Masculinity

Non-Toxic And Good For You

And all you gals out there, don't leave home without you're femininity.

"I just think that culturally, women - we're all human beings - but at least we don't have our masculinity to prove." ~ Gloria Steinem

But don't you have your femininity to prove?

It seems like, for the last few decades at least, the view of the educational establishment is that boys are flawed girls, and are sometimes treated as such.

Toxic masculinity is a supposed issue, maybe a manufactured one, but to me a guy guilty of toxic masculinity is just a masculine guy who’s a jerk. He should stop being a jerk, but not stop being masculine. (Why is there not a crisis of toxic femininity? Inquiring minds want to know.) One wonders if the problem is that masculine traits just aren't useful by the ruling class, until they are.

Why don't we all just go back to being men and women? Masculinity is just what you get with normal boys and men, it's the way they are constructed. The toxic masculinity thing implies that normal masculinity is not normal but is an aberration, using the term just naturally implies that that masculinity itself is bad, a sort of word game to confuse normalcy with bad behavior, thereby besmirching normal male behavior.

Femininity is likewise just what you get with normal girls and women. It's not called toxic, but there does seem to be a war against it as well. Women are made to feel abnormal just for wanting to act like normal women.. They must go into the workplace like men and Prove Themselves. (One wonders if a major reason for the feminist movement was just to increase the amount of income tax collected, and maybe to destroy the family as an institution.)

"Simple femininity is the most important thing about a woman, and it is a quality a great many women are in jeopardy of losing. Women are being emancipated out of their femininity in this modern age." ~ Yul Brynner

It's popular among some these days to affirm that any differences in the sexes are due to the way children are raised, so raising a boy as a girl will make him a girl. (There is a possibly apocryphal story of a couple who gave their two boys dolls to play with. They started using the dolls as guns to play cops and robbers.)

Until recently my daughter taught preschool. She told me that she would show videos about trucks, bulldozers, heavy equipment and such things. All of the boys would be enthralled and all of the girls would be bored. There does seem to be an inherent biological difference.

"Every woman knows that any man engaging in street harassment can switch to anger very quickly and that anger goes to rage and their rage is their masculinity being threatened. We're scared for good reason." ~ Rose McGowan

Yes she is right to be afraid, but what on Earth makes her think that it's because his masculinity is being threatened? A bad person is a bad person, and I suspect baser motives. (Would she consider concealed carry?)

"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men." ~ Norman Mailer

Maybe Norman, but I'm not convinced.

"At a young age, boys learn that to express compassion or empathy is to show weakness. They hear confusing messages that force them to repress their emotions, establish hierarchies, and constantly prove their masculinity ... whether boys and later men have chosen to resist or conform to this masculine norm, there is loneliness, anxiety, and pain." ~ Jennifer Siebel Newsom

Here we have masculinity as a sort of neurosis. Boys don't just naturally become masculine because of their genetic makeup, it's because of nefarious societal forces, and is unhealthy. The push seems to be generally to undermine masculinity by showing it as being some sort of unhealthy mental affliction that we would be better off without. Fortunately, most of America pays no attention.

One would think that, if masculinity is just the result of culture, and since societies differ so much, there would be many in which boys simply don't become masculine, and for that matter maybe only the girls do. (Or maybe neither, or both.) The plains of Africa since time immemorial must have been peopled by hunter gatherers where the women hunt and the men stay home, at least in some cases..

One gets the impression that you have a lot of the somewhat famous pontificating on the issue because that's what one must do in certain circles. They follow like sheep with what ever is the next thing.

Unfortunately, there does seem to be a real issue of testosterone levels dropping in the population, soybeans maybe? I remember reading an article in Science News Magazine sometime around the late 1960s in which they described a small subgroup of people, less than one percent of the population, who think of themselves as the opposite sex. At the time it was just seen as one sort of abnormal psychology, and I thought, well, that's interesting, but somehow now it's all over the place. Soybeans maybe, or some sort of psy-op?

I read a short biography once upon a time about Cyrus the Great of Persia, who was responsible for a large expansion of their empire, including the conquering of Babylon. (I wish I could find the book, but I can't.)

One story in it was about how Croesus of Lydia (much of western modern day Turkey) tried to invade Persia, but after an indecisive battle returned home to Sardis, the capitol. Soon Cyrus arrived in Lydia and conquered it, and as was his habit with conquered kings, he kept Croesus in his court. (He had a general policy of keeping local elites in place after their defeat, probably to avoid constant rebellions. Rome acted similarly.)

https://www.history.com/news/cyrus-the-great-persian-empire-iran

From the above linked History.com article:

The ascendancy of Cyrus troubled Croesus, the king of Lydia, which occupied the western half of present- day Turkey. As he contemplated an attack on the rising power of now-neighboring Persia, Croesus dispatched a messenger to consult the Greek Oracle at Delphi. “If Croesus goes to war, he will destroy a great empire,” the medium to the gods was said to have reported.

Buoyed by the divine message, Croesus led a huge army across the Halys River and attacked the Persians in 547 B.C. After an indecisive battle, Cyrus surprised the retreating Lydian forces by following them through t he wintertime cold toward the capital of Sardis.

With his Persian forces outnumbered in the decisive Battle of Thymbra, Harpagus, the defecting Median general, mounted cavalrymen on the army’s baggage camels and placed them at the front of the battle line. The stench of the camels so repelled the charging Lydian horses that they bolted from the battlefield. Retreating inside the walls of Sardis, the Lydians eventually surrendered after a Persian siege.

The oracle’s words to Croesus had proven true. An empire had been destroyed—but it was his.

The story I remember was that, some time after being conquered, Sardis was preparing to revolt, and Cyrus was preparing to crush the revolt in a bloody battle. Former King Croesus said to Cyrus that a better idea might be to send a force to confiscate all weapons, then after a time the men would become so feminized that their would be no further danger. That was done, and it worked so well it has been a game plan ever since.

In the early days of the country all adult males were expected to be in their local militia. This by itself would provide a protection against being Cyrussed. (A new verb; to Cyrus meaning to disarm all males of a region with the intent to feminize them.) They were well regulated, meaning that they were frequently drilled. Well regulated did not mean top down authoritarian control, as we are now expected to believe.

Being familiar with and training with arms changes the world view and mind set of those involved. They are less likely to adopt the mind set that the rulers are on top, we are on the bottom, and there's nothing to be done. The old saying is that an armed man is a citizen and an unarmed man is a subject.

Stay Brave, Stay Free and Happy Holy Days