Why I think focusing on 'masculine/feminine polarity' in relationships isn't helpful

What was Mark Zuckerberg talking about when he told Joe Rogan he wants more "masculine energy" in corporate culture?

Photo by Alessio Jacona

When Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the words “masculine energy” recently, I was shot back a decade ago, when I was heartbroken and single and confused about relationships and dating. Back when I first heard about the idea of masculine and feminine “energies.”

Though, I’ve since realized that this idea is actually widespread in American society—even if we don’t talk about it as “energy.” We’re told that men and women are naturally, biologically, essentially different. That men are supposed to be hard, financially successful, and emotionally detached, and women soft, compliant, and nurturing. And this causes so much suffering, especially for those of us who aren’t as rich as Mark Zuckerberg, i.e., pretty much everyone. More on that in a moment.

“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” Zuckerberg told the podcaster Joe Rogan, during a nearly three-hour interview. “Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of that. But I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it. I think having a culture that celebrates aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”

What did he mean by corporate culture lacking “masculine energy?” Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times pointed out that, despite decades of feminist progress, men still dominate most high-paying and high-status fields. About 25 percent of tech jobs are held by women, and under 5 percent of the biggest tech companies have a woman in charge. And who could argue that corporations today aren’t “aggressive” enough? Corporate profits in the U.S. hit an all-time high in 2024.

“It’s unclear what, exactly, Zuckerberg meant by this,” Bouie wrote.

I know what he meant. I know it all too well. A decade ago, I’d just been dumped by a woman who I was in love with. I was going to therapy for the first time. I’d joined a men’s support group. I was reading anything and everything that claimed to help men understand women. I was desperate to figure out why I’d just had my heart broken and what to do so it wouldn’t happen again.

One thing I read—the most transformative thing I read—was spiritual teacher and author David Deida’s 1997 book The Way of the Superior Man. I read and reread it like five times in a month. I studied its refreshingly simple answers for men who want to be attractive to women. I told my buddies about it, being careful to never divulge anything about it to the women I was dating.

I understood why it was (and continues to be) so popular, perpetually at the top of Amazon’s bestseller list in the “men’s gender studies” category. It was like a secret code to unlocking things I’d been confused about since fumbling around with girls as a teenager. How to get women to like me. How to be good at sex. How to balance having a career and romantic partner. How to structure my day. How to act and feel like a man.

Looking back, even though the book helped me in some ways, I have lots of critiques. What’s with that cringey title? My main gripe ten years later is with the book’s underlying philosophy: that there are masculine and feminine “energies” inside of us that are “polar” opposites.

“Masculine/feminine polarity” has since become all the rage in “men’s work” communities and on social media aimed at men. As I’ve stepped further into working with men in therapy and writing this newsletter, I’ve seen more and more men’s coaches talking about these energies and the significance of “polarity” in dating, relationships, and sex. “We need more men who are willing to step into their masculine frame and break free from the grips of degeneracy and emasculation,” writes intimacy coach Jake Woodward, who has 367,000 Instagram followers. John Wineland, author of From the Core: A New Masculine Paradigm for Leading with Love, Living Your Truth, and Healing the World—and a popular men’s coach I still find helpful to this day—talks often about “the ancient dance of masculine/feminine polarity.”

The problem is this essentializes gender.

It pretends there are natural, intrinsic, biological, essential differences between men and women. Differences we are just born with and can’t change. Which isn’t scientifically true. Yes, sex is based on chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy (though, it exists on a spectrum, as biologists are discovering). But gender comes from outside of us—from our society’s norms and expectations about men and women. And these norms and expectations don’t come from nowhere. They are created and perpetuated to serve the interests of people who have lots of wealth and power in a particular society. People like Mark Zuckerberg.

Deida essentializes gender right from the start of the book’s introduction. He defines “masculine energy” as purposeful, confident, and directed, with a focus on having a "mission.” “Feminine energy” is the opposite: radiant, energetic, and the abundant force of life, or “going with the flow.” He claims that everyone can access both, but that each of us has one we feel most aligned with. “If you have a more masculine sexual essence, you would, of course, enjoy staying home and playing with the kids. But, deep down, you are driven by a sense of mission,” he writes. “Sexual attraction is based on sexual polarity,” he writes later in the introduction, “which is the force of passion that arcs between masculine and feminine poles.”

From there, he lays out a roadmap for being a man, from finding and focusing on a life purpose to handling relationship conflict. Again, this felt supportive to me in those difficult months after the breakup. And some of it actually did help me as I started dating again. The men in my life didn’t talk about their interior lives, how they felt, what they wanted outside of a successful career, let alone what to do to get the sort of partner and relationship they truly wanted. To read an older, wiser man’s practical step-by-step guide to finding more meaning, purpose, and success felt like being thrown a life raft in an endless ocean of confusion and loneliness.

But I’ve since found that thinking about relationships through the lens of masculine and feminine essences is mostly unhelpful—and even harmful. It not only ignores science and history, but it also reinforces relationship dynamics that actually decrease connection and intimacy, the key ingredients of a great relationship—and life.

The truth is our ideas of what is “masculine” and what is “feminine” are shaped by our time and place. Our time and place is the 21^st-century U.S., a capitalist society with skyrocketing political and economic inequality. Ideas about gender are always shifting and evolving, but the ones we have now were created only a few hundred years ago in Western Europe during the birth of capitalism. These ideas were then brought over to the North American colonies to enforce strict gender roles as the new country began. Men and women had somewhat different roles before that, depending on when and where across the world. Patriarchy existed, but ideas about gender weren’t as binary, or “polar” opposites.

As the philosopher Nancy Fraser says, “The rise of capitalism intensified gender division—by splitting economic production off from [household labor,] treating them as two separate things, located in two distinct institutions and coordinated in two different ways.” Men who weren’t rich and powerful were forced into factories and fields to work long, grueling hours. Women were forced to stay home to run the household and care for the kids, the next generation of workers. There were exceptions to these changes, but generally speaking this is what happened to the average working-class man and woman.

This is why, in our capitalist society, we think it’s natural, intrinsic, biological, essential that men are purposeful, confident, and directed. And women are nurturing, compliant, and radiant. Even though all humans are capable of all of these things. Men are supposed to provide and protect, while women are supposed to focus on relationships and the kids. These stereotypes emerged over the last few hundred years to justify a gender division of labor that didn’t exist before capitalism and helps hold our exploitative, unequal society together. Working class men (and now an increasing number of women) are exploited at work (by people like Mark Zuckerberg), and women (or whoever is doing the housework) are exploited for their unpaid labor at home.

“[Capitalism] has got a hell of a lot of [household] work almost for free, and it has made sure that women, far from struggling against it, would seek that work as the best thing in life (the magic words: ‘Yes, darling, you are a real woman’),” writes scholar Silvia Federici. “At the same time, it has disciplined the male worker also, by making his woman dependent on his work and his wage, and trapped him in this discipline by giving him a servant after he himself has done so much serving at the factory or the office.”

Feminist movements have exposed essentialist ideas about gender as the sham they are.

Women are capable of far more than the narrow role capitalism forced them into. Men are too. We are all human underneath how we’ve been socialized. We are all capable of being purposeful, confident, and directed, while also being nurturing and radiant. Deida admits as much:

“Each of us, man or woman, possesses both inner masculine and inner feminine qualities. Men can wear earrings, tenderly hug each other, and dance ecstatically in the woods. Women can change the oil in the car, accumulate political and financial power, and box in the ring. Men can take care of their children. Women can fight for their country. We have proven these things.”

But he also says that each of us still has a more masculine or feminine “true core.” This determines the partner we are attracted to, what we care most about in life, and what we need to do in a relationship to maximize “deep spiritual and sexual fulfillment.”

This leads to some dubious claims, like that women tend to be “chaotic,” “undisciplined,” “untrustable,” “bitchy,” and “bonkers.” And: “Don't believe the literal content of what your woman says unless love is flowing deeply and fully in the moment when she says it.” And: “As women get older, they typically take on more and more masculine tasks and responsibilities in our culture, so their radiance begins to decrease.”

I can see how this sort of simplistic, binary thinking seemed helpful to my 29-year-old, confused, lonely self (and to so many other men). But I’ve learned over time that it can lead to unhealthy dynamics in dating and relationships.

There were times in dating when I put immense pressure on myself to figure out what a woman wanted without asking her, to “feel her depth carefully.” Instead of asking my partner for her perspective, I’d try to make decisions about our relationship from my “deepest intuitive wisdom and knowledge.” Rather than check in with her when I felt tension, I’d try to “move her body with [my] body. Open her heart with [my] humor. Penetrate her closure with [my] fearless presence.” Deida literally writes, “Don't tolerate her mood. And don't talk about it with her.”

In other words, I tried hard to be a man, rather than myself. I was performing what I thought women wanted, based on this idea of “masculine/feminine polarity.” And though it was sometimes helpful to have some guidance, I didn’t feel authentic. And performing all the time was exhausting. I also got feedback time and time again that most of the women I dated didn’t respond well to it. They wanted an equal partner, a full human being they could be vulnerable and therefore intimate with. Turns out, that’s the key ingredient to a healthy and fulfilling relationship and great sex: vulnerability, the opposite of performance.

I’ve had the thought that I should write an alternative to The Way of the Superior Man, for men who need help with the emotional roller-coaster ride that is dating and relationships. That’s sort of what this newsletter is. I’m still figuring things out myself and sharing as I go along. But one thing I’m sure of is the whole “feminine/masculine polarity” thing is unhealthy.

I now believe we all have a genderless, human core that is the same regardless of our biology or gender. Each of us can express our full humanity, from playing aimlessly with the kids to working on an Excel spreadsheet to closing a business deal to connecting in an emotionally deep way with those we love. Society—our capitalist society—makes us think we are only capable of some of that. Or that we are meant to focus on some of those things and not others.

Back to Zuckerberg, gender essentialism perpetuates an unequal society built on domination and exploitation.

As Bouie pointed out, tech billionaires like Zuckerberg have a personal interest in pushing ideas about “masculine energy,” because it helps them cozy up with Trump and his MAGA movement. Like other rich and powerful corporate leaders, they want less government interference in their profit-making, unless of course its government contracts steered their way. Facebook is facing an antitrust lawsuit from the government trying to force them to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg doesn’t want to do that. So, it’s pretty clear why Facebook recently ended their diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programs and loosened hateful conduct policies. And why Zuckerberg went on the world’s most popular podcast (especially with men) to talk up “masculine energy.”

I beg you to see through that. Billionaires like Trump, Elon, and Zuckerberg are trying to win men over so we don’t see that we actually have more in common with other people like us who don’t have immense wealth and power. There’s another way to be a man than the snake oil they’re trying to sell us. I don’t know exactly how to articulate that way, but I know it’s not The Way of the Superior Man.

Now, a question for the comments below (or email me at jeremy@mohler.coach): What do you think of the whole “masculine/feminine polarity” thing?

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