Be a Man

In the late 500s BC, the military dictator Aristodemus took over the Greek colony of Cumae. He slaughtered his enemies en masse and undertook to ensure that no Cumaean man would ever be more than his slave.

Here is how he did it, according to the essayist Dionysius of Halicarnassus. “To ensure that no noble or manly aspiration would arise in any of the citizens, he decided to feminize every young man by means of his upbringing in the city's schools.” Aristodemus had the boys of Cumae wear long hair and embroidered gowns; he made them listen to soft music and keep out of the sun; he starved them of adult male guidance. This was so none of them would ever grow up strong enough to stand against him (Roman Antiquities 7.9).

What a paranoid and oppressive autocrat did to the sons of his subjugated people, American mental health professionals now propose we do to ourselves. In August of 2018, the American Psychological Association issued its first-ever “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men,” of which the first directive is that psychologists should “strive to recognize that masculinities are constructed based on social, cultural, and contextual norms.” In other words, treatment of boys and men should begin from the premise that manhood is culturally contingent and therefore alterable. The goal of therapeutic practice then becomes “to help boys and men over their lifetimes navigate restrictive definitions of masculinity and create their own concepts of what it means to be male.”