Men as a Conquered People

What can the destruction of the Comanches teach us about masculinity in 2024?

A picture of the famous Comanche Quanah Parker. Fehrenbach notes that this is a “posed agency photo”

Inspired by The Rest is History, in the last month I’ve been re-reading the book “The Comanches: The History of A People” by T. R. Fehrenbach. I would rate this as one of the top 5 history books I’ve read in my life, a lapidary masterpiece that portrays the plains indians as vital, terrifying, and I can’t think of a better way to say this, incredibly fucking cool. One of the least cool times to be a Comanche was the 1870s, when the flame of their glory and the world that fueled it were fading (really, being extinguished) leaving the people behind in the dark. The description of this period in the book is resonant in more ways than one. Does the following remind you of anything?

“For the People collectively were sinking into a terrible social and psychic crisis… when there was no more war, no more hunting, there was no longer any purpose to Nerm existence. The males, in their own minds, were being made slaves… What was a warrior for?… How could men gain honour in this changing world to make the women praise him?”

In a terrible psychic crisis because the end of more traditional ways of living have left them personally purposeless, and with no way to make women praise him… It’s striking how similar this language is to the kind we often use to describe men’s changed social status in 2024. The passage quoted at the start of the section of the book describes the Comanches’ final decline. It continually throws up other points of similarity between the crisis of the Comanches and that of Men in modernity, some of which I have listed below.