Across the Broniverse

Matthew Livelsberger, the man who shot himself in the head just before blowing up a Cybertruck in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, left behind a note explaining his actions. The active-duty soldier’s letter detailed his worries for the nation, which mirror the worries all of us have for the nation: the cost of living, income inequality, and “blatant corruption.”

“Greed and gluttony have consumed us,” he wrote while, somehow, not recognizing that greed and gluttony have been the defining personality traits of the men to whom he pledged his support: Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

He also blamed “DEI” and “lack or morales (sic),” leading to a nation “headed toward collapse.” His note reads like a scattershot mishmash of half-baked conspiracy theories and populist talking points mixed with a smattering of broniverse worry-warting.

“Masculinity is good and men must be leaders,” he wrote. And it’s that sentence upon which I wish to focus.

Let me start by agreeing. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Now let’s break down what I think he meant versus what I mean:

One of the problems with “masculinity” is that we don’t have a good way of talking about what it means to be a man. Hence, we don’t know how to talk about the qualities that make up a man. Because we don’t have an agreed-upon, healthy model of manhood, it follows that we don’t have an agreed-upon, healthy model of masculinity from which to start a conversation.

Apparently, there was a British pop group in the 80’s called Bros*. This is them.

American masculinity has always meant different things to different people. The author Michael Kimmel in his book, Manhood in America, traces differing models of masculinity all the way back to the nation’s founding, when two distinct “types” emerged; a rough analogy might be Daniel Boone and Thomas Jefferson.

Boone was a frontiersman and pioneer whose family emigrated from England to escape religious persecution. He became famous for blazing a two-hundred-mile long trail through the wilds of Kentucky for the purpose of starting a colony to be called “Transylvania.” (The colony was, indeed, founded, although it was short-lived.) Boone’s life was one of outsized physical exploits, including escape from capture by Native Americans. He was the classic American “man of action.”

Jefferson’s model of manhood came more from the European tradition. To Jefferson and many of the Founders, manhood meant physical agility, yes, but also mental acuity. A proper man was a “gentleman,” one versed in the arts and sciences and literature, as well as in the more rough-and-tumble aspects of manliness. This model, too, has carried down to the present day.

Very roughly speaking, the two modern politically parties align themselves along these two axes, with the Republicans patterning themselves on the Daniel Boone model, with the Democrats more aligned with the Jeffersonian model.

Consider some recent Democratic presidents and candidates: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, John Kerry. All thinkers more than doers. Recent Republican presidents and candidates include: Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and John McCain. All doers more than thinkers. Of course, that’s not to suggest that the Democrats don’t “do” and the Republicans don’t “think” (I’m choosing to reserve all obvious jokes for the moment).

I advocate for neither model. Neither necessarily leads to better outcomes. After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway - another example of the two types - were both brilliant writers and raging alcoholics who met bad ends.

Until recently, the two types served different purposes. America was vast and in need of exploring, plowing, and mining. Cattle needed to be rounded up. Wheel wagons needed to be hammered into shape. In our first few centuries, American men (and women) worked with their hands a great deal more than they do now. The Industrial Revolution first altered the location of work from country to city, and then changed the nature of work. Days outdoors were now spent indoors. But it was still a man’s world. Physical factory labor was repetitive, but still physical.

In recent decades, a few commingling trends intruded on this model, which existed, roughly speaking, from the second half of the 19^th century through the first half of the 20^th, when two world wars altered the way the nation thought about the role of women in the workplace. This helped spur the burgeoning women’s right movement, which had been percolating in the background since the nation’s founding, but which gained new traction following the success of the Suffragette Movement.

As women entered the workforce in greater numbers, it led to greater female independence, lessening women’s reliance on men. This has caused men to rethink their purpose. If they are no longer necessary to be breadwinners and protectors, what is their purpose? The answer, of course, is to do the work of humanity rather than the work of “men” or “women.”

Concurrently, technological changes led to more physical tasks becoming automized and outsourced. What used to take a hundred men now takes one or two.

Unfortunately, too many men have invested too much time and energy in attacking the cooperative and creative work of our age as “feminine.” The entire broniverse of Very Online Rightwing Men is devoted to tearing down whatever they view as “feminine/gay” to bolster their own fragile masculinity, so when people talk about working cooperatively to solve our problems, the defenders of the One True Masculinity hear an attack on their autonomy, on their very identity. What is the use of the “rugged indivdualist” in a world that no longer requires such men?

When I talk about “the work of our age,” I don’t just mean work in the sense of earning a paycheck, but the larger work of being a person in the world, in all of its messy complexity. The rigidity of traditional masculinity is hostile to subtlety because nuance rewards careful consideration, which is antithetical to the “do, don’t think” version of traditional masculinity most heavily promoted by the Very Online Men.

When Livelsberger wrote that “masculinity is good,” he’s right. Masculinity is good. But it’s broader and more beautiful than, perhaps, the version of which he was thinking. Not because men are inherently any better or worse than women, but because humanity is broader and more beautiful than we have been taught. And he’s right, men must be leaders. It’s unclear whether he meant men alone should be leaders, but he’s entirely correct to say that we need good men – dare I say, gentlemen – to stand up and be counted. But those men ought to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with women.

We’re going to see more Matthew Livelsbergers. Men like him end up feeling so suffocated by their self-imposed strictures that they sometimes turn to violence as a last-ditch release valve. Thankfully, the only person killed in Livelsberger stunt was Livelsberger, but when another young male opens fire at a school or shopping mall or wherever the next mass shooting takes place, the investigators will no doubt find similar messages of anger and confusion on the devices they leave behind.

Men need help. They need support. But they also need a new vision of manhood, one that celebrates all the great things about traditional masculinity while embracing what is great about the undiscovered dimensions of ourselves, dimensions that are equally our birthrights: empathy, creativity, vulnerability. Women have spent the last sixty years figuring out how vast their own feminity can be. It’s long past time for men to do the same. Or they could just, you know, keep blowing shit up.

*UPDATE: I have been reliably informed by multiple sources that the band Bros is pronounced “Bross,” as the last name of the pictured twins is Goss, and it rhymes with their last name. Also, apparently, they’re pretty good dudes.