I picked up this book with some skepticism about the title. Way of the superior man? Sounds like some patriarchal bullshit. I’ve always held a strongly feminist viewpoint, and I aim to challenge the ways that men oppress women. I also celebrate my feminine qualities – my sensitivity, receptivity, surrender, and ability to hold space for people. I’ve spent the last couple years in my meditation practice developing these “yin” qualities. But I’ve also become more curious about what a healthy “yang” looks like. This book is a promising step towards answering that question for me. And I found his ideas interesting enough that I want to share them with my friends – men, women, and nonbinary/genderqueer/other – to see what they think.

Deida opens the book with the explanation that when he uses the words “man” and “woman” he’s referring to people with masculine and feminine core energies, not the two genders or sexes per se. He asserts that about 80% of men have a “masculine core”, 10% have a “feminine core”, and 10% are “balanced/neutral”. Couples may of course consist of men with feminine cores, women with masculine cores, or any number of combinations. He gives further nuance that this might change over time. Even though I dislike making generalizations or normative statements about men and women, and welcome challenge to the limitations of his framing of gender, I’ll use his convention when explaining his ideas. In a future post I might make some more precise caveats about the nebulosity/constructedness/multidimensionality of gender and sex.

Here are some of his core ideas:

  • A man’s gifts are directness, decisiveness, humor, and loving presence.
  • A man should work through his fears in order to give his full gift and bring more love into the world
  • The priority of the masculine should be the mission that leads towards freedom
  • The priority of the feminine, in men and women, is the flow of love in relationship.

  • A man should always lean just beyond his edge, where he can feel his fears the most. He shouldn’t fall into an overly difficult, self aggrandizing path which uses arrogance/dissociation to numb away one’s fears. He also shouldn’t fall into comfort and security. Thus he should be neither lazy nor aggressive.

  • Men should meet with their friends once a week to challenge each other to be better.
    • Recently I’ve participated in men’s circles that are mostly about being emotionally vulnerable with other men. I found these valuable, but Deida suggests a different approach: instead of just giving each other emotional support, men’s circles should be about challenging your male friends to face their fears and take action on things they’re stuck on. “Good friends should not tolerate medicority in one another,” he says. “If you are at your edge, your men friends should respect that, but not let you off the hook. They should honor your fears, and, in love, continue to goad you beyond them, without pushing you”.
  • In order to cultivate polarization (sexual attraction in a couple), the masculine partner should lean into their masculine qualities, and the feminine partner should lean into their feminine qualities. There’s some other relationship advice given in this book that I’d like to treat with more nuance than I have time for, but I did find it partially relevant to my own dating experience.
  • This book also presents a compelling view about how living in the world and following desire can lead to spiritual development. The core idea is that you follow each desire to completion, gradually maturing in the depth of what you are seeking. As long as you’re living at the edge of your fears, this will eventually push you towards greater freedom in the form of spiritual attainments like overcoming the fear of death and seeing through the ego.

What inspired me most about this book is the idea that the power of masculinity is to look fear square in the face with love, and to do the thing that you want to do and know is right even if it’s scary. I’ve been avoiding writing for a long time because I’m afraid of being criticized, afraid of pissing people off, afraid of sounding like an idiot, afraid of being mediocre. This book pushed me to commit to writing more, starting with this book review. I decided to write it with two days notice, insisting that it be published by the end of the working day whether I like it or not.

Some open questions:

  • How do women feel about this book? What is the equivalent book from the feminine point of view?
  • What does healthy masculinity mean in the context of a patriarchal society?

Thanks to my friend Max Langenkamp for recommending me this book, for his brotherhood, and for challenging me to be a better man