There seems to be broad agreement across the political spectrum that America has a masculinity problem. For many on the left, men who do not profess sufficiently progressive politics are presumptively “toxic.” For many in the center and on the right, the educational system’s ostensible war on boys and the cultural left’s alleged attack on that so-called “toxic masculinity” are in part to blame for the purposelessness and malaise currently afflicting so many males.
While it’s true that many American boys and men today are struggling (doing less well than girls in school; failing to launch careers or start families; and succumbing to alarming rates of depression, anxiety, drug addiction and suicide), this crisis is not actually about the partial rebranding of masculinity as toxic.
It is, in fact, about the total rebranding of adulthood as offensive.
The zeitgeist at present is best understood as society-wide infantilization. We defer to subjective fantasy even when it collides with objective reality. We privilege identity over biology, narrative over fact and feeling over virtue.
This rejection of maturity disproportionately impacts boys and men such that the current “masculinity crisis” appears to exist for two related reasons.
First, because manhood, unlike womanhood, is something that a person can in fact opt out of, not just societally but also personally. If a man is not induced by his family, community or culture to work hard or to start a family, and he chooses to avoid these responsibilities, there is no force compelling him to do otherwise.
A woman, by contrast, is compelled to acknowledge her own adulthood by no less a force than Mother Nature. From middle school onward, her very biology necessitates managing the grown-up business of menstruation and recognizing the unique vulnerabilities (sexual assault, unintended pregnancy and so on) that can lurk around literal and figurative corners.
The second and more significant reason why our maturity crisis looks like a masculinity crisis is that for the last 150 years we have deemed virtues such as courage, assertiveness, strength, reason and sacrifice to be the province of American men. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), whose book on manhood is set for release this spring, calls these the “masculine virtues.” It makes sense, then, that the widespread rejection of these virtues looks to the 21st century observer like a rejection of men.
But these virtues aren’t uniquely male. In fact, they’re the universal attributes of virtuous adulthood in a free society, regardless of sex. Rejecting them isn’t a rejection of men; it’s a rejection of maturity.
The French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, who published “Democracy in America” (1835-1840) after observing familial, societal and governmental life in the United States, used the following words in reference to American women: courage, firmness, reason, strength and energy.
Tocqueville’s 1830’s American women (those early matriarchs of an agrarian, young and pioneering country) sure sound a lot like Hawley’s ideal American men.
By the late 1800s, however, it was not the French Tocqueville but the British Coventry Patmore whose ideal woman ruled in the hearts and minds of Americans. Patmore’s poem “Angel of the House” (1854) was a sensation in the United States before it achieved popularity in England. Here are some of the words that Patmore uses to describe this so-called angel of the house: innocent, artless, simple and sweet.
It is no accident that this description of the ideal woman most closely describes an amiable little girl, not the grown woman of Tocqueville’s observation. This newly delicate, childlike conception of womanhood was part of America’s reaction to industrialization and immigration.
Just a few decades before, most women had worked alongside their husbands on farms, and many had forged West in covered wagons, embodying the Puritan work ethic and its conception of labor as wholesome. But by the late 19th century, women were more often secluded in homes that no longer served as centers of production but rather as havens for a softer, more sentimental incarnation of Christianity.
In the 1840s, Irish immigrants began to pour into America. Simultaneously, the abolitionist outcry against slavery grew louder. In this rapidly changing landscape, the desire to define womanhood in such a way that its privileges and protections would be accessible to white, Protestant women of means – and inaccessible to poor, Irish Catholic and free Black women – resulted in the infantilization of American women.
For a brief moment in the 1960s, the women’s movement seemed poised to reverse that mistake by making available to women the individual rights and responsibilities that had for over 100 years been deemed “male.” Over time, however, feminism disintegrated into an embarrassing backdrop for the airing of petty grievances and the denial of adult reality.
From the myth of the gender wage gap, which is actually a motherhood penalty imposed in part by feminists themselves, to the campus rape crisis that is actually far worse off campus, feminism has become a forum mostly for the personal complaints of privileged women whose flimsy utopianism was foreshadowed by Patmore’s childlike depiction. So, for 50 years now mainstream feminism has been mostly synonymous with women’s infantilization.
And that’s why today, many progressive, secular white women who are themselves more like Patmore’s angel than Tocqueville’s matriarch often code anyone else’s willingness to engage objective truths that they find unpleasant as “toxic,” whether that person is male or female. In many schools and universities, and increasingly in businesses, such women attempt to remake the rest of us in their image.
I have three sons under age eight, and I am not concerned about their masculinity. Boys are physically and characterologically distinct from girls such that even when they display the same strengths and traits, they often do so in different ways.
Masculinity is a neutral fact, manifested by criminals, heroes and everyone in between. Maturity is my concern.
Hence, I am intently focused on my sons growing up to understand that virtues such as courage, firmness, reason and strength are inextricable from virtuous American adulthood. I pray that they will exhibit these virtues, and thereby help to turn our societal denigration of maturity around.
And if I had a daughter, I would hope the same for her.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about culture, politics and religion for various publications, including America magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @ElizabethGMat.