Keep some distance

Women, for lack of a better term, used to be more or less peripheral to the lives of men. They went through a period in their youth when they were more fixated on women than normal, puberty. But once they contracted their marriages and began living as husbands, that fascination died down and began concentrating on productivity and achievement. In the modern era, particularly in the West, women have become more central and important to men. It would not be wrong to consider this a kind of prolonged puberty that men in the West go through.

This is detrimental to men's identity as men because not only do women have a greater role in defining for him what masculinity means, but they also become in his mind the principal opponents who can challenge his manhood. And his relationship with women becomes his main arena for proving himself. In earlier generations, men did not invest so much power in female opinion and behavior that it could harm their masculinity. Only a man's personal successes or failures or his conflicts with other men could lessen or elevate his sense of his own masculinity. Today, the red pill movement appears to view no other foe on the horizon to men's masculine identity besides women.

Their relationships with women, how they treat women, how they are treated by women, their interactions with them, all seem to have become the definitive basis for asserting their masculinity. They prove their dominance to themselves by seeking to dominate those weaker than themselves. And they prove their strength by punching below their weight class. Muslim men around the world find this embarrassing and rightly so. Men prove themselves in relation to other men by their accomplishments, their skills, their success, and they prove themselves to themselves through their integrity, their honesty, their piety, their discipline, and their trustworthiness.

The way a man treats his wife for most Muslims is just one criterion by which he defines his completeness as a man. But even this is not determined by her opinion, but by the objective reality of her material maintenance and her adherence to the deen. She undoubtedly nags, complains, argues, is ungrateful, misbehaves, all of that. But very little of this, if any, registers on the chart of what he deems significant to his manhood. Men in the old days spent very little time concerning themselves with what women said and did unless it reached a level of genuine disruption.

Both men and women as Muslims viewed their marriages not so much as a personal connection between the two of them, but more as the fulfillment of part of Islam's social function. Single adults were viewed as a potential fitna in the community, and women without husbands were a collective source of concern, worry, and obligation. It's better for people to be married and better for the ummah to reproduce. Both husbands and wives performed their respective roles with taqwa of Allah, not necessarily out of romantic love or desire. Men were concerned with men's concerns, women with women's.

And this approach created more stable, happier, and healthier families. This continues to be the case throughout much of the Muslim world, and it offers the best remedy for the needless drama that's overtaking the West, particularly for Muslims who happen to live there. So let's not pretend that we have all the same problems that the West has. We don't. We have the solutions to their problems.