Masculinity Doesn't Mean Acting Like an Animal
Why is it that, in this modern world, it seems that there are only two kinds of competing images of "masculinity" being argued for in the public sphere? The first is really a non-masculinity, the feminized man; the one who likes things women wants him to like, who would never do anything offensive to anyone, who is mainly interested in obeying his wife (or his mother), doesn't believe in competition, doesn't believe that being aggressive could ever possibly be good, agrees with what feminist academia calls "women's ways of knowing" (as in that you don't actually have to worry about logic or fact, but Feeling is paramount), and generally spends most of his time crawling around on his belly apologizing for having a penis.
The other, however, is the Barbarian. It is the man who likes loud things and fire and unintelligible grunting, and who likes beating up other men; he is unapologetically slobby and covered in grime, he treats women like they were objects, and hates responsibility of any kind. He thinks learning and knowledge are for pussies, and only wants to have fun with his "bros".
Each of the above is obviously a direct rejection of the other. But both are basically the same thing: Man as Child. In the one case, the good little boy who does what mommy says; the wiener-kid who has handed over his testicles forever to the women in his life. In the other case, it is the Naughty boy, the one who is free and lives in the wild, the feral child from Lord of the Flies.
And this is of course because the relativist/feminist influence in modern society has taught us that men and all they do is basically bad; people have somehow become convinced that somehow, it is man who is the destroyer, who needs to be contained to exist in society; and if he should escape, can hope for no better but to live like a feral savage.
All of that is bullshit.
Where is the model of true, adult Manhood? The model of Man as Civilizer?!
It was man who created civilization, who wrought order from chaos, far from the destroyer, if it was not for the positive masculine traits: discipline, responsibility, intellectual rigor, bravery, and a willingness to step the fuck up and do what must be done, along with the bravery to say that there are things that are TRUE and things that are FALSE, and that there are things that are RIGHT and things that are WRONG. It was man who took the competitive drive, and the aggressiveness of human nature and did not try to banish it or repress it but directed it, using the tools of the intellect, into constructing wonders. If it was not for these traits, we would all still be living, at best, in mud huts. We would lack virtually all of the comforts and all of the freedoms we have today. We really would be barely better than animals.
So I am a man. And I am neither interested in being a simpering unthinking manchild or a dirt-covered unthinking savage. I am a man who has mastered logic, grammar, and rhetoric. I prize Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice, Benevolence and Charity. I live out the principles of Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth.
And I mourn the fact that our sick, decadent society is failing to tell people that this is what a man is.
And please note, I am not saying that women cannot have these traits; the world would be a better place if more of them did, in fact, rather than subscribing to the ideological elements in our society (post-modernism, marxism, feminism) that seek to destroy those very traits by selling the lies that you don't actually have to learn anything in order "to know", that irrationality is somehow a virtue and logic a vice, that emotionalism is healthy and stoicism is somehow a flaw; and that nothing is ever really true or false, right or wrong, except actually standing for something. That way lies collapse.
RPGPundit
(february 25, 2010)