This essay is self-critical, and also a warning to myself. From my experience and from my reading, I believe there is a kind of male cowardice that has become way more popular during the last half century. We lose men to this form of cowardice. These are the men lost to "abstractland".
The solution I propose is for young men to be aware of this problem. To force themselves to do physical work, to have fun outside (like they should have learned to do as a kid), and to regularly meet new people their age from a variety of backgrounds (both genders).
This stance is not original - others have taught me this position, especially Roissy in DC and Bertrand Russell. This is just me adding my voice and intepretation to the pile.
Something wrong happens to men, mostly young men who read a lot, who spend too much time on abstract subjects like math, software, liberal arts, economics, theology, or other such concerns. The problem is that they become asexual, or emasculated.
I am thinking of the men who...
behave like they have just read Marx, or Chomsky, and they end up dedicating years of their lives to ridding the world of American imperialism and other forms of globalization.
or they find out about the ACLU, read its introductory tenets, and, perhaps coming off a very personal experience, they join the cause and begin fighting for the right to abortion or perhaps the right to some miscellaneous freedom that they don't think has been reached.
they turn to God, read some of the Sermon on the Mount, and become convinced that their role in life is to turn the world's unbelievers into believers. Or at least to "let God's light shine through them." Sundays are church Sundays. Wednesday nights are Bible study nights. And prayer group is for asking for God's strength to help them steer the less enlightened people here on Earth toward salvation.
they become a professor at a research university. Psychology, social studies, chemical engineering - whatever. Their work is the work that matters. The United States better damn well continue to fund the expansion of mankind's collective knowledge (through them). Without their publications and steps forward, men are nothing but beasts. To the extent which public funding does not agree with this, the world is on its way out. Theirs is the fight for increased knowledge for all mankind. May all of our sons and daughter apply to grad school.
they become art critics. They write a lot of book, movie, and television reviews.
after spending significant time on an inefficient tax-payer-funded government projects, they become a zealots for agile programming. 'Agile' becomes the new age solution that's going to save them from future painful experiences in the software field. Programmers who haven't yet adapted to this are clearly too apathetic about quality.
What happens is that their zeal for one of these topics crosses a threshold such that they care about it way too much. It becomes one of the main traits that they identify with. To them, it is at least as important as their day job. It is "their cause". It is the thing they are always ready to get into an argument about. To their reckoning, there are bad guys who are ignorant, and there are good guys who are in-the-know. They are fighting the fight as one of the good guys.
It's important to note that, except perhaps the political examples I mentioned above, these are not originally fights that these young men want to turn into physical confrontations. These are arguments over ideas. Ideals is the game here. These ideals can turn into violent action if a dire environment allows, or if the ideal is deeply attached to the way people make a living (imperialism has triggered its share of violent confrontation) but in most cases, that is not what matters.
Here is my punch line: Place any one of these men in front a physically attractive woman, and they have nothing to say. They cannot get her interest, and if you repeated the experiment 10 times in a row, they wouldn't make any progress with any of the 10 women.
This bothers me. It bothers me that these young men are so one-dimensionally dedicated to their ideal that they no longer feel the urge to attract women, or get better at attracting women. They are so far separated from putting forth effort to quench their lust.
Here's another thing. This issue, as I am stating it, is "beneath" them. They would argue that physical attraction means little to them compared to the inner beauty of a woman. Most attractive women, being not nearly as devoted to topics like the above, would be dismissed as being "stupid".
To be honest I doubt you could get any of these men to seriously confront this. I think they would avoid it or dismiss the issue as not being important; as being immaterial. They'd argue that mankind has evolved beyond pure sensory, or hedonistic, joy.
Sometimes, there is a progression into a different stage. These men become extremely self-deprecating and make fun of how bad their luck is with attractive women. It's a contrast to how serious they were about their cause. They put themselves down, make jokes about their awkwardness... In other words they embrace the previously unspoken image of their sexual helplessness. They make fun of themselves so that there is no argument about this. "I have no idea what to do with an attractive woman. So what?" One has to agree to a somewhat less stoic image in order to crack a smile like this, though. I'd argue that men in this state learn to suppress their enthuasiam for their cause so that they can at least get through social sitautions without making everyone around them uncomfortable. But making jokes about one's weakness is a lousy substitute for being strong.
The fact that society is so quick to forgive this, in a sense, means that we've grown too complacent. The pop culture image of the man today is a man who is a socially skilless dog, who only "gets lucky" with women once in awhile, who should have a shit-eating grin on his face if he ever does something cool by chance, who is terrible in bed and apologetic or joking about it.
But whether they are in forced denial, or self-deprecating acknowledgement, inside these men's minds is a barely conscious, sexually frustrated male that is dying a quiet death. Such a man could be an attractive person who made people around him feel great with ease, but that's not what we have. We have a lost opportunity.
Many of these men marry. "Aha!" you say. "They got married, so they must have found a loving relationship afterall!" My response is that yes, women marry these guys regularly. The women that marry them are unattractive. And the relationships are broken. The women take on masculine traits and have to dominate and direct the man more often than they would prefer. Sometimes the woman even feels like the man's mom. The men worship the women way too much. The relationship is not sexually polarized.
In other words, I don't think being married makes a man exempt from what I am talking about. In my opinion, most of these types of men are married to friends, not lovers, (or if all marriages eventually become friendships, then at least these women cease being mates and start becoming friends way too early). These are women who are not physically or inwardly attractive; probably not feminine. They are probably not energetic. They are probably afraid of being as loving as they could be. Indeed I bet many of the women don't even want kids.
I don't necessarily doubt that these couples manage to rouse themselves to the sex act once in awhile, but I think the sex is probably not that enjoyable, nor frequent. And the children that come from these relationships are likely to be weaker than if the man had bothered fixing himself and finding a more attractive woman. The broken relationship is like...a way to make yourself old but way too early.
What happens to these men? They let themselves grow ugly and fat; they grow long beards. They stay shy throughout their life, except at their jobs, and except when surrounded by like-minded people. They walk around with a persistent frown, or at least with their lipline perfectly straight and rarely in a smile. Life for them is a serious, stoic pursuit of some dream that they have pictured in their mind.
I believe these men are just exhibiting a sophisticated form of cowardice. These are the men lost to "abstractland".
To repeat, the solution I propose is for young men to be aware of this problem. To force themselves to do physical work, to have fun outside (like they should have learned to do as a kid), and to regularly meet new people their age from a variety of backgrounds (both genders).
