The Making of Toxic Masculinity

Screaming against masculinity and “toxic masculinity” is much in the news these days.  Some colleges have courses with that title, in which they devote their time to yelling at men for being men.

Some idiot or sociologist has created this concept that masculinity is “toxic” to civilized environments.

By the time I was in college, in the early eighties, we were inundated with texts on how men were not created for civilized life, how women were so much better as office workers, etc, and how men were “obsolete.”

This is by the way of being an idiocy on a par with the academic whom I heard state that biological gender didn’t exist.  (And before you get lost in the weeds of gender isn’t sex, yeah, because arguing over words has got us so far.  Also in English, there are two genders that apply to human beings, period. So stow it.) It might make some sense to say that psychological gender/sex doesn’t exist, that the amazing variety of gender behavior we see is all the result of gender conditioning and social.  Not that it makes sense per se and even the left obviously can’t square that circle.  But, by definition, you can lie with impunity about things that are inside people’s heads and invisible.  It’s much, much harder to deny the biology.  Biologically there are males and females, which for our species (but not all of them) are XY and XX.  Yes, sure there are intersex individuals, but claiming that because of a birth defect there is no biological sex/gender, is the same as arguing that because some kids are born without hands, it’s not normal for humans to have hands.  Defects don’t deny the matrix.

Why do I say even the left doesn’t believe it?  Because if the left believed that males and females are exactly alike, they would be horrified and offended by transgenders.  After all, why would you go through all the trouble of changing your body shape if it would be enough to behave however you wanted to?  How could your brain be a different sex from your body if all brains were alike?

So the left and their sex/gender/what little girls are made of project is crazier than usual.

Which wouldn’t be all that bad if they didn’t have control of the culture, which they got in their stunningly effective long march through the institutions, which left them in power over most news distribution, entertainment, and education.  But because they have that control it’s getting bad.  Really, really bad.

And it’s not just the transgender thing, though frankly, the future will look very disparagingly on people giving hormones to children who aren’t old enough to be allowed to choose their education, or where to live on their own.  Although the kids who tend to be netted off by this are brilliant over thinkers and loners, i.e. my people, and we’re being exterminated by sterilization, that’s minor.  It’s a loud but small portion of the population.

The greater problem is that left projects their confusion about what little boys and girls are made of onto society at large and has made it their project to eliminate men.  What they’re doing instead is creating the thing they see everywhere, and which didn’t exist without them: toxic masculinity.

Here I should point out that any parent who has raised kids of either sex, knows how much of the gender behavior is innate.  No, we’re not talking about playing with dolls or trucks.  I rather liked trucks, and I still haven’t got the train set I wanted for Christmas at six.  (Hey, you know, that’s probably not so much gender, as my identifying as homo geekus.) And my older son loved dolls.  Okay, he tended to make my old baby dolls into “fierce fighters” but you know, he played with dolls.

At that level, the left is right, that’s more or less where and when you grew up.

The difference is deeper than that, though.  Between three and four, boys test out their aggression.  They break things, climb things, destroy things, are loud and obnoxious and generally want you to make to move to another zip code until they get a job.  Or not, if you’re their parent, since hormones and attachment cloud the thoughts.  (It’s always other people’s children who are the problem.)  And girls get weepy and needy and manipulate you for all they’re worth.

This seems to be fairly universal in every culture, to judge from written documents.

Of course, this is the group as a whole, not individuals.  Some boys are quiet and sweet and some are quiet and manipulative, and some girls (oh, hi guys) are loud and think up the craziest things to do, and wouldn’t recognize social manipulation if it bit them in the ass (it often does, still.)

It’s not certain for any individual, but it’s the way to bet, and exceptions do not in fact make the rules.

At this age, parents get a little scared of boys.  I remember wondering, in the year of the ripped doors, thrown chairs and toy trains to daddy’s head, whether son was a natural-born psychopath.  In retrospect, if I have a regret it’s that we curbed him too effectively (mostly because he was enormous, see doors ripped from hinges) and he now turns aggression inward.

Boys who are properly brought up (to the extent humans do bring anyone up perfectly.  It’s never 100%) learn to curb their aggression and turn it into responsibility, protection, fatherliness.  They learn that their strength can be dangerous and they should use it to protect others from unfair force.

Girls who are properly brought up learn to curb their manipulative tendencies and not to use them to get people at each other’s throats, or to get away with not doing what they should do.  Instead, they use those abilities to smooth the waters, to make peace, to encourage team bonding, to help those who are lost.

We are dealing with a lot of badly brought up children, most of them on the left.  Which again would be okay, except the women who are in charge of most things now (even tech has HR departments) have decided that the female – the uncurbed female – mode of behavior is sane and balanced, and the – curbed – form of behavior is evil and scary.

I don’t know if these people never formed close relationships with males, if they mostly believe what they see in the media, or if they’re just crazy (it’s always an option) but they seem to have decided that all men, everywhere, are unabashed, uncontrolled brutes (and sexual animals.  About 60% of the crazier #metoo complaints are some woman imagining that every man at every moment wants to sleep with her.  When I had an English teacher (who looked notably like Marrat from the painting “Marrat in the bath”, and who was about sixty) tell me she never took an elevator with a male, because he wouldn’t be able to help himself and would rape her, my brother told me it was wishful thinking on her part.  I haven’t said the same to any “feminist leaders” but it doesn’t mean I haven’t thought it.)

Since males largely built civilization everywhere, as we know it (until the technological age and contraceptives, women’s size, and likelihood of pregnancy constrained us somewhat) that can’t be true.  A moment’s thought should tell you that men are suited for civilization because men built civilization.

The un-housebroken females of academia and the media won’t believe it, though.  They project their inner fears (or fantasies) onto the world and insist that children be raised as genderless (never change, Sweden!), that boys be made to behave like girls from the earliest pre-school, and, if that doesn’t work, that college boys be berated for being born with a penis.

They insist that just being born with a penis and testosterone makes men “toxic” and “scary.”

It is a truism to say that in the US the left is your mother, the right is your father, and the libertarians just want you to move out of the fricking basement already, and get a job.

In this case, what the left in the US (and to an extent worldwide) would be understood to an earlier generation of psychologists as a case of the “castrating mother.”

You see, when little boys become violent, and play scary games, and make a lot of noise, they often scare their parents, particularly their mothers.  Castrating mothers get so horrified that they punish all signs of masculinity in their sons.  They attack the child and try to change him into something he’s not and cannot be: a girl.

Unfortunately, the result is not a girl.  The result is a man with all his sense of strength and aggression intact, but gone inward and transmuted into despair, impotence and anger so repressed they don’t even admit it.

These poor creatures cannot get on in the world of men (a world being diminished daily by castrating mothers in power, anyway) and of course they can’t function in the world of females.  They’re not the very occasional outlier male who understands social mechanics better than women and can naturally manipulate them.  They’re creatures made to fit in neither place.

These men are dangerous.  As Heinlein put it, speaking of an earlier generation, “Any male without enough testosterone to sire a child can’t be a pacifist.  At the first opportunity, he lowers the white flag and raises the pirate flag.”

Toxic males are those boys who can neither act like women nor like men. They’ve been deprived of their instinctive reactions, but can never fully emulate the reactions of women. Unless they realize what’s been done to them and change, they are a danger to themselves and others.

The attempts to “curb” men from being men is the true recipe for toxic masculinity.  The more college classes that demand men apologize for being men, the more toxic it gets.

I don’t think there’s a happy ending.