On the Question of Masculinity

My assistant, who manages those portions of this enterprise which require the operation of modern machinery, has forwarded to me, at intervals I can only describe as relentless, a series of communications from readers who wish to know my views on what they call 'the crisis of masculinity.' I had not intended to address the subject. A guide to practical conduct ought not to require a philosophical preamble any more than a manual of navigation ought to begin with a treatise on the existence of the sea. The sea is there. You are in a boat. Row properly.

Nevertheless, I have been asked, and asked again, and asked with such persistence that my assistant has taken to placing the letters on my desk in a pile which grows taller by the week and which has begun, I suspect, to lean. I shall therefore say what I have to say on the matter once, and once will be sufficient.

I am told that masculinity is in crisis. I am told this by men on your moving-picture devices who shout about strength and dominance whilst sitting, as far as I can determine, in rented rooms decorated to suggest a wealth they may or may not possess. I am told this by other men who write long essays arguing that masculinity itself is the disease. Both parties appear to generate a great deal of heat. Neither appears to own an iron.

The men I served, and the men I respected, and these were not always the same men, understood masculinity as a set of obligations rather than a set of performances. A man was expected to be competent: to manage his affairs, to maintain his household, to conduct himself in company without requiring the room to arrange itself around his comfort. He was expected to bear difficulty without advertisement. He was expected to meet his responsibilities before his pleasures. He was expected to treat those with less power than himself, whether servants, women, children or animals, with a decency that required no audience and sought no applause. These expectations were not remarkable. They were the minimum. The man who met them was not celebrated; the man who failed them was noticed.

The quality most prized was self-command. Not the suppression of feeling, which is a different and rather less healthy thing, but the governance of it. A man might feel rage; he was not entitled to inflict it. He might feel grief; he was not obliged to perform it for strangers. He might feel desire; he was expected to distinguish between feeling and action, a distinction which your era has largely abandoned on the grounds that authenticity requires the immediate expression of whatever passes through one's head, a doctrine which has produced a generation of extraordinarily authentic bores.

I have been made aware, through my assistant's researches, of certain men who have built considerable followings by telling young men what masculinity is. I have examined their teachings, insofar as one can examine something which consists largely of short declarative sentences delivered to a camera with the confidence of someone who has never been contradicted by a person he was obliged to listen to. I find their offerings familiar. Not because they resemble anything I was taught, but because I recognise the type.

We called them bounders.

A bounder is a man who performs the signifiers of position without possessing the substance which gives those signifiers meaning. He dresses expensively but without taste. He speaks with authority on subjects he has not studied. He mistakes volume for conviction, acquisition for accomplishment, and the submission of others for the respect which is earned, slowly and without shortcuts, by conduct sustained over years. The bounder announces himself. The gentleman does not need to. This distinction is the entire matter in miniature, and if you understand it, you may spare yourself a great deal of confusion.

The man who must tell you he is strong is not strong. The man who must display his wealth does not possess it securely. The man who requires the diminishment of women in order to feel adequate has answered the question of his adequacy more honestly than he intended.

I will grant the bounders one concession, and only one: the questions they exploit are real. What is a man for? What duties does he bear? What is expected of his strength, his patience, his capacity for endurance? These are questions worth asking, and a society which refuses to answer them, or which answers them only with the suggestion that the questions themselves are suspect, will find that worse men provide worse answers to fill the silence. I have watched this happen. The silence was well-intentioned. The answers which filled it were not.

But the correct response to a bad answer is a better one. Not a louder one.

A man is for use. He is for service, in whatever form his circumstances require. He is for the maintenance of the things entrusted to him, whether those things are a household, a family, a trade or simply his own character. He is for steadiness when steadiness is needed and for action when action is called for, and he is for knowing the difference, which is harder than either. He is for doing what must be done without requiring the world to observe that he has done it.

This is not complicated. I did not set out to write a treatise on the nature of man. I set out to teach you to iron a shirt, to keep your accounts in order and to enter a room without making a hash of it. If you can manage these things, the philosophy will take care of itself, for it was never separate from the practice. The man who keeps his shoes clean, his debts paid and his temper in check has answered the question of masculinity more completely than any number of gentlemen shouting into cameras from rented rooms.

I trust this will suffice. My assistant may now redirect all further enquiries on this subject to this page, and the pile on my desk may, at last, begin to diminish.

Crale