This is the fourth installment in my “Defining Men” series. The first three are:
Part One: Looking Through the Barbie Lens
Part Two: What is Feminism?
Part Three: Do Feminists Hate Men?

Setting the issue of feminism aside (for the most part), let’s focus more exclusively on men and the issues many of us seem to have in common. I’ll start by citing what many may believe to be one of the ultimate “manly men,” Arnold Schwarzenegger. In his August 25, 2023 newsletter, writer Adam Bornstein (no, Arnold doesn’t write this himself) discusses “The Friendship Crisis.”

One of the common issues among many men today is loneliness (Okay, Arnold may have written the following):

You said making friends as an adult is nearly impossible for you, and you’re struggling. First of all, I want you to know that nothing is wrong with you, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Remember, we never beat ourselves up; we always get to work.

But why are men more especially lonely than women?

It seems that how men and women relate to friendship is different. Women tend to base those interactions on verbal communication. How many times have you heard men complain about the length of time women talk to their friends? It’s not like men can’t do this as well, but men aren’t the same as women.

Turns out, men relate more commonly with each other over shared activities. That’s why men will get together and go hunting, fishing, or target shooting. They’ll go camping, or work on a car together, or watch the latest action (explosions and car chases) movie together. Yes, they communicate, but that communication is centered around what they are actively doing.

Arnold goes on to say:

Once you meet someone, the work doesn’t stop. My friend, the former Secretary of State, George Shultz, once told me, “Friendship is like a garden. You can have a garden that is full of weeds and withering away or a garden that is full of beautiful flowers and vegetables. But that takes daily work. You can’t just check in once a month. You have to be constantly tending your garden, planting, watering, pulling weeds.”

If you can’t find a lot of guys who share your preferred activities, making and maintaining friendships is harder. Plus, basing friendships on an activity is more time consuming, so you may end up sacrificing mowing the lawn one weekend, or doing other household chores.

But we live in a world of competing priorities. You may need to take care of young kids while your partner is doing something else, or your partner wants to do something with you. No time left to organize a game of basketball with the guys. It isn’t easy. Even if your day is filled with things you are doing, you could still end up feeling lonely and friendless. If you complain, your partner might not understand and think you’re just being selfish or trying to get out of work around the house.

Another common trait among modern men is having trouble finding a purpose. Everyone needs a sense of having worth in the world and making some significant contribution.

The Joseph Mattera article dovetails on what Arnold said in that men need to be team players:

Many men want their individual gifts to shine. But when it comes to fulfilling destiny, we have to be more like a basketball point guard, like Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns or Magic Johnson of the old Los Angeles Lakers, rather than like a professional golfer, like Tiger Woods (golf, unlike life, is a one person sport). To be successful, men need to learn to leverage their lives by surrounding themselves with people that have strengths they don’t have, so they can compensate for their weaknesses.

No one has all the gifts, wisdom, power, abilities, and experience. God has stacked the deck in our lives a certain way so that we are forced to depend on the “dream team” He has already given us, if we would just open our eyes of faith and find those team members.

First Corinthians 12:8 teaches that God has only given some a “word” of wisdom, another a “word” of knowledge; all we have as individuals are fragments. It takes a team that seeks God to have the whole picture by comparing notes and hearing and doing what the Spirit is saying.

Although we think of female friendships as more “relational,” men are also wired to find significance among other men. The model described above is one of men cooperating rather than competing. Yet, we live in a world where men are taught to compete in order to succeed and be significant. As it was said above, life is more like basketball than golf.

According to this Medium article:

Throughout history man has tried to fill his raison d’être with a creed…

The never ending search for two existential goals — finding freedom and equality — have led homo sapiens to turn to religion, intellect, politics and economics.

Ah, but here’s the rub. Are any of these roles uniquely male or has the landscape changed? NBC News says:

In 2021, the census found that the number of women with degrees was about 3 points higher than the figure for men — 39.1% compared with 36.6%. And looking back at the history of those figures shows how remarkable the change is.

And the gap is growing.

Historically, men have been the providers, the protectors, the defenders of family and values. As part of that, we were generally more educated, because we needed to have a good paying job to support the family. If you go back far enough, it was possible for a single income to pay for a family’s needs.

However, we don’t have to hunt for our dinner anymore and it’s not likely that we’ll have enemies trying to break into our homes and hurt our families. Also, economics have changed to where almost no one can survive or get ahead on one income anymore. On top of that, women are just as capable of earning a good income as men, maybe better given the educational shift. Feminism has historically even demanded that women work outside the home and childrearing has become something demeaning.

Yet in pursuit of equality, societal priorities have shifted so that men are less valued as women become more valued. Men are less unique, and frankly, unnecessary, at least according to some:

Reeves offers a wide menu of policies designed to foster a “prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world.” He would encourage more men to become nurses and teachers, expand paid leave, and create a thousand more vocational high schools. His signature idea, though, is to “redshirt” boys and give them all, by default, an extra year of kindergarten. The aim is to compensate for their slower rates of adolescent brain development, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making.

Reeves, who places great stock in this biological difference, also places great stock in his proposed remedy: “A raft of studies of redshirted boys have shown dramatic reductions in hyperactivity and inattention through the elementary school years, higher levels of life satisfaction, lower chances of being held back a grade later, and higher test scores.”

The writer of the above-cited article (a man, incidentally) believes men are actually inferior emotionally, developmentally, and intellectually to women. We require more time to “bake in the oven,” so to speak, if we’re ever to get it together at all. That message, transmitted to men, and especially boys, may go a long way to explaining why men may embrace and internalize a negative image of themselves.

Case in point is this newspaper headline from an Australian paper. Men are assumed by the publisher to be toxic and boys are viewed always as potential “monsters.”

Maybe part of the problem (and I’ll discuss this further in a minute) is that boys and men are no longer allowed to have their own space to develop activity-based relationships. It’s considered “sexist.” So much so that girls are now admitted into all formerly boy-only groups such as the Boy Scouts. Yet if boys and men were to demand admittance into girl/women only spaces (the issue of trans women in traditional women’s space is a separate discussion), it would be “sexist, misogynistic, and the evil patriarchy.” Go figure.

Certainly, there is a lot of data about depression in men, but men are less likely to seek out help, probably for fear of seeming weak.

Oh, if you are about to say they can always trust their female partners, this isn’t the case. While men have internalized the message that they’re supposed to be tough, never admit to weakness, and all that, a lot of women expect exactly that from their men, even feminists. Some feminists may talk a good game about how men should learn to be more vulnerable, but then when a man shows her that vulnerability, she rejects the man as unsuitable.

Although women tend to attempt suicide more than men, more men complete the suicidal act than women, probably because we tend toward more high-risk behaviors, can be more impulsive, and typically use more lethal means such as guns.

Also, men tend to express depression in terms of alcohol or substance abuse, the aforementioned high-risk behaviors, and anger and aggression. That tends to push people away rather than bring them closer so they can help.

Some or perhaps most of this is interpreted as toxic masculinity or Loss, fear and rage: Are white men rebelling against democracy?

In the aftermath of David DePape’s attempt to kidnap U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his hammer assault on her husband, Paul, analysts pored over the suspect’s online postings, looking for motivation among a toxic stew of grievance. Some connected him to the spirit of the January 6 right-wing mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol. Many seemed to see him as just another inexplicable flashpoint in the explosive politics of our time.

No, a crisis in the purposefulness of men didn’t lead to the above. The person who tried to hurt Pelosi’s husband was clearly mentally ill. However, as the author of this article suggests, it’s more fuel to pour on the fire, blaming all men because a male was involved in an irrational and violent act. Men (particularly white men) become political fodder for those in control of news, communication, and social media.

Each of these chapters feels like a violation of democratic processes and the democratic spirit, often rising from some compound of racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism. But in a series of interviews, Berkeley scholars traced a thread that seems to weave among our conflicts:

After decades of economic, political and cultural change, a makeshift force of white men is rebelling against democracy.

The Salon’s article Sorry, Josh Hawley, the left doesn’t hate masculinity — women just don’t want to make you a sandwich puts any blame or cause for men in crisis on men themselves or rather “misogyny and the patriarchy,” which arguably is the same thing.

The grim truth is a lot of men — and unfortunately, their female enablers — believe female submission is men’s birthright and are quite angry about changing gender norms. It’s why Donald Trump didn’t lose any votes on the right for bragging about sexual assault. It’s why there’s so much whining about “cancel culture” from so many straight men who are criticized for acting like jerks or bigots. It’s why groups like the Proud Boys wallow in “tradwife” fantasies, wishing for the days when women didn’t have rights so had to put up their crap.

In responding to Josh Hawley, Salon writer Amanda Marcotte lumps all men in crisis into one bucket, labels them MAGA Trumpers, and says that feminists don’t hate men, they hate “the system.” She further says:

It’s also worth noting that these “masculine” qualities are hardly exclusive to men. It’s doubtful that even Hawley is a troll enough to deny that women should also want to be courageous, independent, and assertive.

In one sense, the general goals of feminism seem to be working. Women are becoming more educated (more so than men at this point), achieving more political and financial independence, are more “courageous, independent, and assertive,” and so forth.

I’m not going to hang the crisis of men on feminism, at least not as a main cause, but as our traditional roles shift, many men don’t know how to regain their footing. Who are we anymore? Does it matter if we’re men? If in everything we do, we can always be replaced by a woman (or any other generic man), then men, people really, are just faceless little widgets, kind of like spark plugs or light bulbs. One is just as good as another. If one man were to suddenly cease to exist, it wouldn’t matter. He can always be replaced with another drone man.

Not long ago, I watched the movie Falling Down (1993) starring Michael Douglas. It’s the tragic tale about a man who has become purposeless. He has lost his wife and daughter, his career, everything that made him “him.”

Toward the end of the movie, as he’s talking to a police detective (played by Robert Duvall), he says:

How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I helped to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. Instead they give it to the plastic surgeons, y’know, they lied to me.

The character Bill Foster (Douglas) is deeply disturbed and commits terrible acts during the film. He’s no “working class hero” fighting against the system, although there are significant elements in the movie that make it appear that way. There are times when we the audience wants to cheer when he defeats something in the world that frustrates the heck out of us, too.

But he’s also an exaggeration of frustrated, purposeless, hurting men. He’s the exaggeration writers like Amanda Marcotte paint all men to be, or at least all men who don’t complain, who accept or try to accept that they are never going to be significant, special, or even loved.

So what’s the answer? Maybe there isn’t an answer to the question “What is a man?”. Maybe we’re just obsolete.

I hope to find a different answer in the fifth and final chapter of this series.