What Should Men Do?

If you tuned in to primetime TV back in the late 50s and early 60s, you would have gotten a rather succinct view into gender politics of the day. At least, you would have gotten the mass media’s take on gender politics. Men wore suits and worked nine to five jobs, making enough money on their single salaries to house entire families and maintain at least one car. Women wore dresses and aprons while spending their entire days cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids. They were even there to greet their hardworking husbands at the door with a cocktail to help them unwind from the corporate grind. Father knew best, mother baked pies, and everyone knew their place. It was all black and white, so to speak.

Not so today, when the entire concept of gender, family, and normality is a complex web of identities and political firestorms. Women are no longer expected to be homemakers, even if by choice. In fact, the whole concept of femininity has been turned on its head so that one dare not make a judgment of womanhood at all. The family unit is something quite different since those seemingly archaic times, hardly resembling the uniform structures of dad, mom, kids, and the family dog. It seems after decades of strictly defined gender roles, the very idea of gender has been called into question, seen now as a social construct not dissimilar to predominant fashion trends. And it can be just that shallow these days, with a veritable dictionary of genders emerging from the shattering of said roles. The black and white fairy tale seems lost and gone forever, replaced by an ever-changing status quo that cruelly harangs the uninitiated, even as it alters the rites of initiation by the day.

Now, one should not fool themselves into thinking the black and white dream world was all that much better. In fact, it was more like a nightmare for many people. Some of the beliefs of that day were backward to the point of barbarity. Women’s suffrage was only in its thirties by then, and the civil rights act was only just approaching. And let us not forget that the beautiful picture on the screen was just that, a beautiful picture, not reality. The world was a much worse place for many people in that day, and we should not grow so imbittered in our own times that we forget how far we’ve come. Technological advances have grown to the point that nearly any passion can provide some kind of compensation, and loosening of mores has allowed increased freedom in society that would have been undreamed of back in 1955. Women are no longer saddled with the burden of expectation, giving them the same freedom and mobility that men enjoyed before them. There are fewer impoverished people today by a large margin, and it has never been easier to be comfortable in the western world. These are not small changes, and we should not be too quick to pine for days gone by, but we should also be wary of condemning our forebears and shunning their wisdom.

The postmodernist movement introduced a concept to the wider world of sociological thought that would sunder many a firmly held axiom, that concept being relativity. The simplest way of stating this idea is that, because there are an infinite number of ways of viewing any given subject, there is no way of knowing any absolute truths about said subject. Anything we purport to know would only be relative to our own experiences, identities, and biases. This is the basic idea behind contradictory terms like “my truth”, in which something can be factual reality for one person, but not for the next person. This is worth mentioning here because this pervasive concept has infiltrated the thinking of academia, government, and media, thereby forcing itself on the common man just a surely as the black and white sitcoms did decades ago. Gender is no longer as simple as male and female, masculine or feminine; it is whatever a given person believes it to be at whatever time under whatever circumstances. Even biological sex is challenged, with womanhood and manhood having little at all to do with anatomy. It is not surprising, then, that those aforementioned gender roles are a complete and total artifact of a bygone reality, being seen as enslaving evils akin to the racial theories of the past. There is hardly such a thing as woman or man, boy or girl, in as much as they are merely chosen monikers. The question, “what should men do?” is hard enough without the ambiguity of gender roles. With such a mindset, it is not even a valid question, merely a self-reflexive meditation for anyone who considers themselves a “man”. The utterly empty, depressingly stupid answer to that titular question is simply “whatever a man wants to do”.

Only, that is not so. Of all the myriad identities born of our post modern daliences, “man” is the most hated, belittled, and criticized. If you are born male, that is with a penis and testicles, and you then go on to “identify” as a man, you are regarded as something like a reformed drug addict. A man may try in all earnestness not to act in a way that is detestable to the postmodern sensibility, and yet that man will still be required to pay a kind of daily penance for the sin of masculinity. Men are told not to speak on any issue relating to women’s rights, trans rights, et al, even if those supposed issues are just as impossible to define as manhood itself by postmodern metric. Men are also told that they are the reason for all the societal ills across the breadth of history, as if being a man is all the evidence needed to connect an eighteen year old student to Vlad the Impaler or Pol Pot. Perhaps, it is not so difficult to answer that question after all. What should a man do? He should shut the hell up and get out of the way.

In light of this all too familiar prescription, it is no wonder boys and men are falling into antisocial behaviors, ensconced in a virtual world of depression and utter misery. Despite the certainty of the postmodernists, men and boys still exist, and they still feel masculine urges. These urges can indeed be violent and domineering, but they can also be channeled into industry and leadership, if they might be tempered and understood for what they are. But that is not what the western world has chosen to do with its men. Instead, boys are told to sit still and be quiet, while men are told to stifle their own masculinity because it is the cause of all the oppression the world has ever known. What would anyone do if they were constantly told that their very being is oppressive to those around them? Would they hide in fantasy? Would they passively rebel, hoping for change? Or would they lash out like cornered beasts in furious vengeance? These are questions that are getting their answers by the day to our great detriment.

Perhaps the best answer to the question, “what should men do?”, lies in a mixture of past and future. Men should be strong protectors, studious providers, and caring partners. They should not be abusive tyrants, lackadaisical deadbeats, or vicious predators. Men should strive to better themselves and to make the world around them better, using all the God-given drive and daring they have to accomplish noble goals. In a world so beset by temptations of all kinds, men should strive to be chaste and pure, not sexual degenerates or miserable, self-hating addicts to whatever stimulant. Men should not succumb to the decadence and avarice of a culture without morals, for if we want to live in a moral world, we must reflect that same morality onto the world. Men should be allowed to be masculine, and should be praised for their heroism and determination, but we as men have to deserve that admiration and praise. We cannot complain about being hated while behaving in a hateful manner, doing nothing at all to deserve the status we wish to attain. This means a return to a sort of chivalrous ideal, even in the face of a so-called feminism that despises men, for we must remember that the dream on the screen is not reality. Women still desire for men, but men must not take that desire for granted, and must do all in their power to make themselves someone to be desired, admired, and loved. This means men can no longer abide the selflothing, contemptuous tendency to throw up ones hands and let the world descend into meaningless chaos out of callow spite. Defy the world that tells you to sit down and be quite, but when you stand, be an exemplar of the kind of world you want to live in.

While on this topic, there is a special kind of putrescence that must be called out by name for all the harm it does upon or society. This stinking filth is the fatherless epidemic. For whatever reason, men of today, and of yesteryear for that matter, have made a disturbing habit of fathering children and leaving them to the whims of an all too often overworked and incapable mother. This is not to say that single mothers do not deserve the praise they are due, as many of them are as angels among mortals for their devotion to their children. But men who abandon their families do untold damage to their children, especially to young boys. Boys need men to show them how to be men themselves, how to temper their wild virility into stalwart determination and vital leadership. Men who eschew this responsibility are contributors to the worst kind of societal deterioration, and deserve the grossest censure that can be conceived of. What should men do? They should marry the woman they wish to have children with, raise those children, and provide for their families in whatever way is needed. They should not be rampaging sex pests that impregnate women without a care for any consequence, spreading their seed like a plague and complaining incessantly about child support as if they themselves did not cause there so-called troubles.

We are trudging ever onward into a future that seems hellbent on eliminating everything about our past, good or bad. There have been, and are still good men, and we need those good men now more than ever. Men of the 21st century need to be better than the men of the past, better than the men of our present, thus we cannot cling to the past like a lost paradise while we ignore our own society and allow it to slip into a hell of meaninglessness and nihilism. Do not be distracted by those that wish to condemn you for your very being, they are delusional to the point of fantasy, and hating them will only feed that delusion. Strive to be blameless, courageous, resolute, and above all righteous, for the world has too much vengeance and hatred already.