When a Culture Unmans Itself

by David Solway

Men need to “be better.”

—Michelle Obama in conversation with Oprah.

Western civilization is clearly coming part at the seams. There are so many destructive elements at work, they are almost impossible to list. But one of the most destructive of these elements, incited by a punitive feminist ideology, is the relentless campaign to delegitimize the very idea of manhood. And the most effective way to do that is to impugn male sexuality.

We are told constantly that we live in a virtual rape culture, a culture in which rape is widespread and condoned, victims are blamed, and rapists receive little or no punishment. There are rape cultures in the world. If one wants to see one in action, all one need do is look at the Muslim world or at Muslim enclaves and populations that have burrowed into Western nations, where atrocities and scandals continue to multiply. In the Western world, by contrast, rape and other forms of sexual misconduct—even mere allegations of sexual misconduct—are universally condemned and harshly punished.

No matter. Islamic culture gets a free pass while Western culture is said to be ravaged by gynophobia under the reign of male supremacism. In the new sexual paradigm that has clamped succubus-like upon the culture, the heterosexual male mainstream is under attack for the crime of harboring a normal sexual drive, which must be ruthlessly expunged in an offensive characterized by media propaganda, legislative bias and institutional practices. Respectable-seeming websites promote the total reform of masculinity using terms such as “mascupathy” to define masculine traits such as aggression and competitiveness as forms of disease needing to be cured. Western men are being progressively demasculanized, a deficiency which results, as Andrew Klavan argues, in “tremulous feminists who hysterically fear rape culture on college campuses where it is not, and Western leaders who don’t dare to see the rape culture inherent in invading Islam, where it is.”

The signs of anti-male bias are everywhere we look. The university, for example, has become a veritable minefield for male students, who may at any time be hauled before an administrative tribunal and their careers put in jeopardy for sexual misconduct, however trivial or ambiguous. A recent memo from my wife’s university mandates a statement against “sexual violence” in all course syllabi—mind you, nothing against harassing and lying about one’s professor for a better grade, shutting down conservative, Zionist, pro-Life or anti-feminist speakers, perpetrating racist hoaxes, denouncing the teaching of good English and male authors as forms of “microagression,” or any of the other violations of civil conduct that we have witnessed on university campuses recently. The only sexist harassment that takes place regularly in academia is feminist harassment of male students and staff—but that is considered not intimidation but enlightened practice.

Is it any wonder, then, that even our military is being insidiously weakened? Responding to a vehement attack on supposed martial dishonor by a former Supreme Court justice, it has turned from its primary task of defending the country to counseling its soldiers against what it regards as sexual delinquency by issuing wallet cards listing “inappropriate behaviors.” These include “sexual assault, sexual interference, sexual exploitation, offensive sexual remarks or unacceptable language or jokes, unwelcome requests of a sexual nature or verbal abuse of a sexual nature, voyeurism, indecent acts and publishing intimate images of a person without their consent.” The fact is, most men in the civilized West are not sexual predators or unreconstructed brutes but most men do tend to joke and flirt and make off-color remarks and otherwise show an interest in women, whether sexual or romantic, in virtue of being men. More to the point, if men are no longer permitted to be men, how then can they be soldiers?

When manliness is eliminated from a culture fixated on the supposedly corrupt and vicious nature of masculinity, while armies of apologetic White Knights and self-abnegating feminist allies (aka “manginas”) come to replace a diminishing platoon of alpha males—“We live in a world run by betas and their lady friends,” quips J.R. Dunn in a prescient article for American Thinker—the writing is on the wall. As Michael Ignatieff reminded us in The Lesser Evil, a culture, a nation or a civilization cannot expect to survive if it is defended by herbivores. It needs a Praetorian cohort of carnivores, determined men proud of their masculinity and unafraid to confront the enemies outside the gates as well as the fifth columnists, defeatists and appeasers within—i.e., politicians on both sides of the aisle, spineless university administrators, media abettors, tergiversating liberals, tenured academics who indoctrinate from the left rather than educate from the tradition of reputable scholarship, and the feminist Furies acting out their faux version of Lysistrata—if a culture is not only to survive but to flourish.

First published in PJ Media.