I agree 100% with your advice on masculinity, but I think it also applies equally to everyone else. Your advice made me think of my grandmothers. One who during the Great Depression escaped an abusive marriage and with her brother’s assistance drove her kids from South Carolina to Idaho in a Model A and a trailer stuffed with her few possessions to start a new life. She became a custodian at a TB hospital, and a few years later she went to nursing school at age 52. She was active in her church and community, and raised most of the meat, poultry, eggs, fruit and vegetables the family consumed. My other grandmother raised a blended family of fifteen ( yours, mine, ours and theirs), grew most of their own food, co-managed the family ranch and sawmill, taught Sunday school, and played piano at church and for square dances. They lived their lives by the same principles you set forth, and also passed them on to their daughters and sons. They were both quite feminine,but also carried the responsibility for their families and communities, very friendly but not to be trifled with.
Thank you for all your great writing, Ted! I came here because of your music writing but continue to return for your commentary on culture at large.
But isn't it telling that many of the examples of how men should be are being demonstrated by women in our lives, as well as men.
Courage, truthfulness, protecting others, selflessness, tenacity, etc are universal virtues, available to all. They need to be developed by all. They might be thought old-fashioned, but actually are eternal virtues that no one has ever shown we can do without.
For males who wonder how to be, people are responding: develop these virtues! These are the key ones. They will lead to the others.
On the other hand, obsession with one's image, popularity, and notoriety are the coins of the realm for all today. The kids want to be "influencers," the new rock stars.
On the other, other, hand: young males still are larger, stronger, more aggressive, and more in need of excitement than girls are, and schools are not designed for them. They are still the Yang to the girls Yin.
Meanwhile the girls are showing more Yang than they used to, and the boys more Yin.
And with both parents working, sometimes doing multiple jobs, who is actually teaching the children to be adults, anyway? The culture as a whole does the very opposite.
We need to do better than offer "Barbie" and "James Bond" as models of how to be. Kids think those are hopelessly out of date, anyway.
We also need to do better than that row of male tech Oligarchs at the inauguration. Do you want your world to be run by them? Wait, it already is!
Here's a virtue we can all, I hope, get behind: wisdom. Consider its opposite: foolishness. We've got plenty of that. Not to mention: confusion!
I say, even though you say all the "right" things, im not buying it. Mostly bc im not going to listen to some fool when he tells me what i NEED to do. The people i respect and listen to do not talk like this. They are wise enough to know that thats a hollow form of leadership. What comes next, pass around the donation plate?
No.. ill take my cues from those that walk the walk, and nevermind those that talk the talk.
This is, of course, true, but there is a subtle and hard-to-articulate idea about how it is differently in men and women. I can recognise it but can’t explain it using clear, rational, ‘left-brain’ categories. As a result, it becomes invalidated, and we lose something important, this is one of the thingsart can do.
came here to write this - it's actually Freud's prescription for a happy life, and before him countless others - from buddha to the stoics, women were just written out of this 'masculinity' (which we might call humanity) by sexism, let us be blunt, because men were the only ones allowed to be heroes to their own story - to have protagonist syndrome, luckily society has changed and we are demanding that human right - and acknolwedging others, I disagree a tad about Taylor Sheridan's 'cure - sure it works I money terms but it's still a tad grotesque and unneccesary, it's the best end of the idiocy that sees men and women as fundamentally different in qualities. a real James Bond would do all that whilst recognising that it's simply being a decent human.
Very well said. I have no issues with Ted and other writers prescribing this advice as the epitome of good masculanity, but I just think it should apply to every decent and functional adult in society.
Part of the charm is watching Bond, with an almost feline precision, do things most of us can't do including the casual sadism and yes, chasing after beautiful women because that is the world he inhabits (and one that is returning). That was the big problem with No Time to Die. Domesticity doesn't suit Bond. I personally don't need to see him be a good person or "better male" to save the world again
Bond did marry (in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), and to a character played by Dame Diana Rigg no less, but she was promptly killed at the end of the movie.
Unfortunately if he was married ,nowadays he would probably be one of those sitcom guys I been seeing my whole life - an amusing Doofus Chump whom everyone in the family ,right down to the Family Dog shows him how Lame he is.
Haven’t prior wife/wives and subsequent fiancés died? He’s poison! but he’s pursues his job and his vengeance at the same time, that is his golden ticket pass for his violence.
I truly fail to understand how the advice about “delivering on responsibilities”, which I find profoundly relevant in this day and age, is specifically masculine.
I agree with your second thought, Juan. There has become an increasingly larger gap between the values and capabilities of young men and women. There’s a lot of great young men out there, but quite a few flakes too.
actually in the UK where I live the flakes are following folks like Tate and the rise in violence towards women is staggering and has been described as a 'crisis' or an 'epidemic' by the government. so it's not sadly a few flakes, it's really an infection, and I could say something about the current powers that be in the USA, but it's so self evident I won't waste the space. What's sad is that there is also a massive - as you suggest - rise in really great guys who see humans as humans. but the other bit is not a few sadly, it's a lot. and there are more reasons for this - the rise of inequality and ability to buy houses, cars etc all the markers are making this the kind of idea of masculinity for their frustrations,
It's true that the raw data has gone up in terms of reporting, but we can't be sure how much of this is due to incels or the likes of Andrew Tate, or simply the fact that over time woman, and teenage girls in particular, have become more comfortable in stepping forward.
The other factor is the migrant effect. The simple fact is that social construction has been influencing the behaviour of many men in the West in a positive way for decades- one particular watershed moment was Jodie Foster's portrayal of a rape victim in the excellent film 'The Accused'. This process has largely been absent in most other cultures globally. Although there has been some progress, for example, with the fact that the age of consent has been raised in many non-Western countries- this is largely a function of the changing beliefs of a more cosmopolitan ruling class, and isn't reflected in the cultures values of the majority of most populations, particularly in the less educated rural areas of the MENAPT countries.
A report was released by The Centre for Migration Control, an independent organisation, in January 2025. You can find details of the report by looking up 'Foreign Nationals Three Times More Likely to be Arrested for Sex Offences'- although the figure is closer to 3.5 and heavily concentrated by geographic region of origin- with the noted exception of Albania, which tops the chart by a significant margin.
It's worth noting that the Stephen Graham show Adolescence recently released on Netflix. It details the type of phenomenon you're talking about. This might be a part of a broader pattern of children affected by social media. Jonathan Haidt has been quite thorough in demonstrating how social media led to a pattern of higher suicide and self-harms like cutting for girls. But one area which might have been neglected thus far is through the Social Contagion effect first noticed by Chicago epidemiologist Gary Slutkin who noticed that violence could spread socially like a contagion.
Knife crimes began as a very specific activity related to drug crime, but it quickly became a matter of social contagion as teenage boys and young men began to carry knives for protection- but this was still largely confined by geographical location, to larger metropolitan areas, which broader pattern evident through the County Lines problem. However, the presence of viral clips on social media likely contributed to the larger cultural spread across Britain. It might be the case that for teenage boys any antisocial content on social media draws a following and encourages a 'Lord of the Flies' effect in the absence of real life decent male role models.
Social media is simply too harmful to be allowed for under 16 year olds. It hit the girls first through suicide and cutting at epidemic levels, But it now appears that the boys weren't spared, as initially thought. Ironically, the Online Harms Bill was initially billed as being for the protection of children, but to date although there is plenty of discussion on the matter, the government has no plans to ban social media for the under 16s, despite the growing mountain of evidence it causes severe negative harms to long-term mental health and life outcomes.
It always comes down to Archvillain Donald Trump, doesn't it? And it's such a f*cking bore that it does. All of the evidence of Trump's career is that he's actually quite a good boss to work for. He isn't meddlesome. He makes it clear what it is that he wants the employee to do, then turns him loose to look after it. If the employee fails, he goes. Of course, this is torture rack level stuff, right?
I hated the ridicule of Biden's obvious disability because it's cruel, but what did it say about Biden's sense of responsibility that he would run for President in 2020? His own sister is on the record as having said that she could tell before he began the campaign that Biden was slipping into dementia. If others could see it, Biden couldn't have failed to recognize it. Dementia doesn't work that way, as far as I know. It isn't an overnight thing which swoops down upon someone with such force that it renders him incapable of recognizing the next day that he's been diminished. He ran anyway.
Maybe the fecklessness and feebleness which does tend to afflict so many young men have their source in a forty year long societal imperative to favor girls at the expense of boys. The Future is Female!
Trump is a cretin, a war criminal, an abomination. As was (and is) Biden. As usual, a false dichotomy is presented, between Biden and Trump, the R and the D, when in fact both men are criminals, gangsters, supporters of war and genocide. This is very hard to miss. You present Trump as a "Good Boss" who was okay to work for. Not even remotely relevant, even if it were true, and as if this means he's okay after all, despite his well-known criminality, which has been the hallmark of his entire rancid adulthood. He is now bombing civilians in Yemen, and as everyone should know, supports the "relocation" (extermination) of Palestinians in Gaza. This not only is not in dispute, but Trump himself has fairly bragged about it. His "career" (!) as a "real estate" swindler has been marked by unbridled criminality and stupid recklessness, and that both Ukraine and Gaza are presented as real estate "deals" waiting to be tapped should tell us all we need to know, no?
If his criminality were well known throughout his career, why is it only now, in his late seventies, that a conviction which no one believes is legitimate and which Alan Dershowitz says will be evaporated by an appeals court, has been brought to bear against him? Sleazy? Probably. Vile? Doubtful.
A lot of it is because women are brought up to be people pleasers. They are expected to do things for other people, meet their responsibilities. The big thing in advice for women is that they don't have to please everyone, that they can actually consider their own needs and desires.
Meeting one's responsibilities is good advice for everyone, but most women already know that. It's young men who don't think they get anything out of it.
The essay is about how badly literature and movies are failing to show young men how TO BE properly masculine. James Bond has been a symbol for masculinity since Dr. No. Gioia’s essay is about how to retool Bond to save the franchise and present him as a better symbol of masculinity for young men. It’s not whether responsibility is exclusive or paramount to men. It’s about getting off your ass from playing videos games and engage in the world — be a responsible citizen for starters.
It definitely isn't specifically masculine. But most of the malfunctioning males never heard of it, and don't act on it. They don't know how to live, period. No wonder they are disliked.
Well stated, Ted. Today’s men need to man up. There are many wonderful young men out there but too many are shallow simpering and irresponsible phonies. Women are hard pressed finding real men. Ditch the iPhone and video games and go out and make a difference in the real world. A real man is principled and can shift gears between being a bad-ass and having warmth and kindness. A real man is responsible to himself and others. A real man keeps his word once given. A real man protects and respects women and children.
I'm trying to write a novel about a lost wandered who finds a home in a commune run by the sort of everyday strong women that are revered by Ursula LeGuin, in 2179
Bond was always a fantasy, he was written post war, when the UK was on its KNEES, broke, broken and drab as hell, most men had one threadbare and slightly greasy suit, and Bond came along and suggested that all the 'british' things - charm, snobbish knowledge, beautifully cut suits and fabulous gadgets, global power, etc, were still there. Bond was NEVER taken seriously by British men of my generation, it was HIGH CAMP. ironic no, that the big masculine idol is high camp to the UK, a 'good yarn' and kind of indulged, but understanding it was absolute nonsense and compensatory fantasy. Bond's go to humour is wry and knowing - again somewhat fourth wall breaking and wry, he's like Ripley but without quite such a high level of homo eroticism. Bond was never meant to be taken seriously as a role model, but as escapism for a Britain absolutely shattered and traumatised by a long and terrifying war (both my parents were bombed for example as kids) . Taylor Sheridan's men are a different fantasy - the tough guy who also cries when his incredibly hot wife - tough but always immaculate hair and body - provides him with a baby (or can't) the guy who kills his girl's rapist, but doesn't alter society so that boys don't think rape is okay anymore (read Tate et al), it doesn't take on the real issues - lack of real jobs (Graeber's analysis) lack of real job contracts / stability, lowering of quality on everything for profit, massively rising inequality. of course women feel all these things too, but they are attached to our social identity in a somewhat different way. the idea of your ideal masculinity is absolutely no different than a buddhist idea, or a stoic idea of a decent human, of course this was / has always been framed as 'male' or 'masculine' because women have been not put in that picture as humans, just 'ideals' but most people have a mother, sister, girlfriend, or grandmother who easily represents these ideas. it's just called being decently human. I don't know a single person who has an issue with a bit of swagger, bigness, muscle or loudness, only with shitty old fashioned attitudes towards women, gays, and so on. if ones decent humanness is threatened by other people wanting the same respect that you have, it's pretty fragile and built on nothing but image, like Bond. I enjoy bond movies btw, of course I do, but there's a rising tide of violence against women in the UK, so this stuff matters. but yeah, Sheridan sells.
Absolutely. The Bond fantasy was a form of “women want to sleep with him and men want to be him.” That worked when there was broader agreement around the characteristics of such a person. We no longer live in that world any more than we live in the world in which bobbysoxers screamed at Beatles concerts.
Sheridan’s flawed male heroes work for many but are different from the tux-wearing, martini-drinking dry-witted English spy. His characters are more rooted in aspiration than fantasy. The same is true of the Reacher and the Justified TV series.
Daniel Craig’s Bond was an excellent way to end the series. His wounded, physical and often isolated Bond met the times well while retaining enough of the older eras that his evolution seemed natural. To continue the Bond fantasy now would truly be camp, too close to Austin Powers for comfort.
Its hard to imagine a similar male fantasy hero that would have the same broad appeal today. Raised on video games, young men have been attracted to comic book heroes with superpowers but even those have been played out ad nauseam. The Transporter and John Wick series are fantasies but involve solo antiheroes played by actors without analogs among younger actors today (as the failure of The Gray Man initial outing illustrated).
The weight of Bond franchise expectations dooms it to failure. If it were newer or more nimble, it could be fun but like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane, the Bond series now must try to appeal to not merely diverse audiences but divergent ones, a hugely expensive project satisfying none.
It’s okay that Bond is over. The world is not that of the 1950’s or even of the 2010’s, as the news reminds us daily. We need heroes, even fantasy ones. Let’s try some new ones.
Maybe ten years ago there was a comparison of James Bond and Jason Bourne. Bond was based on an everyday Englishman with a day job. The difference was Joe Bloggs had a company car, but Bond had one with machine guns and smoke screens. Joe Bloggs had an expense account to take clients out for a modest lunch, but Bond could take them out to five star restaurants. Bond also had a medical and pension plan just like any other working guy.
Bourne was a bit different. The story opens up with him being fired in the field having been outsourced to workers who could be paid less and ask fewer questions. Bourne had a collection of skills similar to Bond. He could handle himself in a fight, fire a gun, hotwire a car. He had to learn that on his own, and it had cost him.
Bond was a worker of his era; Bourne more like a worker in our era. There are lot fewer decent jobs nowadays, and just about everything is predatory. It's a lot harder to grow up and meet one's responsibilities. I think women take it better. They are more used to be treated as garbage by society, so it comes as less of a shock. For some reason, I keep thinking of the old slogan: "We're all n----rs now."
T. Sheridan's masculinity involves acting like a criminal gang and getting one's self hot-iron branded to demonstrate loyalty...which strikes me as pathetic at best...maybe two steps ahead of an Andrew Tate (or Drumpf's other fringe or closest associates), but no more.
Just once I'd like to see James Bond have to work really hard and be resourceful and romantic to win over a woman he desires. He's no seducer when women throw themselves at him.
speaking of Daniel Craig's Bond, women adore Jack Reacher novels and in the form of actor Alan Ritson, 6foot5of beef, they've got an actor who can deliver the Reacher of the books, on amazon, series 3 now. IN the series women are more likely pull him , he doesn't seduce that much.
Also worth mentioning -- if correcting for inflation means the first Indiana Jones movie made $1.3 billion, that also means they made it on a budget of $67 million. Surely some of the problem with modern movies is the extra money dumped into them to no visible gain. And that's part of the problem for young men as well.
Twenty years ago, getting a job meant sending out resumes, making phone calls, knocking on doors. Fairly clear cut. Now it means paying fees to get a subscription to a career website where a third of the job postings are scams, where you get advice from AI and upload your resume to the mercy of an algorithm, competing with people all over the world instead of in the town where the job is, then watch the service swamp your email with messages about completely irrelevant jobs. What is the way to feel like a man (or even a person) in that world? We have added layers of complexity and cost to the production without adding a clear benefit. I'm sure Dial of Destiny sucks too.
After I retired from the "Big" job (the one that after 4 times there finally got me a pension) - I had also done many many other things during my life - which got me many skills & a very good resume.
As in one of my earlier lives as a Musician ,I never liked looking for gigs - I found an agent ,and when I "retired" I found a very good (specialized) agency in Cali that had a seemingly never ending supply of good paying jobs I went out on. Because - 1. I had a very good resume & 2. I had finally (thanks to my successful wife) gotten skills that were needed that not many folks had Even in my early 70's now actually retired I still get emails asking if I can come out to play.
Sure, if you think that most men and women have the same psychological needs and so will process the same situation in the exact same way. Maybe that’s true! It’s part of why I said “What is the way to feel like a man (or even a person).”
I've been out of the "being a man" game for over two decades. Soon as I was "of age," I was gone, and I never regretted. Not actually something you want to admit on the American internet - but I also shouldn't be saying, while "my own kind" are within earshot, that I sometimes wonder if "being a man," could have worked somehow, and I have observed some things sitting on the margins.
Ted's advice strikes me as a bit circular, because young men in our society don't have responsibilities. At least, not the responsibilities of men. He might have domestic responsibilities, like vacuuming, laundry, or dishes, whether they originate from his mother, girlfriend, or wife, but these are not aspirations. These are not "women's work" - and it's fair to say that for his own self-respect, he should not live as a slob - but mere cleanliness is no substitute for food when one is spiritually starving, and I'm sure we can all think of great artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and soldiers, who we'd forgive for being a bit grubby.
To be a man is to be depended upon. Since Neolithic times, the work of men has fed, housed, protected, and informed - and men depended on each other, too, because dealing with plagues, famines and wars was not within the capacity of a single man. But today, a young man finds he is superfluous. He has seen the evidence that when his peers kill themselves, the loss is felt as merely a performance of grief. Whether he stocks a shelf at Walmart, or rereads the same banal summaries of Foucault over and over in university, or ticks boxes for some soulless cooperate bureaucracy designed to rob his peers, he cannot but feel that he is no more than his own carbon footprint. His labor is barely enough to sustain his own needs - to him it feels as though he is robbed at the grocer, robbed by his landlord, that the wars waged by governments are pointless or exploitative, that both news and academia are no better than sophistry, and moreover, his labor is insignificant to any of these things that act as life support for his spiritually dying generation.
Often, he has no real friends, or lovers, and even family connections are tenuous. What exactly has he to take responsibility for? Everyone else feeds, houses, and protects themselves, if badly, and we have almost no contribution to make to one another but small donations of time to assuage the loneliness, and to complain.
Notice how where a more "traditional" masculinity flourishes, it's most often in things like gangs, where young men act as comrades in arms, working together for mutual benefit in the face of great dangers. I figure certain cults are probably similar in this regard, but that's not something we want to encourage. Even the culture of bitcoin, has the idea of a collective, valorous struggle against the economic system, although it is entirely delusion.
Until men can find some way to reorganize their own labor and resources so that what "a man has to do," is again treated as something of value, he will continue to struggle. Likewise, I think that if women saw men who had any ability to ensure their own security and welfare, they themselves would find it much easier to envision their own security and welfare alongside those men.
Among us pariahs on the sidelines there is a palpable need to organize because we face adversities that none of us could ever handle solo. I find, oddly, that quite a few who have, one way or another given up on ideas like manliness end up being a hell of a lot tougher for it - not all of them, or even the majority, but the one's who learn at least one useful skill to trade for other useful skills among other dependable members of a community, are, whatever they might look like, tough, thoughtful, serious people.
A man needs to have the responsibility of providing for a wife and family. Boys need to see their fathers doing this as role models. Yes, other lifestyles are available but we’re talking here about traditional masculinity. Here in the UK, too many young women are effectively married to the state.
or boys need to grow up and learn about contraception and self and other respect? I had poor parents and grew up in an abusive household but managed not to do that in my life. the reasons people are 'effectively married to the state' is not just about boys taking up their responsibilities post baby, it's also pre baby and about the state allowing terribly low wages (hence UC and before that tax credits) and the increasing lack of decent non zero hour contracts etc. it's all propping up the billionaires, and those billionaires have genuinely toxic attitudes towards women (the billionaires who make news). this becomes the role model.
Andrew Vachss (Wikipedia him) in his novels and his prior work with murderous youth offenders, , pointsout that he had a shit life but he didn't rape or murder so why do some, and why don't others? the key to rehabilitation lies within those 2 questions.
In contrast to the Andrew Tate/soy boy dichotomy offered today, James Bond is already a decent role model. Making films to "fix" the "crisis in masculinity" is cringey anyway. Perhaps we just don't need yet another franchise remake?
Absolutely, it’s time to move on and look towards a better future (despite generalised pessimism). Men and women alike need to bring on a revolution in empathy. Everything else will just fall into place.
As much as I enjoy reading your columns, Ted, I'm very tired of essays trying to explain what young men must do to preserve their "masculinity". Why preserve something not worth preserving? It's as toxic as feminists claim it to be.
I don't see that anyone was discouraged from 'any hint' of masculinity, women and other guys started calling out toxic behaviour and that got turned into 'discouraged from any hint of it'. Boys will be boys has long been a way to allow molestation, rape, even murder, 'the nagging defence' etc, actually what is happening now in the UK and I suspect but don't have the figures for the USA is a massive rise in violence towards women, due to Tates of the world. that the idea is one is either a kind of weak woke or a 'manly' man, (what does that mean?) is absurd and an absurd conclusion to suggest by anyone, some nuance please? I am not aware of anyone disliking manliness or masculinity, but toxic behaviour renamed masculinity has had women (and continues to do so) and gays as its victims for hundreds of years, well in fact thousands so you know, it's time for everyone to grow up. women too are humans. there is no crisis of 'lonely men' there are men refusing to see women as actual human beings, rather than there for their every wish, and that is the crisis - most women cannot be bothered to put up with that (and the genuine dangers to their lives it represents).
I know a fair amount of people who do outright dislike manliness, and masculinity, and honestly can't have a conversation without them castigating all of men everywhere for their privilege, which is tiring. As far as I can tell, it's more about singling out a person's one mark of apparent good fortune in order to bully them. If a man is poor, or uneducated, or doesn't speak well, or he's autistic, or nerdy, or effeminate, or he's an immigrant, or of color, it's pretty easy to dunk on his male privilege as a proxy for a perceived lack of safety or justice that comes from elsewhere. They'll take the most marginal man imaginable and talk about him like he's Jeffery Epstein and justify it against "the glass ceiling" or whatever without once considering that a plight like homelessness might in fact be even more oppressive than being a college-educated white liberal lady who's too shy to ask for a raise.
You won't necessarily see it unless you care enough to be looking out for these kinds of people, but from my observation, it's those least able to convert their maleness into actual social capital that suffer the brunt of both naively feminist misandry and toxic masculine violence among men. And it's precisely because they have it from both directions that they get targeted for radicalization towards whatever would allow them to be dishing out the punishment rather than taking it.
That's the problem when you dumb feminism down to the point that it's just another expression of the patriarchy you're starting with. People forget that it's patriarchy, not andrarchy, and that there's a world a difference between the men with power, and those without it.
Right. There is nothing to “preserve” in the first place. It just has to be expressed in healthy ways without being contorted and deformed by “toxicity”; compensating for insecurities or shame. You just keep it from getting polluted, like air and water.
I agree. Also, do we have masculinity crisis or simply a bunch of lazy entitled young men brain-washed by the internet? As Freud wrote, the core of male identity is the constant anxiety of not measuring up and/or being supplanted. A crisis for women is "oh, those women better be afraid, their biological clock is ticking, they are making bad choices". A crisis for men is "how society failed them" and/or "how women are failing men, and causing crisis to men". All because there is a way society is supposed to be for men. Men SHOULD get what they want. Women have to somehow figure out the way to give men what they want. If not, its automatically a crisis for everyone, but nobody says "men in question have to figure this out on their own"
Women are even more scared of being judged by other women as not having pull power,a woman without a man is as contemptible to most other women,the coffee shop gangs,etc as Spinsters always have been. These abused women,they stay with that husband or boyfriend for years cos they know if they leave they'll lose all they're "friends" the other gassy tarts and also be objects of contempt
That isn't true in my world, though it was somewhat truer when I was young. Women stay with abusive men because they fear the consequences of leaving will be even worse abuses. Most of the single women (often widows) I know have fulfilling lives and no wish to marry again, because in their earlier marriages they were forced into roles that didn't work for them.
Perhaps that is true in some places but abused women mostly stay because of children, lack of financial independence (often enforced by husbands) and fear for their safety. The reaction most women get from friends when leaving an abusive husband is “why did it take you so long.”
hmm. that’s certainly one view. i’m a woman and i’m not scared of being judged as not having pulling power. of course competition exists between all humans, especially if historically power was short supply. the idea that abused women stay for this reason is not what research shows, but perhaps that exists, after all all things exist , but i’d say that abused women stay for reasons of confused love, exhaustion, covert control, overt control, fear, and economic reasons. I suspect, Jane, we will have to agree to disagree upon this. how many men however have been fearful of their life from a woman, and how many women are fearful/have had an incident of violence, sexual or otherwise from a man? the figures don’t match even slightly.
Thank you for your very civil and polite response. Im guessing we inhabit different worlds not just geographically but class wise. I don't "read reports" I LIVE in that world.
It's the feminists who are toxic but all those old girls are dead now or soon will be. They were the enablers of the randy young men who wanted girls to just give it up. Don't believe all those patriarchal lies said Mouth Almighty Germaine Greer,Rosie Boycott,Gloria Steinem and others. If young men desire to behave well and most of them do,they need young women to be the Moral Policemen they have had to be for almost all human history. That's how it is. And should be. Who even today chooses to marry that girl in class who dated every boy,playing the field,and was never demanding or judgmental. None of them. When they marry their wife is that judgmental thin lipped bitch who never recovers her figure after that first baby but goes on to have 3 or 4 more and continually shouts at the kids and rebukes hubby and he bloody loves it. The old woman keeps him walking the line. PS. I'm neither of those but I see it all the time.
That old double standard is dying. I see 2 somewhat opposite trends today. The first is for both the partners to play the field and then live together for a while before deciding if they are well enough matched to make a permanent relationship workable. The second is for both to refrain from sex before marriage. My personal view is that either approach works as long as they both have the same values.
As a woman, I would say that this is a very welcome column! I think young men need this direction. I dated for a million years before finding my husband because there were so many lost young men out there.
And I 'm not saying women are perfect, but really young men just .... don't know how to invest in anything bigger than themselves.
It's a sad thing when a person is penalized for his DNA. That's true on so many levels (sex, race, beauty). For centuries, women have endured this, and what we're seeing now is the backlash. The "typical passage" you quoted underscores the fact that many men don't have a clue about women. Listen up, guys. We aren't all that different from you. We want to be respected for what we are, neither set on a pedestal nor viewed as an inferior being. We're not men without a penis, but we're not an alien species either. There is enough difference between the sexes to make them attractive to each other, but not so much neither side can ever bridge the gap. Ted, the role model you propose certainly appeals to me. That's the kind of man I'm drawn to. But I must point out that those virtues are necessary in women too. They're what set us apart from the beasts. But the two sexes might demonstrate those qualities differently, and their actions be interpreted differently by the opposite sex.
I'm not sure what other novels were in the bunch you read, but I recognize that passage you quoted. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is a very good book. Nobody ought to read it in search of role models, but why does a novel need to provide a roadmap to becoming a better person? Some art is meant to express feelings and experiences, especially unpleasant and uncomfortable ones. Being able to express and articulate such things is necessary for eventually dealing with them anyway.
thanks for this, I also thought it was a poor example, as it literally criticised the genuinely vile 'advice' for 'getting hos' out there, and is absolutely part of the problem, treating women as score cards and objects, leads the person doing it to commodify themselves too - and no one is going to score highly on the commodification list - i.e. ordinary as opposed to instagram gorgeous and rich etc. I'd say it's all part of this consumerism and social media click bait too the Tates and the faux intellectuals like Petersen (yes I know Jordan WAS in academia, but now he's schilling nonsense)
The way to resurrect Bond is to go back to the books and make the movies in the actual time and setting of the books, the early Cold War. People like period dramas, they loved Madmen. The new/old Bond would have the suits and the decor of the mid to late 1950s into the early 1960s, early jet aviation, early computers. The enemy would be the Soviet communists and organized criminals, no one can (rationally) object to that. In the background, Eisenhower is President, Churchill is in his second Premiership. If Bond's behavior is out of step with current mores, that's OK, it's a period piece. That is the way to detach Bond from the contemporary psychic and spiritual cancer. And all the producers have to do is look at the publication date on the books.
I agree 100% with your advice on masculinity, but I think it also applies equally to everyone else. Your advice made me think of my grandmothers. One who during the Great Depression escaped an abusive marriage and with her brother’s assistance drove her kids from South Carolina to Idaho in a Model A and a trailer stuffed with her few possessions to start a new life. She became a custodian at a TB hospital, and a few years later she went to nursing school at age 52. She was active in her church and community, and raised most of the meat, poultry, eggs, fruit and vegetables the family consumed. My other grandmother raised a blended family of fifteen ( yours, mine, ours and theirs), grew most of their own food, co-managed the family ranch and sawmill, taught Sunday school, and played piano at church and for square dances. They lived their lives by the same principles you set forth, and also passed them on to their daughters and sons. They were both quite feminine,but also carried the responsibility for their families and communities, very friendly but not to be trifled with.
Thank you for all your great writing, Ted! I came here because of your music writing but continue to return for your commentary on culture at large.
I agree. Instead of saying 'a real man' delivers on his responsibilities, you could just say 'a mature person'. It applies to everyone.
Idon't think it needs to be seen as inherently manly. But maybe that's just the framing that some men need.
This is an essay on masculinity and James Bond, a man.
Yes, of course.
But isn't it telling that many of the examples of how men should be are being demonstrated by women in our lives, as well as men.
Courage, truthfulness, protecting others, selflessness, tenacity, etc are universal virtues, available to all. They need to be developed by all. They might be thought old-fashioned, but actually are eternal virtues that no one has ever shown we can do without.
For males who wonder how to be, people are responding: develop these virtues! These are the key ones. They will lead to the others.
On the other hand, obsession with one's image, popularity, and notoriety are the coins of the realm for all today. The kids want to be "influencers," the new rock stars.
On the other, other, hand: young males still are larger, stronger, more aggressive, and more in need of excitement than girls are, and schools are not designed for them. They are still the Yang to the girls Yin.
Meanwhile the girls are showing more Yang than they used to, and the boys more Yin.
And with both parents working, sometimes doing multiple jobs, who is actually teaching the children to be adults, anyway? The culture as a whole does the very opposite.
We need to do better than offer "Barbie" and "James Bond" as models of how to be. Kids think those are hopelessly out of date, anyway.
We also need to do better than that row of male tech Oligarchs at the inauguration. Do you want your world to be run by them? Wait, it already is!
Here's a virtue we can all, I hope, get behind: wisdom. Consider its opposite: foolishness. We've got plenty of that. Not to mention: confusion!
What say you?
I say, even though you say all the "right" things, im not buying it. Mostly bc im not going to listen to some fool when he tells me what i NEED to do. The people i respect and listen to do not talk like this. They are wise enough to know that thats a hollow form of leadership. What comes next, pass around the donation plate?
No.. ill take my cues from those that walk the walk, and nevermind those that talk the talk.
agree my grandmothers were incredible for what they did from birth in 1890s through to the early 70s
This is, of course, true, but there is a subtle and hard-to-articulate idea about how it is differently in men and women. I can recognise it but can’t explain it using clear, rational, ‘left-brain’ categories. As a result, it becomes invalidated, and we lose something important, this is one of the thingsart can do.
came here to write this - it's actually Freud's prescription for a happy life, and before him countless others - from buddha to the stoics, women were just written out of this 'masculinity' (which we might call humanity) by sexism, let us be blunt, because men were the only ones allowed to be heroes to their own story - to have protagonist syndrome, luckily society has changed and we are demanding that human right - and acknolwedging others, I disagree a tad about Taylor Sheridan's 'cure - sure it works I money terms but it's still a tad grotesque and unneccesary, it's the best end of the idiocy that sees men and women as fundamentally different in qualities. a real James Bond would do all that whilst recognising that it's simply being a decent human.
Very well said. I have no issues with Ted and other writers prescribing this advice as the epitome of good masculanity, but I just think it should apply to every decent and functional adult in society.
If I'd read this before posting my own reply, I might not have bothered. It's the perfect illustration of what I meant.
Part of the charm is watching Bond, with an almost feline precision, do things most of us can't do including the casual sadism and yes, chasing after beautiful women because that is the world he inhabits (and one that is returning). That was the big problem with No Time to Die. Domesticity doesn't suit Bond. I personally don't need to see him be a good person or "better male" to save the world again
A wife would be a liability to Bond as a spy. She’d be the target all the time and interfere with his work.
Bond did marry (in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), and to a character played by Dame Diana Rigg no less, but she was promptly killed at the end of the movie.
Unfortunately if he was married ,nowadays he would probably be one of those sitcom guys I been seeing my whole life - an amusing Doofus Chump whom everyone in the family ,right down to the Family Dog shows him how Lame he is.
No Thanks
… and she’s dead, Jim… er, John…
Haven’t prior wife/wives and subsequent fiancés died? He’s poison! but he’s pursues his job and his vengeance at the same time, that is his golden ticket pass for his violence.
I think you hit the nail on the head here.
I truly fail to understand how the advice about “delivering on responsibilities”, which I find profoundly relevant in this day and age, is specifically masculine.
On second thought, maybe the premise is that this is good advice regardless of gender, but it’s specifically men who have lapsed on following it.
I agree with your second thought, Juan. There has become an increasingly larger gap between the values and capabilities of young men and women. There’s a lot of great young men out there, but quite a few flakes too.
actually in the UK where I live the flakes are following folks like Tate and the rise in violence towards women is staggering and has been described as a 'crisis' or an 'epidemic' by the government. so it's not sadly a few flakes, it's really an infection, and I could say something about the current powers that be in the USA, but it's so self evident I won't waste the space. What's sad is that there is also a massive - as you suggest - rise in really great guys who see humans as humans. but the other bit is not a few sadly, it's a lot. and there are more reasons for this - the rise of inequality and ability to buy houses, cars etc all the markers are making this the kind of idea of masculinity for their frustrations,
It's true that the raw data has gone up in terms of reporting, but we can't be sure how much of this is due to incels or the likes of Andrew Tate, or simply the fact that over time woman, and teenage girls in particular, have become more comfortable in stepping forward.
The other factor is the migrant effect. The simple fact is that social construction has been influencing the behaviour of many men in the West in a positive way for decades- one particular watershed moment was Jodie Foster's portrayal of a rape victim in the excellent film 'The Accused'. This process has largely been absent in most other cultures globally. Although there has been some progress, for example, with the fact that the age of consent has been raised in many non-Western countries- this is largely a function of the changing beliefs of a more cosmopolitan ruling class, and isn't reflected in the cultures values of the majority of most populations, particularly in the less educated rural areas of the MENAPT countries.
A report was released by The Centre for Migration Control, an independent organisation, in January 2025. You can find details of the report by looking up 'Foreign Nationals Three Times More Likely to be Arrested for Sex Offences'- although the figure is closer to 3.5 and heavily concentrated by geographic region of origin- with the noted exception of Albania, which tops the chart by a significant margin.
It's worth noting that the Stephen Graham show Adolescence recently released on Netflix. It details the type of phenomenon you're talking about. This might be a part of a broader pattern of children affected by social media. Jonathan Haidt has been quite thorough in demonstrating how social media led to a pattern of higher suicide and self-harms like cutting for girls. But one area which might have been neglected thus far is through the Social Contagion effect first noticed by Chicago epidemiologist Gary Slutkin who noticed that violence could spread socially like a contagion.
Knife crimes began as a very specific activity related to drug crime, but it quickly became a matter of social contagion as teenage boys and young men began to carry knives for protection- but this was still largely confined by geographical location, to larger metropolitan areas, which broader pattern evident through the County Lines problem. However, the presence of viral clips on social media likely contributed to the larger cultural spread across Britain. It might be the case that for teenage boys any antisocial content on social media draws a following and encourages a 'Lord of the Flies' effect in the absence of real life decent male role models.
Social media is simply too harmful to be allowed for under 16 year olds. It hit the girls first through suicide and cutting at epidemic levels, But it now appears that the boys weren't spared, as initially thought. Ironically, the Online Harms Bill was initially billed as being for the protection of children, but to date although there is plenty of discussion on the matter, the government has no plans to ban social media for the under 16s, despite the growing mountain of evidence it causes severe negative harms to long-term mental health and life outcomes.
It always comes down to Archvillain Donald Trump, doesn't it? And it's such a f*cking bore that it does. All of the evidence of Trump's career is that he's actually quite a good boss to work for. He isn't meddlesome. He makes it clear what it is that he wants the employee to do, then turns him loose to look after it. If the employee fails, he goes. Of course, this is torture rack level stuff, right?
I hated the ridicule of Biden's obvious disability because it's cruel, but what did it say about Biden's sense of responsibility that he would run for President in 2020? His own sister is on the record as having said that she could tell before he began the campaign that Biden was slipping into dementia. If others could see it, Biden couldn't have failed to recognize it. Dementia doesn't work that way, as far as I know. It isn't an overnight thing which swoops down upon someone with such force that it renders him incapable of recognizing the next day that he's been diminished. He ran anyway.
Maybe the fecklessness and feebleness which does tend to afflict so many young men have their source in a forty year long societal imperative to favor girls at the expense of boys. The Future is Female!
Trump is a cretin, a war criminal, an abomination. As was (and is) Biden. As usual, a false dichotomy is presented, between Biden and Trump, the R and the D, when in fact both men are criminals, gangsters, supporters of war and genocide. This is very hard to miss. You present Trump as a "Good Boss" who was okay to work for. Not even remotely relevant, even if it were true, and as if this means he's okay after all, despite his well-known criminality, which has been the hallmark of his entire rancid adulthood. He is now bombing civilians in Yemen, and as everyone should know, supports the "relocation" (extermination) of Palestinians in Gaza. This not only is not in dispute, but Trump himself has fairly bragged about it. His "career" (!) as a "real estate" swindler has been marked by unbridled criminality and stupid recklessness, and that both Ukraine and Gaza are presented as real estate "deals" waiting to be tapped should tell us all we need to know, no?
If his criminality were well known throughout his career, why is it only now, in his late seventies, that a conviction which no one believes is legitimate and which Alan Dershowitz says will be evaporated by an appeals court, has been brought to bear against him? Sleazy? Probably. Vile? Doubtful.
How can you possibly know that? You're speculating. Try "I feel that there has become an increasingly larger gap . . . " and then go from there.
A lot of it is because women are brought up to be people pleasers. They are expected to do things for other people, meet their responsibilities. The big thing in advice for women is that they don't have to please everyone, that they can actually consider their own needs and desires.
Meeting one's responsibilities is good advice for everyone, but most women already know that. It's young men who don't think they get anything out of it.
The essay is about how badly literature and movies are failing to show young men how TO BE properly masculine. James Bond has been a symbol for masculinity since Dr. No. Gioia’s essay is about how to retool Bond to save the franchise and present him as a better symbol of masculinity for young men. It’s not whether responsibility is exclusive or paramount to men. It’s about getting off your ass from playing videos games and engage in the world — be a responsible citizen for starters.
It definitely isn't specifically masculine. But most of the malfunctioning males never heard of it, and don't act on it. They don't know how to live, period. No wonder they are disliked.
file under: GrowtheF#ckUp
Well stated, Ted. Today’s men need to man up. There are many wonderful young men out there but too many are shallow simpering and irresponsible phonies. Women are hard pressed finding real men. Ditch the iPhone and video games and go out and make a difference in the real world. A real man is principled and can shift gears between being a bad-ass and having warmth and kindness. A real man is responsible to himself and others. A real man keeps his word once given. A real man protects and respects women and children.
I'm trying to write a novel about a lost wandered who finds a home in a commune run by the sort of everyday strong women that are revered by Ursula LeGuin, in 2179
A fertile influence for speculative fiction.
Agreed. To me, the Jamie Frasier character in Outlander fits your description...
How can you make such sweeping generalizations about "today's men?" Are you actually aquainted with dozens or hundreds of them?
Bond was always a fantasy, he was written post war, when the UK was on its KNEES, broke, broken and drab as hell, most men had one threadbare and slightly greasy suit, and Bond came along and suggested that all the 'british' things - charm, snobbish knowledge, beautifully cut suits and fabulous gadgets, global power, etc, were still there. Bond was NEVER taken seriously by British men of my generation, it was HIGH CAMP. ironic no, that the big masculine idol is high camp to the UK, a 'good yarn' and kind of indulged, but understanding it was absolute nonsense and compensatory fantasy. Bond's go to humour is wry and knowing - again somewhat fourth wall breaking and wry, he's like Ripley but without quite such a high level of homo eroticism. Bond was never meant to be taken seriously as a role model, but as escapism for a Britain absolutely shattered and traumatised by a long and terrifying war (both my parents were bombed for example as kids) . Taylor Sheridan's men are a different fantasy - the tough guy who also cries when his incredibly hot wife - tough but always immaculate hair and body - provides him with a baby (or can't) the guy who kills his girl's rapist, but doesn't alter society so that boys don't think rape is okay anymore (read Tate et al), it doesn't take on the real issues - lack of real jobs (Graeber's analysis) lack of real job contracts / stability, lowering of quality on everything for profit, massively rising inequality. of course women feel all these things too, but they are attached to our social identity in a somewhat different way. the idea of your ideal masculinity is absolutely no different than a buddhist idea, or a stoic idea of a decent human, of course this was / has always been framed as 'male' or 'masculine' because women have been not put in that picture as humans, just 'ideals' but most people have a mother, sister, girlfriend, or grandmother who easily represents these ideas. it's just called being decently human. I don't know a single person who has an issue with a bit of swagger, bigness, muscle or loudness, only with shitty old fashioned attitudes towards women, gays, and so on. if ones decent humanness is threatened by other people wanting the same respect that you have, it's pretty fragile and built on nothing but image, like Bond. I enjoy bond movies btw, of course I do, but there's a rising tide of violence against women in the UK, so this stuff matters. but yeah, Sheridan sells.
Absolutely. The Bond fantasy was a form of “women want to sleep with him and men want to be him.” That worked when there was broader agreement around the characteristics of such a person. We no longer live in that world any more than we live in the world in which bobbysoxers screamed at Beatles concerts.
Sheridan’s flawed male heroes work for many but are different from the tux-wearing, martini-drinking dry-witted English spy. His characters are more rooted in aspiration than fantasy. The same is true of the Reacher and the Justified TV series.
Daniel Craig’s Bond was an excellent way to end the series. His wounded, physical and often isolated Bond met the times well while retaining enough of the older eras that his evolution seemed natural. To continue the Bond fantasy now would truly be camp, too close to Austin Powers for comfort.
Its hard to imagine a similar male fantasy hero that would have the same broad appeal today. Raised on video games, young men have been attracted to comic book heroes with superpowers but even those have been played out ad nauseam. The Transporter and John Wick series are fantasies but involve solo antiheroes played by actors without analogs among younger actors today (as the failure of The Gray Man initial outing illustrated).
The weight of Bond franchise expectations dooms it to failure. If it were newer or more nimble, it could be fun but like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane, the Bond series now must try to appeal to not merely diverse audiences but divergent ones, a hugely expensive project satisfying none.
It’s okay that Bond is over. The world is not that of the 1950’s or even of the 2010’s, as the news reminds us daily. We need heroes, even fantasy ones. Let’s try some new ones.
Maybe ten years ago there was a comparison of James Bond and Jason Bourne. Bond was based on an everyday Englishman with a day job. The difference was Joe Bloggs had a company car, but Bond had one with machine guns and smoke screens. Joe Bloggs had an expense account to take clients out for a modest lunch, but Bond could take them out to five star restaurants. Bond also had a medical and pension plan just like any other working guy.
Bourne was a bit different. The story opens up with him being fired in the field having been outsourced to workers who could be paid less and ask fewer questions. Bourne had a collection of skills similar to Bond. He could handle himself in a fight, fire a gun, hotwire a car. He had to learn that on his own, and it had cost him.
Bond was a worker of his era; Bourne more like a worker in our era. There are lot fewer decent jobs nowadays, and just about everything is predatory. It's a lot harder to grow up and meet one's responsibilities. I think women take it better. They are more used to be treated as garbage by society, so it comes as less of a shock. For some reason, I keep thinking of the old slogan: "We're all n----rs now."
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2015/09/20/bourne-aesthetic/
T. Sheridan's masculinity involves acting like a criminal gang and getting one's self hot-iron branded to demonstrate loyalty...which strikes me as pathetic at best...maybe two steps ahead of an Andrew Tate (or Drumpf's other fringe or closest associates), but no more.
Agreed. Also, taking people “to the train station” that you disagree with is not an admirable solution. At least Bond famously has a license to do it.
Just part of their criminality.
so agree. it's just a slightly more 'holds a baby and cries' version of the other stuff.
Meanwhile: https://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2025/03/march-music-what-jazz-records-would-you.html
Just once I'd like to see James Bond have to work really hard and be resourceful and romantic to win over a woman he desires. He's no seducer when women throw themselves at him.
speaking of Daniel Craig's Bond, women adore Jack Reacher novels and in the form of actor Alan Ritson, 6foot5of beef, they've got an actor who can deliver the Reacher of the books, on amazon, series 3 now. IN the series women are more likely pull him , he doesn't seduce that much.
Also worth mentioning -- if correcting for inflation means the first Indiana Jones movie made $1.3 billion, that also means they made it on a budget of $67 million. Surely some of the problem with modern movies is the extra money dumped into them to no visible gain. And that's part of the problem for young men as well.
Twenty years ago, getting a job meant sending out resumes, making phone calls, knocking on doors. Fairly clear cut. Now it means paying fees to get a subscription to a career website where a third of the job postings are scams, where you get advice from AI and upload your resume to the mercy of an algorithm, competing with people all over the world instead of in the town where the job is, then watch the service swamp your email with messages about completely irrelevant jobs. What is the way to feel like a man (or even a person) in that world? We have added layers of complexity and cost to the production without adding a clear benefit. I'm sure Dial of Destiny sucks too.
After I retired from the "Big" job (the one that after 4 times there finally got me a pension) - I had also done many many other things during my life - which got me many skills & a very good resume.
As in one of my earlier lives as a Musician ,I never liked looking for gigs - I found an agent ,and when I "retired" I found a very good (specialized) agency in Cali that had a seemingly never ending supply of good paying jobs I went out on. Because - 1. I had a very good resume & 2. I had finally (thanks to my successful wife) gotten skills that were needed that not many folks had Even in my early 70's now actually retired I still get emails asking if I can come out to play.
and this is also true for women. so it's not really relevant to how males are responding to this global societal issue around employment is it?
Sure, if you think that most men and women have the same psychological needs and so will process the same situation in the exact same way. Maybe that’s true! It’s part of why I said “What is the way to feel like a man (or even a person).”
I've been out of the "being a man" game for over two decades. Soon as I was "of age," I was gone, and I never regretted. Not actually something you want to admit on the American internet - but I also shouldn't be saying, while "my own kind" are within earshot, that I sometimes wonder if "being a man," could have worked somehow, and I have observed some things sitting on the margins.
Ted's advice strikes me as a bit circular, because young men in our society don't have responsibilities. At least, not the responsibilities of men. He might have domestic responsibilities, like vacuuming, laundry, or dishes, whether they originate from his mother, girlfriend, or wife, but these are not aspirations. These are not "women's work" - and it's fair to say that for his own self-respect, he should not live as a slob - but mere cleanliness is no substitute for food when one is spiritually starving, and I'm sure we can all think of great artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and soldiers, who we'd forgive for being a bit grubby.
To be a man is to be depended upon. Since Neolithic times, the work of men has fed, housed, protected, and informed - and men depended on each other, too, because dealing with plagues, famines and wars was not within the capacity of a single man. But today, a young man finds he is superfluous. He has seen the evidence that when his peers kill themselves, the loss is felt as merely a performance of grief. Whether he stocks a shelf at Walmart, or rereads the same banal summaries of Foucault over and over in university, or ticks boxes for some soulless cooperate bureaucracy designed to rob his peers, he cannot but feel that he is no more than his own carbon footprint. His labor is barely enough to sustain his own needs - to him it feels as though he is robbed at the grocer, robbed by his landlord, that the wars waged by governments are pointless or exploitative, that both news and academia are no better than sophistry, and moreover, his labor is insignificant to any of these things that act as life support for his spiritually dying generation.
Often, he has no real friends, or lovers, and even family connections are tenuous. What exactly has he to take responsibility for? Everyone else feeds, houses, and protects themselves, if badly, and we have almost no contribution to make to one another but small donations of time to assuage the loneliness, and to complain.
Notice how where a more "traditional" masculinity flourishes, it's most often in things like gangs, where young men act as comrades in arms, working together for mutual benefit in the face of great dangers. I figure certain cults are probably similar in this regard, but that's not something we want to encourage. Even the culture of bitcoin, has the idea of a collective, valorous struggle against the economic system, although it is entirely delusion.
Until men can find some way to reorganize their own labor and resources so that what "a man has to do," is again treated as something of value, he will continue to struggle. Likewise, I think that if women saw men who had any ability to ensure their own security and welfare, they themselves would find it much easier to envision their own security and welfare alongside those men.
Among us pariahs on the sidelines there is a palpable need to organize because we face adversities that none of us could ever handle solo. I find, oddly, that quite a few who have, one way or another given up on ideas like manliness end up being a hell of a lot tougher for it - not all of them, or even the majority, but the one's who learn at least one useful skill to trade for other useful skills among other dependable members of a community, are, whatever they might look like, tough, thoughtful, serious people.
"To be a man is to be depended upon."
You've gotten to the heart of it in nine words. Thank you!
Being a man has nothing to do with machismo, shooting people, seducing round-heeled women and all that other adolescent James Bond foolishness.
Nicely spoken.
A man needs to have the responsibility of providing for a wife and family. Boys need to see their fathers doing this as role models. Yes, other lifestyles are available but we’re talking here about traditional masculinity. Here in the UK, too many young women are effectively married to the state.
or boys need to grow up and learn about contraception and self and other respect? I had poor parents and grew up in an abusive household but managed not to do that in my life. the reasons people are 'effectively married to the state' is not just about boys taking up their responsibilities post baby, it's also pre baby and about the state allowing terribly low wages (hence UC and before that tax credits) and the increasing lack of decent non zero hour contracts etc. it's all propping up the billionaires, and those billionaires have genuinely toxic attitudes towards women (the billionaires who make news). this becomes the role model.
Andrew Vachss (Wikipedia him) in his novels and his prior work with murderous youth offenders, , pointsout that he had a shit life but he didn't rape or murder so why do some, and why don't others? the key to rehabilitation lies within those 2 questions.
In contrast to the Andrew Tate/soy boy dichotomy offered today, James Bond is already a decent role model. Making films to "fix" the "crisis in masculinity" is cringey anyway. Perhaps we just don't need yet another franchise remake?
Absolutely, it’s time to move on and look towards a better future (despite generalised pessimism). Men and women alike need to bring on a revolution in empathy. Everything else will just fall into place.
As much as I enjoy reading your columns, Ted, I'm very tired of essays trying to explain what young men must do to preserve their "masculinity". Why preserve something not worth preserving? It's as toxic as feminists claim it to be.
because it's hard wired on some level, and we're seeing the results when a generation of youth is discouraged from any hint of it.
Ted's not arguing at all for the toxic aspects of it.
just like there's nothing wrong with femininity in certain situations.
I don't see that anyone was discouraged from 'any hint' of masculinity, women and other guys started calling out toxic behaviour and that got turned into 'discouraged from any hint of it'. Boys will be boys has long been a way to allow molestation, rape, even murder, 'the nagging defence' etc, actually what is happening now in the UK and I suspect but don't have the figures for the USA is a massive rise in violence towards women, due to Tates of the world. that the idea is one is either a kind of weak woke or a 'manly' man, (what does that mean?) is absurd and an absurd conclusion to suggest by anyone, some nuance please? I am not aware of anyone disliking manliness or masculinity, but toxic behaviour renamed masculinity has had women (and continues to do so) and gays as its victims for hundreds of years, well in fact thousands so you know, it's time for everyone to grow up. women too are humans. there is no crisis of 'lonely men' there are men refusing to see women as actual human beings, rather than there for their every wish, and that is the crisis - most women cannot be bothered to put up with that (and the genuine dangers to their lives it represents).
Find a man that actually DOES something, and youll see a manly man
I know a fair amount of people who do outright dislike manliness, and masculinity, and honestly can't have a conversation without them castigating all of men everywhere for their privilege, which is tiring. As far as I can tell, it's more about singling out a person's one mark of apparent good fortune in order to bully them. If a man is poor, or uneducated, or doesn't speak well, or he's autistic, or nerdy, or effeminate, or he's an immigrant, or of color, it's pretty easy to dunk on his male privilege as a proxy for a perceived lack of safety or justice that comes from elsewhere. They'll take the most marginal man imaginable and talk about him like he's Jeffery Epstein and justify it against "the glass ceiling" or whatever without once considering that a plight like homelessness might in fact be even more oppressive than being a college-educated white liberal lady who's too shy to ask for a raise.
You won't necessarily see it unless you care enough to be looking out for these kinds of people, but from my observation, it's those least able to convert their maleness into actual social capital that suffer the brunt of both naively feminist misandry and toxic masculine violence among men. And it's precisely because they have it from both directions that they get targeted for radicalization towards whatever would allow them to be dishing out the punishment rather than taking it.
That's the problem when you dumb feminism down to the point that it's just another expression of the patriarchy you're starting with. People forget that it's patriarchy, not andrarchy, and that there's a world a difference between the men with power, and those without it.
indeed
Right. There is nothing to “preserve” in the first place. It just has to be expressed in healthy ways without being contorted and deformed by “toxicity”; compensating for insecurities or shame. You just keep it from getting polluted, like air and water.
What situations exist where femininity is 'wrong'?
I agree. Also, do we have masculinity crisis or simply a bunch of lazy entitled young men brain-washed by the internet? As Freud wrote, the core of male identity is the constant anxiety of not measuring up and/or being supplanted. A crisis for women is "oh, those women better be afraid, their biological clock is ticking, they are making bad choices". A crisis for men is "how society failed them" and/or "how women are failing men, and causing crisis to men". All because there is a way society is supposed to be for men. Men SHOULD get what they want. Women have to somehow figure out the way to give men what they want. If not, its automatically a crisis for everyone, but nobody says "men in question have to figure this out on their own"
it's like the old saying 'men are scared of being laughed at by other men and women, women are scared of being killed'.
Women are even more scared of being judged by other women as not having pull power,a woman without a man is as contemptible to most other women,the coffee shop gangs,etc as Spinsters always have been. These abused women,they stay with that husband or boyfriend for years cos they know if they leave they'll lose all they're "friends" the other gassy tarts and also be objects of contempt
That isn't true in my world, though it was somewhat truer when I was young. Women stay with abusive men because they fear the consequences of leaving will be even worse abuses. Most of the single women (often widows) I know have fulfilling lives and no wish to marry again, because in their earlier marriages they were forced into roles that didn't work for them.
Perhaps that is true in some places but abused women mostly stay because of children, lack of financial independence (often enforced by husbands) and fear for their safety. The reaction most women get from friends when leaving an abusive husband is “why did it take you so long.”
hmm. that’s certainly one view. i’m a woman and i’m not scared of being judged as not having pulling power. of course competition exists between all humans, especially if historically power was short supply. the idea that abused women stay for this reason is not what research shows, but perhaps that exists, after all all things exist , but i’d say that abused women stay for reasons of confused love, exhaustion, covert control, overt control, fear, and economic reasons. I suspect, Jane, we will have to agree to disagree upon this. how many men however have been fearful of their life from a woman, and how many women are fearful/have had an incident of violence, sexual or otherwise from a man? the figures don’t match even slightly.
Thank you for your very civil and polite response. Im guessing we inhabit different worlds not just geographically but class wise. I don't "read reports" I LIVE in that world.
It's the feminists who are toxic but all those old girls are dead now or soon will be. They were the enablers of the randy young men who wanted girls to just give it up. Don't believe all those patriarchal lies said Mouth Almighty Germaine Greer,Rosie Boycott,Gloria Steinem and others. If young men desire to behave well and most of them do,they need young women to be the Moral Policemen they have had to be for almost all human history. That's how it is. And should be. Who even today chooses to marry that girl in class who dated every boy,playing the field,and was never demanding or judgmental. None of them. When they marry their wife is that judgmental thin lipped bitch who never recovers her figure after that first baby but goes on to have 3 or 4 more and continually shouts at the kids and rebukes hubby and he bloody loves it. The old woman keeps him walking the line. PS. I'm neither of those but I see it all the time.
That old double standard is dying. I see 2 somewhat opposite trends today. The first is for both the partners to play the field and then live together for a while before deciding if they are well enough matched to make a permanent relationship workable. The second is for both to refrain from sex before marriage. My personal view is that either approach works as long as they both have the same values.
As a woman, I would say that this is a very welcome column! I think young men need this direction. I dated for a million years before finding my husband because there were so many lost young men out there.
And I 'm not saying women are perfect, but really young men just .... don't know how to invest in anything bigger than themselves.
It's a sad thing when a person is penalized for his DNA. That's true on so many levels (sex, race, beauty). For centuries, women have endured this, and what we're seeing now is the backlash. The "typical passage" you quoted underscores the fact that many men don't have a clue about women. Listen up, guys. We aren't all that different from you. We want to be respected for what we are, neither set on a pedestal nor viewed as an inferior being. We're not men without a penis, but we're not an alien species either. There is enough difference between the sexes to make them attractive to each other, but not so much neither side can ever bridge the gap. Ted, the role model you propose certainly appeals to me. That's the kind of man I'm drawn to. But I must point out that those virtues are necessary in women too. They're what set us apart from the beasts. But the two sexes might demonstrate those qualities differently, and their actions be interpreted differently by the opposite sex.
how about this as a slogan...
BE MORE HUMAN.
Men: be more human
Women: be more human
Yeah, OK, but James Bond is not a “man”; Bond is a spy, an agent of empire, an actual assassin. Let’s not lose our bearings entirely.
I'm not sure what other novels were in the bunch you read, but I recognize that passage you quoted. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is a very good book. Nobody ought to read it in search of role models, but why does a novel need to provide a roadmap to becoming a better person? Some art is meant to express feelings and experiences, especially unpleasant and uncomfortable ones. Being able to express and articulate such things is necessary for eventually dealing with them anyway.
thanks for this, I also thought it was a poor example, as it literally criticised the genuinely vile 'advice' for 'getting hos' out there, and is absolutely part of the problem, treating women as score cards and objects, leads the person doing it to commodify themselves too - and no one is going to score highly on the commodification list - i.e. ordinary as opposed to instagram gorgeous and rich etc. I'd say it's all part of this consumerism and social media click bait too the Tates and the faux intellectuals like Petersen (yes I know Jordan WAS in academia, but now he's schilling nonsense)
The way to resurrect Bond is to go back to the books and make the movies in the actual time and setting of the books, the early Cold War. People like period dramas, they loved Madmen. The new/old Bond would have the suits and the decor of the mid to late 1950s into the early 1960s, early jet aviation, early computers. The enemy would be the Soviet communists and organized criminals, no one can (rationally) object to that. In the background, Eisenhower is President, Churchill is in his second Premiership. If Bond's behavior is out of step with current mores, that's OK, it's a period piece. That is the way to detach Bond from the contemporary psychic and spiritual cancer. And all the producers have to do is look at the publication date on the books.
spot on only retro 60s bond makes sense.
Which is exactly what Marvel have realised is needed for the Fantastic Four: a retro imaginary future.