Category: Manliness

Restoring the Patriarchy

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I think it would be a good idea. Oh, not the legal aspects of it: with two narrow exceptions, I think men and women should be treated the same under the law. Rather, I think we should restore the cultural aspect of patriarchy, the idea that the father has a special authority and a special responsibility within the home, and that men in general have special obligations within society.

Men are, in general, more powerful (by which I mean more powerful than women; all the comparatives here refer to men relative to women, because there are only two kinds, male and female). Men do most of the creating and most of the destroying, impose most of the structure, cause most of the mayhem. Men are the principal actors in society by virtue of their greater drive and aggression and strength, their lesser interest in people, their greater interest in things and in the manipulation and control of things.

Biology made us that way. We don’t have to like it, but not liking it doesn’t make it untrue.

The problem with pretending that men aren’t more powerful than women, or that this isn’t an intrinsic quality of masculinity, is that by ignoring this reality we necessarily ignore the responsibility of managing it. Pretending that little boys aren’t, by their very natures, more aggressive than little girls discourages us from teaching little boys to channel that aggression into positive and productive pursuits. The aggression doesn’t go away, as the mean streets of Baltimore and Chicago sadly attest every single day.

We know how to discipline young men, how to shape the expression of their growing power. We do it by imposing a beneficent authority upon them, an authority that they can look up to and respect, that itself exhibits the kind of self-control and nobility we wish to see them express.

What does that authority look like? It looks like a father — a father, or the martial surrogate for a father represented by the military. Most pointedly, it looks like a father who embraces his role as the primary leader and disciplinarian.

Our culture is moving in the wrong direction as regards the sexes. It encourages men to be ashamed of their strength, women to be ashamed of their vulnerability, and both to deny that these traits are natural and intrinsic to the respective sexes. Under the illusion of freeing men and women from artificial constraints, it urges women to behave with less caution even as it erodes the cultural constraints on male behavior that served to keep men in check.

We are in denial, and would be better served by greater honesty about the fundamental differences between the sexes, and the unique role fathers play in raising rough boys to be gentle men.

Pride Month and Father’s Day

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Today is Father’s Day. June is Pride month. Until a few years ago, I’d have found nothing particularly incongruous about that conjunction: there is nothing about the celebration of one’s sexual preference, however odd it may be to call that “pride,” that precludes, obfuscates, or undermines an appreciation of the role fathers play in the lives of their children and their value to society.

But times change, and not always for the better.

Today, the LGB community — those people who are, to varying degrees, attracted sexually to members of their own sex — has chosen to associate itself with a distinctly different group, those who embrace one or another form of gender-identity fantasy or delusion. That’s what the T in LGBT refers to.

I’m sympathetic to homosexuals, as we used to call people who experience strong same-sex attraction. (I think it’s no longer considered appropriate to use the term, but I’m nothing if not no slave to fashion. Parse that at your leisure.) Attraction, whether to members of one’s own sex or the more quotidian kind, is what it is, and I’m perfectly willing to believe that it isn’t something one can change even if one wishes one could. I’m glad that being gay or lesbian is legal, tolerated, and accepted.

I’m sympathetic as well to those who suffer one or another form of gender dysphoria, who imagine or wish themselves to be of a different sex, or who are so confused about the nature of sexuality as to imagine that there’s a meaningful category of human sexual identity that is neither male nor female. People suffer all kinds of emotional and psychological troubles, and their suffering is real.

But the so-called trans movement is nonsense — the self-righteous pouring of gasoline on to the sputtering psychoses of true gender confusion. That it has been elevated to the level of a fad, and given a patina of the same victimhood status to which the homosexual community could once lay legitimate claim, is a sign of the narcissistic unseriousness of our time.

The gender identity movement — the trans movement — is a self-contradictory celebration of inchoate and childish urges, of the desire to make it so by wishing it so. Pursuit of its confused fantasy of sexual mutability, of parallel universes of ever more contrived sexual identity, necessitates the abnegation of the simple truth of sexual reality: that there is male and female, man and woman, and — barring a handful of ambiguously and unfortunately malformed individuals — nothing else.

The world can not gracefully accommodate both physiological reality and gender-identity fantasy — and neither can the culture. Unfortunately, the levers of popular culture are in the hands of deeply unserious people, and so the tide of opinion favors the fantastic over the actual.

Which brings us to Father’s Day. The point of this holiday is the recognition that being a father matters — that men have something unique to offer, that masculinity is distinct from femininity, distinct and valuable. That claim is incompatible with the spiraling nonsense of the trans movement.

My favorite band will play at my favorite bar this week in celebration of Pride month. I’d go, if it were merely an LGB event. But the trans thing is stupid, is on the march, and has to be opposed by people who think Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are acknowledgements of something non-trivial.

In Defense of Man-Bashing

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Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds links to a piece by Lisa De Pasquale entitled Why the Anti-Men ‘Galentine’s Day’ is Nothing to Celebrate. According to Ms. Pasquale, this recently invented February 13th holiday (another sitcom-inspired creation) has, at least in some circles, a decidedly anti-male aspect to it.

I understand her objection: men do come in for a lot of criticism lately, and young men — grade school boys in particular — are suffering from increasingly unhinged biases and hostility.

But I’m generally not very sympathetic to complaints about the mistreatment of men. We are, by our very natures, tougher than women, physically and emotionally stronger and less sensitive, less vulnerable. This is one of the reasons it’s so great to be a man, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Yes, I know men have a few legitimate complaints, mostly having to do with a lack of due process. But it’s still easier, safer, and just more fun to be a guy than a gal, so I don’t care to hear people whine about anti-male discrimination. (I do, on the other hand, feel a bit sorry for the little boys in the school yard who have to put up with misguided adult re-education efforts.)

Frankly, I think it’s kind of cute when women get together and pile on men and make fun of us. It’s like watching feisty kittens fight each other. I say, let them enjoy their sisterly solidarity.

This half-serious, casually anti-male feminism has a silver lining. These ladies, with their “The Future is Female” (and they’re half right) tee-shirts and their “male tears” mugs, are acknowledging that men and women are different. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but, after half a century of feminism’s relentless efforts to redefine women as men — first by jettisoning the bra, and ultimately by eliminating the act of motherhood itself — it’s nice to hear women talking about men as something inherently unlike themselves.

Because they’re right: men and women are different. And women, even when then they’re being feisty and cutely cantankerous, are adorable.

A Note to Young Men

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There’s a lot of talk these days about toxic masculinity and the problems men cause, both to themselves and to others, when they behave in classically manly ways.

Well, everyone has an opinion, and people are going to talk. But I’m going to share some things with you, man to man, and I hope you’ll remember them the next time a professor or a late night comic or a shaving company tries to tell you how you can “be better” than the sorry creature they apparently think you are.

First, women like manly men. They always have, and they always will. It’s the way we’re wired, no matter what the geniuses in the Gender Studies department try to tell you.

People like to pretend that women want sensitive guys who are in touch with their feelings, but the truth is that they like guys who are guys, guys who don’t whine, guys who spend more time working out or fixing something than they do getting in touch with their emotions. It isn’t just conservative, old-fashioned girls who think this way: most women, whether conservative or liberal, young or old, rich or poor, like a man who is in touch with his masculine side, not his feminine side.

Think about it. Think of the heroes of our popular culture, the movie stars past and present. Are they wimps? Do they fuss? Are they tentative and cautious, concerned about whose feelings they’re going to hurt when they save the girl (or the world)?

Nah, they’re guys. They do the heavy lifting, they take a beating without crying about it, and they don’t worry that people are going to think them insufficiently sensitive or empathic. They’ve been that way forever, back to the earliest recorded accounts. We all know what manliness is.

Secondly, men like manly men.

Men are willing to put up with quite a bit of … expressed concern … from women, because that’s part of the cost of enjoying the company of women. Women care — and care deeply — about things men barely notice, and women are likely to talk about it. Sometimes they’ll talk quite a lot about it.

That’s okay: women are the way they are, and we love them for it. Just shut up and let them talk; that’s often all they want.

But that kind of thing doesn’t look good on a guy. Women don’t think so, and neither do other men. If you want to be respected by other men, you should keep some stuff — a lot of stuff — to yourself. Men don’t need to spend a lot of time “unburdening” themselves, talking just to share their emotions and concerns. Guys will put up with that from women for obvious reasons, but there isn’t much benefit to hearing it from another guy. And, frankly, it’s embarrassing. So, if you really have to talk about it, cut to the chase: keep it short and to the point, and don’t whine.

Real man means something, and it doesn’t mean like a woman, or feminized, or vulnerable. It means what it’s always meant, and what it still means, even if a bunch of unmanly people want to reinvent it — reinvent you — as something weak and soft and compliant.

There’s nothing wrong with being a man.