The Meekest Man That Ever Ate in Hall

I want to begin with a claim that the people I am going to discuss will think the most insulting thing in this essay, though I do not intend it as an insult at all. It is that there is nothing ancient about them. The young man who has lately taken to calling himself an alpha, who has bought the course and the supplements and the subscription, who quotes a Roman emperor on his telephone between sets, and who speaks of women as a problem in applied mathematics, believes that he has woken from a long modern sleep into something primal, something his grandfather knew and his father was cheated of. He has done nothing of the kind. He has become a customer. The whole apparatus by which he was awakened is a business, and a rather new one, and its product is him.

I say this first because it clears the ground. If the thing were really a return to some older and harder pattern of manhood, one would have to argue with the pattern. But it is not. The men who sell it are not warriors or fathers or priests. They are salesmen with a camera, and the thing they are selling, under the names of dominance and sovereignty and frame, is the oldest commodity of the modern world, which is a method. A method for women. A method for money. A method for the body, with the reps counted and the macros logged. The grievance that attends it, the sense that the world has conspired against men, is simply the advertising; one does not sell a cure without first selling the disease. And the proof that the whole thing is commercial and not primal is that it can be bought, and must be renewed monthly, and comes with a referral code. No tribe ever had a referral code.

Having said that, I want to look at what the method does to the man who buys it, because here I think an old diagnosis applies with uncomfortable exactness. Lewis once described what happens when an education sets out to produce people who are all intellect and all appetite and nothing in between. The head, he said, rules the belly through the chest; and by the chest he meant the trained emotions, the organised and stable sentiments by which a man learns to feel that certain things are shameful and certain things are owed, before he could give you the reasons. The chest is what makes a man feel sick at cruelty, and warm at a kindness, and ashamed to be a coward, without having to calculate it. Take the chest away and you have a creature with a very sharp cerebrum and a very loud stomach, connected by nothing. He called them men without chests, and he thought he was describing the products of a rather dreary kind of schoolroom. He did not foresee that someone would one day sell the condition as a programme and call it masculinity.

For look at what the programme consists of. Above, it is pure calculation: the techniques, the scripts, the openers, the assessments of “value,” the whole cold apparatus of a man treating a conversation with a woman as a chess problem to be solved and the woman as the board. Below, it is pure appetite: the body counts, the conquests, the bare Venus with Eros scraped off her. And between them, where the chest should be, where the thing that would make him feel it was shameful to lie to a girl should sit, there is nothing at all. Worse than nothing. The programme explicitly instructs him to remove it. That is what the crypto-stoicism is for. The emperor is quoted not because anyone has read him but because a few lines of him, torn out, can be made to say that feeling is weakness, that a man’s heart is a liability to be managed, that one must be unmoved. The real Stoics would have been horrified; they trained the emotions, they did not amputate them. But the method needs a man who feels nothing, because a man who feels something might, in the middle of the script, notice that the girl across the table is a person, and the sale would be lost.

So we come to the central lie, and it can be stated in a sentence. The thing mistakes the predator for the protector, and the technician for the lover. The whole imagery of the movement is drawn from the wrong animals. The lion, the wolf, the apex of the food chain: these are creatures that take, and the young man is told that to be a man is to be the one who takes. But every actual tradition of manhood that the race has produced, from the Hebrew to the Homeric to the Christian, defines the man by what he stands between. He is the one between the fire and the children, between the wolf and the fold. The wolf is not a model of masculinity; the wolf is what masculinity exists to kill. A man who has been trained to approach women as a hunter approaches game has not become more of a man. He has changed sides.

And the technician is not a lover. This is the part that I think the young man does not understand and would be ashamed of if he did. Eros, the real thing, is the state in which a man wants not a woman but one woman, this one, and would be insulted by the offer of a substitute, however statistically superior. It is the most particular passion we have. The method is the most general thing imaginable; it is designed to work on anyone, which is to say it is designed to want no one. A man who has mastered the technique of seduction has achieved exactly what the technician of anything achieves: a reliable output from an interchangeable input. He can get a woman. He cannot, by the very perfection of his method, get her, because the method has already decided that there is no her, only a type with a score. He has built a machine that will fetch him everything except the one thing the whole business was supposed to be about.

Now why would anyone do this? The answer, I am afraid, is fear, and the movement’s own vocabulary gives it away. It speaks constantly of frame and control and never being “out-valued,” of not being made a fool of, of the terrible danger of caring more than she does. Put plainly: it is a method for approaching half the human race in such a way that one can never be refused by them. If she declines, the technique was wrong, not the man; if she accepts, it was the technique, not the man; in neither case has he been seen, and that is the point. He is hiding. The algorithm is a hide, in the hunter’s sense, a thing one crouches in so as not to be looked at. And what he is hiding from is not women. It is the ordinary, unbearable exposure of being a man in front of a woman with no script, where she may laugh, or pity, or simply know him, and where the only protection is to have been worth knowing. Lewis wrote that to love at all is to be vulnerable, that the only place outside heaven where you can be safe from the dangers of love is hell, and that if you wrap your heart up carefully enough, in the casket of your selfishness, it will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. He did not know that the casket would one day be sold by subscription. But that is what it is. The programme is a very expensive way of arranging never to be loved.

This is also why the movement cannot produce friendship, and why its gatherings, however loud, are so lonely. Friendship is the love in which two people stand side by side looking at a third thing, with no use for each other. The method can only produce an inner ring, a circle of men bound by their shared contempt for the people outside it, which is the very opposite of friendship and the thing Lewis called the most skilful of all passions at making a man who is not yet very bad do very bad things. The “brotherhood” of the manosphere is not a brotherhood. It is a queue.

And there is the matter of the score. The movement keeps score of everything: of women, of money, of muscle, of followers. The man has a number and is always checking it. I will say the thing as plainly as I can, because it is the whole moral of the essay. A man is never so small as when he is keeping score. The score is the proof that he does not yet know what any of it was for. The knight did not count the ladies he had rescued; the father does not count the nights he sat up; the friend does not keep a ledger. The moment you are counting, you have ceased to give and begun to collect, and a collector is not a man but a kind of purse.

What is the cure? Not, I think, a softer masculinity; the movement is right that something has gone wrong with boys and that nobody taught them, and it is only wrong about everything else. The cure is the oldest one there is and it is called chivalry, and I mean by it exactly what Malory meant when he had Sir Ector mourn over the dead Launcelot: that he was the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies, and the sternest knight to his mortal foe. Notice that this is not a compromise. It is not a man who is moderately fierce and moderately gentle. It is a man who is fierce to the uttermost and gentle to the uttermost, and the two live in him at once, and nature never put them there, because nature does not produce such a creature. The knight is a work of art, of the art that has men for its material. And the whole of the art is in one demand, which is ferocious, and which the manosphere cannot bear to hear: that strength exists for no other purpose whatever than to carry the burdens of those who have less of it. That is what it is for. Not to dominate; not to be admired; not to be “high-value“; to carry. The man who is strongest in the room is the one who should be most on his guard against himself, because he is the one who can do the most harm and is most tempted to call it winning.

A woman who meets such a man does not need to be solved. She can be known, because he is not hiding, and she can refuse him, because he is not afraid, and she can be protected by him, because that is what his strength was always for. The boy with the subscription wanted, I think, to be that man. Somebody sold him a wolf instead, and told him it was ancient, and charged him monthly. He should ask for his money back. The real thing was free, and it was always the harder of the two, and it is the only version in which he will ever be, at the end, meek in hall and stern in the field, and large enough not to count.