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What we've lost (1): Masculinity

The Stoics saw the ideal man as brave and fearless, guided by reason, accepting what he could and could not control, compassionate, but not naïve about suffering

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The last 10 or 15 years have not been kind to Canada. Along with a decline in prosperity has come an erosion of the things that made our society great, a decline of what held us together and made us the envy of the world: things like resilience, friendship and service. In this series, National Post writers consider What We’ve Lost.

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If you didn’t know any better, you’d think men — especially young men — were the problem. Plenty of commentators claim the manosphere is luring boys into monstrous ideas, threatening to turn them into misogynistic trolls who hate women. Online incel communities supposedly lurk behind every 16-year-old boy’s Discord password, videogames like Grand Theft Auto will diminish empathy toward female victims offline, and podcasts like Joe Rogan’s pose “significant dangers” to how young men view gender, power, and equality.

What we've lost (1): Masculinity Back to video

The funny thing for a historian to notice in this contemporary man-fear, this modern andro-anxiety complex, is how much of a rehash it all is. There’s nothing new about being worried about our boys.

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Many Canadians probably stroll into their YMCA on a weekday to hit the gym without realizing that it was born in just such a moment, when moralists in the late 19th century worried about the plight of young men in the city. What would happen to the boys when they were shorn from their family homes, without mothers around to get them to church on Sundays and instill the moral lessons that were thought so desperately needed? The answer was to create something called the Young Men’s Christian Association, to give young lads somewhere to stay in the industrial city, get exercise, and be guided toward their Lord and saviour.

There is one difference in the 2020s, though, and it is a profound one. It is now bizarrely common to claim that boys need to be saved from the very idea of manhood itself. It goes by various terms, most commonly “toxic masculinity,” but the idea is that traditional ideals of manhood are themselves the problem.

The idea isn’t entirely off base. To the extent that previous generations looked the other way at men’s violence toward women, or held ideas that women were men’s “property,” these were sexist and retrograde concepts. In a liberal society that treats people as rights-bearing individuals, any vision of the world that limits freedom based on sex is not one worth preserving.

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The odd thing about modern progressives who present masculinity as inherently suspect, though, is how oblivious they are to the way older ideas of manhood were often designed to restrain precisely the behaviours they now denounce.

Ideals of manhood have long been about urging men to aspire to be better versions of themselves: to be selfless and courageous, to provide for those in their care, their wives and mothers and sisters, and of course their children. The ideal was to put yourself in danger to protect others, to sacrifice your own comfort and safety to ensure others survived. Women and children first.

To modern ears, there is a kind of sexism here. Are men assuming they are better? Why would women need protection? We can do this ourselves, some women might say. Yet, what gets lost in this denunciation of difference is the enduring appeal of the call to manhood. Men could not bear children themselves, but they could sacrifice their labour, their money, their time, and sometimes their lives, to ensure that others survived.

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Manhood has changed across time, but there are consistent themes. The Stoics saw the ideal man as brave and fearless, guided by reason, accepting what he could and could not control, compassionate, but not naïve about suffering. Fast forward to Kipling’s poem “If” and you find a similar call: to endure hardship, to keep striving, to not let ego or hatred rule you, to pick yourself up and start again after failure.

All of this could be, and in many ways still is, a guide for young men.

The good thing to note about Canada in the 21st century is that despite online feuds, social media frenzy, and moralizing, these older ideals still resonate. In quiet, everyday ways we continue to value men who endure hardship and give of themselves, who work to support their families and communities.

I’ve been to several funerals recently for men in middle age who died too young. Again and again, friends and relatives celebrated them as fathers who provided for their families, who expected a lot from their children but gave even more in return.

Even Hollywood seems to get it, at least if the new Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson film “Song Sung Blue” is anything to go by.

In the film which is based on a true story, Jackman stars as a luckless working-class father whose real passion is music. He teams up with an equally troubled Kate Hudson to form a Neil Diamond tribute band. I won’t give away the plot, but it’s safe to say that not everything goes as planned, and that the story contains as much heartbreak as success.

Jackman’s character is about as good a rendition of modern manhood as one could hope for. He is deeply flawed, has made mistakes, and keeps pushing to do better. He sacrifices his own comfort and health to help those around him, while still trying to follow what he loves. He is not rich or powerful, and is a far cry from the “man in finance, trust fund, 6’5,” blue eyes” meme that briefly ruled TikTok.

Yet, by the end of the film, it is hard to imagine a better example of what a good man could look like in the 21st century, for real people living ordinary lives. He achieves this not by constantly examining his feelings, nor by anxiously avoiding anything that might be deemed “toxic.”

He succeeds by taking what is enduring in manly ideals and making them real now, in an all-too-often underappreciated working-class life. He does it by leaning into what has long defined manhood at its best: sacrifice, responsibility, perseverance and the willingness to start again after failure.

In other words, the boys are probably going to be alright. Certainly they could be, if we could get out of the way long enough to let them learn from timeless ideals and put them to work in the 21st century.

NEXT in What we’ve lost: Stigma

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