The Crisis of Masculinity and Pen and Paper RPGs

Pay careful attention to social trends and you will soon become aware that there is a crisis of masculinity afoot. Men are doing badly in school, badly at university, badly in the jobs market, and are turning to suicide at a genuinely alarming rate. At the same time, young men are increasingly told that their very maleness is 'toxic' and that, irrespective of their own personal struggles and background, they benefit from an inescapable 'privilege' that renders their failures deserved and their successes moot. Quite naturally, this embitters them and leads many of them to turn to conmen like Andrew Tate and internet dead-ends like inceldom, pick-up artistry and 4chan.

This is not an issue of 'men's rights', nor just a 'manosphere' talking point; it is a problem that affects everybody. The relationship between men and women is not zero-sum (it is one of the great absurdities of our age that so many people seem to have convinced themselves that there is actually a battle between the sexes), and the worse men do, the fewer good ones there are for women to pair up with, the more genuinely toxic ones there are to do society harm, and the more sons, brothers, fathers, friends etc. there are who will end up on the scrap heap. This suits nobody, men or women, and as a father with young daughters, I take the issue seriously on their behalf. I don't want them growing up in a world populated entirely by half-baked adolescent man-boys consumed with resentment and ill-will. I want them growing up in a world of fully-formed, decent men.

In her recent, excellent book Feminism Against Progress, the cultural critic Mary Harrington (who styles herself a 'reactionary feminist' - a position neatly summarised here) makes the case that a big part of the problem facing young men in particular is that society has gradually winnowed down the opportunities for older men to act as role models for boys in single-sex groups. As she rightly recognises, boys need to have civilised adult male behaviour modelled for them in order to grow up into proper men themselves. And there is a kind of alchemy that takes place in a single-sex environment that fosters this kind of interaction, and which I think particularly benefits young men - who, in the company of young women, often find it almost impossible to avoid either acting the goat or retreating into their shells. As Harrington herself put it in an interview somewhere (I forget where, annoyingly), there is a certain amount of 'chimp-like' behaviour that needs to take place amongst men, whereby the older, sensible ones discipline the young ones and show them what's what - often, in fact almost always, unconsciously - and it is very difficult for this to happen in mixed company.

The issue is that as soon as you start acknowledging this obvious truth (how could it be otherwise?) you immediately open yourself up to the familiar litany of accusations about being exclusionary, non-inclusive, etc., etc. I have nothing to say to those accusations except that only an idiot would suggest that the sexes cannot or should not mix in almost any activity you care to name, and likewise only an idiot would deny that single mothers (for example) often perform absolutely heroic feats in bringing up boys without fathers around, but that does not mean there is something wrong with - and nothing at all beneficial about - male-only and female-only groupings taking place here and there and from time to time as we make our way through childhood and adolescence.

These issues are illustrated very beautifully and poignantly in Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight, whose plot can be understood as a meditation on the theme of male role-modelling. The main character, Able, fatherless and apparently being haphazardly raised by his brother, stumbles from the real world into one of fantasy - wherein he resolves to become a knight after a chance encounter with a man called Sir Ravd. Sir Ravd - who instills in Able the notion that being a knight means to 'live honourably and die honourably', and to always tell the truth - provides the model for Able's subsequent adventures, and through the book we see Able transform from a boy into a man. Initially (having been granted great strength and size by an Aelf woman) he is little better than a fractious bully throwing his weight around, but through constantly keeping his vision of perfect knighthood in mind, he gradually attains discipline, self-control, and above all wisdom. In the end, his greatest achievement of all - his apotheosis, in fact - is not to kill, but to heal - and in achieving this he becomes worthy of manhood, and marriage, and all the rest that follows. 

This is not a complicated metaphor for the process of growing from a boy into a man - achieving sudden and surprising strength and power as a teenager, as well as plenty of rage, aggression, and good old obnoxiousness - and learning to tame and shape those impulses and eventually hammer them into a usable shape, so they are not deployed for harming others but for doing work that is of value. And achieving that status is, as Wolfe reminds us, the key to the door to so much more: marriage, family life, the contentment of adulthood as one who has made peace with oneself and one's position as somebody who contributes to the society in which one finds oneself a part. The critical point is that it is so much harder to do this alone than it is with role models - Sir Ravds, if you will - to teach and guide us through example, and it is therefore profoundly important that opportunities for such role-modelling are available to the young. Some will call this a conservative or old fashioned or even bigoted position, but it is a whole lot more useful and positive than any alternative vision I know of, and has the benefit of according much more closely with my own experience and with providing us with a plausible account of what we see going wrong all around us.

Which brings us to D&D. Let me say straight away that my earlier comments hold true: only an idiot would suggest that there is anything undesirable about mixed-sex gaming groups, and only an idiot would suggest that deliberately (or for that matter unconsciously) excluding people from any hobby is a good idea. But these things can remain true, even while we acknowledge the other truth, which is that lots of people who pay pen and paper RPGs are men, and that the hobby can itself therefore be a vehicle for the kind of male role-modelling that I am talking about (and indeed, probably has fulfilled this function to a certain degree ever since the 1970s). There is, in short, nothing so terribly dreadful about male bonding and probably quite a lot that is good about mixed-age but single-sex gaming groups from time to time and when nobody is being deliberately left-out. It might even in its own small way provide part of the picture by which the masculinity crisis can begin to be unwound. Should we not at least consider whether it could do?

An anecdote to conclude. I have practiced karate for a long time, off and on. At my club there is a young lad, we'll call him B, who is being raised by a single mother after his father went to live on the other side of the globe. A very good-hearted, sincere kid, he absolutely exudes the air of a lost soul - somebody adrift in life, at the position of having quit school after his GCSEs (the British equivalent, I suppose, of dropping out of high school before graduation), with no idea what to live for other than his natural athleticism and love of sport. His problem in karate was for a long time his tendency to seize up - to want to succeed so much and to perform so perfectly that he would literally sometimes freeze, incapable of moving, for minutes at a time. This problem persisted until one evening, after class, B, a few of the other old men at the club, and our instructor were doing a little extra practice and B (much younger than the rest of us) was afflicted by seizure again. Stuck in the middle of the gymnasium floor, shivering with exertion, dripping with sweat, and just unable to make his arms or legs move, it was painful for the rest of us to witness. But then our instructor simply walked over to him, slapped him quite hard on the back, and said, 'Don't worry about it, B. The worse thing that could happen is that you could die.' 

B instantly cracked a huge grin, we all laughed, and it was like the weight of a thousand planets was suddenly lifted off his shoulders. And he never had that kind of issue again. He was like a different person after that point - much more relaxed, much more willing to smile - and all it had taken was a brusque, probably instinctive comment that, crucially, I don't think a woman would have made in that context. It took a man's instinct for what a younger man needed to hear. And sometimes life is like that for human beings. It is crazy that we have become squeamish about the fact, to the real and lasting detriment of so many of the young.