I just stumbled on this. It is quite long but informative
Dear young men,
I want to tell you what I wish I’d been told, as I
bumbled through the awkward years between 15
and 25. This whole letter might sound self-
important, coming from a 34-year-old who writes
mostly about how he’s just beginning to get the
hang of adult life. Maybe it is, and you can take it
or leave it.
All I know is that when I was negotiating that
stretch between junior high and full adulthood, I
could have used some guidance from men who
were old enough to be done with that phase, but
who were too young to be my dad.
But I didn’t have that, so like most of us, I picked
up my strategies from the similarly confused
young men around me. Even though that’s pretty
normal, in terms of instructions on how to be a
mature and respectful adult it’s hard to do worse
than that — so I hope I can offer you a bit of
insight you might not find among your peers.
You’ll still have to choose who to believe and
who to ignore, I just want to offer a different
voice than the ones you may be hearing.
Some of what follows applies particularly to
straight young men, because I’m pulling it from
my own experience, but I think the principles
behind it are pretty universal.
You will constantly have people telling you, both
implicitly and explicitly, that you have to be a
man. What that even means, in the 21st century, I
don’t quite know. It certainly has a less specific
meaning than it used to, and that’s a good thing.
Machismo was never a good fit for many of us
guys, and it clearly doesn’t make the world a
more enlightened place.
Still, if you are male, you will be forced to relate
to this increasingly irrelevant concept of “being a
man” in some way or another.
Even though we humans are (thankfully) moving
on from seeing ourselves as two distinct kinds of
creatures, there’s nothing wrong with being a
man, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
There’s nothing wrong with doing traditionally
“manly” things. Don’t be embarrassed by them. If
you want to watch football on Sunday, or train in
MMA, or grow a handlebar mustache, or buy a
pickup truck, make no apologies.
No, there’s nothing wrong with masculinity —
until it’s used as a gauge for measuring and
excluding people, whether they’re women or other
men, or people who don’t identify as either.
Regardless of whether masculinity appeals to you,
either as something to embody or to simply
admire in others, understand that it’s purely a
matter of personal taste and has nothing to do
with personal value.
Don’t worry about how your sexual experience (or
absence of it) stacks up. At about age 14, boys
feel like they have to start bullshitting about their
sexual exploits in order to survive. The pressure
on these kids is just too great for them to speak
frankly about it. Ignore what everyone says about
their sex lives. They are lying, all of them, at
least a little. And the kids who are actually doing
it in their tweens probably aren’t doing it very
well, and they’re probably not people you’ll want
to trade places with in ten years.
Forget the word “virgin,” as a descriptor for both
yourself and others. It’s an archaic, irrelevant
word, meant to stigmatize and shame people. It
oversells a person’s first sex act as some grand,
transformational experience, which supposedly
vindicates a young man and spoils a young
woman. It’s an obsolete, religious, judgmental
word. Let’s leave it behind.
Failing to “fit in” in school is a good thing. It
means there’s some element of individuality in
you that will not be squashed. God help you if
your self-esteem peaks in high school.
Nobody knows who they are at that age anyway.
People start to get an idea of what’s important to
them and who they want to be in their late
twenties or early thirties. Just try not to cause
too much damage in the mean time. Simply
survive those awkward years. Get good grades
and make some friends, but don’t worry about
being cool. Successfully achieving coolness in
high school is like being knighted by Ronald
McDonald.
All young men will encounter the “seduction
community” at some point. Beware. While there
is some genuinely well-intentioned dating and
self-improvement advice to be found there, so
much of the discussion is absolutely riddled with
misogyny. It isn’t always overt, but it’s always
there. If you start referring to women as
“targets,” you crossed the line a long time ago.
Think of women as being just like you, rather than
some other species. You don’t learn to approach
women, you learn to talk to people. Those forums
are filled with young men who never learned how
to talk to other people. When you’re thirty, come
back and read this stuff. It will make you sad.
If there’s a real secret to “seduction,” here it is:
Always be building a life that turns you on,
represent yourself as honestly and
straightforwardly as you can, and have
conversations with a lot of people. That’s it.
Connections will happen. If you’re bad at those
things, give yourself as long as it takes to get
good at them. You have time.
On the matter of “sluts” — there are none. Nobody
is a slut. The number of sexual partners a person
has had, or is rumored to have had, is a) none of
your business and b) indicates, by itself,
absolutely nothing about the character of that
person. If you want to know what kind of person
someone is, talk to them. If you believe in
personal freedom you cannot believe in sluts.
Throughout your life you’ll encounter sexist
attitudes, even from your favorite people. Much
of it will come in the form of what you are
supposed to do, think and say, in order to be a
man. And unless you’re not paying attention,
you’ll almost certainly discover some of these
attitudes in yourself. Sexism isn’t confined to
bigots and wife-beaters. It’s too common, too
normal for that. It is often subtle, unintentional,
even well-meaning .
You have a responsibility here, whether you want
it or not. Some of the very normal expectations
that will be placed on you as a male — to
distance yourself from femininity, to be tough and
stolid, to laugh at certain jokes, to use words like
“slut” without irony, to deride ambitious or non-
traditional women, to dominate and emasculate
other males — are keeping even the most
enlightened parts of this world less hospitable for
women than for you.
Learn to recognize and violate these
expectations. Don’t be another dead billiard ball,
passing this nasty energy on to your peers, and
eventually your sons. We need new norms, and
creating them will take the help of defiant and
thoughtful young men. That’s you. The problem of
sexism isn’t a women’s issue. It’s a matter of
ensuring personal freedom for everyone regardless
of sex.
And a lot of your pals (and even your heroes)
aren’t going to help in this department. Most of
them will be embarrassed to talk about it,
because they’re too afraid of saying something
that will disqualify them from successfully being a
man, based on their current strategy.
If you believe you should have the freedom to
pursue happiness within your rights, it’s only
sensible to believe in that freedom for everyone,
and that means making sexism your problem too,
even if it never seemed like it was.
At the root of it all is our lingering capacity for
violence — the unfortunate biological reality that
even a physically unremarkable man can knock
out the average woman, if he thinks it will help
him more than it will harm him.
So from the dawn of humanity, whenever there
has been a disagreement between a man and a
woman, both of them knew from the start — no
matter what kind of reason or sense either side
brought to the table — which one must eventually
back down. Unlike the woman, the man could
expect to get his way without having an
intelligent argument, without considering the
needs of others, without being right at all, without
any sensible reason for things to go his way.
This expectation — that power over others is a
viable, noble path to happiness — lingers in the
way we talk, in the way we define manhood, in
the expectations males place on each other. This
is especially influential on high-school and
college-age males, because they do not yet feel
like men, and they believe they’re supposed to.
The forces of civilization and education are very
slowly discrediting this stone-age approach to
life, and dismantling the power imbalance that
has grown around it.
For us to get there, young men need to
understand as early in their lives as possible that
men have a long history of getting their way for
no good reason. This advantage comes, of
course, at the expense of fellow human beings,
and we need to learn to be aware of it and eliminate it wherever we see it.
Is it your fault? No. But whether you want it or
not, you’ve inherited the responsibility of creating
a new answer to the ancient question of what it
means to be a man. The old answers are no
good.
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