Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you've got to be kind.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Men are lost.
Or at least, a lot of people seem to think so.
There are a lot of people right now worried about what masculinity is and is not, and what is toxic vs what is not, and about how some boys are wandering in the “wilderness,” wondering as they are wandering. Well, we know what they are wondering: how to be a “man.” I wrote about this in my Barbie piece.
This crisis, we are told, is unprecedented. All of a sudden, we are in a new world, where men are endangered, where new rules are in place, where what used to be a solid understanding of what manhood is now is in flux.
Here’s my hot take on this: knock it off. This is not a new phenomenon. Every generation of men has to figure out what manhood is and how to measure up to the standard du jour. This is not a crisis that the current crop of boys and men are suddenly encountering; no, we’ve always encountered it, and it is called growing up.
The photo above is Earthrise, from December, 1968. This is the first photograph of Earth from space that mattered. Until the moment this photo was published, every human being for as long as there have been human beings looked up from the earth outward to space. Our perspective was always from home. Earthrise was the first image that gave us the reverse perspective: looking back to Earth from space. We are looking at home from a place that is definitely not home. This photo made something starkly real: the entirety of humankind, everything we know, everyone we love and have ever loved, every country, every home, everything that is alive or ever has been alive, every graveyard, everything, is on that blue planet called Earth, and only on that blue planet called Earth. Seeing that beautiful blue and white sphere set in a pitch-dark void is a gut-punch. The beautiful blue planet? Life. The void? Absolute death.
Two years ago, William Shatner, then 90 years old, made it to space after being the captain of the Starship Enterprise for over 50 years He reflected:
[W]hen I looked … into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.
- William Shatner
I believe something primal shifted in humankind because of Earthrise. We now know, really know, that we are all floating together on this one solo sphere in a universe that is an incredible 94 billion light years across. The idea that we can be separate from each other is ludicrous. We’re all in the same house.
We are not separate people. There is no competition for who is going to make it and who is not. We are all going to make it together, or we will all perish together. The competitions we have are fun little made-up games: who has the biggest car, whose religion is best, where the boundary is between your plot and mine, whose cigarettes we should smoke, who we are supposed to love, and who we are supposed to hate. These games mean nothing in the whole scheme of things except as distractions on the road to oblivion. We all go back into the same box. There are no divisions, and there are no sides. There is only us, and we all deserve our shot.
Earthrise has shown us for the first time in our history, that we can’t live at the expense of others. This planet is not a zero-sum game where if I win, you lose. No, the more each of us wins, the more we all win.
In the last hundred-plus years, we expanded our collective knowledge, our technologies, our capabilities, our health, and our knowledge of each other. We reduced grinding poverty. We improved sanitation, food safety, and food availability. We made it possible for the common person to travel, and then we made it so we can travel farther and faster, making an already small planet smaller and smaller.
We’ve learned something else: there are no innate differences in capability between the sexes. The world of “these are the affairs of men!” are now “these are the affairs of everyone.”
Some men feel that they have lost their place. No, their place is now bigger and includes women.
What does a man do in this context? First, to not feel threatened or territorial. The cat is out of the bag - we can no longer ignore the humanity and capabilities of women. The glass ceiling should not have to be shattered by women; rather, men should just remove it.
Men need to consider the circumstances of women. We can no longer design the world in a way that suits only men.
I read a few weeks ago about how some towns in Germany have parking garages with spaces that are mandated to be for women only. Did you know this? The context was look at Germany and their sexist law that says women need larger parking spaces! Did Germans really enforce bigger parking spots for women just because they are sexist assholes?
No. It’s because these spaces are safer. They are better lit, closer to the exits, sometimes patrolled more, and the bigger space size is to make it easier to load and unload the vehicle because it’s always women taking care of the kids, right? But when men read about this: “heh heh, women can’t park,” or worse “this is sexist against men!”
I am a large man. I walk the streets at night, regardless of city, with no concern for my safety. If there’s a place that is visibly sketchy, I might ensure my wallet is safely stowed. That’s it. When I park my car in a parking garage, my concerns are that some jerk doesn’t scratch my car and that I don’t want to walk too far. I have zero concern for my safety. It’s not that I think about it and then think “eh, I’m okay,” no, it’s that I have no thought of safety whatsoever.
Now, ask any women what they do when they go into a parking garage.
The spaces are an accommodation to women because women are in a different circumstance than men. Women are concerned because of men. As a man, I don’t have that concern.
Most men are clueless about the circumstances of women. We need to understand these circumstances, and ideally, undo them, since these circumstances are created by men. We at least need to acknowledge them.
Being clueless is probably the biggest fault of a good man. Be aware of other people’s circumstances. Be aware of challenges they face that you don’t.
I’ve spent the last three months wracking my brain regarding this piece. There are so many examples of awful behavior by men. So many examples of fragile and fearful men. We’ve had American men actively root against the US National Team in the Women’s World Cup this year. We had men crying about being teased by the Barbie movie. So many men behave badly. The biggest issue I had to confront as I was trying to put this together is that there will always be men who are bastards. There is nothing I can write that will change the mind of a bastard. This is hard to acknowledge.
But there are good men. Good men not only need to understand the circumstances and challenges women face, but also need to sideline the bastards. We need to be an example, and we need to coach our young men. We need to contribute to the progress women have made.
I realized early that I am fighting human nature. We are saddled with men who are bastards, and all the kumbaya in the world won’t prevent bastards from knuckle-dragging the earth. It is human nature for certain men to deny the humanity of women. The irony is ridiculous. But screw human nature. We know too much now. We’ve seen Earth from space, and technology has leveled the playing field. We are no longer cavemen. We are not subject to caveman attitudes.
I wrote about Hermione Syndrome where we tend to make heroes of men and subordinate women to supporting roles for the guys no matter how heroic the women are. I wrote about the Barbie movie where fragile men are whining that a movie actually exists that celebrates women and pokes fun at the boys. In this piece I show that we know we are all together on this orb and alone in the universe, and that the explosion of knowledge and technology has blown apart any justifications the patriarchy ever had for men’s self-appointed rulership of the planet, at every level, from the family to the boardrooms to the empires.
And I wrote that the issues women face, the misogyny they must overcome, and the fears they have just walking out in the world are caused by men.
And so the question: what are men to do?
It comes down to simplicity. Simplicity is effective. Simplicity has the virtue of cutting through all the reasons things can’t be done, and provides a named path through the brambles and undergrowth and swamps of human nature:
Don’t be a Bastard
You know what is right and wrong. You know what to do.
This is not as easy, or even as popular, as you might think. We live in a sea of bastards and sons of bitches and there are a lot of people who lionize them. We are told that obnoxious SOB billionaire X had to be a bastard in order to change the world! Or that being a bastard (a narcissistic sociopathic bastard, especially) is a boon in a CEO despite the evidence that “[we] find more narcissistic CEOs are associated with significantly lower stock-price performance.” It is true that a man has to take care of business. It is not true that he needs to be a bastard.
There’s a great phrase that I came across in the last few years called “punching down.” It means “to attack or criticize someone who is in a worse or less powerful position than you.” I first heard it from Marc Maron on his podcast in the context of comedy. No one likes comics who punch down. Bastards punch down. Don’t do it.
The key to being successful in not being a bastard is empathy and being aware of women’s circumstances. This is an active activity. Be aware of what women are going through, and how what we take for granted is not true for them.
We need to not punch down but to open the door and remove the glass ceiling and recognize the humanity of women.
In other words, don’t be a bastard.