Stop Buying Into Disordered Masculinity
The majority of modern efforts to "reclaim" masculinity are selling men a vicious mirage of their true nature
Masculinity in the West has been under attack slowly for centuries (a bold claim which will be defended at the end), but explicitly and rapidly for a few decades. Like with so many things which our society has lost, the people trying to rebuild from the ruins are doing an utterly terrible job - most visually so in the “manosphere”, with men like Dan Bilzerian and Andrew Tate representing what I am going to refer to as ‘disordered masculinity’.
They think they are opening a lost colouring book, holding a crayon above an outline of Zyzz - long devoid of any colour after having been stripped of it’s substance by a femininised society - and are going to work colouring in between the lines. The truth is that the outline is indeed there, it’s as devoid as they perceive it, but they have tackled it with the artistic dexterity of a Thalidomide infant.
There is indeed a nature of man, one which our psychotic & smothering maternal society has tried to abort. Like all characteristics of a person’s nature, virtue is found with temperance, in what Aristotle called “the golden mean”:
Courage is a virtue - vices exist either side of it. Too little courage makes one a coward, too much of it makes them rash: the perfection of the virtue is found as a balance between the two. Rashness is an untamed kind of courage, one which puts you needlessly in danger. From that, we see how off-balance vices throw other areas of our lives out of balance. If a man has a wife, family - people who depend on him - to throw his life away out of rashness is incredibly foolish of him and jeopardises the safety of his loved ones, not just himself. However, courage may demand that he die for these people in self-sacrifice. One is foolish, one is courageous, even if on the surface they provide the same outcome.
Many peddlers of disordered masculinity correctly identify most of the lost & virtuous aspects of manhood: bravery, the conquering spirit, physical prowess, independence, protection, dedication - and drive them off the cliff into excess. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as they’re driving under the influence of a pitcher-sized cocktail of creatine, cocaine, and SARMs. As a man you should be all of those things listed, but you need to understand the proper ways of manifesting those virtues and knowing how to exercise temperance.
For the remainder I will dismantle the presently occurring excess which I think is the most obvious, but also the most catastrophic: the conquering spirit. Men conquer, it is an aspect of our nature we are highly prone to. You can either accept it or eradicate men, there are no other options, and we see which option our current society is trying to enact. The ancients identified that men in their early 20s, if given the means to pursue ambition, were unstoppable; so they let them, and tried to see that their ambitions were orderly, to be used as an unstoppable force for good.
Augustus was 21 years old when he defeated the armies of Julius Ceasar’s assassins and formed the Second Triumvirate, which led to him becoming the first Roman Emperor. Alexander the Great inherited the Macedonian throne at 19; at his final great battle at the Hydaspes, he had conquered nearly the entire known world east of Greece at the age of 30.
Did they take the masculine conquering spirit to excess? We can tell from the results. Augustus unified all of the Roman territories and institutions which would continue for 500 more years. Alexander’s kingdoms immediately fell into civil war and devolution. This was partly due to the sheer vastness of his new empire, with all of it’s many different cultures and various satraps competing for power but, arguably, mostly down to his failure to appoint an heir. If he had declared a person to succeed him, the story could have been very different. It can’t be conclusively said, but I believe it was largely down to this - a deficiency in his planning, not an empire so large it caved under it’s own weight.
So if even Augustus and Alexander did not take conquering so far as to be viciously excessive, how is the manosphere doing that?
With women.
What does it mean to be a successful man? To those with a disordered masculinity, it is to sleep with so many different women that you couldn’t count them. Again, there is a vague outline of masculinity that they have observed before scribbling over it. A man should conquer in his romantic pursuits, but that would be a wildly unsuccessful conquest.
If you conquer 50 women who don’t deeply care about you for one night each, what do you have to show for it? At best 50 fleeting moments of serotonin dumps - at worst, diseases that will stick with you for life and up to 50 children whose lives will be significantly damaged by your absence. Go you. We wouldn’t say that Alexander conquered the city of Tyre if he held it for one night. That would be a misuse of the conquering spirit which left an ancient city in ruins, for no gain beyond 24 hours. Alexander successfully won it through his mastery and determination, and held it securely until the day he died.
A man must choose a woman whose heart he will conquer first and foremost, and hold it for life. In our age of so-called ‘female empowerment’ - another fraudulent disordering - combined with the contraceptives and foetus murdering methods of our day, along with dedicated apps to accommodate it all, sleeping around is not hard to accomplish. Where is the virtue in an easy, fruitless, fleeting conquest? The fruits of ordered the conquest of a woman for life bare themselves in innumerable ways. With a wife a man can fulfil the other parts of his nature as a provider & protector; and with children all of those aswell as a teacher, a moral example - and most importantly - living for a purpose beyond just themselves or mere material goods.
Once you have a child, you are a father for life. This is a permanent change of your very essence. That is both a fulfilment of your nature and opens the doors to an ancillary nature, with new virtues to be fulfilled as you proceed evermore towards self-perfection. Ordered conquest in love literally brings you closer to perfection; disordered conquest achieves absolutely nothing, at best.
Those of you who think on-the-fly about objections to arguments may think of one in regards to my Tyre analogy. Alexander held an enormous amount of cities for life. Why, then, not polygamy? The first thing to say is that this there is a hierarchy - polygamy is better than adultery or fornication. Indeed the Catholic Church tolerated the practice of polygamy in countries such as Ireland for a long time in order to peacefully convert their people, as a way to bring about a greater long-term good. Without going into ethical terminology such as potency, privation, and non-being (do further research if you want that) I will say that marriage as a heterosexual couple is the ideal.
Marriage with more than a couple is less than ideal, as such, polygamy is less than ideal and gives itself to vices of excess. Adultery and fornication, on the other hand, are abuses of the sexual faculty, not equal to a vice. Sex should only occur between people who have given themselves mind, body, and soul to each other - as in, are married. Not giving yourself mind, body and soul to one person exclusively and to multiple people is clearly defective in comparison, but at least something is given. Extra-marital sex gives nothing but the body, and in an empty way. There is nothing about it which is correctly ordered.
Something is correctly ordered with polygamy, but it is greatly excessive and cannot be endorsed. And, with all vices and particularly of excessive ones, the effects go beyond just that particular. The love shared in an exclusive marriage will always be stronger and greater than that same love divided, and it is love which fuels the pursuit of the other marital goods. Not to mention that after taking one spouse, any after that are sacramentally invalid. That is a huge deal.
As such, from this exposition on the nature of marriage, my bold claim that masculinity has been under attack for centuries is this: divorce, a precedent set hundreds of years ago by Henry VIII.
Once you have a child your nature modifies to be that of still a man, but now also a father. Once married, you are then always a husband. The famous wedding vow goes: “til death do us part” - why, then, do 50% of all marriages in the West end before death? Jesus could not possibly be any clearer in the Gospels that divorce in the new covenant is completely forbidden, and it makes complete sense why. If it is not for life then it is not a marriage, it is a union wrapped up in paperwork that just makes it more inconvenient to get out of. If you get out of it at all you have completely violated the immutable part of your nature as a husband. The legalisation of divorce in the West has blunted and malformed the conquering spirit, as it has made the goal of conquest a temporary one that you don’t have to stick to. A man who seeks short-term gains, can’t see out avowed life-long commitment, and puts his temporal pleasure above higher goods, is one that cannot be called ordered and virtuous.
So, think about the other excesses that disordered men push as “success” and you’ll find a pattern that’s pretty easy to follow. Dial it back, calibrate the targeting, and you’ll find where the true masculine virtue lies. If the virtue you land on happens to be identical to how it was viewed for thousands of years - up until it’s destruction in the 20th century - then you can be sure you’ve got it right.
While the manosphere is excellent in diagnosis, without Christ they can have no cure.
May I recommend Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's book on gender:
Love and the Genders
It is sorely neglected and should be right up there if not more so than CS Lewis's The Four Loves.