The coming crisis: the womanization of men
There is a creeping, substantial problem that may soon dominate our society. Many refuse to acknowledge this; ignored by media, perhaps even encouraged by it. Such will have a greater, more lasting impact than any of the political machinations making the headlines today. This is about the absence of men.
Am not talking of mere gender identification. Current Philippine demographic is about 1:1 male to female ratio, translating roughly to 55 million males. But we’re not talking of males, we’re talking of men.
Because, right now, there’s a substantial number of males that are just all abs but no substance. That is not manliness, that is being ridiculous.
So what is a man? Feminists will have hissy fits but let me just simply put it this way: we know a man when we see him.
He was our father, uncle, grandfather.
Silent, providing, protecting, stoic, and certain.
They were not the emotional, public confessional snowflakes of today, overcome by doubt, physically vain, weak both morally and physically, constantly in need of social affirmation. To the extent that even effeminacy is declared preferred (see Jimmy Kimmel at the recent Oscars).
For decades and perhaps reaching a peak these past few years, men have been attacked for being men. As commentator Allie Stuckey writes, “It’s trendy these days to blame our problems on … “toxic masculinity.” Yet, “the simple truth is: we need good men. We need strong dads. We need loyal brothers and friends. We need them to be protective. We need them to work hard. We need them to care. We need them to be present. We need them to stand up for us. We need them to hold it together. We need all of the things that feminists swear we don’t.”
Nevertheless, in a society where being manly is considered arrogance and the traditional family is just a construct of the medieval patriarchy, Philippine media and culture seem inclined to eradicate manliness.
Even now, 20% of marriages in the Philippines will be broken, 82% of such broken marriages involve children, and more and more young prefer not marrying at all. The consequences are disturbing.
As Barack Obama famously puts it: “We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”
Clearly, fatherless homes are problematic for any child but they are devastating for boys.
From The Federalists’ Bre Payton: “Men account for 77% of the nation’s suicides, they more than twice as likely to become alcoholics, they are more likely to die of an overdose than women, and 90% of inmates are men.”
“Feminism has been hijacked by extremists,” says Christina Hoff Summers.
To which Tucker Carlson adds: “This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening,” he stated. “Ignoring the decline of men does not help anyone. Men and women need each other. One cannot exist without the other. That is elemental biology, but it’s also the reality each one of us has lived, with our parents and siblings and friends. When men fail, all of us suffer.”
Yet here we are, bizarrely hurling ourselves gomorrahically towards the anything goes insanity of same-sex “marriage,” SOGI “rights,” and divorce.
One suspects that the progressive hatred towards men have less to do with the patriarchy than it is to do with virtue. “Virtue,” from the Latin “virtus,” was derived from “vir,” which is the Roman word for “man.”
To say “virtue” is thus to refer to the “excellent qualities of men, including physical strength, valorous conduct, and moral rectitude” (see The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories).
These Platonic and Aristotelian virtues (e.g., prudence, courage, temperance, fortitude; even piety, the golden mean) would find their way to our country’s foundations.
In short, this attack on men is but a variation of the progressive push for relativism, of rejecting objective moral standards, and the doing away of traditional values. It is essentially to pull apart what made us a society.
Let us not allow that to happen.
Let our boys be boys. Make them rough house, play fight, get dirty with competitive sports, let them be rambunctious, allow them to fall and be hurt, make them learn to stand on their own without every minute tenderly telling them it’s all ok. Let the fathers mold their sons, teaching discipline, strength, fortitude.
Let us (specially the women) demand that men, before fathering children, to marry first and be themselves good role models, men of proper character.
Most importantly: allow these sons their fathers. Let’s have laws and policies that preserve the family and the institution of marriage.
Jemy Gatdula is a Senior Fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.
Twitter @jemygatdula
