Lied to Twice

I’m traveling around the world talking to people about masculinity, femininity, and gender.

Right now, I’m on the border of Peru, Brazil, and Colombia in a town called Leticia.

Talking to people is one of the best ways to learn things. (Who’d have thought?)

I’ve started a podcast to share these conversations with you. You can subscribe to Polarity Unscripted on Apple and Spotify.

I’m doing this for a few reasons.

I’m having these conversations for a few reasons:

#1: Academics want to tell you how (not) to be a man

As I see it, there’s a move on in academia to castrate gender. It aims to reduce men, women, and everyone to neutral beings who occasionally rub genitals together. Everyone’s the same.

This activism-inspired approach to gender attempted to level the playing field by proving gender was a “social construct” — a thing made up arbitrarily by society. The Ivory Tower academics dismiss all physical differences between men and women, and fail to account for how societies are structured around childbirth.

Talking to anyone — literally anyone — will prove this “gender as a construct” stuff is pure baloney. Everyone knows that men and women are different in some ways. Any idea otherwise is laughable.

For men, this “gender as a construct” stuff is especially grim. Not because we’re losing social privilege but because we’re losing identity. Motherhood will always be sacrosanct. Femininity is physically embodiment. What men bring to the table is the X factor. We’re auxiliary.

So, in a gender-neutral society, men are nowhere. We’re duplicative because women can do every job we can do, and have kids.

There is something men contribute to women and society. I’ll tell you in the next newsletter/article.

#2: Our relationships in the USA are as lifeless as dehydrated street dogs

As a result — and as a result of social change (much of which was healthy and needed) — we’ve lost polarity in our relationships. Women want me to be more sensitive and softer (yet sleep with the guy on the motorcycle), while men feel pretty lost about how to be and how to relate to women.

If you’ve been on a date recently, it probably felt like an HR review or a job interview, plus cleavage. Women are hardened. They talk about “investing in a relationship,” their “assessment” of a potential partner, and their “criteria” for a man. I’ve heard all those things said.

Men, meanwhile, aren’t seeing women. Whether we’re in a relationship or dating, it’s pretty likely we’re hung up on sex, battling a minor porn addiction pushed on us by advertising, and turned off by how women act now.

We try to communicate with women as though they’re men (because they act like men, ha) and there’s little room for care, empathy, or connection. And frankly, we’re just now doing our growth work because we’re just not being allowed access to ourselves and our emotions.

#3: Influencers are prescribing a definition of “man” that may not serve you

In reaction to all this, relationship-coach influencers are feeding us new ideas about returning to traditional gender roles.

They say:

“Men should be tough and protect/provide. Women should be soft, beautiful, and nurturing.”

The TradWife trend is the pinnacle of this silliness. Female influencers are proposing a stay-at-home life of sourdough and ease. The man does the work, the woman surrenders into her “feminine nature.”

There’s nothing traditional about this — the traditional wife never existed in this way. When the woman stayed home, she was working. Everyone was working — all the time — to make life function and make ends meet.

The TradWife movement is decadent. It’s a result of having enough resources to stay home and be ornamental. And, in today’s economy, it’s not feasible for most men to pull all the financial weight for a family.

On the male side of the fence, there’s an expectation of toughness. We go out in the world, earn, and roll heads before coming home to our soft woman with a bag full of money.

It’s protect-and-provide on steroids.

This is only one aspect of being a man (or a person, because women can do all that too).

There’s something more fundamental that men bring to the table, and it allows us much more freedom, flexibility, and power.

Again, a tease: I’ll tell you about it in the next article/newsletter.

 — 

Fuk all that.

There are so many ways to “do” masculinity and serve society as a productive person!

When it comes to relationships, you don’t need to be locked into a role but it does help to embody a mode of existence. Because there is a difference between men and women, and there are masculine characteristics that can create an engaging relationship dynamic.

Again, next newsletter.

Until then, you can follow these conversations on my podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Cheers.