What's Wrong with Jack Donovan's 'The Way of Men'

Without women, the only way is gay

Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men is exactly the type of book about masculinity that you’d expect a homosexual to write. ‘Above all things,’ he claims, ‘masculinity is about what men want from each other.’ Not once in the book does he mention the essence of manhood — the potential for fatherhood — and there is very little mention of women. But men compete for status in the male dominance hierarchy to gain sexual access to women. And they compete according to criteria women themselves decide.

In terms of evolutionary biology, where the sexes differ, it is the result of sexual — not natural — selection. Men are built to a female specification for the sake of children. As Aristotle pointed out, small mistakes in the beginning lead to big ones in the end. And Donovan’s mistaken view of manhood leads him to absurd conclusions such as that men have ‘always inhabited a world apart from women.’

Hypermasculinity

To understand what Donovan’s ‘world apart’ means, let’s start with an extreme example. He doesn’t use it, but he should have done. It’s the essence of his vision: the rite of passage among the Sambia of eastern New Guinea. Believing that their mothers’ milk initially makes boys more feminine, they take the boy between the ages of six and ten and put him through six stages to initiate him into manhood. At puberty, the boys have to receive semen (‘men’s milk’) — the essence of all life and power — through fellatio. This is done mainly to prepare for war. For them, it marks entry into the fierce and brutal all-male warrior world. Think of it as the ultimate version of the tree house with a ‘no girls allowed’ sign on the front.

From Donovan’s Wikipedia page

But whereas the Sambia, despite homosexual activity, see marriage to a woman and fatherhood as the eventual completion of a boy’s journey to manhood, Donovan never makes it that far. In The Way of Men, the way is gay. He even wrote a whole book, Androphilia, on how ‘homosexuality can be about championing a masculine ideal.’ That book has unsurprisingly received less attention from men, but its essential ideas lurking in this one have gone unnoticed.

The Primacy of Procreation

Remember: small mistakes lead to big ones. According to Donovan,

Being good at being a man has more to do with a man’s ability to succeed with men and within groups of men than it does with a man’s relationship to any woman or any group of women. When someone tells a man to be a man, they are telling him to be more like other men, more like the majority of men, and ideally more like the men whom other men hold in high regard.

Suppose a man spends his life in a male gang. He’s the best protector and provider — the toughest, most competent guy, with the most resources. But now suppose he never procreates with a woman. From an evolutionary point of view, this man is a failure. Why? Because survival is instrumental to reproduction. Women hold men who are good protectors and providers in high regard because these aptitudes are important for procreation. A mother and child need resources and safety. The virtues of the ‘perimeter’ that Donovan describes as the main features of masculinity — strength, courage, mastery and honour — are fundamentally rooted in what women require of fathers, not what men require of each other.

What’s true in Donovan’s book isn’t new. He says he ‘consulted many books’ while writing it, but ‘only a handful of them are cited’. One not cited was doubtless David Gilmore’s Manhood in the Making, written decades before. For Donovan, ‘it has always been the job of men to draw the perimeter, to establish a safe space, to separate us from them and create a circle of trust.’ Similarly, for Gilmore, it’s ‘the need to establish and defend boundaries’. But whereas Gilmore rightly stresses procreating, providing and protecting as the universal masculine imperatives, Donovan loses sight of how these serve the family as the fundamental social unit.

So what’s new in Donovan’s book isn’t true. The men at the top of the male dominance hierarchy are good at doing what women want. And women hold them in high regard, which is why they want to reproduce with them. Men are the genetic filter of the species. They prove themselves in competition with other men to get attention from women in the hope of being able to procreate. Similarly, although women don’t exist in a dominance hierarchy properly speaking — they are arranged in posses (or cliques) rather than a pyramid — what they value is based on what men want. Women wear make up for men’s approval, not each other’s. They are not signalling youth and beauty, ultimately proxies for fertility, to other women.

Consider two animal examples that make the same point: elephant seals and lions. Among elephant seals, brutal fighting results in 4% of the males siring around 85% of the pups. Donovan would have you believe that those 4% get to reproduce because the other males regard them as impressive. No, they have won a game in which the female make the rules and are themselves the judges and the prizes. Among lions, the top males have the thickest, densest and darkest manes. Is this because other male lions like them? No, it’s because they are honest signals of genetic quality. They make it harder for the lions to dissipate heat, effectively making it harder for such a large animal to survive. And if he not only survives but thrives despite the handicap, it shows his genetic quality to the females.

Fundamentally, then, Donovan is wrong that ‘when men compete against each other for status, they are competing for each other’s approval.’ It is true that ‘the women whom men find most desirable have historically been attracted to—or been claimed by—men who were feared or revered by other men.’ But this is because those men have passed the test devised by women. It’s not that ‘female approval has regularly been a consequence of male approval.’ It’s that, ultimately, female approval determines who the top men are. Men don’t decide the success criteria. Because women want procreators, providers and protectors, they shape men via sexual selection to meet that standard. Taller men have a leverage advantage in combat, for example, so women prefer height.

It’s not about a gang of gays deciding the tallest one just looks cool.

Forgetting the Family

This is basic biology. So how did Donovan get it so wrong? Remember: small mistakes in the beginning lead to big ones in the end. His book doesn’t mention fatherhood. And he thinks ‘masculinity is about being a man within a group of men’ — not being a man within a family. Because humans are mammals, he claims that ‘a greater part of the reproductive burden will fall on women.’

But this is only superficially true. Yes, in most species with internal fertilisation, especially mammals, parental investment is female-dominated. Even at birth, the mammalian female doesn’t take a break: milk, for example, is another major maternal investment. But precisely because women are more limited by physiology than men are, this means the female’s greater parental investment is a scarce resource. Males compete for it, fighting and dying for the chance to inseminate females. According to Symons in The Evolution of Human Sexuality, ‘everywhere sex is something that females have that males want’ (OUP, 1979), p.253.

So whereas investment after sex is always greater for females, males invest very heavily in competition before sex. And since their offspring require resources, males also compete heavily after birth. Donovan claims that since ‘men will never get pregnant’ and ‘will never be nursing,’ this means ‘they will be less encumbered by their children.’ He goes so far as to say that ‘they may not even know who their children are.’ But no society has practised polyandry (one wife multiple husbands) for this reason. At least polygyny (one husband, multiple wives) means both parents are known. But even that has never produced a large, stable and successful society. Monogamy trumps both. And it’s women’s preferred mating strategy because it encumbers men with their children. In fact, women are less likely to forgive a partner giving a rival woman resources than having sex with her. If she gets pregnant, at least her child won’t be a drain on the family’s resources if she means nothing to the man. The earliest humans (hunter-gatherers) were strictly monogamous.

But the confusion doesn’t stop here. “What’s a woman?” has become a meme because feminism — in refusing to accept the potential for motherhood as the essence of womanhood — opened the door to the transgender movement. If being a woman is about careers, clothes and cosmetics, then any man can be a woman. But if, for Donovan, manhood isn’t the potential for fatherhood, he faces the same difficulty. “What’s a man?” Well, he flounders, “greater strength differentiates men from women.” But there are female strength athletes who, without drugs, can outlift Donovan. Strength can’t be the essence of masculinity. And it can’t be anything to do with combat either: women have killed men in front-line combat.

So if it’s not strength, what is it? Maybe it’s what Donovan calls ‘mastery’ — the ‘manly virtue’ of dominating one’s environment through technical prowess in various skills. This ‘requires human intellect’. But women, too, share this same ‘human intellect’. Like a feminist who loses femininity by divorcing it from motherhood, Donovan loses masculinity by divorcing it from fatherhood.

The epigraph to his book is Bell Hooks’s remark that “gangsta culture is the essence of patriarchal masculinity.” And it epitomises his misconception of masculinity. Patriarchy is dads, not gangsters or gays. Fathers, not fornicators.

But Donovan likes the idea of gangsta culture because it’s a pure power struggle. For Donovan, Hobbes’s state of nature is an ‘ongoing conflict between small gangs of men.’ Like Hobbes, however, he doesn’t understand that the family is the fundamental social unit. Before they are members of small gangs, men are members of families because they only exist at all because of the families they were born into. The family is the foundation of the tribe and beyond that the city and ultimately the nation. And marriage, as a human universal, is a natural rather than social institution. Pair bonding is as old as the human species.

Donovan thinks that, ‘especially when men have achieved a level of security and prosperity beyond mere survival, women have been evaluated by men based less on their utility than on more nebulous qualities like attractiveness and social charm.’ But really there is nothing nebulous about attractiveness. Men value youth in women because female fertility peaks at about age 20. Even teenage boys, for example, rate a woman five years older than them as the perfect partner. And prostitutes can charge twice as much at 20 years old as they can at 30.

Men also value beauty and symmetry as indicators of genetic fitness. The 0.7 WHR is particularly desirable in women because a small WHR is associated with higher fertility and higher neonatal birth weight. But waist depth vs. waist circumference is an even stronger indicator. In the US, women spend twice as much time on makeup as on books. Why? Makeup mimics youth, corrects asymmetries and signals sexuality.

Getting nebulous with Nietzsche

He’s right to point out that, ‘to the chagrin of masculinity’s reimaginers, women still respond sexually to the kinds of “alpha” traits and behaviors in men that would have made them good hunters and fighters.’ But note again that he fails to point out that ultimately these are the behaviours that would make men good protectors and providers for children. Ironically, then, although Donovan says ‘this book is not about the things that make men human’ but only about ‘the things that make them men’, he misses his own mark by a mile.

As mentioned before, however, there’s some truth in it. Most of it is from other writers. But Donovan does make the reasonable point that, regarding civilisational decline, ‘individual women, a few figureheads aside, can’t fairly be blamed for a whole lot.’ Insofar as this discourages men from blaming women for feminism — a victim narrative — this is commendable. But the point is made poorly because feminism, although fronted by a few female figureheads, was founded by men. Marx and Engels were the first feminists. And Marcuse later said that the feminist movement was the most powerful revolutionary tool the radicals had. That’s because the greatest motivator for men is sex with young women. If you can change young women’s sexual behaviour, you can change society at its root: the family.

A radical is, literally, someone who goes to the root. And Donovan is something of a radical himself. For him, ‘the cost of civilization is a progressive trade-off of vital existence. It’s a trade of the real for the artificial, for the convincing con, made for the promise of security and a full belly.’ 

But here’s where things get…nebulous.

‘Our world,’ Donovan laments, ‘isn’t offering men more paths to virile fulfilment or vital experience.’ Because of this, ‘we must look at the phenomenon of masculinity amorally and as dispassionately as we can. We must find what Man knows for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe.’ (Donovan’s emphasis.)

Donovan uses the word ‘vital’ seven times in his book, increasingly towards the end as if it somehow underscores his main message. And that is some form of Nietzsche’s will to power, hence Donovan’s emphasis on amorality. Although a former Satanist and former go-go dancer in gay bars, Donovan is a Nietzschean at heart: one of his other books focuses solely on Nietzsche. Like Donovan, Nietzsche had basically nothing to say about women and children. Is his Superman married? If not, does he fornicate? If so, does he use contraception? Or does he masturbate alone on a mountain? Or maybe he lives with other Supermen as sodomites in a little tree house? No girls allowed! Certainly, since Nietzsche denies objective morality, none of this would be bad.

Artist: Tom of Finland

Derived from the Latin vitalis ‘of or belonging to life,’ however, ‘vital’ should remind us that, from the perspective of evolutionary biology, survival is simply instrumental to reproduction. In Christian terms, this was God’s command to ‘go forth and multiply.’

That’s the real way of men.

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