These Clowns Represent "Masculinity?"

The lack of honesty around the discussion -- what masculinity is, what men want it to be, where it's headed, etc. -- does nothing to help the modern moment.

This picture above represents three men who are collectively worth more than the GDP of a good chunk of nations, and have (if I am counting properly) 20 kids between them, so an average of 6+ per man. Well over the fertility rate needed for successful development of society. One of those guys, Elon, even talks about that a lot (“doing my part!”). And yet, the grandest joy any of these men seem to get day-over-day is owning the libs, and/or painting America in disgusting, dire terms — i.e. “carnage in the streets” — that kinda makes you wonder why they wouldn’t take their money, go somewhere else, and live a better, cleaner life there as opposed to controlling the government. Until, of course, you realize the word “control” was in that last sentence, and once you have a certain amount of assets, the main thing you still want desperately is control — and maybe friends, which this photo nods to a little bit as well.

At the same time as this photo was happening and lots of people are/were debating masculinity and gender, this piece appeared in The New York Times.

This was written by a woman, Ruth W., who literally wrote a book on being a boy mom. I have not read that specific book and this article above is pretty good and makes good points (more in a second), but I think we also need to acknowledge that a lot of women who brand themselves around being boy moms are toxic as fuck.

Not saying Ruth is. Just saying that’s a recent trend line.

Alright, so if you go into that Ruth article (NYT), she’s talking in very conventional terms about “strength” as an element of masculinity. It’s very hard to remove “strength” from the definition equation, in part because logistically men are just bigger than women (usually), and in part because a lot of women do look for strong men — some of that is feral, some sexual, some virile, some other factors. I think we all kinda know how this works.