Revenge of the Old Gods
The consequences of cultural emasculation
It is hard to talk about masculinity on the internet. Specifically, it’s hard to talk about a certain kind of masculinity (real masculinity) in a certain zone of the internet (the curated internet) without being confused for a misogynist, a pick-up artist, a “not all men” rape-machine, an MRA, or a bitter divorcee. For the most part, bringing up masculinity shoots up a big red flag for the hive-mind to either ignore, mock, accuse, or assail.
There are of course acceptable ways to express your masculinity on places like Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The first acceptable masculinity is the “Good Man.” This is the guy who is constantly engaged in the acts of listening, self-reforming, and learning to be a good father, husband, and friend. This neutered iteration of masculinity seeks above all else to be non-threatening and beige. A good man is a man who does the dishes, talks about his feelings, and has lots of soft, slow, communicative sex. He is ever striving to be the version of a man that he predicts a woman wants, but above all else he strives most of all to be “present” (whatever that means). When asked what defines his masculinity, he says things like “patience” and “generosity.” It does not seem to matter to a “Good Man” that these are just virtues of good humans and have nothing to do with being a man, because Good Men are more of a PR stunt for men than a demographic.
The second brand of acceptable masculinity is the “Bacon Guy.” How do you know the Bacon Guy is a man? Well because he loves Bacon - and lots of it! He likes it on everything, even on craaaaazzzzy things like ice cream. He also loves craft beers, axe throwing, beards, and tossing around the pigskin. While the Good Man has sublimated his masculinity into a vaporous abstraction of “goodness,” the Bacon Guy chooses to prove his masculinity with a progressive accumulation of masculine accoutrement. “Of course I am a man - look at all the beard combs I have!” The Bacon Guy is an acceptable man because - though he might have his silly little notions of “traditional manliness” - he is above all a consumer, and a docile one at that. He is ever willing to outsource the curation of his manliness to various subscription-based startup companies, and oh yeah - he’s REAL DUMB LOL. His voluntary identification as stupid - or at least stupider than his wife - serves as a consistent reassurance that he is not a threat to the social order. That is, as long as his expressions of aggression are quarantined to first-person shooters and dartboards at brewpubs.
Run afoul of those brands of masculinity and you’re bound to get into trouble. And for good reason! If you spent any time on r/TheRedPill circa 2014 you’d have seen that - for a bunch of men ostensibly “going their own way” - most of the posters were still pretty obsessed with women. The basic premise in every one of those message boards was that women are responsible for the creation of a duplicitous “second economy” of sex and relationships that is completely rigged in their favor. Men - being the dummies that they are - are taught from a young age to do one thing for a cookie, and then when they get older and do the thing, they don’t get their damn cookie! What a bunch of bitches, amirite??
For every one instance of a man on those message boards telling a comrade to lift weights and meditate and get a better job and LooksMaxx, there were three other posts talking about women’s duplicitousness, their stupidity, or the value of their “holes.” In the mind of a red-pilled man, life was an endless battle of emotionally dominating a wily woman and then regulating her self-esteem in measured doses until she was completely unsure of how you felt about her at any given time. If a man could muster the sociopathic will necessary to do such a thing to another human on a consistent basis, she would eventually yield and become the “ideal female” - pliable to his demands and loyal only to you. In other words - the long, slow march of psychological abuse.
These men did more to damage the cause of masculinity than can ever be fully calculated. They are the reason it is now impossible to cultivate deeper understandings of true masculinity without others believing you have some ulterior sexual motive. Furthermore, they miss the main truth about masculinity which is that it is designed to work in harmony with the Feminine, not against it. A man who defines his masculinity by his ability to have sex and relationships with women is ironically not defining his masculinity at all. He’s not even in the ballpark. He’s merely yielding to the fickle whim of his sex organ. Sex does not “validate” masculinity. In fact, masculinity is diametrically opposed to external validation.
That is one of the sources of masculine power - it validates itself. From this, we can more easily intuit the types of social problems caused by a scarcity of masculine energy. Feminine energy works communally, it seeks harmonious relationships and the management of social bonds. With men there is no hunting, with women there is no gathering. Feminine energy seeks consensus through community transactions and supports the construction of cohesive social groups. The Feminine creates networks of validation, opportunities for all the members of the group to be seen and heard.
Validation. Being Seen. Not bad things in their own right…
Meanwhile, masculine energy rebels against this cohesion, it demands to go out into the forest to chase fanged beasts in the dark. The masculine brings back fresh kills that introduce novelty and excitement to the otherwise cohesive and predictable communal bubble. These two forces of cohesion and rebellion are locked in an eternal struggle with each other - a struggle that it right and good. But push either piece of this dyad too far and suddenly you have nature out of balance. The threat of too much masculinity is well recorded - wars, genocides, dictatorships, fire, shrapnel, blood, death. But what about too much feminine energy? What might that look like?
Consider our current predicament. In the west, we now find ourselves in a society that is hell bent on identity as the highest moral goal. We have a culture in a state of mania to delineate a million different categories of self-definition, all requiring recognition and codification. A society that rampantly surveils and tattles on itself. A society where masculine impulses are punished and young boys are taught that they hold evil inside of them by nature of who they are. This is the consequence of hyper-femininity, which can be otherwise known as “hyper-communalism.” Our society is too closely knit. We are absolutely on top of each other. We lack the masculine will to enforce boundaries around ourselves - including even the boundaries around how we define a family. After all, what need is there for a family when our entire world is our family? These are the types of bizarre notions that could only ever be taken seriously in a hyper-communal society.
This last paragraph will no doubt cause some to scoff. “Another crypto misogynist screed.” But pay heed - I am not at all criticizing women. Though it is merely my (probably mystical belief) that masculinity usually presides more often and in higher doses in men (and vice-versa for women and femininity), I believe that both energies are present in everyone. They need not balance out within each individual. Each force plays a role in constructing a fair and humane and interesting society. But when they come undone on a widespread level, this is the source of much dysfunction. I do not place blame for this on women at all - I want to be very clear about that. I place blame for this only on those who benefit from a society that values above all else conformity, obedience, visibility, and identity - hallmarks of the communal.
Who indeed does profit from a society like this? Who profits from a society of passive docile consumption and politics of personality? Who could it be that would wish to neuter our culture of its aggressive capacity for resistance and punish those who dare to show strength? Who indeed would spend so much time concocting elaborate theories to slander and malign the most basic masculine impulses, right down to the very way our eyes scan a body?
There are many names for those behind this. It’s probably not one source, but it is likely a few different sources who seem to mindlessly collaborate on these projects and funnel them through an echo chamber of their own circle-jerking validation. Call it what you want: the Cathedral, the Academy, the Machine, Clown World. When it comes down to it, it’s some form of collusion between media, academia, and capital. One hand washes the other that washes the other and then validates the whole hand washing process in a tightly closed loop.
But why now? Why has it burst forth so violently in this very moment? Well - the most obvious reason is because of technology. The leaps and bounds of technological progress have automated most of what we once did by hand. That means that more people are invested in the life of the mind rather than the turn of the screw. More people are going to college and expecting jobs that accommodate their newfound “smarts.” The result is a bloating of an administrative class that has lots of time on their hands and a high need to justify their usefulness. What better way to prove that you’re useful in your bullshit job than to position yourself as the moral arbiter of society?
Academia - once a safeguarded beacon of free inquiry - is now inflated to maximal bureaucratic bloat. The “Associate Directors of Equity and Justice” now vastly outnumber the faculty. Tenure is given out rarely and taken back more often than it ever should be (i.e. never). Universities now concern themselves with the rabid overproduction of cultural shlock that is digested, metabolized, and shit back out in half-baked company policies, military protocols, and congressional motions. What all that achieves is irrelevant - the only thing that is relevant is all of the things that are not achieved because of this. Why deal with climate change if the committee trying to deal with climate change doesn’t include enough non-binary and indigenous people?!!
So where do the other men go? The remainders - the men not subsumed into categories of “good men” or “bacon men” or “redpill men” - what happens to them? Many who are still motivated to “claim their masculinity” at all will often split off into camps of archaic symbologies and shamanistic archetypes. They flee to the realms of the esoteric hoping to bring back a vial of the precious platonic ideal of manhood. They try to cultivate their “inner voice” and reacclimatize themselves to primal states long forgotten. They retreat into forests and deserts and march naked through the sand. They howl at the moon and catch fish with their hands. They must go to any length to find the sacred key that men of valor once knew by heart.
It wasn’t always this complicated. Being a man was rarely a stated code that was read aloud to an adolescent as he completed his rites of passage. Defining yourself as a man was always more of a verb than a noun. You “knew when you knew.” All men still know what it means to be a man, we have simply lost the ability to interface with the knowledge because we feel such a tremendous social compulsion to articulate it. Like many models of identity today, we feel responsible to define ourselves as narrowly as possible so as to avoid confusion and to stake our claim to the lands that we were once promised.
Being a man never had anything to do with this.
This burden to define is the mere product of mystification. The search for one’s masculinity is not outward - it is not even a search at all. Our goal should be less to find masculinity than it should be to clear away the ideological muck that stops us from seeing our masculinity sitting right next to us. We only feel a burden to define this force when we play by the rules of the Feminine. The Feminine finds itself in this exhaustive way - a dialogue that moves through books and voices and film and forms a communal conversation across time. The Masculine finds itself alone. In the forest. At night. With a knife between the teeth. The Masculine spends no time memorizing the complex prayers of the new gods. They build fires and make sacrifices to the old gods. That will be enough to please them.