By Matthew Delaney
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
Like most teenagers, I woke up one day and really wanted to become a man.
That desire shoved me in some funny directions. For instance, in hopes of speeding up my late-bloomer growth curve, I forced my voice to become so deep that I spoke in vibrations more than anything that could be considered the English language.
But they weren’t all that silly. I signed up my lanky, 120-pound body to play freshman football in high school. Yeah, I got my shit rocked plenty of times — but the challenges shared with teammates made for a special kind of brotherhood.
One thing I never lost sight of in this teenaged haze was that my mom, God love her, couldn’t do anything to help me become a man. I was going to have to figure that out on my own. So, I’m confused why the solution to our current masculinity crisis is to beg women to come rescue us.
That was the tact taken by Andrew Yang in his recent podcast about the crisis.
At first the businessman-turned-political-influencer illustrated how dire things are for American men: they are falling behind in educational achievement relative to women; their inability to land good-paying jobs, especially working-class men, is causing them to retreat from society; and most dangerously, some of the men are flocking to far-right ideologies in search of significance.
But these stats have been around for a while and the crisis even longer than that. That knowledge hasn’t made us want to fix it. Yang then cleverly noted that if men continue to fall behind in school, about a third of college-educated women won’t have a suitable partner to marry. His co-host, Zach Graumann, made the point even more explicit when he said, “If feminists want to protect women, we need strong men.”
Read between the lines: They’re trying to convince women that the crisis exists so that they’ll do something about it.
It shouldn’t surprise us that this is coming from the liberal corner of the world. They’re the ones who proclaimed, “The future is female.” Even men’s self-help authors like Jack Myers said in 2016 that “I believe women and the women’s movement can be at the center of a new narrative and national conversation focused on developing positive male role models for future generations.”
That slogan might have gone out of fashion, but the general sentiment hasn’t. The left wants men’s self-image to be curated by women. They literally believe that saving men requires doing the least masculine thing possible.
In all seriousness, the stats Yang laid out should offend everyone with a Y chromosome. The average woman is outperforming the average man at every level. Yes, exceptional men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are still out there. But average women lead social crusades that bend the world to their will. And they do it very well.
Moms successfully went after drunk driving in the 1980s, and gun violence after Sandy Hook. Moms are also winning fights against critical race theory and mask mandates in school districts. The MeToo movement showed us how powerful women are in media and academic spheres, since they could purge even innocent men over false sexual harassment allegations.
Men, on the other hand, don’t even know who we are. The demands of survival originally hammered out an identity for us. But our physical gifts have become useless in an information economy. And our role as fathers has become immaterial thanks to social safety nets.
It’s no wonder the culture has become so dismissive of men. We’ve allowed our failures to define us. From suicide, drug addiction, and committing violent crimes to the social failure of allowing male-only havens like the Boy Scouts and the frat house to be taken away from us because of “toxic masculinity,” men are lost and we’re in pain.
Which is where things get tricky. Men have always been humanity’s crash dummy. We’re supposed to step on the land mines so everyone else can make it safe ground. We’re indispensable because we’re disposable. It’s part of our evolutionary programming. However, without a firm identity, we’ve leaned on that programming to spin our self-destruction as a kind of noble sacrifice.
But there is none. Men allowing themselves to decay so women can take charge of society is not fulfilling their evolutionary duty. It’s allowing the left to get away with refitting its belief that (your) suffering = (elite) progress. It’s devaluing manhood.
Of course, the signs of our worth are all around us. Fatherless homes see more poverty, crime and instability. Effeminate corporations see more woke posturing and less profit. The feminine character of our institutions has brought about one of the most divisive times in our history that didn’t involve war.
The country is in crisis because men are in crisis. If you had any doubts about the value of your masculine self before, this should be your wake-up call. If you’re still doubting what the purpose of your manhood is after that, then don’t worry. A woman will come by to save you shortly.
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