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:
The
Cajun Navy, a network of volunteers with their own boats who trace their origins
back to Hurricane Katrina, battled the elements and exhaustion to help anyone
they could.
Another ordinary
guy who brought his personal boat to the stricken area was asked by a
reporter what he intended to do with it, and the fellow replied
matter-of-factly, “I’m gonna try to save some lives.” There was no boasting or
posturing or “mansplaining” about it; he was simply doing what good men do.
The UK Daily Mail published
this photo of the Houston Fire Department’s Dive Team in a motorboat searching
for people who needed rescuing. Bitter feminists at Salon will no doubt
complain that they seem to be “manspreading” on that raft, but these men don’t
have time for that nonsense and neither do Hurricane Harvey’s victims.
Local station KPRC
spoke with another man who was leading a volunteer rescue crew. "It's just
the way I was raised up," he said.
“Everybody else comes before me.” That simple, humble assertion is the very
essence of chivalric masculinity: service before self, the defense of the
defenseless.
Sometimes that
service demands heroic sacrifice. Houston police Sgt. Steve Perez, 60, was
caught in the floodwaters trying to get to work and lost his life. His wife had
urged him to reconsider reporting for duty, but he
told her, “I've got work to do.” The next time someone dares to use the
insulting term “male privilege,” tell them about Sgt. Perez.
This photo
captured Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Johnson, the father of four and a veteran of
Iraq and Kuwait, going door-to-door in Cypress, Texas along with his colleagues
trying to bring people to safety. In the picture he is carrying two children to
a boat as their parents gathered up important documents. “I’ve always liked
helping people out,” Johnson said simply. How toxic of him.
But the image that
most represents the spirit of men coming to the rescue in Texas is this one, of a
Houston SWAT member carrying a young woman and her child Sunday afternoon. One
woman named Renna who tweeted the photo sarcastically captioned it, “Toxic
masculinity and privilege,” and many commenters chimed in, praising
masculinity.
“A man, behaving as
a man, a real man. Thank goodness for men like him,” tweeted one.
Another
tweeted, “Remember this the next time self-righteous women talk about ‘toxic
masculinity.’ Thank you brave heroes of #Houston and God bless our troops.”
Yet another
Twitterer juxtaposed
the photo with that of the Democrat Party’s “Pajama Boy,” with this caption
that perfectly summed up our current cultural dissonance about manhood: “What
sitcoms, media, and professors tell you she wants vs. what she actually wants.”
That man was
later identified as officer Daryl Hudeck, carrying Catherine Pham and her 13-month-old
son Aiden through knee-deep water covering Interstate 610 in southwest Houston.
“If he’s still single by nightfall, I’ll be disappointed in you Texas ladies,” Renna tweeted.
Another photo
making the rounds showed a handsome man in a wetsuit paddle-boarding a
4-year-old through flooded streets. The poster captioned
it, “More toxicity. When will it end?”
Some will (and did)
complain that such reports were not examples of toxic masculinity. Of course
not – that is the point. These stories and photos in the news media depicted
the true chivalric nature of masculinity: men acting upon their natural
responsibility as protectors, stepping up at risk to their own lives to help
those unable to help themselves. It is this aspect of manhood for which men are
never given credit by those deconstructionists
in the culture and in academia who view masculinity as an obstacle to their
agenda. Misandrist activists and intellectuals never acknowledge that there are positive aspects to masculine
strength or that women want traditionally masculine men.
The heroic efforts
of the men battling Hurricane Harvey put the lie to this subversive idea. As one woman
tweeted in response to the photo of SWAT officer Daryl Hudeck, “It's not
that women aren't brave. They are. But this is just what men do. Great,
gloriously toxic men. Love them to death.”
From Acculturated, 8/31/17
