After talking about The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man (McKay and McKay 2009) for a while, Philemon and I decided to start a reading group. In less than a day, the WhatsApp group we created for that purpose included around 40 people interested in participating. Even though the online meeting had been organized at short notice and some people could not attend due to bandwidth or network problems, around a dozen people were present during the book’s discussion. After a short round of introductions, one participant read aloud the first ten pages of the book, which included advice on how to find the right suit and a discussion of the benefits of different types of tie knots, such as the full Windsor and the half-Windsor. Feeling that these detailed elaborations on tie knots had little to do with the more pressing question of what it meant to be a man in contemporary Kenya, I directed the discussion back to the book’s introduction by asking the participants what they thought about the authors’ diagnosis that men had been feminized.
Philemon answered by elaborating on what he thought women were looking for in a man:
A man who comes out as a leader […] somebody who comes out as calm, collected and knows what he wants in life. So, switching roles or taking over feminine roles does not really matter. You can be doing those roles, for example, I cook once in a while and when I cook, I cook well, but that doesn’t strip me of the qualities of being a man […]. I think the social kind of way in which we said these are the roles of men, these are the roles of women was the wrong way to look at it.
Being a man, as another participant added, thus did not mean occupying a ‘social role’ or attaining specific ‘surface characteristics’ such as how one looked or if one prepared food. In contrast, ‘real manliness’ came from ‘emotional maturity’. From the latter, masculine looks and practices would, as he called it, ‘spring’ automatically. When I asked if emotional maturity was not a quality that both men and women should strive to achieve, the participant explained that the emotional maturity of a man would be a direct result of his ability to ‘take over what I can call the leadership role, because I think that is what God created man for from the inception of everything, so a woman is not supposed to overtake a man in taking what we call the leadership role, especially from what we call the family unit perspective.’
The discussion continued, with Philemon adding that ‘you are not a man by how strong you are physically, but by how strong you are emotionally’ and that, unfortunately, we were living in a ‘society that promotes a man that is more physically, so they go for the looks, the abs, arms and everything.’ However, trying to ‘overcome the world’ with muscles like ‘boys’ did not define a true man. According to Philemon, men had to ‘overcome themselves’ and keep on trying despite failure and external derision, to which all participants agreed. For them, masculinity was not defined by the material goods men possessed, by society’s standards, or by a set of practices that men engaged in according to culturally determined gender roles. It was rather conceptualized as an attitude toward life characterized by the ability to remain ‘calm’ and ‘collected’ and by a high level of control over one’s emotions and inner self. If a man controlled his emotions and worked on his talents, economic success would follow and women would automatically subordinate themselves. Masculinity, in other words, was understood as a gift from God to be rediscovered by every man deep within himself. Combining the idea of God’s gift planted in humans with the belief that men were naturally calmer, more stoic, and more resistant than women, Philemon’s advice seemed to boil down to the idea that men just had to be true to and nurture their male nature in order to attract economic and romantic success.
1 In light of prevailing social trends, such as the rising numbers of single mothers and ‘absent fathers’ (Pala 2018), Philemon believed that it was no longer feasible for men to ‘be passive in the rearing of children’ and ‘to leave everything to their wives while they bring home the paycheck’ (Ingozi 2020: 31). In what might have been an attempt to remain attractive to female readers and followers, both Philemon and Atemo conceptualized masculinity as not only based on patriarchal leadership but also on the ability to care. In contrast to timid boys who were unable to lead and men who could only reign through violence, Philemon and Atemo advised men to mold the relation to their families after the ways in which God treated humanity. Men had to lead firmly and provide abundantly, but at the same time be lenient, caring, and forgiving.Addressing the issue of economic pressure by redefining masculinity allowed self-help literature and masculinity consultancy to flourish as lucrative business models. Offering solutions to migrant men’s experience of pressure thus played a significant role in Atemo’s and Philemon’s transformation into sought-after mentors and successful religious entrepreneurs who made money on social media and by selling books as well as merchandise, such as T-shirts or baseball caps. Yet, Philemon faced competition from other Kenyan masculinity consultants who linked their visions of how to restore patriarchy with narratives and practices adapted from the social and cultural counter-movement against feminism that has been baptized the ‘manosphere’, this being a largely virtual conglomeration of websites, books, blogs, and articles that advise on how to be a man in the twenty first century (Kaiser 2022, O’Neill 2018). It was in this manosphere that Philemon had once been attacked as a ‘simp’, short for ‘sucka idolizing mediocre pussy’ or ‘simpleton’, by followers of a radical anti-feminist movement who accused him of being too lenient and not radical enough in his attempts to ‘set men free’ (Atemo 2018a) by restoring their superior role.