Volume CCLIX — The Masculine Wound How masculinity was pathologised without replacement — and what fills the void

A boy watches his father, not watching him in a formal sense, but watching him in the way boys watch their fathers peripherally, continuously absorbing without knowing what they're absorbing. The way he stands when something goes wrong, the way he handles the man of the door, who's trying to take advantage of the way he comes home from a long day and sits at the table and doesn't complain. The way he's simply solid. The boy files all this, not as lessons, but as architecture.

This is what a man is. This is how a man moves through the world. This is what I am to become. Then he goes to school.

At school, the qualities he observed in his father are given different names. His energy is a disorder. His competitiveness is toxicity. His need to test himself physically is aggression.

His directness is a problem to be managed. The stoicism, his father modeled the ability to carry weight without announcing it, is now called emotional unavailability and presented to him as pathology. Now at such a young age, he doesn't understand this. He only understands that the model he was absorbing at home is being diagnosed as a disease at school.

What his father is, strong, quiet, capable, reliable, is apparently something he's supposed to be ashamed of. So he tries to be different. And because he has no clear model for what different means, he simply tries to be less, less himself, less the thing his father was, less the thing that his body and his psychology and every instinct he has keeps wanting to be. Twenty years later, this boy is a man with no map.

I want to say this plainly and then examine it precisely. Masculinity has not been reformed. It's not been refined or integrated or evolved. It's been pathologized.

The diagnosis is toxic masculinity and the prescription is suppression. And the treatment is the elimination of the masculine qualities themselves, rather than the direction of those qualities toward coherent ends. And the consequences are visible in absolutely every metric that measures male well-being. The CDC's own data for 2023 reports that male suicide rate in the United States is approximately four times higher than the female rate.

Males make up 50% of the population, but nearly 80% of all suicides. In the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the picture is similar. The male suicide rate is three to four times higher than the female rate. And suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 50.

Boys are falling behind at every level of education. In 1972, men earned 57% of all the bachelor's degrees. By 2021, that figure had fallen to 42%, the lowest on record. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, there are now 2.4 million more women than men enrolled in undergraduate programs in the United States.

Women are 9 percentage points more likely to enroll in college immediately after school. The male rate of immediate enrollment has not changed since 1964. These are not signs of a privileged class. These are the signs of a population in crisis.

But the framework that produced the crisis can't acknowledge the crisis. Because if men are struggling, the framework has to account for why. And the only honest account leads directly back to what was done. So the struggle is either ignored or attributed to masculinity itself.

Toxic masculinity is why men don't seek help. The framework that pathologized masculinity now blames masculinity for the consequences of this pathologization. The cause presents itself as the cure. The men who see this clearly have no authorized language in which to say so.

Let's consider what's been taken. Now masculine virtues are very, very real. Strength, not brutality, not domination, but genuine capacity to carry weight, to endure difficulty, to act under pressure with our collapse, courage, the willingness to enter the difficult situation rather than avoid it. Protectiveness, the instinct to place oneself between the vulnerable and the threat, responsibility, the acceptance that some things are yours to carry regardless of whether you choose to carry them.

Restraint, the capacity to hold power without using it simply because you can. These are not pathologies. They're not expressions of privilege. They're the qualities that every functioning society has required men to develop and that every functioning man has needed to inhabit.

They weren't replaced. They were simply named as problems and withdrawn. And into the void left by their withdrawal came everything that the void invites. Pornography, gaming, rage without direction.

The specific quality of purposelessness that arrives in a young man who's been told his nature is toxic, but hasn't been given an alternative, who's been stripped of the framework for what it means to be a man and handed nothing in its place except the instruction not to be what he is. The masculine wound is not the wound that masculinity caused. It's the wound that was caused to masculinity. The boy watching his father was doing something necessary and healthy.

He was learning what he was going to become. He was absorbing the architecture of a male life from the man best positioned to transmit it. That transmission was interrupted not because what his father was carrying was wrong, but because what his father was carrying was inconvenient for a framework that required men to be uncertain about their own nature. A man who knows what he is and why it's valuable cannot easily be told that what he is is the problem, but a man with no map will follow whoever offers one, including the institutions who created the wound in the first place.

The masculine virtues are not the enemy of progress. They're the architecture that makes genuine progress and functional society possible. The strength to carry what others cannot. The courage to say what others won't.

The protectiveness to stand between the vulnerable and whatever threatens them. These things are needed. They were always needed. The wound is not their absence from the world.

Think of how it feels when a man stands up for women and children, when a man protects his family, when a man is strong in character. This is a man you can respect. This is a man women want as a partner. These are the men that build society.

These things are needed. They were always needed. The wound is not their absence from the world. The wound is their absence from the man who should have been taught to carry them.

If what you heard today resonated, then the work is already moving in you. And I wrote a book that shows you where the work begins. It's called Before Approaching the Threshold. It's free.

And the link to AccessIt is in the show notes. Welcome to the Architect Speaks.