Longboy
Finding manhood in a manless place
Previously in this chapter on girls:
Femininity as the commonly approved way of balancing sexiness with prosociality.
Femaleness as the commonly feared source of a woman’s power and subjectivity.
Barbie as a story about coming-of-age journey through embracing one’s femaleness and escaping the longhouse.
I want to close this chapter by switching our attention to the boys. We won’t arrive at a full theory of masculinity merely by swapping out a few terms in the formula I used for femininity, but there are instructive parallels. I also want to talk about young men’s reaction to young women figuring out femininity and femaleness, a source of endless trouble and confusion.
Speaking of trouble and confusion: this is an essay about young people and sexuality. Some readers have trouble processing sentences that contain the words “young” and “sexuality” in close proximity. They reflexively look for social sanction1, demanding to know whether I mean 18, 21, (N/2) + 7, age of consent, or prom.
I am primarily writing about the internal experience of young men and women, and how they learn about each other. For this purpose, “young” can mean any time between when these questions first arise for someone and when one figures them out. This understanding doesn’t happen magically at some age milestone.
And to the readers who are troubled by this: this essay may be a strange read for you, but I hope you persevere. Mostly, because it’s about you.
Demonology
Recap on being ladylike: looking sexy and sexually available is tempting for young girls as a “social shortcut”, especially if they’re not otherwise socially skilled. But promiscuous sexual signaling imposes costs on everyone else: other women feel threatened that their partner may be seduced or their implicit negotiation power weakened. Men have their attention hijacked against their will and become resentful when the sex itself turns out to be less available than advertised. Ultimately, the girl herself bears a social cost.
Skilled femininity lies not in suppressing one’s sexiness, but in focusing it. Namely: being sexy in a way that motivates pursuit by a small and targeted group of men and not by other women’s boyfriends or guys who’ll never stand a chance. This involves a lot of signaling of class and subculture, code switching for different audiences, tuning availability vs. demureness based on context, and maintaining plausible deniability about the fact that you’re aware of being perceived by men at all.
The parallel skill that society expects young men to develop is focusing their horniness.
Men’s testosterone levels usually peak in their early twenties and are higher at 30 than at 15. The wildness of teenage boys comes mostly from the fact that they haven’t learned to control or channel their libido yet. Trans men who take testosterone for the first time as adults often report becoming overwhelmed by indiscriminate horniness, likening it to being possessed. Testosterone is a hell of a drug.
Boys’ sexual attention is so promiscuous it extends far beyond the realm of biological women; a few lines drawn on a page could be enough get a young man worked up. I personally don’t remember many details from the year I turned 15, but I remember every pixel of the sorceress in Diablo II.
In an ideal world, the two sexes would develop together. Young women would learn to signal “attractive but unattainable” to most guys, and “worth it if you work hard” to the men they’re interested in. Young men would learn to read these signals and to channel their horniness into effortful pursuit of the women who want to be pursued by them.
In practice, we lock young guys and girls together in a sex-shaming longhouse and expect them to learn to focus their promiscuity while also focusing on calculus.
Growing Up in the Longhouse
Our last post toured the longhouse of Barbie Land and observed two key features:
The longhouse justifies its myriad rules and impositions by claiming they are necessary to protect young women from men. But whether young women need protection or not, the longhouse always protects itself.
The longhouse doesn’t seek to control men so much as to marginalize them. It tells girls what they must do, but it only tells guys what they’re not allowed to do.
As we discussed, the longhouse can operate at different scales. For a young man, this could be his family, the institution he’s enrolled in (e.g., school or university or job), the community he lives in, or the broad culture he’s part of. As long as the system has the two features above, it will make it hard on purpose for boys to become men because men are a threat to the system.
Venturing out into manhood involves trial and error and taking risks. To do that, a boy needs safety and agency. The longhouse seeks to deprive him of both.
Let’s talk safety first:
This is a huge sex difference, and I have little doubt that it will replicate in other contexts. But where exactly is the difference? The way the question is phrased foregrounds the sex divide in the adults, suggesting that men feel overall less protective of youngsters.
So I flipped the question:
The sex difference that matters is in who needs protection, not who’s providing it. Both men and women overwhelmingly feel protective of young women. Only about half, of either sex, feel protective of young men.
Most discourse about promiscuity (and sometimes, even about war2) focuses on the harm to women. Girls are taught to constrain their sexual signaling “for the sisterhood” and, primarily, for themselves. Guys are taught to constrain their horniness or else.
This doesn’t mean that young women aren’t vulnerable; they are! That’s why everyone rightly feels protective of them! The problem is that protecting girls often leaves boys out to dry.
A classic example is “friendzoning” (not to be confused with actual friendship). Boy asks girl out, girl says “I just value you as a friend”, girl gives no other indication of valuing the boy in any way or desiring his friendship, boy says “thanks but no thanks, bitch”. Boy and girl both go on Reddit to ask, “am I the asshole?”
The steelwoman is that it’s unsafe for a girl to reject a guy outright; she is protecting herself while letting him down gently. What’s often left unanswered is: what is she protecting herself from?
The automatic assumption is: from the guy being rejected getting mad. But then, surely the unfriendly friendzoning makes the situation more dangerous, not less. If a guy doesn’t intuit what’s happening, he could persist in trying to “be friends” and will get more aggravated with the time as the girl keeps signaling her disinterest. If he does notice what’s happening, he has much more reason to get mad about the hypocrisy than if he got a polite but firm “I don’t want to date you”.
Most of the time, the girl is protecting her reputation in the eyes of other people, especially other girls. “look at that stuck up bitch who thinks she’s too cool to even be friendly with a guy, who does she think she is?” For a young girl anxious about social approval and unpracticed in setting boundaries and dealing with conflict, this is a very salient threat.
The goal of friendzoning is to shift the social cost of not “staying friends” from her to him. “he was just looking to get in her pants, asshole!”
A young guy can only learn how to read signals and how to pursue girls by trying and failing. By framing every interaction through the lens of how it is a threat to women, longhouse culture makes this experimentation costly and dangerous for boys. It creates a zero-sum game when learning and maturing should be positive-sum.
If a guy complains, “I asked a girl out and now everyone calls me a creep and a loser” he’s unlikely to get much sympathy. It’s not because everyone thinks that asking girls out is inherently evil, but because defending the guy feels like it shifts the blame on the girl. Young girls already feel guilty and uncomfortable about rejecting guys, people understandably don’t want to make their lives any harder.
The only place our guy might find sympathy is the manosphere, the online space that explicitly embraces “we actually don’t care about girls at all” as a core value. That’s hardly useful for becoming a man, unless perhaps as the flyby body in a slingshot maneuver from “Barbie Land feminism” towards adulthood.
Wesley Fenza wrote an excellent complement to my Barbie essay, fleshing out Ken as the tragic hero who is doomed to fall short where Barbie transcends.
In Barbieland, Kens are mortals and Barbies are Gods. Ken’s ultimate crime is that of hubris - the arrogance to think of himself as equal to a God.
One of the central tenets of the longhouse that Jacob doesn’t mention is that men and women are fundamentally different from one another. In Barbieland, women are Gods, and Gods have a role to play. They live in dreamhouses, like the color pink, enjoy all-night dance parties, and have pointed toes. Kens, as mortals, do none of that. Barbieland, much like Olympus, has no defined role for mortals/men, and instead views them as unruly lesser creatures to be managed or ignored. They serve no actual purpose.
When Ken learns about patriarchy, he’s not excited at the prospect of controlling women. The idea that he should force women into anything never even occurs to him. He’s excited at the prospect of throwing off the yoke of the divine order. He is giddy to discover a world outside of the longhouse where men are useful. They have an actual role to fulfill that’s valued and supported by society beyond as playthings for the Gods. That’s why his first move, far from trying to subjugate women, is to try to get a job. He just wants to feel valued.
After several rejections, Ken realizes that what he read about patriarchy was a lie and he’s not any more useful or valued in the real world than he was in Barbieland. It’s only then he returns to Barbieland and commits his ultimate act of hubris. He attempts to overthrow the Gods.
To have a chance at winning Barbie’s love, Ken has to start by becoming her equal. Slavish devotion only increases the distance between them.
Becoming a man requires channeling masculine energy somewhere other than just at a woman. Ideally, into creating something in yourself and in the world that a woman will value. If women really wanted nothing besides loyalty and devotion they would, in fact, be mostly sleeping with robots by now.
Feeling that you are “Kenough” is important, but so is getting a job. I recommend applying at a horse ranch.
This extends to relationships: women need a guy who does things, but it’s difficult and unpleasant to have to constantly tell a guy what to do. Manager-employee is a bad model for a romantic relationship, especially if you have to be the manager. The proof that a man has learned to focus his sexual attention on a woman who is special to him is that he intuits what she wants and does it of his own agency.
Male agency is the greatest threat to the longhouse, which teaches them to suppress it:
If a boy is accused of harming a girl in the longhouse, or even of making her uncomfortable, ”sorry, I thought this is what she wanted” isn’t exculpatory. On the contrary, it’s an admission of the gravest sin — hubris. Gods are allowed to just do things, not men.
The trap here is twofold: progressive feminism teaches boys that men and women are the same (and thus, by extension, that they desire similar things). It also deprives boys of the opportunity to learn what girls actually want — the only way that anything like this could ever be learned: acting and learning from the results of action.
Is it any wonder the longhouse generates boyish resentment instead of integrated masculinity?
Don’t Hate the Player
There are two chains that keep a young man shackled in the longhouse. Once he breaks them, he is free. These are:
Hating girls.
Hating the longhouse.
#1 has been the point not only of my post on resentment, but this entire sequence on femininity. Growing from girlhood to womanhood is more difficult and complicated than most men can imagine. “Liberated feminism” has not made this any easier for young women. It has only shifted the source of oppression from a central patriarch to decentralized female norms, making rebellion all the harder.
A young man must understand that he will be hurt by young women and will get little sympathy for it. But this is not because young women are his oppressors — they are his fellow inmates. And further he will learn that he can take it. Growing into your masculinity requires tripping up and picking yourself back up, making mistakes and making amends. Like Barbie after breaking free of Gloria’s spell, real women want men to succeed.
#2 is harder to grasp. One thing that’s important to remember is that the longhouse does protect children, of both sexes. I recently listened to English historian John Tosh talk about the shift from boys being raised entirely by men (at home and in boarding schools) at the start of the Victorian era, to women getting more involved in boys’ education as mothers and teachers. The main impact of this shift was that boys stopped being physically beaten all the time by grown men, as was the case before women’s involvement.
And protecting young women is important. There are bad men out there, and just a small number of them can cause great harm, and this threat is less visible to you as a man (especially if you’re one of the good guys) than it is to women. The longhouse will always be needed and will always exist.
But most importantly, the longhouse feeds on male resentment. When guys bitch about sexual harassment trainings at work or call having female teachers “gynocracy” or yearn for the days when “boys would be boys” justified constant low-grade sexual harassment, they are reinforcing the longhouse’s own political formula.
A man leaves the longhouse when he stops clawing at the walls and turns his gaze instead to the wild world outside the window, a place of danger and opportunity. He goes there to give everyone, and especially the women who are special to him, and also himself, more than the longhouse would allow them to have. The door of the longhouse was always open.
A wise friend told me once: “a man can get away with being as horny as he wants if it’s matched by an equal lust for everything else in life”. A boy’s horniness is like a blocked garden hose, water spraying in all directions. Manhood isn’t about blocking the flow, it’s about directing it where it is needed — towards the thirsty hoes.
sanction, noun: 1. approval 2. punishment
tags: inspirational
Good stuff here. I was ready to disagree with "the Longhouse generates incels" but there's not actually much here I object to. "Longhouse" is also a pretty brilliant framing inasmuch as it explicitly avoids the temptation to blame everything on third wave feminism which is both the big trap you're getting at and fails to explain why the described behavior patterns persists beyond just the deep lefty girls. Even the title's the kind of goofy thing I'd come up with too.
Also delighted to see my ancient three-lines post make a return.
Interesting. Had I read this 30-35 years ago perhaps things would have been different. I grew up deep blue, actually bought the whole progressive line hook and sinker a long time ago, and detoured through PUA when I finally started in my late twenties, then stopped reading them when they went full Nazi.
Ah well, maybe you'll help the next generation. :)