I would never call myself a feminist; most of my views as of 2025 seem indeed feminist, but not all of them. In my view, women are not as oppressed as feminists claims they are, and they are far from being just innocent victims of the old school patriarchy -which they themselves taught to their sons and daughters.
But there are things that feminists are right about. Here is one of them.
Our notion of manliness has an inherent flaw that can never be dissed enough -and it is one of the causes of the so-called male loneliness epidemic. The flaw is that our notion of manliness is more intertwined with the ability to harm and oppress than it should be.
When I say "our", I refer to Westerners born or raised in the industrial era. Whether it had always been so, or how strong an association there is between manliness and oppressing in non-western cultures, is out of scope for this post.
Of course, manliness in all cultures I am aware of is even tied to other things, like self-sacrifice (a notion nearly entirely absent from a woman's life), but these are rather secondary -not to mention often associated with losing your life fighting for the interests of the oligarchs and the powerful.
But what is the first thing that come up in your mind when you hear the terms "man" or "manliness"?
Not sure if there is some research on the answers to this question, but let Google give us its' lights. Check the images returned by Google for the terms "man", "manliness", and "masculinity".
That Google's results typically reflect the users' preferences, and those in turn reflect our embedded societal norms is a disputable assumption (the Internet of 2025 is not like the internet of 2005), but in this case, we can still bet that these images indeed reflect something: our notion of manliness is related to strength, making deals (i.e. imposing terms), aggressiveness, and an ability and willingness to fight (not necessarily in defence).
Our meme culture, and especially the one from the Manosphere, also testifies for this. Even if I only used what I see on popular social media pages and groups as a source, manliness is related to a willingness or ability to enforce your will on someone -which is, in fact, the very purpose of aggressiveness. Which agrees with my impression when I take all my cultural experience into account.^
The picture of a man jumping in a burning building to save a child is less representative to our notion of manliness than a man fighting his enemies to force his will on them, imposing himself on his wife, being the boss of his immediate family, or giving orders to his subordinates at the workplace. TLDR, manliness seems to incorporate a substantial part of dominating over others.
But why is it so?
I am not enough of an intellectual to even try to give a satisfactory answer, but I would suspect there our current economic model plays some role, and there is in all likelihood some evolutionary aspect in this.^ (Read the subtext of this asterisk -it is important).
But humans have this curse: their behavior and mindset are too complex to be shaped entirely by their evolutionary background. Material and cultural conditions influence them a lot, and modern societies are both too busy and too individualist for the old notion of manliness to survive as is.
As some anthropologists have noted (Ian Morris is an example), pre-industrial societies did not view of hierarchies as bad, and one result of that was that women were more willing to be obedient; in their mentality, and unlike the modern one, having their husband or father to restrict them and dominate over them was not a catastrophe. Hence that they raised their sons to become oppressive and their daughters to become obedient.
But as times went by, a combination of material conditions (pre-industrial vs industrial) and cultural ones (pre-enlightment vs post-enlightenment, pre-cold-war vs post-cold-war^) paved the way to a society where women are less willing than ever to "obey" a man. And given that many people stick to the perception of manliness as forcing others, and especially women, to do things, this does contribute to the so-called male loneliness epidemic.
The male loneliness epidemic is mostly an illusion; women are equally lonely -the percentage of single men and women is roughly the same. But there is a loneliness epidemic, with the divorces being frequent, and the percentage of people who have never been in a relationship on a constant rise. There are a lot of contributing factors here, but here is one: sticking to the notion of manliness as an ability to bully, oppress, and force others to do things.
Let's normalize not tying manliness to harming and oppressing as much as we do, and see where that leads.
We may even try to associate manliness with fixing and liberating.
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^ Yeah, the same cultural experience gives me the prism under which I perceive posts on social media in the first place, but isn't our experience subjective anyway?
^ I mostly dislike evolutionary explanations -and always fiercely hate how they are (mis)used. All class-kissers of the powerful and the oligarchs evoke evolutionary explanations as support for all that is unjust about our world, seldom if ever taking into account history, geography, culture, or politics.
But there is even something else I dislike in evolutionary explanations: they are too flexible to be useful. You can use them to explain or even justify any fact of life if you try hard enough (even contradictory ones), and you mostly don't have
to try hard. Here is one example: the ones who play golf tend to live 5-10 years longer than the average. The reason for this is entirely the fact that the ones who afford to play golf have high incomes, and mostly come
from backgrounds that also had high incomes. Good nutrition, less stress, better healthcare, and the epigenetical benefits of your mother having the same pros when she was pregnant to you are into play. You can easily dismiss
all of this and claim that golf-players live longer because the upper class has evolved to have superior genes. How does that sound? Dumb, heartless, untrue (see Musk and the Kardashians and see how superior
the genes of the upper class are), fallacious (implying that social position is gene-dependent, and that life-span is determined exclusively by genes), and simpleton-minded, all at the same time? Well, most evolutionary explanations are like that, but with extra steps and less eye-glaring fallacies.
^ The cold war shaped our mentalities in ways even most intellectualls don't even begin to conceive. In their attempt to demonize communism and everything associated with it, the elites demonized collectivism and altruism, promoted unristricted
individual freedom (or corporate freedom, repackaged as individual), and went as far as to deny societies even exist at all and claim that only individuals do. Thatcher's statement was the epitome of how cold war propaganda shaped the Westerners world-view.