The Myth of the Masculinity Crisis

Posted on | May 9, 2016 | 87 Comments

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
— Rick Blaine, Casablanca (1942)

What passes for a “crisis” in 21st-century America usually reflects the peculiar concerns of pundits with too much time on their hands. Europe is being overrun by Muslims, 183 people have already been shot to death so far this year in Chicago, transvestites are hanging around public restrooms in North Carolina, federal security officers are going on murder rampages, and U.S. troops are being deployed to Yemen.

Amid all these evils, what do the intelligentsia think we need now? Some theoretical hand-wringing nonsense about a masculinity crisis:

There is a mini-boom in books about males: the young ones parents raise, often with stereotypical ideas of what a boy should be, and the adult kind that women, and men themselves, get lumbered with. Another new take is “Man Up”, a powerful, thought-provoking call to arms by Rebecca Asher, author of a previous book on the troubles with modern parenting. She and [author Tim] Samuels adduce similar woes to explain why the attention on men is necessary: their much higher involvement in violent crime, as both perpetrators and victims; boys’ higher likelihood of educational failure; untreated mental-health problems and, compared with women, vastly higher suicide rates. The recent recession led to an estimated 10,000 extra male suicides in Europe and North America, according to research Mr Samuels cites.

Winners win and losers lose. The winners succeed and smile, while the losers fail and explain their failures with theories of social justice.

Feminism is about the rationalization of female failure, and some men — eager to cash in on the “social justice” racket — need to rationalize their own failures, hence the academic field of “Men’s Studies.”

 

Basically, this is about “male feminist” types who feel a profound sense of self-pity and hope to persuade feminists to be sympathetic to men. However, if feminists were capable of feeling anything except contempt for men, they wouldn’t be feminists, would they? No, of course not.

“Men’s Studies” is a racket just like “Women’s Studies” is a racket. The key difference is that feminists exercise veto authority over what is taught in Men’s Studies classes, whereas men are not allowed to criticize the anti-male ideology taught in Women’s Studies. Everything taught in university classes now must conform to feminist doctrine — dissent is impermissible — so that Women’s Studies is about teaching women to hate men, and Men’s Studies is about teaching men they deserve to be hated.

Feminism is implacably hostile to men, marriage, motherhood, capitalism and Christianity. Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and cannot be understood otherwise.

“Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse have written about the sexual dilemmas of modern civilization and proposed solutions combining aspects of Freudian theory and Marxian economic analysis. . . .
“Reich’s analysis introduces the theoretical insight that women and gays have known instinctively: that civilization in its present form was designed for heterosexual men, and that its structure guarantees their authority within it. Thus, to change society by ending sexual suppression does not mean the end of civilization, but rather the end of civilization as we know it. . . .
“It was Herbert Marcuse who saw the critical function of homosexuals in ending repression. . . . Marcuse sees homosexuals as having an important place in history in helping to free sexuality, since he feels gay people have a more natural, totally erogenous sexuality.”
— Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (1972)

“We recognize that it is the structure of the culture which engineers the deaths, violations, violence, and we look for alternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it, rebuilding it as we can imagine it.”
— Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (1974)

You see these early “Second Wave” feminists frankly acknowledged their movement’s destructive purpose, to bring about “the end of civilization as we know,” seeking ways of “destroying culture as we know it.” More than four decades into this fanatical campaign of cultural destruction, we find feminists standing amid the debris, shrieking that women are more oppressed than ever, and insisting that what we need is more feminism.

The World Will Always Need Heroes

The so-called “masculinity crisis” got a thorough airing in 2010 when feminist Hannah Rosin published “The End of Men” in The Atlantic, but these themes had been examined from a conservative perspective by Christina Hoff Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men. In fact, much of this had been explored in Dr. Warren Farrell’s 1993 book The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex and in anthropologist Lionel Tiger’s 1999 book The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women, and has since been analyzed further in psychologist Helen Smith’s 2013 book Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream — and Why It Matters. What has happened, you see, is that a problem often addressed by feminism’s conservative critics became so self-evident that liberals and feminists had to join the conversation about men’s problems in order to gain control of the narrative. This permits liberals to continue supporting harmful policies and lets feminists pretend that the victims of their anti-male agenda deserve the harms they suffer, by explaining, rationalizing and justifying all this within a context of Progress, Equality and Social Justice.

We ought to ask ourselves, “What would Rick Blaine do?”

A few nights ago, I happened to catch Casablanca on cable TV. Honestly, I could watch Ingrid Bergman 24/7 and never tire of looking at her, but as I was watching Ingrid, I was also watching Bogie, of course. What was it about Bogie’s portrayal of Rick Blaine that has etched this character permanently into our culture? Much like Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, another famed hero from Hollywood’s Golden Age, Rick Blaine is a cynical realist — shrewd and worldly — and yet his cool, sarcastic exterior conceals a soul that still cherishes a sense of romantic idealism. This contradiction is explained by the backstory of Rick’s whirlwind romance with Ilsa in Paris, and his sense that she betrayed her promise to him. However, this seeming betrayal is revealed to have been something else, as Ilsa was in fact married to the Czech patriot Victor Lazlo, imprisoned by the Nazis. How was Ilsa to know whether Victor was dead or alive? Rick and Isla were both victims of circumstances beyond their control, and he realizes he can’t fairly blame her for what happened. Meanwhile, there is the small problem of the Third Reich, which has conquered Europe and is making its totalitarian presence felt in French Morocco, where Casablanca is crowded with refugees seeking to escape Hitler’s deadly menace. Lazlo and Ilsa need Rick’s help and . . .

Well, I’ll spare you any more spoilers, if you’re the only person on the planet who’s never seen Casablanca, but what was it about Rick Blaine that made him such an iconic character? Sure, Humphrey Bogart is one of the greatest actors in history, yet if you could remake Casablanca scene-for-scene today, and cast any of a half-dozen contemporary leading men in the role of Rick Blaine, the character would still be heroic, entirely apart from Bogart’s acting.

Rick Blaine is a winner because he knows how to handle defeat. The Nazis overrun Paris? OK, fine. Au revoir, Paris! Off to Morocco. The woman he loves is married to another man? “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

No complaining. Expect no pity in life. No one is obliged to acknowledge your personal suffering, and only a fool could ever expect “social justice” in this world full of corruption, cowardice, violence and cruelty.

This is how a man must look at life, if he is to have any hope of surviving hardship and misfortune, and yet this kind of heroic masculinity is now constantly mocked and maligned by our decadent intelligentsia.

Feminism’s determination to destroy civilization knows no limits. One must pity Canadian feminist Anne Theriault’s son:

I think a lot about how Theo will view his sexuality as he gets older. I flip-flop from worrying about whether he might be teased or bullied if he deviates from traditional masculine ideas, to panicking over the fact that he might, against my best efforts, buy into those ideas and become a bully himself. . . . I want him to be who he is, and I want him to be brave and stand up for marginalized and oppressed people, but I also want him to always be safe and happy. And I don’t know if I can have it both ways. Not that it’s really up to me — he’ll have to make his own discoveries and choices about himself, and while I can try to pass on my value system to him, I ultimately don’t have any say in who or what he is.
I just want him to know that . . . I will love him no matter what his sexuality, no matter what his gender, no matter what, end of sentence, full stop.
I just hope that he always knows that I love him and I’m proud of him.

The sons of feminist mothers: Why there are so few feminist grandmothers. pic.twitter.com/RqJNrI4ASb

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 6, 2016

Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of “normal” as an achievement. Really, raising normal kids isn’t that difficult. Even in a world gone mad like America in the Obama age, most kids manage to muddle through OK, and good kids still succeed in life. Granted, there are all kinds of newfangled weirdness in the world kids must be warned against — “Never date anybody on Tinder or OKCupid” — but a reasonable effort to instill old-fashioned virtue in them, and to guide them toward responsible adulthood, usually works out pretty good. But if you’re so concerned about “marginalized and oppressed people” that you’re trying to raise a gender-neutral boy, well, yeah, probably he will be “teased and bullied.” Meanwhile, my teenage sons are hitting the gym, pumping iron and drinking protein milkshakes. Their older brothers (the twins are now 23) probably “teased and bullied” them more than anyone ever will, so there’s not much need to worry about that.

Teaching kids to be strong-minded — psychologically resilient — is a basic goal that I don’t suppose feminists understand. For all their talk about being “strong women,” they seem to spend a lot of time proclaiming their essential weakness. They claim to be “traumatized” when confronted with opposing opinions, and consider criticism “harassment.” Much of their effort is devoted to silencing those who disagree with them, seeking to ensure that feminism’s critics can never be employed on the faculty of any university or published in any major newspaper or magazine. While feminists seek to wall themselves off from any argument that might disturb their emotional sensitivities, meanwhile, young men are attempting to go about their lives amid a firestorm of anti-male hatred ginned up by deranged fanatics like Anne Theriault. It is now quite nearly illegal to be a heterosexual male at many universities, where “rape culture” hysteria has created a campus climate of sexual paranoia.

“You are more likely to be sexually assaulted by your friend than by a random stranger. A dark alley is, in fact, statistically safer than a college campus.”
— Vera Papisova, “We Are Survivors of Sexual Assault, and These Are Our Stories,” Teen Vogue, April 29, 2016

Young men now face challenges their fathers could not have imagined when we were young, but winners still win and losers lose. Considering how feminist mothers are raising their boys to be weak-minded and timid, it’s not hard to guess which category they’ll wind up in. No matter how much feminists hate masculinity, normal women generally prefer masculine men, so the gender-neutral sons of feminists won’t be any competition to my sons. Nor do I expect my daughters need to fear much competition from the daughters of Sally Kohn or Jessica Valenti.

Am I over-confident in my children’s prospects for success? No, I just can’t imagine them losing, when the secret of winning is not really a secret. Hang in there and keep fighting, and don’t listen to losers who say you can’t win or the fight isn’t worth it. Your ancestors survived ordeals far worse than any you’re likely to face, and if they survived, so can you.

Human beings are marvelously adaptable creatures, who can survive in the Arctic snow or the sands of the Sahara. So why this hand-wringing concern from intellectuals about boys who might be harmed by “stereotypical ideas of what a boy should be”? Not every boy can grow up to be Rick Blaine, I guess, but shouldn’t we encourage them at least to aspire to heroic manhood? Teach boys to be tough-minded and pragmatic, with savoir-faire, sanguine confidence and a sense of duty. He must endure hardship and prepare himself to rescue that beautiful damsel in distress who needs a Rick Blaine. Doing the right thing will take every ounce of courage the hero can muster.

‘Social Justice’ and Other Foolish Illusions

Hard times make hard men, and the so-called “masculinity crisis” — to the extent it is not a figment of the fertile imaginations of intellectuals with too much time on their hands — is largely the product of a society grown decadent as a result of its affluence. The children of privilege, like Cora “TrigglyPuff” Segal and Jennie Chenkin at elite Hampshire College, are the most fanatical devotees of the Cult of Social Justice.

The spectacle of deranged cultists screaming in lunatic rage somehow goes unnoticed by the intelligentsia who are wringing their hands in concern over the alleged “masculinity crisis.” If it is young men whose prospects are in jeopardy, why are young women so furious?

 

Progress and Equality look an awful lot like Failure and Decline. Teaching children a warped worldview, telling them they are oppressed because they “live in a white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal society,” as Jennie Chenkin believes, renders them permanently unhappy, and unfit to pursue any career outside the narrow confines of academia and progressive activism. Nor are these miseducated misfits likely to find happiness in their personal lives, because “the personal is political” for feminists. Embracing a hateful anti-male ideology has a tendency to limit a young woman’s dating options. As bad as left-wing women are, left-wing men are even worse — a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Because no decent, honest or sensible young man would ever associate with feminists, the only men feminists ever become involved with are worthless fools or immoral hedonists men like Jian Ghomeshi. Unwilling to recognize their fundamental error, young feminists seek to absolve themselves of blame for their own failures, insisting they are not responsible for the consequences of their bad choices, including their herpes infections.

 

What’s wrong with herpes is not the disease, but the “stigma,” feminists say, and promiscuity should never be criticized, because such criticism is “slut-shaming,” which is misogyny. Don’t want your daughter to become a herpes-infected slut? This proves you hate women — or at least, that’s what feminists say it proves, and only people who hate women ever disagree with what feminists say. Believing themselves endowed with both intellectual and moral superiority to others, feminists claim a monopoly on truth, and defend their monopoly by making accusations of “hate” and “ignorance” against anyone who opposes their agenda. The circularity of feminist logic demonstrates how the premise of their ideology, the claim that they are victimized by male supremacy, tends to turn every disagreement into evidence of how oppressed they are: “See? Here is another man who says I am wrong. Harassment! Patriarchy!”

“Feminism involves the implicit claim that the prevailing conditions under which women live are unjust and must be changed.”
— Carol R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2003)

“Sexism is the belief system that supports patriarchy: the rule of men over women. . . .
“Sexism relies on heterosexism. . .
“Political strategy must be based on a clear analysis and the goal of eliminating heteropatriarchy if we are to eliminate heterosexism.”
— Joy A. Livingston, “Individual Action and Political Strategies: Creating a Future Free of Heterosexism,” in Preventing Heterosexism and Homophobia, edited by Esther D. Rothblum and Lynne A. Bond (1996)

“Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization . . . to come to see oneself as a victim.”
— Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (1990)

“The abolition of compulsory heterosexuality would have an enormous impact on the system of male dominance. . . . The abandonment of compulsory heterosexuality would reshape the sexuality of both girls and boys and, if psychoanalysis is correct, would have tremendous consequences for the structure of the unconscious and for people’s sense of their own gender identity.”
— Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1988)

“By ‘sexuality’ we mean male sexuality, as it is male sexuality that determines the form heterosexuality takes. . . .
“We see heterosexuality as an institution of male domination, not a free expression of personal preference. Heterosexuality is forced upon us. . . . Believing the personal is political means we cannot separate sexuality off from male supremacy as a politics-free zone.”
— Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, Love Your Enemy?: Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism (1981)

“What the women’s liberation movement did create was a homosexual liberation movement that politically challenged male supremacy in one of its most deeply institutionalized aspects — the tyranny of heterosexuality. The political power of lesbianism is a power that can be shared by all women who chose to recognize and use it: the power of an alternative, a possibility that makes male sexual tyranny escapable, rejectable — possibly even doomed.”
— Linda Gordon, “The Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Three Stages of Feminism,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein (1978)

“Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. . . .
“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women.”
— Redstockings, “Manifesto,” 1969

This is what feminists believe. Women live under conditions that are unjust and which must be changed (McCann and Kim, 2003), requiring a feminist consciousness of women’s victimization (Bartky, 1990), attaining the knowledge that men are the agents of women’s oppression (Redstockings, 1969). The system of patriarchy relies on heterosexism (Livingston, 1996), so that feminists must abolish compulsory heterosexuality to reshape the sexuality of both girls and boys (Jaggar, 1988). By destroying the institution of heterosexuality that male supremacy has forced upon women (Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, 1981), the political power of lesbianism will liberate women from male sexual tyranny (Gordon, 1978). Quod erat demonstrandum.

The Lunacy of ‘Gender Theory’

While not everyone who adopts the “feminist” label endorses everything other feminists proclaim, the core ideology of the movement — women’s oppression under male supremacy — was established decades ago. This anti-male/anti-heterosexual belief system is what tens of thousands of young women learn in university Women’s Studies programs. Students are indoctrinated in feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — and these ideas (articulated in Professor Judith Butler’s widely assigned book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity) have the status of Official Truth within academia. Third Wave feminism is “the end of civilization as we know it,” as radical lesbians Sidney Abbot and Barbara Love envisioned long ago.

To understand what the 21st-century feminist movement is about, we need look no farther than the website Everyday Feminism, whose managing editor Melissa Fabello is a self-proclaimed “queer feminist” notorious for her diatribes against heterosexual males.

 

“Right now, today, as of writing this, I identify as queer. But I didn’t always. And no, I’m not referring to that awkward, uncomfortable time in my life where I knew that something felt ‘off,’ but I couldn’t quite place it, and so I paraded around in the charade of ‘straight.’ I mean that a few years ago, I identified as homoflexible. And before that, a lesbian. And even before that, bisexual.”
— Melissa Fabello, January 2016

What sort of women do you expect would write for a site run by a deranged hatemonger and devoted to the celebration of perversity?

Kris Nelson is a Contributing Writer for Everyday Feminism. They run a blog full of short queer-centric radical prose, which can be found at thequeertimes.tumblr.com and a poetry blog that can be found at songswithoutlyrics.tumblr.com. Kris also runs an online store by the name of Spell-Bound, where they sell handcrafted wire work jewelry, crystal pendants, hand sewn tarot bags, and pendulums. They can be contacted at [email protected] and trans-witch.tumblr.com.

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like. https://t.co/faUP21kfIS
(Everyday Feminism columnist https://t.co/aUfBuxrtXO) pic.twitter.com/Qkq9kW04wU

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 8, 2016

Yes, Kris Nelson is a “trans-witch,” born female but identifying by the pronouns “they/them” and also suffering numerous mental disorders. At her — excuse me, I should say their — Queer Times blog, Kris Nelson announces a “Gay Agenda . . . looking to lay waste to the nuclear family.” How is Kris Nelson’s destructive agenda expressed in her — of course I mean, their — Everyday Feminism columns?

Wedding Bells and Prison Bars:
Why Prison Abolition Is a Queer Rights Issue
(March 11, 2015)

Why Success Narratives Are Bullsh*t
and You Can Stop Blaming Yourself
for Your Financial Problems
(May 5, 2015)

Your Top 10 Questions About
Being Genderqueer Answered
(July 17, 2015)

What Is Heteronormativity — And How Does
It Apply to Your Feminism? Here Are 4 Examples
(July 24, 2015)

3 Exciting Ways Witchcraft and Feminism Intersect
(Nov. 19, 2015)

4 Harmful Lies the Media Is
Telling You About Androgyny
(Jan. 1, 2016)

5 Ways US Culture and Society
is Gaslighting Marginalized People
(April 3, 2016)

By the headlines alone, you can see how everything from “Prison Abolition” to “Androgyny” to “Witchcraft” is now part of feminism. Yet while a popular feminist website is publishing moonbat madness, we find the intelligentsia concerned about a crisis in masculinity?

The Intellectual Elite Is Decadent and Depraved. Unable to comprehend how Donald Trump could have won the Republican nomination, David Brooks goes dabbling around in gender theory to explain it: “We’ll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too. . . . The traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. . . . Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.” What sort of nonsense is this? What does Donald Trump’s victory have to do with a “reticent, stoical ideal,” and what evidence is there that this “traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore”? What does David Brooks think he’s doing here, except regurgitating trendy themes from academic sociology, maybe something he read in a magazine or heard in a TED Talk?

Are our troops in Yemen in need of “a new definition of masculinity”? Will a David Brooks column reduce the homicide rate in Chicago? Should we raise our sons to fret about “marginalized and oppressed people”? Or should we teach them to aspire to heroic masculinity?

“Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”
— Rick Blaine, Casablanca

The weak and helpless need heroes who are strong and brave. Do not let weaklings tell you that your strength makes you a “bully,” and never let cowards make you ashamed of your courage. Do not seek praise from fools. They mock the hero because they resent his greatness, and express their envy by ridiculing his virtue. Do not let yourself become discouraged because you are misunderstood. To be insulted by fools is an honor.

Resist the temptation of self-pity. Never blame others for your own failures. When you find you must suffer for the evil that others have done, do not expect anyone to help you, but be grateful you have the strength to endure suffering. Survival is victory, when you are surrounded by enemies who wish you dead, as heroes so often are.

Laugh in the face of danger. You are a survivor. You have lived through hard times before, and have the scars to prove it. Hold your head high and be happy for each new day. Every new challenge is a chance to show those sons of bitches they can’t beat you. And if you ever find yourself in a moment of doubt, just ask yourself, “What would Rick Blaine do?”

 

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