What is the Crisis of Masculinity?

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Despite the hysterical messaging in our culture that America is a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia in which women are oppressed by a deeply entrenched, millennia-old “patriarchy,” the truth is that, increasingly in recent decades, it has been men, not women, who are in crisis.

There are various aspects of this crisis of masculinity. Boys and men aren’t succeeding in school and college anymore like girls and women are. They’re losing dominance in the workplace; in fact we’re facing what’s been called the quiet catastrophe of millions of American men who are not just unemployed but who have simply chosen to drop out of the labor force. Work is essential to dignity, a sense of purpose, and being a productive member of society. Without it, a man slips into an aimless purgatory. His personal relationships suffer. His community suffers. The culture suffers.

Meanwhile, a half century of feminism has left men confused, paralyzed, and resentful toward women. There’s no longer a culturally agreed-upon set of standards of behavior for boys and young men to understand what makes a man, what is expected of a man, even how a man treats a woman. One result of this is that young men are increasingly retreating into the downward spiral of video-gaming and pornography. Another is that they are refusing to get involved in long-term relationships with women. This has far-reaching ramifications, not least of which is the declining birthrate in the Western world. This is why the state of masculinity is literally one of civilizational urgency.

Masculinity, as it has been traditionally understood, is maligned now as sexist, classist, even racist, and certainly archaic. Some among the radical left don’t even bother containing their hatred for it. One blogger condemned masculinity as

a cancer incompatible with modernity. It is one of the most destructive forces in the world and must be destroyed. Traditional masculinity has to die in just the same way that sexism and racism and homophobia have to die. It can’t be reformed, it can’t be rescued. It has to be replaced.

In another example, the UK Guardian once posted an op-ed called, “It’s time to do away with the concept of manhood altogether.” These are just a couple of examples from an ongoing flood of pieces decrying traditional masculinity as some sort of social cancer.

It is challenging in the extreme for boys and young men to understand what it means to be a man in a society that openly smears masculinity as “toxic” and even obsolete. “No society can thrive – or survive – when half its members believe they’re oppressed and the other half are told there’s no reason for them to exist,” write anti-feminists Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly. A civilization whose men are confused and insecure about their masculinity, and who will not or cannot embrace their traditional roles of procreating, protecting, and providing is signaling that it is weak and ripe for conquering. The crisis of Western masculinity is signaling that our civilization is becoming desiccated, weak, and impotent – literally so, as sperm count and testosterone levels are reportedly dropping all across the Western world as precipitously as the birth rate.

“A woman simply is,” writes Camille Paglia in Sex, Art and American Culture, putting her own spin on a famous declaration from Simone de Beauvoir, “but a man must become.” This is true – boys must be taught to become men. For that to happen, they need inspiring, positive male role models. They need to be immersed in a culture that values and respects masculinity and its characteristics and achievements. And they need something too often lacking in our current educational system: moral instruction. “Girls need directive moral education as well,” writes “the Factual Feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers. “But when we consider that boys are more likely to fail at school, to become disengaged, to get into trouble, and generally to lose their way to a viable future, it is reasonable to conclude that boys need it more.”

An important hallmark of masculinity is to be enough in control of your emotions to take care of business when necessary. There is a reason for this: throughout history men have been the providers and protectors, the hunters and warriors, the builders and trailblazers, and those duties demand no small measure of emotional toughness and restraint. This still holds true in today’s urban jungle. In fact, studies show that emotionality may protect women from stress but does not protect men from it. Men best combat stress through self-control.

Critics of masculinity are fond of saying that phrases like “suck it up and be a man” or “man up” are damaging, and depending on the context and the man, they can be. But if a man isn’t capable of manning up when the situation calls for it, then he suffers for it. More importantly, his loved ones suffer for it. His community suffers for it. His country, his civilization suffers for it when he’s told that traditional masculinity is oppressive and violent and hateful and that what he really needs is a good public cry. No matter how loudly a minority of voices in the culture declare otherwise, no woman wants a man who needs to be cuddled every night after work to keep it together. Women want a husband and a father for their children whom they can count on to be a pillar of strength and resilience in times of stress, emergency, and danger. That’s a demanding duty, but a sacred one.

Now, there are certain unhealthy expressions of masculinity that boys and men are sometimes pressured to wear, and it definitely is not healthy for men to be so stoic that they are emotionally repressed. But the feminist take is that men must throw out the baby with the bathwater and utterly reject their true nature.

In any case, being a man, or a good man anyway, is not a measure of how macho or in touch with one’s feminine side a man is, but about the values he lives by and how committed he is to upholding them.

And there’s the rub. In our national conversation about masculinity, there is far more emphasis on how men are inherently broken and bad than there is what makes them whole and good. The critics of traditional masculinity can easily point to what that looks like, but few if any can articulate what constitutes the opposite, what healthy masculinity looks like – apart from men erasing their own nature and acting more like, well, the stereotype of women: less assertive and competitive on the one hand, and more emotional, vulnerable, and nurturing on the other. These critics quite frankly want men emasculated and for women to embrace the worst characteristics of toxic masculinity: promiscuity, profanity, cut-throat ambition, and the like.

Boys need to find their way again to becoming men. To do that they need a code that speaks to their scorned, suppressed masculine nature, a set of values to serve as guideposts to show them the way and keep them on the right path. Resuscitating a code which emphasizes service, duty, responsibility, and defense of the defenseless, among other classic virtues, can rescue boys today from the doldrums of purposelessness and put them on a path to being productive citizens of honor and integrity.

That code is chivalry. More on that to come.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior