Yes life can be hard for men but don't be a jerk

Hello fellow male humans,

I read on the Internet that you’re having a hard time. I believe it because I have been alive since 1979 and even my “successful” life has had lots of internal woe, scrawled across the pages of diaries intermittently kept since high school.  Life is hard in the ways it has always been hard, such as the struggles of family dynamics, school, work, forming friendships, finding romance, finding a deeper meaning, coping with physical and mental illness, and facing inevitable aging and death. However, life is also hard in uniquely modern ways, such as the constant flood of misery, temptation, judgement, and deception delivered through billionaire-owned social media networks to your very addictive mobile computing devices.

Life is hard for women, too. You may not want to hear this, or may not believe it, but it’s even harder for women than it is for you. This is because women face all the timeless and modern hardships listed above, plus additional, serious dangers and hardships from living in still-male-dominated societies. That monologue about women’s plight in the Barbie movie nailed it.

This post isn’t meant to be a debate of who has it harder, and I’m not trying to make you feel worse than you already feel about your male struggles. It’s just important to remember that women are struggling, too.  

In your defense, there ARE some specific, extra struggles associated with being male. I’m not talking about the risk of testicle injuries (although that is a thing). I’m talking about social and emotional struggles. I want to identify some of those struggles and address how we deal with them. How we deal with them has implications not only for our personal happiness but for whether we affect society positively or negatively. Some specific hazards and hardships of the male circumstance include:

1.     A ridiculous excess of sexual and romantic desire. The male libido hits like a meteor at puberty and burns for decades. It supplies a lot of anxious motivation and not a lot of satisfaction. The desire for romantic love is another burning meteor, though that one at least has a chance of finding a stable orbit. Developing positive, romantic and sexual relationship(s) in real life IS worth working towards, after attending to the even more important things like a roof over your head and a supportive network of friends and family. However, if you’re trying to sculpt your real life to meet 100% of your testicles’ ridiculous desires you’re in great danger of becoming a selfish, awful, tragic person. Chasing too hard after impossible desires can really hurt you, and others. For example, people who leverage money and power and/or deviously manipulate people to meet their desires can end up as monsters like Epstein and Weinstein. In addition to those infamous abusers of power, there are legions of lower-profile predators, creeps, and sad dudes who have hurt women or hurt themselves by wasting all their money on porn, how-to-be-a-player courses, strip clubs, prostitutes, etc. Don’t let yourself or your bros become those guys. It’s part of the human condition that there will always be a large portion of your desires that just can’t be met, realistically, ethically, or financially. Some combination of acceptance, imagination, and laughing at yourself will get you through.

2.     The sense of entitlement and deficit of responsibility that come from living in a patriarchal society. Patriarchy is a social system where men hold primary power, dominating roles in political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of property. There are different degrees of patriarchy, but the USA is still strongly patriarchal according to every economic and social thing we can measure. Males get a lot of perks and privileges that women don’t get. For example, expectations for responsibility are MUCH lower for boys and men than they are for girls and women. Cartoon characters illustrate this well. We think boys like Bart Simpson, teenagers like Beavis and Butthead, and men like Homer Simpson are endearingly hilarious in their bad behavior, while their female counterparts Lisa Simpson, Daria Morgendorfer, and Marge Simpson have to be responsible all the time.

Rarely having to clean up our own messes, consider others’ needs, or pay the full price of our transgressions means males in a patriarchy grow up without developing the full responsibility and moral skillsets that all humans should have. Or we’re slow to develop them. We think we’re special good boys and nice guys when actually we’re morally stunted jerks who can’t deal with real life and who put a huge burden on others. That’s the bad edge of the patriarchy sword. Here’s a personal example: I grew up thinking of myself as a super special nice guy who could do no wrong, and I persisted in that view even when I was being selfish and ridiculous in early relationships. This doomed me to hard lessons and delayed social/emotional maturity, and of course it was hard on whoever I was dating.

3.     The toxic competitiveness dynamic. Guys experience weird pressures and expectations from living in societies that over-inflate the importance of male “greatness” and hierarchical position. You’re supposed to be a big hero, or a big stud; the brightest peacock in the flock. Someone is always trying to make you feel bad and insecure for not being man enough, and they’re selling you muscle growth powder, penis enlargers, get-rich-quick schemes, etc. They say it’s not enough just to be a good person and good team player. The message is that 99% of men are worthless, ugly, too-poor, and too-short and wimpy, and you’re going to be miserable and loveless unless you can dominate all the competition and become some kind of warlord pimp Adonis. Now it’s true that there is some disparity in the amount of attention paid to flashy versus average guys, and some women have terrible, superficial tastes in men, just as most men have terrible, superficial tastes in women. It’s also true that there is some real unfairness in terms of the genetic cards we’re dealt, which I addressed in the 2010 post “Ugliness, Fairness, and Happiness.” But the world is not nearly the all-or-nothing, winners-dominate-losers kind of world that the manosphere influencers say it is. The “nice guys finish last” thing is not true. There are many ways that a not-so-flashy guy can find his niche in the world through cooperation, kindness, consistency, etc. You can flavor your niceness with a little pizazz without going to the extremes of being a macho jerk. The natural way to do it is to lean into the things you're good at and see where they lead. I got a lot of mileage out of windsurfing and science as a bachelor, and those are things I liked doing anyways. Compared with the warlord pimp Adonis, who will be hated by most people and likely deposed quickly by the next aspiring warlord pimp Adonis, a humble good guy will develop a stable network of people around him who actually appreciate him and will help and support him as he has helped and supported them. Another reward of developing your goodness rather than striving for greatness (a.k.a. clout), is that it makes a better world for EVERYONE, not just you.

Conclusion: The unfairness of the world is real, but the manosphere’s advice for how you should deal with that unfairness is terrible. Their advice is like, “You have to seize power for yourself by becoming a dominant, aggressive, alpha male. Showing any empathy or kindness towards others will just make you a sucker or a cuck.” Everybody trying to be an alpha male is a recipe for both personal disaster and societal disaster. (The societal disaster part looks a lot like the dysfunctional, right-wing, authoritarian, oligarchal system we have today.) For all but a very few well-positioned billionaires and political elites, the optimal strategy for the self is actually to be LESS selfish; to create a fair, egalitarian society through cooperation, niceness, and holding abusers and exploiters to account. Working TOGETHER we can ALL get ahead.