I’ve always been fascinated at the ease with which specious ideas spread. One day you’re living your life, and unbeknownst to you, someone who holds a reasonable measure of power has an idea based on his or her “research.” That person tells someone else, and then that person tells someone else, and the next thing you know, this new idea has spread like wildfire and people everywhere who are clamoring for answers to complex problems jump on board and say, “Yes, that’s it! That must be it!” All of a sudden, you start reading and hearing about it in the news. An idea has been born. It is now a fact.
That’s how I imagine we arrived at the bogus concept known as “toxic masculinity,” which was apparently deemed “mascupathy” 10 years go by psychotherapist Randy Flood. Mascupathy, Flood and his colleagues decided, is the failure of a man to shed his traditional manly ways. At that point, he officially has a disease.
“We just believe,” writes Flood in Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing The Malaise of American Manhood, “that there is a disease process that goes on when we raise boys to cut off half of their humanity in order to pursue the pinnacle of masculinity.”
This is the conclusion some, such as Flood, have come to for why men and boys are struggling:
Actually, many people have addressed men’s mental health. We simply didn’t arrive at the same conclusion. Men and boys aren’t suffering from an overdose of masculinity; they’re suffering from a dearth of masculinity.
How could it be the former when millions of boys come from fatherless homes and when most boys are products of public schools, where only 23% of teachers are male? Single motherhood has skyrocketed over the last five decades — a whopping 40% increase. Who do we suppose is encouraging boys to “pursue the pinnacle of masculinity”? Their mothers and their female teachers?
Hardly. In schools, girls have the upper hand while boys go along for the ride. Their interests and their innate aggression were stifled the moment we got rid of recess and told boys to sit still and read books centered on women and girls. At home, boys of single mothers are largely responsible for themselves, which is why so many get into trouble. To the extent that single mothers are home, they may be very good at mothering. But they can’t be a father.
Indeed, father absence in America is rampant, and it’s the cause of almost every social ill our country faces. “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it,” noted Barack Obama said in 2008 while running for president.
Fathers are absolutely critical to the well-being of children, boys in particular. A boy with a present and engaged father will have fewer emotional and behavioral problems and better academic and long-term success. His aggression will be channeled in a meaningful and productive way.
But the media is totally silent on this — they lack the courage to tell the truth about single-parent families. Just last week, CBS News jumped on the anti-male (disguised as “helping” males) bandwagon by asking the question, “Is there a better way to raise boys to avoid toxic masculinity?” The 23-minute video, which is accompanied by three ancillary videos, accuses parents and society of raising toxic males by encouraging them to be controlling and even violent.
“We have coined a term called the Man Box,” said Ted Bunch, co-founder and chief development officer of A Call to Men, an organization that aims to promote healthy and respectful manhood. “And that’s a short form for the collective socialization of men that we’ve all been taught on some level … Not asking for help, always feeling like we have to be in control, dominating, and having power over others, not expressing any emotion except for anger. All of those things are rigid notions of manhood. Feeling like we have to be in control, that we have to control things, those are all things that are rigid, and that they don’t bend.”
Again, since boys today are raised primarily by women, who exactly does Bunch imagine is teaching these things? Such ideas may have been common in select households in the 1940s, but they are as rare today as cholera. I don’t think in my 51 years I’ve ever witnessed a parent or anyone in the media promote a “rigid notion of manhood.”
What I have witnessed is a compulsion to lie. “Boys and girls cry the same amount,” said author and professor Lise Eliot. “There’s no biological reason, no hardwired innate reason why boys express less emotion, but certainly there are strong cultural reasons for it.” And then, later in the episode: “You’re going to see two-year-old boys and girls pretty much equally hitting, kicking, or biting each another.”
Fascinating, isn’t it, that the very people who could (and who would) refute this (preschool teachers and at-home parents, who spend day in and day out with children this age) are never consulted. We don’t see those folks on television talking about babies and toddlers because they don’t have Ph.D.s. And yet, they know more about this subject than all the men and women in the media combined.
Boys are suffering from a lack of strong masculine leadership. That’s why they’re not doing well. If anything’s toxic, we are. It is we who set our boys up to fail, with our insistence they will do fine without fathers and that schools don’t need to cater to boys’ needs.
Change just those two things, and boys will thrive.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, columnist, and radio host. Her newest book, WOMEN WHO WIN at Love: How to Build a Relationship That Lasts was published in October 2019. Suzanne’s website is www.suzannevenker.com.
