How American Men Became Weaklings – And I am Not Blaming Feminism
By
David Gottfried
(“That Hamilton Woman” was Winston Churchill’s favorite movie)
In 1972, Edmund Muskie cried, during the New Hampshire primary, when he responded to accusations that he had used derogatory terms in the course of referring to French Canadians.
Many Americans were horrified. Men, in those days, simply never cried in public. Although he had been widely perceived as the front-runner in the race for the Democratic Presidential Nomination, Muskie’s campaign soon collapsed, in large measure because the American populace thought he was too soft because he had cried. Although he was expected to do very well in the New Hampshire primary, not only because he was the frontrunner in the race but also because he was considered a quasi-favorite son of New Hampshire because he was a citizen of next-door Maine, he only beat George McGovern by a slim plurality, garnering 46.4 percent of the vote to Mc Govern’s 37.1 percent. One week later, in the Florida primary, he came in fourth place, and after he came in fourth place again, in the Wisconsin primary held on April 4, 1972, he withdrew from the race.
Nowadays, men seem to cry all the time. Bob Dole cried, and Bill Clinton cried, and quite frankly I have lost track of the large cast of men who cry and bawl their eyes out when confronted by a story deemed sad. As I am writing this, we are witnessing the horrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, occasioned by the malfeasance of BP and their sycophantic handmaidens in government. (I wrote this several years ago.) In the past two weeks, I think I have seen at least three men cry on television. I have yet to see a woman cry.
Now it is all well and good that men care, and feel sensitive, and have empathy and are able to feel our pain (Of course, to be honest about it, nobody ever feels anybody’s pain, as no one has nerve endings reaching into another person’s body, but Bill Clinton enjoyed alleging as much and our touchy-feely media promptly validated his cutesy concepts.)
But as I said, men should be sensitive. However, if men become so sensitive that their eyes well up with tears, that they seem to bleed like a woman shedding menstrual blood, and their ability to make decisions is impaired and obstructed, no one benefits. Just as the media is quite foolish to be mad at Obama for not getting sufficiently mad about the oil spill, we would be foolish to be comforted by the sight of so many big strong men from the epicenter of American macho, the Deep South, cry over some tar balls on their pristine beaches. Such slobbering boys will be silly putty for the measured, seemingly genteel, but utterly cutthroat tycoons of British Petroleum. They were not the sort of Brits that had a nervous breakdown when Princess Di died; they are the sort of Brits that made an Island, with a miniscule proportion of the world’s population, rule half the world. And those British good old boys don’t cry. And, in addition to being, allegedly, such odious imperialists, these men of an older, grander England fought against Muslim Tyrants to free black slaves in the Sudan, developed a vaccine for Small Pox and gave it to her colonial dependents and all the world, stood down the Princes and Popes of the Inquisition, aided the fight for liberty and stood alone, frightfully alone, in her finest hour when, against all odds, she fought the devil in the person of Adolf Hitler.
In any event, in those days, men were stronger than women. Today, we have not approached equality; we have seen a complete role reversal take place. Tonight, while watching the Rachel Maddow show, Ms. Maddow, a bright and energetic lesbian who analyzes issues with logical precision and no nonsense dispatch, was talking to a man about the oil spill in the Gulf. The man, or should I say male, bemoaned the tragedy in the Gulf, saying something to the effect that it was a catastrophe that we did not know how to combat, and seemed on the precipice of becoming a fat women from an old situation comedy blubbering about a soufflé that would not rise. By contrast, Rachel Maddow briskly indicated that she wasn’t into such defeatist, maudlin hysteria and wanted sensible, intellectual analysis. Then, a young female scientist came on the show, and Maddow and the scientist exuded female power. Unlike an earlier generation of feminists who would have made broad, over the top assertions to the effect that the environmental disaster was caused by male arrogance and disrespect for Mother Nature, Rachel Maddow, and her female guest, dove right into the science and possible solutions.
So why have men become such wosses. And I am not referring to straight men versus gay men. I am contending that all men are becoming a bunch of fucking pussies. I am gay, and when I grew up, I felt threatened by some men, believing that those men possessed a greater measure of virility than me. Now, I feel stronger than ninety percent of the straight men I meet. Very simply, almost all men look like suburban sissies who have never confronted death.
And that is precisely why men are so weak. The issue is whether or not we have seen death.
There is something that makes women intimately familiar with mortality. A woman bleeds once a month. Once a month, she is reminded of how the promise of life can turn to death. And, if the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious has any merit, woman also may possess the collective memory of millions of women who died in childbirth.
Women are given bodies that are weaker, and this, paradoxically, makes women stronger. Women always knew about death and sickness. In so many cases, when a serious illness strikes a family, the men run from the sick room with the embarrassment of little boys fearful of seeing something evil which will scar them for life. The women do their time in the sick room and are not afraid to do many things many of us would often consider vulgar and disgusting, such as positioning a frail patient on a bed pan.
And so, at root, women were, perhaps, tougher than men. But, up until recent times, there was something that made men much, much tougher than women. It was, arguably, the most miserable thing in human history, and it was one of the few things which made men respectable, valiant and heroic.
Men always used to go to war. Little boys today know not of what I speak.
When I was growing up, Vietnam was in full swing. Korea had ended ten years before that, and World War Two had ended only a few years before Korea. And please, let’s not forget, there were always lots of little imperial conflicts here and there in all parts of the world. Consider this: Today, we make a big deal over our loss of a few thousand men in Iraq. In England, in 1920 or so, the British lost as many men in Iraq (They were fighting to claim territory they had gained from the demolition of the Ottoman Empire), and Britain has a much, much smaller population than the US. Nevertheless, the Brits hardly remember their dispute in Iraq, in 1920, as a genuine, full-fledged war because the loss of few thousand men was considered small change, especially in contrast with the rivers of English blood shed in World War One.
When I was growing up, war was not something that only a small, impoverished percentage of the populace suffered. We all suffered war. Rich kids fought and died.
And given the ubiquity and commonness of early death, and given the horrible stresses of life, no one was such a health habit pussy. Since you knew a guy who had died in Vietnam, and since you might go to Vietnam and die, and since you had an aunt in a psyche ward, and maybe your Dad in the penitentiary, you didn’t suppose that life was meant to be happy and you were freed from the grotesque rat race to be the happiest, sleekest, healthiest body in designer clothes.
And you enjoyed Steak and Scotch and Cigarettes.
Of course, Steak and Scotch and Cigarettes is arguably not enough to make the case for men as they once were. So let us consider our ability, as a nation, to do things.
In 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt in which he advised the President to consider research toward making a weapon which relied on atomic power. Prior to that time, the US govt. had never spent a dime on atomic weapons research.
In 1945, the United States had an atomic bomb.
Consider the latter-day contrast: In 1973, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, when oil prices quadrupled, all intelligent thinking men in this country realized that we had to overcome our dependence on fossil fuels. Almost 40 years have passed and we have barely made a dent in the problem. Very simply, we can’t do anything anymore. Washington is a city of men with less macho then a purring female kitten.
Washington politicians don’t ask themselves what is right; they hold a focus group to determine what words other people find soothing and sensitive.
On 9/11, airplanes filled to the brim with American men let a few Muslim men armed only with box-cutters slam planes into the World Trade Center and the pentagon. In Uvalde, Texas, dozens of eunuch police officers twiddled their thumbs for one and half hours while one man killed a classroom of elementary school students.
I hold that much of male weakness stems from our unfamiliarity with death and doom. In the past, war wrenched men from the candyassed sugar-coated sentimentality of childhood and told them that there was no Easter Bunny, and probably no good G-d either, and men, bereft of such adorable illusions, became harder and more effective.
Now, we have an American man who is a spoiled monstrosity. He enjoys unprecedented wealth. He thinks war is a video game. He thinks he is tough because he watches football on television, stuffing his face and developing man tits. He speaks and thinks like the 8-year-old cartoon characters on South Park. He attends schools where children, in the early grades, sit in a circle and sing songs. (When Allen Dulles went to an elite Protestant prep school in the era of McKinley, the wealthy boys – who were less spoiled than the very poor boys of today -- were forced to rise at 6 AM, and, before they ate, they had to line up in the courtyard, whatever the weather, to do mental arithmetic and to shout out the answers loudly and clearly)
The American man’s unfamiliarity with war, and with death, makes him ill-equipped to encounter pain and danger.