American Masculinity: We Can Do So Much Better Than The Taters

The bolt broke loose, and down he fell.

Straight into hell…

And just like that, a rock climbing trip turned into a bloodbath, with the frontman for one of the hardest death metal bands in the world hanging upside down from a rock for over an hour, bleeding out, with 25 fractures, including one in his skull. To keep himself from slipping completely out of his harness, he clipped together some carabiners, draped his shattered arm over his neck, and waited.

The doctors wanted to amputate his arm. Instead, they managed to rebuild it around a prosthetic elbow, but he initially lost 70 percent of the movement in his left hand. What did he do? Do you think he quit?

No, he got together with his band.

He wrote an album.

In 2024, Opera quickly earned a reputation as one of the best metal albums of the decade, and perhaps of all time. If you’re a metal fan, or even if you’re not, listen to it and you can hear why. It gives me chills.

To me, this is what masculinity looks like when it’s not trying. It’s just being. And it conveys emotions that women can experience as well.

It’s passionate, and it includes women.

Unreal…

If angry young men are looking for a model of healthy masculinity that can do rage, sadness, vulnerability, and more, I’d like to introduce them to someone whose music might appeal to anyone with rough edges:

Francesco Paoli.

The band is Fleshgod Apocalypse. As I mentioned the other week, I stumbled across them just a few weeks ago when I was diving back into heavy metal, looking for music that could match and channel all the emotions I’ve been feeling over the last few years. They’re not so different from the emotions that many young men—and women—are feeling now: isolation, alienation, anger, and despair.

This is what heavy metal and all its subgenres were meant to help us navigate. As it happens, they’re an Italian band.

The album resonates so much because Francesco Paoli worked with the other members to weave their sense of grief, tragedy, and misfortune into every note. But they also imbued it with hope and courage.

It’s an album about overcoming.

Call me crazy, but maybe this is what millions of us need right now. You could certainly call it masculine. It’s got that energy. It’s got that rage. It’s everything you would expect out of an angry dude who’s been through hell. But he’s not raging out at women or minorities. He’s rocking out on a guitar.

He’s yelling at the sky.

That’s the difference.

And while we might choose to direct our rage elsewhere, that’s not the band’s job. They’re simply giving us permission to feel our emotions, to express them, to make them known. And we need that. We need it a thousand times more than some little twerp selling memberships to a hustler’s university.

There’s a certain male influencer who recently joined this platform. I’ve already said his name, and I’m not going to do him the favor of saying it over and over. You know who I’m talking about. Even if you don’t, you get the idea. There’s not just one of him. There’s dozens. They’re named Joe or Tucker or whatever.

They all sell the same snake oil.

They work overtime to convince millions of young, struggling men that their problems don’t lie with a corrupted system, designed to exploit them, rigged against them. They convince these men that their problem is smart, educated, independent young women. That’s why they can’t get laid. That’s why they can’t pay their rent. That’s why they can’t see any hope for the future. So they learn to hate women, but it’s even worse than that. They learn to hate each other.

This has become an enormous problem.

It’s a gateway to fascism.

That’s the damage they do. They hurt women, yes, but they do just as much damage to men. In fact, you could say they do even more. Because while they demonize women, they’re targeting men. They’re exploiting men.

They’re profiting off men.

So men learn to see each other as competition instead of companions. They learn they must compete with each other for money, for sex, for attention, for value, for dominance. They learn to avoid their feelings, to push them down, and to project superficial charm and confidence all the time. That’s what they learn. No wonder they’re so lonely, so angry, so miserable. That’s exactly how the manosphere influencers want them to stay.

Metal does the opposite.

It’s not the only outlet, but it’s a great example of something we’ve lost. You can take all the anger, all the rage, all the despair you’re feeling, all the trauma you’ve been through, and you can make something beautiful out of it. And the beauty can be dark, angry, bloody, but also tender, vulnerable, and poetic.

It can be all those things.

Do American masculinity influencers tell young men that they can let all their emotions out in one guttural scream? Do they teach them to value the arts? Do they teach them about opera, about classicl music?

Do they sing in Latin?

Do they cook pasta?

I don’t think so…

You can howl at the void in a thunderstorm of blood one minute. The next, you can sit in a bathtub and whisper the wind plucks a harp while your soul disappears. Then you can share your favorite recipes.

That’s what you can do, as a man or a woman.

This is what the incel kings don’t want young men to know. They would rather their followers keep blaming women and everyone else for their problems, because that keeps them alone and bitter and angry. And when you’re alone and bitter and angry, and you believe you have no outlet or refuge for your feelings other than robot girlfriends and crypto fantasies, you get stuck there. You give all your money to grifters, and you stay in that hell.

It’s highly profitable for them.

There’s a way out.

Regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman, you can do what Francesco Paoli did. You can take your trauma, your pain, and make something beautiful. You can pour all of yourself into it. You can make something like that for the world. It doesn’t have to be one of the greatest death metal albums of all time.

It just has to be sincere, and kind.

I don’t need Fleshgod Apocalypse to talk about toxic masculinity or feminism. I just need them to keep doing what they do best, rocking out, being dark, being loud, and cooking spaghetti. I like that a lot better.

Don’t you?