In 1968 I supported “women’s liberation,” which I took to be the simple idea that men and women should have equal opportunity. Evidence that women were not treated equally was not hard to find. For example, my wife wasn’t allowed by her employer, Trans World Airlines, to be married when she was hired. In order to keep her job, she had to submit to routine weight checks. Being over 130 pounds, at 5’9”, would have called for a suspension until “excess” weight was lost.
These strictures did not apply to pilots, a job class where the negative health aspects of being 5’5” and 300 pounds might have a direct effect on passenger safety. Remedies for such discrimination were not long in coming, but the process kicked off a rising tide of shrill activism that spiraled into excess; and implicated great men, from past cultures, dead for hundreds of years. Grudges of the past still fester.
There are still feminists, they have been called equity feminists, who hew to the original intent. My wife, for example, whose degree in Womens Studies (likely attractive because of obvious discrimination she experienced) did not result in intellectual paralysis. This did expose me to the dangers of such curricula in the 80’s. It’s much, much worse now. It also prompted me to investigate feminist theory more thoroughly than I might have otherwise. The picture above is the current shelf, and I discarded about this many when we downsized our house. I also browsed any number of books my wife encountered in her courses.
I have one last minor feminist analysis credential appropriate to the 80’s. I was “Mr. Mom” for several years while my wife was flying internationally. This doesn’t make me non-toxic, however.
Demands for equality of opportunity have given way to insistence on equality of outcome, and the word equity has become a code word to that end. I am no longer the least supportive of feminism. The word is as corrupt as Cathy Newman’s ideopathy.
By emphasizing the extremes of men’s tendency (relative to women) to stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression; and entirely ignoring the beneficial side of those traits when appropriately moderated (almost always by exposure to a man, a father, demonstrating such moderation), the SJWs are out to destroy traditional masculinity by re-defining it as toxic. Maybe a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, as Ms. Steinem famously claimed, but a boy needs exposure to traditional masculinity (now we have to qualify that, just like “liberal”) like a feminist needs a clue.
These are cross reinforcing, of course, but here’s another way to look at:
Stoicism. Self-control and fortitude. Overcoming adversity. The absence of whining, enabling men to work in dirty, dangerous, uncomfortable jobs.
Competitiveness. The entrepreneurial impulse. The urge to scientific curiosity. The drive to co-operate by winning within the rules.
Dominance. Negotiating skill. Drive to succeed. Good leadership.
Aggression. Protecting the weak. Response to threats.
The simpering inherited from the 1960’s led to the proximate roots (circa 1995) of our present male bashing. By the turn of the 21st century, Christina Hoff Sommers was writing, Cassandra-like, on the wall up against which the gender feminists were plotting to line boys. I read The War Against Boys in 2001. It’s one reason I have long detested Title IX.
Following is a long excerpt (but much shorter than the book it summarizes) from a longer piece by Sommers from 2000. It clearly explains how we started on the path to where the words “toxic masculinity” can appear in a razor commercial, and half the population will defend it.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s the excerpt:
“One can welcome [Carol] Gilligan’s [Harvard University’s first professor of gender studies] acceptance of the fact that boys, too, have problems while remaining deeply skeptical of her ideas about their source. Gilligan’s theory about boys’ development includes three hypothetical claims: 1) Boys are being deformed and made sick by a traumatic, forced separation from their mothers. 2) Seemingly healthy boys are cut off from their own feelings and damaged in their capacity to develop healthy relationships. 3) The well-being of society may depend on freeing boys from “cultures that value or valorize heroism, honor, war, and competition—the culture of warriors, the economy of capitalism.” Let us consider each proposition in turn.
According to Gilligan, boys are at special risk in early childhood; they suffer “more stuttering, more bedwetting, more learning problems … when cultural norms pressure them to separate from their mothers.” (Sometimes she adds allergies, attention-deficit disorder, and attempted suicide to the list.) She does not cite any pediatric research to support her theory about the origins of these various early-childhood disorders. Does a study exist, for example, showing that boys who remain intimately bonded with their mothers are less likely to develop allergies or wet their beds?
Gilligan’s assertion that the “pressure of cultural norms” causes boys to separate from their mothers and thus generates a host of early disorders has not been tested empirically. Nor does Gilligan offer any indication of how it could be tested. She does not seem to feel that her assertions need empirical confirmation. She is confident that boys need to be protected from the culture—a culture in which manhood valorizes war and the economy of capitalism, a culture that desensitizes boys and, by submerging their humanity, is the root cause of “out-of-control and out-of-touch behavior” and is the ultimate source of war and other violence committed by men.
But are boys aggressive and violent because they are psychically separated from their mothers? Thirty years of research suggests that the absence of the male parent is more likely to be the problem. The boys who are most at risk for juvenile delinquency and violence are boys who are physically separated from their fathers. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reports that in 1960 children living with their mother but not their father numbered 5.1 million; by 1996 the number was more than 16 million. As the phenomenon of fatherlessness has increased, so has violence. As far back as 1965 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called attention to the social dangers of raising boys without benefit of a paternal presence. He wrote in a 1965 study for the Labor Department, “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos.”
The sociologist David Blankenhorn, in Fatherless America (1995), wrote, “Despite the difficulty of proving causation in the social sciences, the weight of evidence increasingly supports the conclusion that fatherlessness is a primary generator of violence among young men.” William Galston, a former domestic-policy adviser in the Clinton Administration who is now at the University of Maryland, and his colleague Elaine Kamarck, now at Harvard, concur. Commenting on the relationship between crime and one-parent families, they wrote in a 1990 institute report, “The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature.”
Oblivious of all the factual evidence that paternal separation causes aberrant behavior in boys, Carol Gilligan calls for a fundamental change in child rearing that would keep boys in a more sensitive relationship with their feminine side. We need to free young men from a destructive culture of manhood that “impedes their capacity to feel their own and other people’s hurt, to know their own and other’s sadness,” she writes. [Have you noticed how much more likely people are to say, “I feel,” rather than, “I think,” these days?] Since the pathology, as she has diagnosed it, is presumably universal, the cure must be radical. We must change the very nature of childhood: we must find ways to keep boys bonded to their mothers. We must undercut the system of socialization that is so “essential to the perpetuation of patriarchal societies.”
Gilligan’s views are attractive to many of those who believe that boys could profit by being more sensitive and empathetic. But anyone thinking to enlist in Gilligan’s project of getting boys in touch with their inner nurturer would do well to note that her central thesis—that boys are being imprisoned by conventional ideas of masculinity—is not a scientific hypothesis. Nor, it seems, does Gilligan regard it in this light, for she presents no data to support it. It is, in fact, an extravagant piece of speculation of the kind that would not be taken seriously in most professional departments of psychology.
On a less academic plane Gilligan’s proposed reformation seems to challenge common sense. It is obvious that a boy wants his father to help him become a young man, and belonging to the culture of manhood is important to almost every boy. To impugn his desire to become “one of the boys” is to deny that a boy’s biology determines much of what he prefers and is attracted to. Unfortunately, by denying the nature of boys, education theorists can cause them much misery.
Gilligan talks of radically reforming “the fundamental structure of authority” by making changes that will free boys from the stereotypes that bind them. But in what sense are American boys unfree? Was the young Mark Twain or the young Teddy Roosevelt enslaved by conventional modes of boyhood? Is the average Little Leaguer or Cub Scout defective in the ways Gilligan suggests? In practice, getting boys to be more like girls means getting them to stop segregating themselves into all-male groups. That’s the darker, coercive side of the project to “free” boys from their masculine straitjackets.
It is certainly true that a small subset of male children are, as Gilligan argues, desensitized and cut off from feelings of tenderness and care. But these boys are not representative of their sex. Gilligan speaks of boys in general as “hiding their humanity,” showing a capacity to “hurt without feeling hurt.” This, she maintains, is a more or less universal condition that exists because the vast majority of boys are forced into separation from their nurturers. But the idea that boys are abnormally insensitive flies in the face of everyday experience. Boys are competitive and often aggressive, yes; but anyone in close contact with them—parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches, friends—gets daily proof of their humanity, loyalty, and compassion.
Gilligan appears to be making the same mistake with boys that she made with girls—she observes a few children and interprets their problems as indicative of a deep and general malaise caused by the way our society imposes gender stereotypes. The pressure to conform to these stereotypes, she believes, has impaired, distressed, and deformed the members of both sexes by the time they are adolescents. In fact—with the important exception of boys whose fathers are absent and who get their concept of maleness from peer groups—most boys are not violent. Most are not unfeeling or antisocial. They are just boys—and being a boy is not in itself a failing.
Does Gilligan actually understand boys? Does she empathize with them? Is she free of the misandry that infects so many gender theorists who never stop blaming the “male culture” for all social and psychological ills? Nothing we have seen or heard offers the slightest reassurance that Gilligan and her followers are wise enough or objective enough to be trusted with devising new ways of socializing boys.
Every society confronts the problem of civilizing its young males. The traditional approach is through character education: Develop the young man’s sense of honor. Help him become a considerate, conscientious human being. Turn him into a gentleman. This approach respects boys’ masculine nature; it is time-tested, and it works. Even today, despite several decades of moral confusion, most young men understand the term “gentleman”and approve of the ideals it connotes.
What Gilligan and her followers are proposing is quite different: civilize boys by diminishing their masculinity. “Raise boys like we raise girls” is Gloria Steinem’s advice. This approach is deeply disrespectful of boys. It is meddlesome, abusive, and quite beyond what educators in a free society are mandated to do.
Did anything of value come out of the manufactured crisis of diminished girls? Yes, a bit. Parents, teachers, and administrators now pay more attention to girls’ deficits in math and science, and they offer more support for girls’ participation in sports. But who is to say that these benefits outweigh the disservice done by promulgating the myth of the incredible shrinking girl or presenting boys as the unfairly favored sex?
A boy today, through no fault of his own, finds himself implicated in the social crime of shortchanging girls. Yet the allegedly silenced and neglected girl sitting next to him is likely to be the superior student. She is probably more articulate, more mature, more engaged, and more well-balanced. The boy may be aware that she is more likely to go on to college. He may believe that teachers prefer to be around girls and pay more attention to them. At the same time, he is uncomfortably aware that he is considered to be a member of the favored and dominant gender.
The widening gender gap in academic achievement is real. It threatens the future of millions of American boys. Boys do not need to be rescued from their masculinity. But they are not getting the help they need. In the climate of disapproval in which boys now exist, programs designed to aid them have a very low priority. This must change. We should repudiate the partisanship that currently clouds the issues surrounding sex differences in the schools. We should call for balance, objective information, fair treatment, and a concerted national effort to get boys back on track. That means we can no longer allow the partisans of girls to write the rules.”
The Long March through the Institutions took a long time. These cultural vampires have been gnawing away at the foundation for awhile, and now they’re creeping out of the debris into the light. Sadly, they aren’t dissolving into smoke.