Manly Virtues:
Becoming the Men Who Make
Women Feel Perfectly Safe
by
Rod Van Mechelen
© 2003
An emasculated
Profile
A couple weeks ago,
while recuperating from surgery (a "cerebralcortexectomy," or
something like that), I watched E!'s Celebrity Profile of Melissa
Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls on Little House on the
Prairie. During the interview, she spoke fondly of Michael Landon, and
in particular of one episode that had a powerful impact on her life.
The episode involved a
story in which her character, Laura, ran away from home. When
Landon, as her father, finds her, he jumps off his horse, runs over to
her and, sobbing, embraces her. She described it with words to the
effect that, "This was the first time I buried my face in a man's
chest and felt perfectly safe."
This got me to thinking
(quite a feat, given the apparent nature of my surgery): "Perfectly
safe" are words few women in America today feel comfortable using in
the same sentence with a description of how they feel about men.
That's because, during the past 30+ years, feminists have worked very
hard to make women feel afraid of men.
They have profiled us as
rapists, warmongers and batterers, the source of every bad thing in
the world, the cause of all violence, demons of discord, evil
incarnate, the big bad wolves who bring terrible darkness into the
women's world of happiness and light.
It was hard to deny
their denunciation of all things male because, spurious studies of
ideological origin aside, on the face of it so much of what they claim
appeared to be true. Virtually all prosecuted criminals are men. For
millennia, men have taken up arms to make war. Men murder, fight,
rape, create and lead oppressive regimes. Men level mountains, pave
over forests, year-after-year American men don orange garb and, armed
with rifles and beer, tramp out into the woods to kill Bambi. Indeed,
testosterone became all but synonymous with poison.
What could be more
obvious? "Men bad, trees pretty," to misquote Buffy the Vampire
Slayer. And so, being men, we did what men have done for millennia:
our best to protect women by, in this milieu, damning ourselves.
Sexual gag reel
This
produced a comedy of errors on a national and then international
scale: "All men are rapists, that's all they are," goes the famous
line in Marilyn French's enduring tome,
The Women's Room,
so suddenly an uncomfortable coming-of-age liaison could brand a boy
as rapist.
Men, according to
feminist doctrine, prey upon women, so in the aftermath of the utterly
inane debate over
Anita Hill and the Clarence Thomas Hearings,
both male and female coworkers tread on proverbial eggshells for fear
of saying or doing anything that might subject them to disciplinary
actions by uneasy employers anxious to avoid the possibility of pricey
lawsuits over some trivial slight.
It's like a sexual gag
reel, with everybody stumbling around not knowing what to do. In
consequence, millions have gone on-line, where they parade their
sexuality in stark detail. Mild-mannered mannequins of propriety and
politically correct sexless conduct by day, in the twilight they shed
inhibitions, clothing and all sense to pierce this, tattoo that, and
risk contracting incurable STDs in their search for love, sex and
simple human connection in a world gone nuts over pleasing the prissy
proctors of feminist superiority.
Then came 9-11 and a
renewed appreciation for the more masculine virtues.
The return of
"manliness"
If a band of men
martyred themselves to strike a blow against the big bad symbolized
for them by the twin towers of the
World Trade Center,
then it was also true that in the aftermath of this senseless
slaughter, thousands of men rushed to the scene where they
demonstrated courage and self-sacrifice of a kind which made feminists
cringe. The kind of heroic spirit that gives women reason to feel
"perfectly safe."
In the days that
followed 9-11, much was made of this, some of which I contributed, and
though I strive to be fair, there was a strong vein running through
the general cacophony over the manly acts of the heroes of 9-11 that
was sexist to the extremist degree:
After years of
male-bashing, it is good to see some appreciation for male heroism
and even for the fact that traditional machismo always included not
only dominance but protection and rescue. But one senses that some
champions of the manly man would have been almost disappointed if
the heroes of Flight 93 had included a woman. (Some flight
attendants may have helped fight the hijackers.) Meanwhile,
feminists who bemoan the lack of attention to the heroines of Sept.
11 tend to sidestep the fact that it's overwhelmingly men who put
their lives on the line in dangerous jobs. - Cathy Young,
Feminism's slide since Sept. 11,
The Boston Globe,
September 16, 2002 p. A15
Feminism, which was
already mired in its own inane claims and struggling against the
growing strength of a backlash born of anti-male sexism, slid, as
Young put it, "further into irrelevancy."
While this was an
inevitable part of the social movement life cycle, as outlined by Eric
Hoffer in his seminal work,
The True Believer,
the pivotal consequence of this tragedy was that the sea change in
social sentiment started not with a vengeful backlash against women,
which, as long-time readers of The Backlash! know, was one of our
greatest fears, but a tearful celebration for manly virtue.
Return of the "tree
huggers"?
The fact about manly
virtue is that it has never truly gone away, but has spent much of the
past few decades hiding in various sub-cultures, including the
MythoPoetic Men's movement
and
Promise Keepers.
These, however, have
always colored their version of the Virtues with ideological overtones
that appeal only to a few, thereby making them unpalatable to even the
hungriest youths starving for some semblance of sexual sanity. So
while tree-hugging Indian Wannabes and Christian mystics have their
respected place, for the mainstream something more sensible and less
ideological, more practical than practiced, is needed.
What we need is a short
set of principles that make sense, a guide for appropriate conduct
that brings the sexes together rather than drives them apart.
Something we can teach our children that does not drag us back into
the old realities of sexual inequality, but celebrates our differences
at the same time it embraces our equality.
Feeling perfectly safe
Feminism of the late
1980s through most of the 1990s focused on women's safety issues. They
made women fear men, and men responded by protecting women against
men. All this led to, however, was greater fear, deeper sadness and
rampant confusion. What George Gilder described as
sexual suicide.
There are plenty of
books extolling various virtues. I grew up with
Aesop's Fables,
and more recently William J. Bennett compiled his celebrated
Book of Virtues.
Such as these, however, do not address in practical terms the most
basic manly virtues and how to cultivate them. For that, I think, we
need to trek deep into the long-neglected though oft-maligned
territory of boyhood to rediscover what grew out of the work of Ernest
Thompson Seton: the Boy Scouts.
The
Boy Scouts
may not offer a panacea to all the social ills that plague our
culture, certainly not when the
Girl Scouts
preach misandry, or fear and hatred of masculinity. But they do offer
something both lacking and needed by today's youth: a simple yet
comprehensive set of principles embodying appropriate
manly virtues.
This is no final
solution promising an end to all conflict between women and men, but
the feminists led us down this ill-fated path to fear and hatred of
men, and now it's up to us - to "men and the women who love them," as
author and teacher
Warren Farrell
is wont to say - to take the lead and create a culture in which, more
often than not, women can press against the chest of a man and "feel
perfectly safe."
Copyright 2003 Rod Van
Mechelen, all rights reserved
