The Art of Manliness is a website dedicated to helping men become better men. In this episode, we talk to the founder of the site, Stephen Kacz, about what it means to be a man in modern society.
00:00:38.000Art of Manliness, what's funny about it is that it seems to be an actual site where men actually want to hang out there and read it.
00:00:46.000I'm sure you know about the big scam with a lot of the men's interest magazines where they just buy up subscriptions and not many people actually read it, but you guys actually have a significant readership and return readership.
00:00:56.000Yeah, we've developed a really passionate following because our goal from the get-go has just been to help men become better men in all aspects of their life.
00:01:06.000And as a result of that, a lot of our content is just problem-driven.
00:01:11.000Think about the problems that guys have and try to write content that will help them.
00:01:16.000And it's amazing, Stephen, the letters that I've gotten over the years.
00:01:19.000I get actual handwritten letters in the mailbox.
00:01:23.000That's something we advocate on the site, bringing back the art of the handwritten letter.
00:01:29.000People telling us how the site has changed their life, it's helped their marriage.
00:01:33.000I've had one guy tell us the story about how the art of manliness led to him finding his wife.
00:01:43.000He basically read a post and And there's this girl that he was very, you know, he was interested in and ended up marrying her, and that's, yeah, The Art of Manliness brought them together.
00:01:54.000That takes me to an important question I have for you.
00:01:57.000And it's kind of a social question, so it could be a long answer, but I definitely do...
00:02:02.000In speaking with a lot of young men out there, there is more confusion and a lot of young men feel more conflicted about what it is to be a man in today's society than ever.
00:02:15.000And you get some pushback obviously from feminism and from just the way society is sort of, you know, now the big message is your male privilege is showing.
00:02:22.000So sometimes men feel inherently guilty.
00:02:24.000Have you noticed when you get these handwritten letters back that some men just feel a little conflicted about who they should really be in modern America?
00:02:31.000Well, the thing we get is that the site has helped them feel good about being a man.
00:02:36.000And the truth is, yeah, there is a lot of confusion about what it means to be a man in today's society.
00:02:42.000And that's a complex reason why that is.
00:02:45.000A lot of people want to find simple answers that, oh, it's feminism or it's this.
00:02:49.000But this is something that we've been dealing with.
00:02:52.000In America, since its founding, masculinity has always been debated what it means to be a man.
00:02:59.000And, you know, in recent years, there's been an uptick in this sort of like what this, you know, this conversation, right, with all the big media outlets about...
00:03:36.000No, yeah, so the conversation now is that masculinity is obsolete because we're moving into an information economy, so we don't need men to be big and strong, and we don't need a manual blue-collar workforce.
00:03:50.000They need to be more soft and sensitive, etc.
00:03:58.000But what's interesting is that At the turn of the 20th century, like late 19th century, there was a similar conversation, except that instead of moving to an information economy, the argument was that men are becoming obsolete because we are an industrialized nation, and machines are replacing men.
00:04:18.000And a lot of our American folktales that we have, like Paul Bunyan, John Henry, if you think about it, it's about man versus machine.
00:04:27.000I was going to say it's about cool hats and gear.
00:04:53.000And then all of a sudden you've moved to – there are a few wealthy people, the people who own these industries and factories and you create a working class.
00:05:00.000Whereas now with the internet, economically we're returning to that same conversation where people can have their own plot of digital land and wealth effectively can be more distributed.
00:05:09.000The kind of theory is you're going to have fewer billionaires but far more people making good six-figure incomes online independently.
00:05:17.000So it's maybe kind of the same thing except where we're talking about man parts.
00:05:22.000And what's interesting too is that in recent years there's been sort of like this menescence, I guess you'd call it, where the whole, you know, men, guys are growing beards again, they're wearing flannel, they're going camping, and there's all these lifestyle sites dedicated to men, right?
00:05:40.000There are all these businesses that have popped up around that time.
00:05:42.000What's funny is that around the late 19th century, when they were having this sort of conversation about what it means to be a man, there really was like this, I don't know, renaissance in masculinity at the time too.
00:05:54.000You know, a lot of the ideas and, I guess, archetypes of masculinity we have in America today began in the 19th century.
00:06:01.000Boxing became huge in America at this time.
00:06:03.000And John L. Sullivan, the guy who's sort of the boxer guy that's on the top of the art of manliness, handlebar mustache, like he was just a star.
00:06:11.000Like everyone just obsessed about him.
00:06:14.000Football became huge because these were seen as outlets where men could show off their strength, their physical strength in a world that no longer really needed men because of machines.
00:06:26.000So it was an opportunity for men to display that.
00:06:28.000So, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting that we're the same sort of thing.
00:06:32.000You're seeing the same sort of thing happen today as well.
00:06:34.000MMA is becoming really popular amongst, you know, entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley types.
00:07:51.000But the fact is, if you look at great leaders who are great intellectuals, right, they were fantastic thinkers or spiritualists, all of them believed that there was a physical manifestation of that discipline.
00:08:24.000That's something we talk about a lot on the site.
00:08:28.000Lots of great thinkers, like you go back to the ancient Greeks, they thought the same way.
00:08:32.000What it meant to be a man was combining the physical attributes also with these sort of contemplative thinking.
00:08:37.000And they believed, like you said, that doing hard things physically, working hard physically, Showing physical courage transferred itself over to the political or moral or spiritual life.
00:08:50.000They also did some pretty weird stuff, the Greeks.
00:09:34.000Like you're talking about, the Greeks, the Romans, our founding fathers, creative thinkers, intellectuals, who also, you know, were wielding axes and stomping heads.
00:09:43.000Yeah, they were the warrior philosophers.
00:10:07.000It doesn't help us become a better people.
00:10:10.000But I think for the most part, most men, I think, inherently get what it means to be a good man because they they they have men in their lives that they can look to, whether it be their father or a grandfather or even mentors they had in high school.
00:10:50.000And then some guy is talking about how he's going to have a gang knock off your mother because you wouldn't know a good breadstick if it bit you in the posterior.
00:10:58.000And I'm just like, it happens so quickly.
00:11:00.000Your site is one of the few exceptions, almost to the point that it's like Pleasantville, where people are too nice.
00:11:06.000Where I'm like, someone just, you know, yell something anti-Semitic or something that's going to hurt somebody's feelings.
00:11:46.000What's funny, you know your audience with that, I think.
00:11:49.000And I think that, like we've talked about, in the same sort of sense, there are these sort of false male archetypes that were pushed onto people.
00:11:56.000There's this false idea of men's interests.
00:12:00.000You know, my friend Greg Gutfeld, who actually hosts there on Fox News, he was the editor at Men's Health and FHM. He was fired, actually, from Men's Health because he wrote an article on the positive attributes of tobacco.
00:12:11.000And now we know it to be true that it can fight Alzheimer's.
00:12:14.000Now, he wasn't saying go light up, but this was just very controversial, right?
00:12:17.000You can never write that in a Men's Health magazine.
00:12:51.000But you were just appealing to yachting attire, and the next page is basically something that would make penthouse letters from the 70s blush, just incredibly graphic.
00:13:00.000I'm going, a lot of people wouldn't want to read this mix of material.
00:13:04.000It turns out they don't, and I get the sense that from your sight, a lot of men are filling this void of, oh, it's a place I can go where there are pragmatic pieces that help me become a better man.
00:13:16.000Yeah, it's funny you mention the men's magazines and the men's health.
00:13:20.000I mean, that's actually what inspired the art of manliness.
00:13:23.000Here's the story of the genesis of the art of manliness.
00:13:25.000I was in a bookstore one night during law school, killing time, went to the men's interest section, the magazine section, and I was looking at the headlines, something I do all the time, and I remember just sitting there looking at the headlines on these magazines and just realizing that My gosh, every month it's the same thing.
00:14:55.000I don't know who to talk to about this.
00:14:57.000And that's just a microcosm pornography.
00:14:59.000But I can imagine now, when you have people telling men, I mean, this is what they're being taught on campus, that you are guilty by birth.
00:15:08.000And a lot of these men are feminists, or a lot of these men certainly wouldn't want to have privilege thrust upon them.
00:15:14.000It creates a sense of needless guilt because they haven't done anything wrong.
00:15:20.000And that's got to be tough to deal with today as a young teenager.
00:16:39.000order to provide the lifestyle that he wants to give to his family.
00:16:45.000And so he never has the time to teach his kid how to shave.
00:16:47.000And people think, oh, how to shave, teaching your kid, what's that going to do to help your son?
00:16:51.000Yeah, they're going to learn how to shave, but there's more that goes on in that process.
00:16:56.000Because it shows the kid knows my dad cares about me, and he wants the best for me.
00:17:04.000And then just spending time with your kids, conversations come up spontaneously where you can talk to your son or talk to your grandson or talk to a nephew about what it means to be a good man.
00:17:43.000And, you know, there's not, I mean, you're basically, you know, who knows what they're learning there.
00:17:49.000And so they, you know, they might pick up by this sort of like a lot of really popular things like the pickup artist community is really popular online.
00:17:56.000And it's just all about, you know, To be a man, you've got to get all these notches on your belt.
00:18:02.000And that's how they define masculinity.
00:18:04.000And so you get these guys in this trap where they fork over a lot of money to learn how to pick up women, and then they're not successful, and then they just feel like crap because, man, being a man means you have to have sex with as many women as possible.
00:18:18.000I'm a failure as a man, so I suck as a man.
00:18:21.000So you get these very one-dimensional ideas of masculinity.
00:19:03.000So I understand why it, why it happens.
00:19:05.000But yeah, I mean, our, our goal is to help become, help men become a better man in all aspects of their life because that carries over to other areas of the life.
00:19:14.000You know, if you're, if you, you know, for example, if your goal in life is to find a girlfriend, for example, right.
00:19:21.000If that's what you want to do, well, you shouldn't really make your focus in life just like going to bars and like trying these lines and like doing these little techniques.
00:19:29.000What you should be doing is just developing yourself as a man physically, you know, working on your social skills in general that are applicable not just to women but also to men.
00:19:38.000And that women will find you attractive once you kind of develop the whole man.
00:19:43.000And so, yeah, that's sort of our philosophy is just develop the whole man and good things will happen as a consequence of that.
00:19:50.000In a nutshell, if you have to leave people right with this, the Brett McKay, the soundbite that Oprah would love.