Where the Men are Men

Young men on the right are told by the internet to be a man with only slightly more seriousness than young women are condemned for rejecting femininity. Said rejections only carry so much weight, after all, when one considers what used to be a hard and fast rule online: the internet is a place where the men are teenagers and the women are FBI agents. In an age of normalized social media, rampant transgenderism, and Discord, however, things are a little more complicated than the good old days.

That aside though, the general reactionary message is a good one. Men should be men. They should want to be men. They shouldn’t be losers, or apathetic, or dressed up like hippies. They shouldn’t want to waste their lives without ambition, family, or self-respect. And moreover, it shouldn’t even need to be said that men fundamentally, absolutely, literally cannot be women.

But, like any good thing, devilish tendencies find ways to undermine it. Where the well-intentioned correction of slovenly habits can provoke a man to actually use a gym membership, vaingloriousness can commit him to pursuing a hollow masculinity. Efforts to embrace an outward respectability in clothing can miss mark of modesty and fall into obsessive habits of male preening; far from masculine, the overly-groomed man comes across as a feminized makeup artist just as much as the gymbro’s attention to gains might verge on narcissism. Likewise, competitive inclinations should be fostered without the embrace of vices like wrath or envy. It’s a narrow way to cultivate virtue.

And it bears periodic repeating: rejecting the errors of Modernity, especially the manner in which feminism has defined the male subject as some problematic collection of vice, viscera, and genitals, does not mean that a man should excessively indulge in everything that feminism claims to reject. “Always do the opposite of what feminists demand” is, in a general sense, an appropriate rule of thumb. But only in a general sense; it should not serve as the ultimate end of a man’s praxis.

Health Consciousness

You don’t have to spend too much time online to encounter health maniacs. The preponderance of body idolatry is predominately a left wing phenomenon, admittedly, wedded as they are to materialism; with this in mind, it’s no coincidence that campaigns against fat-shaming, glorification of “plus-size” obesity, and so-called sex-positive feminism exist alongside movements toward permaculture gardening, hippie-style commune localism, veganism, and being in shape.

In the last decade, however, coinciding with the rise in men’s movements against feminism, weight lifting, martial arts, and along with it, nutrition-minded e-reactionary culture has bubbled to the surface. The first generation raised on the internet has reached maturity to find themselves fat, unattractive, feminized, and polluted with chemicals that have more syllables than they have fingers, and they’ve come to a crossroads: embrace bugman-dom, consume soy products, watch marvel movies, and continue a well-entrenched porn addiction; or, reject modernity, embrace tradition, indulge in memes, and get in shape. There are varying degrees in between, of course, but the hard divide across political and social spheres to be found in Millennial and, now, Zoomer generations is impossible to ignore. Even mainstream outlets have been forced to comment on it.

This isn’t to draw comparisons between the tendency toward idolatry on the left and self-improvement on the right. There are many on the left who, at least ostensibly, consider themselves not to be idolizing the physical form when they take to dietary restrictions and fitness regimens more strenuous than some ascetical practices; likewise, some sectors of the right glorify the human form under the pretenses of aesthetics to an unreasonable degree, citing reactionaries like Yukio Mishima as role models. Fair enough, though it misses the mark.

It would be inappropriate to degrade the body, as certain Gnostics and as the Manicheans did, as well as certain Eastern religions. But so too is it inappropriate to reduce the human totality to the sum of its organs. The human being is incomplete without the body, yet also is man unable to be summarized by it. Souls aren’t simply ghosts pulling the levers of a fleshy mechanism, as modern, materialist-informed science might have us presume. What this means is that the body exists for a purpose, and that purpose cannot be divorced from the purpose according to which the soul was made. Both must operate in tandem—indeed, more than tandem, as the proper nourishment of one generally yields fruit for both.

So when approaching matters of health, it’s important to take care to avoid the idolatry of the body. For what reason do we pay attention to what we eat? For what reason should we ensure our body remains limber, strong, and in working order? To do these things simply for their own sakes rips the body away from the orderliness required to fulfill its function.

Modesty

To be well dressed was once a prerequisite for entry into any social gathering, but that was before a certain demographic of people were memed by certain social engineering types to be the paragon of haute couture. Although the upper echelon of society maintains their hold on suits, vests and ties, and although this remains the default uniform for legal and financial settings, the causal dress of our day has been reduced to little more than t shirts that don’t fit, designer jeans or cargo pants, and shorts. And the less said about men’s footwear, the better.

This isn’t exactly news to the average self-styled reactionary. We’re well aware of the sordid state of men’s apparel. It’s par for the course to guard against slovenly attire if you’ve decided already to position yourself against Modernity. All the same, however, impulses toward self-aggrandizement—particularly the urge to purposelessly draw attention to yourself—should be avoided.

The problem, as with health consciousness, comes when “being presentable” is pursued for its own sake. A relentless pursuit of fashion seems easy enough to guard against; after all, the vices it drags along behind it are ones that eat into one’s bank account almost as much as they do one’s closet space. But for some, money isn’t much of an issue, and for others, finding space to store things is more an afterthought than a concern. Especially since we don’t tend to buy clothes with the intention of storing them.

A good haircut and, if preferred, a good beard are worth the effort of regular maintenance, but that doesn’t always mean daily preening before a mirror. A man too well-groomed does not inspire confidence so much as unease. Left unasked are the questions: how much time does he have to spend in front of a mirror? and how can a man stand to spend his freedom shopping for clothes? A man’s life is organized around priorities, and properly ordered, they should be associated with fulfilling his station in life. His sense of fashion should be only a means to this end, not an end in itself, and certainly not a means to any other end—such as the empty pursuit of sexual gain. Dressing well to fulfill your station is not synonymous to dressing well in order to chase tail.

Competition

And lest we forget, what would a man be without a competitive streak? Like the other two aspects so far highlighted, competition is good—up to a point. Do we compete simply to prove who’s better than one another according to specific, measurable limitations? Yes, to a point. But is this the sole end of competition? Of course not; no competition is perfect, on rule set is perfect, and discrepancies in these spreads are an understood part of the game. Relying on competition to prove superiority again reduces man’s function to a materialist playing field. It’s an appropriate barometer, but not a perfect measure.

That said, a certain kind of competition is not merely healthy but necessary to manhood. Competition for the sake of itself, however, undermines it—you’ll know you’ve crossed into that territory when obsessiveness, anger, or the compulsive need to win what are otherwise harmless games ends up an unavoidable part of the competitive experience. This isn’t to say that we should learn from every failure, instead; sometimes there’s nothing to learn, and sometimes there’s nothing actually worth learning. Losing an informal toss of the pigskin with relatives during a Thanksgiving gathering doesn’t really mean anything, and dwelling on failures in tactics over such a defeat is really only contingent upon whether one has the time, interest, or mental energy to do so during the gathering. Losing a bid for that major contract your company could use, however, is a totally different story.

Not everything is a competition. This is is one of the more obvious failures of “manosphere” thinking: the reduction of social interaction to the autistic terminology of transactions and gaming, and this is relevant in it’s more intended senses—dating—and to its broader applications normal social discourse. There’s a place for business terminology, of course, and the hint is in its name. But approaching social dynamics from the same angle, though met with mixed success, degrades the person doing it; interaction ceases to be an avenue across which bonding, a form of love, can transit. Instead, a materialist and self-serving interest takes its place—a direct and deliberate inversion.

“Manosphere” thinking, not too unlike the Men’s Rights Activist ideology from the same time period, was as much a product of the sexual revolution as it was a reaction to it—but where MRAs tended shun women in favor of the more-current incel labels, PUA enthusiasts used their scorn to use women to satisfy their own ends. Lifting, crushing puss, and dressing fashionably, especially when oriented toward the indulgences of the flesh, are not signs of a well-adjusted man. Make no mistake, a man engaging in at least two of the three—if not all three—will come across as significantly more reliable than the average stock of men out there. But when such ‘average stock’ has been degraded by decades of psychological warfare, unimaginable levels of xenoestrogens, the stigmatization (if not outright abolition) of boys’ group activities, and the inundation of pornography, those that make even a modicum of effort will stick out from the rest. In the land of pigs, the butcher is king.

Pursuing the Cross

This brings forward all the more reasons to guard against hackneyed efforts at capitalizing on the reaction to feminization. Where PUA thinking makes an idol out of sexual gratification as an outward sign of masculinity, the go-your-own-way mentality of jaded post-MRAs makes an idol out of some disconnected sense of aesthetic idealism. Without a proper anchoring in a Sacramental system, the right’s options for virtue collapse into a vague Nietzschean power fantasy that, like the rest, fail bring forward what can be taken with us into the grave. A beautiful corpse prepared as a consequence of an immanatized instant heaps the summary of a man’s soul onto the flimsy structure of an unclarified aesthetic. It plays into a true sense of aesthetic, as the stereotypical image of a man’s man never fails to impress, but to build an ideology around pure aesthetic, with little else to support it, is begging for a catastrophic and system-wide failure. It appeals to a sense of innate cool without pushing deeper to determine what supports it all. As a result, beauty for the sake of itself lacks the substantive quality that true beauty naturally has—beauty ordered toward the perfection of what is good and true, working in union with the other transcendentals, and pointing toward God. This is to be found most fully in a life lived according to the Sacraments.

It should go without saying that this is not the sort of “both sides are right and wrong” posturing of a centrist. Rather, there is a proper order to the world, and a man’s job is to both recognize it and partake in it. This means fulfilling his given station in life. The ultimate mark of masculinity in a man is not the outward posturing of a Don Juan peacock, nor the rippling muscles of a body builder, nor even the financial stability of a successful businessman. It is the imitation of Christ, the fulfillment of virtues ordered toward that end in the shape of a cross. Doing good things, living a good life—the very term good in itself is only sensible as defined by that which is pleasing to God. To merely avoid harming others, or fulfilling your own base desires and whims: these are the behaviors of animals or machines, but not of men. A man in full communion with the Church, receiving those Sacraments that God sanctified with His Blood and Passion—this is the ultimate end of masculinity: a vehicle by which we can come to better know God so that we may have him look upon us fondly at our judgment.

Have we need for the weight rack, the treadmill, and the punching bag? Of the nutrition labels, the home garden, the water filters? Have we need of the suit jacket, the cuffs, the tie, of the razor? Have we need of the sports, the sparring, the games? Yes, of course we have need of these. We have need of these in both practical senses and spiritual senses. But the practical sense, the sense by which we are distinguished from the enemies of our people that seek to turn men into slaves, is neither the only sense nor the primary sense. And the spiritual sense, which should be ordering our behavior, is a sense that owes itself to a greater object: virtue and God.

We should be getting stronger, eating well, dressing sensibly, and maintaining a competitive and fighting spirit. But we should not be doing so at the expense of our interior life.