Butler, Bros, and Beyond

Constructing a positive vision of masculinity with sci-fi

If you didn’t know it before, marketers and right-wing influencers would tell you definitively that men are lost. The idea that there needs to be a specific vision of positive masculinity is controversial among most on the left and at worst provokes a kind of contempt. This, writes Christine Emba, has made men look for any source of empathy and mentorship, even if it means running to the dogmatic depictions of masculinity that characterize the online manosphere of Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, and Bronze Age Pervert.

The left’s critique of this idea is that, as Ed Yong said in response to Emba’s writing, we should just strive to be good people without any notion of being, specifically, a good man. I’m deeply sympathetic to that rationale. It doesn’t make sense to try to imagine a virtue that is only virtuous if displayed by one gender but not the other.

At the same time, striving to be good means striving within the world in which we were born, and that means having to work with the assumptions that other people carry into their interactions with us. To maximize the good we can do, we can’t just cultivate virtue to lock inside ourselves. Instead, our virtue is only worthwhile if it shows up in our interactions with the world — a world that’s been playing semiotic games with gender long before any of us were born.

So, a positive vision of masculinity should be based on a realistic assessment of the games that men are asked to play, subtly removing the more confining strictures of those roles as it can, but also recognizing the incredible inertia that culture has. This is an essential part of the conundrum men face: that neither the progressive nor paleo version of masculinity is fit to the purpose of today. Emba writes, starting with a quote from Scott Galloway:

“Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.”

I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.

The version of masculinity peddled in the manosphere is equally unsuitable in an entirely different direction and, to the extent their advice is followed, leads to the kind of outcomes that Peterson and Tate themselves have graciously demonstrated for their fans.

Science fiction has long been a fruitful place for exploring gender roles and relations. While there are some that predict a gradual erasure of distinctions and a move towards either a uniformly masculine or feminine society, there are others that simultaneously preserve and question gender roles. Of these, nothing sticks out in my mind as much as Octavia Butler’s work in her Xenogenesis trilogy. (Spoilers below the pic!)

A concept drawing of an Oankali by Reddit user herakles_love

Xenogenesis, which is alternately known as Lilith’s Brood — I don’t know why it has two different names — is the story of a woman who was rescued from a dying Earth by an alien race called the Oankali. The Oankali are a race that has survived and spread through the galaxy by hybridizing with other species that they encounter. Not only that, their primary motivation in life is the “trade” of genes. There are male and female Oankali, but there’s also a third gender called “ooloi” that takes a pervy delight in exploring and mixing others’ genes. The majority of the story is about how humans come to terms (or fail to come to terms) with the fact that they can only save their species by hybridizing with the Oankali.

This is how two characters describe the genders of Oankali:

“I remember Ahajas,” she said softly. “She was so big… I thought she was male. Then Kahguyaht, our ooloi, told me Oankali females are like that. ‘Plenty of room inside for children,’ it said. ‘And plenty of strength to protect the children, both born and unborn.’ Gabe asked what males did if females did all that. ‘They seek new life,’ it said. ‘Males are seekers and collectors of life. What ooloi and females can do, males must do.’ Gabe thought that meant ooloi and females could do without males. Kahguyaht said no, it meant that Oankali as a people would eventually die without males.”

For the Oankali, strength is feminine. Butler had to assign strength to the female Oankali to shake us out of our assumptions around gender, and to make us wonder what instead might go at the top of the pyramid of masculine virtues. Her answer? Variance. Oankali males express this urge towards variance by finding new lifeforms in space, but human males might express it by finding new ways of life through pushing at the edges of our cognitive horizons.

Variance as the most important masculine characteristic has the potential to be both liberating and reasonably acceptable within the confines of the current world. It’s already assumed (not always unproblematically) that men are more likely to take risks in areas from entrepreneurship to extreme sports, and much in between. There are tails of other distributions that I’d like to see filled in a bit, though. For example, pioneering forms of extreme domesticity.

I see drag as paradoxically embracing this masculine ideal of variance. The mostly male performers in drag push feminine archetypes into the realm of goddesses. Likewise, the social media phenomenon of trick shots, where men set up highly improbable but mundane goals for the sole purpose of accomplishing them on camera (and then shouting, “LET’S GOOOO” when they happen). I’ve read that a lot of magic is similar, where the trick is that you’ve simply done way more work than any reasonable person would.

Variance without virtue is no good, of course. Male variance includes the overwhelming share of serial killers. But I can’t help feeling that virtue alone is a little sterile if it doesn’t come with a way of implementing it in the context of our actual world, with all its expectations and institutions. A good vision of masculinity could provide that for the many men who feel like there’s no place for them.