Masculinity and History - Part II

We travel from Assyria to Greece, China, India and the Victorians in our search for masculinity and history and continue to find one societal bond tying it together.  

Transcript

Masculinity and History – Part II

Masculinity is not something given to you but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

Norman Mailer

“Fathering makes a man, whatever his standing in the eyes of the world, feel strong and good and important, just as he makes his child feel loved and valued.”

Frank Pittman

In the previous podcast, I noted an influencer who is self-styled as the Bronze Age Pervert or BAP (real name Costin Alamariu). Rosie Gray, writing for Politico, states, “BAP, who had already built a small but loyal following online, tweeting from his account featuring a profile picture of a shirtless, well-built man photographed from behind, self-published his book Bronze Age Mindset, a curious mix of philosophical analysis, polemic and lifestyle advice all in the service of the argument that embracing one’s authentic masculine virtue is the only way to conquer “lower types of mankind” and root out the worst parts of democracy. (A sampling: “It goes without saying that you must lift weights”; women’s liberation infected society with a “terminal disease”; readers should prepare for impending — and in BAP’s view, desirable — military rule in Western countries.)

To be clear, BAP is some kind of a fool, albeit one with a relatively large following and plenty of notoriety. He chimed into a Salo discussion about marriage and the advantages of “mail-order brides.” He also wrote, “No one is worth marrying; marrying is inherently a bad deal for men.” I tend to believe that misogyny comes from one’s own inadequacies and does not have much to do with the perfidies of women, but I digress. Alamariu also believes that strongmen such as Putin govern better than democracies. Uh-huh? I could share some failed 20th-century states and subsequent tens of millions dead with him, but way too much digressioning. My particular issue with the Bronze Age guy is that he does not know much about, you know, the Bronze Age. 

A little context, the Bronze Age began around 3300 BCE when human ingenuity figured out how to combine tin with copper providing armor and weaponry far superior to that which came before, including stone implements. The Bronze Age ended around 1,200 BCE, or 1177 for those who like precision. 

Here is one description of a Bronze Age community in Northern Europe; all young men, except for possible slaves, may have been expected to participate in games, ritual fighting, and ceremonies at a local level. Hence, they had knowledge and skills of the basic swordfight and probably other fighting techniques and could, if necessary, defend their settlements and occasionally attend either raiding or journeys. But this training was not done at the behest of finding the inner man. 

Instead, note the defending part. Food in the Bronze Age was about something other than getting into one’s Tesla and going down to the local Kroger or Wal-Mart. And the loyalty was to the family, clan, and tribe. It was more about doing one’s part than doing for oneself.

Undoubtedly, traditional values or ideals of strength, aggressiveness, bodily control, sexual potency, and various aspects of physical beauty probably dominated the understanding of what it meant to be a man in the Bronze Age. In an age where food was scarce and competition plentiful, these attributes would be prized. But one study conducted around Bronze Age burial rituals “repeatedly show that males and females were treated alike with regard to ritual practices in connection with their funerals. Most variables are not related to either males or females, and although some features might be mainly associated with males, they occasionally occur among females as well.” In one sacred aspect of the Bronze Age, or at least in this corner of the era, there was equality.

Lisbeth Skogstrand of the University of Oslo, writing of the late Bronze Age, notes, “The warrior was never a readymade role men could just step in or out of, but a dynamic category and lifestyle, demanding lifelong preparation and exercising. In other words, the male archetypes and warrior stereotype are justly questioned.” BAP and other influencers today would have us believe that masculinity as the warrior man is some sort of mindset. The historical record shows that such as man is built over time. Skgostrand concludes, “Masculinities are constantly negotiated, and alterations in notions of masculinities are not just a passive consequence of other social changes but may also induce and generate further development.” BAP is not wrong in seeing a warrior model from the Bronze Age but is entirely wrong in the conclusions drawn. And then, we come to a depiction of the Bronze-Aged hero in one of the most famous works in all literature.  

First, we assume that Homer was real and not devised as the repository for the oral telling of an authentic 1200s BCE conflict in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey are chock block with Bronzed Age “heroes,” though we need to define that term further. Gray describes BAP’s affair with Homer. “BAP had read a 2012 essay by Luttwak in the London Review of Books about a spate of recent translations of The Iliad and what it said about the epic’s lasting appeal. Luttwak wrote that The Iliad, with its valorization of men who were braver and nobler even than the gods, “offers a vision of uncompromised human dignity which was very rare indeed over much of human history,” of “human dignity at its fullest, undiminished by piety or deference to gods or kings.” Catnip for BAP.

But BAP needs to learn the concept of hubris central to the Greeks and Homer. First, The Iliad ends badly for all involved. The hero of the Iliad is not Achilles, as is sometimes believed, but rather Prince Hector of Troy. Hector is a devoted family man and is central to the first recorded scene of domestic tranquility in all literature with him, his wife, Andromache, and his infant son. Achilles is a brooding, selfish, man-child mess. Briseis ends up pregnant with Achilles’ child. Wise King Priam must be more delusional about what a gift might contain. Agamemnon is deluded by his own arrogance. Ajax goes mad and kills himself. Paris is impaled. And I always wondered why Thetis did not, after dipping her son into the Styx, say, now Achilles, you may want to double armor that heel. I get it; the bully boy Achilles bests the noble Hector in that one-to-one duel that ex-MMA fighter Andrew Tate may covet. But that does not change the fact that Achilles’ victory was fraught with disaster. If Hector had won, the Greeks would have gone home, and the Prince of Troy tells Priam, do not bring that thing through our gates; it is creeping me out. Let’s burn it!”

Who comes across in both books as the cleverest of all? Odysseus, who desires to get back to…his wife! BAP does not believe in marriage, but Mr. Bronze Age discards the desire of Odysseus to return and the nobility of his wife, Penelope. Despite repeated attempts, she maintains her virtue for him. Homer depicted his Bronze Age heroes as more Mitt Romney or Mitch McConnell than Donald Trump. The intelligent, clever family man gets a grand (albeit bloody, poor-suiters) homecoming. The loud-mouth boar gets killed by a well-placed arrow.

Male depictions over the millennia are typically influenced by culture, religion, personal style, artistic elements, and time period. Some of these representations almost contradict others, but they all depict masculinity. One of the reliefs from 600s Ninevah, the capital of the Neo Assyrian Empire, shows the King, Ashurbanipal, fighting a full-grown lion in seeming hand-to-hand combat. He is the action hero as he slays ferocious lions on horseback, on foot, or from the back of a chariot using a variety of weapons. But he is also the protector of his people. And yes, Assyrian Kings got their pick of women, mainly from conquered lands, but they were also supposed to be protectors of their realms. Hence the propagandist depictions of hand-to-claw lion fighting. But that is the royal family. Shockingly, the average Assyrian did not have his pick of women.  

We turn to one of the foremost Assyrian experts, Ekhart Frahm, to tell us what real families in Assyria were composed of, “Assyrian families of the imperial period tended to be small. A husband would normally live with his wife and children, sometimes a few slaves, and occasionally his parents, in his private residence. The primary purpose of marriage in Assyria was to produce offspring. Apart from bringing joy, children were expected to take care of their parents when the latter grew old, to bury them—normally in vaults located below the family home—and to keep their memory alive by performing monthly rituals in honor of the dead.” Though the period we write about was technically the Iron Age, it was only a few centuries after the end of the Bronze Age, and we see very little of the dominating Andrew Tate Lothario-like figure at the center of this life.  

So let’s move to the Ancient Greeks’ 2nd century BCE statue of Apollo in the British Museum, which has the curly locks of an actual sun god atop a body that a modern-day actor auditioning for an action movie, with shirtless scenes might envy. It is toned muscle and six-pack abs all the way. And then there is the demigod Hercules. In a statue dating back to the 2nd century CE, recently unearthed near Phillippi, this Greek looks more like a WWE figure after a long daily regimen of steroids.  

But what of the homosexuality set to be a part of Greek life? It is undeniable that relationships we would call homosexual, especially between men and youths, played an important role in Ancient Greek society. However, social attitudes toward pederasty were not uniform throughout all Greek city-states in all periods. When these relationships did occur, they could be between an older man and a youth. However, unlike the image this conjures, iconographical and textual evidence shows that Greek adolescents could reject adult suitors or discontinue relationships that no longer pleased them.

Against this permissiveness, we come to one of the most masculine of peoples, the Romans. One of the concepts driving this was the Roman belief that there were not two distinct sexes but rather one, built with differences. Sort of like two Ford 150s, but one has all the extras. Here is the ancient Roman doctor Galen, “All the parts, then, that men have, woman have too, the difference between them lying in only one thing, which must be kept in mind throughout the discussion, namely, that in women the parts are within [the body], whereas in men they are outside, in the region called the perineum.” In the Roman mind, men were not superior because of strength or speed; instead, they were just better. Yet being born, a man was not enough to make a man masculine in the ancient Greco-Roman world. A man could be labeled effeminate. 

Since a man was the standard, the better version of humanity, virtues were considered masculine characteristics. Men were depicted as strong, brave, magnanimous, and rational. They could control themselves. Women, on the other hand, were depicted as weak, vindictive, irrational, and self-indulgent. Women lacked courage. They were credulous and superstitious. Arrogance, deception, ambition, and lust for power were feminine vices. These vices resulted from women’s lack of masculine reason and self-control. The women’s lack of control was based on biology. But not to worry, this was not a fault of individual character because they were, you know, females. 

And this is why a man who fell short of their masculine standards was more put upon than a member of other cultures in Roman eyes. If a man is born to perfection, anything short of that is a massive default. And because the Romans recognized and celebrated this ethos, they felt superior in masculinity to other societies. Cicero, for instance, constructs Roman men as morally superior to and more masculine than the Greeks, who, in turn, thought they were more masculine than other societies.  

According to historian Craig Williams, control and dominion were the prime directives of Roman masculinity. A man had to constantly defend his masculinity by controlling not only those under his jurisdiction but also himself and his desires and emotions. Control was connected with power (potestas), meaning both power over others and independence from the power of others. The unmanly status of groups lower in the gender hierarchy mentioned above resulted from their inability to control others or themselves. These taboos created and perpetuated the idea that a Roman man (vir) had to exercise power over all aspects of his life; along with retaining control over their household and clients, Roman men were expected to display dominance over their emotions in a way similar to modern-day toxic masculinity. Among other things, Roman men considered it unacceptable to be bombastically angry in public, kiss a spouse, or cry. Anything showing a man’s weakening control over his emotions was frowned upon. 

At the center of this concept, and the hub of Roman life, was the family, with the oldest male being paterfamilias. This role was not just head of the household but one that contained life or death decisions upon the title holder. Decisions made within the family could Trump Roman law. I’m afraid I have to disagree with this type of authority. Still, I understand that for a Roman male, the privileges were not vested in entertaining lusts and power trips but rather in serving the state better and, even more importantly, maintaining family integrity. 

And women were not always the subject of oppression in Roman life. Historian Nathanial Harris writes, “Roman women always enjoyed greater physical freedom than women in most other ancient cultures, including that of the Greeks.” Again, this was in service to the greater good of the family unit as women were expected to manage the household capably and, when necessary, show great loyalty to their husbands.  

Just so that we know that these masculine virtues were not just constructs of the West, we will cite Zhanhao Zhang, who, in a piece for Georgetown’s Footnotes, writes, “In early imperial China, masculinity was linked to physical strength and courage. Classic of Poetry, a collection of verse dating from the 11th century to the 7th century BCE, is one of the most influential ancient Chinese texts. One of its poems tells the story of an admiring wife praising her husband, describing him as “mighty, and…the hero of the country” Verses of Chu, another ancient Chinese classic, asserts that an ideal man is “both brave and martial, but in the end, is strong and can’t be humiliated. The poems and songs of the early imperial era present physical and mental strength as central components of proper masculinity.” 

And like the Romans, the family was at the center also, with the eldest male holding authority; in The Family in China, Past and Present, Maurice Freedman describes the primacy of the family in the domestic sphere but also talks of kinship. But even that more fantastic realm, which inhibited some of the authority of the family patriarch, is still a man’s realm. 

And in India? In Jerrod Whitakers “Strong Arms and Drinking Strength: Masculinity, Violence, and the Body in Ancient India notes the ritualized poetic construction of male identity in the Rigveda (rig-veda), India’s oldest Sanskrit text, arguing that an important aspect of early Vedic life was the sustained promotion and embodiment of what it means to be a true man. The Rigveda contains over a thousand hymns, addressed primarily to three gods: the deified ritual Fire, Agni; the war god, Indra; and Soma. The hymns were sung in day-long fire rituals in which poet-priests prepared the sacred drink to empower Indra. The dominant image of Indra is that of a highly glamorized, violent, and powerful Aryan male; the three gods represent the ideals of manhood.” And he used to take the physical form of other men to have Sexual intercourse with their wives. Part of the definition of masculinity in India, as with many societies but not all, is basically to be a lion between the sheets.  

The middle ages in Europe were patriarchial with a few alternations. One such examination by Anne Laskaya detailed four distinct definitions of masculinity: heroic, Christian, courtly lover, and intellectual. The heroic male was based on the ideals of pre-Christian warriors and rulers. In this case, men were expected to be physically strong, intelligent, willing, and able to conquer and maintain rule over others, whether in a domestic or community setting.

But there was a wrinkle not as impactful in ancient times, and that was the power of the Church and that the leaders of the Church were celibate. These male occupational roles could not be gendered in the manner of dominance over women or virility as an excellent Roman man would. In addition, the absence of women from these occupations raised two critical issues. The first was that men in these positions could not use women to assert their masculinity, whether through supporting a dependent female or impregnating her to show virility. Secondly, celibacy imposed on a growing number of men meant that there would be a surplus of unmarried women, who would be “unprotected, uncontrolled, and undefined.”

China also changed in the medieval period due to religion. But whereas Christianity, or at least that preached by Church leaders, reinforced traditional power dynamics of masculinity, Buddhism had the opposite effect in China. “Buddhist thought significantly impacted every aspect of Chinese life, especially gender. Key aspects of Buddhism include the not-male-not-female embodiment of compassion and the notion of feminine Buddhahood. Although the Buddha was originally depicted in male form, the Avalokitesvara (ava loki tesvara) was often characterized in China as a woman; some representations included attributes associated with both men and women. Adds Zhang. Another key aspect of Buddhism was the importance of wisdom and the denunciation of violence. Men–especially members of the growing literati-gentry class who enjoyed social mobility through the imperial university examination system–depended less on bodily strength and more on the cultivation of wisdom.” But let’s be clear, though the values of traditional masculinity were diminished; it was still men taking those exams.  

We have seen an Assyrian King fighting a lion, Romans ostensibly having control over any emotion, and medieval man combining superiority in both mind and body. Still, if we want to mine the ore of toxic masculinity – we should blame the Victorians! In “Man Up – The Victorian Origins of Toxic Masculinity by Josephine Jobbins, the author claims, “Damaging ideals of manhood, however, should not be understood as a purely modern phenomenon. Many of the characteristics that toxic masculinity prescribes in the twenty-first century and contribute to the stigma surrounding men discussing their emotions and, more seriously, their mental health, can be traced back to the Victorian period.” 

Jobbins Adds, “Strength and athleticism were vital aspects of Victorian masculinity, as today. In the twenty-first century, this often takes the form of unrealistic expectations of the male body, as exemplified in the ever-popular superhero film, which reflects a wider expectation of emotional strength.” But even Jobbins confuses the Victorian sense of masculinity and its necessity for maintaining the British Empire with stoicism. She quotes Kipling, If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;  

ours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

 This was a point I covered in the previous podcasts. There is a difference between being in touch with your emotions and emoting. When did emoting become something of positive value?  

The piece in The Washington Post by Christine Emba titled “Men are Lost,” also quoted in the previous podcast, noted that things dubbed “toxic,” such as physical strength or protectiveness, are not necessarily bad things in themselves, and she even castigates certain groups of feminists for failing to recognize the damage of such descriptions, “I would not say they have helped much, we are talking bigger things here.” Unless one lives in Bakhmut in Ukraine, there will likely not be an invasion of the US wherein, like the Trojans, the men needed to be on the walls to ward off the invaders. Nor, with modern equipment and robots, the once physically demanding jobs are likely to bring us back to the early 1900s. Note those famous photos of the construction workers high up on the skeleton of the Empire State Building eating lunch. They were all men. But with cranes and helicopters, there is no need for such prowess today.  

“For all the overheated rhetoric deployed to engage men’s sympathies, what’s mainly on offer is the impossible suggestion that they reenact the lives their grandfathers led, followed by encouragement to blame society when that inevitably fails.” Adds Emba. 

And then Emba came to something I feel is at the heart of this issue during an interview with a 19-year-old man, “Then he turned wistful. ‘I don’t feel like men, in general, have the same types of role models that women do, even in their own lives. … Just because you’re in the majority doesn’t mean you don’t need support.” And this young man did not realize he is, in fact, in the minority, with women comprising 51% of the population.

According to the America First Institute, 2022 data indicates approximately 18.3 million children live without a father in the home, comprising about 1 in 4 US children. 

Other data indicate 84% of homeless families are headed by women, and 90% of homeless and runaway children come from fatherless homes. 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. 85% of children who exhibit behavior disorders are from fatherless homes. 

But why have a father at all? In a piece in The New York Times in 2018, writer Emma Brockes in her essay “Single at 38? Have that Baby!” declared, “When I was 38 and single, I started fertility treatment, and a month after turning 39, I had twins. In the three years since, single women in their late 30s — at the office, at baby showers, on the phone after friends pass on my number — have been seeking me out for advice.” No father? No problem. Of course, it would be different for a man to try this.  

In 2014, President Barack Obama announced the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, a $200 million program meant to improve the lives of at-risk boys and men of color. The pushback came immediately: More than 1,000 women signed an open letter criticizing the program for excluding girls. And remember, this $200 million was out of a federal budget of $4 trillion, a rounding error on a rounding error.  

And just this week, as if on cue, the progenitor of the It Takes a Village mindset, Hillary Clinton, is talking about loneliness, especially in terms of American men. In a 3,500-word essay in The Atlantic averred, “The wisdom and the power of the American Village” without talking about marriage or noting this incisive stat: According to a Gallup survey in 2020, 41 percent of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas only 16 percent of people who were married.  

I noted that Emba’s piece was (surprisingly) even-handed; here is an example, “if women are still seen as needing tools to overcome disadvantage, men are often expected to shape up by themselves. For a group that can be focused to a fault on addressing microaggressions, it’s surprisingly acceptable for those on the left to victim-blame men who are struggling themselves.”

Richard Reeves, writer of the book “Of Boys and Men” notes, “Marriage patterns also have shifted, creating a growing class divide, with educated couples more likely to marry and stay together than their less educated counterparts. This divide exacerbates economic and social inequalities.” There is a direct correlation between income and asset achievement by race and marriage rates by race. But when men are not marrying either because they do not see the reason or the women do not, we will have inequality compared to those who do. In 2018, Harvard economist Raj Chetty published a groundbreaking study on race and economic opportunity. Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys. As the study noted, “The few areas in which black-white gaps are relatively small tend to be low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks. Black males who move to such neighborhoods earlier in childhood earn more and are less likely to be incarcerated. However, fewer than 5% of black children grow up in such environments.”

So this is not just about young men spending too much time on porn sites or eliminating mining and farm jobs. It is about institutional rot at the heart of our Republic—the breakdown of familial institutions such as marriage and social ones. Reeves also mentions a friendship gap among men. As a boy and young man, I saw the decline of the old male social institutions such as the Rotary Club, Elks, and the Lions. Today it is Church, once an outlet for men to socialize. And of all the institutions just named, the most important by far to solve the problem of masculinity in this nation is that of the family.  

Whenever we pivot from Jordan Peterson’s clean your room (not a bad admonition but not a complete answer) to the decline of fathers helping to raise children, the fixes will become much harder and cannot be mandated. One of the old CEOs I used to work with would say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. I would amend that to the culture eats policy for breakfast. 

We cannot dictate that fathers become, well, fathers. But we can influence. On Medium is a piece by Ossiana Tepfenhar titled Women Don’t Need Men, And It’s Breaking The Manosphere. “the worst thing that could happen to a woman, according to these guys, is that she ends up alone. So, you see, you need a man now! Or else! Unfortunately for them, they’re peddling a bald-faced lie. Studies show single, childless women to be the happiest. Women no longer need a man to make a living or have kids. They have been doing it all on their own for a while.” And in The Guardian, we have a “happiness expert” who states, “Women are happier without children or a spouse.” 

This is the corollary to the foolishness of BAP. It is amusing and irritating that this kind of tripe is peddled at the same time a former Secretary of State and major party nominee for president, a self-described feminist, is also talking of a loneliness problem. If two people tell you they’re Jesus, at least one lies.  

Emba notes, “We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help men and women and support the common good.” But who exactly finds these ways? Who teaches boys and young men how to channel the value of masculinity in a society that justly abhors the dominant role of masculinity in the past or avoid the yes, toxicity of BAP and Tate?  

And this is a point I cannot make enough. Nature abhors the vacuum. If a new system is not found for channeling masculinity, it will manifest in destructive acts it already has. The paradigm of the Romans believing that men are innately superior has been (hopefully) cast aside, and something looking like equality has taken its place, which is good. But change in and of itself is not good, and the roles of males are changing. History can provide us with some answers.  

Going back to those images, we began this podcast. The protectiveness provided by war leader Ashurbanipal, the self-mastery of the Roman male or the Chinese Buddhist, or the procreation abilities espoused in the worship of Indra. But mostly, it is to be present in the lives of not just our sons but of our daughters as well. Fathers are always the first men they know and serve as models for future relationships. And in those relationships, they do not choose flop men or Incels. And with the paradigm of older, present men guiding the younger, there will be far more of those and more masculine men (the good kind) from which to choose.