toxic masculinity

Remove the Man 2019

In October of 2017 I wrote an essay titled Male Control. It was actually the second time I’d covered the topic of how a feminine-primary social order (a Gynocracy if you will) seeks to control its male population by deliberately sowing confusion about masculinity into multiple generations of boys, and later men. Prior to this I’d written another seminal post titled Remove the Man in which is outlined the ways in which that Gynocracy makes efforts to systematically remove men from our language. Usually this takes the form of ‘erasing’ the letters m-a-n from the English language wherever it appears in an official capacity (i.e. state bylaws, universities, legislative documents), but also in gender-neutral translations of the Bible now. The only real constant in all of this the deliberate erasure of ‘man’ and/or ‘men’ from that language.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

George Orwell

I wrote Remove the Man back in 2013 in response to one such effort by the Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who passed a bill to make state laws gender neutral. The effort actually began in 2007, but in 2019 a simple search for ‘gender neutral language’ will show you the extent and scope of this much larger effort. This essay served and the starting point for a larger awareness for me – that of the push to remove men and masculinity from more than just our language, but rather the removal of all things conventionally masculine. As Orwell states here, the thought, the thinking, about masculinity and men is the focus of the corruption.

But language is only one way that the concept of what is masculine is distorted for a purpose.

Today the American Psychological Association issued its first-ever guidelines for practice with boys/men’s. In it the concept of conventional (traditional) masculinity is outlined as ‘harmful’.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.

It would be easy to refute this basic presumption with countless examples of how all of these traits, most of which are innate parts of men’s evolved mental firmware, have been key in developing a civil society as well as healthy masculine identity. But what we’re seeing in this is a corruption of language that is leading to the standardization of the corruption of thought.

Stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are evolved aspects of the male psyche that have served men for millennia. To the Red Pill aware man this is self-evident. What is less evident is the new context in which these ‘educated’ men apply meaning to these terms. Academia has been so thoroughly assimilated by the Feminine Imperative that the men making official decrees about psychological principle no longer have the insight to understand that their perspective is informed by ‘female-correct‘ thought.

There are two presumptions being made here:

First, is that men’s predisposition for stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are the results of a patriarchal societies adverse influence on boys and men.

The belief is founded in blank-slate social constructionism. I addressed this in Old Lies:

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. 

Now, granted, the men responsible for these psychological practices and their standardization tried to walk back the idea that conventionally masculine attributes weren’t “all bad”. This is expected because an aspect like stoicism can still be considered useful to a feminine-primary social order. It’s just that the larger social order wants the aspects of masculinity to manifest on its own terms and serving a female-centric utility.

A determined hard-driving man is what they want when the floodwaters start rising and women need to be carried to safety, but when a man uses that aspect of his masculine nature for his exclusive benefit, or a purpose that conflicts with feminine primacy, that’s when the aspect is defined as dangerous. However, the overall preconception is that there is some sinister influence of an old-school chauvinistic patriarchy teaching boys and men to be ‘toxically’ masculine. I addressed this fallacy in Old Lies, but this is one more example of how fem-centric society must cling to a clichéd parody of how boys must be being taught in order to cover the fact that boys are raised like defective girls today.

What is glaringly ignored is that these traits, and many more, are endemic parts of men’s evolved nature. Our emotional natures are not the same as that of women’s. Our brains are not wired the same as women’s. Men and women process emotions differently from the other, particularly negative emotions. This is a feature of the male brain, not a bug. But today the APA has decided unilaterally that men’s way of dealing with emotion is “incorrect”. Incorrect because the only correct way would be one that aligns with the women’s interests they’ve been conditioned to believe are only beneficial to larger society. To the APA, masculinity itself is a bug.

Secondly, this deliberate misconception relies entirely on social constructionism and almost entirely ignores the biological factors that contribute to masculine gender identity. I’m presently working on another essay that explores the dependency on blank-slate equalism as the basis for virtually every presumption the mainstream has about gender identity, so I don’t want to give too much away. However, the whole presumption of gender in humanist psychology depends on the falsehood that men and women are functionally coequal.

Accepting that failed notion of blank-slate equalism is what scaffolds the entire premise of this standard of masculinity. Masculinity is something that cannot be removed from society if its source is something that is unique to only men by virtue of their biology. They cannot ensure female-correctness as a societal standard if men and women are different. People like those in authority at the APA know this. It’s why merely talking about those innate gender differences is deemed a hate-crime today. Inspiring doubt in the blank-slate standard risks destroying the scaffolding for all their preconceptions of gender.

In the end this is one more, I think significant, effort in removing men and conventional masculinity from our collective thought. This standardization of how men should be ‘dealt with’ in therapy, or colored by in just considering men’s role in psychology is an ideological power play. Modern psychology officially doesn’t ‘get men’ anymore.

The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) will now officially list ‘traditional’ masculinity as a hazard or a disorder for male humans. They can’t be called ‘men’ because that would gender them.

I read a few Twitter threads about this change to the DSM and I think they’re worth reading to get a better grasp of the gravity of this standardization:

On December 29th, 2018 I made some pretty ominous predictions about what I thought the manosphere and men in general could expect to see in 2019-2020. We’re not eve a week into the first month and a lot of what I expected is starting to develop. The gender divide is now a gender ‘Cold War’ and going forward I see the polarization between the sexes becoming even uglier than the 2016 election cycle.

This issuance from the APA is a foundation for how psychology – our Lords of the new church – will define what is acceptably ‘male’ and what is not. Furthermore it defines what aspects of masculinity is officially hazardous based on social constructionism and science denial.

Going forward I think Red Pill aware men will have to view mainstream psychology with even more suspicion than we do already. My Red Man Group colleague, Rian Stone, has mentioned that this equivalent of a “Papal Bull” from the APA represents a call to action for the Red Pill community and the manosphere in general to help men understand that conventional, “traditional” masculinity is not a disorder.

The Red Pill saves lives. I can only see this standardization as a net negative for men who are already five times more likely than women to take their own lives. Men seeking psychological help will only find their problems compounded by psychologists trained to believe masculinity is inherently toxic. And as a result we need to be prepared to help our Blue Pill brothers unplug and show them their inherent worth as conventionally masculine men.

Male Control

Back in October, 2016 I wrote an essay called Sexual Zoning. In that post I explored the social inconsistencies and potential for (sometimes catastrophic) consequences for men in misunderstanding what were, and what have become, particular zones in which men and women covertly acknowledge the potential for an intersexual connection.

In the bygone Western social system, young people were expected to regularly interact with one another in controlled, regulated environments, in a way that fostered productive, long-term, monogamous, assortative relationships. This was a sort of “holistic” milieu, so to speak, where young people treated one another as potential future partners, sexual and otherwise, in a socially regulated manner, in all cases when they were permitted to interact. This was even the norm in workplaces where both men and women were present. The average man found a girlfriend through his extended family or social circle, because families and social circles were normally large.

What we have today is the complete opposite: “sexual zoning”. Some mixed-sex environments, like the workplace, schools and campuses, are made completely asexual – sterile, so to speak. No sexualized interactions are permitted to take place. This is demanded by law and expected by society. In such environments, you’re supposed to treat members of the opposite sex strictly as colleagues or professionals, non-sexual beings. (Hot men are allowed to get away with more, of course, but that’s another issue.) Other mixed-sex environments, on the other hand, like nightclubs, are expected to be full-on sexual. Everybody there knows that all interactions entail the future possibility of casual sex. It’s basically a meat market. You’re expected to hit on girls, and girls expect to be hit on by attractive men. Socializing in these environments requires action, engagement. If you want to find a partner, either just for sex or something more, you have to go there, you have to have Game etc.

The video I’ve chosen to dissect here is a prime example of how generations of men have been raised to deliberately misunderstand intersexual dynamics and at the same time demonize the conventional masculinity that so much of western culture has been founded upon. To be thorough though, really every culture throughout history has been primarily founded on conventional masculinity and the aspects that contribute to maleness.

Jonathan McIntosh finds an easy mark in the archetypal masculine characters of Harrison Ford, but there’s a very important reason the 80’s icon is so egregious to the men of McIntosh’s generation. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, etc. are all the Alpha male rogues this generation has been taught to love in terms of bravado, but to hate because they ‘always get the girl’; and they get her in such a way that it grates against all that their feminine-primary upbringing led them to believe was just this side of sexual assault.

McIntosh relates that he was part of a generation that idealized Harrison Ford’s most iconic characters, yet now he feels pangs of regret and resentment for having looked up the characters’ archetype. This is a perfect illustration of how conventional masculinity has been reverse engineered by our feminine-primary social order since the Sexual Revolution. I’ve mentioned in many prior essays that while overt masculinity is vilified as the cause of all social evils, it still remains the most arousing aspect of men for women. Boys like McIntosh saw this archetype and made that connection to female attraction, but it took generations of Blue Pill reconditioning to make them feel bad for ever attempting to adopt that bravado into their own personalities.

While growing up the message was the same Blue Pill identifying with the feminine (in fact Beta Game depends on that identification). Play nice, play equal, respect all women by default and never assert yourself too overtly or too crudely lest you risk offending her sensibilities. These are the boys who were raised by family, media and their schooling to expect a rationality that women could be expected to say what they mean and then do what they said. Yet that never seemed to gel when they would deductively see the girls they wanted, the ones who told them they wanted a ‘nice guy’ who respected them, consistently reward the asshole jerk with the intimacy and sex they thought would come to them if they followed what they were told.

In the end, Han Solo and Indiana Jones get the girl and she genuinely desires him – not because this is some odd fantasy of the writer’s imagination, but because this is (was) a standard aspect of women’s genuine attraction to men. The aberration is the idea that the attraction and affair would go any other way. Only in this feminized generation does thousands of years of male-female interaction seem at all unsettling.

So, here we have conventionally masculine archetypes – sometimes rakish, sometimes bold and dutiful – following their own path, making themselves their Mental Point of Origin, and making their mission (not their woman) their priority. Whether it was Captain Kirk, Han Solo or Conan the Barbarian the mental order was always firmly focused on the individual man and his action. Between the time of the Sexual Revolution and 2017, the Feminine Imperative has systematically erased the conventionally masculine archetype; so much so that the gender-loathing men of this generation are either appalled at displays of masculinity or they simply have no frame of reference with which to contrast it with the distorted and blurred ideas of what masculinity should mean to them.

For some ‘men’ the notion of conventional masculinity itself is rejected altogether. It doesn’t mean anything to be a man for this generation, so conventional archetypes of men are offensive.

As a result of these four to five generations of progressively more feminized men we now see the confusion and disgust at conventional masculinity coming from this generation of men. We see a generation of males who have no positive association with their own gender. They become increasingly more isolated because they are convinced that anything that might be gender-exclusive to men alone is, by default, a form of misogyny. There is nothing ‘positive’ about being a man, yet for all of the misconceptions about gender being social constructs, exclusively female organizing of women and fempowerment is still viewed as beneficial; a sign of society ‘evolving’.

I recently read an article in the Boston Globe about middle aged men’s increasing social isolation. I would argue that for all of the raising of awareness about this phenomenon it is primarily generations of men’s inability to interact with other men that is at the root of this isolation. For decades now men have been discouraged from meeting with other men in any formalized fashion. Men are either suspect of misogyny or homosexuality if they get together for the sake of being men. What were seeing now is generations of men who no longer understand how to socially interact with other men.

Furthermore, when this isolation becomes a concern of women, those men are again berated for not interacting with other men in the ways that women do. Women talk, men do, but a feminine-primary social order only approves of one way for men to associate with one another – in the way that women do. Thus, we see the confusion of women that men don’t call each other up to schedule a coffee date for the express reason of conversation. Men and women have different forms of communication, but the socially approved form is only ever from the feminine context. Men interacting “as men do” – in a conventionally masculine way – is always misogynistic. Thus, we see overseers in the locker room, if only symbolically, to regulate what and how men communicate with each other.

The End of Toxic Masculinity

Dalrock had a great quick-hit post recently about how Michael Moore was suggesting that men be required by law to seek their wife or long-term girlfriend’s (or most recent Ex) signed permission to purchase a firearm in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Vegas.

That this idea would ever be a serious consideration speaks volumes about how masculine gender-loathing has become endemic in western culture. I get that Michael Moore is a self-inflicted cuck, but all I’m seeing in the wake of the Vegas shooting is less about gun control and more about male control.

It’s no longer about categorizing masculinity as “toxic” or “hyper” – that narrative is officially dropped after this shooting. Now, any masculinity is a threat, any expression of conventional masculinity is the true problem. Suggesting that a woman’s oversight and discernment should be necessary for a man to have access to a civil right only further reinforces what I’ve been saying for some time now – only the feminine is ‘correct’ in any social discourse. Only the feminine is legitimate in exercising judgement, educating new generations and deciding which man will breed and which will not.

Think about this; what’s being suggested is that men be denied a civil right that apparently only women should legitimately have. For all the fallacious blathering of women in pink pussy hats about how they think they’re losing rights today, here we have an actual right of men being denied by women, by the Feminine Imperative.

The ‘toxic’ masculinity narrative made a qualitative distinction between a feminine-acceptable form of masculinity and a potentially dangerous form. Needless to say the accepted form always consisted of whatever aspects of masculinity that was immediately beneficial to womankind. ‘Toxic’ masculinity was always characterized as Man Up or Shut Up masculinity:

Man Up or Shut Up – The Male Catch 22

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

Now, in the Feminine Imperative’s unceasing efforts to Remove the Man a distinction between a useful masculinity and a dangerous masculinity is no longer something that resonates. All masculinity, all aspects, beneficial or detrimental, are to be considered the problem:

That the problem might just be masculinity, plain and simple, is not something we’re eager to countenance. While we might be prepared to apply a little structural analysis to the situation – yes, there is something about men and the way they are conditioned that leads us to this place – we’re unwilling to draw any final conclusions. Masculinity doesn’t kill people; it’s those mysterious toxins that are to blame.

[…]But strip away the so-called toxic aspects of masculinity: the aggression, the violence, the hate, the guns, and what are you left with? Strength, endurance, a woody-scented perfume, a liking for the colour blue? Certainly nothing that need be associated with manhood or maleness. These are simply individual qualities. The only reason to code them as “masculine” is to preserve a social hierarchy that ought to be destroyed.

[…]What would be so terrible about a world in which boys were treated no differently to girls from the day they were born? In which there are no pink/blue codifications to hide behind? In which a man’s anger and aggression were considered every bit as aberrant and unnatural as a woman’s?

The problem we’re facing isn’t toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic. It’s time we questioned even its most subtle manifestations.

Going forward this will be the narrative. There will be no distinction between misogyny, masculinity and maleness. What this author, perhaps deliberately, doesn’t want to address is that masculinity and all the associated ways our thinking and our behaviors that manifest from the biological side of our nature aren’t something that can be dissociated from us without killing us or erasing what we were evolved to be. There are no truly positive or negative aspects of masculinity, just as there are no positive or negative aspects of Hypergamy. They just are, and what makes them beneficial or detrimental all depends on the context in which they are applied. That may seem strange coming from the author of a book titled Positive Masculinity but understand that what is positive about masculinity is made so by need and by circumstance.

In a world created in the image of the Feminine Imperative masculinity itself is a horrible evil, until it’s needed to save women from rising floodwaters.

You see, for as much as the imperative would like to remove the ‘man’ from our language, our cultural consciousness, that man will always be needed in spite of the hate directed towards masculinity. This is what a feminine-primary society would have us redefine as some other term, something not unique to a male human being. But conventional, evolved, masculine strength and purpose will always manifest in men who unapologetically embrace it without an afterthought.

In my interview with Craig James we discussed men’s higher order thinking and purpose as well as our vital animal nature. You don’t separate one from the other. This is what the Feminine Imperative would have from men; a unilaterally female controlled utility-based masculinity that saves them from the worst consequences of both their environments and their decisions and simultaneously disappears when inconvenient. We hear women bleating about a lack of Real Men and the disappearance of true grit, and in the next article linked we see efforts to erase men entirely from social influence.

As I told Craig, when I’m in the squat rack I’m glad I have a feral, animal nature. It’s a survival aspect of human evolution. I’m not suggesting with this essay that men will become extinct; on the contrary I think what will help define our new conventional masculinity will largely be determined by how we express it in spite of a world arrayed against Man-kind. An equalist culture based on blank-slate equalism doesn’t see that you don’t separate the animal side of the human being from the high-order side. It is unwilling to accept that we need both; that we benefit and sometimes suffer from both.