Crisis of Masculinity, or Crisis of Economic Individualism?

A particular view of the male lot in life goes something like this:

Males are from early childhood subject to a deliberately brutal and brutalizing upbringing in preparation for a life which will be centered on a brutal and brutalizing status-resource competition for the sake of winning and keeping females by way of his ability to support them and the offspring he has with them materially. Said competition will have far more losers than winners; exact its toll on the humanity of the indisputable winners; and by and large make men miserable--to the decreasing extent that they are still able to feel anything at all.

It is not a particularly pleasant vision of life. Many call it tragic, and hold that men for the most part know it, such that it is far from uncommon for men to desire to escape it one way or the other, in spite of the extreme disapproval of attempts to do so on the part of "society" as it insists that every male cheerfully throw himself into the competition and "give it his all," that doing so is what it means to be an "adult" and a "man"; and judges those less than successful in the scrum less than adults and men--even as the already horrid terms of the contest grow ever more removed from reality. After all, the game sets up women as the prize in the contest, and in Life After Feminism the conventional wisdom no longer abides men seeing women as a reward or a prize, all as it no longer countenances men expecting women to conform to the standards that traditionally made men think of them as prizes (a sweet and deferential temperament, sexual attractiveness and availability, will-make-a-house-a-home domesticity, etc. in that way Jerry Hall rather pithily summed up years ago). Indeed, today men are collectively chastised on a constant basis for "entitlement" for expecting, or even simply desiring those qualities in women, as indeed they demand that men value women for other qualities (not least, traditionally masculine qualities such as intelligence, self-assertiveness, "toughness," and conventionally masculine achievements in the aforementioned "game") which, frankly, may elicit less genuine feeling on men's part than those they traditionally sought in women, and even contradict what they really do find attractive. Moreover, feminists also demand that men, even while given no respite from the aforementioned competition and its costs, and judged as harshly as ever for how they do in it, bear an equal share of traditionally female burdens such as care for the home or the rearing of children, and doing the "emotional heavy lifting" in the relationship. Indeed, the thinking now goes that the man should be as prepared as his female partner to be the supportive helpmeet to his spouse--sacrificing his own "career" to hers if need be (never mind that according to the logic described here that career is the sin qua non of his being with her, or anyone else).

Without the prize the (again, miserable) competition and all associated with it lose their incentive structure--all as men find themselves subject to increasingly numerous and contradictory demands, such that a man can feel that he is increasingly punished for what his upbringing makes him, for his being what society requires him to be as that hardened competitor whose ways of thinking and acting he cannot simply "turn off" and would surely suffer even if he could in the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation (with it feeling all the more bewildering, and unjust, that the same feminists so often celebrate what they denounce as "toxic masculinity" in men as exemplary #Girlboss behavior in women). Still, society brooks no balking at their declining to throw themselves into the competition for all that, doubling down on its demand for conformity--as it panics that young men understandably refuse to submit to that demand, opting instead to play video games all day long.

This incoherence is not a very surprising response where the cultural traditionalists are concerned. After all, they are traditionalists because they are committed to the old ways, and hostile to any sort of critical thought about them, the more easily in as they are not too anxious about the world being a fair or peaceful or comfortable place for its less privileged inhabitants, or for that matter, any sort of rational consistency in lifeways. It is more surprising that a great many feminists seem to also think that men should go on living in the old ways--embracing the competition with all the old earnestness, just not expecting the old satisfactions, or any compensation for the loss of those old satisfactions, out of it. After all, if the patriarchy feminists denounce is indeed more than a piece of rhetoric, is this vision of life as a brutal competition not central to that order to which they are so opposed? Is it not therefore imperative on feminists to oppose the brutality and brutalization for which women as well as men ultimately pay a very high price? And indeed would doing so not win to their cause a great many "male allies" who would be ecstatic at the thought of putting a stake through the heart of this heartless vision of life, of a vision of "women's liberation" that would bring "men's liberation" as well? Moreover, if such enlightened self-interest of this kind does not avail, would women's own increasing subjection to the same demands and pressures, the same brutalizing experiences in school and work, sports and military service and all the rest, producing similar alienations, not make women question this vision of life and what it does to women for their own sakes? (Even if it sits poorly with a media narrative that prefers to counterpoise female triumph and male failure it is not just men who, confronting the raw deal that is "adulthood," elect to drop out of what they also see as a scam--and even spend their life playing video games instead.)

Alas, the reader has likely already registered a factor preventing all this from figuring significantly in their position, namely that the competition we are talking about is ultimately economic individualism. A left-wing feminist--left-wing in the sense of her desire for a world beyond economic individualism, beyond capitalism--may very well countenance a different kind of society, in which a different kind of male life-path is at least a plausible, honorable, choice. By contrast a bourgeois feminist, for whom the issue is not the social system but the share of the more privileged women in the rewards going to those at its top, does not. Indeed, for her economic individualism is non-negotiable, There Is No Alternative, and so to the competition the men must go (and the women too). That men, brutalized, become brutal, is just an occasion to turn a structural, systemic, societal issue into an individual one and moralize at them about "choice" and "personal responsibility" in that way so dear to every cold, cruel, sanctimonious bourgeois heart (or whatever it is they use for hearts). Acknowledging that what the "thought-leaders" of today would have us believe to be a matter of gender--a supposed "crisis of masculinity"--proves on closer inspection to be a matter of economics, the crisis of masculinity in fact a crisis of economic individualism, whose outcome is unlikely to be settled by hectoring from either the traditionalists, or the sort of feminist who gets so much of a platform in the media from which to make her pronouncements.