Where Have all the Real Men Gone?

How the feminization of culture and the decline of the male hero is ruining everything for everybody (Part 1)

I like men. I like the fact that they are different from women—that they are from Mars while we are from Venus. I like the fact that they're always trying to fix things. It's adorable, even when it's annoying. Men are not women—even though you can now get yourself banned from social media for saying so out loud.

I'm married to a man—and the fact that we are from different planets seems to be working out surprisingly well. Twenty-eight years and counting! Many of my friends are also men—gay, straight, manly, nerdy—all different kinds of men—but still undeniably men. In my professional life as a psychiatrist working primarily with military veterans, most of my patients are men—and I can vouch for the fact that men are hurting. Why wouldn't they be hurting, living in a culture that seems to demean them for being what they are by nature?

When I was growing up, this is how our culture portrayed men:

Yes, the Marlboro Man. Okay, I wouldn’t complain if he gave up the cancer sticks, but you gotta love this guy. He's a self-made man. He rides the range herding cattle and protecting the land he paid for himself with his rodeo prize money. He has injuries from those long ago bull-riding days but he never complains about them. If anyone tries to rustle his cattle, you know the Malboro Man will kill the sorry SOB because he owns guns, lots of them, and he knows how to use them. In business, he's tough but fair—a man of honour, whose word is good. You don't need a written contract with this man. A handshake will do. If you're his woman and an intruder tries to break into your house, you know you are free to hide in the closet because he will protect you, along with any children you may have made with him. And speaking of children, he will teach his boys to be real men, just like him, and he will kick the sorry ass of any mofo who looks at his daughters the wrong way—even if it does flare up those old rodeo injuries.

But of course I jest. We all know that the stereotype I’ve just described is a product of the patriarchy (the white Christian cis-heteronormative patriarchy, to be precise) and we know this because the venerable American Psychological Association—an organization increasingly dominated by women—has said so. In its 2018 Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Men and Boys, the APA concluded that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.” Well, I’m glad that’s settled.

How the the APA sees boys. Why can’t we all just be girls?

Of course the cultural trend of belittling masculinity didn’t just start with the APA in 2018. Since at least the 1960’s, the purportedly positive feminist message that women are (to borrow from pop star Helen Reddy) “invincible” was accompanied by a parallel negative message about men and masculinity—that men are at best superfluous and annoying, and at worst downright toxic and dangerous. In advertising, the Marlboro Man has been supplanted by the “buffoon” stereotype, typified by the “playoff pants man” in this “Skip the Dishes” ad:

Okay, it is kind of hilarious….but would you want to date this guy?

Meanwhile, in the realm of “TV dads”, Ward Cleaver has been replaced by the buffoon to end all buffoons, Homer Simpson.

In the movies, male heroes have largely been supplanted by strong women and girls who save the day while male characters are pigeonholed into—at best—passive supportive roles and (more commonly) the role of the abusive villain or blundering incompetent. Disney has led the charge in this denigration of male characters, but it is ubiquitous in Hollywood—particularly (and disturbingly) in movies made for children. As Matthew Arrington noted in a 2018 essay entitled How Disney Created an Entire Generation of Lost Boys and Destroyed the Heroic Male,

Since the late 70’s, Disney has created more and more animated films depicting the demise of men. No longer is a man considered the hero or even heroic for that matter, but rather a “necessary evil”. Today’s Disney films are a far cry from Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and the Sword in the Stone. As much as Disney’s animations have become ever more spectacular and sophisticated, its treatment of men has become ever more warped, jaded and outright duplicitous. Just about every male Disney character today is now shoehorned into…archetypes that depict men in the worst way possible

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Treating all this as a zero sum game is helping no one, including those who think that demeaning men is somehow beneficial to women. It isn’t. If we don’t find some way to right the pendulum that has swung from one extreme to the other, the marginalized young men of today will not grow into the healthy and productive husbands, partners, teachers, leaders and fathers that this world needs and that would be a crying shame. Boys deserve better and so do our girls.

Arrington discusses the movie Frozen as an example of this trend:

Sure, it’s great to have a heroine portrayed as independent and able to save herself instead of waiting around to be rescued by Prince Charming. But why must it be done at the expense and dignity of men? Instead of making the Prince a worthy equal, the message is – no prince required at all. Frozen has been wildly successful and little girls everywhere have Frozen-themed birthday parties and love to dress up as the ice queen Elsa. Where does that leave little boys and who can they aspire to? The nose-picking, dim-witted, and smelly Kristoff or the verbally abusive, manipulative, deceitful and psychopathic Prince Hans? What a dismal choice!

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Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Without heroes and positive male role models (which create expectations for behaviour) both men and women—and boys and girls—are suffering. If we immerse boys and young men in a culture that tells them their innate traits are toxic, that their contributions are not needed and that we expect nothing of them, how could they fail to live down to our low expectations? When we tell them that striving and competing are proof that they are toxic males, can we blame them for choosing to stay in mom’s basement playing video games and smoking dope? Conversely, if the best you can hope for as a young heterosexual woman is a Homer Simpson or a Prince Hans or the playoff pants man, why would you ever choose to settle down? Why not choose single parenthood? Or give up on men altogether and become a lesbian, as an increasing number of young women are doing.

In the “bad old days”, the expectation was that men would literally die for women—and they often did, with great courage and without complaint. When you walk through the Titanic graveyards in Halifax, Nova Scotia (which I have done) you see row after row of graves of men like this one, who gave up his place in the life boats so that women and children could be saved:

Some women, at least, were thankful for this sacrifice:

Now, we are shocked when a man opens a car door for a woman.

Travis Kelce opens car door for Taylor Swift and it almost breaks the internet. Could it be that the culture is starved for a little old-fashioned chivalry?

And incidents like the one depicted below (which happened just last week) are becoming distressingly common:

Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be soy-boys…

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

―C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Everywhere we turn, boys are failing, falling behind academically (at every level), dropping out of the workforce and killing themselves in record numbers. Although “experts” tell us we are still living in a patriarchy, it’s hard to escape the sense that we are increasingly living in a toxic matriarchy, complete with emotional reasoning, “mean girl” ethics, and a culture of radical safetyism at the expense of Malboro-Man-style liberty and honour. Contra the APA, I would argue that what we need is more stoicism and less concern with the “feelings” of those who choose to embrace victimhood. How about a little more John Wayne and a lot less Victorian fainting couch?

What exactly are the implications of toxic femininity to our culture and to our lives? Stay tuned. In part 2 of “Where Have all the Real Men Gone” I’ll introduce you to the Evil Queen.