The recent slaughter of nearly 50 people in an Orlando gay bar is now the
deadliest mass shooting in American history, and as such it has ratcheted up
our national conversation about guns and terrorism into a frenzied crosstalk
about whom and what to blame: Islam? The NRA? Homophobia? Salon’s Amanda Marcotte believes it can all be explained by “toxic
masculinity.”
Toxic masculinity is a concept from the men’s movement that feminists like
Marcotte have pounced on to explain the root cause of all violent male
misbehavior from gay-bashing to domestic violence to terrorism. “It is a
specific model of manhood,” she writes, “geared towards dominance and control.
It’s a manhood that views women and LGBT people as inferior, sees sex as an act
not of affection but domination, and which valorizes violence as the way to
prove one’s self to the world.”
I don’t dispute that the notion of toxic masculinity applies to many men.
But Marcotte, heavy on sneering and light on facts, uses the concept to rope such
losers together with her favorite target – Republican male gun owners, whom she
dismisses as posturing and insecure bullies – and to make them responsible for mass
shootings with such varied motives as mental illness, workplace violence, and
Islamic terrorism: “[T]his persistent pressure to constantly be proving
manhood and warding off anything considered feminine or emasculating is the
main reason why we have so many damn shootings in the United States.”
Marcotte goes on in that vein – and on and on: “Being able to stockpile
weapons and have ever bigger and scarier-looking guns is straightforward and
undeniable overcompensation [sic] insecure men, trying to prove what manly men
they are.” We need a society, she says, “with more dancing and less waving guns
around while talking about what a manly man you imagine yourself to be.”
She hastens to reassure “whiny dudes” like me that not all masculinity is
toxic, but she doesn’t offer a nontoxic counterpoint. Presumably it is the
opposite of her caricatures of gun-owning Republicans. No doubt Marcotte respects
a man who abhors guns and violence – someone like the New York Daily News’ Gersh Kuntzman, perhaps, who wrote an unintentionally hilarious piece about his “terrifying” first experience shooting
an AR-15. The PTSD and bruising he claims he suffered from firing a weapon that
a seven-year-old girl can handle must be nothing compared to the drubbing he
is now taking on the internet.
Anyone who has real-world experience with bullies and bad men knows they are not deterred by self-emasculated pacifists, disapproving lectures, or angry feminists. They are stopped only by good men who are capable, armed if necessary, and ready to do violence in defense of the weaker and the innocent. But Marcotte doesn’t believe in heroes; she flatly asserts that “the mythical ‘good guy with a gun’ who is [sic] promised to stop mass shootings has yet to actually produce himself.”
Anyone who has real-world experience with bullies and bad men knows they are not deterred by self-emasculated pacifists, disapproving lectures, or angry feminists. They are stopped only by good men who are capable, armed if necessary, and ready to do violence in defense of the weaker and the innocent. But Marcotte doesn’t believe in heroes; she flatly asserts that “the mythical ‘good guy with a gun’ who is [sic] promised to stop mass shootings has yet to actually produce himself.”
This is demonstrably false. There are many examples of such civilians
(not to mention police officers); here is a list of some, and here are more. Those mass shooters who are not stopped by
a good guy with a gun succeed because they almost always choose gun-free zones –
precisely because they know they won’t be confronted there by a good guy with a
gun.
Marcotte isn’t buying it; she conflates both good guys and bad and rolls
her eyes at them all: “[E]ven though toxic masculinity is clearly the problem
here, you have a bunch of conservatives running around and pushing toxic
masculinity as the solution, as if all we need to end violence and
terrorism is a bunch of silly posturing about who is the biggest man of all the
menfolk out there.”
Conservatives believe no such thing. This is an absurd accusation. What
conservatives believe is that Americans have a natural right to self-defense,
guaranteed by the Second Amendment. Conservatives don’t believe that the answer
to gun violence is to deprive law-abiding citizens of a fighting chance to
survive a mass shooting. But Marcotte believes that shooting back is a fantasy
which comes “from a place of deep insecurity and gender weirdness that treats
phallic symbols like they are magical totems.” Her obsession with reducing
everything masculine to sexual insecurity says far more about her than it does
about conservative men, none of whom she apparently knows or cares to
understand.
I, however, know plenty such men, including gay conservative gun owners. They
are nothing like the straw men of Amanda Marcotte’s hateful imagination. They
don’t “wave guns around” – because they’re trained and safe – and they don’t
boast desperately about what manly men they are, because they are manly men. Many are current or
former military or law enforcement. They’re not irrational or insecure. They’re
respectful of women, and their women love them for their quiet strength and
chivalry. And they’re not violent – although they are trained, armed and
prepared to wage righteous violence
when their families, friends, or country are threatened, as free men should be.
That’s not toxic masculinity – that’s the antidote to it.
From Acculturated, 6/21/16