On the Crisis of Men

On a Saturday morning this winter, while my wife trained for a half-marathon, I was tasked with taking our eighteen-month-old daughter to the neighborhood synagogue for “Shabbat for Tots.” Shabbat for Tots was exactly what it sounds like: about two dozen children between one and four years old gathered in a preschool classroom with their parents while a woman in her twenties played guitar and sang songs very loudly. Some of the songs contained ostensibly religious content; one, about “Shabbat feelings,” caused the woman with the guitar to shudder, weep and laugh hysterically in turn—none of which cleared up for me what these emotions had to do with the Jewish day of rest. Others were simple and didactic; the kids were asked to identify their knees, then to bend their knees, to identify their feet, then to stomp their feet. At one point they were all handed rattlers, with which they made hideous sounds for a few minutes before being asked to return them to a large bucket—an instruction that led to my daughter being nearly stampeded by two heedless three-year-old girls, toward whom I felt an unwelcome spasm of hatred.

Notwithstanding my neighborhood’s reputation for avant-garde family arrangements, I was the only man at Shabbat for Tots who had not come with his wife, something I noticed because, whenever I was not preventing my daughter from drinking cleaning detergent or unplugging the window air-conditioning unit, I was looking at the other men in the room. Looking at other men is a somewhat novel experience for me. In my former life as a non-father, if I took any notice of another man in the same room, it was probably to appraise him physically, on the off chance that we were to become locked in some form of primitive combat. (Would I be able to beat him in a race? How easy would it be for him to strangle me?) As a father, however, I find myself looking at other men—at other fathers—all the time, and not at all as competition. Often they look back, just as quizzically, at me. I think we are trying to figure out how we should look, how we should act, how we should deal with the perennial awkwardness of being a father in public.

I was reminded, or in truth was already interpreting my experience in light of, a scene in Book Two of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel, My Struggle. In the scene, which comes as part of a much longer reflection on modern fatherhood, Knausgaard takes his eight-month-old daughter Vanja to “Rhythm Time,” a music class in Stockholm. As one of the few men sitting on the floor in a room full of mothers, babies and soft pillows, he imagines how he must look to the attractive young woman who is leading the class:

I wasn’t embarrassed, it wasn’t embarrassing sitting there, it was humiliating and degrading. Everything was gentle and friendly and nice, all the movements were tiny, and I sat huddled on a cushion droning along with the mothers and children, a song, to cap it all, led by a woman I would have liked to bed. But sitting there I was rendered completely harmless, without dignity, impotent, there was no difference between me and her, except that she was more attractive, and the leveling, whereby I had forfeited everything that was me, even my size, and that voluntarily, filled me with rage.

I was not worried, at Shabbat for Tots, about what the guitarist thought of me. What she was tasked with doing—the singing in the too-loud voice, and the stomping, and the exaggerated Shabbat emotions, all in front of not only a bunch of toddlers but also their adult parents—struck me as nearly unspeakable. My own burdens seemed light in comparison. I could, however, identify with Knausgaard’s feeling of being rendered soft and harmless, of having to forget that there were such things as potency or masculine dignity. The fact that we were helping our wives take care of our children on the weekend was not the problem: this was a responsibility we had all signed up for, approved of and—at least theoretically—accepted. But Shabbat for Tots asked more of us than to help take care of our children; rather, everything in that room signaled that we were expected to become children, or someone’s fantasy of a child: that is, harmless, asexual, insensible to any non-family-friendly desires. To fully inhabit the role that had been laid out for us there was not, it seemed, to be a good father; it was to be a good little boy, whereas the only reason we were there was because we had become fathers, and thus were no longer little boys. Or so we wanted to believe. But were we really fathers?

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I grew up in the age of the crisis of men. Already a frequent subject of national headlines when I became a teenager in the early Nineties (extensively catalogued by Susan Faludi in her 1999 book Stiffed), by the early 2000s, when I was in college, the burdens of contemporary manhood had become the dominant theme of prestige television and film. There were the belated men, the ones who had come “too late,” as Tony Soprano memorably put it to his psychiatrist, and thus instead of getting to build the country with their biceps were stuck in therapy and a rapidly feminizing suburbia, watching helplessly as the old codes were violated and then forgotten completely. There were the nostalgic men, like Don Draper, who aspired to live in the sepia-toned world that he famously pitched as an advertising template to Kodak executives on Mad Men. There were the men who found in violence and criminality a temporary respite from the confines of contemporary manhood—Tony again, but also Walter White on Breaking Bad and Frank Lucas in American Gangster. And there were the ones who impersonated a clearly disintegrated authority to unconsciously comedic effect, like Michael Scott in The Office. If you had to choose, the best among bad options at the time was to become one of Judd Apatow’s hapless husbands; sure, these were pudgy man-children destined to be remembered as footnotes even by their own families, but at least they seemed to be in on the joke.

Knausgaard’s My Struggle, whose six books were published between 2009 and 2011 (they appeared in English between 2012 and 2018), can be understood as belonging to the crisis-of-men genre. Indeed, we might say that in Knausgaard’s novel the crisis of men reaches its full dialectical self-consciousness. Whereas for the protagonists of those millennial TV shows, internal contradictions often displayed themselves in morbid psychoanalytic symptoms—depression, violence, sleeping with the closest available woman—Knausgaard’s autofictional narrator drags his inner conflict out into the open, then subjects it to thousands of pages of merciless analysis. For Knausgaard, as for Apatow, this is partly a source of comedy, and the scene at Rhythm Time is just one of several comic set pieces about family life in a Scandinavian welfare state. But it is not all comedy.

In Book Six, some three thousand pages after Knausgaard has wheeled his daughter out of her music class, he investigates the difference between the social roles of “son” and “father,” which for him describe the two essential paths for the modern man. Knausgaard’s own father, he alleges, was a restless and often volatile man who managed to discipline himself for barely long enough to remain in the house as his children were growing up but who never truly became a father. In the “absence of any inner peace or gravity,” his father’s behavior was thus guided “by the outside, and for someone born in 1944, this was the authoritarian, rule-setting father.” (Never one for understatement, Knausgaard claims to be reminded of his father while watching videos of Hitler, though to be fair he also says he is reminded of himself.) Knausgaard is desperate to avoid being like his father, whose arbitrary temper and alcoholism had terrified him for most of his childhood, but, having seen only this defective model up close, he is unsure what it would take to improve upon it. “Being a father is a commitment,” he hazards. “But what are you committing yourself to?”

Knausgaard’s conclusion is that a true father is committed to being present for his family, which means above all that he abides by the “limit” that having a family places on him. “You have to be at your post; you have to be at home,” he writes. “Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son.”

Although the father-son dichotomy comes late in My Struggle, it can be read back into the long conflict that the narrator of the novels has undergone between his desire to become a writer, which is tied up with all his inner dreams and yearnings for what he calls the “unlimited”—and therefore with his status as a son—and his desire to become a father, which is to say a good man as his society and his wife Linda define it. Yet in contrast to the crisis-of-men shows, whose drama was predicated on their protagonists remaining in a state of immaturity and indecision, Knausgaard makes a choice. At the end of Book Six, he proclaims that he is no longer a son, and therefore no longer a writer. He chooses the role of father over the role of artist. In a sense, he suggests that this is the only defensible choice, that all the rest is egotism, dissipation and role-playing. But having made this choice, he leaves behind him a work of art that documents voluminously, and with a rare honesty, the full spectrum of its consequences. For all he loathes the repetitive tasks of childcare, not to mention the Dantean trials of endurance known as kids’ birthday parties, Knausgaard affirms that his involvement in the everyday lives of his children allows him a “closeness” that never existed between his father and him. He also enumerates, often at length, the cost of this commitment—not only to him as an artist but also to him as a man. “When I pushed the stroller all over town and spent my days taking care of my child,” he writes in Book Two:

It was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result, on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity. It was not my intellect that made this clear to me, because my intellect knew I was doing this for a good reason, namely that Linda and I would be on an equal footing with regard to our child, but rather my emotions, which filled me with desperation whenever I squeezed myself into a mold that was so small and so constricted that I could no longer move. (...)

One way to put Knausgaard’s achievement, against this backdrop, is to say that he succeeded in depicting the struggle to become a modern man and father—the kind of non-authoritarian father who assumes the duty of taking their child to Rhythm Time, however reluctantly—without either falsely suppressing or unduly exaggerating that struggle’s costs. Another way to put it is that, by continuously testing his own experience against the prefabricated narratives that were supposed to explain it to him, he dragged our public conversation about men at least a little closer to the conversations that actually existing men are having among ourselves, and with ourselves.

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Despite or maybe because of how uncomfortable I was at Shabbat for Tots, I felt a vague sense of pride that we—the men—were there at all. That we were sticking it out with only an occasional grimace as opposed to, I don’t know, spontaneously combusting. This was an idiotic thought, I know, especially when one considers how uselessly we would otherwise be spending our Saturday mornings. It was even more idiotic in view of the fact that we were hardly Vikings. For the most part, we worked sitting in front of computers; for exercise we ran on treadmills, or got screamed at by (usually female) Pilates instructors, or dragged ourselves up and down a basketball court at the Y, hoping to avoid serious injury. (Unlike my wife, I could not run a half-marathon if my life depended on it.) Perhaps what was really humiliating was not how out of place we were at Shabbat for Tots, but how familiar the underlying dynamic felt to us, as if we were only now being forced up against the bedrock of our daily reality. We had chosen to live in this soft, progressive world, just like Knausgaard had. More than anything else in that synagogue, this was the limit we had committed ourselves to accepting as fathers.

by Jon Baskin, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Laura Czirják, Fatherhood, 2023
[ed. Father's Day, 2024. See also: Dad Brain Is Real, and It’s a Good Thing (NYT):]

"But a shrinking paternal brain may also have downsides. We found that fathers who lost more gray matter volume had worse sleep and more symptoms of depression and anxiety in the first year after birth. More studies with larger samples of men are needed, but our preliminary takeaway was that the same brain adaptations that seemed to track with engagement in fatherhood also signaled risk to men’s well-being.

Infant care can be exhausting and isolating, so it makes sense that it might take a toll on involved fathers, just as it can on mothers. Our lab has found similar patterns for men’s testosterone, which can dip around the transition to new fatherhood. Dampened testosterone seems to bolster fathers’ investment in parenting, yet also may confer risk for postpartum depression.

Even so, most fathers tell us that they derive tremendous meaning and purpose from their connection to their children. Contemporary fathers are almost as likely as mothers to say that parenthood is central to their identity, and men are even more likely to report that children improve their well-being than women are. (...)

The take-home message for men is that brain change is likely a good thing, even if it exposes vulnerability. Podcasters and pundits have exhorted men to pump up their manliness by raising their testosterone through cage fights, ice baths, weight-lifting and red light therapy, but these influencers miss the mark on men’s health. A well-lived life requires a physiology that adapts to changing demands."