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Here’s what the world doesn’t need: another woman writer complaining about masculinity

We tend to discuss what men are and should be, while suggesting it is inappropriate for men to comment on femininity or womanhood

Laura Kennedy: The quality of a person’s ideas is not relative to their gender
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Laura Kennedy
Mon Jul 08 2024 - 06:00

The Victorians created much of the world we live in. Modern policing and sanitation. Compulsory education. John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’, which provides a blueprint for much of what we now believe about the role of the individual in society. Also Liberty fabrics (a different kind of liberty). The Victorians were innovators in science, art, industry and ideas. Considering their world helps us to make sense of the one we live in. With rapidity previously unseen, the Victorians changed the world.

They were also among the first to seriously explore questions about gender roles, the rights of women to own property and to vote. Mill published an essay called ‘The Subjection of Women’ in 1869 based on ideas developed with his wife Harriet. It suggests the subordination of women was unjust, and that traditional gender roles which confined women to the home were not based in natural differences or capacities, but socially constructed to the advantage of men. This was an era in which people were engaged in a radical and heated revision of ideas about gender, much like our own.

'There is nothing innately toxic, unacceptable or backward about masculinity, whose features traditionally have been understood to include many wonderful qualities’

With his spray-on suits and penchant for arbitrary shirtlessness, Andrew Tate has become the modern face (or biceps) of ‘toxic masculinity’. With tweets- or posts on X- like this one from last week, it’s not too hard to see why – he wrote: “White men are doomed because they can’t control their women. White men are weak and women force them to be loyal and have very few kids and be cowards ...” before suggesting that non-white men will “conquer the white population”.

Tate advocates a sort of cartoon version of constipated Teutonic masculinity. There’s a lot of wealth acquisition, fast cars and young, attractive, submissive women untainted by much sexual experience blended with a badly rendered spot of Plato, a smattering of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, a twist (perhaps more of a wrench) of misinterpreted stoicism and a good splash of diluted Victorian Muscular Christianity.

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Here is what the world doesn’t need: another woman writer complaining about masculinity. We tend to discuss what men are and should be ad nauseam, often without compassion and while suggesting it is inappropriate for men to comment on femininity or womanhood. Of course it isn’t. The quality of a person’s ideas is not relative to their gender (though Tate believes otherwise). As data shows that Gen Z is two generations rather than one, with Gen Z women in the US 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries and in the UK, 25 points more than males, it is clear that polarised conversation about gender helps no one. Finger wagging about the nefarious “other” may comfort the in-group but it breeds bad ideas and ultimately keeps Tate in bitcoin and undersized suits.

‘Tate has selectively chosen the elements of classical masculinity that are most congenial to his ego and ignored the ones that appeal less to him.’

There is nothing innately toxic, unacceptable or backward about masculinity, whose features traditionally have been understood to include many wonderful qualities – a sense of duty toward family and community, reliability, strength (which is not just about lifting a heavy thing but having the resilience and fortitude to do difficult things when needed). Of course it should go without saying that none of these qualities are inherently male. Nor are they exclusively masculine. Still, by the standards of the philosophers he has borrowed from to glue together his bizarre, egotistical conception of ideal manhood, Tate is not living a virtuous life or meeting the standard of what it means to be a good man. Masculinity is not brittle. Strength is not fragile, discipline is not coercive, and stoicism doesn’t take selfies next to a Porsche with custom licence plates parked beside a swimming pool.

By a muscular Christian conception at least, which itself borrowed from Plato, Aristotle and the stoics just as Tate “borrows” from the Victorians, to be masculine is to be disciplined, mindful of one’s physical fitness and health, a conscientious citizen. It is also to be the head of one’s household, the breadwinner, the person who is responsible for everyone else and to whom everyone else is answerable. In Tate’s pseudo-Victorian soft porn dreamworld, men are independent and everyone else is, as Mill would have put it, subjected. Tate has selectively chosen the elements of classical masculinity that are most congenial to his ego and ignored the ones that appeal less to him. This is a la carte masculinity at best. No self-respecting stoic would even recognise it. To perpetuate Tate’s ideal masculinity, we’d have to return to the cave, but he might not actually care for that. There’d be nowhere to charge his iPhone.