This morning’s assortment of email alerts included a fine short essay by Anthony Esolen, writing at American Greatness on the subject of “toxic masculinity”. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a longish excerpt:
We’ve all been hearing plenty about “toxic masculinity’ these days, and never from people who trouble to tell us what strong, virtuous, and noble masculinity might look like. That should not surprise us. If someone should use the phrase “toxic Judaism,’ we would not expect from him a wistful description of gentle, intelligent rabbis studying for many years each phrase of the Scriptures and all the centuries of commentary thereupon, or a call for Jews to return to their heritage. We would expect rather a sense that all Judaism is more or less toxic, and the less of it a Jew might have, so much the better. In other words, we would expect sheer bigotry.
And yet I can see a paradoxical use for that phrase, “toxic masculinity.’ Many drugs, we know, are medicinal in small doses but toxic in large doses. The reverse applies here. Masculinity is the drug that is dynamic, creative, and protective in large doses, but querulous, selfish, irresponsible, and dangerous in small doses. And we find it to be so in some rather strange places.
Let me explain. I recall many years ago a study which showed that prison inmates with lower levels of testosterone tended to get into fights more often; and feminists, not known for thinking past a single move on the chessboard, concluded that it therefore proved that testosterone had nothing to do with aggressiveness. Of course it proved no such thing. Every boy knows that the bully is never the strongest kid in the class. The bully is the one who feels his weakness or inadequacy and takes it out on boys who are smaller than he is. The more manly you are, the more you will command simply by your presence. No announcement is needed.
A man’s man does not raise his hand in anger against a woman. He despises men who do that: he considers them to be less than the mud on the sole of his shoe. Women, for their part, are attracted to strong and virile men for the protection they will afford them, because women are vulnerable””smaller and weaker than teenage boys, even when they are not bearing a child or taking care of an infant or of small children. To use the old poetic image, she is the fruitful and “marriageable vine’ that clings to the tall and strong but otherwise barren elm.
We may find “toxic masculinity,’ then, wherever there is toxic aggression but without manliness, without the sense that power is to be used sparingly and always for protection of the weaker, without the strict accountability that the man demands of himself, blaming himself first for things that go wrong, while giving credit to others when things go right. The more masculine you are, the more confident you are that you need not prove your manhood by swagger, by picking on the weak, by pumping yourself, and by stiffing those who have assisted you.
There’s a reason why “virile” and “virtuous” have the same etymological root, and it’s up to us men to keep that ancient and honorable virtue alive. (Indeed, it’s our duty — and the mephitic cultural ascendance of dessicated feminists and epicene soy-boys should remind us that our civilization depends on it.)
In his book Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, Forrest McDonald had this to say (my emphasis):
Public virtue entailed firmness, courage, endurance, industry, frugal living, strength, and above all, unremitting devotion to the weal of the public’s corporate self, the community of virtuous men. It was at once individualistic and communal: individualistic in that no member could be dependent upon another and still be reckoned a member of the public; communal in that every man gave himself totally to the good of the public as a whole. If public virtue declined, the republic declined, and if it declined too far, the republic died. Philosophical historians had worked out a regular life cycle, or more properly death cycle, of republics. Manhood gave way to effeminacy, republican liberty to licentiousness. Licentiousness, in turn, degenerated into anarchy, and anarchy inevitably led to tyranny.
So, brothers, as we prepare to enjoy and honor our nation’s birthday, remember: the stakes are high. Man up.
2 Comments
Meek used to be understood as power under control. Thus, masculinity should be meek.
Still, beating the crap out of soyboy is tempting.
I do have a quibble with not using power against the weak. As a general matter, perhaps, but there are exceptions. If the weak insist on confrontation and are endangering good order, then power (to the point necessary to instill correct order) is warranted.
Also, he seems to promote a bit too much white-knighting. There is a particularly loathsome commenter (Marie) on that thread who strikes me as a typical feminazi. She claims she “don’t need no man” to protect her – may she get her wish, good and hard. That’s the problem – these women are so insulated from the consequences of their ideas, attitudes and actions, they do not learn; in fact, may not be able to learn because of it.