I recently watched Tucker Carlson’s Men in America. It’s a series playing Wednesdays, of which he has currently published two episodes. The bleak picture that he painted of American men shocked me to the core. Some of the stats that he related didn’t particularly surprise me such as men’s shortened life spans, drug addiction, suicide, and incarceration rates. I have known about these social problems for most of my life. Some other stats, however, did surprise me such as women outnumbering men in graduate school and men’s wages actually dropping. It gets worse. One in five children lives without a father, and young, unmarried men are buying homes at half the rate of young, unmarried women, opting to live with a parent or relative instead. These do not reflect victories for women so much as they represent failures for men and the families who depend on them.
It gets worse still. Tucker’s most troubling claim was that men’s testosterone (T) levels have plummeted over the last several decades. To be clear, this is an age-independent phenomenon. Thomas G. Travison and others published a study spanning about fifteen years showing that the T-levels of the average forty year old in 2003 was about 15% lower than the average forty year old in 1988. If the trend has continued to the present, then the average forty year old in 2018 has T-levels 30% lower than the average forty year old in 1988. Tucker also claims that sperm counts are down by 60% since the 1970s. Because sperm count is closely linked to testosterone, this would be expected if the trend in declining T-levels extends that far back.
Testosterone is the quintessential male hormone. Females also produce it in small quantities, but testosterone is responsible for many traits which we recognize as masculine such as aggression, risk-taking, and being muscular. Now before feminists start clapping and cheering, let me ask, is it possible that the demise of men is possibly linked to the demise of masculinity, and is this what we really want? From reading feminists, it would appear that it is. In writing for The Guardian, Jaclyn Friedman all but equates masculinity with toxicity. She praises a program that “inoculates” middle school boys by altering their perception of masculinity. In other words, their maleness is a threat that must be preemptively adjusted. She even blasts men’s instinct to protect as merely a “kinder, gentler way to force three-dimensional women into two-dimensional boxes and strip us of our humanity.” The Wikipedia article on masculinity looks like some feminists have injected as much propaganda as they can between genuine scholarship. For instance, it mentions the “intersection of masculinity with other axes of social discrimination,” suggesting that masculinity is by its nature a form of discrimination.
For USA Today, Alia E. Dastagir also writes of toxic masculinity as if there’s no other kind. She states that, “the stereotypical sense of masculinity is at war with everything we know about what it means to be human.” She quotes a professor of gender studies, Jane Ward, who claims that, “The bar for men is so low [… that] this man brushing his daughter’s hair […] is applauded as almost an act of heroism, and it’s so telling for something like that to go viral, because it’s perceived to be so remarkable that a man would gently brush his daughter’s hair or braid her hair. People think it’s news.” To her I’d like to say, no, Jane, they don’t think it’s news. It’s the response of normal people saying that men are not the monsters that feminists perceive them to be.
Then there are the male feminists, heaven help us. Tyler Zimmer claims that, “Men are taught to regularly say and do things to women […] that they would never want men to say or do to them. […] It’s because masculinity is founded on the myth that men alone are rights-bearing persons and women are subordinate, passive, second-class beings.” Excuse me Tyler, but I was never taught any of those things. I have, however, noticed in both men and women behaviors that are reprehensible, behaviors which they would never want a person to do in turn to them. Perhaps it’s a human problem. Tyler further states that, “This is the kind of masculinity [the repression of natural feelings] that also teaches men they don’t have to ask permission to act on their sexual desires,” and that, “They’re supposed to take charge and have no reason to respect women’s autonomy,” and again that, “Communication [is] the very thing modern notions of masculinity train us away from.”
Honestly, I do not know where Tyler received his teaching, but he does not describe my upbringing or the upbringing of many other men I personally know. It could be argued that the repression of feelings is a teaching of stoicism, which, according to Google dictionary, “is an ancient Greek school of philosophy founded at Athens by Zeno of Citium. The school taught that virtue, the highest good, is based on knowledge, and that the wise live in harmony with the divine Reason (also identified with Fate and Providence) that governs nature, and are indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune and to pleasure and pain.” This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with sexism. Furthermore, I admire Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Steinbeck, all men, who taught me that communication and beautiful language are highly masculine traits.
So are the feminists right? Is masculinity toxic? Should I rejoice that T-levels are falling and that men are dying out? No! I hope not and I do not rejoice. Rather I will heed Dylan Thomas who wrote:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I will vigorously engage in behaviors which increase male virility such as healthy competition, weight lifting, sex, and good nutrition. Furthermore, I’ll do my best to be a good man, a good husband, and a good father. I will be a provider and a protector, feminism notwithstanding. I believe that men are necessary and I believe that they are innately good. I call upon my fellow men to prove that masculinity is a strong force against evil. There is no such thing as toxic masculinity. Assault is toxic, rape is toxic, preying on the weak is toxic, but masculinity is the development of male virtue. Be good. Be wise. Be strong. Be worthy lovers of women.
Ariel Hammon
Author of JACK
I really enjoyed reading this post.
I have been researching the drop of testosterone in American men for years. While no one agrees on the cause, there are a couple of interesting points.
Men that are 70 are likely to have higher testosterone then men in their 20’s.
Teenage pregnancy is down. While normally this is a good thing, when you understand why, it’s pretty disturbing. Young men are content to sit at home, in front of pornhub rather then go “talk” to girls.
However, one group that has not seen a drop in teenage pregnancy is conservative Christian groups. Apparently, their young men still feel the “urge” to go out and “talk” to girls. Liberals and feminist obviously find this disturbing.
While I first caught wind of this 20 years, there is a strong undertone that feminist believe they don’t need men. Women can be strong, but chances are, if all the men died for some reasons, that evolution would turn some of them into men. It’s hard to pack Xena, Warrior Princess into the same package of Mother Theresa.
My concern is that survival of human race has depended upon testosterone up to now. Even if the all the American men neuter themselves, there are still huge groups of “less educated men” out that would happily take our place. We will never rid of it completely because nature supports and we cannot control everyone.