The Romantic Sex
The Meaning Of Manhood
“Property, houses, land and servants belong to women. Man is only a fecundator, a wanderer, occupying himself with arts, war, or games, or else dedicating himself to an intellectual or spiritual life.” – Alain Danielou, ‘Gods of Love and Ecstasy’.
What does it mean to be a man? That is a question that has occupied mankind throughout most of our history. The Romans sought to cultivate virtus, and the Greeks likewise cultivated andreia, both terms meaning manliness. They distinguished between men, who possessed these virtues, and mere human beings such as women, children and slaves. And many cultures have practiced some form of rite of passage wherein a man learns the meaning of manhood through the harrowing imposed by the rite.
In our own times this question runs as hot as ever, in no small part because of the rampant cultural decay we see all around us. There are no rites of passage today whereby a boy becomes a man, and so many young men suffer from a profound sense of failure. They know that they are meant to become something, but they know not what or how.
In response to this there has grown a veritable cottage industry of grifters and sophists who aim to teach men how to be men. I am talking of course about the Tates and the Cernoviches of online culture, the pick-up artists and dating coaches, “alpha male programs” and all the various cargo cult practices espoused today to make you a man, be it cleaning your room or sunning your balls.
Like many other men of our age I have felt this sense of failure, and I have asked myself again and again what it means to be a man. But the answers that our age gives have never satisfied me. Nor can I say that the answers of the past have fared better, for ancient man is so far removed from us moderns that we can scarcely understand him.
I decided, therefore, that I would have to arrive at my own answer.
A Certain Type Of Man
“If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’.
In venturing to answer the question of what it means to be a man, I came upon a problem. This problem lies in that man does not just differ from woman, but also from man. We cannot stop at merely concluding that there are men – we must also conclude that there are types of men, and that these types vary to some degree in their nature. I found that attempting to formulate a universal description of manhood merely watered it down. Man reduced to his common denominator is no longer a man.
Thus, I chose to look into my own heart and define in what way I experience myself as being a man. One may perhaps ask why I should be of particular interest, and the answer is that I am not. Not as individual, at any rate. However, the individual personality is just a conflux of supra-personal forces, and mine is no different in that regard. While the character of every person is unique they still share certain archetypal patterns.
So I set my sails on precisely one such pattern, the supra-personal force within me that I most associate with my own manhood. In considering that pattern, I could then formulate the character of a certain type of man. It is the type of man that will be most likely to understand what it is that I say and why I say it. It is also a type that I think very highly of, but which is largely ignored by the paltry grifters that teach manhood today.
Before considering this type of man, let us first consider the universal male condition, the facts of life that all men share.
The Universal Male Condition
“For no one, no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. This [the sword] you can trust.” – Conan the Barbarian (1982).
What is it like to awaken to oneself as a man for the first time? It is like being thrown out into a blizzard; like being left to drown in the void; like being a castaway on dark waters. To be a man in the universal sense is to realize the total indifference of the world towards you. That first moment when a young boy understands that he does not matter to anyone, that he must fend for himself in a world that cares not for his well-being or survival – that is the moment when he enters into the universal male condition.
This indifference glares out at the young man from every eye. His family views him as a burden and a failure if he doesn’t immediately prove his worth. His peers scrutinize him at every turn for any sign of weakness. To the state he is a slave to be grudgingly kept alive and bitterly opposed, while to his society he is a beast of burden to be worked to the bone. And to women he is a reluctant resource that must be hectored and nagged for every last bit of value until cast aside and forgotten.
To be a man is to be expected to die for women, for “society”, for “the good cause”, for the nation – for anything but oneself. And it is here that man must ultimately assert himself or perish. He must become a wanderer of the frigid wastes, a denizen of the void, a captain of his tiny raft on the stormy sea. Should he fail in this he will be neither mourned nor remembered.
This is what is meant by the Mars symbol, the symbol of manhood. It shows the spear and the shield, the traditional weaponry of the Greek fighting man. In post-Antiquity, the sword embodies the same symbolic meaning. For what is the sword, if not manliness itself, the virtus and andreia of the Ancients? To pick up the sword means to stop fleeing and to face the world, to dare and to brave, to win or to die on one’s feet. Manliness at its most basic is courage.
Courage As Measured Recklessness
“What is freedom? Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’.
The indifference of the world is the one constant in the lives of men, and the need for courage unites man in a common character. But what courage means varies between types. To some it means very plainly the willingness and capacity to use violence; to others it means squarely shouldering the many burdens society expects a man to carry. And it is here that the type that we are seeking begins to distinguish himself.
Faced with the cold wasteland of indifference, some men will respond with a desire to unbind themselves. They will understand that if they matter to no one then they are also bound to no one. From an early age they will reject the claims of others on their lives, seeing that behind the veil of approval hide the chains of slavery. No talk of duty rouses them, for they have learned from the indifference of life to be indifferent themselves to the concerns of the herd.
To these men, courage becomes the will and capacity for independence. They feel like men when they trust their own judgment, stay true to their hearts and carelessly throw themselves unto strange and uncanny paths. Curiosity, inner solitude and a desire to wander in the broadest sense of the word – these are the virtues that these men cultivate. To them the sword is trust in oneself.
And what do these men find after having cultivated their own peculiar virtues? That the indifference of life is transformed into an intoxicating freedom. To be bound by no duty and claimed by no man means that one can throw oneself out into the strangest currents of life. It means that one can be careless in one’s passions and promiscuous in heart. Courage, then, begins to resemble a measured recklessness. One learns not just to soar, but to desire to soar above all else.
That desire is one of the supra-personal forces I mentioned before. It is the spirit of levity, and we will henceforth know it as Sky.
Sky: The Spirit of Levity
“The myth tells again and again how [Dionysus’] fury ripped them loose from their peaceful domesticity, from the hum-drum orderly activities of their daily lives […]” – Walter Otto, ‘Dionysus’.
When our man awakens to his nature and begins to get a taste for the intoxicating freedom of life, he will begin to relate to life differently from others. His tastes and inclinations develop such that he becomes an enigma to others, and they to him.
He will find himself more and more at odds with his peers. The community begins to play a much smaller role in the life of our man than it does to others. He grows more solitary and nomadic, more likely to stray away either within himself or into the outside world. He grows more jealous of his independence, more willing to seek conflict to maintain it, more able to bear scorn and contempt. Social life appears stifling and demanding, and is felt to be intolerable if there is no space for privacy and solitude.
Ordinary life feels like a distraction to him, and will grate on him more and more. He does not avoid the daily maintenance of his being, but it is seen as something trivial, something unworthy of serious attention. His eyes glaze over when faced with the practical concerns of daily life; he goes through the motions but is not truly present. He works only in short bursts between periods of leisure, and if he must work without this autonomy he finds it absolutely excruciating.
Instead of these mundane concerns, he lives rather in his heart and his mind. He is fascinated by impressions and ideas, is more sensitive to the aesthetic than the practical, cares more for value than for utility. He is given to fantasy and contemplation, building elaborate dream-worlds where he can play and soar. The only time work does not seem meaningless to him is when he brings these worlds into waking reality, and he will wither without some creative, spiritual or intellectual outlet.
Through this whole approach to life there runs a single binding thread – Sky, or the spirit of levity. What is Sky? It is the mode of life characterized by a light heart and a free soul, by the dreamy and the visionary, by recklessness and adventure. It is characterized by frivolity and surfeit, by the spirit as opposed to matter and by the claustrophobic desire for independence from everyday life and its suffocating responsibilities. Sky is the unbound and the unbounded, life-as-boyhood, and the essence of the Puer Aeternus.
To embody Sky is therefore to be shaped and possessed by this supra-personal force of living dream and unbounded play. All people embody this to some degree, but men to a much greater extent than women. Women do not possess the same courage, the same measured recklessness and thirst for independence that men do.
Sky, therefore, is a decidedly masculine force, and the type we have in mind derives the lion’s share of his masculinity from Sky. This is not to suggest that there are no other such forces which give rise to masculine types, only that this is the one that concerns us.
We have seen how Sky relates to solitude. But though man may be alone in the world, he is not on that account the only one in the world. There is a second type of human, the complement and contrast to man. I speak of course about woman. To fully understand our chosen type of man, we must understand how he relates to woman. We must therefore understand the universal condition of woman, and of the force which contrasts Sky.
The Universal Female Condition
“The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.” Camille Paglia, ‘Sexual Personae’.
If the male condition is defined by cosmic indifference, the female condition is defined by the limitations of the body. Woman is not alone in the same sense that man is, nor does she have to fight in the same way that he does. Instead, it is the fact of her body which looms over her and defines the way in which she relates to the world.
The most glaringly obvious aspect of this is pregnancy. Pregnancy represents not just a profound transformation of the body – of the physical self – but also an immense danger to woman. It renders her vulnerable in ways that a man is not, and leaves her largely at the mercy of men. This is not a vulnerability which ceases with pregnancy, for with the birth of the child her burdens have just begun. If he wishes, a man can return to roving when the passions have died down. A woman cannot.
We understand therefore that woman is far more dependent on man for her safety and survival than man is on woman. She cannot afford to throw herself recklessly at the world like man can, for it would mean the death of her and her offspring. Instead, she must find ways of securing from man the requirements for her survival.
Should man ever find himself in this condition, he would perish. The cosmic indifference would never let a dependent man live. But woman manages and even thrives under these conditions. Her secret we find again in her body, for woman arouses in man a desperate desire to love and possess. It is one of the great ironies of Nature that the independent sex should desire the dependent. Arousing this desire can be very dangerous for a woman, and yet it is also the leash by which she may bind a man to her will.
This capacity to manipulate and seduce extends even beyond the realm of sex. Woman can excite sympathy and pity, and make others care for her and her safety. She is armed with a natural gregariousness, and contrasts man’s nomadic and solitary nature by being wholly a creature of the tribe, the family, the home and the community. But as with all things woman, this comes at the cost of her independence. She has no choice but to immerse herself in the petty power plays of social life.
We must then consider that just as the types of men are defined by how they handle the indifference of the world, the types of women are defined by how they handle dependency. And while there may be many ways for a woman to deal with this existential condition, we notice something very interesting.
Dependency itself is anathema to Sky. It is the spirit of gravity, which we will fittingly refer to as Earth.
Earth: The Spirit Of Gravity
“And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the Spirit of Gravity – through him all things fall.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’.
“It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze.” – Camille Paglia, ‘Sexual Personae’.
What is Earth? We have arrived so far at the conclusion that woman is burdened by cares. She is burdened by the conditions of her body and the vulnerability of pregnancy; by the needs of children; by her dependency on men; and by the demands placed on her by the community. She must fret and worry about material conditions and social expectations, about the practical matters of mere life, about the management of domestic existence.
This spirit is what we call Earth, and what we mean by this is the mode of life characterized by needs and musts, by worry, greed and calculation. It is conformity and dependence, seriousness and gravity, banality and everyday responsibilities. It represents the limits of matter and conditioned existence. This is the polar opposite of Sky and its playful freedom, and Earth is precisely how woman will appear to the man who is dominated by Sky.
He will view her as a vicious and dangerous thing, a creature that ever threatens to pull him down from his perch above the clouds and into the miasma of mundane life. She appears as a responsibility and a prison, like a devourer and a looming death, and our type strains against her influence. And yet, he still desires her as all men do. This is a chimerical desire, the dream image of a woman who can join him in the skies. It is the dream of woman as muse and grace, but also as femme fatale and love goddess.
Why is this significant in understanding our type of man? Because the attitude that he takes to woman is precisely the attitude that he takes to life. He views the world as a place that threatens to trap him in mundanity, but he also sees in it the possibility of something extraordinary, something intoxicating.
Why do you think Mark Antony was so enamored with Cleopatra? It was not her beauty, but her capacity for play that seduced him. Just as our man struggles to realize Sky in woman, he likewise struggles to realize Sky in life itself, in ordinary life. He therefore wants life to be as he wants woman to be – an adventure, a muse, a playmate. In short, he desires romance, for existence to be romantic.
Thus, we dub our type of man the Romantic.
The Meaning Of Romanticism
“Life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’.
We begin to see how a myriad of themes converge in the character of the Romantic. He contends with the indifference of the world through a reckless, irrational trust in himself. He yearns for freedom, to unbind himself from everything that limits the expansion of his spirit. More than this, he desires to soar, to play, to dance. He chafes against mundanity and wishes to break through it with wild ecstasy and abandon. Finally, he desires to draw this ecstasy from the world itself, to transfigure and remake it within himself.
What is it that ties these disparate themes together? It is the burning drive to aestheticize the experience of life. The inborn desire of the Romantic is for the very experience of life to be beautified, magnified, mystified – for existence to be filled to the very brim with color and blood and meaning.
The Romantic is driven to find and express the beauty and sublimity of life, be it good or bad. He seeks contrast and contradiction, intensity and rarity of experience, an intoxicating liberation from the mundane. He is enamored with ideas, with impressions, with hidden depths.
This process is not merely an interior process, for to draw the world into himself man must first act and be within it. In his search for the sublime, the Romantic will feel a burning need to express what he finds. He does so in art and philosophy, in writing and storytelling. The mysteries of the world call to him, and the very act of searching them out requires that he recreates them.
It is to this end that the Romantic lives, though he may scarcely know it himself. He lives in order for every experience of wonder and terror to coalesce inside him and awaken to new clarity. Be it the darkest melancholies and the most painful longings, or nerve-firing hedonic delights, or drunken Arcadican dreams – the purpose of the Romantic is for them all to find completion in him and to be poured out to enrich the world. The blood and nerves of the Romantic are merely the alchemical equipment by which life is churned and refined into a more potent draught.
In this way, life achieves its hidden end.
God-At-Play
“Instead of curbing their eccentricities, Shiva joins in their wild revelries and sings and dances with gusto to the accompaniment of their cacophonous music.” – Vanamali, ‘Shiva’.
All things are inescapably connected. Not one thing exists which does not participate in existence. The driving forces of every heart are not just phantasms in the nerves, but parts of reality itself. When we will, the world wills through us. We cannot be separated from it – indeed, we as individual persons are nothing but that willing crashing against the limits of individuation.
Every type and character, every form of life that represents a distinct mode of being, serves some form of purpose in the grand tapestry of being. This is no less true of the Romantic as we have described him. As we have seen, he plays the part of transfiguring reality by experiencing it through the lens of his own character. But to understand why this is significant we must understand who the Romantic truly is, or what anything truly is.
The Romantic is none other than reality itself.
What the Romantic does in his heart is done by Life itself, for itself, in order to recognize in itself its own Divine Play. The great game of being sings through all things. Part of the glory of that song is that it isn’t heard by the singer. It is therefore the purpose of men who remain boys at heart to hear the song, to awaken to reality as the God-That-Plays and to participate in that song with the fullness of their being.
To be a Romantic, therefore, is to know Life, to know oneself as part of it and to participate in the creation and recreation of Life. It is to realize that one is play, plaything and player in one. It is to see what hides in the depths, and to beautify the world with the things found there. Above all, it is to love with the carelessness of Sky and to let the subtle mystery of Life revel and reveal itself within one’s own life.
And that is my answer. That is what it means to be a man.