Toxic Comfortability
How long into the apocalypse would Harry Styles last?
There has been a lot made about “toxic masculinity” lately. The idea that it’s negative for men to espouse masculine qualities is relatively new, and I think my generation is the first to feel the effects. You realize with only a little digging that boys and young men are not doing so well these days. Here are a few stats that I was shocked to learn:
boys are four times more likely to commit suicide than girls
63% of young men (18-29) report being single compared to 34% of young women
61% of single men today say they aren’t looking for a romantic relationship; that’s an 11-point increase from pre-pandemic numbers
females are 15 percentage points more likely to attend college than males (compared to 13 percentage points in the other direction in 1972).
The project to get more females into higher education and better-paying jobs has been well-intentioned. I don’t know of anybody who thinks there should be more barriers to females entering STEM or a leadership team at a company, but as Saagar Enjeti alludes to in his monologue below, there are real downstream societal effects that come with these data.
America has more fatherless households than any other country in the world. The economic prospects for young men today are worse than that of our parents’ generation. Women are dating older men than before leaving more and more young ones single. Boys are more often being told that those things we are naturally drawn to are toxic and should be suppressed.
So, we have a batch of young, single, nihilist men that don’t have obvious paths to financial stability… that won’t cause any problems, will it???
Male Role Models
I am told we are supposed to look up to Harry Styles these days. I am told he is a 21st-century man, and I should be so lucky to be secure in a dress…
It seems that the mainstream zeitgeist standing opposed to masculinity left a void in the male role model domain that we are only now emerging from. Those of us who were skeptical of the Harry Styles types were left floating at sea, but who were we to turn to for a better model of masculinity?
Some characters emerged that didn’t (and don’t) seem so model-worthy, but they gained prominence by speaking something, anything into this void. People like Dan Bilzerian and Andrew Tate are some that have amassed a large young male following. I can listen to them to learn how to get “bitches and clout”... tempting but not quite my aim.
There are the charlatans like The Liver King, a man with a body fat percentage equal to the number of seconds Harry Styles would last in the apocalypse, who claimed to have gotten so lean by living primally and eating liver. Turns out he spends upwards of $11k per month on steroids. I guess we are getting warmer but still, no thanks.
There is the OG of podcasting, Joe Rogan, and his disciples. Rogan has been putting out podcasts for over a decade now. Along the way he has encouraged many of his guests to start their own. A couple of those names to take his advice include Jocko Willink and Cam Hanes. Jocko is a retired Navy Seal, jiu jitsu practitioner, entrepreneur, and bow hunter. He speaks to guests from many different fields about becoming a better leader, fitness, hunting, business, and simply living a more fulfilled life. Same with Cam Hanes who is a blue collar ultra runner, author, and seasoned bow hunter. Now, we are onto something!
These men have huge platforms and incredibly positive messages that they don’t just preach, they live. The best way to summarize their message is: be a kind, curious person and do hard shit! This is quite the departure from those on the other side whose message is closer to: working out is racist and what are you doing to enable safer spaces? With the Rogan-Jocko-Hanes types “bow hunter” carries as much social capital as “victim” does with their critics. It reminds me of the first minute of this South Park bit.
The Precautionary Principle
It is hard for us moderns to put it into perspective, but up until the last hundred years or so humans struggled to meet basic needs. And this remains the battle for a majority of the world still today. Americans and Western Europeans live so far removed from the reality of human experience for most of time. This graphic by Tim Urban helps to orient ourselves in human history.
Outlandish thought: maybe males having masculine qualities is a byproduct of evolution? Maybe males being naturally drawn to masculine things is because we are the descendants of the survivors of all the human hardship, and those who survived had masculine qualities because it gave them a competitive edge in their environment? Maybe we don’t know what we are asking for when we preach towards a future with less masculine men??
In A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, both evolutionary biologists, talk about the Precautionary Principle. This is the idea that we should not remove things, be it cultural or physical, without first understanding the role they play. Could this be what we have done with masculinity in the last couple of decades?
Perhaps before we chalk-up maleness as toxic, maybe we should wrap our head around what it has done to get us here.
Get Uncomfortable
The problem is not toxic masculinity; it is toxic comfortability. We are living in an unprecedented time. The experience of Americans in the last century has been dramatically different than the experience of humans in the previous 2,000 centuries. The culture and sex roles within our species that were present a century ago that are now dunked on today were the product of so much evolution. These things came to be because the humans that embodied them were more likely to survive and reproduce. This was true for SO LONG until the environment radically changed.
Our environment today rewards eye balls, attention, and clicks instead of the ability to fend off invaders or stalking an elk that will feed your community. The environment switched on us so quickly, but the newness of it should speak to its shakiness. We feel like society as it is will always exist because it has always existed like this in our lifetime. I only say be careful. This is an experiment. If our modern culture gets what it wants with “super-secure” men wearing dresses and being vegans for the climate, what does that mean for us if this experiment fails? What does that mean if the environment reverts back to what it’s been for 99.95% of human history? And aren’t we just an extended power grid outage away from that being reality?
Aside from the fact that we might not have the skills to survive if society as we know it fails, we did evolve with genetic/chemical systems that reward things like hunting, being strong, endurance sport, and yes, even fighting. Being good at these things kept us alive for many years, and now that they are more or less optional for survival doesn’t mean that those reward systems simply turn off. They are still in there. So, when you have a batch of men who are not encouraged to pursue things like lifting weights, running, competing, leading a family, or hunting because that reinforces a toxically masculine culture… you just might get problems. They might just feel aimless, and they might just act on that aimlessness.
TLDR: We do not have a problem of toxic masculinity; we have a problem of toxic comfortability. Modern life is unlike that present for 99.95% of human history. The characteristics that got us here are now optional, but the genetic reward systems are still deeply embedded. Young men should look to emulate people like Joe Rogan, Jocko Willink, and Cam Hanes instead of Harry Styles. It will guide us to more fulfillment, purpose, and might be what saves us in the end.
Further on all this…
Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves
Ezra Klein’s podcast w/Richard Reeves
Honestly podcast w/Sebastian Junger
Cam Hanes’ podcast w/Rich Froning (another one worth emulating)
JRE #1959 w/David Buss on evolutionary psychology