i have spent quite a lot of my life wondering what makes a man.
not whether i am one. i am a straight white man. in quite a few respects, i won the birth lottery.
thanks, god.
the bipolar disorder was a slightly questionable addition. still thanks, but a little less.
(i am agnostic.)
but growing up, knowing that i was a boy didn’t tell me much about what kind of boy i was supposed to be. or what kind of man i wanted to become.
i struggled with the expectations. with ideas of manliness that i couldn’t quite see myself in. to some extent, i still do.
maybe that was part of what contributed to my anorexia at 16. i don’t know. i wouldn’t want to reduce something that complicated to one explanation. but i remember how difficult it was to work out who i was while also trying to become someone i thought i was supposed to be.
being privileged didn’t make that confusion disappear. it meant there were other difficulties i didn’t have to face on top of it.
outside of sexual relationships, gender has rarely been the thing i cared most about in another person. i cared about what kind of person they were.
but the expectations attached to gender clearly mattered to me. even when i wished they didn’t.
so i don’t think discussing masculinity, femininity or gender beyond biology is pointless. quite the opposite. i think it matters a lot.
i just think the questions are complicated. and our ability to talk about them has become increasingly limited by how emotionally loaded they are.
one thing i keep coming back to is empathy.
trying to understand what sits one or two levels underneath someone’s behavior. the insecurity, loneliness, fear or need to belong that might help explain it.
i have a similar feeling about politics. i find voting for an extremist party deeply troubling. but in some cases, i can understand how someone got there.
that understanding doesn’t make the vote harmless. it gives us a better chance of addressing whatever made the promise appealing.
i think separating the what from the why matters.
and i want to be clear about what i mean here.
women’s anger at male violence, entitlement and abuse is justified. when i hear “not all men, but always men,” i don’t feel attacked, i agree. i hear the exhaustion and fear behind it. my discomfort with expectations of masculinity doesn’t cancel out the harm men do.
reading about the sexual assault allegations in the “cornell 7” case, and the questions surrounding the institutional response, makes it painfully difficult to treat this as an abstract debate about identity. there are real people suffering the consequences.
this is not a request to soften our judgment of abuse. people who rape, abuse or humiliate women are responsible for their actions. their insecurities do not excuse them.
the person i am thinking about is a 13-year-old boy. and how to help him not becoming them.
someone who is struggling with himself. who doesn’t know where he belongs, what makes him valuable or what becoming a man is supposed to look like.
then someone like andrew tate appears on his phone and offers an answer.
a horrific answer. but a simple one.
here is who you need to become. here is how you gain respect. here is why you feel powerless. here is whom you should blame.
i find the emergence of the manosphere terrifying. i also find it intellectually fascinating, because i want to understand why these narratives find such a receptive audience.
i can feel empathy for that boy and still be horrified by what he is being taught.
i think we need to hold both thoughts at once.
because i worry that telling him everything wrong with the answer he has found will only get us so far if we cannot also offer him something worth moving toward.
my parents are divorced. i grew up with a woman as my primary caregiver, and without the kind of male role model i think i needed.
the older i get, and after 14 years of therapy, the more i realize that this influenced me more than i once thought.
that is a reflection on my own childhood. it isn’t a judgment on women raising boys, or a claim that every boy needs a particular family structure.
for me, though, there was something missing: a man i could look at and think, i can imagine growing into something like that.
so what makes a good man?
i don’t have a definitive answer. i am increasingly skeptical that there should be one.
but i think we need a positive idea of masculinity. one that gives boys room to become different kinds of men, while still giving them something meaningful to aspire to.
a man who takes responsibility for what he does. who can care for people and let them care for him. who can be ambitious without treating everyone around him as competition. who can handle rejection without turning it into resentment or entitlement.
someone who can admit that he is frightened, confused or wrong, and still feel that he has something to offer.
none of these qualities belongs exclusively to men. of course they don’t.
but a boy trying to imagine his adult life may need to see them in a man. a person he can identify with. someone whose way of being makes those qualities feel possible for him too.
people who know me know about my slight obsession with zohran mamdani.
slight is a crazy understatement btw.
agree with his politics or don’t. to me, part of his appeal is the way he carries himself. i see warmth, humor, conviction and a willingness to care openly about other people.
that is my impression of a public figure. i don’t know him personally. but it is an example of masculinity i find compelling, and one i wish more young boys encountered.
we need examples like that in ordinary life too. teachers, relatives, coaches, friends. men who are there often enough for a boy to see how they handle frustration, apologize, care for someone or ask for help.
i don’t think we can shame boys into a healthy relationship with being men.
we can challenge harmful beliefs. set boundaries. insist on responsibility. and take women’s safety seriously.
we can also take seriously a young boy’s need for belonging, guidance and a future version of himself he can feel hopeful about.
i still don’t fully know what makes a man.
but i would like the boys growing up now to have more answers available than i felt i had.