In the midst of the so-called “masculinity crisis”, two new books enter the heart of the conversation. In Fatherhood, Augustine Sedgewick traces the evolution of fatherhood through “a succession of identity crises spanning thousands of years”, while in Lost Boys, journalist James Bloodworth immerses himself in the “red-pilled” world of alpha-male boot camps, pick-up artist conventions and social media influencers to understand how these once fringe communities are shaping our culture.
As so much of the conversation about modern masculinity seems limited to snappy, 10-second podcast reels, these two books are welcome interventions and we are in good hands. Sedgewick (author of Coffeeland) is an award-winning historian, while Bloodworth is a seasoned sleuth whose previous work Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain was nominated for the Orwell Prize. They join other thoughtful responses to the debate, such as Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men (2022). If only Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote in the introduction to The Second Sex, that “a man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male”, could see how far we’ve come.
While the term “masculinity crisis” has a distinctly modern, millennial tinge to it, Sedgewick argues that crisis and masculinity have gone hand in hand for centuries. At the core of fatherhood lies a curious paradox: while our personal experiences of fathers tend to be defined by complexity, conflict and often disappointment, our public stories remain rooted in myth and fantasy, built on archetypes of power and authority. “Fathers have often likened themselves to gods, begetting, bestowing, smiting, and saving at will,” he writes. “But for mortals, such expectations can only end in failure.”
At each major historical moment — the rise of Christianity, the Industrial Revolution, the spread of capitalism, to name a few — the story of fatherhood has shape-shifted in order to maintain dominance. Sedgewick artfully examines how this has played out through eight individuals — thinkers, writers, kings and revolutionaries — who have both been shaped by the customs of their times and in turn shaped our preconceptions of what fathers can and can’t do or should and shouldn’t be.
The book’s whistle-stop biographies are highly informative: Plato wanted to disentangle fatherhood from the household, while Aristotle sought to reestablish it; St Augustine taught us the first thing we inherit from our fathers, before we could even say “dad”, was original sin; Freud, perhaps unsurprisingly, then taught us how to hate them. Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Emerson and Thoreau, Charles Darwin and Bob Dylan complete the scrum of eight in what is a rather narrow, distinctly “white dad” line-up, as Sedgwick concedes.
It is a limitation, but one that doesn’t detract from his thesis at large: if we want to create new stories of fatherhood, we first have to acknowledge and debunk its foundational myths. And if we want better stories of fatherhood, rooted in reality not fantasy, better means worse. Fewer superheroes, more dads, Sedgewick pleads.
If Fatherhood shows that the hidden truth of fatherhood and masculinity is that they are concepts we make and can be remade, Bloodworth’s Lost Boys warns us of what orthodox masculinity could look like if it were left in the hands of the “manosphere” — and the extent to which it already is.
Sedgewick casts his eye from a distance but Bloodworth gets up close and personal, grappling with how and why ancient myths of masculinity are being resurrected by certain groups of men who want to wind the clock back to “gender roles of the 1950s”. To the signed-up members of the manosphere, they, not women, are the victims; feminism is out to get them.
Along his journey, he inventories the artefacts that constitute this rather amorphous but pervasive kingdom, and guides us through its linguistic codes: Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks, “looksmaxxing”, Sexual Market Value (SMV) etc. Bloodworth expertly conveys the way the subculture thinks (evolutionary pop psychology, largely) and works (anxiety-based marketing, predominantly) while exposing the contradictions at its heart. “They prided themselves on possessing an absolute fealty to the facts,” he writes, “and then built theories about women based on their subjective feelings.”
Some figures he writes about are so reprehensible I was tempted to google them, but fearing there might be no way back from an algorithmically induced descent into the manosphere, I resisted. But it’s this tension — between wanting to look away and the need to engage — that makes Bloodworth’s book so compelling. That so many men are flocking to these sorts of communities — for a sense of belonging, for the allure of insider wisdom — says something important and we need to pay attention.
There aren’t any easy answers but both books provide a compelling diagnosis of the root of masculinity’s morbid symptoms. Namely, the myths upon which we have built masculinity are not fit for purpose in today’s world. The consequences are too grave.
Perhaps Sedgewick’s subtitle, “A History of Love and Power”, offers a clue. We find it easy to talk about men’s relationship with power, but love, much less so. “To create loving men, we must love males,” wrote bell hooks in her visionary 2004 work The Will to Change, as prescient today as it was two decades ago. “In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.” Is it from here that new stories of men and fathers could begin?
Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power by Augustine Sedgewick Picador £20/Scribner $30, 320 pages
Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere by James Bloodworth Atlantic £14.99 320 pages
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