Toxic masculinity, Progressive hypocrites and victims, and real men *UPDATED”
The past two months have proven that toxic masculinity is the Progressives’ purview, while real American men still get the job done no matter the risk.
In the late 1960s, the appropriate term of art for men who hadn’t seen the light was “male chauvinist pig.” Feminists applied this moniker to men who refused to recognize Second Wave feminism (equal pay for equal work and equal opportunities). As feminism morphed into trying to control male sexuality in a world that had abandoned old-fashioned codes of conduct, the term switched to “sexist.” The focus was no longer on equal pay for equal work and equal opportunities, but had switched to a focus on sexual harassment in the workplace.
The 1960s and 1970s war on sexism had a great run. Millions of trees died thanks to voluminous HR binders regularity workplace conduct, a whole industry of compliance coaches was enriched, and law firms seized upon compliance as a reliable income stream. Eventually, though, most men began to wise up and stopped grabbing women or making unwanted sex a quid pro quo for workplace advancement. By the 1980s, the focus shifted from concrete harassment and assault on the job (with the later being a criminal act as well as a tortious one), to the intangible standard looking at what the so-called “reasonable women” would consider to be a hostile workplace.
Decades of training and litigation against chauvinism, sexism, and hostile workplace-ism have done their job. The biggest part of the bell curve of American men has been trained not to discriminate against women in the workplace, not to expose them to unwanted sexual advances, and not to create a hostile workplace.
You’d think the Progressives would celebrate, but that would mean you think that they’re interested in improving women’s lot, rather than maintaining power over America’s social dynamics. With the latter as their true goal, Progressives needed a new target. With men avoiding past behavioral sins, Progressives have shifted from blaming egregious behavior to blaming men for merely existing.
Yes, the fact that you are a man is toxic. Just by being you, you offend and crush women. You sit wrong, you speak or speak-up wrong in meetings, you explain too much . . . you’re just too, too male, you disgusting, bullying creature, you!
One of the results of this war on men qua men, is the feminizing of the most recent generation of young men, especially those from America’s self-styled Progressive elite. Here’s a concrete example: When I’ve visited my little Bookworm’s obscenely expensive liberal arts college, which is 63% female, the men I saw (a sampling of 30-40 on a small campus) were not traditionally manly. All gave off a vague bisexual or gay vibe.
Having thought about it, I’m pretty sure the gay guys actually were gay. I have a suspicion, though, that those who appeared bisexual were, in fact, young men who have been trained away from appearing manly. For example, they all end their sentences as women do, with upward inflection or uptalk. That is, even when making a declarative statement, their inflection rises at the end of the sentence, making it sound like a question.
When something shocks or surprises these young men, they press their hands to their cheeks as women do. They gossip as women do. And they engage in social spats as women do. That is, we’re not talking the hierarchical jostling that’s typical of men; instead, what I saw was “mean girl” behavior from young men. There is no toxic masculinity of campus because there is no (or very little) masculinity on campus to begin with.
Separate from the damage done to young men, what Progressives failed to realize with their full frontal attack on masculinity itself is that, when you clamp down on ordinary male behavior, you end up with a subterranean, festering, oleaginous, potentially explosive mass of truly toxic behavior. This hidden behavior is going to be at its worst in those communities that make the loudest noises about how evil such behavior is: Hollywood, with Progressives in Washington, D.C. a close second.
Nowhere else in America have both men and women been as loud in their condemnations of toxic masculinity. Even as Hollywood cranks out movies with manly (yet sensitive) men with guns, Hollywood’s players, both in front of and behind the cameras, never stop talking about the evil of manliness. (And guns, of course. Always guns.)
It’s not at all surprising, then, that Hollywood has suddenly become Ground Zero for the bursting of that loathsome subterranean boil: the public pressure to be a Third Wave Feminist (i.e., anti-men, even if you’re a man) has been extraordinary, while the number of men violating Hollywood’s apparent shibboleths has been equally strong. If you want a graphic to help you visualize this point, check out Dr. Pimple Popper’s videos. They’re horribly gross — or so I’ve heard, as I haven’t watched them. Nevertheless, they’re instructive to help you understand what’s festering under Hollywood’s merely grotesque usual presentation. Lip service cannot long contain assault, harassment, coercion, and rape.
Which gets me to the hypocrisy point. With Progressive Harvey Weinstein, jointed by an ever-growing cast of top-list Progressive Hollywood names (e.g., Ben Affleck, Oliver Stone, George Clooney), dominating the headlines, Progressives are trying to fight back with the only weapon they’ve got: Donald Trump!
“How dare you,” they say, “point to Weinstein and Clinton when you’ve given Trump a pass.”
That is not a good argument. First, as I pointed out yesterday, the accusations against Trump are not the same as those against Weinstein and Bill Clinton, that other famous Progressive predator. No one contends that Trump raped or assaulted women, or crudely exposed himself in front of woman who hadn’t consented to that exposure. Myriad women have made that claim against Weinstein and Clinton.
No one contends that Trump demanded sexual favors as a quid pro quo for hiring a woman or continuing her employment. Myriad women have made that claim against Weinstein. Moreover, of the women who contended that Trump was boorish, not one of them stuck around when research showed that their stories were riddled with holes and that their fanatic Hillary support made their narrative suspect. When challenged in a media environment that was totally supportive, they nevertheless just melted away.
So what we’re left with when it comes to Trump is his being convicted by his own words. And what are these words? He wanted an affair with woman and backed off when she said no. And he crudely stated, entirely accurately (and in the third person, with no reference to himself), that a man who is rich and powerful can find women who are willing to allow him any sexual favors he wants. That’s it. One can fault Trump for locker room talk and, it appears, trying to have sex with a married woman, but there’s nothing in the tape that raises him to the level of either Weinstein or Clinton, both of whom physically assaulted and raped women, and who used their disproportionate power to inveigle women into sexual acts.
Second, the hypocrisy argument fails, not just when one compares conservative Trump to Progressive Weinstein and Clinton (and to all those other Hollywood types), but also when one looks at conservatives versus Progressives generally. Conservatives have indeed attacked Clinton relentlessly for what he did. Nevertheless, they’ve never embraced the whole sexist, “toxic masculinity” meme and instead have pushed back against it. They’ve argued for old-fashioned values, while acknowledging (a) that the Progressive-created culture attacks those values, making it difficult to advance them and (b) that people are frail and will not always live up to these values.
Meanwhile, it’s been the Progressives who have relentlessly advanced the narrative that men — or, more accurately, conservative men — are inherently evil and that Progressive political and social policies, all of which Progressive men follow religiously, of course, are the bulwarks against this evil. As Hollywood proves, this is untrue — and everybody in Hollywood has known its untrue even while insisting that America’s sexual and gender social contract must change. They have been pushing on us standards that the powerful refuse to follow and that the weak fear to follow. (Washington D.C.’s sex and gender scandal hasn’t yet exploded, but it will.)
Regarding my point, above, about how the victims of Hollywood’s predatory males have kept silent, Don Surber makes a compelling argument that these women’s (and men’s) silence is a direct response to the Clinton years. Hillary may tweet out that all women should automatically be believed, a theory that lesbian sex police on college campuses take seriously even when the evidence points in the other direction. In Progressive Hollywood, though, where men hold the power and women want the jobs, victims got a different message: Don’t mess with the predatory Progressive power brokers because they will destroy you and you will be betraying the Progressive cause.
John Ringo’s appropriately well-received post also addresses the Stockholm Syndrome and projection that are the norm among Hollywood’s victimized women, some of the men, and probably too many children:
People who are subject to long-term abuse MUST find an outlet for the anger that bubbles in them all the time. They don’t, dare not for various reasons, lash out at their abusers. Think of children in abusive homes. How can they lash out at their parents who are abusing them? They are powerless. So they become bullies in turn.
Conservatives are an easy target. OBVIOUSLY they are worse than the ‘good’ and ‘decent’ liberal men who talk about how important feminism is all the time. Then abuse them. Conservatives HAVE to be worse! They HAVE to be! It’s just not getting reported, just as the abuse they are subjected to by the Harvey Weinsteins of the world is not reported. And since the people around them are ‘their’ tribe, they must, for various psychological reasons, be ‘good’ or at least ‘better’ than the enemy tribe.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t conservatives just as shitty as Harvey Weinstein. There probably are. But they are MUCH more likely to be outed by the news media. (Think of Newt Gingrich and divorcing his dying wife or for that matter the Access Hollywood tape. Interesting that name keeps coming up don’t you think?) Do you really think if a Republican senator was charged by a woman with groping her or masturbating into a plant, that the New York Times would kill the story?
In that way the liberal bias in media can be considered a God send to conservatives and Republicans. It polices our ranks. It is a major weakness for the Democrats and liberals because it refuses to do so. Thus you get the Harvey Weinsteins, the Weiners, the Spitzers who are all ‘protected’ classes until they can’t be protected anymore.
So do liberal actresses and models and all the rest really think conservative men are the worst human beings in the world?
Yes. Yes, they do. Because they have to work every day with some of the ACTUALLY worst human beings in the world. And they have to believe conservative men are worse. Otherwise, there’s no point to being on the ‘good’ side.
The irony of all this is that, just as the Hollywood pustule is coming to its head, Nature’s recent reminders that she is all-powerful have allowed America to witness a grand, exhilarating and heartwarming display of actual masculinity. There is no toxic masculinity here. This is the good stuff, when men pull up their pants and do what good men do: Go into dangerous places and take care of people who need help.
And yes, of course there were women out there fire fighting, and rescuing, and providing shelter for, and supporting, and giving of themselves to the victims of these disasters, but the reality is that, as these pictures show, when it comes to the physical stuff, it’s the men who have the strength and stamina. Your average women simply cannot slog through water carrying a woman and her baby to safety — but men can and do.
So here’s the right message, the real message, rather than the toxic effluvia flowing from Progressives in Hollywood, the media, and Washington D.C.: When you raise your boys right, by caring for, loving, and respecting them, and by shaping their manly traits into virtues, not vices, you will see a generation of men who will care for, love, and respect you too — and they will lay down their lives doing so if necessary.
UPDATE: Another picture came my way:
A friend of mine told me that her son, a firefighter, has been pulling 40 hour shifts trying to save people, home, and businesses.
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