Last Friday an article was posted in the New York Times Men’s Style section that
I’m still desperately hoping is satire: “27 Ways to Be a Modern Man.” If it’s not, then the state of modern
manliness is a sorry one indeed.
We’ll get to that
article in a moment; it wasn’t the only recent commentary on contemporary
manhood. Writing last week in the National Review,
for example, David French expressed disgust with our “unmanly” “victim culture”
that encourages us to cultivate “a sense of weakness and fragility.” It is a
mindset that is “killing manhood,” he warns.
The College Fix
reported this week that Vanderbilt University recently held a “Healthy Masculinities Week”
(who knew there’s more than one masculinity?) featuring programs that helpfully
deconstruct America’s “narrow definition of masculinity” for impressionable
students.
A short video from Huffpost
Women that openly equates masculinity with sexism (tagline: “Because sexism hurts men too”)
has been making the internet rounds again. In it, a handful of rather
effeminate hipsters suffering from vocal fry struggle to
answer the question, “What does masculinity mean?” One of them comically posits
that, “historically,” masculinity has been “a way to differentiate yourself
from women.” Well, duh.
The video pushes the concept that masculinity
is entirely an artificial social construct, an unnatural façade, a learned set
of aggressive, domineering attitudes that prevents men from fully accessing and
expressing the full range of their gender fluidity. The men in the video
complain that society’s expectations of masculinity suppress them emotionally
and prevent them from being who they really
are. In a perfect world, they claim, masculinity wouldn’t even exist. “Ideally,
there would be no such thing as masculinity or
femininity,” theorizes one man, who describes himself as LGBT and says
masculinity is “irrelevant” to him. “We would all just be people.” I was
reminded of the title of comedian Adam Carolla’s book, In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks. If this Huffpost video is any
indication, Carolla’s vision of the future is already upon us.
But the pinnacle – or rather, the nadir – of
all this recent musing about manhood was the aforementioned New York Times piece. It begins by
stating that being a modern man is all about adhering to principle – so far, so
good. Then it quickly degenerates into a whimsical list of behaviors ranging from polite to
pathetic, that supposedly define modern masculinity. Here’s a sampling:
#17: “Does the
modern man have a melon baller? What do you think? How else would the
cantaloupe, watermelon and honeydew he serves be so uniformly shaped?”
#18: “The modern
man has thought seriously about buying a shoehorn.”
#20: “On occasion, the modern man is the
little spoon. Some nights, when he is feeling down or vulnerable, he needs an
emotional and physical shield.” I’m willing to bet that if modern man needs to
be “the little spoon” on too many
occasions, he’ll end up the only spoon in the drawer.
#24: “The modern
man doesn’t get hung up on his phone’s battery percentage. If it needs to run
flat, so be it.” Now that’s living on the edge.
#25: “The modern
man has no use for a gun. He doesn’t own one, and he never will.” And yet,
according to #16, the unarmed modern man is also expected to fend off an
intruder in the bedroom to enable his wife to get away. He’d better hope the
intruder is an unarmed modern man too.
#26: “The modern
man cries. He cries often.”
If this list is so
off-base, you ask, then what does
masculinity mean today? For thousands
of years it has boiled down to three essentials: procreating, protecting, and providing. But the modern American lives in an age of
comfort, prosperity, and peace unparalleled in human history, so all three
roles are less critical today for the average man – particularly that of
protector, which has been outsourced to a (diminishing) warrior class.
One of the items on the NY Times list perfectly exemplifies this. Whereas there was once a
time when a man did not sleep before securing his family against wild animals,
the elements, and human enemies, the modern man retires to bed only after he “makes
sure his spouse’s phone and his kids’ electronic devices are charging for the
night.” Is this what modern man has been reduced to – not a protector, but a mere
butler?
There is a broader, more complex discussion
to be had about exactly what constitutes “manly” characteristics and virtues,
and how modern man can reverse his slide into gender confusion and irrelevance,
but the essential takeaway here is that traditional, universal standards of manhood
are under cultural assault today by radical feminists and gender activists to
redefine masculinity out of existence, or at the very least to marginalize it. This
effort to blur gender lines has been in progress for decades, but seems to be
accelerating thanks to its very active movement on college campuses.
The good news is that I predict it will lead
to a massive pushback from the silent majority of American men and women who accept and prefer their different
but complementary roles, and who don’t want to see masculinity, well,
emasculated.
From Acculturated, 10/6/15
