Is Masculinity Archaic?

For Here There Is No Place That Does Not See You

I: The Nudes

It was oddly erotic walking through the Louvre. Yes, erotic. We shuffled through the endless halls, all of us bundled up in scarves and stockings, parents with kids-in-tow, foreigners with headsets waddling like ducks behind their guides. I saw one museum employee scolding a tourist for unwrapping a chocolate bar: Nevair do zat! he hissed. Nevair! Not a particularly sexy scene. And yet, despite the fact that the food, as well as all the visitors, were expected to remain fully clothed, the place was teeming with naked bodies. There were nudes in almost every room — bodies whose sole purpose was to be admired. And, of course, all of us had come to see them.

That is, to be seen.

§

The Venus de Milo got a lot of attention, and rightly so, though not perhaps the kind of attention she deserved. Despite her towering stature — she really did loom over everything — I saw the crowd long before I noticed her. It spilled out, like a cupful of thumbtacks, into an adjacent room. Or like a swarm of bees surrounding their Queen, nudging forward eagerly. The bees held up their arms in feeble attempts to capture her beauty. Their little thumbs tapped and tapped. It was like stumbling upon, in the Louvre of all places, a completely silent Taylor Swift concert: her fans clustered around one image of femininity — as iron filings to a magnet — and then, with the help of their phones, fracturing that image into thousands of flat, pixellated replicas.

Not only, I realized, was I standing before an ancient statue; I was bearing witness to an ancient pattern: the simultaneous allure and desecration of the feminine. The bees were not after her beauty, not really. They were after her fame. They were here to say they saw her; the seeing itself, the experience, was eclipsed entirely by the event. And I must confess that I was more struck by this process — her relationship to the crowd and its relationship to her — than by the statue. More entranced by the blur of tiny Venuses than by Venus herself. They became my object of meditation; Aphrodite vanished.

§

In the next room, the Salle des Cariatides, most of the nudes were male. The hall, which housed ancient Greek and Roman statues, was full of their stories: A group of satyrs attending to Dionysus; Herekles battling Medusa; Pan removing a thorn from a satyr’s foot. But more than the stories they depicted, I was taken by the devotion their sculptors must have had to the masculine form. Rippling through their muscled bodies was an outpouring of attention and care. I imagined a lifetime of work to get the shoulders and loins just right. Is my own body, I felt myself start to consider, worthy of such care?

Unlike us mortal tourists, the marble gods were not dressed for November. They stood above us beaming their nudity like suns that never set — as though they’d created an eternal summer within the halls of the Louvre. It was not unlike walking into the men’s changeroom at a community pool. There were naked men in every direction. Even if you wanted to, it would be impossible to look away.

And yet, despite the solar flare of male exposure, there were hardly any penises. Most of the gods had lost them to time. Where the penis used to be was often a circular nub, sometimes with a pair of testicles, lonely, but more often only the pubic hair remained. (So much can happen in a handful of centuries: earthquakes, vandalism, Christian censorship.) At any rate, their marble members were either intentionally destroyed or accidentally dismembered. For the gods had entered time, where the stories they will always tell will always be forgotten. And here, in the realm of history, their nakedness was telling a story they did not intend: a tragedy, really, about the perceived threat and inherent vulnerability of the penis.

As I walked among these broad-chested gods and heroes, I started to feel my own body beneath my clothes: how my muscles tensed and relaxed with every step I took; how my skin felt muggy under my wool coat; how my underwear was cradling my own penis — so gratefully attached to the rest of my body. I looked around, a bit sheepish, at all my fellow humans. People go to the Louvre, I had thought, to see the great artifacts of history. But now I realized that we were looking at ourselves. This thought, which felt like an epiphany, still strikes me as profound and painfully obvious.

The statues themselves seemed to welcome our attention. They stood proudly, flaunting their stuff, even those who’d been mutilated. As if they knew they were not just the benefactors of this eternal summer, but the source of it. This, it must be said, was quite different from a men’s changeroom; it’s unfortunately rare to encounter such pride among the lockers and wet tile. Nor do most male bodies adhere to the idealized image of an adolescent Hellenic athlete. But I for one would like to see a marble statue of an old man, hunched over, peeling off his swim trunks.

§

Recently I entered the fourth decade of my life. A friend of mine, who was with me on my birthday, likened turning thirty to cresting a large hill. From up there, he said, you see where you’ve come from, and get a sense of where you’re going. (Namely, down). Since cresting that hill of mine, a question I’ve been asking for years has become substantially heavier — pressing down on me like a large slab of marble.

What does it mean to be a man?

It’s possible to hear this question in a variety ways. Most of us, no doubt, will add a silent clause at the end: as opposed to a woman. The question, in this way of hearing it, is about delineating the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. Or we might hear the question as a search for an archaic social role — like someone trying to discover how to become an alchemist in an age of modern chemistry. Tellingly, perhaps, I suspect it’s far less common to hear the question as an inquiry into the nature of maturity. For just as murky the boundary is between the masculine and the feminine, so too is the boundary, at least in our culture, between boyhood and manhood.

The way men answer this question will take the shape of their lives. In our culture, some of these answers look a lot like pickup artists; others, the exact opposite. Some, like pickup trucks, become more sleek and menacing each year. And still others champion, without knowing it, the virtue of fear. But the dominant answer, it seems to me, is not an answer at all: it simply shrugs. “It doesn’t mean anything,” the shrug seems to say. Or its meanings are so subjective — as multiple as there are men — that the question itself is moot. Why ask?

And then there’s the issue of authority. To whom should we turn to answer such a question? Who knows what it means anymore? And who cares? Without elders to guide us into the mysteries of ourselves, we might hit the books — turning to anthropology, political punditry, evolutionary biology, or critical theory for an answer. More likely, though, we’ll defer to the algorithmic algal bloom of YouTube personalities.

§

What does it mean to be a man?

Like a loose lug nut, that question was rattling around in the back of my mind as I wandered the Louvre. I was looking for “The Miletus Torso” — a statue, or what remains of it, from the archaic period of Greek sculpture, 8th to 5th century BC. It is thought to portray Apollo. To my surprise, the torso was not in the Salle des Cariatides with all the other naked gods. I went through twice, just to be sure; I returned to the adjacent room with the Venus de Milo. Nothing. What does it mean to be a man? I’d looked everywhere, everywhere the statue should have been — all the rooms dedicated to ancient Greek sculptures — and still couldn’t find it. Somehow, I was looking in the wrong place.

I was about to ask a security guard when I saw a large staircase descending to the basement. At the bottom of the staircase, in the foyer to the caverns of ancient Egyptian pottery, I saw the broad back of Apollo. I went down.

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II: The Archaic

The statue itself is far less renowned than the poem Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about it in 1908. Had I never read the poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” I would not have gone looking for the statue. Would not have stood transfixed before it — drawn by a question with no apparent answer to an ancient relic made of stone.

I rediscovered Rilke’s poem recently when I bought an anthology called The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. It was edited by Robert Bly, Michael Meade, and James Hillman, three leading figures of the mythopoetic men’s movement. While the mythopoetic approach to masculinity has since been derided by some feminist scholars as essentialist and revisionist, its core impulse was neither conservative nor traditionalist.¹ It was archetypal.² That is, it revived mythology and male initiation as psychocultural technologies — a forge and a crucible — necessary for the birth of mature masculinity. Crucially, the mythopoets were decidedly less concerned about the difference between men and women than that of boys and men.

The mythopoets were guided, in other words, by the insight I’d had in the Salle des Cariatides. That these marble statues were not just artifacts of a bygone era; they were symbols of forces, within and without, that we are being lived by.³

§

My experience of reading “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” has always been tinged with frustration. The enormity of the last line, in particular, made it clear that I was missing something vital. As though Rilke were sharing a secret, openly, that I could not understand. But now I know the poem’s last words are addressed to me. Here is Stephen Mitchell’s translation:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs 
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The title of the poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” is wonderfully misleading — a sleight of hand. For the poem’s true subject is not Apollo’s torso at all; not his placid hips and thighs, nor the cascade of the shoulders.

I first encountered the poem in Jan Zwicky’s book Lyric Philosophy. For Zwicky, the poem is an emblem of poetic insight, a mirror held up to poetry itself. It’s about the experience of meaning that leads the poet, any poet, to pick up his pen. It’s a poem about Apollo, the god of poetry and music, who first mastered lyre. Rilke’s creation approaches, one might say, the archetypal frequency of poetry: the resonant note at the base of all lyric praise.

Zwicky writes that Rilke’s poem offers “a true image” insofar as it “moves in sympathetic resonance with a line of force in the deep structure of the world.”⁴ The image in the poem, in other words, is not static. The image is a gesture, a pluck of the string: it enacts what it sees, rather than trying to explain it. And what it sees, in the case of Rilke’s metaphor, is an experience of being seen.

The poem is also, of course, a meditation on the masculine form. And it's one of the best definitions of mature masculinity I’ve found. It might even be an answer to my question: What does it mean to be a man?

But Rilke’s words do not define masculinity as does a dictionary; much more like Van Gogh’s brush strokes define the irises. Non-metaphorical language, as Zwicky observes, tends to hypostatize meaning: it can turn something living and colourful — a purple flower opening to Spring — into a specimen with a Latin name. The word “masculinity” itself does this, as do its literal definitions. But Rilke’s poem, his metaphor, keeps the door to its meaning open. It doesn’t pluck the flower and count its stamens; it gets down on all fours and prays.

§

Were masculinity a marble statue, would it not, by now, be headless and archaic as Apollo?

Recently the New York Times published an opinion article insisting that the concept of “healthy masculinity” is a misguided, and even misogynistic, concept. The author, Ruth Whippman, argues that attempts to reclaim masculinity, however well intentioned, degrade womanhood while enforcing unhealthy standards for boys. To Whippman’s chagrin, “we still see masculinity as something innate and immovable, rather than a limiting social construct.” She continues: “If we really want to help boys break free and find more expansive and healthier ways to show up in the world, it’s not ‘positive masculinity’ that they need, but full humanity.”⁵

Masculinity: god of a fallen civilization.
Masculinity: an archaic notion; a hard and brittle construction.

For Whipmann, the question of manhood as a function of maturity is not salient. The fact that “masculinity” is socially constructed is grounds to toss the concept altogether.⁶ This is, admittedly, a rather insensible view, and one that betrays a superficial understanding of the postmodern feminist philosophy its reasoning is built upon. Indeed, the very concept of masculinity, in this way of seeing, is a threat to human wholeness. I don’t want to refute her argument on its own terms, but I do think it’s valuable insofar as it exemplifies a pervasive epistemic mood. One in which masculinity has become an empty signifier — its meanings so disparate that any suggestion of its coherence appears naive and archaic.

What does it mean to be a man? Trying to answer such a question these days is a lot like trying to describe the head of a headless statue. The image has been thoroughly dismembered, almost beyond recognition. Of masculinity, we might say what Gertrude Stein, upon returning home in the 1930s, said of Oakland: “There is no there there.” No presence or distinct quality; no center of gravity. All our attempts to define it, woven by day like Penelope’s shroud, are unwoven each night. And perhaps it must be so.

Whipmann does offer an important insight about masculinity. If the answer to my question “What does it mean to be a man?” can only be experienced as an unattainable point of comparison, then the result, psychologically, will be shame. We’ll never be good enough. Man enough. And sure enough, as I stood at the base of the stairs — looking up at Apollo’s literally chiselled abs — I heard several men whisper to their lovers, “I should really start hitting the gym again.” This is exactly, I think, what Whippman is trying to challenge, and rightly so. As C. G. Jung put it in The Red Book:

Woe betide those who live my way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.⁷

But is masculinity itself an ideal? An example to compare ourselves against? I’m not convinced. But even if we were able to relate to an image of masculinity, or femininity, without shame, it’s important to consider the image itself.⁸

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III: The Archetypal

Head gone, genitals and limbs lopped off: it’s understandable to look upon this tortured shape with pity, confusion, or ambivalence. After all, what’s there to see?

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs 
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

In the realm of literality, the realm of the poem’s first sentence, what Rilke sees makes no sense. The poem begins with a declarative statement: “We cannot know his legendary head…” Why? Because Apollo is headless, a battered hunk of marble, and that’s that. “And yet,” as the poem’s next sentence begins, Rilke looks at this archaic torso and sees it “still suffused with brilliance.” How can anyone honestly look upon a statue so thoroughly deconstructed, so blatantly headless, so worn down by centuries, and see something living and real?

This is a reasonable question. It’s easy to make the case that masculinity, as a discursive entity, is archaic; and it’s difficult to argue otherwise. But perhaps we’re thinking too literally. If we approach masculinity with non-metaphorical language — like plucking a flower and counting its penises — its beauty will not open to us. And so if masculinity were a sculpture, and I believe it is, I’d want to study it as Rilke does. I’d want to approach it not as an intellectual artifact, but as an archetypal image.

The broadest and most useful understanding of Jung’s notion of archetype overall is as metaphor — an “as-if,” a possibility or potential — which can be richly explored from a number of different perspectives.⁹

Rilke seems baffled by what he sees. Because it’s as if Apollo’s head were still there. If the torso really were headless, he reasons, it “would not” smile through its hips, “would not dazzle you so,” “would not burst like a star.” All these would-nots create a dreamy subjunctive mood — pointing to a reality that ought to be evident, but which, to the poet’s astonishment, is not. This statue should be dead, defaced, and yet the brilliance of Apollo suggests that he is, after all, a sun god — the source of life itself.

The poem spirals downward under the tension between two poles: the impossibility of knowledge on the one hand, and the mysterious as-if world of the poet’s vision on the other. On its face, the poem is not an answer to my question. Instead, it seems to be asking: Can we ever know what masculinity is? I like this question, because it takes a step back, ironically, from the rather Apollonian attempt to pin everything down. It’s a question that’s been humbled by its subject, a question approaching Dionysian awe. Perhaps the point is not to be able to place the image, but to feel its brilliance. Can we ever know what masculinity is? The answer to the question is right there in the poem: We cannot know… And yet…

Everything following the poem’s “And yet” speaks to a form of knowledge that is not merely conceptual. In a sense, the poem is about the intelligence of the body, the brilliance of eros. Apollo’s smile guides us toward “that dark center where procreation flared.” And the poet chooses to believe what he sees, to trust his body’s vision, even though it defies all logic. As I mentioned above, what Rilke sees, and what he wants his reader to see, is an experience of being seen. By the end of the poem, what at first appears archaic has transformed, utterly, into something archetypal — the as-if realm of metaphor — as if this headless torso were looking back at you.

As if the face of Apollo were everywhere.

§

I don’t know how long I stood in front of “The Miletus Torso” — at least an hour. Long enough to make the security guards visibly nervous.

My expectations for this encounter were unreasonably high. I’d come hoping to receive a definitive answer to my question. To enjoy the numinous impression that Rilke himself had received. I was a pilgrim too earnest for anyone’s good. I had The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart in my backpack, Rilke’s poem bookmarked.

And so, of course, my experience looking at the statue was largely disappointing. I stood there waiting for a vision, a sunbeam, to make everything make sense. I found myself looking for a living presence beyond the broken figure, some secret knowledge I could take back home. And what I encountered, instead, was a desecrated piece of stone. Some people wandered by with headsets, and I wished that I had a pair. Information about the statue was starting to feel much more compelling than Apollo himself. My mind was spinning, creating puzzles and trying to solve them at the same time. I was picking Apollo apart, mining his marble for its mysteries. I’d become one of those little bees, fragmenting the very image I longed for.

But then, suddenly, everything dilated. As if someone had turned off the lights to my mind. There were no more questions, and yet nothing to cling to. Apollo’s beauty was no longer an idea. We stood there for an eternal moment, breathing slowly. He smiled.

§

An archetype recognizes you at the moment you recognize it. And yet it is impossible to say, exactly, what is being recognized. And to be clear, I don’t think Rilke identifies himself with Apollo’s beauty. Rather, seeing his beauty births, in Rilke, a boundless sense of responsibility. For the world, it turns out, is alive, and everything you do matters. Everything is felt and seen, for the faces of the gods are everywhere. I didn’t walk away with an answer tucked into my pocket. All I had was a moral imperative: “You must change your life.”

What does it mean to be a man? Trying to answer this question is a lot like trying to describe the head of a headless statue. It is not that the question has no answer, but that the answer, as Rilke put, must be lived. For this reason, Rilke advised the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus “to try to cherish the questions themselves.”

Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.¹⁰

A true image, as Jung insisted, is not an example to follow; nor is it just an abstraction. A true image — an answer — is a living gesture. It resonates with the deep structure of the world.

§

Men of the world, of this day and age, may the sun shine through you. May your gaze be a blessing on the world.

Beauty is a crucible: let it melt you down.
Beauty is a blade: let it cut “clinging away from love.”¹¹

The depth of your power,
the breadth of your responsibility,
depends upon the beauty you are willing to behold.

And beheld by.

For here there is no place that does not see you.

1. Some, such as

Tracy Clark-Flory

, would almost certainly disagree with this. If you want to read a contemporary feminist critique of the mythopoetic approach to masculinity, here is one of her acerbic take-downs.

2. This warrants a larger conversation about the relationship, often conflated, between archetype and essence (often understood as biological determinism). In my reading, approaching masculinity as an archetypal reality threads a needle between two camps in a culture war. If you want to examine this distinction more fully, Jonathan Waller’s essay “Jordan Peterson is not Jungian” does an excellent job at describing why Left-leaning people tend to be suspicious of Jungian archetypes — and how such suspicion is often based on a faulty understanding of its relationship to determinism.

Because the majority of people have not the capacity for discernment that allows for a distinction between causal determinism and archetypal determinism, any mention of a-priori, predetermined aspects of the psyche are often immediately seen as an ideological rallying cry for conservatism.

3. In the anthology, Rilke’s poem appears in a section titled The Cultivated Heart — which emphasizes the centrality of courtesy and amorous sensitivity to male initiation.

4. Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, §219.

5. Ruth Whippman, “We Can Do Better Than ‘Positive Masculinity,” New York Times, 2023.

6. All discursive entities are by definition socially constructed — masculinity included. And it’s worth noting that the notion of “humanity” the author suggests for its replacement is no less socially constructed. In fact, the concept of “humanity” as a human universal is a much more recent modern phenomenon than that of masculinity or femininitiy. Scholars and artists in the black radical tradition, such as Dionne Brand, have taken issue with the notion of “humanity” on the grounds that it seems to constitute a racially exclusive category: blackness always signifying the position of the animal/Other, always on the periphery of the “human,” and thus helping to define the human by serving as its limiting case. Still, I would ask, does that mean the word is soiled beyond repair? Should we refrain from using the word human because its history is — like everything else in our modern age — bound up in the racial violence of capitalism?

7. C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 125.

8. My essay explores Rilke’s image of the statue of Apollo as analogous to the state of masculinity. But there is a much larger discussion to be had — which is beyond the scope of this essay — about the symbol of Apollo himself. I’m not suggesting that Apollo is the masculine archetype. He is one of many archetypal images, and he should be studied as such.
James Hillman insists that Apollo, for all his admirable qualities — including restraint, artistry, harmony, and reason — has a shadow. The clarity of his vision places him at a distance from the world: the cold perch of objectivity. In other words, Apollo’s brilliance can become out-of-touch. As Hillman puts it, "Apollo certainly presents a pattern that is disastrous, destructive for psychological life, cut off from everything that has to do with feminine ways.” And it is no coincidence that modernity, as Camille Paglia has observed, was fathered by the Apollonian mind.
Whippman’s suggestion exemplifies the feminine corollary to Apollo’s shadow: a femininity so cut off from the masculine that it can only experience it as a threat to itself. Just as Apollo’s pursuit of reason an harmony can create an aversion to the vicissitudes of life, this feminine shadow wages war on all distinctiveness, and mistakes this confusion for balance.

9. Patricia Perry, “Archetype.” Berry’s definition of archetype goes on to address its universality while distinguishing it from Plato’s forms.

10. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 21.

11. Robert Bly, “Iron John: A Book About Men,” 165.