Beware The Male Apologist

All right, welcome to the Mantalk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and today we're going to be talking about the male apologist. Now, this is maybe a term, an archetype that maybe you've never heard of before. You're probably not going to find it in Merriam Webster's Dictionary, but it is a term and an archetype, a sort of personality that I have seen continuing to rise and grow within our modern culture. The reason why I wanted to talk about this is because the male apologist is in some ways very damaging to male and female relationships. Because as I'm going to get into in this video, he's challenging to date for women. He is someone that's very hard to trust for men. And as an individual, the male apologist often feels very dissatisfied within his own life. Now, as I go through defining what a male apologist is, how he is generally created, I just want you to think about maybe somebody in your life that sort of fits this bill. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just for a deeper level of understanding of how some of us work. And frankly, I've been this guy. I was like what I would categorize as a male apologist in my 20s. I was deeply untrustful towards other men. I would talk shit about them behind their back. I gained a tremendous amount of self worth and validation from women. I tried to create a personality and an identity based on what I thought women wanted me to be as a man. So I'm giving you some insight into what this archetype is like. And to be honest, I probably did the most damage in my life when I was this character, when I was this archetype, when I was bought into this internal narrative. And I'm gonna talk about why it's so important. Because within male cult, within masculine circles, this archetype is very prominent. And it's one of the hard things to deal with. It's very challenging for men to come into terms with. And I think part of our journey as men, part of our collective healing as men, or coming together as men or strengthening ourselves as men, is to be able to have conversations about when we are struggling with certain aspects of, of masculinity or of maleness. And so let's dive straight in. So the first thing I want to start with is defining the male apologist. What is it? What is a male apologist? Generally, a male apologist is someone who is distancing themselves from masculine or male behavior, masculine or male traits, and someone who apologizes for traits, virtues, values that are associated to men, that are associated to masculinity, especially when deemed by women as being unsavory. So sometimes things like assertiveness or directness or being unapologetic are seen as something that is looked down on by female culture. Not always. Some women really appreciate that value and they embody that value themselves. But sometimes it's something that's looked down by on female culture. Now, why does the male apologist do this? What does he benefit? What does a man benefit from by apologizing for certain male traits or certain masculine values or virtues? Before I tell you that, I just want to say this doesn't mean that you as a man shouldn't apologize for your own behavior or for when things have gone wrong. Right? We can clearly see that, you know, if you are unfaithful in a relationship, there's probably something to apologize there. If you've been wrong and you've gotten into conflict in your relationship, there's probably something to apologize for there. This notion that we as men shouldn't apologize, I think is. Is not only outdated, but isn't. It doesn't actually serve anybody. Or the man that can't own his own shortcomings is just as blind as a man to who is apologizing for everything that men have ever done perceivably wrong. And then living his life in accordance with, trying to avoid anything like that, either one pigeonholes us into a very myopic, narrow version of, of masculinity and of living life as a man. So what does a man who embodies this male apologist get out of apologizing for male behavior, out of apologizing for masculine traits? He gets the status recognition, he gets the social power, and he gets the validation from women. Now, within social circles, within communal environments, women hold a tremendous amount of power because traditionally, women and the feminine are much more social creatures. And you can see this in some of the work that Jonathan Haidt is doing, who is a social psychologist and researcher within modern research around social media and the difference between boys and girls and how they interact online in social media. And that social media is much more damaging in some regards to young girls because they hold a lot more social power. And the social power that they hold is very important within the social communities of girls and women. And so what happens is that when a man feels threatened by other men or feels like he doesn't want to enter into male communities or circles, he doesn't know how to have those types of relationships. His Worth and his internal value is often predicated on how he is viewed by other women. And he will begin to act in ways that gain him a tremendous amount of social clout and of social power, of social value and worth based on his ability and capacity to distance himself from perceived male and masculine traits that are maybe perceived or deemed as unsavory by the women that he's around. Now, the challenge with this is that most women have very different ideas of what they want from men. If you sit down and talk to 100 different women, or even 10 different women, and you say, tell me about your ideal man, they're all going to give you a different definition of who they ideally want in their partner, right? Who they would ideally like to be with, or who they would ideally like to spend their time with in a man. And so what ends up happening for these male apologists is that they become very chameleon. Like, they become very well adept at being able to shapeshift themselves into what they think other women want them to be or how they think other women want them to act. And the challenge with that is that if they have a lot of women in their life, which many of them do, one of the signs of male apologists is that they're off. They often say things like, I don't have many men in my life. I don't get along with men. I don't know how to connect with men. I just get along so much easier with women. That isn't always the case, but generally I've seen that be a byproduct of men that are disconnected from their own sense of maleness or masculinity. And generally they see that masculinity as a threat. So what builds? What creates the male apologist? From what I've seen, there are a few different scenarios that create the male apologist. But before I get into that, I just want to talk about why this is potentially important to know about. Right? Why is the male apologist a really important archetype for us to be aware of within masculine culture? The first reason is because this is often the man that men feel like they can't trust. Like, if you're a guy and you have a lot of male friends within your circle, and there's like, that one guy that you're just like. I just feel like I cannot trust that guy, and I do not know why, but you interact with him and you talk to him and you hear him continuing to diminish men and put men down and talk shit about masculinity. And basically have a sort of mentality that is anti men. You know, it's almost like against men. And it sort of leaves you feeling confused, but it also leaves you feeling like, I don't. I definitely can't trust this guy. Because generally these are the guys that are talking behind your back. They're generally the guys that if they have a problem with you, they're not going to bring it to your face. They're going to talk to everyone else around you rather than just come to you and have a conversation. They're generally the men that are going to try and use the women in their life to validate their perspective rather than come and have a conversation with you. You'll often feel like you can't trust this man with maybe your. Your wife or your partner because there's something just sort of off there. So it's challenging in the sense that for men, it's very hard for them to trust the male apologist. And for women, it can also be very challenging because these are the good guys, right? These are the guys that know exactly what to say to women, exactly what to say. They have become masters at understanding what a woman wants to hear and when she wants to hear it and what she wants from him. So these are generally the guys that women gets really excited about because he knows how to say all the right things. He knows how to speak the language, he knows how to sell her on what a good guy he is. And then often he, you know, very quickly she'll start to see the cracks in the armor, right? Maybe he starts to become really needy and really codependent, really clingy. And he needs her validation because his worth is only coming from women. Maybe he's the guy that is disconnected from his masculinity and sees it as a threat and sees maleness as dangerous or damaging. And so he's constantly trying to connect with as many as women as possible. And so he might be also the guy who seems like a really nice guy, but is talking to 80 different women at once or is on the dating apps while he says he's monogamous with you. He might also be the guy that has some really seriously suppressed anger, right? He looks like a nice guy on the surface. You get into a relationship with him three to five months in, and all of a sudden all this anger starts to come out and no one else sees it, right? It's only in the relationship. That's often a sign that a man is disconnected from a part of himself that he has been told is connected with masculinity, is connected with maleness. And because of that, he's tried to distance himself from it. For both parties, for both men and women alike, the male apologist is not dangerous isn't quite the right word, but it's damaging to, I would say, gender relationships. I think that's probably the best way that I can describe it. So what generally creates a male apologist? Again, this is just in my perspective, it's based on what I've seen after working with thousands of men and seeing quite a few of these men and what's built them. So first off is what creates the male apologist is often a damaging or wounded relationship to and from other men. So a man may have been harmed by a male figure in his life, a father, an uncle, a grandfather, a mentor, a coach, or maybe a team, maybe a group of other boys or men that he was interacting with. So this is very, very common. So he'll start to see men as dangerous, men as damaging because he's been hurt by them. And so the idea of being able to interact with them is quite challenging, right, because there's this risk that he's going to get hurt again. And so the, the important piece here is that there is a deep wound, a pain within that man, that in order for him to claim his own sense of masculinity, in order for him to sometimes have more clarity of direction in his life, or understand the path that he wants to create for himself, or understand the kind of relationship that he really wants, or to be very clear and direct with the woman that he's dating and say, this is the type of relationship that I want, this is the type of communication that I want, this is the type of sex that I want to explore. He will have to come face to face with the pain that he has been given by other men, because to be in solidarity, to own that masculine part of himself is to have to heal the wound that he had been given by other men. So that's one, that's one possibility that I see quite a bit of. The other possibility is that he has become a sort of receptacle, a sort of refuse bin from the pain that women have been given by men. So a perfect example is maybe a young boy grows up in an environment where he is raised by a mother and she has been hurt by her ex husband, right? He, he left her for somebody else and she continues to talk negatively about men, about his father, right? Your father is such a jerk. Your father's such a piece of crap. You know, why didn't he? He's not an honorable man. Men aren't honorable. Men are dangerous, right? All men are going to hurt you. All men hurt women. Those types of narratives can seep into a man's experience, and especially when he hears them from a young age. And what he begins to believe is that my masculinity is dangerous, my masculinity is harmful, my maleness is dangerous. And so I need to create distance from that. And the second thing that he learns is in order to connect with women, in order to be safe to women, which a lot of men are hearing in our culture today, which is absolutely imperative, right? In order for a man to be safe for a woman, he needs to be not manly, he needs to be not male, he needs to be not masculine. Because those qualities and traits, as he observed and learned in his upbringing, are dangerous to the women that he loves and cares about. The last possibility, and again, these are just three possibilities, probably many more. And I would encourage you to comment below with anything that you would like to add to this conversation, specifically how you've seen male apologists be built, or some of their behavioral patterns or anything that you'd like to challenge or have questions about. Because I. I'm probably going to dig into this further. But the last part that I see is that when men grow up in a social environment, so maybe they go through high school, they start to date a woman, and they. They learn very quickly that in order for them to be accepted by a woman that they're really attracted to, they somehow learn along the way that they have to shapeshift themselves into what that woman wants from them. And he can, very quickly, as a teenager or as a young, young adult, get caught in this trap that tells him. And maybe it's directly from a woman that he's dating, maybe it's just from the. The peer group that he's surrounded by that tells him, you need to act as a man in a way that I approve of as a woman, or in a way that I tell you to as a woman. So some guys, they fall in love for the very first time in high school. They are really enamored with their girlfriend. Maybe they're having sexual relationships for the very first time. And so he wants to keep that, he wants to maintain that. And in order to do that, because he's quite youthful and he hasn't really made contact with his masculinity or claimed that part, he can lose that part. And that woman can communicate to him, you need to act in these ways so that I approve of you. And what almost always inevitably ends up happening is that he turns into a very needy, clingy guy who's constantly trying to make her happy. He's living his life for her. I hear this all the time, especially in couples that get divorced later on in life is like the man will say, you know, I was living my life for her, or no matter what I did, I couldn't make her happy. Right? Just listen to that. No matter what I did, I couldn't make her happy. So just in that phrase, her happiness was his responsibility. And this is what the male apologist will do often is that the women in his life, he takes it as his heroic responsibility to tend to them entirely to make sure that who he is is fully acceptable, is fully approved of and validated of by women. And he completely removes himself as much as possible from male and masc masculine culture. And the challenge with that is that he begins to disconnect from certain aspects of who he is. So the danger in this is often that, as I pointed out in the first experience, he has to disconnect from a pain that he's been given from other men. So there's a lack of healing there. He can be very disconnected from his own sense of drive, his own sense of determination or discipline, because he can see these things as a form of punishment. He can view these things as a form of negative masculine traits. Sometimes male apologists will feel wildly out of control and chaotic, like they have no direction in their life. The other thing is that oftentimes male apologists are very disconnected from their anger. And I remember putting a post up once where, you know, I said, every, every man has a dangerous, dangerous man within him. And it was really interesting to see how many men were like, yes, I have had to tend to that part of myself. And then how many men were like, there's nothing dangerous within me? And that is an. Is an alarm. It's an alarm bell for me personally. And, you know, we can debate this and disagree with this, and maybe it's something that you think is. Is. Is complete, you know, horseshit. But I would say that for the most part, we all have the capacity to be dangerous in some way, shape or form, men especially. And when we look at the role that men have played histor historically, it's almost embedded into our architecture. Not necessarily genetically or neurologically, but the fact that we have testosterone coursing through our body has shown through a tremendous amount of research that testosterone can leave us to be more susceptible to the predilections of aggression. Specifically, we'll just use that one example. So when a man is disconnected from his own anger or his own capacity for aggression, what it often creates is unconscious passive aggressiveness. So a lot of nice guys, a lot of male apologists, and those two things are generally separate. They don't have to be connected. Sometimes they are. But a lot of male apologists end up being quite passive aggressive because they've disconnected from and disembodied themselves from their own anger. They don't know how to connect to it. So it sort of comes out in these passive aggressive ways. In their relationships, they, they end up hurting people. They don't communicate what they really want within the relationship. And so they have to try and get their needs met in other ways because they, they don't feel like they can really own what's true for them, what they really want and desire within that relationship. They can't be forthcoming and direct and assertive about their experience of the relationship. They're constantly prioritizing.

Not hurting emotionally, psychologically.

Certainly not physically. I mean, we never want to harm anyone physically within our lives, in my opinion. But they prioritize not emotionally hurting the women in their life, above speaking their own needs, above speaking their own wants and desires, above telling the truth about who they are and what they want. And they do that because, as I said in the beginning, a male apologist has somewhere along the way seen his ascension into having power as something that is going to come from women. So for him, the way in which he's going to feel worthy, valuable, powerful, confidential, strong, is based on pretty much solely, in some cases, the validation and the recognition that he gets only from women. And so to tell a woman that he wants something or needs something in a relationship, if that's going to cause her emotional distress or she's not going to be happy about that, or she's going to be upset, he will have the tendency to withhold that because that will go into in contradiction to, and it will create conflict in a way that he doesn't know how to handle. And it will possibly threaten the foundation of what gives him confidence, of what fuels him internally, what gives him strength. So what do we do? That's probably for another video, but what I will say is I would love to hear your thoughts on what I covered today. So comment on this wherever you are watching it, whether you're watching it on YouTube or Instagram. What do you disagree with? What did you love? What really stood out to you? What did you learn, what would you add to this conversation? And what questions would you like me to go into from here? So thank you so much for tuning in. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.