Manly Scott Galloway Explains How to Be a Man

The key is to be more like Scott Galloway, apparently

The patriarchy is always in crisis; the patriarchy always needs shoring up. This is not a bug; it is a feature. Because, as long as the patriarchy needs defenders, (white male wealthy) patriarchs will always be able to barter their expertise as patriarchs for money, prestige, and a cleared runway for bloviating. And there is nothing a patriarch likes more (a patriarch will tell you at length) than a good long runway for bloviating.

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To write this, I had to read Scott Galloway’s book. Please take pity on me and consider subsidizing my misery? Paid subs are $50/year, $5/month.

Galloway to the rescue…sort of

Enter Scott Galloway, marketer, investor, business dude, patriarch, and, of course MAN. In his new book Notes on Being a Man he insists that there is a (wait for it!) crisis among men. Men, he says, “face an educational system biased against them” because their “brains mature later than girls.” They also are targeted by nefarious social media algorithms which lead them to “isolation, boredom, and ignorance.” They are addicted to porn! They eat too many calories! Something must be done!

And what must be done? Well, here things start to get a bit more vague. Galloway is, to put it charitably, light on policy suggestions about how to save men from this manly crisis. At one point he mentions that we should raise the minimum wage to $25; at another he mutters darkly that Congress should Do Something about social media.

Otherwise, though, Galloway hardly mentions public policy. If more men are living at home (as Galloway suggests), maybe we could—erase student debt, provide free health care, invest in public universities to lower tuition, build more housing, or take other actions to make it easier for young people to start their lives? Maybe we could tax rich people like Scott Galloway, who admits repeatedly that he has too much disposable income? Maybe if suicide among men is a major problem we should consider more gun regulation so men have a more difficult time shooting themselves?

Galloway neither entertains nor answers any of those questions. Instead, he spends most of the book implying (or more than implying) that the way to solve the crisis of manliness is for men to be more like Scott Galloway. The bulk of what I will charitably describe as his prose is devoted to vague evospych assertions, alternating with a limp and repetitive memoir, sprinkled with blandly inspirational self-help lessons.

Men, Galloway proclaims, are destined to Protect, Provide, and Procreate. “Kindness and asking for help,” he muses, “are two unheralded weapons for men.” Then a bit down the line he launches into a charming anecdote about how he dumped his wife of over a decade because he wanted to play the field and date younger women. “I don’t regret getting divorced,” he insists, though he admits he feels kind of bad about it since the moment he told her he was leaving was “the most I’ve ever hurt another person.” He married too young, he says; if he’d stayed he would have been resentful; they’re both better off. Maybe, though it seems like he could have just not done the absolutely most stereotypical male asshole thing? So much for protecting. And also so much, apparently, for kindness.

Don’t say toxic…say Galloway!

The book, in short, is an incoherent and vaguely repellant mess. If it doesn’t have a thesis, though, it does have a kind of vague ethos. That might be summed up by one of his early “Notes” in which Galloway declares:

there’s no such thing as “toxic masculinity”—that’s the emperor of all oxymorons. There’s cruelty, criminality, bullying, predation, and abuse of power. If you’re guilty of any of these things, or conflate being male with coarseness and savagery, you’re not masculine; you’re anti-masculine.

Galloway acknowledges at various points that there are problems with masculinity; he says for example that “Some fucked-up sense of masculinity still inhibits my ability to express how much my friends and colleagues mean to me without a little help inspired by alcohol.” But he also comes out adamantly against the idea that traditional notions of masculinity, or the structure of patriarchy (a word he never uses) could possibly be harmful to men, or women, or people of any gender.

Galloway believes that you help men by trumpeting the virtues of masculinity. If he can present a healthy, cool, exciting, responsible vision of masculinity, and establish that as the meaning of masculinity, then men, young and old, will strive for that ideal and become good people. Maybe they won’t cruelly dump their wives to sleep for younger women; maybe they won’t need to flirt with problem drinking (as Galloway suggests he does) in order to be able to say they care about their friends.

The problem which Galloway persistently dances around is that there is no one way to be a man. On the contrary, the insistence that to be a man requires you to check off certain boxes is a big part of the stress and misery of being a man—and a big part of what leads men to treat their wives, their friends, their children, and themselves in such ugly ways.

Just as a start, what does it mean for men when they are told that one of their main goals as a man is to Procreate? Galloway waves around some to be sures in his discussion, noting that not all men can or want to have kids. But then he goes on to blithely babble about how if men aren’t seeking out sex they’re atrophying in the basement watching porn, while men with children create “surplus value.”

For men, this means providing more love to others than was given to you—becoming a better son, brother, friend, or employer to people. Your job, if you become a father, is to create surplus value as measured by being a better dad than your dad was to you.

This is phrased to make it sound reasonable and loving. But when you focus on genitals and sex and procreation as the essence of manliness, you tend to exclude gay men, trans men, intersex men, men who are sterile, asexual men, or men who aren’t having sex, for any number of reason. If you then say, “well adopt,” you’re excluding people without the money or resources to have children. Not to mention people who just don’t want kids.

More, centering masculinity on procreation puts a huge amount of pressure on women and children to play their appointed role in shoring up men’s sense of themselves as men. You can’t, after all, be a better father than your dad if your wife doesn’t want to have children—or (God forbid!) gets an abortion? For that matter, it’s hard to separate Galloway’s enthusiasm for sex and procreation from his miserable treatment of his first wife. If the goal of manliness is procreation, then how can you blame men for wanting to go out there and procreate more and better?

And what if your kids refuse to do the things that in your eyes would make you a good father? What if your child is queer, for example? What if you see that as an attack on your own masculinity? Many people do—and the outcomes for queer kids are often miserable and traumatic.

Masculinity vs. men

Galloway, to his credit, is not Jordan Peterson; he does not actively attack trans men or gay men or poor men. When he mentions them it’s with sympathy. He notes that the Latino dishwashers at his restaurant job worked very hard and had fewer opportunities than he did. He mentions with sympathy a college friend who was gay and died of AIDS.

These men, though are off to the side of the main narrative. Galloway sympathizes with them. He even says that the Latino dishwashers taught him “much-needed immunity against the notion of American meritocracy.” But the point of bringing that up is not to argue for a radical reallocation of American wealth, or a massive expansion of the safety net. Instead, he says the dishwashers were important because they “helped me appreciate what I had.”

Men who are not the main man—the white male affluent patriarch—are sad object lessons, rather than protagonists of their own story. Galloway’s advice for men isn’t really advice for these marginalized men; they are, after all, secondary, and anyway beyond help. Their function in Galloway’s narrative is to remind the men who matter how lucky they are to be closer to the ideal of manliness embodied by Scott Galloway.

Galloway doesn’t seriously engage with the needs or problems of gay men, or trans men, or Latino men, or Black men (no discussion of incarceration), or disabled men (what happens to them when Galloway keeps talking about the importance of men being “strong”?) or poor men, because he is not really especially interested in helping or protecting men at all. Instead, he is interested in protecting and buttressing masculinity itself, which is inseparable from patriarchy. And patriarchy, as the rule of men, is intertwined with the men who rule—those men being, like Scott Galloway, white, fit, able-bodied, and quite wealthy.

Galloway insists he is solving the crisis of masculinity by presenting his life as a case study in effective masculinity. He was poor and became wealthy! He was unattractive and then he went on to bulk up and sleep with lots of women! His dad was an emotionally unavailable deadbeat, and now Scott Galloway writes sincere letters to his kids about how they need to add surplus value to the lives of those around them! Learn from him to be a man!

But setting up an affluent famous white wealthy able-bodied thin cishet white guy as the standard of manliness is not solving the problem of masculinity. It’s perpetuating it. Because the problem of masculinity, the bit of masculinity that is toxic, is the idea that all us men are striving to become the wealthy powerful patriarchs with lots of money and women and kids to validate our masculinity ye even to the nether bits.

Creating a single narrative of masculinity based on a single supposed standard of protecting, procreating, and providing puts a massive, unbearable strain on basically all men. If your sense of self depends on you being a protector, you’re going to have trouble admitting when you need help yourself, or acknowledging that you can’t, in fact, keep everyone around you safe. If your sense of self requires you to be a provider, you are quite possibly going to be depressed, angry, and maybe worse than depressed and angry if your wife earns more than you do. And if you’re determined to be a procreator—well, seeing sexual prowess as central to your self can make you mistreat people in a whole range of ways.

When you read around the edges of Galloway’s memoir, you can see that his ideas of masculinity often seem to cause even him, and those around him, distress. I’ve mentioned the way his obsession with procreation seems to have destroyed his first marriage, and the way, by his own account, his vision of himself as a strong protector seems to have led him to alcohol as a way to manage his emotions. He also mentions that he doesn’t eat much (“I still find eating a nuisance…). Whether that’s an eating disorder or not I of course can’t diagnose, but it certainly resonates uncomfortably with his fatphobic and fitness rants.

None of this is surprising. Traditional masculinity, which is what Galloway is touting, is referred to as toxic for a reason. The demand to perform patriarchy—to look a certain way, to perform a certain competence, to be invulnerable, to be seen with the right kind of women—tears men apart, and encourages them to tear others apart as well. If we want to help men, and people of other genders as well, we need to stop setting up Scott Galloway as the way to be a man, and instead acknowledge that there are all kinds of men and all kinds of masculinity. Once we do that, we can maybe start formulating policies to help all men, and all people, rather than penning more stale memoirs encouraging everyone and their brother to be some guy with a podcast who thinks he’s doing patriarchy right.