IN DEFENCE OF MEN
The caustic, insightful commentator, Brendan O’Neill, has written an essay for the British opinion site, Spiked, about the cultural assault on men and masculinity. He tees off his piece as a review of a book titled How Not to be a Boy by comic writer, Robert Webb. It’s a good place to start his counter attack on the therapeutic castrati of the West. O’Neill’s hostility to religion is often irritating, but he is a talented, brilliant writer.
And we have Robert Webb’s How Not to be a Boy. The title itself drips with this arrogance of extrapolation. Webb, a comic writer, best known as one of the stars of Peep Show alongside David Mitchell, thinks his childhood experiences have endowed him with a special insight into the predicament of men, the toxic nature of masculinity, and the necessity for 50 per cent of the population to change their ways if they want to survive. He really says this. His aim with this memoir is no less than to ‘extend that awareness [he means the gender-awareness that he has already achieved] to the half of the population who might still be under the impression that gender conditioning didn’t happen to them because they have a Y chromosome’. It’s almost religious. The Confessions of Robert Webb. I mean, I think my life has been pretty interesting, and I have certainly learned a lot from it, but turning it into a moral guide for everyone else? The very thought makes me wince. I’m no Augustine. And neither is Webb.
and this,
And such a longing is, too often these days, written off as ‘toxic masculinity’. At root, today’s attack on men is really an attack on the aspiration to self-governance, which is an aspiration shared by individuals of every gender, race and class. The cult of fragility and self-abasement might be attractive and even socially beneficial to a small strata of the literary middle classes, like Webb, but it is generally viewed as repulsive by the population at large. It might be useful to the new elite to advertise their wounds and weakness — it wins them media praise and book deals, after all — but such indulgent victimology has no positive role to play in society at large. And so people resist it, whether by being men or by being strong women — that is, by being individuals who, through ‘the operations of intelligence and will’, might command their lives and impact on their communities.
Let us stand up, then, for men. Even for masculinity. And for women who aspire to be as autonomous as men have traditionally been. For these people, the majority, do not have the luxury of wallowing in weakness. I have always had a soft spot for Camille Paglia’s observation in a Playboy article in 1995: ‘The women’s movement is rooted in the belief that we don’t need men. All it will take is one natural disaster to prove how wrong that is. Then, the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class.’ The new middle-class clerisy, whose number includes Webb, would do well to remember this: your literary luxury to demean the virtues of masculinity is predicated on the fact that you live in a society in which masculine men, particularly working-class ones, will defend your life and your family in the face of a disaster that will hopefully never come. You are free to insult these people precisely because these people have developed the ‘masculine’ strength to defend the society you live in.
You owe it to yourself to RTWDT.
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