It's just so frustrating... they invite you in with preludes that really do help men:
- "Clean your room!"
- "Work out more!"
- "Stop eating garbage!"
- "Focus on yourself, not your video games!"
These are really basic self-help insights that have existed for decades and have aided lots of people (not just men).
But as it turns out the self-help stuff is just a Trojan horse for their bigotry: misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, anti-semitism, and racism.
It's sad to see so many impressionable young men led down such a dark path.
Anyway, good article. This paragraph ran particularly true for me:
As long as there has been masculinity, it has been in crisis. During the agrarian to urban migration shift in the late 19th century, political and literary luminaries like Teddy Roosevelt and Walt Whitman expressed concern (bound up with racist panic) that city life would sap European men’s primal virility. In a 1958 essay in Esquire headlined “The Crisis of Masculinity,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that American women had advanced to “a place in our society which American men have not been psychologically prepared to accept.” As a reaction to widespread social, economic, and technological change, the male collective subconscious roars: it used to be better, now it’s getting worse.
This kind of masculinity is inherently fragile and always needs to be defended. It's always threatened... perpetually in crisis, as this says. So requires defensiveness, lashing out, and enemies.
I think we can do better in terms of masculinity.