The Meaning of Being a Man

Dedicated to my father and mother

Introduction

Why This Is Not a Book

About Gender

A young man and a young woman are standing in front of each other. The woman is looking up at the man putting her face close to his. She is angry, and she is repeating the phrase, ‘You’re scum. You’re fucking scum.’ The man tries to avoid her gaze by looking straight ahead.

The previous is a scene from the documentary The Red Pill by Cassie Jaye. The man is queuing to enter a lecture on Boys to Men: Transforming the Boy’s Crisis. The woman is part of a group of demonstrators who are trying to block people from entering the event.

The image of the young man and the young woman has stuck with me ever since I watched the documentary, and it has emerged repeatedly on my inner screen in the course of the writing of this book. The image makes me sad. I feel sorry for the young man. He has to stand up to abuse and shaming just because he wants to hear a lecture on boys and men. Maybe he is merely trying to figure out what it means to be a man. I also feel sorry for the woman. While I do not entirely understand her, I get the sense that beneath her anger is some kind of pain and suffering. She does not look happy, and I doubt that shouting at the man is going to relieve her of her pain and suffering. Most of all, I feel sorry for the fact that the two young people clearly cannot connect. I cannot help thinking that under different circumstances, they could be a couple. They could even get married, have children together, and become a father and a mother. But for now, they seem to be separated by a gender rage gap.

This book is written for the young man in the film as well as for all other men who are interested in the question: What does it mean to be a man? One of the primary obligations of philosophy is to provide people with the intellectual means to think about, talk about, and make sense of their own life. I have spent more than half my life in the university world. As a student and later as a professional academic, I have spent most of my working hours reading, writing, and teaching sociology and philosophy. I am grateful for everything that these great academic disciplines have given me. But I will also say that based on my personal experience, both of these disciplines have let down men like the young man in the film, who are trying to make sense of what it means to be a man. The vast majority of the academic books and papers that I have come across in my professional life at the university which purport to say something relevant to this question, are at best nonsensical and at worst downright misleading. There are plenty of books which have clever insights on what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be gay, what it means to be lesbian, what it means to be a worker, what it means to be an employee, what it means to be a manager, what it means to be poor, what it means to be rich, what it means to be a gambler, what it means to be mentally ill, what it means to be a criminal, what it means to be old, what it means to be young, what it means to be a subject, what it means to be a rational being, what it means to be an irrational being, what it means to be a social construct, what it means to be a body with a brain, and so on. Regarding the question of what it means to be a man, however, I have seen very little academic material of use. I have found books that use words such as man and masculinity in their titles, but they have not had much value to me in my effort to understand myself as a man and in my own life as a man. Perhaps I have not looked hard enough. Perhaps there are books that I have just not found yet. That is entirely possible. However, I have now decided to stop looking and instead to write my own book posing the question of being a man as a genuine and legitimate question of philosophy.

The timing of the book is no coincidence. While I have been interested in issues of men and women for many years, I have also had a sense that entering academic debates about these issues was like entering a minefield. Straying off the beaten track comes at the risk of detonating explosions of moral outrage and shaming. Today, however, I have the sense that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift concerning the way that questions of men and women can be raised and discussed within the academic world as well as in the general public debate. Deviations from the hegemonic discourse of gender theory are sometimes still met by moral outrage, shaming, and in some cases even formal sanctions, but at the same time more and more new voices are entering the debate to contest the status of this hegemony. This has given me the courage and confidence to enter the debate with my own voice.

In this paradigm shift, Jordan Peterson’s publication of the book 12 Rules for Life in 2018 stands as an important event. The extreme popularity of the book as well as of Jordan Peterson himself is in some sense a bit of a mystery. 12 Rules for Life is hardly characterized by philosophical complexity or intellectual novelty. It rather seems to be the exact opposite qualities that have made the book stand out in the academic landscape. It constitutes a fairly straightforward presentation of a series of old-fashioned virtues and common-sense ideas. For me, the significance of the book is not as much derived from its content as from the mere fact that Peterson dared to say what he was saying, and that so many people were ready to listen. The publication and immediate popularity of the book provided in itself an opportunity to open discussions about the questions raised in the book. Jordan Peterson has taken a few steps into the minefield, thus treading a new path for others to follow.

While Jordan Peterson is popular among many different kinds of people, his ideas seem to resonate particularly well with men and with young men in particular. His book does not provide a systematic account of the conditions and differences between men and women. Throughout the book, we find scattered remarks about men and women, the masculine and the feminine, but they do not add up to a coherent theory. Nevertheless, the book seems to provide a valuable framework for thinking and talking about what it means to be a man and how to find your purpose in life as a man. In this sense, Jordan Peterson has opened a field of inquiry, which has been largely ignored by philosophy, sociology, psychology, and adjacent disciplines for at least as long as I have been part of the academic world. It is within this field of inquiry that the current book positions itself.

The book here is not a book about gender. If you happen to have found it in a library or bookshop in the section on gender studies, please contact the librarian and ask her to reclassify it. If the library has a section on ontology, that would be a good place for the book. Otherwise, she may just place it under philosophy. For many people, gender studies make a lot of sense. That is great for them. They have been well served by philosophy, sociology, and adjacent disciplines, and they have a wide selection of books, papers, workshops, courses, and even entire university programs that they can choose between in their quest for knowledge and understanding of themselves in the world. I wish them all the best. For me, however, gender studies have made little or no sense in terms of understanding what it means to be a man.

The way that philosophy can help people better understand, think, and talk about their lives is by providing them with adequate concepts. Concepts are the tools of thinking and good concepts improve the way that we can think about and make sense of our being in the world. But the opposite is also true. Bad concepts lead us astray and prevent us from making sense of our being in the world. This is how I have come to feel about the concept of gender. As soon as I begin to make sense of what it means to be a man, by using the concept of gender, I feel like I am being led astray. It is not just that the concept provides me with wrong answers to my questions. It is as if the concept prevents me from asking the proper question in the first place.

At the time of writing this introduction there is a large poster ad on my street, right next to the bicycle lane. It is an ad for a major Danish newspaper and it reads, ‘Hvor mange køn er der plads til i et samfund? Skal det være et lige antal?’ In English, this would be, ‘How many genders are there room for in society? Does it have to be an even number?’ For me, the poster is a little Maggi cube of the way that the concept of gender frames much of our thinking and talking about issues of men and women today. It also encapsulates many of my frustrations with the concept.

The ideological subtext of the ad, as well as the reply it is designed to elicit in the mind of the reader, are quite clear. But if I ponder the questions in the ad for more than the two seconds it takes to scorch past on my bicycle, I become puzzled. What does it actually mean? To what is it that I am supposed to give an answer? Is it a question of whether every member of society should have the right to express their identity and satisfy their sexuality in whatever way they feel like as long as they do not harm others? Is it a question of whether the science of biology applies to human beings? Or is the question just a test of whether I belong to a certain segment of society, which is supposedly more virtuous, enlightened, decent, and tolerant than the rest of society?

The ad makes use of a certain kind of philosophical sleight of hand. It is a sleight of hand that I have used many times myself in various situations so I know how it works. The trick is to do two things at the same time: On the one hand, you pretend that you are asking a simple open question. On the other hand, you simultaneously frame the question in a way that has already incorporated certain assumptions thus narrowing the scope of possible, legitimate answers. As soon as the recipient of the question starts pondering possible answers, he is already trapped, because he has inadvertently accepted the premises of the question. He finds himself entangled in the question.

The fact that the question of gender in the ad is posed in terms of quantity gives the question an immediate air of objectivity and science. The second part of the question even makes it seem as if it is some kind of a mathematical problem. But then the phrases ‘are there room for’ and ‘does it have to be’ imply that it is ultimately a matter of tolerance and inclusivity. Just as we see in much of the public as well as academic debates on the issue, the question of the number of genders immediately creates confusion between factuality and normativity, between reason and politics. In this confusion, it is often normativity and politics which is premised to be determining in the last instance.

Having passed the ad now a few times, I think I have come up with a response to the two questions. My answers are, ‘Yes, it has to be an even number. And the number is zero.’ To escape the kind of entanglements created by the question of the number of genders, I have found it most useful to abandon the concept of gender altogether. While gender may appear as a simple word from our everyday language, it also carries with it a lot of heavy philosophical baggage in which we easily find ourselves entangled as we use the word to think and talk about men, women, and related issues. Throughout the book, we shall spend some effort unpacking the baggage of the concept of gender. The main effort of the book, however, goes into formulating ways of thinking and talking about the question of being a man without using the concept of gender at all.

A key reason for abandoning the concept of gender is to create an opportunity to think and talk about what it means to be a man, without simultaneously having to think and talk about what it means to be a woman. The concept of gender tends to carry with it the premise that whenever you say something about being a man, you have implicitly also said something about being a woman. Imagine I were to say something like, ‘Becoming a man is about taking responsibility for your own life, while at the same time honoring the heritage that has brought you into the world.’ For someone thinking within the framework of gender, such a proposition likely elicits questions of the type, ‘So what you’re saying is that women do not take responsibility for their own life?’ The assumption behind such a question is that whenever I say something about being a man, I necessarily imply that the opposite is the case for being a woman. A further assumption is that if the opposite is not necessarily the case for being a woman, I should not be saying it about being a man in the first place.

This is another kind of premise in which it is very easy to get yourself entangled. At least that is my own experience from many private conversations as well as public and academic debates. A typical result of such entanglement is that the conversation moves to a meta-level, where the issue is no longer what it means to be a man, but rather how and whether it is legitimate to pose and talk about this question in the first place. This means that the original point of the conversation is lost. Since most people are not just intellectually but also personally invested in the questions of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, entanglements of this kind are sometimes accompanied by unpleasant emotional outbursts and strong moral outrage. To steer clear of such entanglements, many people take care to talk only about ‘persons’ or ‘human beings’ rather than men and women. Alternatively, they simply just shut up about such issues altogether and keep their ideas and opinions to themselves.

Sometimes you do not even have to be in a conversation with others to entangle yourself in certain conceptual premises preventing you from thinking and talking clearly about issues that matter to you. It can happen inside your head.

A big part of writing a book is to find our voice as an author. I do this by invoking an imaginary reader as I write and then I listen to my voice through the ears of this reader. If a word, a sentence, or perhaps even an entire chapter does not sound right in the ears of the imaginary reader, I scrap it and try a new word, a new sentence, or even a new chapter. This can be a difficult and often even excruciating process. In working with this particular book, I have experienced an additional challenge in this dialectic of going back and forth between writing and listening. I try a particular formulation and I have the sense that it sounds right in the ears of my imaginary reader. Then suddenly I get the sense that a third party is intruding on the process and I hear a nagging, piercing voice drowning out my formulations and preventing my imaginary reader from hearing anything. This third voice is not unlike the voice of the woman in The Red Pill documentary shouting into the face of the man, ‘You’re scum. You’re fucking scum.’ Perhaps that is why the scene from the film has struck such a strong chord with me. It provides an image of an entanglement, which I seem to have incorporated into my thinking and writing.

My inner nagging, piercing voice tends to emerge whenever I use a formulation that may violate certain sensitivities around ‘gender issues’. An example close at hand is the formulation used just a few pages previous to the current one, ‘If you happen to have found it in a library or bookshop in the section on gender studies, please contact the librarian and ask her to reclassify it.’ When I wrote the first version of this sentence, I had a clear image of a female librarian in my mind, so I used the pronoun ‘her’ to capture this image, but then my nagging piercing inner voice interrupted my flow of writing, giving me second thoughts on this pronoun. Is it sexist to assume that a person in a service function is necessarily a woman? Accordingly, I then revised the sentence into, ‘If you happen to have found it in a library or bookshop in the section on gender studies, please contact the librarian and ask him or her to reclassify it.’ This was sufficient to calm down the inner voice, even though I still had a slight doubt about the appropriateness of the order of the pronouns. Should it rather be ‘ask her or him’? Now, as you can tell, the sentence has gone through a second revision reinstating the original formulation, which is less clumsy and truer to my original image.

Three rules for writing

A key purpose of this book is to create a safe space for thinking freely, clearly, and honestly about what it means to be a man without being interrupted by inner or outer voices of moral outrage. The work of creating this safe space for myself as well as for the reader relies on three principles. The principles function as rules that I have tried to follow to the best of my capacity. In this sense, we can think of them as a kind of dogma rules like the ones invented by a group of Danish film directors led by Lars von Trier in the 1990s. The principles also function as liberties that I have granted myself. In this sense, we can think of them as a kind of male privilege that comes with being a man writing a book about men.

#1 Write only about being a man. That is the first principle. The book aims to explore what it means to be a man without basing this exploration on a comparison between being a man and being a woman. To clarify what this means, we shall invoke our first philosopher of the book. This is my second favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

My favorite quote from him is, ‘Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.’¹ We can translate it in the following way, ‘There is indeed the unspeakable. This shows itself, it is the mystical.’ The quote makes a distinction between that which exists and can be expressed in words, on the one hand, and that which exists but cannot be expressed in words, on the other. While we can expand our knowledge about the former by talking and writing about it, we have to adopt a more humble approach to the latter. We just have to wait for it to show itself.

In this book, we shall approach the difference between being a man and being a woman as mystical. It does indeed exist. It shows itself all the time. Yet the book does not aim to make it explicit in words. I shall indeed be speaking about what it means to be a man. But I shall try not to speak about what it means to be a women. Hence, I shall try not to speak about the difference between the two forms of being. Wittgenstein also writes, ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.’² This is easier to translate, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ The principle ‘write only about being a man’ could also be written, ‘be silent about being a woman’. Perhaps this principle is also an appeal to the nagging, piercing voice, ‘I am not talking about you right now, so please give me some silence, as I think about being a man.’

#2 Write only to men. It is my experience that many men speak much more freely, clearly, and honestly about issues related to being a