My dad is a Bill O’Reilly / Donald Trump / William Shatner kinda guy. Now in his 80s he’s total MAGA.
In my twenties, I noticed I really didn’t care about gender norms. Wasn’t into cars or guns or football (was way into tech but this was still in the DOS age so everyone else thought tech was weird).
After Trump I turned in my man card. Real men, society tells me, look like Trump, like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. There are some great guys like Gary out there. But the thing that makes them great isn’t their masculine representation
My hero as a young adult was the NORAD officer at the beginning of Wargames ( NORAD Officer played by John Spencer, seen here) who wouldn’t proceed with a nuclear launch command and kill twenty million people. A friend of mine – and coven mate – talks about an uncle who was a total 60s hippy in the USAF assigned as an Air Force Missileer. He openly admitted to his superiors that he wasn’t going to turn that key for them no matter how dire the circumstances were. He just refused to launch a nuclear tipped ICBM at anyone. They kept him in the position anyway.
This was my understanding of manhood in the 1980s. Restraint. The capacity to hold power without using it. Maybe Atticus Finch bears a rifle to put down a literal rabid dog, but never in circumstances any less dire, and the weapon is put away afterwards. Also taking care of business. To man up (related to pony up ) was to pay bills, to call the utility office to negotiate a late payment to align with a paycheck, to deal civilly with exes and rivals to make sure no one was without power or heat or food. – And then in the 1990s all that became adulting. The bearing of responsibilities had no gender; we were all expected to do it.
Except then in the late aughts came the subprime mortgage crisis, and nearly a trillion dollars was spent defying capitalist theory (that failed companies are left to collapse and their investors suffer the consequences). We learned that if you’re big enough or powerful enough, you don’t have to be responsible. Instead the government will bail you out, even as minimum wage wasn’t keeping up with living expenses, homelessness was rising, and tax cuts to the wealthy were not recinded. It was the era of OWS, who were quietly swept away by law enforcement while the cameras were turned off. It was a sign of things to come.
Now manhood is about raw power. Neitzsche was right: A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is Will to Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof. Manhood in 2025 is the privilege to assert force upon others without concern or consequence, to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and not lose any voters.
The rabid dog is afflicted. It doesn’t have any choice. In 2025, manly men choose violence: They discharge their power to assert their power, showing the world how masculine they are.
I’ve had way too few Garys in my life.
My dad is a Bill O’Reilly / Donald Trump / William Shatner kinda guy. Now in his 80s he’s total MAGA.
In my twenties, I noticed I really didn’t care about gender norms. Wasn’t into cars or guns or football (was way into tech but this was still in the DOS age so everyone else thought tech was weird).
After Trump I turned in my man card. Real men, society tells me, look like Trump, like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. There are some great guys like Gary out there. But the thing that makes them great isn’t their masculine representation
My hero as a young adult was the NORAD officer at the beginning of Wargames ( NORAD Officer played by John Spencer, seen here) who wouldn’t proceed with a nuclear launch command and kill twenty million people. A friend of mine – and coven mate – talks about an uncle who was a total 60s hippy in the USAF assigned as an Air Force Missileer. He openly admitted to his superiors that he wasn’t going to turn that key for them no matter how dire the circumstances were. He just refused to launch a nuclear tipped ICBM at anyone. They kept him in the position anyway.
This was my understanding of manhood in the 1980s. Restraint. The capacity to hold power without using it. Maybe Atticus Finch bears a rifle to put down a literal rabid dog, but never in circumstances any less dire, and the weapon is put away afterwards. Also taking care of business. To man up (related to pony up ) was to pay bills, to call the utility office to negotiate a late payment to align with a paycheck, to deal civilly with exes and rivals to make sure no one was without power or heat or food. – And then in the 1990s all that became adulting. The bearing of responsibilities had no gender; we were all expected to do it.
Except then in the late aughts came the subprime mortgage crisis, and nearly a trillion dollars was spent defying capitalist theory (that failed companies are left to collapse and their investors suffer the consequences). We learned that if you’re big enough or powerful enough, you don’t have to be responsible. Instead the government will bail you out, even as minimum wage wasn’t keeping up with living expenses, homelessness was rising, and tax cuts to the wealthy were not recinded. It was the era of OWS, who were quietly swept away by law enforcement while the cameras were turned off. It was a sign of things to come.
Now manhood is about raw power. Neitzsche was right: A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is Will to Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof. Manhood in 2025 is the privilege to assert force upon others without concern or consequence, to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and not lose any voters.
The rabid dog is afflicted. It doesn’t have any choice. In 2025, manly men choose violence: They discharge their power to assert their power, showing the world how masculine they are.
So I don’t want anything to do with it anymore.
Excellently put, bravo