jackb
Masculinity is Not a Mass Product
There’s been a good long line over the last several years of people clamoring for more literature about men, by men. Many have noticed that publishing is managed primarily by safetyist women, that men are pursuing college study and especially the humanities at drastically decreasing rates, so on and so forth. There are many reasons why men feel less inclined toward writing novels of this sort, but in my capacity as a man who loves literature, I think the most salient question is this: why would they?
If you’re dying for stories written by men that explore their internal lives, there is a long and diverse history of people writing exactly that. Looking for fiction that explores how boys make men of themselves and find their place as masculine adults? Go read Dickens! Interested in how men approach and find allure in women? Read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Henry James, or a million others. Are you curious about the experience of disaffected young men who go down an anti-social rabbit hole of solipsistic pseudo-philosophy and come out the other side as dangerous misanthropes? Try Crime and Punishment !
Perhaps you are interested in a novel written from the perspective of a man with some kind of trauma or other social disenfranchisement that causes him to feel alienated, distant, and emasculated in every social situation. Perhaps this man feels aimless and without meaningful pursuits, which is constantly reaffirmed by his total inability to secure the affections of the women in his milieu; and yet despite all of this, he consistently labors to make himself seen and heard both interpersonally and through his writing. You could absolutely trawl through the self-publication platforms and search for a diamond in the rough. You could send out a call from Esquire magazine and whichever other places asking men to reveal their innermost selves to you on the page.
You could also just pick up a copy of The Sun Also Rises.
But wait, you’re saying, all of those books are old and dusty! Raskolnikov was no incel - he never logs in to Reddit or posts a slur in a journalist’s Twitter replies! Oliver Twist may have been taken under the wing of an exploitative scumbag with a dysgenic program for male adulthood, but he never had the TikTok algorithm force-feed him Andrew Tate slop like the kids today! These are very different things! The experience of masculinity now is radically different from how it was a hundred years ago!
If this is your response, then I’d like to gently suggest that you’re not actually interested in how men move through the world and maintain their internal lives. Maybe what you’re looking for are actually stories about men using Instagram. Which is okay! For better or worse, systems like social media are now part and parcel to the western world. However, it does bring up the question of why My Twisted World, the memoir-manifesto of UC Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger, is not as popular as Industrial Society and its Future, despite dealing with topics like sexuality and intimacy, which are traditionally more interesting to women than political theory and industrial history. (If this claim bothers you, consider whether the bestseller list is more likely to contain romance novels or sober military histories, and then recall that the vast majority of people who buy books are women). Perhaps it’s because Kaczynski was broadly successful in his campaign to terrorize the people he saw as his enemies, as well as having achieved impressive credentials in academia. In contrast, Rodger was a consummate loser in essentially every metric available, and that fundamental fecklessness is inexcusably revolting in a man, no matter how precisely his writing aligns with what is being asked after in these calls for litfic about men’s internal lives.
Anyway, there is clearly more to be said about who men are and what their lives are like in our brave new world. If Shakespeare had determined that Homer adequately covered man’s inclination to make devastating war in service of self-aggrandizement, or how singular fixations on legacy and legend can be the downfall of great men and societies, then he wouldn’t have given us Macbeth or probably several of his other masterpieces.
The point here is not to make some hack claim that all the ideas have already been had, every piece already written. There are of course a number of factors which distinguish the circumstances of the contemporary man from those of his predecessors, and those of us inclined toward art are, as ever, called to express those circumstances and the men and women that inhabit them.
The question is what we can say about contemporary men’s internal lives, or ‘interiority’ if you like, and why it seems to have vanished from popular literature. Andrew Boryga makes the excellent point that this is primarily because men’s internal thoughts have not been popular among opinion merchants in general lately. Again, if you doubt this, I encourage you to compare how much literature markets itself as written by men compared to that written by women. Boryga attributes this largely to a tendency of men to express themselves in ways that agitate women’s sensibilities, which becomes untenable when women are hegemonic in publishing. Even the c-suite has become primarily populate by women, but more important is this: the functionaries that read and edit submissions or sign advance checks (and therefore embody the actual activity of publishing) are overwhelmingly women, as are the outsiders aggregating reviews on Goodreads or booktok/tube that generate an actual readership, which is itself also almost entirely women.
For a book to be popular in this climate, it must, by definition, be saying something that women want to hear, which is very rarely how normal straight men think or speak on their own terms.
If you’re reading this as a straight man, consider how long it’s been since you last spoke completely freely and naturally, without any kind of careful self-adjustment or softening of language, in the company of women. For that matter, I wonder how often women feel they can speak freely in the company of men. This isn’t purely a matter of political ends, though that is a factor; rather I think the political differences that are now so common between the sexes are downstream of a general gap that has been widening between us for a long time.
Few aspects of our society have been so frequently demolished and rebuilt in recent history as the relationship between men and women. Which sex is suited to which stations in society; how they ought to conduct themselves around each other in private or in public; whether one or the other should have primacy in certain domains; whether the categories exist at all or if there might be more than those two; what reparations, if any, are due for past grievances. We barely agree on the terms of one question before stacking another on top of it, over and over for generations, and then we wonder how it is that we’ve grown so distant and alien to each other.
These questions do have answers, and these problems do have resolutions. I don’t claim special insight on any of them, and I also don’t think any of them have to be settled before we see the return of men’s personal writing to the fold of popular literature. But I do think it’s silly to ask us to be honest and direct when you’ve given every impression that you neither understand nor appreciate it when we do so.