The most recent Intelligence Squared debate put forth the proposition, ‘Men are finished,’ and asked two pairs of experts to argue for and against. The audience was polled at the beginning and the end, and the winner was decided by how many minds were changed. Those for the proposition won by a landslide. Men are, apparently, finished. I would argue that this outcome was partially influenced by the fact that those arguing against the proposition made complete morons of themselves, but that was still the outcome of the debate: men are finished.

I should immediately reveal my bias: I am male.

The argument was structured, from both sides, around the idea that ‘feminine’ qualities like compromise and communication are far more valuable in the modern workforce and on the American stage than ‘masculine’ qualities like risk-taking, competitiveness, and physical strength.

This entire debate suffers from a variety of ontological cancer that is very difficult to pinpoint and excise, so I’ll be careful about it. The guiltiest strand of mutant information is the titled proposition of the thing: ‘Men are Finished.’

According to the definitions and parameters put forth by both sides of this debate, I am not a man: I’m much better at communication than most men or women that I know; I excel at conflict resolution, managing emotion, and compromise; I can be competitive and aggressive, but I generally disallow these qualities to impede what I see as the greater causes of relationship building and creative collaboration.

Yes, yes, I have many masculine qualities — and many feminine ones too. This is true of a lot of people, we know, Devin, okay. Nobody’s a perfect stereotype. But that doesn’t mean you’re not a man. I’m well aware of this, but those titling this debate apparently weren’t.

This is the ontological cancer I’m talking about. This is one of the only times in my career as a writer that I’ll join the essentialist-bashing party: seriously people, when you title a debate ‘Men Are Finished,’ you need to be aware that ‘men’ refers to one half of the population. So

when you say, ‘Men are finished,’ you are also extensively saying, ‘Those people are finished.’ If you then make a list of qualities and use those qualities to make your entire case for that segment of the population being ‘finished,’ you had better make damn sure that those qualities can be applied irrevocably to that segment of the population.

This debate is a logician’s nightmare.

Yes, I’m aware that there are statistics in place detailing the male proclivity toward aggression, their inability to communicate, all these things. When women in the misogynistic past had particular qualities applied to them as essential characteristics of their being, you know what they did? They said, ‘That’s not us. We’re not useless, we’re not losers. Don’t tell us what we are.’ They had to fight tooth and nail against those definitions. Fuck you for telling me that I’m finished — I am not finished. We’re not finished. Don’t count us out just yet.

You might be assuming I secretly think voting in favor of that motion was good, and will galvanize the American male out of crisis, and you might be right. After all, what’s an American male? What will the American male look like in the future?

I read a great article on RibbonFarm.com recently about extrinsic and intrinsic navigation systems. That sounds fucking boring, but I’ll walk you through it. This writer guy was tired of being called a generalist when he viewed himself as a specialist, so he set out to examine why this label, generalist, bothered him so much. He didn’t want to be seen as unfocused and foofy. What he determined was that the only reason people called him a broad generalist is because he hopped over disciplinary boundaries all the time. He took things from computer science, from English, from philosophy, from mathematics. But here’s the thing: he was always choosing the things he took very carefully. He always had a clear idea of his goals and he picked precisely the tools needed to do the job; he was just building a writing career outside of current academic boundaries. He’s actually a ‘very narrow, hidebound specialist,’ and his writings focus on a very specific, interrelated set of things. He didn’t use the external map of disciplinary boundaries provided to him by college to chart his way; he used an internal gyroscope and an accelerometer (which are apparently all you need); he mapped his own very specific path.

The point of be bringing him up is that we should not be using an extrinsic, prewritten coordinate system to figure out what kind of person we’re going to be or how we’re going to contribute to the world, because we waste our potential that way. The groupings of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics provided by these debaters are precisely that kind of insidious trap. As is the proposition that ‘men are finished.’ Guys, don’t let it scare you. I know you get scared sometimes, and so do I, and that’s okay. But they can only tell you you, as a man, are finished if they can tell you what you, as a man, are. So can they?

As the debate drew to a close, the point was made a few times that these stereotypical characteristics shouldn’t restrict us, and that the male of the future would evolve beyond them. But these ‘innovative thinkers’ half-assed something they should be expert at: guiding innovation.

Framing the discussion with these ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics, and arguing over whether or not ‘men are finished,’ are excellent ways to stifle the innovative potential of the conversation, because

we shouldn’t be guided by those external maps — we should be guided by our internal proclivities and aptitudes, otherwise we’re wasting people’s creative and productive abilities. Who knows what we’ll miss or what we won’t contribute as a result.

Men as a group are falling behind precisely because we’ve been so slow to cut our own trail out of the restrictive definitions of the past. The debate did very little to advance this, its most important idea. At the very end, they were just arriving at that idea. I was struck by the sudden and unshakeable impression that I was watching a roomful of scavenging dinosaurs struggle over a triceratops carcass.

Men: we need to think about what tools we need for the future, and we need to get up off our asses, find them, and use them. We’re going to have to redefine masculinity ourselves, through this program of conscious living. Because it’s become very clear that nobody’s got the imagination to redefine it for us. And they shouldn’t. We shouldn’t let them.