on Masculinity and Violence
“Strength & Virtue. A fitness Expedition in Greece.
An eight day expedition for men on the island of *****, Greece. Reclaim the ancient Greek belief that a man’s highest calling is to forge his body and soul for the war of daily life. Join a brotherhood as you ruck into caves, swim the wine-dark sea, summit mountains, and walk hidden paths.
Train in our outdoor gym. Face hard physical trials. Feast on meat and wine. Experience ancient camaraderie in the sacred struggle to become a better man.
limited space available
Use code ******* for $1000 off”
I found this flyer in a trendy downtown OKC coffee shop. Something about reading it while listening to the Bee Gees and sipping a Chai Latte made me chuckle. But I guess that’s kind of the idea. My fiancé chuckled to herself about how many marketing consultants and accountants would eat this sort of thing up. But I guess that’s kind of the idea.
It fascinates me to think about how we got here. How the idea of masculinity, and how it’s perceived in America today, would compel somebody to create this program or enroll. It reminds me of similar rhetoric appearing in the recent federal announcement President Trump made, changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War. I hear Pete Hegseth, our new US Secretary of War, speak of returning “the warrior ethos” to the country and I wonder what on Earth that could even possibly mean to a contemporary American man. What is being accomplished by changing the word “defense” to “war”? This rhetoric, found in both fitness retreats and federal branding, obviously deeply moves American men in a visceral and emotional way.
Attempting to begin from an empathetic place- I understand how we got here, largely. In societies facing the threat of extreme violence, honor and power will be given to people who offer us safety from that violence. From a collective perspective, the dangers of the world cause us unrest and anxiety; we long for peace and security. We cheer when we get it, we hug the people who got it for us. American culture identifies itself with European culture, European culture identifies itself with ancient Roman culture, and ancient Roman culture identified itself with even more ancient Greek culture. Even more specifically, the average American is going to model their life after the powerful members of medieval European culture, many of whom specifically were delegated wealth and power because of their military participation. To me, this means that American men are not only going to revere war heroes, but envision themselves as war heroes in their own lives as well.
Movements that root their authority and truth in tradition and history, American Conservatism as an example, have to be able to trace their roots back through these cultures to feel valid. If tradition is the god we worship, then we are not able to define masculinity using anything new or revolutionary. For these Americans, masculinity is measured by the honor you accumulate by performing your duties. Except, less than one percent of American men participate in the active-duty military and only six percent are retired veterans. Our historical definition of a hero’s masculinity runs into a problem, unless we can think of our own lives as being little personal wars and ourselves as the warriors fighting off all the dangerous things that threaten us.
When we think of ancient honor won through violence, we think of Spartan soldiers returning home in parades of applause to feast and have sex with their wives. In the end, it does not matter what Spartans or Greeks or Romans or anyone actually thought about war, sex, or honor. The real people who actually lived do not matter. We have written stories about them in our heads that we prefer to their actual history. A complex society with good and bad ideas, like everyone else, is less useful than a masculine utopia of abs and chest hair directed by Zack Snyder. The social imaginary we have built around things like masculinity is rooted in myths and stories we tell ourselves about how things used to be or ought to be.
All of this means that for a conservative marketing consultant in contemporary OKC to feel like a man, he has to warrior-ify himself. He rejects new ideas of masculinity, alternative cultural ideas of masculinity, or alternative religious ideas of masculinity. He instead has to spend thousands of dollars and a week of PTO to fly across the world and do crunches on a Greek island. He simply is not enough unless he does. He has not earned his honor, he has not earned his self esteem, he has not earned the chance to love himself. The warrior’s addictions become demons to slay, his healthy routines become battles to win, and his family becomes a tribe to protect.
To the fictional Greek warrior, war is not used as a tool to protect a life of reading poetry and cuddling with your children, the point of life itself is the violence of war. War and violence, tools used ideally to safeguard the beautiful things back home, have themselves become the beautiful things.
Schaeffer, Katherine. 2023. “For Veterans Day, Facts about the US Veteran Population | Pew Research Center.” Pew Research Center. 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/.
