The Degradation of Masculine Enterprise
The softening of men's groups and male culture is creating a cohort of weakness and spinelessness in our society.
The first thing I noticed sitting down to write about men’s issues was some strange internal urge to say something like— women struggle with many issues but…, or although there’s been much discussion and progress on equality I think…
But why? Why do we have to hedge what we say here? Why is there always some caveat when someone wants to talk about men’s issues online or in public? Look up any book, research article, podcast, or interview about men’s issues in the 21st century; almost 100% of them will have a token line or paragraph saying that they acknowledge the struggles women face.
There’s no need to apologize or add caveats. There’s only 2 of us here, men— and women. We’re both in this together. And the reaction I had inside my body to try and smooth out the beginning of this article to avoid being labeled as too masculine, is part symptom of what’s happening in society that’s causing trouble for men.
Biology
In every animal species each sex has a variety of different traits. Some are similar and some are very different. Combined together they create the conditions for optimal life and cooperation within the species. Wether they work in pairs, family groups, or tribes; having the traits from both sexes is required for optimal health and growth in the cohort. But the fact today is, because of historical mistreatment of women, and progressive post-modern radical thinking, we treat and talk about men like second class citizens to the detriment of us all.
In wolves males are slightly larger and more aggressive. Their traditional roles are territorial defence, patrolling, and hunting large prey. While the females are responsible for rearing the young, hunting small to medium sized prey, selecting den sites, and pack leadership / cohesion. Wolves are among the most cooperative and dynamic species on our planet.
In Killer Whale pods females are responsible for navigating, maintaining the social organization, rearing and training the young, and resource distribution. While the males are sent out for long-range exploration, deep dive for food, and protection of the pod. These are the great cooperators of the oceans. Their complimentary skills make them successful hunters and create large and intricate social groups.
Different ≠ Unequal. Nature demonstrates that traits aren't about hierarchy but about complementary functions. Clarity in roles reduces conflict and increases efficiency. But our society today makes all efforts to ensure we downplay the differences and muddy the roles. And suggests that one of the predominant traits of our males is negative and undesirable— masculinity.
Groups for boys and men
During the Battle of the Atlantic British sailors during WWII noticed that young men would die at higher rates than older sailors after being ‘torpedoed’ and sent adrift in lifeboats or scattered into the Atlantic. “They didn't die from lack of knowledge, but from lack of hardiness.” was the common conception. So a school was created in Wales to train and make-ready young men for the rigours of the sea and war. The school is called Outward Bound and it still exists today and has expanded to over 30 countries.
In 1942 the school was commanded by J. F. "Freddy" Fuller, veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic and survivor of two successive torpedo attacks. At one point he commanded an open lifeboat in the Atlantic Ocean for thirty-five days without losing a single member of his crew. The school focused on teaching young men mental toughness, confidence, self-reliance, group cohesion, and the will to survive. All skills useful to young men during wartime, as well as afterwards during the repair and rebuilding efforts. Survival rates improved for the remainder of the war.
Fast forward to today and not only are mental toughness and physical courage seen as hyper-masculine and thus negative and to be avoided. But the school has completely transformed and is no longer an institution for boys and men. Outward Bound Canada (OBC) has programs like ‘Women of Courage’, and leadership development programs of which 56% of the participants coming from ‘Equity-deserving Groups’. OBC also informs us that 21% of its total participants for 2023 were from the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
This is just one small example of the broader pattern in society of suppression of male traits and male only spaces. We see this in the military, sports programs, eduction, higher-education, groups like the Boy Scouts (now co-ed) and other camps and clubs, workplace cultures, and even men’s charities like Movember; all feeling the pressure to conform to the culture and add space, time, money, and words, for women.
This pressure is creating direct impacts to society. It’s fuelling a mental health crisis in men, forcing a decline in male achievement, the disappearance of male spaces, and suppression of male traits. Creating weaker emergency services, reduced societal resilience and cooperation, lack of male mentorship, and a breakdown of male bounding. It’s not about dominance, we require the energies from both male and female, society needs both— we are complementary. It might be uncomfortable to understand the male traits, especially when it comes to violence and aggression. But unfortunately it’s required in life. We need healthy male expression and we need to have those traits in our species. That’s why they’re there.
To climb out of the freezing cold Atlantic and drag your busted ass back onto a lifeboat drifting around dodging Nazi submarines only to be picked up, dried off, and tossed back onto a battleship to launch missiles at Germans is a masculine trait. And England wouldn’t exist today without maleness and the people that had hyper-masculine traits. (including woman)
Today there’s a grand total of 3 men’s shelters in the United Kingdom and 1 in Canada (yes, one). Testosterone levels have dropped, sperm counts have dropped, and although not entirely correlated; birth rates have also dropped. Toxic masculinity is mental toughness rebranded by woke rent-seekers who work from home and can’t squat their own bodyweight.
Men account for 75-80% of the suicides in North America (3-4x higher than females), 40% of men report regular mental distress, increased diagnoses of depression and anxiety, and massive increases in social isolation. 30% of young men report no intimate relationship in the past year, 27% of men under 30 report zero sexual activity, and male virginity past the age of 25 has doubled since 2008.
Men are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, get injured or die at work, get incarcerated, die in combat, to get addicted to harmful drugs, to be homeless, and to kill themselves.
This has broad social and societal impacts, most of which are only just beginning and are poised to continue and or get worse. Marriage rates are lowest in recorded history, male enrolment in college is down, male unemployment is rising, the average male spends 7+ hours a day on a screen, and more men are living with their parents than at anytime since the 1940’s. And video games, pornography, substance abuse, and isolation, are all treading up— fast.
Most men are lost and wandering around feeling unwanted. Men are openly ashamed and blocked in every layer of our culture, and apathy has taken root. Young men have very few role models, and any progress or talk about men’s health or issues is met with criticism about being too masculine or taking resources and attention away from others. Young men have stopped eating meat, playing sports, lifting weights, and have forgetting how to change the oil in a car or throw a punch.
Wartime
I believe that all the negative talk about masculinity and aggression in men will go out the window come wartime. We want our men weak and docile. We want our safe spaces and we want forced-outcomes between men and woman when it comes to C suite jobs and positions of power. But when the war bell rings; guess who they're gonna want to drive the tank and man the machine guns? Men. Poor men.
The Canadian Armed Forces, along with all other government departments including the Prime Ministers Office have sent out all manner of subliminal (and overt) sexist comments, statements, and policies. Reading them while switching the roles in question, we can easily call them out for what they are— sexist.
Here are some examples of research articles from the apparently ‘scientific’ Canadian Military Journal, Summer 2023 edition:
“I’m Not Your Typical White Soldier”: Interrogating Whiteness and Power in the Canadian Armed Forces
Supporting Military Families: Challenging or Reinforcing Patriarchy?
Women’s Deployment Experiences: Safety, Barriers, and CAF Culture Change
Anticipating Future Culture Struggles Over Contested Military Identities
Getting to the Root of the Problem: Understanding and Changing Canadian Military Culture
The implicit crux of these these articles; the ‘root of the problem’, or the ‘barriers to change’, are men. And more specifically— white men. In the scientific article ‘Getting to the Root of the Problem: Understanding and Changing Canadian Military Culture’ authors Maya Eichler and Vanessa Brown write:
“Largely unwritten yet commonly held notions of who constitutes an ideal military member tend to centre cisgender, heterosexual, Anglophone, white, able-bodied men of settler colonial heritage. In this way, the military is a product of, as well as an agent in the reproduction of, the very root causes that lie at the foundation of its culture problem.”
and
“Sexism is the key ideology of patriarchy, ascribing to women characteristics such as weakness, deference, pacifism, and nurturing, and to men characteristics such as toughness, violence, strength, and rationality. Militaries are key patriarchal institutions. Their internal organization reflects the masculine biases and male power found in broader society. At the same time, men’s dominance in positions of power and privilege within militaries supports patriarchal forms of domination in broader society.”
And in the article Anticipating Future Culture Struggles Over Contested Military Identities author Captain (Navy) retired Alan C. Okros writes:
“Expanding on Raewyn Connell’s foundational work, the literature on militarized masculinities highlights the problematic standardization of specific masculine behaviours associated with white male heterosexuality and normalized performances of these behaviours within militaries that stand to privilege most men over women, and subordinate some men to others. Sandra Whitworth notes that, in the CAF, masculine behaviours are founded in relation to general principles of “violence and aggression, institutional unity and hierarchy.”
and
“Echoing the call from scholars, the CPCC shift in CAF identity is from a singular ideal hero warrior to recognizing multiple ways to demonstrate military identity. This initiative acknowledges that the warrior image is rooted in an outdated hero archetype which emphasizes combat/kinetic functions performed by those who are strong, stoic, and physically resilient (along with being white, male, and cisgender).”
The core function of the military is to protect our nation from adversarial dangers that threaten the life, limb, and sovereignty of our country and its inhabitants. To say that the warrior is “in an outdated hero archetype which emphasizes combat/kinetic functions” is laughable. The only thing that’s going to stop the enemy from riding over the hills and slaughtering everyone is COMBAT and KINETIC functions. The Canadian Armed Forces is not a social welfare program, DEI experimental playground, dumping ground for poorly designed and slow to finish procurement programs, and sure as hell isn’t a place where we should be degrading to men, their mental health, and their contribution to society.
“… an ideal military member tend to centre cisgender, heterosexual, Anglophone, white, able-bodied men of settler colonial heritage. In this way, the military is a product of, as well as an agent in the reproduction of, the very root causes that lie at the foundation of its culture problem.” — Say what? White, able-bodied men are not a problem. And they’re not a culture problem. Every subsection of society has its own culture. Created by the people and the interactions within. It changes rapidly over time. The ‘communitas’ is a fluid and dynamic thing. We should not try to conform cultures (in any subgroup) to conform to ideals that we think are right. Especially so in groups and domains where we are not involved or have no skin in the game.
I don’t know what it took to hold the line against the Germans in France during WWI. The trenches were packed with able-bodied white men. The culture was probably vastly different than what you and your family experience today in your groups and workplaces. Our job isn’t to conform these group cultures and identities, but allow them to foster optimal culture for the job and task at hand. War is hell. War is about getting the job done no matter what. We risk our life and limb to protect those we love and those that cannot protect themselves.
Bullying and hazing is something that has been rooted out in our society. In elite military groups or combat outfits (since the time of the Bronze Age), there has been a high level of peer-pressure, bullying, hazing, and a bottom-up group dynamic when it comes to enforcing the standards. Military men uphold certain standards of toughness and grit for a reason. It’s not because they don’t like beta males; it’s because when the shells are exploding all around you, your teammates are wounded, and the enemy is coming down the trench line— a lack of grit will get us all killed.
This is not to say that the characteristics and personalities of those who have been washed out of military boot-camps and other programs are bad or somehow inferior or less-than. It means that they fit into a larger picture and fill different roles in our society, just like the animals in the wild. Ants wouldn’t put the Queen on the front line, and wolves don’t send their matriarch to patrol the territory.
Masculine rituals and groups for men exist in silo’s for a reason. Cultures of the past understood the importance of training and testing their men— sometimes at the expense of their health and wellbeing. The Dagara people in Western Africa have a coming of age ritual for their young boys. When the boys are in their teenage years they’re sent away from the tribe and the tribe’s women. They spend time in nature with male elders and eventually they’ll spend a significant time alone before returning to the tribe having had a spiritual transformation and thus grown into adulthood. The Dagara tribes accept that some boys may not return from their solitary spiritual quest, that boys (and the tribe) require that they go through hard times— even if it means their death. Because if we don't and we coddle them, hard times can mean death for not just the young men but the whole tribe.
Humans are anti-fragile; we need pain for growth. Learning to push through tough times is something we all go through. But again, some groups, and some sexes, require more or less depending on the task at hand, where and when the society lives, and the individuals soul or life-path. What looks terrifying and unnecessary to you might be non-negotiable for others. And the comfort creep in today’s society is pushing our men and masculinity to levels unsafe and not fit for even a peacetime society.
Even the most basic level of hardship and conflict for children has been erased— unsupervised play. Expertly described in Jonathan Haidt’s book: The Coddling of the American Mind, the lack of unsupervised play among children in North American is contributing to a lack of confidence, depression, anxiety, lower testosterone levels, lowered sex drive, and a general drop in health of young men. No longer left alone to sort out their own disagreements, or forced to deal with the pain of rejection and conflict without the intervention of parents and elders. Our children do not learn how to regulate themselves enough to operate effectively in our easy-paced society. And there’s no way in hell any of our boys would survive for a week or two in the West African wilds with their African counterparts.
What now
The Canadian Armed Forces has done away with almost any physical or performance standards except for a few remaining specialized units. Over the last 50 years the damage and degradation of our nations defences hasn’t come from our enemies, but from within. We did it to ourselves.
If you have the ability to create new male spaces in your environment, do it. If you have the resources to create groups for men and boys, do it. We need to celebrate masculine virtues and maintain the standards where they’re applicable. As we’ve seen, the standards for male bonding in male groups designed societal defence have been set for thousands of years. This does not mean woman cannot meet or shouldn’t meet these standards. This means the standards are there for a reason, and should not be adjusted to create a sexual balance where biologically speaking, there shouldn’t be. We need to recognize biological reality.
A society that suppresses healthy masculinity doesn't eliminate masculine energy— it merely ensures its expression will be unhealthy.
This needs to be plastered at every battalion and NDHQ. I’m equally disgusted with the coddling and infantalizing of our warrior class. Your candor is exactly what we need before it gets ugly.