Charles Bethea

He helped walk me through this.

But there's this recurring history of hypermasculinity, and it's always a predictable response to the perceived threats of feminization, which kind of ebb and flow on their own.

So, for example, in the late 19th and early 20th century, as women begin to enter the workforce in greater numbers,

men are told to take what's called the West cure.

Basically, it's a prescription to the cowboy lifestyle.

So Teddy Roosevelt, a young Teddy Roosevelt, goes ranching and hunting in the Dakotas to quote-unquote cure his anxiety and exhaustion after the death of his wife and mother.

He goes on famously, of course, to be president, but also to found the Boone and Crockett Club to advocate playing rough and tumble sports.

After this, you get the Boy Scouts, you get the 4-H Club, you get the Knights of Pythias and the Odd Fellows, all these fraternities that were really popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, which was actually known, I learned, as the golden age of fraternalism.

But the pendulum swings back the other way.

So after the Great Depression, a few world wars, American society takes to nurturing men again because they've been damaged by war.

And society is more encouraging of this kind of sedate suburban backyard cookout lifestyle.

Then you get a few decades later, you get gay liberation, feminism, more workplace equality.

The pendulum swings back.

And so you get the publishing of a book in 1991.

called Iron John by this writer-poet Robert Bly, who's advocating a return to a deep masculinity through wilderness retreats, stuff that actually kind of resembles some of what Rise and other programs are doing.

And Bly, he idealizes what he calls the mythopoetic man.

And this gives way a few years later to alpha male, which I think is a slightly simpler set of words than mythopoetic man.

Yeah.

So this guy Frans de Waal was his name in the late 70s, early 80s.

He's this Dutch primatologist who is studying male chimps in a zoo in the Netherlands.