Masculine Morality

Masculinity is not a social construct. Manhood is not a set of personality traits. It is an innate nature in men that will develop and manifest in either positive or negative ways or most often both. When a boy reaches adulthood, he becomes a man who either understands how to manifest his masculine nature responsibly or not. But either way, he is a powerful creation possessing more inherent power than a woman.

That power may be latent, it may be self controlled and channeled constructively, or it may be wild and destructive. If it is latent, largely unmanifest, dormant, it's still there, and it will emerge eventually. Whether it emerges in a healthy way or not largely depends on why it was unmanifest to begin with. Was it repressed? Was it sabotaged?

Was it brutalized before developing, or was it just unconscious? But almost any mother or sister knows by her own experience that a boy she used to take care of and boss around, at a certain point, he becomes an independent force of nature all his own. Doesn't matter if he was raised by a single mother, by a feminist, if he was surrounded by women all his life. Once he's a man, his nature takes over. Masculinity is not the result of social programming.

At a certain point, we're going to have to recognize that it is highly dangerous to classify any man as weak, as beta, or as a simp. It's dangerous for women to do that with any man that they're involved with, and it's dangerous for men to do it with each other. Those are men you're talking about, and men are the most formidable creatures on this planet. Two of the softest, gentlest, most unassuming guys that I ever met. Mild mannered, quiet, passive guys.

Both of them had been involved with women who took advantage of them, exploited them, used them, disrespected them, thought of them as weak. I met those two men in prison because they had murdered their girlfriends. And frankly, a disproportionate number of the stories of men in prison and what led to their crimes and incarceration involve their dysfunctional masculinity with regards to their relationships with women and their need to prove their manhood vis a vis women. If I were to summarize the nature of this dysfunction, it would be that they overemphasized the significance of women in defining themselves as men and they lost the Islamic criteria of what makes a man a Rajul. The whole alpha beta concept, the shallow traits of machismo, and the whole manly man stereotype is profoundly undermining and reckless and none of it helps men understand or define themselves usefully.

It is not helpful to talk about men in terms of them being either strong or weak, dominant or passive, controlling or controlled, or high value or low value. All of that just makes men try to prove themselves in negative and unhealthy ways. You must recognize, acknowledge, and respect the inherent power in every man and return to an understanding of that emphasizes the moral use of that power in defining masculinity.