What Makes a Man?

The first Nietzsche book I bought was Beyond Good and Evil, and I should probably begin by saying that I have not finished it.

I am still very new to philosophy. I am trying to learn how to read Nietzsche, Hegel, and the other intimidating men who have shaped so much of the way we think about morality, consciousness, politics, and human nature. I am nowhere near the point where I feel qualified to explain Nietzsche as a whole. What happened was much simpler: I started reading him and noticed what he was saying about women.

That sent me down a rabbit hole I did not expect. I had never really thought about how many of the men we call great philosophers also described women as less rational, naturally subordinate, unsuited to intellectual life, or destined for fundamentally different roles. Nietzsche is simply the first one I am trying to understand properly because Beyond Good and Evil happens to be the first book of his sitting beside my bed.

There are already things in Nietzsche that I find beautiful: self overcoming, becoming who you are, creating values instead of simply inheriting them, amor fati, and the possibility of transforming suffering rather than merely escaping it. Then, in the same book, I encountered passages about women that stopped me. He mocks the idea of equal rights and equal education between men and women, and at one point describes woman as something a man of depth would conceive of as a possession, destined for service.

The obvious context is that Nietzsche was born in 1844 into a deeply patriarchal society. Women did not have anything resembling the educational, political, economic, or relational autonomy available to women now. The intellectual institutions around him were overwhelmingly male. Ideas about what women were for were not merely private opinions. They were embedded in law, marriage, education, and the social order itself.

That context matters, but it did not fully satisfy my curiosity. I started wondering about Nietzsche the person. What were his relationships with women actually like? Had he ever been in love? Had he been rejected? How much of any philosopher's worldview is pure reasoning, and how much of it is biography, culture, relationships, wounds, and the historical system that formed him?

That is how I found Lou Salomé.

Lou was 21 when Nietzsche met her in Rome in 1882. She was Russian, intellectually ambitious, determined to build a life outside the conventional expectations placed on women, and had already met Nietzsche's friend Paul Rée. Rée fell in love with her and proposed marriage. Lou refused. What she proposed instead was much stranger for the nineteenth century: that she and Rée live and study together platonically, almost as brother and sister, with another intellectual companion joining them. Rée suggested Nietzsche.

Nietzsche met Lou, became intensely fascinated by her, and proposed marriage too. She refused him as well. So for a brief period, two philosophers were romantically interested in the same young woman while she was trying to convince them to create an intellectual household with her.

There is a famous staged photograph of Lou standing behind Nietzsche and Rée holding a whip while the two men pose in front of a little cart. It looks more scandalous than the surviving evidence suggests. I could not find credible evidence that the three were sexually involved. The reality seems more psychologically interesting anyway: intellectual intimacy, competing romantic feelings, rejection, jealousy, unconventional plans, and eventually collapse.

Lou and Rée continued without Nietzsche. Nietzsche broke with both of them and never saw Lou again. One interpretation, associated with Nietzsche biographer Julian Young, treats the affair as one of the most traumatic episodes of his life and argues that it affected his intellectual outlook. Another influential interpretation cautions that although the experience clearly destabilized him, there is no good reason to imagine that his philosophy after 1882 would have been fundamentally different had he never met Lou.

I am not interested in reducing Nietzsche to a man who got rejected and became bitter. That would be intellectually lazy, and I have not read nearly enough of him to make a claim like that. But the story made me think about something broader: a person can be extraordinarily developed in one dimension and much less developed in another. Someone can possess enormous intellectual power and still struggle with intimacy. Someone can have a profound sense of mission and still carry assumptions about relationships that they cannot see in themselves.

And from there my mind moved from Nietzsche to men more generally.

Part of that is because relationships between men and women have changed so dramatically. We still live with patriarchal structures and inherited gender expectations, but women now have levels of education, financial independence, political participation, and freedom in relationships that would have been almost unimaginable in Nietzsche's world. Across OECD countries, 55 percent of women ages 25 to 34 now have tertiary education, compared with 42 percent of men.

That changes the social contract. A woman increasingly does not need a relationship simply to survive economically or to have social legitimacy. A man cannot rely quite as much on the role itself to make him valuable. Partnership has to be chosen between two people with more freedom than previous generations had.

At the same time, there is something worth paying attention to around men. In the United States, the male suicide rate in 2024 was nearly four times the female rate. Popular conversation often calls this a male loneliness crisis, although the data are more complicated than that phrase suggests. A 2025 Pew study found that men and women reported loneliness at roughly equal rates, but men were substantially less likely to say they would turn to friends, relatives, or a mental health professional for emotional support.

We have also never been more technically connected. A person can speak to almost anyone, almost anywhere, instantly. Yet connection and intimacy are not the same thing. A young man can see thousands of women online while having very little experience talking to one. He can access sexual stimulation without learning intimacy. He can swipe through people without becoming comfortable with rejection, courtship, conflict, or sustaining a relationship. He can spend hundreds of hours listening to men explain masculinity without anyone in his actual life requiring him to become responsible for anything.

That last part is what has been occupying me.

For a very long time, societies gave men a rigid script for adulthood: work, acquire competence, provide, marry, support a household, become a father, take your place among other adult men. That script was inseparable from women's lack of freedom, so I am not nostalgic for it. But dismantling a bad social structure does not automatically answer the developmental question the structure used to answer: what does adulthood require of me now?

This is partly why I have been listening again to Alison Armstrong. Her framework describes male development through stages she calls Page, Knight, Prince, and King. I do not take this as established developmental science, but I find the underlying idea useful. The Page is learning. The Knight is testing himself and building competence. The Prince is establishing himself in the world. The King is less occupied with proving himself and more capable of stewardship, responsibility, and contribution.

David Deida approaches similar territory through a much more spiritual lens in The Way of the Superior Man. He repeatedly returns to purpose, integrity, and the idea that a man's romantic relationship cannot become a substitute for a direction he has failed to develop for himself. A woman cannot become the organizing purpose of his existence.

Mainstream developmental psychology has its own language for part of this. Erik Erikson described adulthood as eventually moving toward generativity: caring for, creating for, and contributing to something beyond the self. Parenthood can be one enormous expression of that, but not the only one. It can also be a craft, students, a community, a company, a family, work that matters, or people whose lives genuinely depend on you showing up.

I thought about this recently while remembering a conversation between Tony Robbins and Alex Hormozi. Hormozi has achieved a level of business success most people can barely imagine, yet Robbins kept circling something beyond achievement. He asked him about children and talked about how responsibility for others had changed his own life, but the larger idea was not simply that everyone needs to become a parent. It was that eventually something larger than yourself has to call you.

Maybe responsibility itself is developmental.

Maybe one of the ways human beings mature is when life stops being entirely organized around what we want and begins asking what we are capable of carrying.

This is where the manosphere becomes interesting to me.

The manosphere is not one organization or one ideology. It is a broad, fragmented ecosystem of online spaces dedicated to men's issues, masculinity, dating, gender relations, self improvement, and male grievances. It includes communities as different as men's rights activists, Red Pill and Black Pill spaces, incels, Men Going Their Own Way, pickup artists, looksmaxxing communities, and more ordinary male self improvement content. Some of those spaces focus on confidence, fitness, money, or belonging. Others can become explicitly hostile toward women and feminism.

That distinction matters because I do not think most boys enter these spaces because they wake up wanting to hate women. Many of the questions being asked are legitimate developmental questions: How do I become confident? How do I become competent? How do I become attractive? Why am I lonely? What does masculinity mean now? What am I supposed to be working toward? What does it mean to become a man?

Andrew Tate is one of the most visible modern answers to those questions. He packages money, status, fitness, sexuality, discipline, and a highly adversarial model of gender into something resembling an initiation story: you are weak now, here is what power looks like, follow this and become a man.

Armstrong gives a very different answer. Develop through the stage you are actually in. Deida's answer is purpose and integrity. Erikson's language is identity, intimacy, and eventually contribution. Tony Robbins keeps returning to growth and something larger than the self.

The darker parts of the manosphere can take the same feeling of male disorientation and offer a different answer entirely: the problem is women.

Women became too independent. Feminism changed the rules. Dating is unfair. Women expect too much. Men have lost their rightful place.

And that is how my Nietzsche rabbit hole came all the way back around.

I started wondering, somewhat absurdly, where Nietzsche would fit if he were alive now.

Would he belong somewhere in the manosphere?

Parts of it would probably love him. His suspicion of equality, fascination with hierarchy and strength, contempt for conformity, and some of the things he wrote about women could generate an almost unlimited supply of viral clips and quote cards.

But Nietzsche also gives us one of the most interesting ways of criticizing the whole thing: ressentiment.

Very roughly, ressentiment describes what can happen when powerlessness and injury harden into resentment, and resentment begins organizing itself around an enemy. Instead of creating from yourself, you become reactive. Someone outside you becomes necessary to explain why your life is not what you wanted it to be.

That makes modern Nietzsche surprisingly difficult to place.

A man could quote Nietzsche all day to justify his anger toward women while behaving in exactly the reactive way Nietzsche spent so much time criticizing. Nietzsche might be enormously popular inside parts of the manosphere while also finding its most grievance driven tendencies contemptible.

And perhaps Nietzsche himself makes the contradiction more interesting. Here was a man capable of writing profoundly about self overcoming, agency, and becoming who you are, while also carrying assumptions about women shaped by his century and, perhaps, by limitations in his own relational life. I do not know whether Lou's rejection shaped his later views of women. I have not read enough Nietzsche to make that claim, and scholars themselves disagree about how much the affair mattered.

What I know is that I started this rabbit hole because I could not understand how so many brilliant philosophers could think so poorly, or so narrowly, about women.

I ended up thinking about men.

About what helps them develop. About what happens when old roles disappear before new forms of adulthood have taken shape. About the difference between being surrounded by symbols of masculinity and developing the capacities maturity actually requires. About why a young man searching for direction might find Armstrong, Deida, religion, a mentor, a gym, a podcast, Andrew Tate, or some combination of all of them.

And about how pain can lead in very different directions.

Maybe part of maturity, for men and for all of us, is becoming capable of carrying more reality: responsibility without resentment, purpose without obsession, strength without domination, intimacy without possession, rejection without turning the person who rejected you into an enemy, and the ability to build something rather than spending your life explaining who prevented you from having it.

Maybe the old world gave men a script for adulthood, even if that script came attached to systems we were right to dismantle. The harder question is what happens when nobody automatically gives you another one.

When the world changes, when the relationship you wanted does not happen, when the role you thought you would inherit no longer exists, what do you ask yourself next?

Who took this from me?

Or what is this asking me to become?

I am still reading Nietzsche. Maybe I will think differently by the time I finish the book. That is part of why I wanted to write this now, from the middle of the question rather than from the end of it.

Further reading and sources

Project Gutenberg: Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

Cambridge: The Salomé Affair in Friedrich Nietzsche

Wikimedia Commons: Lou Salomé, Paul Rée, and Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882

OECD: Education at a Glance 2025

CDC: Suicide Data and Statistics

Pew Research Center: Men, Women and Social Connections

Ofcom: The Manosphere Unmasked

Alison Armstrong: Understanding the Stages of Men

David Deida: The Way of the Superior Man

APA Dictionary of Psychology: Generativity versus stagnation

The Game with Alex Hormozi: Tony Robbins on meaning when success feels empty