Donovan recently announced that the book has sold over 13,000 copies, which counts as significant success for such a counter-cultural work. The typical professionally represented book in a mainstream category counts as a success these days if it sells around 20,000 copies or more.
What’s curious about it is that while this book has made a major impact on the manosphere, just about none of the people criticizing that community has bothered to actually pick up, read, review, and refute the book, which is an unapologetic look at the biological and cultural differences between men and women not just in the modern world, but in the historic context.
Donovan also takes on men’s rights activists and others who try to oppose feminism from an egalitarian perspective:
When pressed to answer this question, feminists and men’s rights activists never seem to be able to come up with anything but promises of increased financial and physical security and the freedom to show weakness and fear. Masses of men never rushed to the streets demanding the freedom to show weakness and fear, and they never braved gunfire or battle axes for the right to cry in public. Countless men, however, have died for the ideas of freedom and self-determination, for the survival and honor of their own tribes, for the right to form their own gangs.
Feminists, elite bureaucrats, and wealthy men all have something to gain for themselves by pitching widespread male passivity. The way of the gang disrupts stable systems, threatens the business interests (and social status ) of the wealthy, and creates danger and uncertainty for women. If men can’t figure out what kind of future they want, there are plenty of people who are ready to determine what kind of future they’ll get.
The author refuses to pander to people who take a victim pose as it relates to feminism:
The anger that drives the Men’s Rights Movement comes from a sense that women aren’t playing fairly, that they are cheating, that when given the chance they will use the rhetoric of equality to skew things in their own favor. The men are right about that. Women are re-designing the world in their own image. It is naïve for men to expect otherwise.
Yes, people don’t always fight fair. Just because you expose that they’re not fighting fair does not mean that they will stop doing it, especially if it works well.
If you’ve skipped buying this book, you should flip through the first section of it, and see if you can stop reading.
What makes this a dangerous book, as books go, is that it talks directly to men about the other option, without rolling around in bathos about what a rotten lot men have these days. Showing off your wounds and talking about how much it hurts only works if it’s in a sympathetic social context. In today’s social context, a display of weakness can get you a lot of Facebook likes and Tumblr reblogs, but it will not actually change your fundamental situation for the better, because a society of vain preening types is not going to care about you beyond what you can do for them.
My other guess as to why liberal publications have not been quick to jump on it is that they rarely cover books anymore, because they mostly focus on being a guide to television watching. Because it doesn’t map well to any TV shows that most Americans are watching, most American periodical readers would have no interest in what some author has to say about manhood.
Nonetheless, this book will probably continue being passed from man to man, and the more people that even take into account what it has to say will be changed. This book would not have been terribly shocking in 1910 or even 1930, but it’s beyond the pale now, which is part of what makes it such an enjoyable pamphlet.
It’s an intriguing and enjoyable read but as Donovan readily admits, man’s natural violent gang behavior is incompatible with civilized society and modern technology. Today it’s practiced in pure form only by ghetto rejects, and the 1914 enthusiasm for living the manly dream ended up destroying Europe. The great challenge is finding a sustainable compromise.
I think talking about ” finding a sustainable compromise ” is part of the problem. For all the neutered white males talking about compromise, there are hundreds of millions of men in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, as well as Eastern Europe who have no intention of compromising. There are many millions of men in the U.S. who don’t want to compromise anything to find “sustainable” solutions.
That type of language belongs in the boardroom or the classroom, not the real world.
Trying to suppress of circumvent pugnacious masculinity will only result in greater chaos and social dysfunction, not less.
We’re seeing the results of that suppression now, and it will only get worse.
Correction- suppress OR circumvent.
I disagree. I believe, (I’ll have to check) that Donovan himself states that the same energy and passion that drives man’s violent gang behavior can be channeled into other activities. I think it’s important that a man should take up a sport, learn a trade, or do something of equal or greater value. Even in work, we should tackle our jobs with the utmost passion and dedication. It’s important that we still make use of our masculine drive, lest we lose it altogether.
Thanks for the review. FWIW, I think The Way of Men has sold about 15,00 copies by now. December and January were huge months. It’s actually growing in popularity. And it is becoming kind of conspicuous that it’s never be attacked or even addressed by any mainstream publication or men’s magazine. (Especially since I’ve heard it has been taught in college classes) While that would bring a lot of notoriety (and hassle) and possibly sell a ton more books — I think I prefer that men are buying it for or passing it along to friends, sons and brothers. I have an army officer who keeps buying autographed copies for his men. That means a lot more to me than making a bunch of shrews angry.
You would think that some editor would at least make a point of trying to slag it. Oh well. Glad to hear that it’s getting that kind of uptake.
Time to buy it suppose. I’ve seen nothing but glowing recommendations.
The Way Of Men is like Tropic of Cancer or The Glass Canoe, a book which puts on the page the way men actually think and act.
Very, very rare.
After reading it I thought “There is nothing here that I haven’t thought at some point in my life. In different thought bubbles. All quite obvious stuff really”. Pity I never sat down and actually worked through it in a methodical manner. I bet a million men could say the same thing. His defining of the 4 masculine virtues and his distinction between a good man and a man good at being a man, are obvious and ground breaking.
Not just that Donovan is a genius for working out a dialectic for masculinity but also that he had the courage to do it. At least one of the (many) reasons I would never have come up with such a thesis is that thinking so deeply about masculinity would have made me have to face a lot of tough questions about my own masculine failings. That a gay man had the nerve to do so is really astonishing. Hats off again.
Donovan has also come up with what in my opinion is the best ‘way forward speech’ for the alt right –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkxDEDEYOsU
Love this line –
Or you may just get that one day as a lion, to die like you were born, kicking and screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.
Donovan and R-Spence are the best speakers on the alt-right.
Thanks man. Yeah I get a lot of that. The book works because men already know what I am telling them, and they’ve already thought a lot of the things I wrote, but if they’d go to write about it they’d probably church it up and make sound “nicer” or more about “being a good man.”
I do have to admit though that the last line you mentioned was a nod to gun guys, as that’s from a meme I came across a few times online.
Dheers Jadk.
There are a lot of great speakers on the alt right.
In my early days reading alt right stuff I often had second thoughts along the lines of “Yes these guys seem right, but on the other hand they must be a bunch of weirdos, loonies etc” You know the way low level indoctrination works. Particularly on guys like myself who are pretty well educated on the mainstream canon. Alt righters were citing guys off the canon (say Lothrop Stoddard or Evola) or dismissed by the canon (say Henry Williamson or Wyndham Lewis) and I was thinking ‘Sure I know the canon is bullshit, but these guys are not even in the footnotes”.
The speeches of guys like Jack, Richard, Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, Frank Salter, Alex Kurtagic, and particularly Jonathan Bowden convinced me otherwise. I have a shitload of this content in mp3 form that I stripped off Youtube.
I was convinced of HBD not by a lot of deep reading but by listening to the debate between Rushton and Suzuki –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9FGHtfnYWY
Not just good content but impressive presentation, demeanour and physical appearance. That stuff really matters where you are talking about a movement that the mainstream derides as a bunch of ugly losers.