What the Frock???

 

 

Rethinking the Feminization of our Boys

 

 

 

Welcome to Progressive Island! Where the freedom to be yourself is exalted; where the siren call to follow your heart is a cardinal virtue; where the whim becomes the way and where rules are for fools. It is a dreamland of endless options and a plethora of possibilities where, for the purveyance of a small fee to our modern-day Mr. Roarke, we can enjoy all the bliss that a life without scruples will most assuredly avail.

We can partake of any and all thoughts and actions without fear of reprisal from authority. We are free to act with abandon, damn the consequences and then relegate the knowledge of the bills coming due for those actions to the backs of our minds, vacuously confident that as the consequences remain out of our minds, so too they will remain out of our lives.

But they won't.

We members of the human race have always harbored a propensity to contravene convention. We dislike being hemmed in or told what to do. We feel the need to breath free and often bridle at authority, confident that we alone know what is best for us. This can at times be a positive attribute in that it motivates us to look out for ourselves and to cast a wary eye on those who might not have our best interests at heart. But it can also be a detriment to our well-being when, suffused with inflated self-regard, we choose to ignore the hard-won experience of those who have gone before. This peccadillo is most frequently observable in our youth who, due to lack of education and life experience, have not formed the wisdom which time and trial usually endow.

I grew up in the 60's and 70's and was therefore greatly influenced by the zeitgeist of that era. The "free love" and "sex, drugs and rock and roll" ethos permeated every aspect of my existence. It was a time when the concept of the wisdom of elders was seen as an oxymoronic notion. The press, the media, the music constantly drummed into us the idea that we had found a better way; we were shaking off the shackles of our parents' square existence and heeding to the call of the new age: an era of enlightenment and freedom heretofore unseen on the planet. It was also the time of the birth of the new feminism--a more aggrieved and militant movement that went far beyond just the demand of equal rights for women and began to delve into the concept of a superiority of the female over the male; a beginning of the idea of toxic masculinity--a defect in men which was responsible for all the evil and ruin in the world. A defect which needed repair and a sex which needed strident correction. It was also the time when the resilient feminist fairy tale of a kinder and gentler world under the helm of women was birthed and quickly became supposedly so glaringly apparent via feminist literature as to be a no-brainer. In humble refutation of that hypothesis, I offer the eleven small rebuttals below:

I rest my case.

But, be that as it may, the current animosity towards all things masculine is showing itself to be a hardy and persistent contagion. When anything goes wrong or doesn't turn out to your liking, what better self-exculpatory stance to take than that of the aggrieved victim? And what better villain to hold up to scorn and contempt than the ubiquitous and always-available male (especially of the Caucasian variety.) They are the to go-to bad guy these days--available for parties, bar mitzvahs and the ever-popular burning at the stake, which has led (unsurprisingly in some circles) to the asinine idea that it would, without doubt, benefit all manki...er, humankind to just rid ourselves of that toxic masculinity once and for all. So we are proceeding to do just that and, boy oh boy, the benefits are beginning to pile up like cadavers at Jonestown.

Science has shown that it is always easier to show well in a debate when your opponent is bound, gagged and has a belly full of Nembutal. This is pretty much the state of affairs in the ongoing and increasingly hallucinatory public discourse on matters of gender equality and its related topic of feminine versus masculine traits. The pro-feminist position is always given wall-to-wall favorable coverage in the corporate-controlled media, while those questioning the wisdom of vilifying an entire half of the population for the crime of being born with the wrong genitalia is shown an indifference and disavowal that one would have to go back to the stillborn Ron Paul presidential campaign to find in equivalence.

While I have no qualm with the assertion that men are much more likely to be jailed for criminal acts than women, and that their criminality tends to be more violent, I would argue that that is so not only because men have more testosterone, but also because men are more highly represented, and therefore active, in the public sphere than are women and are therefore more likely to be included in activities of note in not only the good works of society but also the bad. It's strictly a numbers game, and increased participation most generally equals increased representation. But if we are going to allude to the elevated crime statistics among males, we should also note the corresponding elevated positive contributions of those same males--and white males of European ancestry more specifically--due to their predominance and activity in the upper echelons of western society. The formation of western civilization, the enlightenment, the great Protestant reformation--all of these were white male enterprises, as was the abolition of the international slave trade. (Don't hold your breath waiting to hear these balancing statistics on MSNBC or CNN after the next Michael Brown or Jussie Smollett imbroglio.) Remember, the arc of the story in the mainstream media only ever travels in one direction.

But as the narrative of the singular evil of men and masculinity crumbles under the weight of raw data, we might want to pause in our feminization of the American male and do a little reassessing. As the family unit disintegrates and boys are left at the mercy of the media, their peers, and teachers harnessed to the anti-male, pro-feminist party line via their standardized and politically-correct text books, there is little to be hopeful for in pulling these boys out of the hole that sixty-plus years of demeaning reportage and man-hating screeds have deposited them. 

They have been coerced into a self-loathing and rootless existence becasue they have been told to believe that, as men, they are always the problem and never the solution. They are forever maligned as powerful and manipulative when in fact they are increasingly rudderless and clueless as to not only what to aspire, but even how to behave in that endeavor. 

Is it any wonder that confusion reigns in a mind loosed from any mooring as to what that person's role or worth is in society? When the feminine virtues are held out as the only virtues worth having, where is a boy to get the masculine models he needs to come into his own.? A person who believes the feminine mode of behavior is demonstrably superior and bereft of any negatives has never worked in a predominantly-female workplace--they can be as catty, vicious and unforgiving as the worst anecdotes. And when commentators like George Carlin opined that if women ran the world there would be no more wars, they were miming a party line that is as illusory as it is nonsensical. If we're going to indulge in hyperbole, allow me to suggest that our first woman president would be indistinguishable from any of her male predecessors with the small exception of the purely coincidental onset of both global thermonuclear war and her menopause--it's as valid a supposition as the estrogenic Nirvana hypothesis.

So when the boys and men of western civilization have been destroyed; when they have been browbeaten into effete and effeminate innocuousness, to whom will the ladies turn for protection from the invading hoards (and, trust me on this, there have always been and will always be invading hoards.) Will they muster for the battle? Will we tamed and domesticated males look on in breathless suspense from the high-rise windows of our air-conditioned offices as our feminist protectors charge into the churning maelstrom of violence below with their purses flailing in defense of western civilization? Or perhaps they will be able to render as unnecessary all of those martial exertions with a few well-worded proclamations on the floor of the now-all female UN?

Listen, I hate opining on such gratuitous and fatuous fantasies, especially in such a caustic and sarcastic manner but, sadly, the ridiculousness of the subject matter really demands nothing less. To think that in this country and in this century we have come to believe that the masculine attributes: stoicism, resoluteness of purpose, physical strength and the willingness to use that strength in the protection of ourselves and our loved ones; that we have somehow progressed beyond the need of those qualities and will no longer need them in the fanciful feminized future--where some sort of ethereal mutual respect, universal decency and redistribution of wealth in benevolent communalism will at last make the world a fair, equitable and sublimely feminine place for the first time in all of recorded history...well, hey, I used to believe in the Easter bunny too. But I grew up. It is a fantasy. And not only a fantasy, but an ignorant and suicidal fantasy which would be astounding if it hadn't come from the minds and mouths of feminists and today's university-addled progressives, who left the real world decades ago to live in a specious utopia of failed dreams, populated with specters of the likes of Jim Jones and Karl Marx. These are places that exist only in the minds of those with a severely-impaired cognitive ability.

It is a fatal conceit to believe that the world would be better off without the masculine attributes, but the lure of that sophistry is as strong today as it was 50 years ago when it began to blossom in the then-nascent modern feminism. Although I would never discount the utility, desirability and necessity of the feminine qualities, I am just as firm in believing that we are alive and free today because brave men had the courage and masculine fortitude to stand up to evil and murderous ideologies, and to bring violence to bear against them if all other roads to reconciliation were blocked. I know there will always be evil in the world, and men will always be the predominant purveyors of that evil, but make no mistake, the answer to evil men is good men. It is not now, nor has it ever been, women--or their feminized male equivalents.