Masculinity is Not a Mass Product

Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl — Caspar David Friedrich, 1837

There's been a good bit of noise lately about people clamoring for more literature about men, by men. The literary novel is no longer the domain of the richly-realized young man in current year. You shouldn’t need to be told this, but at any rate, you can read excellent meditations affirming and exploring as much from several talented Substack writers (among them Ross Barkan, Naomi Kanakia, Chris Jesu Lee), in addition to the odd article like this one from Esquire that bemoans a dearth of “sad boy” literature specifically and the absence of authentically male perspective more generally.

Many on Substack and beyond have noted that publishing is managed primarily by liberal women, that men are pursuing college study and especially the humanities at drastically decreasing rates, so on and so forth. There are many reasons why men feel less inclined toward writing novels of this sort, but in my perspective as a man who loves literature, I think the most salient question is this: why would they?

If you're dying for literature written by men that explores their internal lives, there is a long and diverse history of people writing precisely those kinds of stories. Are you looking for fiction that explores how boys make men of themselves and find their place as masculine adults? Go read Dickens! Interested in how men approach and find allure in women? Read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Henry James, or a million others. Are you curious about the experience of disaffected young men who go down anti-social rabbit holes of solipsistic pseudo-philosophy and come out the other side as radicalized misanthropes? Try Crime and Punishment !

Perhaps you are interested in a novel written from the perspective of a man with some kind of trauma or disability or other social disenfranchisement that causes him to feel alienated, distant, and emasculated in every social situation. Perhaps this man feels aimless and without meaningful pursuits, which is constantly reaffirmed by his total inability to secure the affections of the women in his milieu; and yet despite all of this, he relentlessly labors to make himself seen and heard both interpersonally and through his writing. You could absolutely trawl through the self-publication platforms and search for a diamond in the rough. You could send out a call from Esquire magazine and whichever other places asking men to reveal their innermost selves to you on the page.

You could also just pick up a copy of The Sun Also Rises.

But wait, you're saying, all of those books are old and dusty! Raskolnikov was no incel - he never logs in to Reddit or posts a slur in a journalist's Twitter replies! Oliver Twist may have been taken under the wing of an exploitative scumbag with a dysgenic program for male adulthood, but he never had the TikTok algorithm force-feed him Andrew Tate slop like the kids today! These are very different things! The experience of masculinity now is radically different from how it was a hundred years ago!

If this is your response, I’d like to gently suggest that you're not actually interested in how men move through the world and maintain their internal lives; you are actually looking for stories about men using Instagram. Which is okay! For better or worse, systems like social media do in fact matter and influence our lives.

One does wonder why My Twisted World, the memoir-manifesto of UC Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger, is not as popular as Industrial Society and its Future, despite dealing with topics like sexuality and intimacy, which are traditionally more interesting to women than political theory and industrial history¹. Perhaps it's because Kaczynski was broadly successful in both his terror campaign and his civilian academic accomplishments, while Rodger was a consummate loser in essentially every available metric, embodying a fundamental fecklessness that will always be irreparably repulsive in a man.

Anyway, there is clearly more to be said about who men are and what their lives are like in our brave new world. If Shakespeare had determined that Homer adequately covered man's inclination to make devastating war in service of self-aggrandizement, or how singular fixations on legacy and legend can be the downfall of great men and nations, then he wouldn't have given us Macbeth, nor several of his other masterpieces.

The point here is not to make some terminating claim that all the ideas have already been had, every piece already written. There are of course a number of factors which distinguish the circumstances of the contemporary man from those of his predecessors. Artists and creatives are accordingly called to express those circumstances and the men and women that inhabit them.

The question is what we can say about the contemporary man's emotional and psychological life, or 'interiority' if you like, and why it seems to have vanished from popular literature. Andrew Boryga makes the excellent observation that this is primarily because men's internal thoughts have not been popular in the ideas market in general lately². Boryga attributes this largely to a tendency of men to express themselves in ways that chafe at women's sensibilities, which becomes disqualifying when women are hegemonic in the literary ecosystem. Even the c-suite has become primarily populated by women, but more important is this: the functionaries that read and edit submissions or sign advance checks (and therefore embody the actual activity of publishing) are overwhelmingly from the fairer sex, as are the outsiders aggregating reviews on Goodreads or booktok/tube that generate an actual readership, which is itself also almost entirely women.

For a book to be popular in this climate, it must, by definition, be saying something that women want to hear, which is very rarely how straight men think or speak on their own terms.

If you're reading this as a straight man, consider how long it's been since you last spoke completely freely and naturally, without any kind of careful self-adjustment or softening of language, in the company of women. For that matter, I wonder how often women feel they can speak uninhibited in the company of men. This isn't purely a matter of political ends, though the political does impinge on the artistic; rather I think the political differences that are now so common between the sexes are downstream of a general gap that has been widening between us for a long time.

The legacy of modernity is as broad as humanity, but singularly recurrent among its outgrowths is the frequency with which men and women renegotiate their relationship to one another. Which sex is suited to which stations in society; how ought they to conduct themselves around each other in private or in public; whether one or the other should have primacy in certain domains; whether the categories exist at all or if there might be more than those two; what reparations, if any, are due for past grievances. We barely agree on the terms of one question before stacking another on top of it, over and over for generations, and then we wonder how it is that we've grown so distant and alien to each other.

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Postscript -

Thank you for your interest in my little ditty. I’ve daydreamed for years about having some kind of a platform where people might see and enjoy my writing, and despite my best efforts to find something more lucrative to do with myself, the essay holds me in its thrall. I sincerely hope you’ve found something worthwhile here, and if you have, please consider telling someone about it:

More to come.

-jackbad

1. If this claim bothers you, try to guess whether a bestseller is more likely to be a dramatic novel about sex and intimacy or a sober military history, and then recall that the overwhelming majority of people who buy books are women.

2. Again, if you doubt this, ask yourself how long it’s been since you saw a book written by a man market itself as such. Ask again about movies and businesses.