Now Even Men Are Offended by Gentlemanliness 

I guess nobody wants to be a simp, but does anyone want to be a gentleman? 

When writing a book in 2016 about male rites of passage and Catholic anthropology, I took great pains to show how an effeminate culture of men makes it impossible for boys to become men. But let’s clarify what effeminacy is. Yes, there is a relatedness to “feminine,” but effeminacy is not a positive addition, becoming “more womanly.” It’s more the negative: becoming “less manly.” Strictly speaking, effeminacy is usually understood as a vice for men. Effeminate men are unable or unwilling to sacrifice themselves. Aquinas basically defines it as being soft. 

This type of “softness,” Aquinas makes clear, is related to those who recoil or retreat from what is good: the failure to persevere, though not just for any reason. “Now a thing is not declared to be soft through yielding to a heavy blow,” he says, “for walls yield to the battering-ram.” In other words, one is not soft when the thing really is a heavy blow. Rather, “a thing is said to be ‘soft’ if it readily yields to the touch,” Aquinas writes. And what touch exactly does an effeminate man yield easily to? Aquinas answers: “an effeminate man is one who withdraws from good on account of sorrow caused by lack of pleasure, yielding as it were to a weak motion.”  

But, ten years after writing my book, I never thought I would find myself so alarmed and disgusted by young men that have become effectively the opposite of soft. I wouldn’t call it “hard” per se, that men are now of the persevering sort. Rather, it is a hardness of heart specifically toward women, a sort of “giving up” on women, really. If effeminacy can be found in the unwillingness to sacrifice as much as it can be in the physical lack of ability to do so, these “hard” men could be dorks or gym bros and jiujitsu studs, but they are in fact effeminate in their refusal to consider deeply a man’s call to honor women, a call deeply embedded in Christian culture under ideals like chivalry and gentlemanliness. 

Of Bonfires, Rehoboam, and Wild Women  

In the big world of the weird wild web, I was alerted to an exemplary flare-up on X caused by The Pillar’s Ed Condon suggesting that men remember that marriages rarely begin because a man articulates a relationship of authority and submission, but approaches a woman in, well, fear and trembling. Because women can be “wild,” he said.  

The resulting maelstrom (malestorm?) in the comments was a proverbial teenage tantrum. Perhaps the first two comments with tens of thousands of impressions will suffice as examples: 

The insults and dismissals and blame continued longer than I was willing to read, but you get the gist. These men are mad at the state of women as they see it, and they’re mad at anyone that might suggest they’re part of the problem.  

These boys are bitter and, thanks to the so-called “manosphere,” they have been given tools and articulations of “manliness” that make them feel strong again. They blame women, and are sure that anyone who disagrees with their brash and bold declaration of truth is complicit with the lady-hydra of modern feminism. It comes through the vernacular of the internet, which requires overconfidence, certainty of solutions to complex problems, and emojis. They know the architecture of longhouses, the playbook of female narcs, and the road back to sanity: real manliness that must balk at the sort of humble, fearful respect that Ed Condon proposed. Like Nietzsche’s disgust with Christianity’s humility and self-sacrifice in the face of our obvious potential and might, so too these men think calls to gentlemanliness are simply cloaked surrenders to gender-equality ideologies that undermine hierarchy, reduce men to co-women, and might even lead to the worst of things, which is women not conditioned for their most important role in life: the sexual fulfillment of men. Many of these men are perfectly decent (besides the porn, phone, and video game addiction) and suitable to become the heads of the bodies of women—if they would just submit to it all. 

Now, there is real pain and stress out there. Something has snapped, and it does seem harder than ever for young people to find their way into stable family life. But it’s always been hard. I know firsthand how complex and difficult it is out there in the so-called “dating world,” but these internet crusaders don’t have the answers they think they have. Psychologists call it “the illusion of explanatory depth,” when one believes he understands complex problems far more than he really does. 

The most startling personal example was with a young man at a bonfire after a conference. I was trying to go to bed, being the old man I’ve become, but then I found myself literally getting in the face of a young man insisting he recant something he said: for his own good, not mine. It wasn’t because he had personally insulted me, but that he had revealed an intellectual and practical error so dangerous it just had to be defeated. His offense? He had proposed that, due to the “marital debt” and a woman’s call to submission and a man’s headship, it is impossible for a man to rape his wife. No matter the force, no matter the conquering of will and body, no matter the pleas to stop or wait from the defeated woman, it could never be a rape. She could not refuse, and he will not be refused. This is the thing, he said, that feminism has made us forget.  

So, I lit a cigarette and poured another glass (or Dixie cup).  

Slowly, a few young men came to his defense. And, slowly, I was surrounded by men that had the thing none of those young guys had: wives. The men with wives, you can bet, knew better from a mere intuitive level (call it poetic knowledge formed in reality) that this man’s position was vile and unchristian. I won’t rehash my more intellectual argument that I gave these young men (that pulled in Aquinas’s teaching around the intellect’s need for the sense data of the body as the best lens by which to see the hierarchy of a husband and a wife—not to mention, the clear rebuke of marital rape in the Summa). Instead, I just want to point out again a similarity I’m seeing in these situations online and in real life, which is the rejection of counsel from those with experience combined with a narrowed, oversimplified, and reduced (I won’t say “distilled”) vision of authority and submission.  

One comes to realize that the sort of “manliness” defended by men like the ones I encountered on retreat is like the “reason” of a mad man. Recall Chesterton’s quip that the madman doesn’t lose his reason, but loses everything but his reason. These young men seem to have lost everything but their articulation of headship. Which, of course, doesn’t mean they’re manly; it just means they can speak and operate in a small circle of “manliness” where everything makes sense, enemies and villains included, and they can do the quintessential act of boyish men: blame others and refuse counsel and correction.  

Let’s talk about the blame first. 

First, a man with advanced experience knows the man he’s talking to and his position, so saying something like Ed Condon’s “generation” messed things up is intellectually lazy. I know it covers a lot of ground, but never speak to a man about what “his generation” did. Prudence deals in particulars. Do the work of it. This means: listen to those who have the experience you lack. 

They also speak a lot about the blame feminism deserves, but in my experience, feminism—though not without its major flaws—might not be as powerful as it seems. I think it has a relatively easy antidote in the presence, example, and love of good men. The lies and disorders of feminism seem to operate in the vacuum of absent men. It fills voids left by lesser men more than it conquers the treasure houses of good men. 

As to refusing counsel and correction, I would point out that an ideal of modern teenagedom is the “generational clique” of basically the same group of people you entered kindergarten with. Unlike traditional societies, industrial and technocratic societies tend to divide by age and not by sex. Our internet dweebs may self-segregate more by sex, but they still lack the maturity that wisdom and responsibility require. An ideal teenager is neither responsible for anyone under him nor receptive to authority over him. There, in the middle, they maintain an immense amount of foolishness, especially if they get simmering over the opposite sex together. 

These internet bros remind me of Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, who is responsible for such a foolish insistence on his strength and manliness that he causes the dismemberment of the Davidic kingdom. Upon ascending the throne of his father, Rehoboam was approached by people seeking a lightening of the taxes and labors required by Solomon. Rehoboam requested two days to think it over. He “asked advice first of the older men that had been courtiers in the lifetime of his father” (1 Kings 12:6). So he went to the experienced generation first. They recommended yielding to the request of the people, since the demands on them were extensive; Solomon’s temple and lifestyle required much. They point out that such benevolence would yield a loyal and loving populace in the long run. In other words, the truest sign of authority and strength is mercy and gentleness.   

“But he left their advice unheeded,” Scripture tells us, “and took counsel instead with the younger men who had grown up with him” (1 Kings 12:8). What a “wise” teenager he is. Their advice? Make life even harder! Assert authority. Strength. They will submit to your strength. In perhaps one of the most telling and clichéd moments, they recommended bragging publicly about the physical makeup of Rehoboam and Solomon, with a strong indication they meant to brag about the size of genitalia.   

Behold the mighty strength and wisdom of boys who know better than their fathers.  

So, Rehoboam went to the assembled people and repeated the message of his friends. They will submit. He is strong. And a revolt ensued that divided David’s kingdom forever.   

It might also be worth noting that Rehoboam’s son, Abijah, who came from the favorite of eighteen wives (and sixty concubines), became a mighty man and victor in war. Lots of muscles, glory, and women. He also “walked in the sins of his father” and was explicitly not devoted to God (1 Kings 15:3). He was not what Christian men would call a gentleman, even if he had the ability to defeat men and attract (or control) women. I bet he would make a “successful” male influencer today.  

Christians Are Gentlemen 

One of the greatest things Christianity gave to men specifically was clear instruction on how to treat women. Although now we’re accustomed to the accusations of controlling patriarchy, it was the early Church that was radical with women, not in its articulation of submissiveness or authority, which isn’t as complicated as many people make it out to be, but in its call to honor your wife as a sister in Christ.   

In a homily on the famous Ephesians 5 verses, for example, St. John Chrysostom has beautiful words that strike the heart of a man. This is my twentieth year of marriage, and these words humble and even shame me in their truth and beauty: 

But the partner of one’s life, the mother of one’s children, the foundation of one’s every joy, one ought never to chain down by fear and menaces, but with love and good temper. For what sort of union is that, where the wife trembles at her husband? And what sort of pleasure will the husband himself enjoy, if he dwells with his wife as with a slave, and not as with a freewoman? Yea, though you should suffer anything on her account, do not upbraid her; for neither did Christ do this. 

We should be good at this. But why aren’t we?   

Yes, the childless, unmarried influencers out there are like Rehoboam, projecting confidence in front of crowds and destroying the hard-won cultural infrastructure of their fathers. 

Yet, if we want to respond to this crisis, it isn’t so much that we should attack the errors as rebuild the cultures and relationships in which these things are handed down as wisdom, from fathers to sons. That young men are not asking for and respecting the advice of their fathers is a serious problem. But the true scandal is in the orphaning of these boys by a generation of men. That’s on us. We’re letting the internet raise them. We won’t be able to walk up to them and just tell them to stop being dorks online. Though that might help. The more important thing is to build the trust, customs, and communal stability that provide the power of a rite of passage, the entry of a boy into the brotherhood of men, the community of fathers. As we say at Fraternus, we need fathers to be brothers again for the sake of their sons. Then, from that place of confidence and strength, we should send a young man out to get the girl: with fear and trembling.  

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