Beyond Toxic: Five Features of Healthy Masculinity

Social Issues Essay. Intro, and Features 1) & 2). Started 3.13.25; finished 3.15.25.

I am writing today in an honest search for a set of ideas which countervail the noxious sense of petty male grievance goose-stepping its way back through our politics. I very much want to put men back on the search for ideals to strive for, and a sense of how men, whether secular or religious, can orient ourselves towards those that which provides the most durable life satisfaction. Moreover, I’ll try and fly in the face of forces which seek to disequilibriate me and my fellow men, to their advantage. There’s too much noise in mens’ lives, and we can’t hear or see ourselves clearly; small wonder that so much of our thinking and decision-making is prone to manipulation by bad actors and bad algorithms. But on this rock, I build my church.

I can’t speak to Jesus, and I claim no rarified male aptitudes as the basis for this work. But I’ve been the beneficiary of a lot of first- and second-hand wisdom about what constitutes a man in my 38 years here. I’ve been a teacher for near-thirteen years in the New York City public school system - and teachers seldom stop thinking about what it would take to build a better society at the individual level. All of which to say, I’ll help if I can.

I want to start small: five truths (as I’ve come to know them) through which a healthy sense of masculinity can take form. My list of five is neither conclusive, nor closed to edit - it’s just a good-faith effort to write my way into an issue I find myself increasingly preoccupied by. There is so much evidence, from so many sources beyond just the White House, that men have lost the plot on what it should mean when we say, Be a man. And I want to put some urgency back into the search for it.

In advocating for my views on a healthy and sustainable masculinism, I hope to provide a perspective on where some common frustrating male behavior finds its source, and decouple masculinity from the empty pejorative “toxic” in doing so. I hope to grapple with how best to help men live a meaningful and integrated life amidst a divisive, chaotic world. This essay is not an effort to evade responsibility for past harms, inspire a MRM-style counter-movement against femininity, or minimize the crimes for which conventional masculinity is culpable. In point of fact, I very much hope this piece’s conclusions are consonant with the goals of either feminism or masculinism, as currently practiced. The better men we have, the easier all our work becomes.

As the ‘24 election conclusively proved, men do not respond well to direct instruction. It does not matter how on-face logical or well-intentioned the ask is, or how wild the alternative: men are prone to a strand of cussedness which forecloses on the possibility of our ever admitting the need to backseat it for a time, and accept a woman’s belief that she should lead. And in a society founded on hero-worship to acts of rebellion, petty, full-throated resistance has become a conditioned response. 

But I’ll say this: men have been known to change when we see an advantage. 

If a set of circumstances present themselves which are objectively better than a man’s present ones - and he doesn’t feel he’s being coerced or pressured into accepting them - he’ll typically set aside ideology, pride, and whatever else to pursue pragmatism. It just feels good, for most of us, to do so. It’s that aspect of male identity I wish to appeal to. I want to entreat men to change how they see themselves and their circumstances because there’s a better deal available: not because I’m disappointed or upset, or wish to shame my sex into adopting an *enlightened* perspective. I want to put up sturdy, practical reasons for reforming and reconceiving male attitudes towards women and self, and do so in such a way that acknowledges their reality.

If this essay ever feels like an exercise in shame & blame, then I haven’t gotten my point across, because that’s opposite my intent. Some diagnosing and specifying of problems has to be done, but as I say, I’m looking for the affirmative case. I’m looking for things men can do, not insufficiencies they can dwell on.

I’ll speak to the first two of these five features of healthy masculinism today, and I'll post the other three (with some accompanying concluding thoughts) later this weekend or early next week.

Without further ado:

1. THE CENTRALITY OF SKILLS:

My father-in-law, an retired Mexican-American academic and compulsive tinkerer, thinker, and sailor, keeps a quote from author Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love on a desk above his wall:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." 

Every man I’ve admired, my own father first and foremost, has lived by this ideal to some degree. In his 20s, Dad parlayed an assortment of construction jobs across Wyoming and North Dakota into a piece of property in Montana, where he ended up settling and marrying a Kiwi woman and raising two children; all three of us were and are beloved by him, and he put that love into his work, too. He was a curious and capable student of his trade, and to this day, Lee Maxwell retains the knowledge to build an entire house from a plan drafted by his own hand - starting with a hand-built foundation, and finishing with custom-cut rafters and a stone chimney - minus the plumbing and electrical. This is rare and manly knowledge indeed, in the prefabbed, trussed-together, lowest-common-denominator world we live in.

But beyond Dad’s variety of professional competencies, he always modeled a spirit of honest intellectual inquiry for my sister and I. He and our mother read broadly and often during evenings and weekends, and stayed game for discussion on a whole range of political and social topics around our family dinner table. He raised his family on the belief that education, skills, and abilities - led by an inquisitive mind, comfortable in conversation with people from all walks - would serve as the bedrock of a healthy self.

As he should’ve.

For both my father and father-in-law have a strong grasp on a particular truth of masculinity: that our value as men is established in this world by the skills we hone while we’re in it.

Women are born with intrinsic value: their ability to bring forth life through nutrition and gestation from their own bodies is what our species is all about, really, and so a woman’s worth is never in question. The social pressures and expectations unique to womanhood can be stultifying and suffocating in the extreme; nevertheless, womens’ essential purpose or worthiness to inhabit this planet is never doubted.

Men, by contrast, must demonstrate value. They need a purpose - some means of being of use to somebody - since they cannot create life, and are often hamfisted at sustaining it. To achieve a purpose, men must master skills, and present them in a labor market, and historically, this has meant things you do with your hands.

Whether by gradually mastering trades requiring apprenticeship and licensure, or by taking laboring jobs with low barriers to entry, the American man has usually found a method for honing a craft and building a life for himself and his family around it. This is why the trend towards American deindustrialization, starting under Reagan and accelerating under Clinton after NAFTA, has done more than impoverish working people: it has eroded the skilled labor pool and damaged peoples’ sense of self-reliance, and, concordantly, trashed their sense of self-worth. Exhibit A: November 5th, 2024.

You know some version of this story, no doubt; I’ll not belabor the point. I’ll only say that there’s a bright shiny line connecting our society’s progression from anomie to desperation to rage, to the fact that neoliberalism has forced people from tradecraft into warehouse-and-office work. Remuneration from multinational conglomerates, who collude to cut benefits and roll up competitors into monopolies to reduce employees’ labor-power, usually drops off or stagnates under such conditions.

It follows that developing competencies professionally - relational and interpersonal and entrepreneurial skills, as much as manual ones - must be a first priority in building a healthy masculinity. Steady family income is the hinge on which every other opportunity or privilege in the family opens or closes. So whether formalized through a degree or license or apprenticeship, or based in prior experience or personal interest, there should be means available for men to learn new abilities of all sorts.

But I believe we must also consider the value of shared skill-based hobbies here as well, and give them their due. An economy will always be imperfect, and people will always need interests and passions that can sustain them through lean periods at work - so it follows that we think of pride-affirming skills in contexts outside of profession, too.

The “shared” aspect, foremost, is key. Working in competition against others, or in collaboration on some external goal, is a powerful social adhesive: not for nothing do white-collar people fixate on golf, or suburbanites on pickleball, or Alabamans on college football. Identity and shared expressions of interest are latent in these hobbies: so too, then, are opportunities to grow with and through a fellow human.

But a caveat: it’s important that this shared hobby or interest not try to integrate habits from the office, and begin to revolve around profit-making or professionalization. Money - and the power relationships it engenders - can have a corrosive effect on male friendship, and entrepreneurialism around leisure-time activities is worth avoiding.

2. EMPATHY AS STRATEGY:

Empathy has always had a natural home as the virtue of people working as nurturers, caretakers, educators, and religious leaders. In political discourse, it’s frequently brought up as a sort of idyll of child-raising - “If only my kid had Empathy, they could do [x, y, z]!” - while still being understood essentially as women-and-children stuff, antithetical to the work of Real Men. And empathy is a politicized act now. There’s few quicker ways to draw sneer, jeers, or accusations of “wokeism” than to evoke it in a comments thread online. There exists, inside the manosphere and out, a special antipathy towards empathy.

But what’s interesting to me is that the concept of empathy holds two different acts within it. On one hand, there’s a warm connotation placed on the word; the act of inhabiting another’s perspective involves intimacy if you’re doing it right, and so “empathy” as a term has become shorthand for demonstrating all sorts of emotional care.

However, empathy is also an analytic act. This business about “seeing the world through another person’s eyes” necessarily involves synthesizing as many facts about their life as we can recall - then using that synthesis to theorize how they’ll make decisions. Empathy involves the sort of complex, multiphasic tasks which fire male neurons. Men should practice empathic thinking regularly - not simply as a gesture to get in good with women, but as a means by which they can fortify their own decision-making.

And men should know well enough to use it like a tool: not stigmatize it as something that weakens us. Only insecure men, living in fear of influence from others, lack the courage to inhabit another person’s perspective.

In some areas of male culture, I think, empathy is accepted. Good investors, for example, know the value of assessing the behavior, dispositions, and decision-making of a company’s front-office empathically prior to investment. A company’s quantitative value can be exaggerated or distorted, and so well-drawn qualitative conclusions about a leader’s character can hold real value in assessing a company’s actual prospects.

But in far too many male spaces, in-person and online, the word is still a dirty one. This is a shame, because refusing to empathize, and adopting a social posture which deliberately hides or denies the value of empathy, only further drives a wedge between men and women that need not exist. 

I work with Gen-Z women each day as a high school teacher, and the refrain against the "nonchalant” young men in their dating pool has emerged as a singular generational pet-peeve. How and why this word took hold the way it did is unclear to me, but it’s all young women want to talk about when expressing aggravation with modern dating & romance culture. Men have either been conditioned out of emotional expression - or into a flat emotional affect, depending on how you look at it - and, anecdotally at least, the results of this shift are everywhere. In almost thirteen years in the classroom, I’ve never seen womens’ anxiety about finding a suitable partner so high. 
 
As with the crisis in confidence emerging from a devaluation of trades and skills, the crisis in public acceptance of empathy is clear and present. A reification of empathy as strategy, then - creating the belief that it’s something we can do as a means of success in the office or home, not simply because women think it’s virtuous - can be one way to get past the belief that it’s a feminine aptitude.

Regardless of its acceptance as a personal and political virtue, though, empathy continues to have intrinsic value. Without it, we have a hard time seeing each other’s motives clearly and specifically. With it, our world expands. For as with skills and abilities, empathy’s virtue is that it allows for a life of connection and meaning through others - and those connections, once made, have a way of enriching our lives in unexpected and profoundly meaningful ways.

Keep your eyes and heart open, then. Keep striving to see into a person’s thought process, and beyond their public persona.

And keep rejecting the notion that trying to do so will feminize you.
The lie stops holding power, if and when we stop giving it oxygen.

Next time on Hoedown of the Vanities:
Latin phrases, sportsmanship, and the wisdom of Bruce Lee.

More of Maxwell’s Man-Musings:

What "Barbie" Got Wrong About Patriarchy

Femininity In Masculinity