By 
When asked why he chose a girl as the protagonist of his film Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham had this to say:
“The boys talked about Minecraft. The girls talk about their souls.”
This is kind of how we’ve evolved. In the broadest of perspectives, women are generally interested in aspects of being people, and men are interested in things or activities.
Women consume content about relationships, mental health, hair and makeup, fashion, and improving their aura–things that pertain specifically (even if sometimes in stupid ways) to improving themselves, the way they appear to the world, or the way they connect to the world.
Men are into various ways to beat other men. We’re into sports, and video games, and media where the protagonist (an idealized version of ourselves) carries around a hammer he built himself, and uses it to bludgeon bitter, weaselly villains (who we actually are).
Disclaimer: This whole article is going to feature big time generalizations like this. So if you’re going to be one of those people who can’t understand the existence of broad trends because they don’t apply to you (i.e. “But I am a man and I do not like sports!”) then maybe just read literally anything else on my site. Maybe I’ll write something about narcissism soon that’ll apply perfectly to you.
To fully understand this, I think it’s beneficial to look back at human evolution, and how men and women got to be here.
Men were selected (selected means fucked) based on their ability to hunt and protect. This means that men were prioritized based on physical ability, and psychopathic emotions. The more indifferent they were to death and suffering, the more likely they were to win an ax battle over whose cave this is, to hoard goods for their own, and to kill a rabbit for dinner instead of wanting to snuggle it and name if Colonel Bun Bun.
That had to be such a priority, that being a loving, introspective, empathetic person really couldn’t be a priority. Sure it would have been nice, but it was better to have a whack job father that could beat a rhino to death, than to have one who gave a shit about your feelings. As a man, as long as you were just barely not psychotic enough to kill your wife and children, you were preferable.
So basically, you kind of had to be a piece of shit to get laid.
Social intelligence wasn’t a concern, relationships weren’t much of a concern, and friendships weren’t much of a concern. Nobody had time for that shit, so you didn’t really feel like you were missing anything by not developing any of this.
So women, as we know, were caregivers, which entails being selected and developed to have a higher interpersonal intelligence. After all, you need to be empathetic and caring to not throw a screaming 4-month-old off of a cliff. This means they developed a great ability to interact with each other, nurture relationships well, and link their piece of shit baby daddies to some semblance of humanity so that they might feel something like joy once in their lives.
These were the original manic pixie dream cavewomen.
How These Cavepeople Exist Now
So fast forward to now–a time which is, in terms of evolution, like four seconds after these caveman times I was just talking about.
Due to a nearly evaporated middle class, the fact that men have to talk to people more often, and the fact that “providing” involves a lot less brutal animal slaughter, society has changed immensely. Roles are less clearly defined. Now everyone is a caregiver, and everyone is a provider, and everyone has a real, well-rounded role as a person who has to rely on human interaction. Everyone is everything.
Here’s how that has resulted for everyone.
For women it’s mostly been steps in a good direction. Most forms of providing are now unisex, with many being more ideal for women. Along with this, they’re still good at creating and maintaining relationships. Sure they get eye-fucked and dismissed all the time, but they’re at least biologically set up to thrive in the modern world, because their gifts and inherent focuses have remained relevant.
For men, this sucks. The beings we’ve evolved into are largely irrelevant now. There’s no use for constantly craving orifices to stick your dick in. A “protector” in a civilized society is usually just a ridiculous asshole puffing his chest because someone called his wife Karen instead of Erin. Our evolved roles have been largely replaced by technology and civilization. Machines can lift shit. A stepstool can help you reach the top shelf. A Barretta can protect a well-trained toddler. We don’t need you to build anything, or fix anything. Everything in the world has already been built by someone your kid’s age, and costs like 8 cents to replace.
The things we were biologically selected for aren’t very relevant any more unless you’re in some kind of military, or animal slaughtering position. For most of us, we’re just left with this aggression, this constant need to hump things, a severe lack of interpersonal skills, and no use for any of it.
And here’s the part that hurts: We still have the same depths, and problems, and shit to figure out that women do. We’re just way worse at discovering it and expressing it. We have way more ability to survive now than we did when we were club-toting cavemen, and way more time to live, but we just suck at it too much to get what we really need from it.
The result of all of this is the following:
1) Way too many men don’t have the social skills to make women interested in them, and yet still feel entitled to women’s bodies.
2) Men try to use common interests in things to make friends. We play sports and video games, and talk about them, and it’s the best thing we’ve got going, but it’s not enough. When that activity gets old, or out of season, or we get carpal tunnel from playing Fortnite too much, we lose what we relate over, and because there is no empathetic, human basis to it, slowly, we lose the friendship.
As a result, it’s very common for men to forget to talk to your best friend for a few months, which becomes a few years, and eventually you have no idea he’s on his second kid and working for a tech company in Belgium, and also apparently he’s gay?
3) We’ve lost a lot of meaning in who we are because who we naturally are is kind of stupid in a civilized society, and as a result of all of this…
4) An insane, horrifying number of us die by suicide.
Men are getting left behind in many respects because society is getting better. But we don’t have to get left behind—not if we consciously look to evolve.
But what does that mean? Am I really saying that we should be more like women? Am I saying we should eschew the core of our masculine selves in the pursuit of a more conventionally feminine outlook and personality?
Well, kinda, yeah. We don’t really have much place for grunting hulk smashing subhumans any more, so why wouldn’t you–in these specific ways–want to be more like women?
I’m not talking about wearing makeup, or getting into astrology (not that there’s anything wrong with anyone wearing makeup—astrology on the other hand…), but if we’re going to better fit into a modern society, here are the simple ways we can evolve.
4 Ways Men Can Evolve
1) Work Out Aggression
You know how when you walk your dog enough, the dog yaps less, bites less, and stops humping the legs of non-consenting adults? Men kind of work in the same way.
We’re all aware of the idea of working out aggression, but we severely underrate how important it is for us to function in a civilized society. When we don’t work out aggression, we talk to women from about four inches away, we drive like maniacs, and we feel an inherent urge to punch things.
Look, we can improve a lot of who we are internally. But there will always be a caveman within us that wants to grunt-fuck and beat on things, and he needs to be exorcised as much possible–preferably by exercising him.
So prioritize working out aggression in your life. You can find your own way of doing it. Punch bags that are meant to be punched, go for a run, masturbate before making big life decisions. Burn that caveman energy off, so that you can function better and accomplish everything else on this list more effectively.
2) See Other Humans
Some will tell you to go back to your manly roots–to hunt, to camp, to grease wrestle with your friend Bobby, and then not look at each other the rest of the day to confirm “nothing gay happened here.” These are all fine options, but the important part is this: do something consistently where you interact with others in person.
This isn’t a universal problem for men, but it’s not an uncommon one either. Men have a tendency to zero in on their passion at the expense of everything else in their life–and often, that passion is either executed by themselves, or worse, with people on the internet.
If this describes you, I know you love whatever the thing you do by yourself all the time is. You love playing Red Dead, or working on your car, or building your model Hindenbergs. I really get it. But also maybe chill the fuck out on it a little bit.
Seeing other people’s faces, and saying words out loud to them is the only way to fully connect to them through reality. If you want to lead a better life in reality, and not just with 12-year-olds on Call of Duty calling your mom a whore, at some point, you have to exist in it.
So seek out what might be out there for you–whether it’s a rec basketball league, or a weekly D&D game, or a grease wrestling club, and then move onto to step three.
3) Be Intimate with Your Bro, bro!
A small percentage of men eventually learn what intimacy is, and an even smaller percentage of straight men feel okay having that with other men. At the slightest hint of intimacy, we do the straight dude back pat in the middle of a hug, or change the subject, or break the way too palpable tension with a gay joke.
It’s so hard for men to maintain this closeness with each other because they are so afraid of letting the shield down, because if you let your shield down a few millennia ago, you’d quite literally get stabbed by Spartacus.
But Spartacus is gone (or at least, he’s less threatening now). Society has moved on. If we’re going to evolve, you’ve got to throw that shield in the trash. Being able to talk honestly with people, venting, expressing emotional states–you fucking need these things to be a functional human, and most men don’t let themselves have them–and certainly not with the people we talk to the most (other dudes).
So value your relationship, and let others know you care about them, but go beyond that. Break some barriers. Discuss something that hurts your feelings with a brother-in-law. Cry in front of your dad. Give your buddy a hug. Look into his eyes. Suck his dick. (Sorry, I ‘m still holding onto my stupid gay joke shield a little.)
4) Be Just Friends with a Woman
This is the ultimate, holy grail step for men. It seems incredibly simple, but almost all of us suck at being friends with a woman that we’re not trying to fuck. We internally see them ultimately as a mating partner, and when that is the lens, genuine friendship tends to come up short.
If we can do this though, not only can we learn from women, we can learn to control our tendency to see them as sex objects, and we can see them–actually–as equals. Again, seems like grade school stuff. But we do kinda suck at it.
So practice this. Continually work on taking yourself out of the grunt-fucking mindset and listen to a woman, and relate to her, and show interest in her without also thinking things that would make her feel totally violated. You’ll fail miserably and pop some weird boners for a while, but you can get better at this if you keep on trying.
The concern many will have in light of all of this is this idea of, “Well then what is masculinity? How do we define ourselves as men in an era where conventional manhood has become less relevant?”
The answer, I think, is that we don’t, because…why would we? Who gives a shit about achieving some kind of cohesive gender identity? What does it matter? What–we need some kind of inherent instruction on how to live based on our genitalia? No we don’t.
Again, everyone is everything now. We can just be whatever the hell we choose to be. We can define ourselves as individuals, not as dick-havers. We can just be free.
Of course, we’ll always have a caveman inside of us, and as a result, we’ll always have an initial struggle with intimacy, maintaining relationships, and not being kinda predators. But we can improve. We can take our next step in evolution, and some day, if we really are mindful of this and work on it, maybe we can even hug another dude without the straight dude back pat.
