Culture warrior Mark Tapson challenges the Left’s claim that male chromosomes create toxic masculinity — and offers an antidote to this misandrist view.
The Speaker’s group that I co-chair hosted a wonderful speaker today: Mark Tapson. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because you’ve seen his writing on quality conservative websites such as Front Page Magazine, the now defunct Truth Revolt (which is making way for a different, even better project), Breitbart, etc.
As is true for me, Mark is a former Democrat who found the cognitive dissonance between his values and the modern Democrat party too difficult to tolerate. Unlike me, he is not a gadfly but is, instead, a really deep thinker and a very knowledgeable man. Today, the thoughts and knowledge he shared with us revolved around the culture war on men and ways to counter the deep damage this war is inflicting on our fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers. Moreover, if these men are the primary victims, every woman in each man’s life becomes collateral damage.
The talk was wonderful. Mark is a very engaging speaker — he has a pleasant voice and his tone walks the fine line between lecture and conversation. You know he’s standing there educating you, but it feels as if you’re just at a party listening to the most interesting man in the room. Add knowledge and passion to the mix and you’ve got a talk that flies by. I was absolutely stunned when I realized that he’d been talking for 40 minutes. It felt like half that length. If we hadn’t had to clear the room, I think my group would still be there listening to him.
So what did Mark talk about? I didn’t take notes, so the rest of this post will be a little ragged, since my memory is more surreal than photographic. Anything intelligent in this post is Mark’s. Any mistakes or stupidities are mine.
Cultural Marxism is engaged in a full-out attack on roughly 50% and the damage is very real. Men have always been more likely to die on the job, because they take more dangerous jobs and, if that job is soldiering, death is a given. However, in today’s world, men are also more likely to commit suicide, to be victims of crime, to drop out of school, to have mental illnesses, and to be homeless. Not only does cultural Marxism fail to view this with appropriate horror, it believes these trends are a righteous punishment visited on today’s generation of men for patriarchal sins in the past.
At schools,in the news, and in the entertainment world — all entities over which the Left gained control during the culture wars — Americans are constantly taught that men are violent, insensitive, dangerous, oppressive and, in the modern parlance, the embodiment of “toxic masculinity.” The recent rash of mass shootings has escalated the rhetoric against men, because women (unless Muslim) tend not to do mass shootings.
Mark horrified the room by reading a litany of headlines blaming the Parkland shooting on “toxic masculinity.” It turns out that, while many conservatives have focused on the Left’s attack on the Second Amendment whenever there’s a shooting, there’s been a parallel attack that sees Leftists saying, “let’s not just get rid of guns, let’s ‘demasculinize’ men too.” It’s irrelevant to Leftists that the vast, vast majority of men and gun owners are not crazed killers. What matters is that shootings provide a justification for saying that manly men and guns have both got to go.
This full-court press against what constitutes manliness is a culture war phenomenon, rather than a genuine effort to end mass shootings. After all, if the Left really wanted to end these shootings, it would focus, not on guns and XY chromosomes, which are common to half the population; instead, the Left would look at the small number of significant common denominators binding shooters, such as long histories of mental illness, broken homes, fatherlessness, psychotropic drugs, etc., not to mention the fact that law enforcement in many cases failed spectacularly to stop known wolves. [Read more…]
