The idea that men need models of a “good” masculinity is based on a naive theory of how gender comes about - simply individual role models over social institutions like the labor market, social insurance, the family, etc. I imagine this is willful ignorance a lot of the time, coming from people who believe that gender should structure those institutions as well as get meaning from them.
Yes, and maybe the weakening of the political and economic forces that reproduce this division accounts for people turning to the role model of masculinity in this kind of commentary and in practice.
Good post. Honestly, a whole lot of the media's masculinity discussion is really frustrating. They talk in generalities and seem to really be dancing around two specific points:
1. How to help people who, with de-inudstrialization, can no longer get rewarding careers in physically-demanding labor, a lot of whom are men who in the 50s would have been in jobs that were near-exclusively done by men
2. How to help heterosexual men who struggle to form romantic or sexual relationships with women in ways that aren't sexist or condescending
I think we can address #1 without making gender the main focus of our concerns, and I feel sorry for the men in category #2, but I'm not sure what politicians or political movements can do, or how all this talk about masculinity will help... but a lot of people (online) seem to think #2 should be a priority of the left, which seems misguided to me
Yes, completely. I think a lot of the men in crisis discourse could be disambiguated like this. If the issue is loss of industrial jobs, we can simply address that issue on its own terms without appeal to some hazy idea of masculinity!
Good post. I too have grown tired of simplistic 'men are in crisis' pieces that are coming out now. I think you highlighted well some of the logical inconsistencies of a leftist rehabilitation of masculinity as a concept. I think the worry about pursuing a less gendered approach to role models is that it is more 'difficult'. So we had a patriarchal prescription of masculinity that feminism has successfully at least partially eroded public confidence in, such that some men/boys feel 'lost' in their social role. I think the only justification for replacing this role with a 'healthy' masculinity would be as a stop-gap. Some people may accept that the old social role was bad and harmful but may have difficulties accepting less-gendered vision of social roles, either because they ideologically oppose it or just gender binary roles are deeply culturally ingrained. The pragmatist approach could argue it is better for the left to attempt to fill this gap in order to reach this population rather than ceding them to the reactionaries. Whether this pro outweighs the cons you outline I can't really say.
One difficulty /incoherence is that because masculinity is viewed as the 'default' gender in the general public sphere, many putative male role models are often not viewed as 'male' role models. I Like probably the biggest male role model on the American left would be Bernie Sanders (?) but I don't think he is typically held up as an exemplar of a male role model in the same way that AOC or similar I think is cultural considered a female role model. It seems that in order to be characterized as a specifically 'male' role model you need to be in some ways exemplars of the very patriarchal forms of masculinity (ie physically strong, confident, assertive), particularly for impressionable youths. I think this why Andrew Tate, who acts as almost a caricature, with the cars, cigars, etc, is most popular with young boys/pre-teens. I don't think a feminist-allied masculine figure will ever compete in this arena because the reactionaries will always have the home field advantage of what we culturally recognize as masculinity to begin with.
That’s a great point, particular the home field advantage bit. I agree about the stop gap stuff. I just think it’s important for people to be mindful, when trying to devise male role models as stop gaps, of the end goal. Too much of the nominally leftist-ish discussion of positive male role models basically accepts gender essentialism as a fundamental and unalterable fact, and that sucks
Stunning analysis per usual! I have a more basic and likely oversimplified take - these are men with a strong implicit bias towards patriarchy and want to ensure the conditions are in place for the next cadre of male leaders to emerge lest those pesky and hormonal women take control. Thanks for another great note!
A very strange article. You show some self-awareness of the narrowness of your particularly world-view (‘liberal centrist’), but can’t quite seem to summon the requisite cognitive dissonance of that ideology. (You take things at face value - whereas most take the fundamental hypocrisy as a given). Its very telling that you only attempt to go against straw-men and morons like Josh Hawley, because it renders the issue ridiculous, imbues it with that middlebrow humour so beloved of American journalists, and allows you to dismiss the entire discussion out of hand. I don’t think this is a serious attempt to engage with one of the most pressing and philosophically complex issues of the moment.
Of course you think some wanker that writes for the Brookings Institute is the 'best there is' lmao. There's an entire field of historical, literary and psychoanalytical accounts that were written 20, 30 or even a 100 years ago before the study of masculinties became an arriere-garde of feminist scholarship and ceased to be a distinct subject in and of itself. All of them are relevant to the contemporary moment. My second academic monograph is on this topic- masculinity and modernist fascist literature - which is still under review. It's odd that you need me to elucidate this for you - but I think you're being genuine, so send me an email and I'd be happy to send some stuff.
I think the most absurd thing about this discourse is that people writing about it are convinced that this is an exclusively contemporary problem without historical antecedents...seems disengenuous...but I suppose most of the people writing about are journalists.
Is one of your objections to this line of argument that categories like gender and their specific virtues (eg, "courage") are a problem b/c they result in some individuals who lack these virtues "feeling like failed instances of their kind," whereas somehow fewer people would feel this way if we universalized virtues instead of gendering them? I mean, wouldn't it be even worse to be a failure of a human being than only a failure of a man?
And are all currently-gendered qualities as potentially amenable to universalization as courage? I have in mind particularly the quality of birthing babies, which is not a virtue in the Aristotelian sense, but we might say is a good quality for society if you want society to continue. To an extent, we can praise both sexes equally for exemplary "parenthood" in raising children, but we can't praise men for bearing children. Does that mean some virtues are inaccessible to them qua men, or does it just mean that if a quality is not accessible in this way, it is not a virtue worth praising?
Finally, what if some people, male and female, when left to "be what they are," don't know what to try to become good at in the first place? Should they try to be good at writing books or playing chess or being courageous? It seems hard to be good at all these things at once! How do they prioritize? It seems that if there is no hierarchy, then the grounds of virtue are a little imperiled. Poetry vs. Pushpin, counting blades of grass, that kind of thing. But if there IS a hierarchy, AND it turns out that men and women on average consistently excel at different elements of this hierarchy, you're right that this is a merely descriptive observation and not itself a normative argument, but it seems hard to draw no normative inferences from this if it's a globally and historically consistent observation of group divergence. (Precisely which normative inference we draw is open - we could normatively argue that precisely BECAUSE men seem more naturally inclined to acts of courage, we ought to praise them less for it and increase our praise of it in women, if we think our society needs lots more courage. We do something like that in other contexts, like in praising ordinary civilians for acts which are basic job requirements for emergency responders.)
To the first point, this is a good point. I think the problem isn’t just that some people would lack some virtues, but that a particular bundle of virtues is generally proposed as mandatory for being a good instance of a man/woman, and this isn’t generally regarded as an optional pursuit, whereas there tends to be more pluralism about human virtues. In the world I’m envisioning, there’s simply a plurality of ways of being a successful person. Maybe there could be a plurality of ways of being a successful man/woman in the world of gender norms, and that would surely be better, but this isn’t how gender has tended to work historically—and still strikes me as especially unfair that some people should be discouraged from displaying virtues they’re inclined to display, by dint of personality, solely in virtue of their gender. That seems like a special sort of injustice—being prevented from cultivating a virtue one could have—distinct from and additional to merely being faulted for not having a virtue. So this is at least a second kind of injustice in the gender situation. (If you think women simply lack the “masculine” virtues, you won’t think this injustice occurs.)
I suppose I don’t see capacity for child-bearing as a virtue, merely a capability (one that can be approached with virtue, of course). The fact that it isn’t equally available to everyone isn’t what makes it not a virtue—the fact that it isn’t chosen or cultivated is, I think. Capacity to give birth is like capacity to grow red hair. It’s hard for me to think of a moral virtue that I don’t think is accessible to both genders in equal measure. Also, I distinguish between sex and gender so I don’t think this is an exclusive capacity of women, although more women certainly have it than men. (And more men have the capacity for physical strength than women, but I don’t think that’s really a moral virtue either, even if it’s a capacity that can be put to morally praiseworthy ends.)
I’m not so sympathetic to this last point because I think people have personalities and therefore have talents and inclinations and propensities, so I don’t think gender is really so necessary when it comes to helping them decide what to do. But surely social institutions that exposed people to many pursuits are possible and could fill in the stopgap if there really were some vacuum left.
Don't we already live in a world in which "there are a plurality of ways to be a successful person"? I mean, could men ever be said to be having a crisis like this if we lived in Sparta and there was exactly one way to live correctly? It's only because there are options that people get confused.
I certainly take your point about varying individual proclivities, but even so, proclivities are not formed excellence and require guidance. Not every possible individual propensity can be celebrated (eg, a propensity towards theft or murder or punching annoying people in the face, etc), and the challenges of living together always demand that we suppress or redirect some of our proclivities and, reciprocally, strengthen some of our weaknesses. No one is likely to be spontaneously born with only good proclivities and no harmful ones. All polities require education, to varying degrees of intensity, for this reason.
Now, you could say gender differences, even if they exist in some descriptive sense (men stronger, women more socially intuitive, etc), need not play any role in that education, but if our goal is to help individuals strengthen their good proclivities and suppress their bad ones, and we consistently or at least disproportionately find that one group that turns out to be women excels in X qualities and lags in Y qualities, while another that is male is the inverse, it's hard to see why we would not want that to inform an optimal education practice. Just like if medical science discovers that a group that overlaps with "women" disproportionately dies after taking a certain drug, while another ("men") thrives from it, we would surely want doctors to take that into account when prescribing, wouldn't we? (And gendered differences in responses to drugs and various environmental exposures are real and understudied, usually to the detriment of women!) Not every single descriptive difference will have normative implications, to be sure, but if your ideal society has some conception of virtue (=good proclivities that we praise), it will necessarily have some a hierarchy, and those descriptive differences that do implicate virtue will end up with normative valences.
Well, one question is why there are descriptive differences, and to what extent these differences are the product of socialization. Because I think the ones with moral implications (differences not in physical capacity but in virtue) are almost entirely the product of socialization, I don’t think so many would remain in a society in which gender was less emphasized. I suspect we disagree about that. Note that I didn’t say I think there are fundamental or natural differences in the distribution of virtues (stuff like courage), only in the distribution of physical capacity (which I don’t think is a virtue).
I did not say I think every proclivity should be celebrated, so I’m not sure what you’re responding to there. To say a plurality should be is obviously not to say all should be.
I also think that the differences, if they did persist in the post gender utopia, a would almost certainly be minor and at the population level, meaning there would many individual exceptions to the general rule. Given that I think we owe every particular individual person a change to flourish and to cultivate her particular talents, it seems to me to be unjust if we were to assume at the outset that someone should be encouraged to cultivate or the quash a trait, solely on the basis of her gender, and to educate her accordingly accordingly. If 5% more men turn out to be more inclined to do philosophy or whatever, even in a world where pernicious socialization structures are absent, aren’t we being unfair to the many women who are just as good at philosophy (even if there are somewhat fewer of them) if we structure society in such a way that we don’t give them a chance to demonstrate that? And aren’t we potentially depriving ourselves of great philosophers? All of which is to say: I still don’t get what we gain from distinguishing on the basis of gender that isn’t captured by simply distinguishing on the basis of traits and talents. If it turns out that valuable traits are not evenly distributed across genders in a world of fair opportunity, okay, but then we don’t miss out on the (in your view) anomalous smart woman who would be good at the activity—and this latter approach has the merit of ensuring we are fair to the people with traits we might not expect them to have.
Thanks for all these thoughts, as always—and this elaboration helps me get at where I disagree. I think the affirmation that "all virtues are for everyone" is actually widely accepted and assumed to be the primary and most important part of building prosocial behaviors and practices. (It's there in Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women, even—the call to virtue *for all* as the companion of liberty.) Let's say that's 88% of the project of being alive: we all have the invitation and capacity to find a wide variety of role models and symbols and stories that call all of us to various strong dispositions and habits, ideally helping us transcend self-absorption at best and harms toward others at worst. But I think Reeves is in a rhetorical bind that's too easily dismissed, because he is choosing to deal with the other 12% of life, in which the empirical asymmetries between men and women (I mean sex, here, not gender) do show up and necessitate some slightly different practices and discourse. So, no, physical strength is not a virtue in itself and does not need to be described as such, but because both protection and harm can come from women's *overall* greater physical vulnerability and men's *overall* greater physical strength, it's worth asking whether men, in a given historical era, have the kinds of socialization, virtue ethics awareness, and cultural stories that continue to shore up the prosocial end of using that feature of being male. Or similarly, even if women's consensus-building practices are a hazy mix of nature and nurture, that feature might be creating a kind of passively accrued social resilience that men don't have as easily and normatively. It doesn't have to be some essentialist discourse; just an invitation to look more closely at the specifics, no? For most of my adult life, I have said: Whatever! The differences among us are so, so tiny, and that's a good thing. But Reeves is gathering the kind of compounded data that I now think shouldn't be ignored, and I *really* think it's simplistic to imagine that that much data across sectors only indicates men who are nostalgic for an old order.
I find this to be a compelling way of putting the point! I think I could be persuaded (maybe already am persuaded?) that we should take the physical differences seriously and try to work out the normative consequences that follow from them. As a point about sex rather than gender, this whole thing makes a lot more sense to me. It just doesn’t seem to me that this is what a lot of the discourse about male role models or salvaging masculinity is doing—I think most of what I’ve seen is less about the physical reality that (most) men are stronger than (most) women and how to address this general disparity and more about how men feel lost and need new normative moral models of masculine virtue—not do I think the reason people turn to Andrew Tate en masse is because the kind of discussion you’re calling for is absent. But I agree with you that discussion of physical differences at margins is worthwhile.
Agree that distortions *abound* in the commentary, and it's incredibly frustrating. It takes a lot of discipline to say: the physical distinctions *do* have bearing on culture and common life, BUT they don't indicate anything like scripted roles, assigned traits, personality stereotypes, aptitude for x professions (except, ok, firefighters and such). That discipline probably looks like squishy opinion, so it doesn't get much airtime. But I think Reeves is actually doing a pretty good job, considering the temptations of the lazy media machine on all sides. I loved your colleague Christine Emba's piece!
But is it possible that someone whose examples of "men doing cool shit" are Andrew Holleran, David Cronenberg and Eliud Kipchoge is not a man and doesn't understand men?
I always think it’s so funny when people in this discourse fall back on standpoint epistemology. I do not think you have to be a member of a particular identity category to understand that identity category, no
It's so funny that a person in this discourse would fall back on interpreting that comment as meaning that women can't understand men rather than that someone whose examples of "men doing cool shit" are Andrew Holleran, David Cronenberg and Eliud Kipchoge doesn't understand men.
It's funnier still that to misinterpret that comment in that fashion contains the implicit assumption that no man would chose Andrew Holleran, David Cronenberg and Eliud Kipchoge as his examples of "men doing cool shit."
I find this post neglects that men and women play fundamentally different roles in a heterosexual relationship when it comes to raising a child. This is an inherently biologically separate process. Part of being a good man is being a good father. How does one be a good father and is this different from being a good "parent" (non-gendered). It seemingly obviously is different, as being a mother is a very distinct reality. Being a good man for your wife and child is a distinct reality. The inability to acknowledge this basic fact seems akin to being willfully obtuse about the whole thing. Are we really just two non-gendered chromosomed humans giving birth to a child without any relation to how distinctive sex differences affect our socialization and thus what makes us better mates/fathers/mothers an important consideration in a gendered fashion? It seems like we have to use far more conceptual to absolve ourselves of these fundamental realities. You yourself pose the idea that in a non-gendered utopia, what if males are "more courageous" on average, and then you say, that is fine because "people" can express themselves however "people" want. I don't see why it is so wrong to acknowledge that tendencies toward various activities and behaviors tend to be gendered, and this gendered behavior tends to match with sex, and so there is a combination of biology and socialization at play. Your view of gender as a complete projection of socialization and nothing more makes you treat this conversation about men as something that you can't believe is even being discussed, but from my view, I can't believe how you don't see how these conversations through the gaze of gender/sex are not important.
The fact that Tate has an audience in the first place should make you question your assumptions about what gender is. They have innate masculinity, but can’t express it competently. Some of them are too young to know better. The rest are bitter and resentful losers. They get punished on two fronts: they fail in society’s competitive arenas, but then they’re condemned by the culture of neurotic feminism. Telling them to not be masculine or trying to redefine masculinity in more feminine terms is futile. It just pressurize their rage. It’s like telling a Lizzo worshiper that she can lose weight via nutrition and exercise. They don’t listen to reason. They use righteous indignation to avoid feeling responsible.
The idea that men need models of a “good” masculinity is based on a naive theory of how gender comes about - simply individual role models over social institutions like the labor market, social insurance, the family, etc. I imagine this is willful ignorance a lot of the time, coming from people who believe that gender should structure those institutions as well as get meaning from them.
Totally—such a good point. I think gender is almost totally a matter of the division of labor!
Yes, and maybe the weakening of the political and economic forces that reproduce this division accounts for people turning to the role model of masculinity in this kind of commentary and in practice.
Good post. Honestly, a whole lot of the media's masculinity discussion is really frustrating. They talk in generalities and seem to really be dancing around two specific points:
1. How to help people who, with de-inudstrialization, can no longer get rewarding careers in physically-demanding labor, a lot of whom are men who in the 50s would have been in jobs that were near-exclusively done by men
2. How to help heterosexual men who struggle to form romantic or sexual relationships with women in ways that aren't sexist or condescending
I think we can address #1 without making gender the main focus of our concerns, and I feel sorry for the men in category #2, but I'm not sure what politicians or political movements can do, or how all this talk about masculinity will help... but a lot of people (online) seem to think #2 should be a priority of the left, which seems misguided to me
Yes, completely. I think a lot of the men in crisis discourse could be disambiguated like this. If the issue is loss of industrial jobs, we can simply address that issue on its own terms without appeal to some hazy idea of masculinity!
Good post. I too have grown tired of simplistic 'men are in crisis' pieces that are coming out now. I think you highlighted well some of the logical inconsistencies of a leftist rehabilitation of masculinity as a concept. I think the worry about pursuing a less gendered approach to role models is that it is more 'difficult'. So we had a patriarchal prescription of masculinity that feminism has successfully at least partially eroded public confidence in, such that some men/boys feel 'lost' in their social role. I think the only justification for replacing this role with a 'healthy' masculinity would be as a stop-gap. Some people may accept that the old social role was bad and harmful but may have difficulties accepting less-gendered vision of social roles, either because they ideologically oppose it or just gender binary roles are deeply culturally ingrained. The pragmatist approach could argue it is better for the left to attempt to fill this gap in order to reach this population rather than ceding them to the reactionaries. Whether this pro outweighs the cons you outline I can't really say.
One difficulty /incoherence is that because masculinity is viewed as the 'default' gender in the general public sphere, many putative male role models are often not viewed as 'male' role models. I Like probably the biggest male role model on the American left would be Bernie Sanders (?) but I don't think he is typically held up as an exemplar of a male role model in the same way that AOC or similar I think is cultural considered a female role model. It seems that in order to be characterized as a specifically 'male' role model you need to be in some ways exemplars of the very patriarchal forms of masculinity (ie physically strong, confident, assertive), particularly for impressionable youths. I think this why Andrew Tate, who acts as almost a caricature, with the cars, cigars, etc, is most popular with young boys/pre-teens. I don't think a feminist-allied masculine figure will ever compete in this arena because the reactionaries will always have the home field advantage of what we culturally recognize as masculinity to begin with.
That’s a great point, particular the home field advantage bit. I agree about the stop gap stuff. I just think it’s important for people to be mindful, when trying to devise male role models as stop gaps, of the end goal. Too much of the nominally leftist-ish discussion of positive male role models basically accepts gender essentialism as a fundamental and unalterable fact, and that sucks
Stunning analysis per usual! I have a more basic and likely oversimplified take - these are men with a strong implicit bias towards patriarchy and want to ensure the conditions are in place for the next cadre of male leaders to emerge lest those pesky and hormonal women take control. Thanks for another great note!
Also a strong possibility!
A very strange article. You show some self-awareness of the narrowness of your particularly world-view (‘liberal centrist’), but can’t quite seem to summon the requisite cognitive dissonance of that ideology. (You take things at face value - whereas most take the fundamental hypocrisy as a given). Its very telling that you only attempt to go against straw-men and morons like Josh Hawley, because it renders the issue ridiculous, imbues it with that middlebrow humour so beloved of American journalists, and allows you to dismiss the entire discussion out of hand. I don’t think this is a serious attempt to engage with one of the most pressing and philosophically complex issues of the moment.
I’ve looked hard for better discussions of masculinity! I think reeves is pretty much the best there is. Is there a better one you recommend?
Of course you think some wanker that writes for the Brookings Institute is the 'best there is' lmao. There's an entire field of historical, literary and psychoanalytical accounts that were written 20, 30 or even a 100 years ago before the study of masculinties became an arriere-garde of feminist scholarship and ceased to be a distinct subject in and of itself. All of them are relevant to the contemporary moment. My second academic monograph is on this topic- masculinity and modernist fascist literature - which is still under review. It's odd that you need me to elucidate this for you - but I think you're being genuine, so send me an email and I'd be happy to send some stuff.
I think the most absurd thing about this discourse is that people writing about it are convinced that this is an exclusively contemporary problem without historical antecedents...seems disengenuous...but I suppose most of the people writing about are journalists.
Is one of your objections to this line of argument that categories like gender and their specific virtues (eg, "courage") are a problem b/c they result in some individuals who lack these virtues "feeling like failed instances of their kind," whereas somehow fewer people would feel this way if we universalized virtues instead of gendering them? I mean, wouldn't it be even worse to be a failure of a human being than only a failure of a man?
And are all currently-gendered qualities as potentially amenable to universalization as courage? I have in mind particularly the quality of birthing babies, which is not a virtue in the Aristotelian sense, but we might say is a good quality for society if you want society to continue. To an extent, we can praise both sexes equally for exemplary "parenthood" in raising children, but we can't praise men for bearing children. Does that mean some virtues are inaccessible to them qua men, or does it just mean that if a quality is not accessible in this way, it is not a virtue worth praising?
Finally, what if some people, male and female, when left to "be what they are," don't know what to try to become good at in the first place? Should they try to be good at writing books or playing chess or being courageous? It seems hard to be good at all these things at once! How do they prioritize? It seems that if there is no hierarchy, then the grounds of virtue are a little imperiled. Poetry vs. Pushpin, counting blades of grass, that kind of thing. But if there IS a hierarchy, AND it turns out that men and women on average consistently excel at different elements of this hierarchy, you're right that this is a merely descriptive observation and not itself a normative argument, but it seems hard to draw no normative inferences from this if it's a globally and historically consistent observation of group divergence. (Precisely which normative inference we draw is open - we could normatively argue that precisely BECAUSE men seem more naturally inclined to acts of courage, we ought to praise them less for it and increase our praise of it in women, if we think our society needs lots more courage. We do something like that in other contexts, like in praising ordinary civilians for acts which are basic job requirements for emergency responders.)
To the first point, this is a good point. I think the problem isn’t just that some people would lack some virtues, but that a particular bundle of virtues is generally proposed as mandatory for being a good instance of a man/woman, and this isn’t generally regarded as an optional pursuit, whereas there tends to be more pluralism about human virtues. In the world I’m envisioning, there’s simply a plurality of ways of being a successful person. Maybe there could be a plurality of ways of being a successful man/woman in the world of gender norms, and that would surely be better, but this isn’t how gender has tended to work historically—and still strikes me as especially unfair that some people should be discouraged from displaying virtues they’re inclined to display, by dint of personality, solely in virtue of their gender. That seems like a special sort of injustice—being prevented from cultivating a virtue one could have—distinct from and additional to merely being faulted for not having a virtue. So this is at least a second kind of injustice in the gender situation. (If you think women simply lack the “masculine” virtues, you won’t think this injustice occurs.)
I suppose I don’t see capacity for child-bearing as a virtue, merely a capability (one that can be approached with virtue, of course). The fact that it isn’t equally available to everyone isn’t what makes it not a virtue—the fact that it isn’t chosen or cultivated is, I think. Capacity to give birth is like capacity to grow red hair. It’s hard for me to think of a moral virtue that I don’t think is accessible to both genders in equal measure. Also, I distinguish between sex and gender so I don’t think this is an exclusive capacity of women, although more women certainly have it than men. (And more men have the capacity for physical strength than women, but I don’t think that’s really a moral virtue either, even if it’s a capacity that can be put to morally praiseworthy ends.)
I’m not so sympathetic to this last point because I think people have personalities and therefore have talents and inclinations and propensities, so I don’t think gender is really so necessary when it comes to helping them decide what to do. But surely social institutions that exposed people to many pursuits are possible and could fill in the stopgap if there really were some vacuum left.
Don't we already live in a world in which "there are a plurality of ways to be a successful person"? I mean, could men ever be said to be having a crisis like this if we lived in Sparta and there was exactly one way to live correctly? It's only because there are options that people get confused.
I certainly take your point about varying individual proclivities, but even so, proclivities are not formed excellence and require guidance. Not every possible individual propensity can be celebrated (eg, a propensity towards theft or murder or punching annoying people in the face, etc), and the challenges of living together always demand that we suppress or redirect some of our proclivities and, reciprocally, strengthen some of our weaknesses. No one is likely to be spontaneously born with only good proclivities and no harmful ones. All polities require education, to varying degrees of intensity, for this reason.
Now, you could say gender differences, even if they exist in some descriptive sense (men stronger, women more socially intuitive, etc), need not play any role in that education, but if our goal is to help individuals strengthen their good proclivities and suppress their bad ones, and we consistently or at least disproportionately find that one group that turns out to be women excels in X qualities and lags in Y qualities, while another that is male is the inverse, it's hard to see why we would not want that to inform an optimal education practice. Just like if medical science discovers that a group that overlaps with "women" disproportionately dies after taking a certain drug, while another ("men") thrives from it, we would surely want doctors to take that into account when prescribing, wouldn't we? (And gendered differences in responses to drugs and various environmental exposures are real and understudied, usually to the detriment of women!) Not every single descriptive difference will have normative implications, to be sure, but if your ideal society has some conception of virtue (=good proclivities that we praise), it will necessarily have some a hierarchy, and those descriptive differences that do implicate virtue will end up with normative valences.
Well, one question is why there are descriptive differences, and to what extent these differences are the product of socialization. Because I think the ones with moral implications (differences not in physical capacity but in virtue) are almost entirely the product of socialization, I don’t think so many would remain in a society in which gender was less emphasized. I suspect we disagree about that. Note that I didn’t say I think there are fundamental or natural differences in the distribution of virtues (stuff like courage), only in the distribution of physical capacity (which I don’t think is a virtue).
I did not say I think every proclivity should be celebrated, so I’m not sure what you’re responding to there. To say a plurality should be is obviously not to say all should be.
I also think that the differences, if they did persist in the post gender utopia, a would almost certainly be minor and at the population level, meaning there would many individual exceptions to the general rule. Given that I think we owe every particular individual person a change to flourish and to cultivate her particular talents, it seems to me to be unjust if we were to assume at the outset that someone should be encouraged to cultivate or the quash a trait, solely on the basis of her gender, and to educate her accordingly accordingly. If 5% more men turn out to be more inclined to do philosophy or whatever, even in a world where pernicious socialization structures are absent, aren’t we being unfair to the many women who are just as good at philosophy (even if there are somewhat fewer of them) if we structure society in such a way that we don’t give them a chance to demonstrate that? And aren’t we potentially depriving ourselves of great philosophers? All of which is to say: I still don’t get what we gain from distinguishing on the basis of gender that isn’t captured by simply distinguishing on the basis of traits and talents. If it turns out that valuable traits are not evenly distributed across genders in a world of fair opportunity, okay, but then we don’t miss out on the (in your view) anomalous smart woman who would be good at the activity—and this latter approach has the merit of ensuring we are fair to the people with traits we might not expect them to have.
Thanks for all these thoughts, as always—and this elaboration helps me get at where I disagree. I think the affirmation that "all virtues are for everyone" is actually widely accepted and assumed to be the primary and most important part of building prosocial behaviors and practices. (It's there in Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women, even—the call to virtue *for all* as the companion of liberty.) Let's say that's 88% of the project of being alive: we all have the invitation and capacity to find a wide variety of role models and symbols and stories that call all of us to various strong dispositions and habits, ideally helping us transcend self-absorption at best and harms toward others at worst. But I think Reeves is in a rhetorical bind that's too easily dismissed, because he is choosing to deal with the other 12% of life, in which the empirical asymmetries between men and women (I mean sex, here, not gender) do show up and necessitate some slightly different practices and discourse. So, no, physical strength is not a virtue in itself and does not need to be described as such, but because both protection and harm can come from women's *overall* greater physical vulnerability and men's *overall* greater physical strength, it's worth asking whether men, in a given historical era, have the kinds of socialization, virtue ethics awareness, and cultural stories that continue to shore up the prosocial end of using that feature of being male. Or similarly, even if women's consensus-building practices are a hazy mix of nature and nurture, that feature might be creating a kind of passively accrued social resilience that men don't have as easily and normatively. It doesn't have to be some essentialist discourse; just an invitation to look more closely at the specifics, no? For most of my adult life, I have said: Whatever! The differences among us are so, so tiny, and that's a good thing. But Reeves is gathering the kind of compounded data that I now think shouldn't be ignored, and I *really* think it's simplistic to imagine that that much data across sectors only indicates men who are nostalgic for an old order.
I find this to be a compelling way of putting the point! I think I could be persuaded (maybe already am persuaded?) that we should take the physical differences seriously and try to work out the normative consequences that follow from them. As a point about sex rather than gender, this whole thing makes a lot more sense to me. It just doesn’t seem to me that this is what a lot of the discourse about male role models or salvaging masculinity is doing—I think most of what I’ve seen is less about the physical reality that (most) men are stronger than (most) women and how to address this general disparity and more about how men feel lost and need new normative moral models of masculine virtue—not do I think the reason people turn to Andrew Tate en masse is because the kind of discussion you’re calling for is absent. But I agree with you that discussion of physical differences at margins is worthwhile.
Agree that distortions *abound* in the commentary, and it's incredibly frustrating. It takes a lot of discipline to say: the physical distinctions *do* have bearing on culture and common life, BUT they don't indicate anything like scripted roles, assigned traits, personality stereotypes, aptitude for x professions (except, ok, firefighters and such). That discipline probably looks like squishy opinion, so it doesn't get much airtime. But I think Reeves is actually doing a pretty good job, considering the temptations of the lazy media machine on all sides. I loved your colleague Christine Emba's piece!
But is it possible that someone whose examples of "men doing cool shit" are Andrew Holleran, David Cronenberg and Eliud Kipchoge is not a man and doesn't understand men?
I always think it’s so funny when people in this discourse fall back on standpoint epistemology. I do not think you have to be a member of a particular identity category to understand that identity category, no
It's so funny that a person in this discourse would fall back on interpreting that comment as meaning that women can't understand men rather than that someone whose examples of "men doing cool shit" are Andrew Holleran, David Cronenberg and Eliud Kipchoge doesn't understand men.
It's funnier still that to misinterpret that comment in that fashion contains the implicit assumption that no man would chose Andrew Holleran, David Cronenberg and Eliud Kipchoge as his examples of "men doing cool shit."
Much to ponder.
Are you saying those men are *not* doing cool shit?
Excellent piece
I find this post neglects that men and women play fundamentally different roles in a heterosexual relationship when it comes to raising a child. This is an inherently biologically separate process. Part of being a good man is being a good father. How does one be a good father and is this different from being a good "parent" (non-gendered). It seemingly obviously is different, as being a mother is a very distinct reality. Being a good man for your wife and child is a distinct reality. The inability to acknowledge this basic fact seems akin to being willfully obtuse about the whole thing. Are we really just two non-gendered chromosomed humans giving birth to a child without any relation to how distinctive sex differences affect our socialization and thus what makes us better mates/fathers/mothers an important consideration in a gendered fashion? It seems like we have to use far more conceptual to absolve ourselves of these fundamental realities. You yourself pose the idea that in a non-gendered utopia, what if males are "more courageous" on average, and then you say, that is fine because "people" can express themselves however "people" want. I don't see why it is so wrong to acknowledge that tendencies toward various activities and behaviors tend to be gendered, and this gendered behavior tends to match with sex, and so there is a combination of biology and socialization at play. Your view of gender as a complete projection of socialization and nothing more makes you treat this conversation about men as something that you can't believe is even being discussed, but from my view, I can't believe how you don't see how these conversations through the gaze of gender/sex are not important.
The fact that Tate has an audience in the first place should make you question your assumptions about what gender is. They have innate masculinity, but can’t express it competently. Some of them are too young to know better. The rest are bitter and resentful losers. They get punished on two fronts: they fail in society’s competitive arenas, but then they’re condemned by the culture of neurotic feminism. Telling them to not be masculine or trying to redefine masculinity in more feminine terms is futile. It just pressurize their rage. It’s like telling a Lizzo worshiper that she can lose weight via nutrition and exercise. They don’t listen to reason. They use righteous indignation to avoid feeling responsible.