#592： Being a Man in the Lousy Modern World
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Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss a book Robert Twigger wrote 20 years ago called Being a Man in the Lousy Modern World. We discuss how the modern world infantilizes men so they are easier to control, and whether things have changed much since then.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast emerson famously
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said society everywhere is a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members my guest
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today says things have gotten a lot worse since emerson uttered those words over a century and a
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half ago name is robert twigger we last had him on the show to discuss his book micro mastery
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that's episode number 528 if you want to check that out today we discuss a book he wrote 20 years
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ago called being a man in the lousy modern world we begin a conversation discussing how the modern
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world infantilizes men so they're easier to control and whether robert thinks things have changed since
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he initially published the book we then dig into the four factors robert says need to be in place
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for a man to feel like a man and why experiencing these qualities has become a lot harder to do in
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the present age we then discuss what robert did to counter the currents of modern malaise like hiking
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the pyrenees mountains and learning a martial art and whether doing those things actually made him
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feel manlier we enter a conversation with what men can do to start fighting back against the
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conspiracy against their manhood out of the shows over check out our show notes at aom.is
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all right robert twigger welcome back to the show thanks for having me always always glad to
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to be to be talking to the art of manliness well we had you on the show uh last year to talk about
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your book micro mastery and that's episode number 528 for those who want to check it out it's all about
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learning new skills by thinking small it's a really great episode as a fan favorite but we're gonna talk
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about a book you wrote 20 almost 20 years ago it's called being a man in the lousy modern world so tell
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us what was the impetus behind this book the real impetus was at that time so i was writing that i don't
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know sort of 1999 or something like that exactly 20 years ago there was a whole spate of adverts in
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which men were portrayed as sort of dorks and patsies and the women were all smart and sassy they were
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often it was often there were commercials in in people's homes you know and it was the dorky husband
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who couldn't do anything and and the wife was in control and i just thought this is just sending
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such a stupid wrong message so it's kind of anger and then it sort of all kind of spiraled out from
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there so i just started to look at what the role of men was in in the lousy modern world and the way
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you wrote this you sort of contrasted your you had a son that was coming yeah you contrasted that
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trying to figure out what does it mean to be a man in this world and then contrasting all these
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adventures you tried to go on to figure that out yeah i mean the other strand in the book was
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using because my previous uh couple of books had been these adventures but i had all these leftover
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stuff that i'd done because i was writing for kind of adventure travel pieces for magazines and uh
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so i had all this this this material and uh i thought well i've got to i've got to use it none
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each adventure itself probably wouldn't have justified a book so i wove that in and it became
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because the adventure seemed part of being a man you know it seemed like a man who shunned any form
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of adventure always i guess it's because adventure called forth the need for courage and i knew that
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that courage was was a key key part of it and you can i mean it was funny the contrast between like
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you getting ready for the the arrival of your son it was sort of like a day in the life of just a
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regular suburban guy living in the western world you know barbecues and you're kind of like uh the
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way you described is like this is this is not it yeah i mean and i i might i wanted to make it honest
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and there's a sort of problem because the kind of language you use to describe adventures is it doesn't
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suit describing relationships and about you know what you feel about your kids and all that sort of
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things so it was a fine line to to draw i also didn't want to just you know burrow into total
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sentimentality because you know before your kids are born i mean what can you feel you they just
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arrived you know you don't know what they're going to be like so it was it was tricky it was tricky
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ground but as you say yeah it was it's half that theme through the book which i keep going back to
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which is as the day progresses that's the kind of driving force it's kind of like a micro adventure
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in itself but uh it's it's mr suburbia and my life is mr suburbia and i'm just not not sort of happy
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with it so what is it about the lousy modern world that you you felt like that makes manliness feel
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obsolete like you feel like it's not suited for men yeah i mean there's so many strands here but i mean
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the the i mean just coming from the top it's it's got to be that we have so many prosthetic devices
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computers cars things that actually take out the physical aspect and if there's there are many
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differences between men and women but i mean the most obvious one is there's a physical strength
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difference so if you're not actually having to use your physical strength at all you're different
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from you know most men that have come before you in history so there's there's that side there's the
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skill aspect even small skills like learning to light a fire which my dad used to do you know
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lighting the fire in the house even things like fixing the car she did i can't even fix my own car
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now because i don't know i don't know how to do the codes into the computerized bit i mean it's it's
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kind of endless really the the way we we become so impotent and we're just kind of like living like
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kings in this in this world of of largely electronic backup well and i think one of the points you make
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that i thought was really incisive is that the modern world does a great job of keeping us like
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children even as adults like i just said you can't even fix your own car because there's like a computer
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that you have to be able to program and you have to be licensed to do that change and and you make
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this point that uh that children are easier to control than adults and it's kind of you can make the
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you get some that say a cynical conclusion that well that's what corporations and governments want
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they want us to be easily controlled well yeah i mean it may not be i don't think there's some kind
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of conscious uber mind who's saying that let's let's infantile and infantilize our entire population but
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it it just seems to work out better that way so maybe there's some sort of evolutionary
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imperative at work inside corporations and big organizations that gradually the solution that
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infantilizes the the workforce seems to work better so you kind of by increments move towards
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that position and it's generally the case yeah i mean even the police you know when when for example
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somebody stands up and defends themselves against the mugging there's always the the warning from
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the police the police say don't do this in future um it's a dangerous thing to try and defend
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yourself at the same time as the newspaper report is saying oh what a great thing the 78 year
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old guy fought off the mugger so there's this constant message that you're you're better off
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just just being like a kid really but the insidious thing is that because of all these advances like
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you know things are cheap we've got all this technology that you know basically gives us the
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world at our fingertips it makes us feel like we're in control but sometimes we're really not in
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control yeah i mean it's it's a weird idea of control isn't it it's a bit like i mean we already had
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it today when the computer works you you're apparently in control as soon as it doesn't work
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you discover the exact limitations of your control if you can't fix something how much can you say
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you're in control i mean i think being able to fix stuff is is a key part of being a man and when we
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live in a world where we can't fix things very easily maybe we're just going along on someone else's
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ride well i guess yeah emerson's right he said that society everywhere is in conspiracy against
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the manhood of every one of its members well yeah i mean that was what 150 years ago something like
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that yeah it's got to be right man it's got to be and so you wrote this 20 years ago and you were
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seeing this stuff then like how how have things changed have things gotten worse have it stayed the
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same as have you seen things get better in some places yeah it's weird how things have changed um
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in some ways it's got it's got a lot worse things that i could humorously joke about then
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you can't really joke about now because you'll be you'll be um targeted as somebody you know that's
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not something you can joke about things have become off limits so that's kind of worse the better side
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is there's been a huge there's been a growth in things the art of manliness came along there's been
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a growth in people becoming more aware of mental health issues of young men which is a tremendous
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problem so those kind of knowing jokes oh it's the men you know the other day i was at a party and
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some someone woman sort of made some mocking comment about men with respect to mental health
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i was able to sort of pull the it's a serious subject kind of thing i didn't have to back off and
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take it so there's been a bit of a pushback there but it's but it's a big cost you know we've seen
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i mean i i talk about it in the book i talk about how criminality is is a kind of refuge it's like
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the last refuge of masculinity for many men and if you haven't got much imagination you can't get
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yourself off and do a dangerous or or interesting adventure you you're probably drawn to criminal
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behavior so you know that's we've seen a massive or increasing rise in criminality and you know that
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that kind of area and spill over into mental health issues so so in that sense was it's it's
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pretty similar though so uh in the book you lay out you you lay out four factors that you think need
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to be in place for a man to be considered a man so this is again this is what you said 20 years ago
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that might this might have changed but what what are what were those four factors that you that you saw
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the four factors were killing a beast courage courage is one ability to you know set skills
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you know there were basic skills that that you know seem to be involved with being a man and
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passing a rite of passage you know that's that's something that i circle in the book which is that
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men seem to have the need to have undergone some kind of test of difficultness or dangerousness
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and it's a before and after and you see it characterized in you know even things like a
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like a bar mitzvah or other rites of passage after which you are a man it's a ritual and i think that
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if anything that's i mean just to sort of move on a bit from those four characteristics that's one of
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the key issues of the um of the book is that this lack of ritual in our society means the transition
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from a from a boy to a man is blurred or never even exists so and i think rituals are the way we
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we make transitions and we've we've lost sight of that well and we we sort of still have rituals but
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as you point out in the book they're sort of watered down yeah yeah there's things like you know
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pass your driving test you know graduate high school graduate college yeah yeah yeah and they're lame
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as hell i mean you can't really look at yourself and think i um i'm on the i i can stand shoulder
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to shoulder with you know people who were in the first world war or you know single-handedly paddled
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their way up the amazon or something so it's a sort of you're going to just feel lame if you if you
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accept cult the culture right there there there are male rites of passages for this lousy modern world
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yeah exactly but yeah i mean you you said this idea like a rite of passage it really can help a boy
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transition that man it has that help it has those factors there's an element of risk to it of danger
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where you have to display courage you have to display fortitude and lacking that it's just it
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it doesn't it's not it's not transformative if there's no risk involved yeah i i think that that's
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the it just sharpens things up and and the ability to assess risk is probably a big part of it i mean
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i had i know this guy a good friend and he told me he's going off to pamplona to party and i said
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well you've got to run the bulls if you're going to go to pamplona he said no no that's just stupid
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that's stupid you know that's kind of like the lousy modern world speaking you know you're like mr
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sensible and of course running the bulls has risks and and if you're drunk the risks are higher but you
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know you can assess those risks and decide whether you're going to do it or not otherwise don't go to
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pamplona because otherwise you're borrowing the the the sort of the kudos of ernest hemingway and
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all the people who went there and you're just going there for a big kind of piss up and that seemed to
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be kind of like you know another problem you know but the problem itself is not the danger it's the
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unwillingness to assess it because again that's a kind of self-reliance so i'm not saying do dangerous
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things for the sake of it to be stupid i mean there are plenty of people who do that i'm getting some
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of them get killed what i'm saying is develop the skill to assess risk don't sort of just offload
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that skill to you know looking on the internet and someone tells you it's dangerous or something
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well let's talk about let's delve deeper into this courage because you you kind of you got
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philosophical about this like trying to figure out what is courage because there's some people who
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look courageous like aristotle the philosopher grappled with this idea is like how can you tell
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someone's really courageous right they could just be like they're crazy and they don't feel fear and they
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just would just do crazy stuff so i mean are they really courageous so how what's your assessment
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of that well i think yeah aristotle does mention no courage by its absence rather than by its presence
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that's one thing you talking to people who served in the army and in dangerous situations it's courage
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isn't it's not that rare you know there are you know most people given them given the right kind of
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backup will be courageous so it's it's it's not something we should feel that it's like a really rare
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quality it's it's it's a it's pretty available to everybody but i think everybody needs to to be
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able to test test themselves in a number of situations because you're right that mere bravado
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can look like courage unless someone has felt the consequences you know i mean i in the book i talk
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about this climbing where i was when i was younger did climbing i never had any concept of risk i fell off
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and broke a cracked some vertebra in my cracked a couple of vertebra and then i realized there were
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consequences and i stopped being as crazy and in fact i didn't really do much climbing after that so i
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kind of realized that maybe i wasn't that courageous when it came to to heights so it's finding those i
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think that courage is is an exploration of finding those those points where you push yourself and
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and again it's a sort of self-knowledge thing that without putting yourself in those difficult
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situations you won't get that self-knowledge so maybe even more than courage what we're looking at
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here is is knowing yourself and knowing what your limitations are because i think as i said most people
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do have have courage and they are sort of a natural human characteristic and i think one of the
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problems of the the lousy modern world as you put it is that we don't have that many opportunities
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to display courage like you have to like often proactively go seek it you know in times past
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that it would come to you you had to display courage for whatever reason because the world
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was a dangerous place but now it's so safe you have to go look for it instead of it finding you
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yeah you do really i mean it there are plenty of opportunities for showing that you're stoical in
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the modern world for showing that you can put up with awful shit over a long period but courage
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sort of find out the full kind of topography of courage i think you do need to be in in
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situations which demand quick thinking as well as kind of like just endlessly putting up with
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something and for that yeah you you probably have to see well you do have to seek it out i think i
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think you have to get either into the wilderness or you have to you know deny yourself the normal
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creature comforts and find find a bit of a challenge well let's talk about this idea of being skilled as a
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component of manliness i thought it was fun this is fun reading this because you know i'd read your
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book micromastery we talked about it and this was 20 years later so it's interesting to see your
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thinking of of skills being an important part of being a man even 20 years ago so what what is it
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about being handy that you think makes a man admirable well i think it's it's the hands yeah it's it's
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it's using our hands you know i think that uh we know that there's something associated with it i
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always remember my grandfather who's very i mean he he'd kind of he he originally he ended up as an
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engineer but he'd started as you know doing manual work building walls and and using all kinds of hand
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tools he had these really he's not a big guy but his hands are big and strong and that we feel it in
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the old handshake you know why do we have such a such a store by having a bone crushing handshake it's
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because it kind of means something it means that you can you can handle weapons you can you can make
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things you have the skill to be useful i think it's it's all about a utility factor nobody wants
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to feel useless and i think that this connection in the lousy modern world between people not finding
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meaning and people being very very lazy and not getting off their butt it's connected to feeling
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useless so if you have skills hand skills you are useful and therefore you will work and you will find
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meaning so they're all kind of deeply connected and we know that there's you know parts of the brain
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connected with you know getting hand skill are really sort of if you can use this term ancient parts of
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parts of our cognition you know this is not it's not a recent development so i think it's tapping into
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something that's that is ancient and valuable and yeah i mean even even neanderthal man even proto-humans
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were were adept at hand skill so it seems like a an essential essential thing to to master and it's
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one of those ways of becoming more competent is one of those ways you can rebel against this conspiracy
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against your manhood yeah i think it i think it really is i think it's it's it's it's a way of
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it's it's very satisfying as well you know the idea of you know you can go into the wilderness and start
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a fire without using a lighter and petrol you know if you can use a make a bow drill and start a fire
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like that i mean there's huge growth in survival which we've seen i mean the being a man thing it
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already had started in the 90s but in the last 20 years we've seen a massive growth in
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bushcraft and survival and youtube has been a huge a huge help there in spreading all kinds of skills
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it's now really quite easy to get quite arcane skills which you had to go on special courses
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to learn in the past you can access them through youtube we're gonna take a quick break for your
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word from our sponsors and now back to the show all right so let's talk about this idea of the ability
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to kill man or beast so what's going on there i mean i think i mean i think the point you made is that
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it's something that people i think tacitly accept as being you know a part of being a man it's like
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if you were able if you have the capability to do violence but they're dodgy about it they don't like
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to talk about it yeah i mean it's it's dodgy ground because you you know you're entering the area of the
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criminal in in the modern culture but if you go back to traditional societies most of the rites of
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passages were either you killed a lion or or some some dangerous beast or you killed a member of
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another tribe but not in the sort of psychopathological warfare of the 20th century
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it was probably some kind of raiding warfare and even tribes like the nagas do you know these head
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hunters in in burmese indian border i spent some time with you if you ran away you weren't considered
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a coward but if you got killed in a raid you were given a dishonorable burial which is quite interesting
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so it limited warfare but it allowed people the chance to to to get involved sometimes of course
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people were killed in that in those environments but that the numbers were far far less than the vast
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numbers that have been killed in the in the 20th century so we can't really boast that our system is
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more humane or more manageable so i think that that gets rid of that objection but the hard part is to
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you know to say that that is an aspect the potentiality of of of killing somebody perhaps
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the only way around it is to talk about defense you know that you are prepared in a situation to put
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yourself in a difficult situation and be competent to to to protect somebody even if it meant dispatching
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somebody it does it is it is borderline psycho though so that's that is that is always going
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to be the problem and i think the way around it is to think of this is a skill which is a kind of
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bridging between the sort of the past and the present that if you are if you believe that you
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couldn't in a certain situation your family was threatened and you had to defend them if you believed
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you would just walk away and let them be killed and you wouldn't do something about it
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then there's something missing you know i think that you need to have that potential
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and that skill to be able to do that and probably it's more of a willpower thing and it's nothing to
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be particularly proud of because you know thousands of people in this world are going around killing
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people with you know without any thought you know a friend of mine told me that he was in somalia
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as war reporter and when he decided that the game was getting a bit dangerous was when a kid you know
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we're talking about a 10 year old kid pointed to kalashnikov and just pulled the trigger because
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it was unloaded so or the bullet jammed or whatever and he was lucky but that the ability to just you
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know blow somebody away is not some huge great skill in that sense but if you are a rational calm
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normal and you're not an unhinged human being then then it's quite a leap so maybe what we're edging
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towards here is if if you are someone who is repelled by the idea of killing and you're normal
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in that sense you should make that effort to comprehend it and i suppose that's what i'm saying
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but if you're the sort of person who just can't wait to go and stab somebody then then you're obviously
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a psychopath and we're not talking about you so i think that the the perspective of the book was really
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aimed at that thoughtful perhaps rather suburban character who thinks this is an untenable and
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outrageous position and maybe it's all about getting that mental flexibility and moving yourself
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into that position well and i mean something this is sort of an issue that's that philosophers have
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grappled with it's like can can you really be considered kind or good if you don't have the
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ability to do like violence or bad or whatever right it's like is it any virtue that you don't
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even have the ability like you don't have to overcome it yeah see what i'm saying so it's like
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can you really be proud of your virtue if you had no opportunity to test it or like control it somehow
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yeah i think that the you know that's that's a kind of another way into it and i think that's a
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a good way of looking at it that you may be over focused on those virtues and you might
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not understand that well perhaps they need to be defended in some way and that they may go hand in
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hand with with a lied virtue i mean thinking i'm thinking things like courage and generosity i've
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often noticed that people who are very generous often courageous and actually if you read in sort
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of you know traditional type psychology they're considered to go hand in hand so if you want to build
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your courage build your generosity so there are some some sort of links maybe at a deeper level between
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more passive virtues and and the more kind of outgoing aggressive virtues or or borderline
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vices depending how you look at them well you make this distinction too between men being either
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passive or active and i think that goes to what you were just saying there like men are i think
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there's we have this idea that men should be active instead of passive and i mean what does that
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look like for you in the yeah and what is that one of the things i i regret not doing in that book was
00:24:24.960
not using the yin yang distinction which of course was fairly well known but it wasn't really mainstream
00:24:30.880
and now i think it is more mainstream and it's one of the better one of the things that has definitely
00:24:35.620
happened over the last 20 years is a lot of the concepts that were a bit borderline then are totally
00:24:41.220
mainstream brain plasticity totally mainstream use it or lose it you know the idea that if you don't
00:24:47.980
practice these skills you'll lose them all of these things are now mainstream and one of them was yin and
00:24:52.180
yang and i think that that's the passive active thing the sort of yin characteristics i mean you know
00:24:57.700
in the sort of eastern philosophies you know things things always have a yin and yang element and it
00:25:02.740
depends on where on the spectrum you are and i think this they don't necessarily map perfectly onto male and
00:25:09.060
female but definitely men are more on the yang end of the spectrum and women in general are more on the
00:25:16.760
yin end of the spectrum and there's a bunch of characteristics that are yin and yang and passivity
00:25:21.600
is more of a yin characteristic which doesn't mean it's better or worse it's just a characteristic
00:25:26.620
and um so i i definitely think that men are more on the yang end and therefore need to do more active
00:25:36.940
stuff but another point you make in your book is that the lousy modern world or soft suburban existence
00:25:42.340
can often take men who are have that active stance towards the world and then turn them into like
00:25:48.540
they become like they're just really guppy fish they start out male young and then when they get
00:25:52.500
older they turn into females yeah i think that i mean that was that was my great theory that i thought
00:25:57.400
would be taken up but people just kind of like completely ignored it but yeah i thought that the
00:26:02.140
the sort of traditional polarity societies seem to need to organize themselves into polarity and
00:26:07.700
maybe that reflects the yin yang thing and in most cultures it's male female but we now have evolved a
00:26:15.600
young old polarity so you're kind of young until you're about 38 you start making all these references
00:26:21.980
to getting older and then you suddenly adopt all these kind of kind of timid older characteristics that
00:26:27.940
they're quite yin and so they they're sort of more like old style feminine characteristics but you
00:26:33.640
can't call call them that now so it's now just what older people do so so that was and i but i think
00:26:40.380
there are all sorts of interesting possibilities like i do think if you could if you if you trap
00:26:47.020
an active person in a in a controlled environment and they become focused on so on i mean we see a growth
00:26:56.060
in not asperger's syndrome per se but sort of characteristics asperger type characteristics
00:27:03.040
you know listing involvement deep involvement in sort of this sort of hobbies and and i wonder if
00:27:10.300
that's a reaction to to being kind of trapped in a in a non-active environment you tend not to see that
00:27:18.040
in tribal groups which still go out hunting and roaming around and generally being
00:27:25.580
kind of hunter-gatherer types you don't see that same sort of nerdy kind of behavior which may be
00:27:32.820
a kind of reaction to being sort of penned in well i mean that's another thing we've done in our
00:27:36.860
lousy modern world we've taken being active sometimes the extreme like the extreme forms of
00:27:41.660
being active and we said well that's a pathology like they've got adhd we're gonna give you some
00:27:46.080
medicine for that because again it's all about control like we want to control people yeah i think
00:27:51.080
that's certainly true i mean if you look at the school school is a it's only tangentially about
00:27:56.340
education i mean it's really about socializing people to function in in this world that is very
00:28:02.720
that does demand a high level of submission to in certain areas i mean one of the shocking things
00:28:09.900
i found going around a prison in scotland where i gave a talk a couple of years ago and i
00:28:16.220
reminded me of school i mean in not in a bad way even in kind of a good way because the guards were
00:28:21.800
really trying to help the prisoners in a good way and and i was teaching i was talking to some
00:28:26.240
of the good prisoners who hadn't sort of you know messed up so they were allowed to listen to my talk
00:28:30.000
and the whole thing was like a hardcore grim version of school so it shocked me and i realized
00:28:35.700
in other words those prisoners had just been trained for this environment this is what they knew
00:28:41.260
by going to school so i mean this is i'm not saying that's the only function of school because
00:28:47.260
obviously people do learn things but they they could learn them a lot more efficiently in another
00:28:51.980
way we know that but that's not the big issue the issue is that society needs to control all these
00:28:59.200
people it can't have them just running around and just observing that doesn't mean to say that
00:29:03.460
i'm proposing that we disband all these things but it's just about developing that awareness
00:29:07.960
and having that awareness doesn't mean that you are automatically opposed to those institutions
00:29:13.780
i mean i think that's one of the things i was trying to do in the book is to build
00:29:16.500
a sense of you know have be able to hold those slightly contradictory positions in your brain at the same
00:29:25.000
time don't don't assume that you have to be either one thing or the other and again you're like
00:29:31.000
the people that are often trying to control are boys it's like i mean usually yeah i mean usually the
00:29:35.520
schools are what the research says the way school's set up it's suited for girls boys you know some do
00:29:41.680
okay but then some boys don't do well at all in it because there's just so much there's no flexibility
00:29:47.300
they like to be active and they don't get that at school yeah i mean there are just a hundred ways
00:29:52.000
that you could improve it and that we probably go off in a complete tangent but you're you're right
00:29:57.480
you know we human beings were not meant to sit motionless or not hardly moving in one seat all day long
00:30:05.160
you know it's just it's just not what humans are supposed to do and to expect people to do that
00:30:09.780
it's just it's just kind of it's kind of lunacy so you talk about within this this lousy modern world
00:30:16.020
like we don't have these opportunities to show male attributes the courage the ability to be skilled
00:30:22.540
like you have to go out and find it like what are some of the stuff that you did to go display this
00:30:27.620
stuff and like were you did you were you trying to create a rite of passage for yourself with all
00:30:31.560
these activities you did i think what i was trying to do was emulate people who'd come before me i
00:30:38.920
i wanted to to you know i knew that people had fought in wars i knew that people had gone on
00:30:45.340
expeditions and i'd read books about them and i thought we've got to live up to that we can't just
00:30:50.680
just assume that things were great in the past and we've just got to you know all be wimpy nowadays so
00:30:56.460
there was it was a conscious trying to sort of to emulate people in the past and but starting on a
00:31:03.700
really small way because i was quite a timid guy i'm not like sort of superman who just jumped off so
00:31:09.320
i started i mean i think the first thing is this doing a long distance walk in in the pyrenees so
00:31:14.920
walking alone about 700 kilometers along this couple of trails that connect the atlantic with the
00:31:23.280
mediterranean and that was a big deal for me because it was you know self-reliance you know
00:31:28.660
some slightly scary situations when i got lost but you know it wasn't beyond the ability of almost
00:31:35.060
anybody to do and then that gave me the the impetus to go to japan and study this martial art and i'd
00:31:41.540
always known that i wanted to do a martial art i just not found a situation where i could do one
00:31:48.220
and actually progress and get better because i wasn't that good at it and then when i got to japan i
00:31:52.680
realized you could do it absolutely full-on and full-time five hours a day five days a week
00:31:57.740
and that's when i began to properly progress and achieve that sort of bucket list tick which you
00:32:05.000
know get a black belt was had always been a kind of you know there's kind of an overlap with the
00:32:09.620
bucket list i suppose here but i'm a big believer wish list i think it's better than wish lists
00:32:13.900
making a wish list of uh achievements is is it's no bad thing and you also went bullfighting or you
00:32:20.640
oh yeah yeah there was a training yeah the cow famous cow yeah that would that came about through
00:32:26.160
a men's magazine maxim i think and england had a bullfighter called frank evans sadly now dead
00:32:33.520
and he offered to train me and i had to go up to manchester his town and he had a we went into
00:32:41.620
a local school playground where he uh he had a shopping trolley with a a bale of straw in it and
00:32:49.280
that was the bull and i had to practice kind of stabbing it and you know lifting the the cloak
00:32:54.520
and yeah and then we went out to spain to practice with a cow because you can't if you practice with
00:33:00.820
a bull you have to actually dispatch the bull and i wasn't really going to do that so you you have to
00:33:06.700
practice with a cow because then the cow is allowed to live and the reason why you have to dispatch the
00:33:10.260
bull is that the bull will learn basically they don't want the bull to learn how to kill humans
00:33:14.380
yeah yeah i mean they learn so fast in the 15 minutes that they're in because they've been living
00:33:19.940
on the range for two to four years so they're they've had a wonderful life they haven't been
00:33:23.900
inside a horrid shed for six months and then you know stunned by one of those guns like they used in
00:33:30.100
no country for old men none of that they've had a wonderful life and it's come to an end in 15
00:33:35.240
minutes and quite frankly if if that was the way i was going to go i wouldn't mind but yeah they learn
00:33:40.500
so much they become very dangerous and they will they will easily kill the next matador so they're
00:33:45.720
dispatched but cows are considered to be less difficult but of course cows learn too so they can
00:33:53.560
be they can be they can be there is a wild card and frank himself had suffered some a terrible injury
00:33:59.400
where a coward pronged him right up the ass punctured his bladder but it had left no damage
00:34:05.060
so he you know it was an internal injury but had no external kind of damage so it was rather
00:34:11.140
touch and go nasty thing to happen and that sounds unpleasant it's a deeply unpleasant i'm just trying
00:34:18.140
not to laugh because it's a horrible thing to happen to anyone but anyway yeah so yeah we went
00:34:22.380
into it was a tiny cow but uh still yeah pretty scary when it's coming coming full on at you and all
00:34:28.360
you've got is a is a is a cape and a sword to protect you but uh yeah it was that was a cool
00:34:33.980
thing and uh kind of glad i did it wait and after you did all this stuff like did you feel change like
00:34:39.580
did you feel like i feel like a man or was it sort of like uh that was a letdown i think i was thinking
00:34:45.440
reflecting about this the other day i was thinking god yeah you've done some stuff you're all right
00:34:49.080
i think it experience has an odd effect on you that isn't explicit so it doesn't it doesn't come
00:34:56.480
up as sentences in your head it's just does change the way you approach life a bit it makes you those
00:35:03.160
kind of experiences will tend to make you more confident in unusual situations you'll just think
00:35:09.240
oh this isn't so bad so that's good so it gives you a it gives you a range in which to judge things
00:35:14.680
and some skills which you might need but it's it's not that you're not going to feel any different
00:35:21.120
i think that's the kind of thing when you're a kid you always think i'm going to feel different
00:35:24.040
you're just the same you know you're still you but you you're less anxious and you're you're more
00:35:32.500
yeah you're less anxious really and you're more willing to have a go at something so it's a sort
00:35:38.080
of it increases your your range you know the possibilities that you have but you'll you won't
00:35:43.480
you won't feel like clint eastwood inside whatever he feels like inside have you talked
00:35:49.860
to your son about this stuff as he's gotten older uh not really i mean that's the other thing i'm i
00:35:55.580
don't think i'm a great dad so you're almost like an okay one i've i've uh yeah i kind of brought it
00:36:03.020
up but mostly what i pontificate on is is treated as uh you know marginal marginal interest in our
00:36:10.480
household so um so that's always a problem but i've the books are there for them to read my
00:36:16.560
daughter read it i think she she gets it better that's the other paradox of course yeah you spend
00:36:20.440
all this effort thinking you're talking to your son and you may well be talking to your daughter
00:36:24.300
so things work in mysterious ways what did she get about the book like what what did she say like
00:36:29.360
what connected with her yeah what she got and i think i can see it she's tolerant of all kinds of
00:36:37.760
different she can see uh what masculine behavior is important and what isn't and what is just like a
00:36:45.500
like what men do she's used to to she's not one of these women who demands men to all kind of act as
00:36:52.580
if they're you know downtrodden and passive she's she's more able to respond to what they're actually
00:37:00.700
saying or doing rather than what you might imagine they are because there are quite a lot of especially
00:37:06.640
if you go to college now there are kind of a lot of you know behavioral norms that men are supposed
00:37:12.540
to adhere to which obviously what everyone does yeah there's like classes now when you get you start
00:37:19.380
your freshman year where you have to talk about like what you're how we're supposed to do and not do
00:37:22.840
yeah i know it's kind of it's so weird it's making this whole area of tacit communication where you
00:37:28.520
just you you know you should know already it's kind of trying to make it all explicit and it's a
00:37:34.620
really bizarre kind of uh move but yeah i mean i'm not envious of them
00:37:40.920
well okay you're not so you're not there but like what do you what do you think men who are
00:37:45.440
listening to this podcast can start doing to experience what you call enhanced male being
00:37:50.060
like what what are the takeaways apart from buying the book apart from is it even is it still in print
00:37:54.680
yeah you don't know yeah it's definitely that's the thing of the imprint thing doesn't you know
00:37:59.200
there's quite a few uh secondhand copies out there especially you get to the amazon uk site so i think
00:38:03.240
you can still get it it may still be in print i don't know because it was on a reading list at
00:38:09.120
british columbia and simon fraser university it was on their masculinity course as a kind of academic
00:38:14.920
text for a while so i think it still has a life out there you probably will be able to get a copy
00:38:19.680
but yeah yeah okay that aside what could you do i think there's far more resources out there and
00:38:27.940
i think when i've got into this practical wisdom there's this sort of website on university of
00:38:35.500
chicago it's kind of movement practical wisdom which is sort of moving away from rules and incentives and
00:38:42.880
trying to ground behavior in in experience and i think that that's a way of sidestepping
00:38:50.500
compartmentalizing and labeling you know which i think is you know it's part of the has been part of
00:38:57.080
the problem but yeah in general i would say you've got to honor your yang i mean i say this to my
00:39:03.760
friends i've got a yang up i mean the other day i was going to join this gun club and of course you
00:39:08.440
know shooting guns in in the uk is it's pretty difficult but it's just a it's a yang experience
00:39:13.920
to go out shoot off a few rounds you know it's it's you know ultimately you may maybe you go hunting
00:39:21.020
maybe you don't go hunting but it definitely clocks you up a bit more yang and you come out feeling a
00:39:25.540
little bit more a bit more alive and a bit more energized so i would generally say yang up find
00:39:33.700
yang type activities chopping wood it's been shown that even if you're 80 years old you go out and chop
00:39:38.940
wood your testosterone levels rise to that of a 30 year old i mean jogging won't do that for you
00:39:44.260
you know find out those activities that do do give you that kind of use aggression i mean aggression
00:39:50.840
as a function which is to to use tools or weapons in a in a fast and efficient way so you don't lose
00:39:59.460
it i mean you you've and don't necessarily get into all those kind of endurance sports like riding
00:40:07.080
your bike for 5 000 miles you know there's there's you gotta have you have a variety i think of
00:40:13.180
activities well robert where can people go to learn more about your work well i've got i've got a
00:40:18.920
website robertswigger.com with about a thousand articles on it of all kinds of stuff i mean as
00:40:26.440
you know from the last chat i'm i mean my my my kind of the area i'm mainly into is polymathy which
00:40:32.540
is you know being skilled at many different things i think that that my being a man thing was just a
00:40:38.360
sort of subset of the the whole polymathic impulse which i think is as men and women i think we all need
00:40:45.680
to to spread our wings and not be trapped into specialization well robert twigger thanks for
00:40:51.300
your time it's been a pleasure thank you brett been great my guest today was robert twigger he's
00:40:56.440
the author of several books the book we discussed today was called being a man in the lousy modern
00:41:00.680
world it's available on amazon.com but you got to go to the uk version of amazon it's not available
00:41:05.360
in the states also check out his website robert twigger.com and check out our show notes at
00:41:09.580
aom.is slash twigger where you can find links to resources ring delve deeper into this topic
00:41:13.960
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at
00:41:24.620
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00:41:28.440
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