House of Eratosthenes

An ongoing mantra of the left is that everyone is a victim, with a singular carve-out for white men. A large group of the female population has embraced this chant.

While there may be a number of grievances put forth by this movement, there also comes a theme that is particularly dangerous: the feminist attack on masculinity. This is derived not only from feminists; it comes from the left in general.

There has emerged a war on masculinity. Why? Because masculine men are harder to control under tyrannical socialism. The modern beta male, on the other hand, craves socialism. This is why the left has branded masculinity as toxic: it stands as a roadblock to their endgame.

Leftists blame, of all things, masculinity for the recent spate of sexual harassment scandals. For eons, masculinity has been considered a natural and even required trait of being male, but it is now apparently the reason for deviancy. Who knew?

The glaring problem with this argument is that the men who are typically being accused of such transgressions are anything but masculine. Sexual harassment is bipartisan; both liberal and conservative men in positions of power seem to harass women with aplomb. But where is this referenced masculinity? Harvey Weinstein? Al Franken? Louis CK? I posit that a consistent theme among most accused harassers is a complete lack of masculinity. I would go so far as to suggest that the lack of masculinity is a contributing factor to this problem.

Yes…I remember this as an early part of my wakening. As a young man, I knew some people, some were friends of mine, who were married and demonstrated, let us say, a diversity of levels of commitment to their marriages. I remember this flash of insight I had, that the philanderers were touchy-feely. “I don’t love [blank] (wife) the way I love [blank] (side-bitch).” Okay, I’ve been divorced myself since then, I get it that people get married too young and then grow apart. What I was learning back in those early days was that my upbringing, back in the pop-psych “Everyone needs to get in touch with their feelings” era, was skewed. And as I see more, the correlation becomes clearer.

Going Shakespearean with the lovey-dovey all-of-life-is-a-wedding-party bullshit, is not respectful to women. “A real man isn’t afraid to show his feelings and cry” is nonsense. Oh, there’s a tiny bit of truth in it, sure. Everyone is human and humans cry, I get that, but this tired litany has caused a lot of damage because of its excess simplicity. This little dig about not-afraid-to is just a way to invert reality, make manly things look unmanly and vice versa. You can’t flip reality like a pancake that way. And you know what, when you’re involved in something deeply personal that affects a lot of people — a death within a large family, for example — situations arise in which showing your tears really doesn’t help anyone. Aggrieved people need someone strong. They need it often, a lot more often than they need someone to help them cry. Crying’s like picking your nose. If you need to do it, you’ll find a way to get it done, you don’t need help.

But yeah. Guys who fuck around on their wives, are much more likely to be “in touch with their feelings,” I’ve noticed. The guys who are boring because they’re just thinking all the time, trying to get stuff done, tend not to fuck around because they just don’t have time. And their wives, far from being bored & pushed into living out some perverse shades-of-grey fantasy, have a tendency to stay put too. These aren’t absolutes, and my evidence is anecdotal. But it’s a matter of record that I was inclined to think some things, and circumstances forced me to re-think those…I’m likely not the only one.

Condensed version: People take their marriages about as seriously as they take life. It shouldn’t surprise us.

Masculinity leads a man to seek to better himself in many regards, while collectivism thrives on mediocrity. Collectivism in this country is sought by the lazy who don’t want to work but feel entitled to free handouts of all kinds. Unfortunately, collectivism is also touted by many who are successful, such as middle-class suburbanites who feel guilty for what they have achieved through hard work while others have not been so fortunate. Yet, when suggesting that the redistribution effort begins with their own 401(k)s, seldom will you find volunteers. Collectivism is also cheered on by certain billionaire hypocrites who made their wealth through capitalism yet now tout the wonders of socialist systems. The irony.
:
The left’s war on masculinity should come as no surprise. The cultures in history that have resisted oppressive regimes in the past have celebrated masculinity rather than demeaned it.

There is an often quoted poem that sums up a society’s life cycle: “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” The abundance of weak men in our society is ushering in those hard times, and it is celebrated by the left every step of the way.

I just love that poem, which I could find an original attribution. It’s so…true. There is a tendency in our young people not to get it, especially if they identify with these weak men who give us the hard times. They get offended. But it’s surprising how quickly you can rack up the years-on-earth necessary to see this turntable complete a rotation or two, and by then you can’t in good conscience deny it or even question it. It’s just things the way they are. Seems to be about 15 to 20 years per lap, give or take.

The cultures in history that have resisted oppressive regimes in the past have celebrated masculinity rather than demeaned it.

I have to take issue with this. The Axis powers are a huge counterexample. Here’s Himmler, in his famous “secret speech” at Posen:

Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And … to have seen this through and — with the exception of human weakness — to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. …We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who would kill us. We however do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because we don’t want, at the end of all this, to get sick and die from the same bacillus that we have exterminated.I will never see it happen that even one … bit of putrefaction comes in contact with us, or takes root in us. On the contrary, where it might try to take root, we will burn it out together. …But altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.

Apologies for the length of the excerpt, but it’s important to have the full context. Nazis were collectivists to the bone; they were oppressive because they were bone-deep collectivists; the SS were the most Nazi Nazis; and the SS was based on a huge, outlandish, caricatured masculinity. Nobody “celebrated masculinity rather than demeaned it” more than the SS.

Or, if you prefer, the Imperial Japanese Army. This being the Internet, I’m sure a million anime fans will be along shortly to lecture us on the finer points of bushido, but we have to admit that whatever the Japanese thought they were fighting for in the Pacific, they weren’t pussies. Nor — crucially — were they individualists. The average Japanese soldier endured stuff that would make your average cowboy break down weeping for Mommy… and he did it because of his collectivist values.

The point (I do have one) is that in our own way, we’re promoting a myth as big as the Left’s. Nobody — not even cowboys and frontiersmen — were actually rugged individualists. The original “frontier” masculine ideal — which I agree that we can and must get back to — was that we’ll leave each other alone… but within a common set of cultural values, which rested on the assumption that we’d all come together for the common good. Masculinity — the good, productive, non-toxic kind — is about individual excellence within a hierarchy. Knowing one’s place in the hierarchy,and excelling.

The Left hates both hierarchy and excellence, for obvious reasons, but in promoting the idea that a “real man” is a rugged individualist who resists collectivism, we’re sabotaging both of them as well. The first step to getting masculinity back is to acknowledge that all human traits exist in a continuum — each one of us is better at some things, worse at others, than everyone else, and that’s ok. Your strengths compensate for my weaknesses, and vice versa, and that’s how the team pulls together to win the big ballgame.

Or, you know, we could all sit around in our individual man caves, scratching our balls and watching ESPN and being rugged individualists.

[Apologies for the length of the comment, but this kind of thing drives me nuts. We’re accepting the form and substance of the Left’s argument, while supposedly fighting it. It’s all bad and it has to stop].
- Severian | 06/29/2018 @ 07:43
Apologies also for the jacked up formatting. Should be a blockquote starting from “most of you will know” and ending at “or in our character.” The rest is me, not Heinrich Himmler. An excellent example of your strengths compensating for my weaknesses — you can program computers; I can ramble incoherently.
- Severian | 06/29/2018 @ 07:45
Fixed the formatting. Your intent was obvious so I, you know, empowered myself.

I too tripped over this, for the same reason. I was thinking about Benito Mussolini and of the manly bare-chested horse-riding Vladimir Putin. Jonah Goldberg writes at length about this fondness the liberal fascist has for the image of the manly-man in his book.

If everything is manly-man than nothing is. The footsie-pajama soy-boys today often think of themselves as manly…”A real man doesn’t need guns,” “A real man isn’t afraid to cry and/or to show his feelings,” “A real man has checked his privilege,” etc. Liberals, evaluated by conservatives, are sissies, and so are conservatives when they’re evaluated by liberals. I’m afraid the damage has been done already: Masculinity has been fully re-defined as a positive attribute that all sides in political disagreements claim for themselves, and deny to their opposition. It’s been reduced to nothing more than a weapon. I get your message about how the erosion has to stop, but erosion has already happened, and in full.

To restore the meaning to the term, we have to look to something measured objectively; to nature. There’s no place else to go, since man is simply going to adjudicate manliness as something that applies to his political compatriots. But it’s not going to work, to say “manliness is smiling when I get punched in the face eight times, and I’m a better man than you are because you can only get punched in the face four times.” Such a test relies on an unnatural component, which is someone doing the punching. This is where the collectivist argument of “we’re the real manly men” breaks down; they assert a “right,” like to health care, and it relies on someone else providing something. So you can make the claim, like your Nazi up above…a real man isn’t afraid to exterminate lots of people, or to share his material things with the Fatherland, or so forth, but the cowboy’s (or caveman’s) claim is going to be superior because of the independence factor.

He did go out on the cattle drive, or go up to live in the mountains through the winter, and live to tell the tale. Decisions had to be made. The Japanese soldier “endur[ing] stuff that would make your average cowboy break down weeping” could not say the same. Masculinity, I maintain, is in the brain, in the decision-making lobe. Women bring this too, some of them excel at it, so perhaps I’m abusing definitions here too…but here in the west, when we admire a man for being a real man, it seems to me we’re talking about this. “What’s this? A decision, involving a plurality of options, and each option involves risk or giving up something…they all suck in some way…hmmm, well I’ve figured out what to do, so forward we go and don’t look back.” (Until the job’s done and it’s time to do a sensible post-mortem or something.)

Collectivists, you’ll notice, don’t do that. Oh sure they admit to bad results, but it’s always the other guy’s fault, or the taxpayer’s fault for not paying enough…
- mkfreeberg | 06/30/2018 @ 04:26
Mulling it over just a bit more, I see this is headed straight to my ever-thickening file folder marked, “It’s all about the definitions.” Hate to sound like a broken record, but once again it comes down to that.

If you’re this manly-manly collectivist Nazi guy, or Japanese soldier who’s endured all this abuse, then yes you have your manliness and you live in a culture that affirms this is what manliness is. But here’s the thing: Said culture might change its mind tomorrow and declare you’re a wimp. Now cultures evolve like aircraft carriers steer…so it’s not too likely to happen. But the potential is there, because cultures are man-made and men are fickle.

Now to whatever extent and in whatever settings we still respect individualism here in the U.S., that necessarily must mean we equate being a functional adult with having the capability of providing for oneself and, if one has such a thing, a family. We have it in common with the collectivist cultures that “be a real man” has something to do with reaching adulthood and acting like it. However, unlike them, this brings us in harmony with nature. The liberal collectivist living in his bio-dome can say “I’m a manly man because I’ve provided for my family,” but he’s living in a mythology if this just means trudging off to the local agency, presenting his citizenship tattoo to prove he is Of The Body, and collecting his weekly allocation of welfare cheese. Nature doesn’t smile upon that; it passes no tests, other than the man-made ones like waiting out the time until a certain birthday or so forth.

It’s all about the definitions. If words can be attached to whatever, in order to suit some political agenda, be it a good one or a bad one — then eventually all the words are going to be attached to all the things, and thus lose their meaning. This is the rule, in politics, and not an exception.
- mkfreeberg | 06/30/2018 @ 04:40
I agree that we need to get the definitions down, but it’s veering a bit close to cultural relativism up in here. 🙂 For instance:

The footsie-pajama soy-boys today often think of themselves as manly…”A real man doesn’t need guns,” “A real man isn’t afraid to cry and/or to show his feelings,” “A real man has checked his privilege,” etc. Liberals, evaluated by conservatives, are sissies, and so are conservatives when they’re evaluated by liberals.

Having been around a LOT of footsie-pajama-soy-boys — i.e. 90% of modern college students, and 100% of professors — I can tell you this isn’t true. They don’t think of themselves as “real men.” Yes, they use the phrase “real men,” as in “real men aren’t afraid to cry,” but they use it in the same way they use phrases like “the Constitution,” “free speech,” etc. It’s a smokescreen — “free speech” means “you’re free to parrot Approved Thoughts any time you like,” and “the Constitution” keeps getting in the way of their approved policies. In both cases, in other words, if they had their druthers they’d never need those phrases at all.

We, on the other hand, are the Reality People. I bet every modern American has run across a situation where she thinks “gosh, if only the Marlboro Man were here!” Nobody, I venture to guess, has ever said “oh, if only we had a pencil-necked soyboy with his own set of pronouns right now!” There are baseline characteristics of masculinity, in other words — ability to throw (and take!) a punch, willingness to stab a mastodon — that are universal. Indeed, the whole idea of representative government is based on them — we only have a “social contract” to get us out of the State of Nature, which was famously “the war of all against all,” nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. That very few of us have to throw a punch or stab a mastodon anymore doesn’t negate the fact that those abilities are part of the firmware.

The difference between Fascist Man and Classical Liberal Man, then, isn’t in the behavior. Vlad Putin is a real man all right, and so were Reinhard Heydrich and the Imperial Japanese Marines… AND the guys who fought against them. It’s about the direction of the behavior. Fascists glorify war; Classical Liberals abhor it. It’s the difference between “war is necessary” and “war is a necessary evil.” Both require the same traits; the worldview is 180 apart.

My vote for a good working definition of “real man” that we might actually aspire to is the old “Muscular Christianity” ideal…. but that’s a discussion for another time, I suppose.
- Severian | 06/30/2018 @ 10:28

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Masculine Men Are Harder to ControlThursday, June 28th, 2018

Masculine Men Are Harder to Control
Thursday, June 28th, 2018