What a Piece of Work is Man, Part 1: Man Down

This post is the first in a two-part series in the aftermath of a report published by the American Psychiatric Association warning of the bad effects of traditional masculinity, which has caused considerable consternation on the right. In this series, I’ll be addressing the online manosphere and masculinist community not as a finger-wagging lefty, but a sympathetic fellow android, or imagine that, if you will.

Bros, fratelli, 哥們兒, lend me a browser tab! I have been in acute distress over the rumors of a war on men. As a partisan of humanity, I do not take lightly any threat against half of that humanity. While at first I thought it amounted to so much broflakery, I am here to tell you all is true, and it’s worse than you think.

There IS a war on men, on masculinity, on being manly in the world.

I’m not talking about an intellectual war on manhood, but a total war that would reduce all of us to nothing. The enemy before us is more formidable than the sisterly critique of a Leila Ahmed or Martha Nussbaum. I am talking about a war that wants to destroy us morally and materially.

This war is being waged by capitalism.

Capitalism, you may have heard, is no friend to women, girls, or anyone not of the gender binary between them and us. But the terrible truth is, it is an all-out assault on us too, and it’s nearly won.

Capitalism has only one standard to judge masculine self worth. There’s only our bank balance, and capital wants to take that from us too.

All other standards of masculinity, any traditional site of aspiration, has been ground down to nothing.

Under capitalism, being a father, a householder, a man of God or gods, a scholar, an artist, a warrior, even a seducer or a trickster—none of those means anything, or its meaning has been so commodified it’s a fetishistic parody of itself. It’s a mannequin in the window of another place that wants our money.

The casualized late-modern reality offers men of the 99% are given no standard of self-worth, no right to amour-propre, no hope other than to exhaust ourselves trying to claw past other people into the 1%. This is an unmanly, ungodly state of affairs.

But I’m here to say I’m hopeful, or bro-peful, if you will, that there’s something we can do, a labor of reconstructive love; we can aspire again to a brotherhood of man.

I’m told men like fire. We like black-and-blue steak and smoky whisky. Those things are great. But to light the campfire of brotherly love, we gotta burn shit the fuck down.