Men of War

A Christmas post about why the men in your life like war

Why do men like war?

‘Tis a time of peace and goodwill to men (at least where they know it’s Christmas), and that also means it’s a time of gift-giving. Sometimes gifts are given freely, sometimes under obligation, and sometimes out of frustration.

Men—the cishet kind, at least—are notoriously hard to shop for, which sounds like a stereotype, and maybe it is, but as a representative of the group I think it’s generally accurate. So hard am I to shop for, at least, that I consult “best gifts for men” lists to find out what I want. This strategy rarely works, although when it does the process can yield a hit. (Congratulations to the Esquire 2020 list for introducing me to some excellent sweatshirts.)

Yet these lists can be based on some cruder gender stereotypes themselves. In particular, they presume men like golf, American rules football, and liquor. I like none of those things well enough to justify a present.

When I do in-person shopping, however, I tend to shop in bookstores. And there I find displays geared to people like me. And people like me, apparently, like war. A lot.

That’s why your local Barnes & Noble will have a big table full of history books about the Second World War and the Civil War at the front right now. (I haven’t been to a B&N this holiday season, but you know the table I’m talking about: lots of tan book covers for the Civil War, lots of pictures of airplanes and grunts in Higgins boats for the Second World War.)

Looking at a butterfly meme: is this fun Christmas reading?

So notorious is fixation of the male gaze on war that at least some historians scorn it as “Dad History”, a genre of blokes, boats, and battles. This is not the kind of history that people with academic positions write—it is the kind of history that people who think that history departments need to get back to doing real history tend to read, either enthusiastically or guiltily.

I have self-consciously refined tastes in these quadrants, as well—no David McCullough for me, thank you, I’ll stick to my Fred Anderson volumes about the Seven Years War and my Allen Taylor about the War of 1812—but indeed my tastes are still based on the same soffrito of dudes, dreadnoughts, and D-Days. When I’m coding or data munging, I consume the video equivalents: Mustard videos on YouTube about the history of aviation. (Ask me anything about the B-70 Valkyrie bomber! Or—don’t.)

Some of my reading habits results from professional or professional-adjacent stuff. (“I have to read three books about the War of 1812! I’ll get to those books about boring-as-hell international organizations I actually teach about later.”) Some of it is longstanding idiosyncratic taste. And some of it reflects my current inability to read fiction other than Emily St. John Mandel’s work. But none of it is particularly unusual—it’s a slight niche, but it’s not an empty one: middle-aged cishet white guy who likes war-ish stuff.

So why do we like it? This requires some gender ideology to parse, even some intersectionality. War has been male-identified for quite a long time, and the construction of the U.S. national security state in particular was framed as a very white, very straight project from the 1940s onward. The American way of war isn’t just capital intensive but was, for a long time, geared at protecting and extending hierarchies at home. (It also fitted in well with the previous British project that we partly inherited, although our comparatively greater investment in landpower meant that we have a little less of the upper-class accent and a little greater respect for our ghazi classes of special operators.) This does help explain why women don’t like this sort of book, a point to which we’ll return. Yet past a point this is tautological. Guys like this stuff because social structures say guys like it? Brilliant, thanks.

What’s interesting to me is that as far as I can tell this is a taste that crosses national lines: I certainly see a lot of similar volumes in British bookstores, and airplane-reading classes in Euro airports have long evinced similar tastes. This suggests that we’re looking at something specific about gender performance that goes beyond the gender studies 101 answer.

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My guess is that this is the result of three factors. The first is that guys like to read about guys in teams. Mostly, that’s about winning teams—business books and sports books, the other prominent Guy Nonfiction Genres, are also fundamentally stories about how teams (predominantly or exclusively male) conceive and implement strategies. You almost always are asked to identify with a successful team, and almost always with a male leader thereof. (There’s a lot more written about Steve Jobs than Steve Ballmer.) The desire for homosociality (a preference for same-sex relationships of a nonsexual relationships) and even para-homosociality (that is, a preference for same sex parasocial relationships) runs deep.

The second is that guys have been learning about particular wars for generations, as part of a father-to-son (mostly son) transmission of culture that forms the bedrock of a lot of real-world homosocial relationships. This could be one reason why even though the fascination with war is cross-national, the fascination with particular wars differs—I don’t think that there’s a lot of English buffs of the American Civil War, for instance (although there’s always the Phil Collins exception). This is one reason why Dad History tends to prefer unrefined stories of heroism that snobs think were left behind with the trenches in the First World War. Boy, if you think that zest for war got terminated with the Western Front, do I have a shelf of Tom Clancy books for you. This also means that anything that calls into question the master narratives of Dad History will be scorned as woke. (I would not be surprised if this has been the reaction to The Blind Strategist, a pretty scathing re-evaluation of the thought of John Boyd, and if you don’t know who John Boyd is you’re still a level one Dad History mage.) In other words, Dad History is a way of sustaining relations with, well, Dads.

The third is that these are escapism, but not in the way you might think. These books aren’t escapism because they are about winning (although that makes it more pleasant). They’re escapism because they are about guys like you who are doing things that matter. The Second World War is more fun to read about than Vietnam not just because we won, but because everyone got to play a role. You, too, could participate in remaking the world is fun to read about. The Civil War offers something of the same escapism. So does the Cold War. By contrast, I am under no illusions that I will ever be a Seal Team Six warrior, and their advice about how to manage people is pretty irrelevant to me. (I’m more realistic; I listen to the Calm app monologues of LeBron James.) This is the enduring attraction of Tom Clancy: fundamentally, his oeuvre wasn’t about the tech but it was about guys doing jobs. Performing functions as part of a team for a mission that matters: that’s what folks are escaping to.

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So where are the women? The serious study of international conflict in my profession, political science, is still pretty male-dominated but nothing like what it used to be. That isn’t reflected in Dad History, even the more important kind. This has something to do with the audience, but that is again, ultimately, circular.

My genuine guess—and here I’m leaving behind my professional social science role for a second—is that women have better relationships in reality and so have less need for this sort of escapism. To paint with verrrrry broad strokes, women’s escapism tends to focus on the peaks of relationships (romance novels, broadly), acute fears and how to address them (Law & Order: Special Victims Units), and the cultivation of nurturing relationships. This is escapism but of a different kind.

In part, I think, that’s because women genuinely, statistically, just appear to have closer friendships and relations than men. As a genre, writing about war is not writing about intimate relationships: it’s a genre that focuses on the creation and performance of teams. Parasociality and meaningful work? That’s a heady brew.

To be sure, reading about war is a more civilized way of displacing anxieties about meaning and friendship than drowning sorrows in brown liquor or obsessively following the NFL. At least my performance of taste very much hopes it is.

So we’ll end this holiday season newsletter on a practical note. If you’re looking for something to get the man in your life who has A War that they’re a fan of, my recommendation is this: Don’t buy from the Dad History table. Elevate their tastes a tad by promoting them to Father History. Get them a book about what came before or what came after. Broaden their interest just a little bit. And maybe suggest they start a book club where they and the other dads can talk about Churchill and Eisenhower (and maybe Marlborough) .

Endnotes

Branislav Slantchev on the war in Ukraine, lengthy but self-recommending:

Until the Kremlin accepts that it cannot achieve its goals by force, it will keep going, and no negotiations that fail to deliver said goals would stop it. By the same token, given the sky-high support for defending the country against Russia, the Ukrainians are not going to concede anything remotely close to these terms short of total military defeat. It is not at all clear to me what peace-mongers imagine negotiations can achieve.

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Patrick McKenzie on the on-the-ground experiences of Operation Warp Speed and other parts of America’s pandemic response—conservative perspective but worth reading:

The product rollout for the vaccine should have been approximately as logistically straightforward as any product rollout in the United States. It was not, principally because it did not use the US’s formidable advantages in coordinating product rollouts.

and

This caused a standing wave of inquiries to hit all levels of US healthcare infrastructure in the early months of the vaccination effort. Very few of those inquiries went well for any party. It is widely believed, and was widely believed at the time, that this was primarily because supply was lacking, but it was often the case that supply was frequently not being used as quickly as it was produced because demand could not find it.

and

The United States government decided to resolve this temporary-but-undeniable shortage by instituting a prioritization system, leaving the exact contours of that prioritization to its political subdivisions. In broad strokes it expected that the vaccine would first be administered to healthcare providers, so-called essential workers, the elderly, and people with conditions that would pose an increased risk of severe outcomes. The plan was always to vaccinate everyone who wanted a vaccine, at the public’s expense, eventually. … California, not to mince words, prioritized the appearance of equity over saving lives, over and over and over again, as part of an explicitly documented strategy, at all levels of the government. You can read the sanitized version of the rationale, by putative medical ethics experts, in numerous official documents. The less sanitized version came out frequently in meetings.