Manhood Is the Purpose of Masculinity

A recent speech by Josh Hawley about the cultural Left’s assault on men, manhood, and masculinity has kicked up a predictable cycle of debates. David French and Josh Hammer have rehearsed again their spat over whether Reagan-style fusionist conservatism is inherently weak and unmanly, as Hammer contends, and whether Trumpism is unduly obsessed with a particular vision of toughness, as French contends. The New York Times published an essay by Liza Featherstone arguing, as one would expect from the Times, that appeals to masculinity risk being “homophobic and fascistic,” that what men really need “requires public funding,” and that “many men also need the freedom not to be ‘men’ at all, but rather to become sissies . . . or even women.” Hawley must be wrong about men, Featherstone tells us, because he “has opposed just about every common public project recently proposed, from the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the Build Back Better Act to the Green New Deal.”

Hawley’s full speech is worth reading, and one need not agree with every particular, or embrace Hawley’s well-known enthusiasm for Teddy Roosevelt — or, contra Featherstone, endorse every vote the man has cast — in order to see the problem he identifies:

American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers; they’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse. Many men in this country are in crisis, and their ranks are swelling. . . .

Women now make up 60 percent of college students; men, 40 percent. Experts predict a 2:1 ratio soon, with the trend sped up by the pandemic. . . . Since 1965, the number of adult men between the ages of twenty and sixty-four not working — not even looking for work, but completely and totally out of the labor force — has quintupled, soaring from 3 million in the 1960s to more than 16 million in 2015. . . .

And the less men work, the less they marry. Marriage rates are plummeting. And the age of first marriage continues to rise, as men push commitment off further and further into the future. By 2010, a majority of men in this country between 25 and 34 had never married. And that trend has accelerated since. Fewer marriages means fewer fathers in the home. By 2020, over 18 million American children lived without a father present. That’s more than a quarter of all children in America.

Hawley goes on to detail just a fraction of “the Left’s assault on the masculine virtues” from universities to popular culture to even, of all places, the military.

The idea of a crisis of masculinity is not new. The entire arc of evolution, civilization, and economic and technological progress has been away from the caveman who hunts for all his food with spears and clubs and protects his family with physical force, and towards domestication: first the farm, then the factory, then the desk, then the cubicle. At each stage, the old uses of masculinity were devalued; at each stage, new courses were found for old impulses. Yet, it has often been the restless, questing energy of men that has done so much to drive those advances ever forward.

It is important to distinguish masculinity from manhood. Masculinity is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or bad purposes. The purpose of masculinity is manhood. Our society’s goal in raising young men should neither be to stamp out their masculinity nor to fetishize masculinity for its own sake but to teach men to put masculinity to its proper uses. Hawley properly identifies the most important purpose of manhood: “There is no higher calling, and no greater duty, than raising a family.”

Part of the difficulty of debating masculinity is a problem common to cultural debate: getting people to agree on the terms we are talking about. When we talk about masculinity, we mean the specific physical and personality traits that are unique to men or are disproportionately present in men. The most prominent of these are physical strength, aggressiveness, and a certain level of aggression. Masculine men are also typically characterized by competitiveness; an enthusiasm for physical labor; a fascination with building and fixing physical things; a preference for physical order and function over aesthetics; a drive to classify, rank, and categorize everything; and a focus on problem-solving rather than the exchange of emotions.

Manhood is something more than that: It is the tools of masculinity put to a righteous use. Manhood is not just about sexual conquest but about providing the stability, support, and protection to a wife and children. Manhood is not just about strength and aggression but using those things to serve a purpose and restraining them when they do not — fighting for hearth and home and community, not fighting for the sheer adrenaline rush of fighting. Manhood sees the urge to compete and the drive to build and fix things as ways for men to contribute to a greater good. Manhood implies steadiness and responsibility. It is no accident that the greatest Christian icon of manhood is St. Joseph — a man who provided a family even to a child not his own, who led that family away from danger, and was a carpenter who taught that trade to the son he raised.

An additional status is that of a gentleman. Up through the 18th century, “gentleman” was a distinct social class. As the class distinction eroded, particularly in the United States, it became all the more important for a man to distinguish himself as a gentleman by his adherence to a code of conduct. The 19th-century gentleman would have scoffed at the idea that there was something effete about this; a gentleman was expected to be orderly and mannered and gracious, but he was also expected to follow manly pursuits such as horsemanship and hunting.

There is one sign of manhood which takes time and effort to develop: A man is in control of his emotions. This is sometimes confused with being cold or suppressing one’s emotions, but it is quite the contrary: A real man is not afraid to weep, laugh, or rage, but he does so when it is appropriate and not simply when he is overcome by his passions. Women, who tend to have a different relationship with emotional expression, come to depend upon the emotional stability that a man provides in a relationship.

The strength to control one’s emotions has long been a much-revered aspect of manhood. Men as diverse as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Jackie Robinson — all much admired in different times and places for different reasons — had in common that they were men of powerful emotions who won the respect of those around them by mastering their tempers and their feelings of anger, depression, and despair.

Not all of our public role models of manhood are equal, however. One of the reasons why Donald Trump has been such a flashpoint for arguments about manhood and masculinity is that Trump embodies some, but not all, of the features of masculinity. Trump abounds in swagger, competitiveness, bravado, aggression, ambition, physical size, and (in his youth) strength and athleticism. Trump thinks big, builds things, frames the world in terms of ranks and superlatives, and seeks out attractive women and the company of athletes and warriors. Yet Trump has also been a terrible role model of manhood, with his divorces, his adulteries, his habit of walking away from business and political failures and dumping all the responsibility on others, and most of all, his conspicuous and still-ongoing public failure to control his emotions and rule rather than be ruled by his passions. Unlike Washington or Lincoln, I suspect that nobody will look to Trump as an icon of manhood once he is gone from the active political scene.

Where David French, who has written quite a lot on this topic (including during his time at National Review) has a point is the extent to which a segment of the Right has an unhealthy drive to divorce masculinity from manhood. It may be glamorous to be the cowboy alone on his mustang, but the West was settled much more by Pa Ingalls types in their plodding covered wagons (the minivans of the 19th century) than by Clint Eastwood characters drifting alone across the plains. It is great to be a fighter, but manhood is more than just fighting everybody all the time; the father or boss you respect, or the man you’d want marrying your daughter, knows how to choose his battles to fight with prudence and for good causes. It is great to be physically strong, but strong for what? For whom? It is great to be sexually vigorous, but if you want to impress me with your manhood, tell me how many children you have raised, not how many women you have bedded.

A home still needs somebody who can open the pickle jar. But a man needs somebody to open it for.