Just two weeks ago, I posted a piece on the growing divide between journalists and the general public. More and more, journalists are college-educated at elite schools and hail from privileged backgrounds making them much like the ruling elites on whom they report. Left out is any understanding of or reporting on the lives, loves, trials, tribulations and thoughts of everyone else, particularly working-class Americans.
Predictable as the sunrise, along came a perfect example of the genre, courtesy of Newsweek penned by Life and Trends writer, Alyce Collins. Her topic: masculinity. Her article: off-the-shelf collegiate ideology.
It’s exactly the sort of piece that 99% of non-elite Americans wouldn’t waste 15 seconds on. That’s the time it takes to read to where Collins identifies as examples of negative masculinity hunting, military service, teaching and coaching high school kids. Her audience consists solely of progressives who already agree with her. Everyone else just flipped to the Sports section.
Now, perhaps realizing that she hasn’t a clue about actual masculinity, Collins turns to “experts” who, we’re supposed to believe, do.
One of those, Matt Englar-Carlson, explains that positive masculinity “creates space to realize that there’s (sic) multiple ways to be a man.” Toxic masculinity “tells boys and men to behave in certain ways and conform to certain stereotypes” while the positive variety “liberates us from the masculine straitjacket and allows us to express ourselves any way we want.”
Nope. Collins and her experts are too wrapped up in their progressive ideology to notice the obvious – that the “positive” masculinity that they claim to be so expansive is actually far less tolerant than the traditional kind they abhor. After all, how tolerant can you be when you reject outright masculine behavior like teaching, coaching and military service? What they call liberating is really just straitlaced conformity to norms of which they approve. There’s nothing tolerant about them.
More important than their blindness to their own hypocrisy is their ignorance of their chosen subject. They call masculinity a “straitjacket” that it has never been, at least until recently. In fact, human society has always understood that the range of masculine behaviors is astonishingly varied and usually those behaviors have been at least accepted and often valued.
Do they notice that few men today kowtow to the stereotype of the hypermasculine male they seem to believe to be ubiquitous? What do they make of the countless well-known men of centuries past that did nothing of the sort? How do they explain that most of those historical men whom we now most revere looked nothing like the stereotype of today’s fevered imaginings?
Have they heard of Confucious, perhaps the single most influential person in history? Shakespeare? Mozart? Darwin? What about any of the numberless poets, artists, healers, scientists, philosophers and spiritual leaders? In what way were they straitjacketed according to their sex? Was the Buddha just another male whose sole interest was the domination of others?
Hard men, strong men, gentle men, kind men, creative men, smart men, stupid men, masculine men, effeminate men – they’ve all existed in all parts of the world for all times. Were there limitations on permissible behavior? Same-sex attraction was, until recently a dangerous line to walk and military service at the whim of the sovereign has always been a requirement. But the range of acceptable behavior was always broad, as even a casual glance at history shows.
The idea that masculinity is a straitjacket is therefore mostly nonsense and mostly a recent invention. Strangely, that’s one thing the article inadvertently gets right. As one of Collin’s experts said, “’a very negative stereotype’ of masculinity has emerged.”
Indeed it has. Where did it come from? Ah, that’s a question no one in the article dares ask, much less answer, because to do so would be apostasy, a deviation from the true religion. I refer of course to the toxic ideology called radical feminism of which the fear and loathing of everything masculine has always been a core feature.
For the past 60 years and more, those feminists have made the most outrageous and usually utterly false claims about men – that we’re all rapists, that fathers are uniquely dangerous to their wives and children, that only by our oppression of women have we accomplished anything, that the amazing safety, prosperity and good health we enjoy today are nothing but the consequences of a hateful patriarchy, etc. Before extremist feminism came along, men claimed a certain respect. Now the only way to be a “positive” male is to abandon everything that being one has always meant.
So if Collins and whoever her audience is want positive masculinity, someone should let them in on the secret – they already have it and have for millennia. All they have to do is open their eyes and look at the reality of men, everything we do to advance civilization, science and the arts, protect and support the ones we love and make everyday life convenient, safe and prosperous. While they’re at it, they could also notice that we do all of that while enduring the most disgraceful calumnies from every corner of life, public and private.
But they won’t. They won’t because they’re intellectually unserious and, more importantly, to give men the basic respect and empathy we’re due would be to reverse the narrative that’s been repeated ad infinitum for decades and become such an integral part of our culture as to be all but beyond questioning.
And so the notion of “positive masculinity” will continue to be deployed for strategic reasons, like convincing progressives to vote for a white male, while the countless millions of hard-working, smart, ambitious, generative, kind, faithful, courageous men whom we pass every day on the street, and on whom our very lives depend, go unremarked.
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
