A century ago women were still denied suffrage, but today they seem poised to take the reins of business and government straight from our ossified male hands. Despite the myriad and pervasive forms of gender inequality that still exist, women are simply outperforming us on the metrics of tomorrow, while we fellas are struggling to shed our collective, antiquated sense of masculinity.
The world is changing, and it has less need than ever of our most traditional talent, the trait that made us indispensable: our physical strength. Strength is what makes us men, what makes us tough. With it we could provide food, build structures, and of course kill others. Strength was our stranglehold on physical power, and became infused with the societal and cultural power structures people have created throughout history. Strength was and still is glorified publicly, however the ancient Greeks prized a sculpted figure because they needed those muscled forms to be successful, we glorify sculpted male physiques because so few of us have them.
The paradigm is changing as the cultural and societal structures require and rely less and less on male muscle. This has been a long time coming, evident since the day John Henry died, working himself to death to prove man’s strength was superior to steam. Meanwhile the skills needed to be successful in the 21st century — and the jobs that hire for those skills — increasingly belong to women.
The crumbling foundation of our masculine sense-of-self is causing many problems. We lash out with violence, killing those closest to us, strangers, and ourselves. We perpetrate sexual violence against women. We have high rates of addiction, we are increasingly jobless and in poor health, we are dispossessed, and we are angry. Women are more empowered than ever, no longer in need of our brawn and reliant on the income so long synonymous with it. No longer compelled to tolerate our worse habits for survival, many women choose not to pursue traditional relationships. They are choosy, and why shouldn’t they be? An educated, successful woman shouldn’t settle any more than an educated, successful man should.
None of the trends making women successful at our expense are going to change. They’re only going to accelerate. So men have two options, adapt or continue our precipitous plummet into uselessness. We need a conception of masculinity that allows us to be confident and successful, but fits in a world less in need of our muscles. Men need to be tougher, but in a more feminine sense.
The world is an interconnected place. Travel and communication and faster than ever before. Knowledge is at our fingertips. We rely on complex webs of information to make decisions and take action. Integration, collaboration, teamwork, the ability to collectively problem-solve and overcome differences, these are the traits that the 21st century will reward. These are the traits that millennia of traditional femininity have fostered, and women are capitalizing by doing what they have always done.
It takes a village to do all the tasks and chores of a domestic economy that women have always performed — invisible to the history books — necessary to keep society functioning. While men did most of what you read about in history class, women did all the things that most men still don’t understand are so important, time-consuming, and difficult. Women cultivated networks of people they trusted and leveraged those networks for assistance and information, sharing the work, completing chores with limited resources at their disposal, and generally creating symbiosis. The same skills women have always used to raise children and form the stable domestic foundation for society as we know it are exactly what make them successful in today’s global economy.
So if men want to remain relevant, we need to become more suited to the feminine economy, and we need to become tougher, psychologically tougher. First and foremost this means recognizing and addressing our deficiencies. We must become more collaborative, less competitive. We must listen to understand rather than waiting to respond. Most importantly, we must learn to share our outsized portion of the opportunity.
I love watching Planet Earth, but we’re not the lions, nor the beetles, nor any other species that responds only to biological urges. We do not need to assert ourselves territorially, sexually, or materially to reproduce nor to ensure our survival. In fact we now have the capacity to take some of these aims to self-destructive ends. Even if a chimpanzee war party were to go on a rage-fueled rampage, they could never eliminate the species. The same cannot be said of human beings with nuclear weapons.
This is not to say that all people — men and women — are immune to our biological tendencies, we all get hungry and use the bathroom in addition to other things. But the very thing that makes us human, that separates us from the beetle, the lion, the chimpanzee, is that we can thing critically about how our structures impact our environment and our survival. Is hyper-patriarchal structure of many species threatened by climate change, and can they analyze that question? I would guess yes and no. Is the patriarchal manner in which human societies are structured threatened by modern forces, can men recognize this, and can we adapt to this new reality? The answers are yes, yes, and I hope, yes.
I hope, yes, but I am unsure. Right now too many men are willing to resort to and reassert traditional forms of male toughness, embodied politically by Donald Trump, who is perceived as tough because he appeals to some bygone age when you simply punched the other guy and grabbed his girlfriend’s genitals and you were the bigger man. Those old days were the stone age, and this “masculinity” is thin, shallow, and literally primitive. It is not tough.
What Donald Trump and I have in common is that we have both wanted to punch people. What makes us different is that I know that the tough thing to do when I feel that way is to reflect, analyze, deescalate. The punch should be my last resort, and exerting my dominance with a punch doesn’t make me better than the lion, “tough” until he tires of punching, and is killed or chased off by a competitor who seizes his land and harem. Many men think the lion is tough, but toughness is knowing when and why to withhold violence, applying force only when truly necessary, and certainly not in reactive anger. It is easy to punch in anger, to have no one question you. It is much tougher to look in the mirror and examine your own flaws.
Another thing Donald and I have in common is that we both find women attractive, and like him, I have had encounters with women albeit in very, very different manners. Here too Trump and those who embrace his “masculinity” are like the beasts, asserting physical dominance over other men and women to lay sexual claim. This view underlies rape-culture, and is summed up in Trump’s deplorable comment: grab them by the p*ssy. This is neither masculine, nor fortunately, common. Men do talk about women, yes, but not about sexual assault and rape. Men share details of sexual encounters, but real men don’t perceive women as animals to be conquered like a distant relative on the evolutionary tree.
Real men appeal to women, not prey on them. Masculinity is attractive to women, bestial displays of faux-toughness are not masculine. You are not the lion, but in pretending to be, you look more like a small frail animal using mimicry to stay safe, perhaps the owl butterfly. You do not appear tough or truly masculine because you are not. This couldn’t be more true for Trump, the tough guy cartoon. Trump isn’t tough, isn’t masculine, he’s a charade, a theatrical performer (literally) playing the role of antiquated macho man.
The longer men continue to conceive of ourselves as first and foremost strong and therefore entitled, the more our traditional powers and roles will erode, and the uglier it will be for everyone. Masculinity no longer means dominating like the lion, it means weaving and benefiting from symbiosis, it means acceptance and tolerance and prudence when using what is still a valuable asset, our strength. It means pursuing women as equal and empowered partners, not demeaning them and certainly not assaulting them.
The world does not need to become post-man, but unless we can adapt, I doubt we’ll be of much use.