Apparently no one has bothered to let this poor sap (I don’t know who he is) know that the “Toxic” masculinity narrative has now been replaced with “masculinity is toxic“. I find it interesting that when it comes to the mainstream societal understandings of what masculinity once was and what it is now – or what the mainstream believes it should be now – much of these interpretations are based on fanciful, anachronistic, ideas of what contributed to our understanding of masculinity now. I’ve gone into my own definitions of what constitutes ‘conventional’ masculinity for men many times before so I won’t belabor it now, however, as the popular narrative changes I’ve noticed some very common presumptions that masculinity critics like to use and are repeated over and over.
The first of these, and the most common, is the deliberate misconception that a boy’s learning to be masculine never left the 1950-60s. In the wake of the Nikolas Cruz shooting this rationale surfaced quite a bit. It still is. The idea is that boys are born as these tender, delicate souls, all naturally ready to emote and sensate like precious little girls – that is until the nebulous evil ‘patriarchy’ gets ahold of them and batters them into “being tough”, not crying and told to stop being such pussies. This is the old anachronism that presupposes western society never left the ‘macho tough guy’ preconditioning of boys to raise them to be these future murderers, wife beaters and misogynists.
This is, of course, the “boys are broken” narrative I addressed in Good Humans. It’s kind of ironic when you think that this narrative would have us believe boys naturally wanting to be boys is a net social negative and it takes some strong intervention in their upbringing to turn them into good humans. So what is it? Are boys being their natural selves by wanting to be rambunctious, risk taking, shit-giving, masculine boys, or are they naturally these tender little emo-beings coming fresh out of the womb only to have their ‘genuine’ sensitive emotional souls crushed by “hyper-masculine” fathers, male teachers and school coaches. This is one of the more stupid, but deliberate, paradoxes the Village and the Feminine Imperative conveniently switch between as circumstances require yet one more anti-masculine response.
Lies for Boys
You can see this confusion in the above Tweet.
Our society teaches boys to “toughen up”.
Actually no, the feminine-primary social order that has been systematically feminizing boys into feminine-identifying men for the past 50 years does nothing of the kind. Since the mid-seventies the cultural narrative took a hard turn to the feminine-correct in raising boys into pacified ‘harmless’ men. We’re going on five generations of telling boys it is incumbent upon them to get in touch with their mythical feminine sides if they want to evolve beyond ‘traditional masculinity’. There is no ‘toughening’ being taught to boys in a female primary education system that teaches boys in a manner that presumes they are defective girls.
…which is okay, but not okay when “toughening up” also means suppressing feelings.
Feelings are perhaps the only thing boys are being taught to prioritize in their feminine-primary educations today. This fact deserves a bit of explanation here. Male and female humans process emotions differently. Women in particular process negative emotions in a much different way than men. Men tend to prioritize information through a filter of rational discernment first and then sort out how they feel about that information in an emotional context. Women are much the opposite; girls process information through an emotional filter first and then sort out what the information actually means to them (and after that, how it might affect others). If this sounds like the essays I’ve written about how men’s and women’s communications methods differ you’re not too far off. Men prioritize the content (information) of a conversation while women prioritize the context (the feels she gets) from a conversation. This is how our brains work, and when one method isn’t socially favored above the other both methods can be complementary to the other.
But in a feminine-primary social order this is not how things work. As I mentioned, for the past 50+ years our educational system has shifted to favor the learning methodologies of girls at the expense of boys. This ‘girls style’ teaching has been the standard for so long now that we largely take it for granted that it is the only correct style of teaching. Today, men account for less than 25% of all teachers in the United States. In the UK it’s 25% and n Canada only 17% of elementary school teachers are male. Teaching is a female dominated profession and especially for younger kids. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers, and 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers, are men. How do you think stats like these affect the learning methodologies applied to boys and girls?
Yet still this lie that boys are the victims of some overwhelming toxic masculinity in their upbringing is the first reflexive explanation we hear from women and feminized men when a kid commits a criminal act. Why?
Lies for Equalism
Because it sounds right. It sounds like it should be right. The presumption is that boys are, in fact, girls; or at least they should be a functional equivalent of girls when it comes to educations. Over the past 50 years the baseless presumptions of blank-slate egalitarian equalism has not only inserted its lies into our social consciousness, but also into our presumptions about educating kids. I’ll repeat, men and women are biologically and psychologically different and boys and girls are equally different. The ways they learn are distinct to their sex. Yet for the past 4 generations egalitarian equalism has convinced (mostly female) educators that boys and girls are functional equals and gender differences are learned rather than innate.
While equalism informs (mostly female) teachers that boys and girls are the same, the teaching methodology that works best for girls and women is the predominant one today and for the recent past generations. The only way to justify this method as the universal one is to presume that boys are the same as girls – just ‘defective’ girls that must be taught to quash their innate maleness. If boys and girls are presumed to be blank-slate equals then it must follow that boys are just as emotion-prioritizing and sensitive as any girl, and it is through a process of an imagined patreo-misogyny social conditioning that boys psychologically cover over their “true” natures – that of precious little (defective) girls. In essence the equalist belief is that all babies are born as little equal blank-slates, but the ideal template for those blank-slates is a female nature irrespective of the sex of the child.
When a boy’s real, masculine, inborn nature expresses itself the first thing it meets in this equalist-but-feminine-primary education is derision and shame. For as much as boys would be boys they are taught that they aren’t good for being so. They’re encouraged to self-repress, self-deprecate their gender and self-police their brothers. They’re taught that the correct way to think is to emote like girls because that’s correct for the template of a “good human”. Despite the female-centric teaching boys innate nature still find ways for boys to be boys and when this happens an egalitarian (feminine-primary) social order presume the ‘bad behavior’ must be the result of the influence of an evil patriarchy that truly hasn’t existed in the way they believe it does for 50 some odd years.
As I’ve detailed in past essays, society only sees fathers as tolerable and superfluous when it comes to raising boys. Single mothers are celebrated as super-human and in the equalist lie that would have us believe that women can not only ‘have it all’ but they can ‘do it all’ we rarely question the necessity of a masculine influence in a child’s life. We give it lip service and parrot back the need for a man to “step up and take responsibility as a parent”. The message to dads is always “do better”, because the pretense for fathers is that they are inherently irresponsible and ‘broken’ just like all boys are.
The Village might even concede that a father is some advantage to a child, but ultimately he’s superfluous – that is until that kid is involved in some kind of criminality. Then the questions become “Where was this kid’s father? Why wasn’t he around to teach this kid some discipline and respect for human life?” The children of single mothers are overwhelmingly more likely to be come involved in criminality, but we don’t look at her half-measure parenting as a possible cause. Remember, she’s a super-hero and blameless, so any blame for this kid’s acts fall on the shoulders of a weak or absent father. Then fathers are necessary. Then the kid needed to ‘toughen up’ and dad should’ve taught it to him. And all of this comes full circle and feeds into the idea of father’s inherent incompetence again.
Lies for ‘Defective Girls’
The next lie is that boys can be,…
…both tough and fragile, vulnerable and resilient. Being vulnerable doesn’t affect your manliness.
I’ve written a lot about the lie of transvaluation and Vulnerability in the past, but this was really in terms of how women perceive men and require strength and dominance. Another aspect of masculinity that is encoded into women’s mental firmware is to seek out men with superior competency. A woman just is, a man must become is the first maxim of a man accepting his Burden of Performance. Part of this masculine competency involves strength, know-how and determination; all things that have been replaced with feminine-primary emotionalism and naval gazing for boys.
Men are expected to know how to do everything and what they do not know, what they are not competent in is one criteria of how they are judged by women. A lot of guys might think, “So the fuck what? I don’t base my self-worth on the opinions of women.” As well you shouldn’t, but it doesn’t change the truth that if you don’t know how to change a tire when you get flat, or you need another man who does know how to do it to change it for you, a woman sees you as less competent – and by extension less capable of providing her with the security she needs from a masculine ideal. Women evolved to see men as a Jack of all trades, master of some.
A man’s vulnerability (taught to him as a child by his female-primary teachers) most definitely affects his manliness. Vulnerability is, by definition, a weakness. It is a flaw in the design, a chink in the armor and vulnerabilities will be exploited by enemies and rivals to ensure that man fails while a stronger one succeeds in all things. This is Darwinism so simple that to question it seems illogical, but in our equalist utopia toughness and fragility find no contradiction; vulnerability and resilience are bed partners. Again, we must consider that this illogical balance can only exist in the female ‘good human’ template and the idea that everything is learned and nothing is innate about male and female humans. Promoting the idea that ‘vulnerability doesn’t affect manliness’ presumes that the person declaring it is in some way an authority on a manliness that has been already demonized and conditioned out of our boys today.
They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.
Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.
Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist. A kid like Nikolas Cruz was bound to happen in a world that teaches boys to prioritize feelings above rationality. He was taught like a defective girl. He never learned the masculine inspired discipline, determination and resiliency because all that conflicts with the lie that vulnerability is ever a strength. All that conflicts with his feminine-primary upbringing.
As such, these ‘defective girls’ are unequipped to handle the rejection of a girlfriend. The participation trophy generation, the one where everyone’s a winner and no one ever has to deal with defeat, never teaches these ‘defective girls’ what to do when they finally do taste a bitter defeat. They never learned how to come back from it because that would mean admitting that vulnerability and emotionalism (the female-correct way to handle it) are in fact weaknesses. So, predictably, a ‘defective girl’ like Nikolas Cruz does what any petulant teenage girl would – he has an emotional outburst. Only his outburst consists of gunning down 17 kids with an assault rifle.
The answer to incidents like this doesn’t lie in gun control or further feminization of boys. It lies in reimagining how we educate boys and how we see masculinity as a net positive that can deter exactly this kind of emotional outburst. If you truly want these shootings to stop it’s time we embrace real men teaching real toughness and resilience in our boys. It’s time we teach boys like they will become tough, strong, invulnerable young men we may need to provide future generations with a much needed security. And the time where we’ll need them is coming faster than anyone today really thinks.