Wrestling with Masculinity

“Dreamin’” Self-Portrait Original Watercolor 2002

I am sixty-eight years old, and I am tired of men my age pretending to understand things they do not. I have lived a long time and watched a great deal. Yet a few days ago, I fell down a hole I did not climb back out of for hours. What I found there shocked me.

Boys are hitting themselves in the face with hammers.

I feel compelled to write about this because I think most people my age have no idea, and sadly, most people of any age would rather not know.

The Dictionary of the Wound

There is a practice called looksmaxxing. It is exactly what it sounds like: maximizing your looks, and at first glance, it is harmless. Skincare. Haircuts. The gym. They call that softmaxxing, and there is nothing wrong with a boy wanting to be handsome.

But then there are the other extremes. I had no idea.

Mewing: pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth for hours, every day, to reshape your jaw. Some boys stay silent through the entire school day to hold the position. Some drink only liquids so they never have to stop.

Bonesmashing: striking your own facial bones, your jaw, your cheekbones, with a hard object. A hammer. Your own fist. The belief is that the bone will grow back stronger and sharper, like a callus. The reality is fractures, nerve damage, deformity, and in some cases, damage to your vision. Boys are taking hammers to their faces. There is a young influencer named Clavicular, barely out of his teens, who sells a monthly course complete with bonesmashing tutorials, and who brags that he has used steroids and crystal meth since the age of fourteen to look the way he looks. His followers are boys who pay him.

There is a whole language for it. To mog someone is to out-look them, to dominate a room by being prettier. To ascend is to climb the ranks toward Chad, the apex male. Underneath sits the blackpill, the belief that women choose men on bone structure alone, that kindness and character are worthless, that if your jaw is wrong your life is over before it starts. Boys as young as twelve are absorbing this as truth.

Doctors have a more somber phrase for what they are seeing. They call it body dysmorphia. They call it an eating disorder, and one in three people with an eating disorder is male, a fact almost no one knows, because many of us thought that starving yourself to fit an unreachable image was a girl’s affliction. The doctors are seeing the depression. They are seeing suicidal thoughts. One clinician put it as cleanly as I have heard it: a looksmaxxing boy is a young man asking whether he is enough, and reaching for the answer in the worst possible place.

That sentence floored me. Because I know that boy, I was that boy. And I think I finally understand what is being done to him.

The Sword Turned Inward

I have written, these past weeks, about the dividing sword. About the men who built their whole selves around dominance. Men who cut the world into winner and loser, man and not-man, above and below, and who must keep cutting, because a sword that stops cutting is just a frightened man alone with himself. The UFC fighter Hokit on the White House lawn, demeaning a woman so that he can feel tall. The pastors of my youth and my career. The manosphere selling rage by the click.

Here is what sent chill bumps up my spine.

They have handed the sword to the children. And they have taught the children to turn it on themselves.

A boy cannot yet swing the sword at a woman, at a culture, at an enemy. He has no power, no platform, no target. So they sell him the only target he has. His own face. His own body. His own unbearable suspicion that he is not enough. Bonesmash your jaw. Starve your cheeks. Maxx yourself into a man. It is the same amputation the “strongmen” performed on themselves—cut away everything soft, everything tender, everything that aches—except now it is sold to a young boy as a hobby, with tutorials, for fifty dollars a month.

I know that amputation in my body. I spent thirty years learning to perform it. Cut off the part that feels too much. Cut off the part that weeps. Cut off the part that wants to be held. Become hard, become invulnerable, become a man. The boys with the hammers are doing to their faces what the church did to my being, and what the manosphere does to grown men’s self-perception. Same blade. Younger flesh.

And the cruelty of it, the part that triggers me, is who they hunt. These “macho men” do not go after the confident boy, the easy boy, the boy who was loved well. It goes after the lonely one. The geek with the glasses. The sensitive one who feels everything and has been told that feeling is the flaw. It finds the boy who is already certain he is not enough, and it hands him a hammer and says here, fix yourself. It is the rage machine’s youth division, and it recruits from the saddest desks in the room.

I was a boy at one of those desks. So was nearly every tender man I have ever loved and respected.

The Thing I am Still Wrestling With

I suppose this is where I should tell you what real masculinity is. That is how these essays are meant to progress. The older, wiser man arrives at his answer and hands it down.

I will not do that, and I want to tell you why.

The men with the hammers and swords, the men with the pulpits, the men with the podcasts—their entire fallacy is that they claim to know what a man is, and they will sell you the answer, and they will cut you to fit it. Every one of them has a definition. Every one of them has a knife.

If I end this by telling you what I think a real man is, I have only handed you a kinder, gentler weapon. I would have joined the long line of authoritarian men who looked at a frightened boy and said, “Be this instead.”

I will not do it. At sixty-eight, married to a strong woman on a Spanish terrace across an ocean from where I was born, I will admit that I am still wrestling with masculinity. That is not a failure on my part or of the essay. That is the truest thing I have to give you.

But I can tell you what I have learned in the wrestling.

I can tell you that everything they tried to cut out of me was the best of me. The sensitivity they shamed. The tenderness they mocked. The tears they called weakness. They wanted me to set down the flowering wand and pick up the dividing sword, and they were certain the wand made me less of a man.

In 2004, two years before I voluntarily resigned from the ministry forever, our executive staff went on a leadership retreat. The conveners handed us a questionnaire—comprehensive, hundreds of questions, every corner of a man’s life. It was the first time most of my peers learned the things I never bragged about: the solo summits of fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, the multiple marathons, the week in Alaskan grizzly country with a raft and a tent.

Then they had us rate one another across a long list of categories. One of them was masculinity. They ranked me dead last. The least masculine man at the table.

I had conquered more wilderness than any of them. I had been alone and survived more dangerous places, by choice, than all of them combined, and the proof was right there in my own life experience. They scored me at the bottom anyway, because I directed the arts. Because my work was beauty instead of dominance. Because I was sensitive.

I said so, out loud, in the feedback session. I was too frustrated to stay quiet. But the words fell on deaf ears.

The leadership evaluation was measuring courage, risk, and strength. I had those in surplus. But the staff members (all male) were measuring by other criteria: how close a man stood to the feminine. I made art. I was gentle, empathic, and kind. So, in their eyes, I lost. This masculine yet feminine man never had a chance.

It took most of my life to understand they had it exactly backward.

The person I was was never a defect. It was the whole point.

What I Would Ask the Boys

I keep thinking of young men I have known. Picture the geeks with the big glasses—too tall, too short, too sensitive, feeling everything, sure they are not enough, certain that if they could just fix their face or harden their heart, they would finally be normal. These young men have no model for any other kind of man. Most of their fathers are swordsmen, untrustworthy with anything tender. The only voices offering them a blueprint of masculinity are the ones selling them a hammer and a sword.

If I could sit with one of those boys at my café, I would not tell him what a man is. I would ask him the questions I think no one has ever asked him.

What do you love? What do you make when no one is watching? When was the last time something moved you to tears—and who taught you that was weakness?

Who told you your face was the problem?

When you picture the man you want to become, is he comfortable in his skin, or is he wearing armor? Does he have friends, or only followers? When he is alone at three in the morning, is he at peace, or is he still afraid?

And then the last question. The one I would most want him to carry home. What if the ache you are trying to fix was never a flaw? What if it is the truest, most alive thing about you, the proof you were built to know and be known, to love and be loved?

What I Would Ask the Rest of Us

These are the questions I keep wrestling with at sixty-eight, and I will not pretend to have finished. The wrestling has taught me to ask better questions, and these I would put to all of us, not only the boys.

What if masculinity was never the cage? What if it was never the sword, and never the hammer? What if it is not a jaw line, or a perfect body, or the number of people you can tower above? What is the full range of being a human being? Why do we let these macho shysters sell us a sliver of it and call everything else weakness?

What if a man can summit a mountain and still weep? What if he can be strong and still tender? What if he can hold a sword’s worth of courage and never once need to cut anyone with it, least of all himself?

The men with the hammers will tell you to put down everything soft and pick up the blade.

I am an older man, and I have wrestled with this my whole life, and here is all I know for certain. Put down the hammer. Put down the sword. What if our true selves were never the thing that needed fixing?

What if we were men the entire time? The fearful “men” just needed us never to find out.