The advice we give men is all wrong

To start with, we should embrace the idea that the sexes have the same virtues

The arrest of misogynist influencer Andrew Tate has set in motion another cycle of discourse about how to reach out men, especially how the left of center community can keep men from falling into a reactionary rabbit hole. A commonly arrived at solution is to provide ‘men’s advice’ from a leftist or feminist perspective - whether men would take such advice is of course another question entirely. After all, Tate and others like him - from college lecturers to streamers - often manage to build brands primarily on telling men and boys what they want to hear, or what assuages their egos. It’s unclear a feminist manosphere could have the same allure.

Others have dived into the conundrum in greater depth - I recommend Dhaaruni Sreenivas’s Substack post on the topic - but on twitter at least the conversation seems to quickly devolve into a series of accusation: that one side lacks empathy towards men, or that the other is coddling their feelings at the expense of women’s safety.

The whole men’s media environment, however, reminds me a bit of how Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women, describes the advice given to women in the 18th century as coming from

“…men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect”

Wollstonecraft writes of the advice men gave women - but today I think men do the same disservice to one another. There are hundreds of ‘gurus’ offering advice on how to ‘pick up’ women, teaching men to be ‘only anxious to inspire’ lust, rather than exacting respect. This seems to be a demand driven phenomena - boys and young are ready to consume an immense amount of media if it promises them sexual success. Some will argue this is an inevitable result of the sexual revolution and ‘hook up’ culture, but this is true more in perception than reality. Men who follow such ‘pick up artists’ are in for a rude awakening.

After all, the median American man has just around 6 lifetime sexual partners, according to the CDC. Even assuming a man with twice as many partners, if most of those are ‘one-night stands’ or even short flings, that translates to a rather disappointing amount of sex overall, with long gaps in between!

For the most part, then, outside of a few pointers on initial interactions with women, there is not much a left of center perspective can offer men in the world of ‘hook up’ advice because most of what is out there anyway is built on a fiction. The reality instead is that the overwhelming majority of men are going to primarily find sex in long term relationships, where advice about life in general, attracting respect from women (hopefully starting by respecting them), is going to be more important.

Of course, this is not particularly glamorous, and it is unlikely that a YouTube guru arguing that in fact there is no one simple trick to sex on demand and that the actual solution to unsatisfying romantic pursues lies with improving their life circumstances is going to, in the short run, draw many clicks away from Andrew Tate. However, these are not the only personalities known for drawing in young men and there is room to compete with less sex obsessed conservative self-helpers - typified by Canadian professor and social media personality Jordan Peterson. Though perhaps now known primarily for his cringeworthy denunciations of ‘woke moralists’, Peterson’s fan base was largely built on offering personal advice. His bestseller 12 Rules for Life, for example, interweaves a fundamentally conservative viewpoint (one of the rules is ‘accept that inequality exists’) with more basic advice (the preceding rule is ‘define your problem specifically)’.

This is a gaping hole in left of center offerings for men or women - providing guidance or at least a perspective on how to live a good life, where politics plays only a part. This is key, because in reality many young people who go looking for advice online (or just something interesting to watch) have not invested themselves in some set of political beliefs - making sense of their personal lives is often more pressing, and offering solid advice there is a good entrance point into offering more specifically feminist or liberal views.

Personally, I’ve never encountered better life advice than that offered by the Stoic philosophers - Epictetus, Seneca, and the like - and I’ve written elsewhere that reclaiming Stoicism from the toxically masculine men who tend to be its more ardent proponents is an undertaking worth doing. But this is hardly the only ethical or philosophical system that could form the basis of a very productive advice to young men! Compelling and timely advice for young men and boys in a society with a diminishing number of ‘fixed points’ by which to direct one’s life is many times more valuable than dating advice particularly, and it’s likely that having more charismatic and effective purveyors of that kind of wisdom to the left of center would do a great deal to start to close the worrying partisan gap between young men and young women.

There is a hazard, however, in any life plan or self-help directed specifically at men - it runs the risk of reinforcing the idea that there exist particular and uniquely masculine virtues. This again Wollstonecraft identified in her own time:

“To explain and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been presented to prove that in the acquiring of virtue the two sexes ought to have very different aims; or, to put it bluntly, women aren’t thought to have enough strength of mind to acquire virtue properly so-called”

Today, we frequently see a variation on this error: men are taught that the virtues that apply to them are unique to them, that they are either fundamentally incapable of acquiring traits (like compassion, patience, and the like) that are seen as virtuous in women, or that in men those traits are no longer virtuous. The most obvious perpetrators here are organizations that charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend conferences and ‘boot camps’ promising to help men restore their masculinity, but the assumption that men need to learn to be men rather than simply learning to be good people is deeply rooted even in liberal parts of media and society. One loftily ambitious goal for the reworking of our culture ought to be to shift this perception, such that men simply seek to develop virtues, unconcerned with the masculinity or femininity thereof.

Of course, idealism must be tempered with pragmatism. We may hope for a society where gendered life advice is unneeded while accepting that, for the moment, men may respond better to male voices, and may also require some specific advice on navigating society - including gender roles - as currently constructed. However, we should not lose sight of the realities Wollstonecraft so forcefully asserted centuries ago: men and women, whatever their differences, have the same fundamental purpose in life - “the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character”.