Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
A friend of mine just sent me an article from the New York Times that says upper-income men no longer want to have sons, because they’re too terrifyingly masculine. Can this be real?
Phil Buntz,
Milwaukee
Is it real? Is that a serious question? Get real, Phil. This is America, 2017. I’m reading the Drudge Report right now, as I often do when I want to see how the End of the World is proceeding. For me, it’s become like reading Revelation, without all the confusing symbolism. Here are just a few representative headlines: Don’t have California secede, divide it in two! … Death of the porn star: humans replaced by “virtual actors” … New fad: adult swaddling therapy. So yes, it’s real. The Idiocracy has turned on its afterburners. Whatever you expect to happen, lower those expectations by factoring in unprecedented vulgarity, shamelessness, and stupidity—then expect the unexpected, which will come to pass. Nostradamus predicted the world would end in 3797. He clearly was a heedless optimist.
The offending article you point to is authored by one Andrew Reiner, an English professor who is also, God help us, writing a book about masculinity. (Not to be confused with other recent books about dying manhood like The End of Men, Angry White Men: American Masculinity At the End of An Era, and The End of Men: A Novel.) In his Times piece, Reiner states that when his son Macallah was born five years ago (I couldn’t make up that name, though his poor son probably wishes I had), Reiner’s students asked him how it felt to be a new father. He blurted out that it was “terrifying … all I can think about is bullying … this boy’s going to be raised to feel and express his vulnerability. That’s a curse in this culture.”
Is it? Because last I checked, no vulnerability in our culture goes unexpressed. Our liberals are out in the street, complaining about one perceived injustice or another, every other day. Our president tweets incessantly about all the alleged mistreatment he is suffering at the hands of the media and his enemies (both real and imagined), while conservatives express hurt and confusion that anyone dare question our Dear Leader. If our country was encapsulated now by one infantile syllable, it would be: “Wahhhh!” We have become a nation of whiners. The problem, it seems, is not that we don’t express ourselves, but that we never stop.
Remember when grandpa used to dispense wise clichés like “Grin and bear it”? Sorry gramps, we don’t do that anymore. We’ve traded out for “grimace and express it”. The traditional hallmarks of “manliness”—bravery, stoicism, physical courage—have been discounted for some time now, and are damn near being criminalized by the likes of Reiner and The Emasculators.
As ever-wise Harvey Mansfield, who literally wrote the book on manliness (titled, appropriately, Manliness) put it: “Today the very word manliness seems quaint and obsolete. We are in the process of making the English language gender neutral, and manliness, the quality of one gender, or rather, of one sex, seems to describe the essence of the enemy we are attacking, the evil we are eradicating.” Sometimes, I wonder if I should be encouraging my own two sons to go full Caitlyn, as owning a penis 20 years from now will likely be considered as criminal as drinking a large Coke or driving your own car.
But I’m getting away from Reiner’s piece. In it, Reiner samples many instances of popular sentiment, in which his ilk opines that it’s better to parent girls. A writer on NPR states that she “wanted a girl mainly because I felt it was harder to be a boy in today’s society. If I have a boy I will embrace the challenge of raising a boy … who can learn the power of vulnerability even as male culture tries to make him see it as weakness.” He cites a study conducted by the California Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics, and New York University, in which adoptive American parents preferred girls by nearly a third since parents “fear dysfunctional social behavior in adopted children and perceive girls as ‘less risky’ than boys in that respect.” He bemoans another authoritative source, a Vice blogger, who claims that “misandry” (a hatred of men) “has become ‘chic,'” manifesting itself in blogs and online essays and tweets
Those aforementioned grandfathers of ours, the ones who whipped the Nazis and set us on a path to unprecedented prosperity, used to have a word for men who talked like this. They called them “women.” I love women, I should point out. And in no way mean to disparage them. I love them so much that I married one, and made two hearty, healthy sons with her. Neither of whose gender we feel sick over, nor do we wish daughterhood upon, as Reiner seems to be doing to unfortunate Macallah.
I often say that women are tougher than men. Because they are. In my experience, they are more resolute, more no-nonsense, and tend not to get wrapped around the axle of their own vanity, as men often do. Maybe I’m wrong, according to Reiner, to not be having a crisis of conscience about my sons being boys. But I suspect that the very reason the Vice blogger he references has contempt for crying men such as Reiner (aside from the natural contempt any self-respecting woman would have for a man who takes his gender cues from Vice bloggers) is that they’re too apologetic over their own God-given equipment, or as modern parlance has it, their “assigned” gender.
I not only don’t condone Reiner’s parenting approach, but actively advocate against it. I don’t raise my own two sons to be mouth-breathing hooligans out of the Male Stereotype Handbook. I want them to respect women, to be gallant, to stand up for the weak, to neither count themselves bullies, nor to suffer being bullied. In short, I want them to grow up to be well-adjusted men. Which used to be considered a worthy aspiration, not a badge of shame.
And in raising them as such, neither do I try too strenuously to plane their rough edges down. Mostly, I encourage them to articulate their thoughts and emotions, to settle their differences with each other like civilized gentlemen. But occasionally, if fists are involved, oh well. Boys will be boys. A little rough and tumble never hurt anyone. When they were younger, I’d sometimes let them scrap until one of them cried (thus, cultivating their more feminine sensitive sides in the bargain). It’s good training for the world at large, most of which doesn’t particularly care about your feelings. When they run into conflicts in their lives, I tell them, a nicely-turned phrase, a seamless piece of logic, a precisely expressed argument—these usually do the trick. But on special occasions, a clean uppercut can work wonders, too. It tends to have a sobering influence. As my spiritual lodestar, Mike Tyson, used to say, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
So let your boys be boys. It’ll be fine. They’ve been making them for several millennia now. And most girls tend to like them, too. That’s why they marry them. “Boy energy,” as our New York Times worrywart calls it, is not the end of civilization. Rather, it’s exactly 50 percent of the reason civilization keeps perpetuating itself.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
