Authenticity Man

On that male vulnerability, male literature, male emotions thing going around

---

Photo by Maëliss Demaison on Unsplash

0.

She could tell I was faking it.

There's a certain protocol that the two of us observe, beyond coos and whispers and bite marks lovingly mapped out like some foreign dance routine over her skin. Everyone who's been in this dingy room before us knows it; the place is a dilapidated shack off road, with no pretensions about its decor or place in society.

I tread her curves lightly, touching where I know her husband’s touched her the night before. I know because she tells me.

I'd met her in a chat room that bore a similar resemblance to the tattered, smelly walls that now enclosed us. It was rotten, filled with lonely sluts and old fucks looking for the one last pleasure that poverty and stupidity couldn't deny them. A circle of hell if there ever was one, and I sometimes wonder what I was doing venturing there in the first place. God probably knows, but He’s not telling me.

As she holds me, I think that if there is a God, He must be laughing his ass off right now.

She'd been brief. Introduced herself. Told me about her lazy bitch-ass husband, how she'd been aching in no uncertain terms to do something like this for a long time. How he always took her for granted. How it made her want to do the same. Described in detail all the nasty things she'd bring home to him from me. Her idea of an anniversary gift, I suppose. Charming lady. Sometimes I admire my own impeccable taste.

We’d decided on the time and place five hours after we'd met. It seemed like five minutes. I'd only brought one stipulation: that I wear a mask, some way to camouflage my identity. The standard disclaimer. She bought it without complaint: apparently she'd been there and done this with people carrying fetishes far worse than masks.

In retrospect, there’s a lot that could have gone wrong. I was too fast, too eager. Could’ve been a catfish on the other side of that door, an extortionist or even just a simple gangster who could have made my life hell with a little blackmail and a little pressure. Or worse, she could have been ugly. Don’t talk to strangers, kids.

But I guess I got lucky on this one.

That night, I'd told my girlfriend that I had some late-night work to do. She didn't bat an eye that night, which was weird, because she usually knows when I'm lying. I have a bunch of tells. I sweat. I breathe. I clench my fingers tight around whatever I’m holding. A reasonably competent cop could figure it out in seconds. My excuses, my artifices- they're all useless against her, which only quickens my pulse even more.

I can only guess at her reaction if she knew what I was doing here. But I push the thoughts out of my mind. I’ve been pretty good at avoiding things lately.

She's crouching over me now, listening to my irregular breathing, feeling my heartbeat pulse inside her. I've picked a pumpkin Halloween mask this time; a cheap rubber one from the dollar store, smelling like the nasty stuff I assume condoms are made of. But it apparently still doesn't conceal the emotions I must be projecting now, this tired sense of futility mingled with despair.

She looks at me with something approaching concern. I don't need her pity; I don't need her thinking of me like some lonely fuck who can't even get it up in a cheap motel. I don’t want to be the person that needs the empathy of some bitch screwing around on her husband, of all things.

"Is something bothering you, baby?" she whispers, her breath hot and foul. Her breasts press against my chest with the weight of a torture device, her clasping thighs the turning screw about to undo my pelvis.

I wonder what to say. It’s a beautiful thing when a woman’s heavy weight is on top of you and she asks you what’s wrong. It’s a beautiful thing for a moment, lying to a woman you love so you can pretend to be honest with a woman you don’t.

“No,” I whisper, my fingers clenching her sides tight, making her whimper. “Nothing at all.”

-from a word document I found on my computer titled simply “untitled-3”. This story was titled “#6- faking it”. Like most of the other stories in that word document, it was unfinished. I think it was fanfiction of some kind, but I don’t remember what book, TV show, or anime inspired this one. The dates are unclear, but I may have written this in between high school and college.

---

I.

Photo by Evelyn Clement on Unsplash

In July, author Andrew Boryga wrote a Substack post on the subject of male vulnerability and authenticity in fiction that went viral, generating over several hundred collective likes, comments, and restacks.

Much like Alex Perez before him in 2022, Boryga (using less inflammatory, though admittedly less funny language) pointed out something most people at least functionally interested in literature know- the state of publishing in 2024 is, and has been for a noticeable time, decidedly un-male. It’s one of the few industries where women undeniably outpace men; I don’t know if the statistic Perez cited of 80% of agents, editors, and publishers being white women is accurate, but a simple Google search showing the industry breakdown invariably shows the “female” slice of the pie being bigger than the “male” no matter which way you slice it.

Alex and Andrew’s takes have been one of a small but rising wave of authors (some of them even white women) to question where all the straight men have gone in literary fiction, where the only noticeable mainstream straight dude authors people can think of offhand are David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, J.D. Salinger, or that jerk who wrote I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. ¹

As the “where have all teh literary menz gone” question has bounced around the internet, it has been positioned in different frames depending on one’s prior sympathy for men: Either men are being pushed out of the literary world by a group of schoolmarmish woke hall monitors, or men are just a bunch of insecure toxic masculine bros who would rather write some fascist nonfiction about the Roman Empire than (gasp) deal with feelings or try to have empathy for others.

But I want to highlight Andrew’s post in particular for engaging the issue with an open, honest salvo:

As a straight male bookworm—which is a breed of person that I find is rarer and rarer to encounter in the wild these days—it makes sense to me why men like myself have tuned out literature and turned toward podcasts and self-improvement books, as Tobin notes. 

To me, it has less to do with men not having an interest in exploring themselves and their fellow man, or their relationships with women, on the page, but rather, men feeling like that exploration isn’t worth it because the result will often be ignored, panned, or rejected.

While less humorous than Perez’s explanation involving woke white college lady publishers with their tote bags going to lunch and brunch, it’s something that Boryga and other male writers from lower-class backgrounds (importantly, not marginalized backgrounds) can confirm hearing from agents.

Andrew explains it deeper thus:

You see the thing is, that vulnerability, that rawness that people seemingly want, may very well sound too rough, cringy, uncultured, un-PC, un-woke, or whatever the hell you would like to call it. Those stories might include characters, for example, who use words like bitch to refer to women, or characters who think often about women’s bodies and sexualize them in their minds or in real life, or characters who are violent and mean, and cruel, as men can often be. They may include characters who use the wrong words of the day, and perhaps are oblivious to the new sets of words in the first place, or hostile to the idea of some random body of disconnected people having the power to determine a set of acceptable words and hold everyone accountable to them. 

In simple terms: The characters and the writing, particularly when it comes from the perspective of working class men, won’t always sound like what white, upper class women (the women who make up the large majority of editors, agents, and readers) will expect, or more importantly, want, men to sound like. 

Unless you were living under a rock for all of human history, there’s certainly a case to be made that a lot of male behavior is not particularly likeable or sympathetic to women (or even, frankly, other men). There’s certainly arguments in favor of being concerned how much of that kind of behavior we’re interested in modeling in society, towards the next generation of hairless apes that share our hopes and dreams. There’s certainly space to argue in favor of a “healthier” masculinity that eschews the rougher parts, the darker parts, the sexual parts. ²

But the people who would prefer to see less misogyny and brutishness in their fiction would also be the last people to deny it exists in real life- if anything, they’d be the first to bristle at other people saying MeToo went too far or sexism has been solved or Sports Illustrated is woke crap now or whatever. And so you have this liminal space where male misbehavior is an inextricable, foundational part of male reality, yet simultaneously something men themselves are discouraged from exploring in fiction except in the most circumscribed terms- a contrast that stands out all the more in the wake of a societal push to ask men to be more emotional, more introspective, more authentic. We’ve asked men to dig within themselves and ask what being a full-rounded, complete man really means to them, but who said the answers they came up with had to be something heartwarming? No, if anything, after so many years of arguing that violence, domination, and cartoonishly gross sexuality are the inescapable hallmarks of patriarchal masculinity, why are we surprised when a man’s authentic inner life may contain all the things we blamed him for having in the first place?

We write about dragons, ghosts, and magic because we know they are not real. We don’t write about men’s shadows because we know how real they are.

---

II.

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

There’s a passage from an old Jay Caspian Kang essay on gambling, The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High, that I’ve always returned to:

For example, I could tell you that during a 36-hour period in July of 2006, I lost $18,000 in Las Vegas. Or I could tell you I once picked through every corner of my car, including the grating underneath the spare tire, for five dollars of spare change so that I could make the minimum bet at a blackjack table (a bet I lost). And my interest in divulging these details would not be to instruct or to edify, or even to elicit empathy from fellow addicts. My interest would be to rip open my suffering heart and show you its beautiful beating, and in this way, I might think of myself as having been more alive than you, my hopefully horrified reader, were at a similar age and time.

Part of this is probably the vainglorious and all-too-human impulse to draw comfort from others’ misfortunes. For all of my life failings, I’ve never lost a significant sum of money in poker chips to a beautiful stripper while my girlfriend was in the same building, and reading about some other guy doing it, well, feels good.

But the passage also resonates with me more for its comfortingly stark admission: it offers a line of hope that sometimes our shadow selves can be compelling in and of themselves, and for men living on the margin of the politically incorrect belief that women merely need to exist to be valid while men have to earn it, what better opiate could exist?

Kang doesn’t exactly sugarcoat his own addiction in this personal essay, yet you come away hearing his plea that there was something worthy that could be mined from the entire sordid affair: another human being’s “suffering heart” with all its “beautiful beating”. He asks you to believe that there’s something readers, despite being “hopefully horrified”, could nevertheless respect in his sins, even while admitting that gambling is inherently just a tax on undisciplined, self-destructive people who are bad at math. How’s that for kicking down Asian stereotypes? ³

Now take gambling and substitute manhood, something at once more accepted yet more sinful. Kang’s gambling tale is just another thread of hope to the budding male author reckoning with his shadow self: the promise that just like illogically losing huge amounts of money for dopamine, writing about one’s authentic loser virgin status or internet porn addiction or affection for sexist jokes is actually beautiful in its own way, or at least worthy of publishing to a mass audience.

In a perfect world, it would be that way.

---

III.

Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

Of the hundred-plus comments left on Andrew’s post about male vulnerability in fiction, the vast majority were supportive, even cathartic. But there were a few (ostensibly female) dissenters, who pointed out bluntly, baldly, that such “authenticity” in the service of highlighting toxic and retrograde behavior they’d already seen a lifetime of only strengthened their resolve to never read another male author ever again.

To be absolutely clear, I’m not intending to put these women on blast here; I believe in the free exchange of ideas and the right for anyone to dislike what they don’t like. If I told you there aren’t any authors I’ve ever boycotted myself, some for reasons far pettier than perceived sexism or racism, I would be lying. You can choose to believe this is sarcasm, but I do genuinely respect the courage it takes for anyone to publicly post a comment that unflinchingly lays out one’s own prejudices, as well as posting a dissenting comment in the obvious midst of a prevailing tide, and these women pulled off both at the same time very well. They have my admiration in that regard.

And so I welcome their honesty, the last piece of the puzzle that dovetails nicely alongside Andrew’s post. The reason we don’t see much of this stuff isn’t a mystery; it’s because women themselves have said they don’t like it, and if (some) women have the institutional power to decline to read such pieces (or stop such pieces from being unleashed upon the helpless public), they will of course do so, and most men in turn are at least aware enough to realize that reality. And frankly, I don’t really blame them. Power is like money- what’s the point of having it if you can’t use it once in a while?

#NotAllWomen, of course; there were also many female commenters and restackers expressing gratitude and interest for the opportunity to read more male pieces showing authentic male vulnerability, in all its imperfection and ugliness. These women should be commended as well for speaking their thoughts, which could easily be interpreted as heretical if they ever escaped the environs of Substack, and by all accounts, their interest seems genuine. Still, when it comes to straight male writing in this moment, it seems that cultural and institutional power leans with the first group of women rather than the second.

So, is authentic male interiority inherently doomed to be rough and raw, rimmed with violence and domination and caveman grunts? Is it inherently going to be misogynistic and objectifying, the land of bitches and pussies and chasing tail? Is it inherently less emotional, less put-together, less nice? Is it something less if it doesn’t include those things?

I was, as I’ve stated elsewhere, the second-generation child of “traditional” (read: not American liberal) immigrants, with a bookish, slight build, extreme shyness, and a noticeable inaptitude for sports. These were not traits that earned me much stereotypical masculine acclaim from classmates, parents, or society alike. I can lay claim to multiple instances where I was pressured to show interest in more stereotypically masculine pursuits instead of reading or video gaming, or to be more “manly”⁴. I was accused (?) of having a crush on a girl by bullies, whom I didn’t really, but it still sucked when she said “Oh god, no” in response. I struggled with making friends. I’ve felt bad about getting rejected by dates for girls. I’ve been called gay. I’ve felt like being single sometimes made me feel like I wasn’t a real man. I read Harry Potter and I also read Harry Potter fanfiction despite knowing guys don’t do those things. I’ve even taken a couple of creative writing classes.

Those are all things I could write if I were to write a piece about what masculinity means to me personally. It would be authentic, in that nothing I’ve written was false. All of those things happened to me and they happened in part because I was male, even though I’m aware gender roles and bullies and feeling bad when you get rejected aren’t uniquely male things. I think my maleness would color those experiences and the way I write about them in a way a female author’s identity wouldn’t (and vice versa). The way I view being bullied, the way I view not playing sports, the way I view reading and gaming, the way I view being rejected for a date: all of that intersects with the social and internalized experience of being male in ways that don’t necessarily map neatly to that of the female- something I’m sure feminists themselves, in the vein of Kimberle Crenshaw, would be happy to point out.

But more importantly, all of these things coincidentally involve me being the victim of someone or something else, rather than the other way around. It’s funny how that works.

And I think you can see where I’m going with this. Stories about our righteousness are one thing, but what human being among us has lived a life that is totally righteous? What man, indeed?

Do we do male misbehavior a service if we do not grapple with the fact that a lot of it speaks to some unpleasant but all-too-real impulses that descended not from the sky but from the darkness of our hearts?

If we tell a story of our lives that is authentic but also studiously curated, at what point does it become merely, as Jean-Luc Picard famously warned Wesley Crusher, a truth up to a point? And while all writing, all art, must inevitably be curated to some degree, at what point does simple editing and scope become something more?

---

IV.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

What Andrew’s post calls for, as he says, is for us to accept male voices in all of their authenticity- an authenticity that doesn’t necessarily have to be explicitly misogynistic or violent or domineering, but an authenticity that’s grappling with its own rough edges and will inevitably be imperfect in ways that differ from the ways women’s authenticity (or trans folks’ authenticity, for that matter) are imperfect.

Yet ultimately, the implications of his call reverberate not just for men in publishing, but men in the entire arena of grappling with their thoughts and emotions at a time when a good number of those thoughts and emotions have been put under the microscope of public opinion. His post was aimed towards the realms of fiction, but I’d bet money it also lit a match in men who struggle with worrying about being acceptable, about being safe, about being non-dangerous and non-toxic and not one of Those Guys. Men who- despite everything they’ve heard about patriarchy and privilege and bears in the woods- worry that they’re the Other, not just in fiction, but in real life. Men who want to know, just for a moment, that the parts of themselves that they’ve been told to hide from society- not without reason!- still deserve to exist, to be, if not good, then at least valid in some fashion. We are all sinners, but no absolution has ever been achieved through silence.

But part of being a man is also realizing at the end of the day that you cannot truly *make* anyone be there for you, that the dragons and demons inside your heart will not magically become cute and cuddly even if you begin every one of your shadow thoughts with an acknowledgment of your male privilege and a promise to “speak out” whenever you hear someone else using bad pickup lines. Perhaps deep down, we know the obvious: that things that make people feel bad aren’t the same as things that make them feel good, and are we as men truly masculine if we demand that people accept the worst parts of us while also wishing those same parts free of judgment?

So for me, there’s a kind of different kind of discomfort too. Not the discomfort from the female editors and publishers who have to read our male fantasy wishcasting replete with nubile, empty-headed damsels and thots for the taking, but a discomfort on the part of all of us men who read Andrew’s words and wished that all of us could be accepted, all the male vulnerability, male messiness, male emotions, all of it; not just the sympathetic stuff, but also the rough stuff, the edgy stuff, the bleak and violent and pornographic stuff, in fiction, in reality.

It’s one thing to claim that you can’t be authentic about growing up male because the publishing industrial complex doesn’t like your phenotype, but it’s another to admit that in fact, there are parts of your male shadow self that you’ve kept sealed away from the public, not out of any particular need to be stoic and fulfill the tenets of daddy’s toxic masculinity, but more because you worry that there’s something dishonest about trying to write about locker room jokes and internet pornography and asking people to love you on that basis alone. We are all valid, of course, but some of us are and always will be more valid than others.

Of course, when I say those things, I myself am flawed but lovable, just a temporarily embarrassed normal dude who deserves sympathy and understanding and not scorn, and anyone with a brain could see that. But the jock bullies from high school, the irony-drenched hipster, the sneering male feminist, the bitter incel, the sprawled-out wino leaving a trail of stank piss on the linoleum floor of the 7 train to Queens, how many of those men have I ever truly 100% accepted in spite of their flaws?

And I suppose there’s something about male honesty, in a way, that shrouds as much as it shares. The feeling that no matter how much you listen, it can always get worse. If a dude admits, sotto voce, he looks at porn but honestly, like, only once a week, it’s no big deal, you’re going to assume he’s jacking it Monday through Friday 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, weekend hours available on request. Like a cheater who swears he’s reformed and it was only one time and she meant nothing, babe, the more shameful and sordid a disclosure, the more you have reason to suspect something worse lurking underneath. (How many times have we heard in the era of “The Future Is Female” that men have had “enough chances”?) Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. More to the point, with men, it always feels like there’s always something to hide.

As an example: There’s a reason the “male feminist”, the self-effacing ally who leaps with joy to argue that he is the source of all the wrongs in the world, is a much-lampooned trope on both sides of the aisle. It’s not that his self-flagellation can’t ever be honest; it’s that such honesty often betrays something more insidious underneath, an honesty rooted less in a love for women and more for a seething hatred for a boy that never had a chance to grow up in a post-sexism world, a boy who through the act of pointing out that men can never, ever be victims studiously ignores himself. There’s certainly a practical and political use for that particular kind of honesty, but as Tony Tulathimutte pointed out in his short story,⁵ it’s rarely attractive or compelling in any way that truly matters, even to feminist women themselves, because it’s an honesty that attempts to run cover for your deeper girl-pleasing dick-wetting desires, the kind of honesty that makes you dishonest about the fact that you think you’re a good guy when you’re not. It’s owning who you really are, but not really. Not really.

(Then again, as I write this, I also wonder: are those of us who criticize the left-leaning dominance of modern publishing prepared to also accept the male feminist’s awkward, piteously woke self-hate as a form of authentic male vulnerability, even if it politically opposes the authentic male vulnerability of a pallid incel who thinks feminism is cancer spread by 1’s and 2’s who can’t get laid? Why am I far more offended by the male vulnerability of the simpering Nice Guy who actually goes outside and tries to friend up women, however imperfectly, rather than the male vulnerability of the loser that checks out, stays home and watches interracial porn?)

I’m reminded of how guys frequently joke about hoping their loved ones will delete their browser history in the event of their untimely death. There’s an undercurrent of reality in such jests that goes beyond caring about the abstracts of internet privacy, because if we truly believed that our shadow selves had something valuable to say in and of themselves, we should all be proud to shout our unredacted browser histories the same way women these days are encouraged to #ShoutYourAbortion, to reclaim the shame from something once thought shameful. But unsurprisingly, we don’t. It’s an admission, cloaked in joking not-really-joking irony, that there are parts of us we would prefer not to be radically honest about, not because they’re too girly or gay, but because they’re uncompelling in only the way certain heterosexual parts of the id can be. Shame doesn’t always have to be shameful- but sometimes, it also just is. What more can we say?

---

V.

Chris Jesu Lee (a writer I unabashedly admire) has written about a similar phenomenon in Asian American Psycho, asking in essence why much of mainstream Asian American literature these days, with a few exceptions, is noticeably, well, milquetoast.⁶ Bland, successful protagonists with understandable but not-too-revolutionary racial resentments, framed in an inoffensive PMC pastiche noticeably bereft of the blood and guts and raw crudity of Asian-Asian media like Oldboy, Parasite, and Squid Game. Chris calls for all of us, Asian and non-Asian alike, to interrogate the discomforts and the family-unfriendly fantasies and what we really think about white (or other) people when no one is looking. To Chris, in an era where Asian-American literature is intended as comfort literature, it needs to make us uncomfortable as well.

One could go the easy route and say: America and Asia are just different, the old trope of America being a place that’s more outward while Asia is more repressed. America has more outwards-facing violence and sex and drugs and crime but is deeply puritanical deep down, while Asia is a super safe and buttoned-down society but also has the truly off-the wall crimes and sadistic game shows and hentai that puts anything ever filmed in a California studio to shame.⁷ To be sure, it’s a reductive stereotype and one that has been analyzed to death by people far smarter than me with way more receipts and counterexamples. But it’s also one that has a certain allure to a young Asian-American male wondering why he’s denied the kind of sympathetic-unsympathetic darkness and unrighteous-righteous rage afforded through the Asian-Asian media that everyone is suddenly hoisting up with pleasure- and as the international audience numbers for the aforementioned Oldboy, Parasite, and Squid Game showed, liking the vicarious, affirming thrill of bloody violence and betrayal and deeply fucked up revenge didn’t even require you to be Asian.

And so it’s tempting to read Chris’ post about the flaccid inoffensiveness of most Asian American literature as a call for edginess for its own sake, a kind of affirmative action for the Seung-Hui Chos and the 2channers of the world, to break through the Nice Quiet Asian Bamboo Ceiling and unleash the same inner Asian selves that Parasite export back to us from overseas.⁸ But I don’t think that’s the whole story, because if that were all, it would be nothing for me to scribble out several thousand Honor Levy-honest words of Fuck shit chinky Asian yellow white black dick virgin ass geisha gook racist tits ad nauseam and release it to the world, waiting for the world to fete me for my bravery just like that one kid who simply wrote BLACK LIVES MATTER in all caps a bunch of times as an application essay.⁹

What I see Chris gesturing at is this: Asian-American messiness, Asian-American nihilism, Asian-American psychofuckgeishayellowwhitefever is valuable to literature not just because it’s edgy and “honest” and cuts against the grain of what society expects, but also because to bear that honesty out in a way that salvages something from all the gore and hate requires a sensitivity of the soul that is at odds with the whole darkness-as-authenticity enterprise, and perhaps a writer who can successfully summit these treacherous peaks is a writer more skilled than one who cannot. Jay Caspian Kang’s essay on problem gambling spoke to me because it was real, but can I deny that some level of writerly skill-craft-whatever-you-want-to-call-it was involved in transmuting the act of throwing away $18,000 for no reason into something compelling, and that there is a difference between a gambler who tells his story like a Jay Caspian Kang and one who tells it like a BossmanJack?¹⁰

Because let’s be honest- if you want to read something raw and tortured and offensive and tragically real right now, there’s nothing stopping one from closing this tab and typing “Elliot Rodger manifesto” into Google. You can do it now if you want, I’ll wait.

While Elliot did himself no favors in the court of public opinion the day he decided to argue with bullets instead of words, would we really be lining up to sympathize with- or even seek out- his angry hatefucking prose regarding ignorant females, even if he’d never taken a single life? I think we all know- Asian-Americans, and men, and all of humanity- that certain sufferings don’t emerge from the womb with a glistening placenta of sympathy by default. Certain honesties require, if not their own lies, then perhaps a bit of massaging, a bit of exploration, a bit of that secret sauce that separates the storytellers from the guys just reading off a teleprompter.

Perhaps it isn’t so much that we blame the world for being unable to grapple with honest feelings, whether Asian American or male or both; maybe it’s just the simple realization that honesty is a currency some of us don’t really know how, or want, to spend. Chris points out the all-too-relatable desire to be liked that many Asian-Americans, never mind writers, suffer from, and how it ultimately neuters them into portraying only the circumscribed kind of Asian-American vulnerability that audiences might want to see, and I nod and pump my fist in recognition. But then I, too, also suffer from that insidious disease of wanting to be liked, Ichiro Kishimi’s book notwithstanding. So who am I to throw stones?

And Chris’ call for the soul of an Asian-American literature unwilling to compromise, and the reasons why it hasn’t existed for so long, serves as an equally uncomfortable thorn to the corresponding question for male literature brought up by Perez, Boryga, and many others. There’s clearly a yearning for unvarnished vulnerability from a male perspective that shouldn’t care about being liked by the cool kids of the day, but what if the most authentically unflattering thing about some of us dudes is admitting that we do desperately, pathetically want the ugliest parts of our manhood to be liked by the same people that call it toxic and unpublishable? As Alex Perez pointed out:

Masculine writing = writing about heterosexual male concerns from a non-feminist point of view. It doesn’t mean that the masculine writer can’t be a feminist or write about feminism or whatever, but he can’t care about not being seen as a feminist or an ally…If a man is worried about what feminists will think of him, he’s not a masculine writer because he’ll never be able to write honestly about the male condition.

What I believe Perez is getting at isn’t that just that the punishment for daring to write about authentic male vulnerability is disproportionate and unfair and motivated by the casual misandry of Barnard grads who order $12 mimosas in Bushwick. What he’s drilling down to is a stand against the kind of male writer who fears those consequences. He’d prefer to live in a world where the inflated prices of simply writing an authentic male perspective don’t exist, but he’d also prefer to live in a world where men have the conviction to damn the torpedoes and write what comes to their heart anyway, instead of throwing in the towel.

I don’t think that Perez is necessarily saying men should martyr themselves for their art, but perhaps here, when he defines masculine writing, he’s speaking not just about the actual words, but the resolve of the writer who writes them. The writer who has the courage to say “Yes, I know this story about men competing with each other to rack up dates with chicks of a certain race is going to get shit on seven ways to Sunday, and I still think it deserves to be submitted and published.”

It’s not that I don’t admire Perez; his descriptions of the modern publishing scene are as hilarious as they are acerbic, and I’m no fan of the ultra-woke myself. I found myself cheered by his interview, gladly agreeing with all the broadsides he lobbed at Big Publishing and Progressive-Writers-Men-Bad-World. Also, he’s a damn good writer. But having written all this stuff about how I worry that some of my own personal darkness is just too dark, not just for shrill Brooklynites, but for everyone as a whole, would he agree with me? Perhaps honestly writing about the straight male condition in 2024 necessitates this kind of self-reflection in a way that previous eras didn’t, but that feels as much like a cop-out cope, a surrender to the Empire, as anything else. In trying to express my own clumsy solidarity with those who argue we need a more truly authentic and scuffed male vulnerability, have I ended up proving them right in the worst way?

---

VI.

As I read this essay, I realize I’ve committed one of the greatest sins of writing, a sin so endemic that it’s often touted as a virtue.

It isn’t written for the kind of guy who’s ready to do something about the problem. Not really. It’s written for the kind of guy who’s never been the first to raise his hand, the guy who overthinks everything to death, the guy who thinks worrying is a substitute for doing because for him they end up consuming the same number of calories anyway, the guy who thinks stoicism is cool and then goes full neurotic on anything with a pulse. It’s written for the kind of guy who agrees with everything everyone says about men needing to be more out there, men being turned aside, men getting left behind in ways that escape the patriarchy, men not being everything they could be, and then worries that the things he has to say aren’t good enough.

I’m speaking, of course, about that sin known as writing for yourself.

Andrew Boryga told us that if we wanted more male vulnerability in fiction, we’d have to accept that vulnerability on our own terms. And I’m immensely grateful to him and everyone else for putting that fact out there, an inescapable truth we can’t run away from if we want to believe that having male voices in fiction means anything other than an empty, half-hearted affirmative action slogan.

But I also realize, after writing hundreds and hundreds of words, more than I can ever remember writing for any class assignment or research paper, that the one vulnerability that really mattered, the only person’s terms I truly had to accept before anyone else’s, was mine. That’s it. No more, no less. Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others. What right do I have to compel others’ honesty if I can’t model my own?

Because that guy is me. I’m the guy who worries and seethes even as I agree men should write more. I’m the guy who opens up Word documents and then stares at the blank screen for hours. I’m Elliot Rodger and I’m also Phaedra Starling, the bastard second-generation son of 4chan and Tumblr. I’m my parents and I’m also their son. I’m the guy who wrote unedited crossover fanfiction and vapid, misogynistic damsels in distress and dreams that are other people’s nightmares. I wrote exactly what I thought a young man, who took a couple of creative writing classes and then never wrote anything meaningful for over a decade and then tried to pick it back up and found it rusty but felt he needed to say something anyway because it was his time, should hear. I’m the guy I wrote this essay for. I am that man.

Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash

---

1. By this I mean authors that inherently remind one of straight dudes, not just authors who are straight dudes themselves, hence why I am not using examples like, say, John Green.

2. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I dislike the well-intentioned phenomenon of “healthy masculinity” despite being the kind of person who should support it most in theory, and the reasons why probably deserve their own long-ass post.

3. Yes, it’s also a stereotype that Asians gamble a lot. But I’ve noticed that that particular stereotype is largely unknown amongst most Westerners who see Asians as a model minority. I’ve always appreciated Kang’s essay for showing how self-aware Asians are of their own gambling proclivities.

4. Video gaming is one of those things that’s distinctly very male and yet also very un-masculine. Funny how that works.

5. I hesitate to bring up Tony Tulathimutte because his very existence is a counterexample to the argument that truly authentic portrayals of inner male ugliness are verboten in literary fiction. Also, the dude writes ten thousand times better than I do. But given the reception The Feminist received in some quarters, perhaps this reference isn’t too irrelevant to the conversation about undesirable male vulnerability after all.

6. Incidentally, the aforementioned Tony Tulathimutte’s novel Private Citizens is mentioned by Chris as one of those rare exceptions.

7. Hentai? I’m not providing links, but this is the internet, son, and I know some of you know. Just don’t pull a Kurt Eichenwald.

8. If you thought 2chan is related to 4chan, you would be right. It’s a Japanese imageboard started by Hiroyuki Nishimura in 1999, and the forerunner for Christopher Poole (“moot”), a 2ch enjoyer, starting 4chan in 2003. You get the idea. Nishimura later took over 4chan from Poole in 2015, where 4chan users affectionately referred to him as “Hiroshima Nagasaki”. Between being the child of two first-generation immigrant parents and 2ch, any illusions I had about Asians being somehow less racist, sexist, or edgy than Westerners were pretty much six feet under by the time I was in my early teens.

9. I think he got into Stanford, right?

10. BossManJack, a semi-famous gambling streamer and cocaine addict whose main marketable skills are creating holes in his bedroom wall, screaming abuse at his elderly parents, and coming up with flash fiction about fornicating his critics’ mothers, is the dictionary definition of someone you google just to say “yeah, my life is fucked up but at least I’m not this guy.” It remains to be seen whether his recent arrest for assault will change things.