Recently we heard from Republican Congressman Josh Hawley, who said that boys in America are being treated like “an illness in search of a cure,” according to Democrats, and that after years of being told their manhood is a problem, men in this country are sipping into an enclave of idleness, video games and pornography.
Clearly he seems rather raw on a personal level with regard to this message. Many men have a problem with criticism, especially when it comes to their manhood. (They might say they're paying the cost to be the boss. Some men might be said to have a point there -- still, it matters how a man fills that boss role.) Of course, most of his intent in the speech he gave at a national conservatism gathering in October was to hang more sins of un-Americanism on the Democrats. That's always the quick and easy way to garner approval from one's fellow Republicans: remind them of the evils we Dems are constantly working to the detriment of our country.
Especially the greatest evil of all: emasculating American manhood, by saying that masculinity itself is the problem. (Boy, isn't that just like us Godless libtards.)
The thing is, masculinity itself isn't the problem. Toxic masculinity is.
Toxic masculinity is the belief that because you were born with a penis and testicles, you are on top in the social order, compared to women and children. (Minorities used to be in that latter group as well -- and still are, in the minds of many people of both genders in this country.) It is the idea that what you're doing, what you believe, what you want out of life, are all more important than what other people, especially the non-adults and non-males in your life, might want. You know best, by virtue of the testosterone flowing through your veins.
Never ask questions; never apologize; never seek compromise. Those are all signs of weakness. Never admit you have any sort of problem, any sort of frailty. Never ask for help, even if you badly need it.
Never do anything that might cause your fellow males to brand you a woman. That's the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. Because a womanish man is always seen as weak, and must be cut from the herd if the herd is to remain strong.
And you don't want to be that guy.
(Believe me: for a large part of my life, I was that guy.)
And in the area of politics, there's no need to overthink it. Whatever your good buddies at the local watering hole think is what you raise your glass to. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “People take up political views in order to agree with their friends.” The herd instinct -- or perhaps I should say troop instinct, since we are primates, after all -- is strong in very many of us, despite our American ideal of the “rugged individualist.”
Masculinity, in and of itself, is not a toxin. Men are necessary and vital to the human race; I'm not such a radical feminist that I would ever say otherwise. I like men; I have many good men friends who are strong, sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working, decent, funny at times (as in witty) -- there's nothing these guys need to change about themselves, except for the changes that naturally come with life and growth.
Masculinity is toxic for many men, however (with plenty of knock-on effects for everyone else around them). The problem, as CNN contributor David Perry pointed out in his recent article on Hawley's tirade, is that men in this country wind up in a rigid hierarchy that forces them into competition with each other, competition at which most of them will fail. (Tell me about it. I failed so many times at that game myself.) And competition is a very male game here, brutal and unforgiving, with only a few winners. (Good Goddess, if everyone wound up successful, what would success even mean anymore?)
This leaves so many men with the feeling that they were practically born to be cast aside-- that they have no hope of being winners. That was likely the emotion that brought so many torch-bearing White supremacists to chant “You will not replace us!” in the streets of Charlottsville in 2017. (As many times as I've seen that footage, I've never spotted a woman with a torch in that group.) Paranoia is the perfect tool to motivate men who feel left behind … and undoubtedly, after decades of plant closings and changes in technology turning so many struggling breadwinners loose from their jobs, perhaps they shouldn't be viewed as total monsters. (Until politicians work their hideous magic on them, of course.)
Then again, a man long frustrated in life can be a scary individual after a time. That, too, was me at times in my male life -- angry, feeling cheated after trying to do everything the world demanded of me, and deeply depressed, seeing no way out. (Then, of course, there was gender identity disorder, the cherry on top of my noisome sundae.) I would never have lit up a torch and gone marching, because I do not believe men, White men especially, can claim innate superiority over all other groups. That would be such a nice simple answer, but the problem with nice simple answers is, they're almost always wrong.
Then yet again, lots of people, men especially, just want an answer they can live with. It doesn't have to be right.
Men feel themselves embattled on all sides, fighting changes to their world that they never agreed to, can't accept and will go to great lengths to reverse. That thinking does a lot to explain what motivates conservatives from the GOP, the Chinese Communist Party, even Islamist terror groups. And you'll notice, those are largely men's clubs, even the GOP, which has slapped down good, strong women like Cheney and Murkowski while rewarding ladies who act like louts, like Greene, Boebert, and a host of others. They know enough to play the men's game, not that it reflects well, one suspects, on other GOP women who aren't female lots.
Men and women both have it rough, in different ways. Nobody should feel dispensable in this world, gentlemen and ladies (and the rest of us). Because no one is.