Houston Rescuers Prove the Lie of ‘Toxic Masculinity’

Men. We are just the worst, with our toxic masculinity and patriarchal privilege. We are the source of literally all the world’s problems, from war, income inequality, and “rape culture” to the misogynistic microaggressions of “mansplaining” and “manspreading.” If we are ever to create a nonviolent, truly gender-equal world, we must rip away the false, culturally-constructed façade of masculinity. We must free ourselves from the strictures of macho posturing, embrace vulnerability, and redefine what it means to be strong.

That is the message being promoted incessantly today from celebrities like John Legend to the halls of academia to media outlets such as Slate, Salon, and HuffPost. Seemingly overnight, our culture has unquestioningly embraced the term “toxic masculinity.” Male nature itself is the problem, we are told, and the solution is the deconstruction of our understanding of what it means to be a man. But photos and news reports coming out of the devastation wreaked in Texas by Hurricane Harvey are putting the lie to this subversive idea.

In addition to the men among law enforcement and first responders, whose daily mission it is “to serve and protect” while putting their own lives on the line, thousands of volunteers among regular citizens have stepped up and made their way to the region to bring aid to those endangered by Harvey. Some examples among them, which the media singled out:

Do We Need Men Anymore?

Considering how much time Grayson Perry has spent pondering masculinity, it’s disappointing how little he seems to value or understand it.

An award-winning artist, author, television presenter, and BBC Reith lecturer, the London-based Perry is also a transvestite and, as he rather simply puts it, “a man.” Not long ago he pursued a thoughtful if flawed exploration of masculinity in a three-part BBC TV series called All Man, and now has written a short, self-illustrated book on the subject called The Descent of Man. The book poses and attempts to answer the question that men of no other century have ever had to ask: “What does it mean to be a male in the twenty-first century?”

Masculinity is the source of a great deal of handwringing and finger-wagging in our gender-confused time. It is viewed by many as resting somewhere on a scale between problematic and abominable, and there is an increasing urgency to do something about it. Grayson Perry, who considers himself very masculine, sees it as the very source of all our troubles. “I sometimes watch the evening news on television and think all of the world’s problems can be boiled down to one thing: the behavior of people with a Y chromosome,” his book begins. “The consequences of rogue masculinity are, I think, one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue, facing the world today.”

Want Teenage Boys to Read? Give Them Books About Heroes

Studies show that teenage boys lag behind teenage girls in reading. Even in adulthood, women are far more enthusiastic readers; two out of three adults who say they never read books are male. Debate rages about whether biology or culture is to blame, but the fact remains that girls simply seem to enjoy reading more – how do we inspire a greater love of reading in boys?

Musing upon this question, Daniel Handler, the author of children’s books under the pen name Lemony Snicket, considered what drove him to be a voracious reader as a teen. He came to the conclusion that all of the wide variety of books he read in those years had one thing in common: “they were filthy.” He noted that novels like Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus moved and fascinated him, not least because of “the dirty parts.” Handler thus offered this solution in the New York Times recently: “Want Teenage Boys to Read? Easy. Give Them Books About Sex.”

It’s “offensive to pretend, when we’re ostensibly wondering how to get more young men to read, that they’re not interested in the thing we all know they’re interested in,” wrote Handler. “I believe in the power of literature to connect, to transform, particularly for young minds beginning to explore the world… Let’s not smirk at their interests. Let’s give them books that might engage them.”

Having once been a teenage boy and a voracious reader myself, I thought back to those thrilling days of yesteryear and to the intense curiosity aroused by the forbidden mystery of sex. I spent long stretches in bookstores and at drugstore book racks skimming through books with lurid covers for naughty passages that offered even a glimpse beyond the veil.

Pop Culture’s Peter Pan Problem

In 1983 The Peter Pan Syndrome, a pop psychology book which examined the phenomenon of men who seem locked into perpetual adolescence, struck a chord in the culture and became a bestseller. Nearly thirty-five years later, the phenomenon doesn’t seem to be any less prevalent. Now a recent op-ed for The New York Times suggests that there is an ugly racial and sexist dimension to it as well.

In “The Men Who Never Have to Grow Up,” Jennifer Weiner complains that Americans have a soft spot for such “manolescents” – as long as they are white. We are charmed by roguish “good ole boys,” she says, and excuse even their crimes as mere boys-will-be-boys hijinks, but we don’t extend the same amused tolerance to nonwhites and women.

As examples, Weiner lists YouTube clowns Rhett McLaughlin, Link Neal, and Colin Furzelike, all in their late thirties; radio and TV stars Ryan Seacrest, Chris Hardwick, and Billy Bush, all in their early-to-mid-forties, who “have ridden boyish charm into lucrative ubiquity”; and swimmer/reality star Ryan Lochte, 32, whose drunken vandalism during the Rio Olympics was forgiven by officials even after he invented an armed robbery to cover for it.

In graver examples, Weiner cites Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, convicted at 20 of sexual assault but given a slap on the wrist by a judge concerned about how the conviction might impact the young man’s future; the late Ted Kennedy, who was 37 when he abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne to die in the car he drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, for which he received a mere two-month suspended sentence; and 39-year-old Donald Trump, Jr., whom Weiner accuses of colluding with the Russians to skew the 2016 presidential election.