The Third Way

On masculinity, Pixar movies, and knowing how to use a dryer sheet.

I got an email from a reader a while back that I’ve been sitting on. He said I was “modeling a third way of embracing traditional tenets of masculinity while not being afraid to hold them in check and question their validity.”

I read it a few times. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It felt like it could get political or opinionated fast, and I’m a little scared of that direction. But I couldn’t shake it either. Because he was describing something I’ve been living without having the language for.

Here’s the version of masculinity I grew up with.

My uncles built a moving company into an empire. They had beach houses and box seats. They shook hands hard and picked up every check. They didn’t talk about their feelings. They solved problems with money and pressure and presence. They were the men my mother admired, because she never felt like one of them. And she taught me, without ever saying it directly, that those were the men worth becoming.

So I tried. West Point. Finance. A company in the Cambodian jungle. I raised a million dollars, some from the men I wanted to impress. I lived in a shipping container. I rode motorcycles through villages where I didn’t speak the language.

By every measure of the masculinity I was taught, I was doing it right.

I was also miserable, relapsing, and building my entire identity around what other men thought of me.

When I was in my twenties I took a Latin ballroom dancing class. I loved it. My cousin from that same family found out and gave me so much shit that I quit. I let a guy’s opinion about what men should do take away something that made me happy. That’s the tax of the version we’ve got right now.

There’s a conversation happening right now about men. What’s wrong with them, what’s wrong with masculinity, who’s to blame. I find most of it useless. One side says men need to toughen up and stop being soft. The other side says masculinity itself is the problem. Both are lazy.

I read Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis and I think he’s right. We are getting softer. Life got easier and we lost something in the trade. We don’t carry heavy things or sit in the cold or do hard stuff that sucks anymore. That’s not controversial, that’s just what happens when society advances.

But the answer isn’t to cosplay as your grandfather. To pick some version of manhood from 1955 and try to go back to it. That guy didn’t talk to his kids and drank himself through a marriage. That guy was tough as hell and also profoundly alone.

And to be clear, that IS the cosplay. I’ve already written about my actual grandfather. A Marine Corps jet pilot who ejected over the Caribbean. He was also a crier. If I had to pick one word to describe him, it wouldn’t have been tough. I would have chosen joyous. The guys on the internet pretending to be him are the ones who got it wrong.

Being able to fake masculinity is a luxury provided by comfort. There are guys in this country working hundred-hour weeks at blue collar jobs, providing for their families, not because they watched a podcast about discipline, because they don’t have a choice. They don’t have time to post about it. They’re just doing it.

The answer is to do hard things AND be honest about what they cost you. Ruck with 50 pounds on your back and also tell your wife you’re struggling. Build something with your hands and also admit you don’t know what you’re doing. The hard part isn’t either one of those. The hard part is both.

I know how to weld, but I cry at every Pixar movie. In fact, I cry a lot. I’m writing this from my basement after folding a load of laundry while my badass wife Anna is out at the office doing most of the providing. I must be soft because I know how to use a dryer sheet.

I fired an RPG in Cambodia and I sang a song I wrote around a campfire at a therapy retreat. I built a company in the jungle and I write about my feelings on the internet every week.

Both of those things are true about me. The guy who builds companies and the guy who writes a memoir about how building companies almost destroyed him. The guy who wanted to be like his uncles and the guy who had to uninvite them from his life.

I don't think the answer is telling men what to be. We’ve tried that. I think it's telling men they don't have to pick. You can be tough and honest. Ambitious and self-aware. Adventurous and vulnerable. You can ride a motorcycle through Cambodia and also go to therapy. One doesn’t cancel out the other.

The problem isn’t masculinity. The problem is thinking you have to choose one version of yourself and kill the rest.

I know I’m not the only one living like this. Most men I know are already in the middle. They are tough and emotional, ambitious and present, doing hard things and admitting when it hurts. They just don’t talk about it. There’s no incentive to. The attention economy is built to reward the extremes. Nuance doesn’t go viral. The algorithm wants an argument, not a life.

But most men are living the third way already. They just don’t have a megaphone, because the middle doesn’t sell.

My daughter Helen is almost two. I think about what I want to model for her. I don’t want to teach her about men. I want to show her what a man can be.

I want her to see someone who builds things with his hands and isn’t afraid of discomfort, including expressing his feelings.

I don’t want her to admire men the way we’ve been taught to, from the outside, measuring them by what they built. I want her to know one from the inside.

That’s the third way. It’s not soft. It’s not hard. It’s just honest.

Thanks, Scott.

-Jake