When a man loudly defends his manhood, regardless of what was said about his hands, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” No man emasculates himself as quickly as the one who puts forward his own masculinity.
Separated from femininity, masculinity has no meaningful significance.
If man, “homo,” may be actually divided into “vir,” male, and “femina,” female, if those two categories are to possess a relationship to reality that surpasses mere sexual characteristics — the repetitiveness or variety of chromosomes at play, the predominance of testosterone or estrogen, or the consequent shape and function of pelvises and femoral sockets — then discussions of masculinity must remain coupled to the feminine, and rooted in the human. To do otherwise is to fall into the same traps of identity politics as third-wave feminism.
If there really is a crisis of American men, it is not a crisis isolated from society’s conception either of women or of itself. We may talk about fulfilling the role society has created for men, or men meeting the needs of their community, but let us be careful when discussing the masculine and the feminine in isolated abstractions, as no question is removeable from its context.
In her lecture “Are Women Human?,” friend of C.S. Lewis and first-wave feminist Dorothy Sayers asked her audience to imagine a world where a man is thought of “not as a member of society, but merely (salva reverential) a virile member of society.” That is, with a wink, to imagine a world where magazines and newspapers have “men’s interest” sections and nurses and flight attendants are not the only commonly gendered “male-” occupations, a world where men are explicitly defined by their maleness. At the time, Sayers intended this rhetorical device to illustrate the ridiculousness, and resulting strange alienation, of isolating the feminine from the human. That is, if a woman is always a “lady doctor” or “female mechanic,” then she is always other than the norm, other than human, which in such a society is masculine by default.
Today our culture is saturated by materials denoted by maleness, ranging from the damaging — like pornographic “men’s interest” magazines — to the benevolent, like the excellent “Art of Manliness” website. In some real, significant sense, American men feel alienated in and from their very maleness. But projects attempting to double down on what manhood is without acknowledging the cultural context in which they operate or tradition from which they come devolve into a phallo-centric identity politics. Men’s Rights Activists, the pathetic self-pity monsters of the dirty corners of the internet, are indistinguishable in ideological method from third-wave feminists — though much more rapey.
Early feminists like Sayers demonstrated that society saw the male as the unmarked default category in social roles, that the female must always be marked, and thus other and marginalized. The first wave won women their civil rights and equal legal status. Second-wave feminism led to third-wave as it moved past exposing the unique challenges women face, to othering the female not just from men or simple humanity but from other females, birthing a self-consuming fractured ideology of identity.
The contemporary male desire to reassert and define masculinity in reaction to felt marginalization reveals that society has succeeded in unsexing “homo” entirely. Rather than feminism and its respondents creating a humankind that denotes not just masculine, but also feminine, both have been excised and alienated from simple humanity.
Heterodox radical feminist and cultural critic Camille Paglia’s reflections on feminism and the sexes have earned her notoriety for affirming men and women’s mutual codependence and wedded identities.
In December 2013, she wrote in Time magazine that “when an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.”
Paglia condemns this unisex war on and by the sexes to unsex humanity. It is gnostic in its rejection of biology and modern in its rejection of history. As she argues, traditional gender roles arose as a kind of division of labor born out of the biological realities of pregnancy, a division made almost superfluous by capitalism’s labor-saving devices. But Paglia believes that a failure to acknowledge the biological differences between men and women, physiological and psychological, or a denial of the essentialness of filling societal roles traditionally assigned to one sex, like childcare and soldiery, threatens the stability of American civilization.
When discussing masculinity, we must not make the same mistakes. Rather than speaking in male terms over and against femininity or simple humanity, we must look to history and the contexts in which gender roles arose. A clear understanding of the ways that social and material circumstances partnered with biological differentiation to determine those roles can lead to a clear-eyed examination of how they are best distinguished today.
Most of all, remember Genesis, and “homo” as both masculine and feminine. For, “Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created.”