by Seth Joseph

We lie to young men. We do it so much and in so many ways.

Wishful thinking, perhaps? We all need that from time to time— a polite side-stepping of the truth can be a necessary lubrication, an oil in grinding gears. But when it comes to women, and particularly what we teach about dating, the lies and half honest answers we feed our young men can do quite a lot of harm in the long term. Let’s eschew convention for a moment and look at some of these well-meaning fibs up close shall we? Men get so little help in this department, have so much expected of them, and have so much happiness and fulfillment at stake.

“Just Be Yourself”

The absolute worst thing you can tell a young, struggling man is to just be passive. And yet, society repeats these feel-good mantras ad nauseam: Accept the way you are. You are good enough without effort. You’ll get what you want passively. Here is your participation trophy. Some day, if you just wait around the love you deserve will just fall from the fucking sky. And so, when it comes to rejection, the standard acceptable advice we give to young men is to “just be yourself”.

And there is still a nugget of decent advice there in this tired maxim: don’t sell yourself out for a relationship. However, the suggestion that a man just being himself will help him gain control of his failing romantic life is not only ridiculous, it is actively harmful.

The truth is, unlike women, men are not sexually valuable just for existing and being decent. From a biological standpoint, men are not inherently worth anything. To put it crudely: sperm is cheap. To be worth a damn men have to learn how to be exceptional through hard, intensive struggle, deep and difficult growth and reflection, and years of discipline and willpower.

If you look through history books, you will find countless stories of men building boats and sailing off to distant shores. You won’t find similar stories involving boats full of women. Why not? The popular answer is “oppression”, but this is just another feminist-inspired lie. The very concept that women were what? Held in chains? Deprived of boat building tools under threat of violence? Had their budding shipyards intentionally sabotaged throughout all of history?

The much simpler truth is that for women throughout human history, sticking around and going with the flow was usually a quite viable path to reproductive success and survival. Women can just “be themselves” and their chances of reproduction wind up still being pretty solid. Men, on the other hand, have had to resort to drastic action in order to have similar chances. But we keep on telling this one-size-fits all nonsense to young men, and it reinforces the warm and fuzzy notion of our current zeitgeist that biological differences in the sexes just don’t exist if we say they don’t, and say it often and loudly enough.

Despite what anyone tells you, yourself just might not make the cut if you are on the bottom 90% of men in terms of natural attractiveness. You have to make yourself valuable: for what you do, build, create, discover. And sometimes, you have to just build a boat and sail away. Waiting for the world to reward you for “who you are inside”, is a recipe for disaster if you weren’t lucky enough to be born an elite, top 10% man. Therefore, when struggling, ignore anyone who tells you to “just be yourself”. Often, what they are really telling you is to “just stay in your lane.”

“Male Aggression is Problematic.”