What is a Man?

A guest post by Michael Mohr

Hello, my friends! I am starting a series of essay exchanges with fellow Substackers¹, and I am honored to present the first guest post on Sacred Tension by Michael Mohr, creator of the Sincere American Writing Substack.

We settled on masculinity as our topic. In this essay, Michael asks what it means to be a man, and he plumbs his challenging past and the philosophy of Kierkegaard for an answer. This exchange is not meant to be a sermon to the choir but to provoke an earnest and cordial conversation about masculinity between our audiences. If you agree, disagree, or have anything to add to Michael’s position, let us know in the comments section, and don’t forget to subscribe to Sincere American Writing.

Michael’s bio: An author and book editor, I started writing this newsletter in August 2022 out of a sense of frustration with the literary establishment, which seemed to be veering further and further into the extremes of identitarian politics, and away from that gorgeous, elusive thing we once called literature. True Art has always been transgressive and has picked no political side. A true writer is interested in only one thing: subjective truth; nuance; human complexity; asking the deep questions; searching for that elusive idea called meaning. For the last decade I’ve seen that mission slide into obscurity. My mission has been to push back against that.

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A question that has often come up for me—and has again recently—is the question: What is a man? I often consider this because I see myself as a bit of a freak, a paradox, a contradiction in terms, a strange mix of tough and soft, male and female, sensitive and thick-skinned.

I find that when most people in the “general population” talk about “men” they mean this: A boring dude with a bulbous gut who watches sports religiously, thinks women are a little crazy, loves discussing finances and the stock market, brings home the financial bacon for the household, and has a pretty, hyper-female wife and kids of whom he is the boss.

This, of course, is a very outdated—dare I say it: Patriarchal—way of thinking of manhood in 2023, especially for my [Millennial] generation (I am 40). I often feel similarly in this area as I do in politics, as someone broadly “on the left”: I feel condemned by both the Right and by the fringe side of my own “party.” In either of these sides’ eyes I am not good enough.

So it is with the notion of “manhood.” If you ask Millennials and Gen-Z youngsters who live in major cities and who are more on the left side politically, they’ll often refer to someone like me as being a little on the “toxic masculinity” side. Not because I’m a bad guy or an asshole—though my alcoholic teens and twenties tell a more complex story here—but because I am unapologetically “a man.” I have a penis. I am pretty damn strong physically. I am short—5’7—but thick, built like a Redwood. I like women. I have a long, tortured history with women, sex and dating. I have a dominant personality in many ways.

I have many vivid memories from the past of gnarly fist-fights, nasty car crashes, stabbing myself in the thigh two inches deep on accident, not to mention all the absolutely insane things I’ve done in blackouts back in the day. I twice choked two different guys my age until they nearly passed out. I sometimes have a wicked temper. I have frequent violent thoughts, and a certain violent past. I’ve done just about every drug you can think of, including shooting Heroin. I once spit in a cop’s face, drunk, in Ventura, age 18. Etc. I could go on with these silly, petty descriptors.

And yet.

I’ve also always—all my life—been a shy, deeply insecure, highly sensitive human being, a man who is wildly, unusually in touch with his emotions, who is a writer to his very core, who loves to escape through sincere reading of the classics, who is more often than not the more “emotionally needy” of the two when it comes to romantic relationships. What makes me a writer—dare I say an artist—is that I’ve never shied away from Death. It’s always been fascinating to me that we’re all constantly living right next door to death—any of us could die right now, in five minutes, in two years, in fifty—and yet the cultural attitude is to deny this reality with everything we’ve got.

Kierkegaard wrote often about death, anxiety, faith. I’m pulling this from his book Either/Or and also from quotes attributed to him in the book I am still currently reading, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.) He writes about the “immediate” or “inauthentic” men, the men who are “philistines,” who simply play their cultural roles like repressed actors and never look at The Gaping Black Hole That is Our Collective Reality (my language). It takes insane amounts of courage to look at and face death.

Most people look away; they make sure they’re constantly distracted; they are terrified of accepting The End. Yet The End is hovering around each and every one of us every single day. I’ve had enough near-death experiences to understand this on a deep level. I think this is one of the reasons there is so much unexpected social cohesion in Alcoholics Anonymous: We’ve all been right up to the edge, to the brink countless times. We no longer have the luxury, the privilege of pretending. Our lives are a testament—those of us who survive; many do not—to survival.

What takes more courage: Watching sports and distracting yourself constantly or looking death in the eyes? Which one is more “manly”? Is courage not synonymous with manhood? Is expressing emotion and being in touch with your feelings “weak,” or is it ballsy? We learned from Freud, Jung, William James and psychology ever since them that our emotions and feelings drive us one way or another.

Our lives are largely moved by unconscious drives and desires. It’s not like if you sit around watching sports and fucking and going to your 9-5 you’re “evading” either emotions or death; you’re simply repressing them. They’re driving you just as much or more than someone who is a deeper thinker, you just aren’t aware of it. In other words: This type of person is weak, has given up, has ceded all their real power to these unconscious drives. I don’t see how this is a workable definition of “manhood.”

I also don’t subscribe—I know: Complex me—to the Millennial and Gen-Z silliness around this New Age idea: That men are supposed to be “feminists,” that we’re supposed to tuck our dick and balls between our legs and cluck like pathetic ducks. That we’re shot-through with “toxic masculinity.” There’s been a disconnect from day one between what the media told us vis a vis #MeToo about constant *“consent” and being a more sensitive/feminine “man” and what real actual women on the ground want.

I can’t tell you how many dates I went on starting in 2018—after my last long relationship ended—and up until I met Britney, the love of my life, who I’m happily engaged to, in 2022, where the woman and I ended up discussing 3^rd-wave feminism and #MeToo and the state of the “current male” and the woman would almost invariably always say some form of, We’re women. We want men. We want to be protected and taken care of. We want to feel safe. Now, I’m not claiming women today still want some sort of backward Male Savior. Obviously, women have more personal agency and structural power now than they ever have had before in American history. There’s more work to do, for sure; women still have a hill to climb to achieve total systemic equality with men.

And many women nowadays are strong, vocal feminists who have their own high-paying careers, and who pay for their half of the meal (or the whole meal) and who more than pull their weight. This is all a good thing. My point is that, though this all my be totally true—and it is—most women today still, when asked one-on-one, in private, want men. They don’t want weak guys who act like girls. They want to know if they’re walking down an alley at night and a man comes out of the shadows and accosts her, her guy is going to do something to protect her.

Women and men—not to be “controversial”—are biologically and physiologically different.

I know: Gasp!

Anyway. I digress. Back to manhood.

The definitions of “success” in our country seem as backwards to me as the definitions of “manhood.” Success seems to fit into a very narrow straightjacket called materialism. Capitalism at its very worst: If you make a lot of money you’re “successful.” Nevermind if you’re an asshole or have low/no integrity or treat your wife/husband/kids like trash or have no moral/ethical compass; all that stuff is for weak/moral people. You have money, and somehow that gives you that special golden gory sheen of “look at me.”

Ditto “manhood.” You used to play football. You drink a lot of beer. You once did cocaine off women’s tits. Sports is your language. Your 9-5 makes you feel safe and special and secure. A boss tells you what to do and you follow orders.

But how does this exactly make you a “man”? It seems to me it makes you a systemic tool. It makes you someone who has low self-esteem, who can’t stand on his own two feet, who’s just a sheep, a blind follower, someone who doesn’t think deeply or seriously about their own very existence. You’re going to die someday, motherfucker. Die!!!

What does sports have to do with death, the death that could come in 20 minutes or three years or 50? How did we get to this gaudy place in our contemporary “civilized” historical moment where our self-lying is so profoundly effective that we’ve completely lost the human condition plot? How can we sit there idly and pretend we’re anything more than “gods and worms”? (A phrase from Becker in The Denial of Death.) But we aren’t actually gods. We lie to ourselves, telling ourselves the story that we’re gods. Hence materialism, war, greed, power, sex, work, family, politics, sports, culture wars, etc: Anything to distract us from Our Real Condition.

And our Real Condition is ephemeral; temporary; brief. Nabaokov said, in his memoir, Speak, Memory: “Life is but a brief crack of light between two abysses.” This is right in more ways than one. It’s right in the deepest sense; it cuts us right now to the very marrow, the very hard white bone. You can’t escape death. It finds us all. You can, however, learn to accept it. For me, reading Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Camus, Sartre helps. They were aware of the fragility of the stubborn, sad human condition, the metacognition we all suffer from. We’re animals with finite bodies who are conscious of our own consciousness, who are aware of the fact that we’re aware. We’re aware—beautifully and tragically—of the fact that we die. This is what distinguishes us from other animals. Animals live on basic impulses and instincts; Man lives knowing the horrible condition of his truth.

Whether you face that truth or not says everything about you.

Manhood, to me, is looking. It’s not avoiding. It’s ogling Death in the red meaty eyes and saying, Alright; take me. It’s acceptance of The Way Things Are. It’s not denial of our state. It’s not distractions. It’s not sports or money or possessions. It’s not sex or power or greed. If anything it’s the opposite: It’s self-love and self-acceptance, and acceptance of this damned thing we call Life. In order to truly live you have to truly face death.

I can confidently say I am a man.

*By “constant consent” what I mean is the idea that men should consistently ask women “Can I touch you here? Can I take this off? Can I do this” etc. The vast majority of women—in my direct experience, as well as from what they’ve told me, and from what male friends have recounted in their experiences—do not want this. It makes sex feel clinical and stunted. Women by and large want a fun, smooth, adult consensual experience that is organic and obvious, without having to ask a woman twenty times what she “wants.” This turns sex into a sort of weird mechanical job versus an enjoyable mutual experience.

Agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to Sincere American Writing.

1. If you would like to do a post-exchange with me, please let me know! DM me or respond to this email if you are interested. I’m looking for writers with around 1000+ subscribers and who’s work would be of interest to my audience (i.e. your knitting substack is awesome, but not in the wheelhouse of Sacred Tension.)