Kill traditional masculinity?

Ross Douthat is at it again, this time taking liberals to task for their treatment of masculinity (he’s taken conservatives to task for theirs already). He first holds up a post from Fredrik De Boer as an example of Left thinking on masculinity. Quoting from De Boer:

… Whatever their virtues or vices, the manly men from long ago that these bros imagine they are emulating didn’t spend all their time thinking about what it meant to be manly men. Indeed: it’s precisely the unthinking acceptance of the gender hierarchy that gave these men the “confidence” (read: entitlement) that neo-masculinists want to emulate. But you can’t think your way to an unthinking prejudice. If you have to read a website to tell you to be traditionally masculine, you will never, ever be traditionally masculine. You can’t choose an unchosen attitude. John Wayne did not have a blog. And I truly believe that it’s the combination of this association between masculinity and the capacity for violence on one hand, and the ambient postmodernism we live in on the other, that creates these monsters … They are told that they only have value if they embody an ideal they cannot think their way into.

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The masculinity that replaces it will not be “anti-male,” whatever that could possibly mean. It won’t be anti-strength. It won’t be anti-confidence or anti-leadership or anti-toughness. It won’t be anti-sex … But it will reject utterly the strangled, stupid, pathetic association between male strength and the capacity for violence. It will stop associating a man’s value with the number of women he has sex with. It will recognize traditional masculinity for what it is: a broken, impossible fantasy that even its most enthusiastic proponents can’t achieve, a straightjacket that constrains men like [the Santa Barbara killer], crushing them, and calls it empowerment. Time for it to die.

To which Douthat replies:

And I just don’t quite know what he’s talking about, because in our culture — Western, English-speaking, American — the traditional iconography of masculine heroism doesn’t really resemble this “Grand Theft Auto”/”Scarface” description at all. I mean, yes, if the “tradition” you have in mind is Pashtun honor killings, then I agree, traditional masculinity would be better off extinct. But where American society is concerned, when I look at the sewers of misogyny or the back alleys of “bro” culture, I mostly see men in revolt against both feminism and our culture’s older images of masculine strength and self-possession, not men struggling to inhabit the latter tradition, or live up to its impossible/immoral demands.

Take the one icon De Boer tosses off as example: The Western-movie hero, the John Wayne figure, the unselfconscious manly man. (Wayne himself, of course, was just as self-consciously performative in his way as any contemporary pick-up artist guru: He didn’t have a blog, but he was an actor with a stage name …) From De Boer’s description of what “traditional masculinity” entails, you would think that the archetypal movies of Wayne’s genre celebrated mass murder and sexual entitlement, or throbbed with palpable misogyny, or made true manliness look like a matter of imposing your will at gunpoint and then reaping your reward in bedpost notches. But watch some famous Westerns from the pre-Peckinpah era: Do you regularly see characters bedding a steady stream of willing women while shooting their way to fame and fortune? Surely not as often as you see men, in the style of the lead characters in “High Noon” and “Shane,” reluctantly shouldering a burden of violence and paying a heavy moral price; not as often as you see men (including Wayne in several of his most iconic roles) who don’t get the girl, don’t get sexual fulfillment (not a major theme of the genre, to put it mildly) or the life of domesticity they want, precisely because of their identity as gunslingers and the obligations and/or sins that accompany that way of life.

Now one can critique the “lonely gunslinger” trope on all sorts of ideological levels, but it’s very hard to see the kind of masculine ideal embodied by Shane and Will Kane as looming large, in any meaningful way, in the fantasy lives of contemporary misogynists.

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A Humphrey Bogart, a Jimmy Stewart, a Cary Grant, a Spencer Tracy — these were icons whose characters often dealt with female stars as equals, who had sex appeal to burn but weren’t defined by their libidos or their list of conquests, who dealt in violence sparingly or not at all. Likewise in Victorian fiction, in books as eagerly devoured by the masses as any blockbuster entertainment today: How often is a rake or cad presented as a worthy model, how often is a killer celebrated for his body count? How often does a Dickens or a Tolstoy or a Trollope leave the impression that the masculine ideal involves dealing violence indiscriminately and sleeping with every blonde who catches your eye? Is Steerforth the hero of “David Copperfield”? Is Wickham the male ideal held up by “Pride and Prejudice”? In Western literature, who better embodies “traditional masculinity” as an aspirational ideal — Vronsky or Darcy? Angel Clare or Gabriel Oak? Raskolnikov the murderer or Raskolnikov the penitent?

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One possible rejoinder to these points is that even the positive-seeming aspects of Victorian or Old Hollywood images of masculinity depended on the sense of “entitlement” and the ”unthinking acceptance of the gender hierarchy” that De Boer (quite accurately) describes as central features of those eras, and so today’s more debased “ideal” is basically what’s left when the patriarchy can no longer promise men power in exchange for self-restraint, privilege in exchange for self-containment. Another possible rejoinder is that the traditional ideal was just a pure self-serving fabrication, that the Good Men of art and literature were always, inevitably Don Draper or Pete Campbell in real life.

I think the first rejoinder is partially fair (and gets at why a simple “neo-traditionalism” is problematic), the second one less so. But neither of them gets you to a “traditional masculinity needs to die” prescription for contemporary male problems.

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Which is basically the root of my disagreement with the left’s writers on a lot of these issues. They look at the state of sex and gender, masculinity and femininity, and see an uncomplicatedly progressive social revolution that just hasn’t fully succeeded yet — that hasn’t brought men, especially, into the sunlit uplands of egalitarian enlightenment — because far too many “traditional” concepts and constraints still perdure. I see a social revolution that has brought good and bad, intermixed, and whose supporters could profit from the realization that some of the human goods they seek are actually more clearly visible behind us, somewhere back in a cultural past they still insist they’re fighting to overthrow, whose actual details the darkness of forgetting has almost swallowed up.

I have to wonder if De Boer has ever even seen any John Wayne movies. As someone who spends a great deal of my movie-watching time in the old classics I have to suspect that De Boer’s idea of a movie classic is anything within the last thirty years (during which time John Wayne was not making movies). He’s clearly never seen “The African Queen”, in which it’s Katherine Hepburn’s character who is clearly in charge through the entire movie, while Humphrey Bogart actually has to rise up to her level before they can truly become a strong partnership. There was no “bedpost notching” involved, but if there were, it was Rose Sayer cutting the notch, not Charlie Allnut.

Most every movie from this era of “horrible masculinity that must die” shows man after man being anything but what De Boer describes. Did their “male privilige” give them confidence? Perhaps so, but if so, they used it poorly. Most of the movies show them resisting taking what they want from women (if indeed they ever wanted that), doing everything they can to not exploit their advantage. In “Roman Holiday” Gregory Peck goes out of his way to not take advantage of a drugged Audrey Hepburn. “No means no” never entered into it, because he refused to even ask the question. If I had to choose an era of film characters to entrust my daughter to, it would not be our “enlightened” modern age. But the characters from the era De Boer decries? I would trust them in a heart-beat to not only not take advantage of a woman, but to only resort to violence in defending her from the low-lifes who would.

I am left to conclude that De Boer has never watched any of the movies he’s so against. Either that or he finds the integrity and true manhood of those characters so intimidating and so unlike himself that he has to resort to slander to put them back in their box as part of that past we must set fire to at all costs. I believe he is just another sad example of these “right-thinking” social engineers who, in spite of having had their social way for over fifty years, can’t accept the fact that they’ve actually made things worse, and therefore have to keep casting back farther and farther to find a bogey-man to pin it on. Sure, that era had its problems, but they seem to forget that it was the people of that era that took the biggest steps to fix those problems and nothing that anyone today can take credit for–though they sure try to. “What, our programs haven’t fixed poverty?–hey look! Civil Rights Movement! High five!”

It’s worse than neo-centrism. It’s a complete lack of understanding about what makes society work. They see the problems of the past and, rather than looking closely to determine what caused those problems and what things actually made society stronger, they want to throw it all out. They instead put up their picture of how they want the world to work and keep pushing and pushing . What, it’s not working yet? More cowbell! Shut up you idiots who keep suggesting we borrow from the past. The past was bad Bad BAD! Our new order is superior. Why? Because we say so, and if you can’t see that it’s because you’re bad Bad BAD too! We just haven’t tried things our way long enough or pushed them hard enough! More cowbell, I say!

I’m not saying their vision is entirely wrong, or their solutions, either. But when they put on their blinders and insist that nothing old can stay I have to question if they really know what they’re doing. It wasn’t the classic movies that created Don Draper. It wasn’t classic literature that puked up Jamie Lannister. If we’re so much better than that now, if we know so clearly what a real man should be, why are these men so interesting to us? It’s not because we love to hate them–that’s not the buzz I see surrounding these characters. What the success of these and so many other similar characters tells me is that we say we want one thing, but worship another.

Kill traditional masculinity? I think I understand why they would want that. We can’t have those icons around to make us feel guilty for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to figure out how to both wallow in the muck and ascend Olympus simultaneously–and it’s all John Wayne’s fault.

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Update: Another interesting article, somewhat related, but on an entirely different topic: Washington Post: Too many women ignore their own misogyny