On Masculinity

Readers have asked what I make of the supposed crisis of masculinity. The subject is discussed loudly and often without much reference to how men conduct themselves.

I am told that masculinity is in crisis by men upon your moving-picture devices who shout about strength and dominance from rented rooms decorated to suggest uncertain wealth. Other men answer with long essays arguing that masculinity itself is the disease. Both parties generate considerable heat, while the evidence of practical competence remains scarce.

The men I served, and the men I respected, with imperfect overlap between the groups, understood masculinity as a set of obligations. A man was expected to manage his affairs and household, to bear difficulty without advertising it, and to meet his responsibilities before his pleasures. His treatment of those with less power, whether servants, women, children, or animals, mattered particularly because it occurred without an audience. These expectations were ordinary, and failure to meet them was noticed.

The quality most prized was self-command. I mean the governance of feeling, since suppression belongs to a different and less healthy category. A man might feel rage; he had no licence to inflict it. He might feel grief; he owed strangers no performance of it. 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.

My assistant's researches have also introduced me to men who have built considerable followings by telling young men what masculinity is, generally through short declarations delivered to a camera with the confidence of somebody who has never been contradicted by a person he was obliged to hear out. The type is familiar; we called them bounders.

A bounder performs the signs of position without possessing the substance which gives them meaning. He dresses expensively and without taste, speaks with authority upon subjects he has not studied, and mistakes volume for conviction, acquisition for accomplishment, or submission for respect. He generally talks first, where the gentleman is content to let conduct do more of the work.

Claims of strength mean little without conduct. Displays of wealth prove expenditure. A man who diminishes women to establish his own position has established very little.

The questions exploited by such men are nevertheless real: what is a man for, which duties does he bear, and what use should he make of strength or endurance? A society which treats the questions themselves as suspect leaves room for worse men to provide worse answers. A better answer, delivered at a civilised volume, is more useful than well-intentioned silence.

A man should be useful in his circumstances and maintain what is entrusted to him: a household, a family, a trade, or his own conduct. He should act when action is needed and remain steady when it is not.

Keeping one's accounts, temper, clothes, and commitments in order provides a better answer than declarations made to a camera.

Crale