I've been thinking a lot about Oliver Traldi's recent article in the American Conservative, Does Male Suffering Matter?. It's a review of two books, one of which is a collection of "Cat Person" author Kristen Roupenan's short stories, and the other is Wesley Yang's The Souls of Yellow Folk. Both books, Traldi asserts, are about dating and the way either create or experience pain. Roupenan's stories mostly explore how women experience men these days, and the answer is that women experience men mostly as deeply worrisome mysteries who could "go off" at any moment, and that every straight woman experiences her need for human contact as fraught with the risk of reaching into a bowl full of M&Ms and pulling out that one laced with cyanide. Yang's book is full of profiles of real, mostly Asian, men and the suffering and vulnerability they've experienced throughout their lives.

I have a question: can you tell me what this thing is? No fair peeking at the URL or reading ahead.

It's a diaper bag. The baby doesn't care about the color of the bag that stores his or her spare diapers, wipes, and feeding kit. Even the tag line, "Ditch the Girly Diaper Bag," is an anxiety-revealing pile of horse shit. This is about fatherhood being seen as unmanly, and about care and affection being seen as weak.

Fucking man up, dude. Stride through life knowing nothing, no pink think, no rainbow thing, not even a dress, can take away your manliness. Especially not a baby. Man, you got a baby to take care of? Lifetime tour of duty that starts with long, sleepless nights making sure that kid is warm, fed, and loved? With a human soul riding on the outcome of your decisions? Fucking fuck me, that's as fucking manly as it gets.

You know who makes men suffer?

You know who creates male suffering?

Men create male suffering.

Not women. Not families. Men. Men make the public laws that rule our public lives: Men control the halls of Congress. Men make up the majority of the Supreme Court. The President has always been a man. Men make the private regulations that rule our professional lives: Out of the Fortune 500 companies in the world, men run 474 of them. Men create the bulk of our culture: only 31% of movies featured a woman in the lead role last year, and only 3% of movies are directed by women, and only 12% of top-level roles (producer, sole writer, cinematographer, etc.) for movies are filled by women. For multi-writer staff features, which are now commonplace, men make up 84% of the staff.

I'm going to say something controversial: I believe in binary gender roles. I think there is such a thing as "masculine" and "feminine," and that these roles are useful ideals to have around. They're binary in the way that the north and south pole on a magnet are binary, but if you scatter iron filings around a bar magnet you get these lovely patterns showing islands of stability all around the bar where the filings land. They're binary the way bass and treble are binary, but you don't get music without the range in between.

And yes, I believe that the feminine role, adopted and embraced to its fullest extent, makes a virtue out of nurturing and negotiating, kinship and community, empathy and sympathy, the preservation and nourishment of family, whereas the masculine role, adopted and embraced, makes a virtue out of physical and moral courage, ambition, action, and stubborness.

On the other hand, I also believe that AFAB and AMAB (assigned female at birth / assigned male at birth) people, and everyone who some doctor decided was "ambiguous," all of us, have every right to pick and choose among these virtues and try to live them out to their fullest.

What makes men suffer is other men judging them for not being manly enough. For deriding another man that having a pink phone cover is a sign weakness. For pointing at a dude with a six month old, his lifetime commitment to fatherhood only now coming into view, and laughing because the diaper bag is baby blue.

And you know what really sucks? It's the way dudes just take that crap. It's the way so few men show the moral courage necessary to say, "Fuck you. I got a family to take care of here." It's the way the moral and healthy stubborness of sticking with your decision to be a family man can transform itself into an unwillingness to show weakness even as your health fails.

Oliver Traldi is described as "a graduate student in philosophy." Good. He's young. He closes with this:

Even the pickup artists, with their spreadsheets of ranked hookups and their cold, mercenary attitudes are looking, in their own confused way, for the warmth of human companionship. People don’t, by and large, join and assist one another in order to develop a certain narrative of themselves. They do it because they feel called to, by the fully real other people with whom they’re dealing.

... and my reaction is simply: Sorry, Oliver, you've not lived enough, or lived enough outside whatever system allowed you to afford the University of Notre Dame, to have been out in the real world.

There are men, a lot of men, who aren't looking for human companionship from women. They're looking for relief. They're not "called to fully real other people"; many of them have trouble understanding their own reality, much less that of other people. As Dan Savage once sagely wrote, these aren't men looking to have sex; when puberty hit, sex had them and they've been trying to come to grips with this weird unwanted uncontrolled urgent thing inside them ever since. Nobody helped them understand it. Nobody told them about it. And to the extent that traditional systems try to systematize dealing with it, they fail the minority for whom the system fails and create evermore suffering.

And yes, men are suffering. And the Stoic looks at them and says, "You know what causes your suffering? Listening to other men explain to you that you should suffer." Stop listening to other men. Stop comparing yourself to other men. Listen to yourself for a change. And know that nothing at all can take away your masculinity if you decide that you're a man.

Traldi is adding his voice to the body of men who are blaming women for the narrative of male suffering. He should look in the mirror instead.