On Hating Men

For the past few months I’ve been binge-reading the firsthand accounts of the men who won WWII – the fighter and bomber pilots, the navigators and gunners and bombardiers of the big war birds, the tankers and the infantrymen, foot soldiers and officers alike. They, along with the women who were their wives, riveters, nurses, welders and so on, more than earned their appellation as the Greatest Generation. Their courage and persistence and ability to face terrors and absorb punishment that I can’t even fathom was mind-boggling. I find myself downloading one book after another on my Kindle, devouring those tales of a mighty struggle won through, among many other factors, the powerful masculinity of the guys on the front lines.

Meanwhile, I’ve been force-fed another sort of reading binge, via the constant stream of pieces castigating men here on LinkedIn. Endless articles – appearing now nearly daily – tell us how men are at fault for countless things (these are direct quotes from a handful of those articles, from just the past few months):

• “Our sons need to know that the imprudence of young women does not acquit the infamy of young men.”
• “Hypothesis 1: Men are stupid… Hypothesis 2: Men are blind.”
• “On college campuses across the country, the words “male athlete” and “sexual violence” are often seen as inextricably linked. And the truth is, they are.”
• “And, it is time for men to stop expressing their frustrations about how women's roles have changed. Get over it!”
• “This is especially true for gender-based violence, where nearly 100% of the time men are the ones perpetrating these crimes towards women.”
• “Women know one thing - however they or society label themselves, some games just cannot be lost. It's a sense of perseverance that men, honestly, can only imagine, hopefully learn from and should always appreciate.”
• “The victims of these abuses are, overwhelmingly (although not exclusively) our daughters. The perpetrators of these abuses are, inescapably, our sons.”
• “Is this a female thing? I have no idea. I know whatever skill or acumen I have was forged through bravery and failure and repetition. Maybe for men it comes by way of ego and presumption.”
• “Men are rewarded for faking an 80-hour work week.”
• "Dads: It's Time to Man-Up for Working Moms"

Week after endless week, the same messages appear, not just on LinkedIn, but in the news and in entertainment and in “science” and in our schools. (Just Google “masculinity” and you’ll see what I mean.) There is a constant drumbeat: that men are broken and evil and idiotic and lazy and apparently all but worthless, and must change in just about every imaginable way.

I’ve wondered this for ages: just what in the living hell is wrong with our society, our institutions, our businesses, that these vicious misandrist messages are deemed acceptable, much less healthy? Any similar article taking all women to task for perceived failings would quickly become a national scandal.

Sadly, it’s not a recent phenomenon. Men have been widely castigated and lampooned for more than a generation now, and it’s inevitably taking a toll. Today’s boys are falling further and further behind in school, and are being drugged and punished for behaving like boys. At elite institutions, young men’s voices are being actively silenced (and young men are letting that happen, which itself is a shocking, terrifying departure from the qualities of independence and self-confidence the WWII generation had in abundance). Men are lagging women in college degrees earned, and are increasingly disengaging from adult society.

The dichotomy for me in reading the lives of the heroes of the 1940s and the assaults on boys and men today is as fascinating as it is heartbreaking. Those long-ago boys were raised by mothers and fathers and a society that treasured their masculinity, and the unique gifts it brings to mankind. What sickness then took hold that made the children and grandchildren of the Greatest Generation believe that it was impossible to open the world wider for women without a wholesale tearing down of men? What caused the epidemic of diffidence that made the past two generations of men unable or unwilling to defend against these endless attacks? And what is it today, now that the terrible toll resulting from that initial assault has been evident for more than a decade, that makes us believe that increasing the tempo and severity of the war on masculinity is a winning move?

I’m raising two young boys. I had hoped that the pendulum might swing back from the insanity of the past few decades so that they could live in a culture that valued who they are. Instead it’s swinging further toward disaster; witness the ongoing attempt, now reaching the halls of Congress, to assume all men are rapists and to strip them of their due process rights. This is extremely scary stuff, as if the rest of it weren’t scary enough.

I’m trying to teach my sons to live beyond these assaults in the time-honored fashion that shaped the winners of that most important war, as recounted in their tales of their own boyhoods: participating in sports and Boy Scouts, having an early freedom to wander, enjoying the outdoors, engaging in reasonable risk-taking, and cultivating their natural love of mechanical things, to give just a few examples (examples which themselves are under widespread assault by today’s sick culture). I pray it’s enough to save them from the war they face – the war to grow up to be fine boys and men proud of their masculinity in the face of a society that, by many stark indications, hates them.

I will work doggedly to instill some of my war heroes’ courage and persistence into my boys, to weather storms and fight battles not of their own making, but which must be fought and won just as those men of yesteryear won theirs – not in a real shooting war for them, I fervently pray, but in a war of widely condoned (and even celebrated!) bigotry, misandry, intolerance and hatred. Concurrently, I’ll do everything in my power to keep them free of the victim mentality; we’re gagging on purported victims as it is. And meanwhile I’ll also continue to sincerely hope against hope that we as a society find our way back to sanity.