of premodern groups in which boys have to pass gruesome and frightening tests to be considered a man: Satere-Mawe Indians in the Amazon put their hands in gloves filled with poisonous ants for half an hour; Maasai herders in East Africa are circumcised without aesthetic and must show no pain; boys on Pentecost Island in the South Pacific bungee-jump from high wooden platforms with vines tied to their ankles.

Elsewhere, manhood rites specifically test competence: San bushmen must successfully hunt and kill an antelope; the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea have to demonstrate skills including carving, playing men’s music instruments and showing a knowledge of the forest (as well as undergoing horrendous weeks-long scarification rituals). Researchers find that “although many cultures also have rites of passage for womanhood, girls and women do not seem to have the same requirements of social proof to achieve and maintain their essential status as women” and that “an authentic femininity rarely involves tests or proofs of action.”

Studies of contemporary attitudes suggest little has changed. In one, a group of students read the statement, “My life isn’t what I expected it would be. I used to be a man. Now, I’m not a man anymore.” A second group read the same statement, but with ‘man’ swapped for ‘woman’. They found the ‘woman’ statement harder to understand; they also interpreted the loss of manhood in social terms (he no longer met society’s standards for being a man) whereas lost womanhood was likely to be seen in physical terms (she’d had a sex-change operation). Producing children was not considered a precondition of womanhood. It was more likely to be seen as a precondition of manhood, with participants visualising infertile men as children. The researchers concluded, “whereas womanhood is viewed as a developmental certainty that is permanent once achieved, manhood is seen as more of a social accomplishment that can be lost and therefore must be defended.” Elsewhere, surveys of both men and women find a widespread belief that if a man fails to be a ‘winner’, a ‘provider’, a ‘protector’ and ‘maintain mastery and control at all times’, they are ‘not a man.’

Manhood is precarious, then. It must be maintained and proven, over and over again. When we lose our claim to manhood, it hurts. It’s a massive assault on our status, the cauterisation of a core part of our identity. Evolutionarily, the consequences of losing manhood in the face of the tribe might have been appalling. Those considered useless to the collective could be thrown out or executed. Even if spared that, life would’ve been grim. “Women at the bottom of a status hierarchy may have gotten undesirable mates, with whom they produced undesirable offspring. However, men at the bottom of a status hierarchy may not have reproduced at all.“

In modern market economies, we don’t tend to prove our manhood with displays of courage, as we did in hunter-gatherer tribes. We’re much more likely to do it with displays of competence. We’re nerds, collectors, hobbyists, players, tinkerers, fans and bores. We go through obsessions with pizza ovens, chess openings, mechanical computer keyboards, metal detecting, vintage hifi, the rise of Hitler and very fast bicycles. Part of the male urge to build muscle is surely to show expertise: the superhero bodies in the place where I train belong mostly to friendly men who seek not to dominate but to impress with their superior competence. Most of all, we work. In the 21st century west, the status games of employment offer some of the most nourishing ways men can prove their usefulness through ability.

Men are frequently criticised for seeking social proof of their masculinity. When we become over-enthusiastic about our chosen zone of competence, we irritate by ‘mansplaining’. When we overtly draw attention to it we’re ‘willy-waving’. When we’re competitive, we’re engaging in a ‘dick-measuring competition’. When displaying our competence through success cues like expensive cars, we’re ‘compensating’ for a phallic shortcoming. When visibly frustrated by threats to our masculinity, including our competence, we’re showing ‘small dick energy’.

The need for competence is also, I believe, a major reason why men between the ages of 35 and 54 kill themselves at a higher rate than any other group. Middle age is when we begin to feel our competencies creak, halt and decline. We slow down, hit the limit of our talents and become threatened by younger, more energetic and switched-on rivals. We start to feel ignored, invisible and irrelevant. We realise, perhaps for the first time, that the dream we had for our future, in which we climbed to some hyper-competent position in the hierarchy, is not going to come true. We might even find ourselves fired or laid off – and so we feel we’ve become useless, a parasite, a burden. This is a psychic catastrophe for a great many men. One study of over three million people in Sweden found an “excess hazard of suicide mortality” for unemployed men, following a recession, but not unemployed women.

Assaults on our perceived competence are assaults on our masculinity which are assaults on our very sense of self. When they seem irreversible – and especially when they collide with additional crises, such as the loss of family following divorce – they can be fatal. A report commissioned by The Samaritans on the causes of high suicide rates amongst middle-aged men acknowledged that “having a job and being able to provide for your family is central to ‘being a man’,” and that men feel “a sense of shame and defeat“ when not meeting ”a masculine ‘gold standard’”. But even this report, commissioned by a noble organisation (of which I am a member) in service of men in mortal pain, feels bespittled with anti-male sentiment. Masculinity, according to their experts, is about “power, control and invincibility” and men experience suicidality “as a way of regaining control.” Honestly, how many men in your life are actually characterised by a need to maintain power, control and invincibility? And how many just want to feel, very much, that they’re good at something?

Thankfully, not everyone who seeks to help men holds them in such low regard. In the early 1990s, in South Australia, Maxine Chaseling started worrying about her father, who was depressed and isolated following a heart attack. Realising he only cheered up when beavering away at something in his shed, she decided to help him and other local men by setting up a communal shed in which they could gather. This was the beginning of the ‘Men’s Shed Movement’ in which men work together on projects such as restoring furniture or fixing lawnmowers, and to mentor others. Their slogan – ‘Men don’t talk face to face, they talk shoulder to shoulder’ – is tacit acknowledgment of men’s deep need to exercise competence, and the fact that they tend to be much more comfortable socialising whilst working on some kind of agentic task than they are chatting over coffee. The movement has since become global, with over 900 sheds in Australia alone. One survey found an impressive 99.5 percent of ‘shedders’ saying it made them feel better about themselves.

Why does it feel subversive, writing all this down? Why does it feel unsafe? I can’t deny I’m uncomfortable publishing this essay. It’s a regrettable fact that, deep as we are into the ‘girl boss era’, many men are scared of modern progressive women and their allies, who have earned immense cultural and institutional power, and can be brutal in their exercising of it. Good men have become allergic to defending their gender.

We’re asked to acknowledge the negative aspects of masculinity, and it’s true a minority of men are violent, misogynist bullies; our instinct for hierarchy, victory and face-to-face conflict has been responsible for cruel and unjust environments. But allowing only the denigration of masculinity is dangerous. It will backfire. Reasonable men must find the courage to stand up and describe our collective goodness. Humanity has benefited immeasurably from the masculine urge for competence. If we’re required to account for what makes us toxic, we must also be allowed to celebrate the things that make us great.