There is this feminist notion that masculinity is a basket of “good” and “bad” characteristics that men can pick and choose from. The pleasant qualities are things like provision of food, provision of funds, providing a home, duty, honor and procreation. The “bad” or distasteful characteristics are things like intense strength, lust, violence and furious indignation.
The project of radical feminism has been to convince men, and women alike, that men must rid themselves of all the distasteful qualities and characteristics of their nature. If they don’t, they threaten, the “toxic male” will no longer find acceptance in the feminized world in which we now live. The term for this is emasculation.
And yet, you cannot cherry-pick the parts of masculinity that you are happy with. Just as an engineer cannot keep the abutments and dispense with the footings of a wall, bridge or building, the man is the totality of strength and weakness built in perfect tension and relationship to each other. The man is much like a high tension bridge. You cannot have the strengths without the foundation spanning the weak points.
In every textbook or class on biology, the male and female of a species are dramatically different and can never be expected to act, interact or look similarly. But, ask any woman and the majority will tell you that men are looked at from the female mind as a hairy, misbehaving woman.
When a man seeks to rid himself of the “nasty parts,” pointed out and perceived as “bad” by the female, the bridge collapses. You cannot bridge an ocean without tension, without a mass of steel suspended in configurations of terrifying force and power, that steel welded together with white hot heat and molten flux.
The solution is not to rid yourself or conform. It is to admit, acknowledge and own every aspect of your gender, no matter how ugly, volatile or untidy it may appear to the opposite sex.
Man is messy. He always has been. Try to bury that fact and your gender will bury you.
Denying the mess is a recipe for repression, misery, malaise, fatigue and heart disease.
Make no mistake, when you go off script and embrace the mess, you will feel, and appear, dangerous.
Feminism will treat your masculinity like a loaded gun because unapologetic fully-embraced masculinity IS a loaded gun. You are dangerous. That’s what it means to be a man.
Uncocking the hammer does nothing but emasculate you, and render you a useless tool, a dull blade, to your family and the world at large.
The lie is that you can get rid of the “nasty bits” and retain your masculine power. In truth, you have two choices.
- Be dangerous, yet well disciplined
- Scale yourself down to a cap gun . . . shooting blanks.
Be warned, the second choice sounds great, and actually is initially pleasant to the females in your life, but it leads to depression and the modern male malaise.
Chose wisely.
(Adapted from Bryan Ward’s Third Way Man)