As a side note, has it ever occurred to you that that NUMBness you talk about might affect all of us and it might be a consequence of the way the world around us is at the moment?

Finally, Hugo, I wonder why the insistence on the universality of your perceptions. Why not just tell people that for a certain set of confused young men coming out of your specific culture, you see certain choices as possible. You don’t need to make universal claims; not everyone reads your blog anyway. So why do you?

As Hugo pointed out, there’s no single, culture-wide definition of masculinity. There’s no agreement on what it means to be a man. Instead, there are numerous different groups, each with different beliefs. I’m not going to argue that one of those groups is the one, true group, which has the universal answer for any man.

Any group affiliation can fill this emptiness, even if that’s not the “official” reason for the group. You can fill the emptiness by joining a bowling league, if that’s your thing. Deep philosophical truths can be gained from physical labor. (”Wax on, wax off.” “Shut up and shovel the gravel.”)

It’s all about finding a group you can accept that also accepts you.

“You haven’t spent any time being introspective. You haven’t spent any time thinking about yourself, have you?”

“Where’s your dad? He should be telling you that.”

The boy may well have answered - ”I don’t know where my dad is, he left me and my mum to become a secular hedonist, play Halo all day and hit on my class mates”

What does ring true with me are pieces of the situation that you and jeffliveshere allude to: namely the emotional isolation that so many males experience as they move from childhood to adulthood. This isolation is a toxic and in some ways inevitable byproduct of our patriarchal indoctrination of males, and one which too many feminists dismiss in their determination to view all gender issues through a ‘men are universally privileged’ lens. The damage is compounded by what is at times a psychotically individualistic culture.

I think women can sometimes experience this as well, but not as often and not as brutally as men generally do, due to homophobia, the need to ‘prove’ oneself as a man and internalize violence, etc. Women are in general allowed to retain a much greater sense of the validity of their emotional needs and as a result develop relationships that are more playful, vulnerable, nurturing and more emotionally authentic than those that many men develop.

From this angle, I think your suggestion that males need solely to ‘look within’ to combat the emotional consequences of this enforced isolation is rather like telling someone, “That poison is making you sick! Here, have some more.”

Noumena, your point is rooted in the presupposition that what you call “the good” is defined as “don’t do what pleases you and brings you happiness in life, do what satisfies those who have set themselves up to judge you.” As I don’t accept your premise, why should I accept your definition of “the good”?

Neither the “Leykis libertines” nor their Christian conservative counterparts are much interested in having men do “deep inner work.” The former urge men to indulge their impulses in the name of freedom …. [and] think “inner work” is a load of feminist crap

Because it is bad logic. It is begging the question, the conclusion is placed before the argument. It’s a baseless claim, and no more than “Their priorities are different than mine so they (insert epithet/accusation here).”

Or to break it down further, it is an argument of the form of “They’re a bunch of poopyheads.”

What’s to answer?