An interesting dialogue on masculinity has arisen, which is fortunate since you’d think the first thing a “men’s rights” movement would do would be to understand men. Alas, our political system is more defensive than pro-active, so that didn’t happen. But now is a good time to do it.
In one of the first posts to kick off this round of dialogue, Koanic writes:
What are the culturally universal traits definining manhood? Mark from Post: Masculine lists two:
- Emotional dissociation.
- Initiation.
Jack Donovan counters this with a more cosmological definition:
Masculinity is that which is least feminine; femininity is that which is least masculine.
In the last article posted on this site, it was suggested that masculine and feminine are complementary principles.
So now, as good investigators (a large category, of which “scientist” and “mystic” are both subsets) let us return to the original definition and see if we can reconcile these three viewpoints. Here’s an initial stab.
- Discipline.
- Initiation.
The idea of men as logically dissociated makes sense in that we must put emotions on the back-burner in order to accomplish what we need to do. However, there’s a larger part of it, which is discipline, in a martial sense.
You put aside your emotions, or even smaller logical concerns. A truly masculine force is able to sacrifice some or many in order to save all (yeah, I’m thinking of Ender’s Game here). This is a subset of what seems to always define masculinity for me, which is strong goal-orientation versus method-orientation, which is more of a concern for nurturers.
When someone is goal-oriented, everything else takes a back seat and becomes a means to that end. This is why men are the guardians of civilization, and women its anchors. The two complementary principles ensure that good things can exist by stimulating the need for them in each other.
+1. The goal oriented frame is the key.
I was checking Jack Donovan stuff. Masculinity for the gay men… sort of bizarre if you ask me, in the sense that as a man you want to put your seed in the most fertile ground possible and and dominate, rather than having an external dominant force put his seed on you.
I have had a few discussions with other males about what the essence of masculinity is, but i think I have more searching to do in order to find the right words. I “feel” what it means to be masculine, but it is sort of mysterious to me when I try to word it.
Also, some reading to anyone who is interested:
http://www.jack-donovan.com/documents/No%20Mans%20LandPDF.pdf
Masculinity is always social. A man is always a man among men. It’s a species endowment which individual men have to find their place within.
To borrow from psychoanalyst Anthony Stevens, the essence of the male archetype is rank. For the female, it is affiliation. Each sex is a virituoso, both group and individual, in their opposite and complementary value.
Men naturally compete with each other –which means that both dominance AND submission are male dynamics– for their place within the male hierarchy. Few men –loners– exile themselves from that ranked grouping.
And through that ranked grouping, men create affiliation with each other.
Women overtly resist hierarchy and rank, enacting affiliation first of all. (But any observation of them in groups will show you that they use this affiliation to create their own shadow hierarchies.)
Power and love: primary human realms.
[...] it’s too confused to find its own hindquarters at twilight — needs to do is first find a definition of masculinity. It then needs to defend that definition and nurture [...]