I’m a regular reader of Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, “Things Worth Remembering” in The Free Press, where he takes us back to timeless speeches and poems and reflects on them with his sharp wit and insight. A few weeks ago, on Father’s Day, he wrote about Camille Paglia’s speech on masculinity at a Munk debate in Toronto. Most of the article was greatly relevant and had important implications, as is usual with Murray’s pieces. Paglia’s speech seemed very sincere and honest in its attempt to “give credit where credit is due”, and praise men for all the work that they do around the world to keep society afloat, like the work on oil tankers and cargo ships. The article rightly pointed out that modern feminists only look at high status jobs when they talk about gender inequality at the workplace. However, towards the end of the article, both Murray and Paglia crossed over into slightly tricky terrain.
“Paglia does not limit her praise to men who build things and keep them running,” Murray says. “She envisions a day when men will be called upon to do the things they have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.” Then, he quotes the paragraph that he thinks is central to Paglia’s speech: “The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal. After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again. Oh sure, there will be the odd, gun-toting, Amazonian, survivalist gal who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children [expect] men to scrounge for food and water and defend the home turf.”
Here, in my mind, the two of them had crossed over from a very practical critique of modern feminism into something quite different. Saying that environments like oil rigs and cargo ships - jobs that demand brute strength - are masculine realms is not problematic. Sheer physicality and being male are undeniably correlated. But saying that “defending the home turf” is an exclusively male endeavor, is going a significant step further. So, I commented on the post since I was reading the article here, on Substack. I don’t remember the exact comment since I subsequently had to delete it (explanation ahead), but it was something like this:
“Most women and children expect men to scrounge for food and water and defend the home turf. Really? What an absolute 180. Someone explain to me how this is any different from saying that most men and children expect women to cook and clean, and take care of the home turf?”
Moments after posting the comment I got some shocked and disgusted replies. They had a very consistent and predictable tone. They all used phrases like, “real men” and “what kind of man”. All of these replies basically said the same thing: It is very unmanly to run away from the masculine responsibilities of protecting the tribe by equating them to the oppression of gender roles that women have had to endure. At one point these replies started to cross the line and become uncivil. It is worth noting that many of these replies were posted by blue-haired, self-proclaimed feminists. One of them read, and I’m cleaning up the language here, “I guess we will just have to wait for these people to die.” After reading this one, I decided to delete my comment.
None of the replies really addressed the point I was trying to make as they all assumed as given, the very thing I was trying to challenge. The idea that there are masculine responsibilities like scrounging for food and defending the tribe, is based on the assumption of gender roles; the very assumption that gave us ideas like “women should stay in the kitchen”. The latter is now unacceptable because liberal feminism rejected the idea of gender roles entirely. The argument for this was a very sound one. People should be treated as individuals as much as possible and their immutable characteristics should be ignored in every scenario as long as it is feasible to do so.
But this argument is thrown out the window when we talk about gender roles typically associated with men, i.e., warfare and providing for the family. One might ask, why is this so? Why the double standards? Is it because of the honor associated with being a soldier and the sense of purpose that one derives from providing for his family? Maybe so, but we should remember that staying in the kitchen and taking care of the children were not always looked at as limiting a woman’s potential. In many parts of the world, they still aren't. These were seen as a woman’s sacred duties. In my home country, India, the people that think women have no business being outside the house also claim to “worship women”. So, the same kind of honor and sense of purpose have been historically associated with female roles. Therefore, the honor factor is not what’s doing it. If we dug a little deeper into what unfolded in the comments section of Murray’s article and thought about why it is that I felt compelled to delete my comment, we would find out why this double standard has persisted.
The rhetoric about male gender roles have not changed nearly as much as they have about women because of one very significant factor: the male fear of humiliation. Men dread having to face a situation where they are called unmanly or lesser men, and this fear is taken advantage of. When they try and point out the hypocrisy in the gender roles discussion, their opponents need not make the effort of putting forward a logically sound argument. All they need to do is hurl emasculating insults. This is where phrases like “real men” and “what kind of man” make an entry. This cynical approach makes the double standards especially toxic since they can’t even be pointed out without having archaic insults thrown back at you by even the most radical of feminists.
There are far too many people, most of them politically right of center, who can’t seem to help but pine for the old days, when the primordial roles of men and women were part of mainstream human life. The image of men returning home from a hard day of physical work to their wife and children scurrying about at home, is viscerally attractive to them. The people that hold this way of life dear often hide themselves among the plain realists who recognize that the physical and biological differences between men and women - that do, in some cases, have implications that need to be acknowledged - are, in fact, barriers that need to be overcome; barriers to the liberal endeavor that seeks to always treat people as individuals. This is the very opposite of romanticizing and longing for ancient times when these differences were more real factors in a person’s life.
At this point, many people reading this might be eager to dismiss my argument as 'woke nonsense,' saying it sounds like another naive viewpoint that is simply ignorant of reality. I would sincerely urge those people to reconsider their hasty dismissal. To say that my argument here is anything close to woke is to thoroughly mischaracterize both the word “woke” and the basis for my line of reasoning. What I’m saying is completely consistent with the ideal of universality: To treat everyone as equals. Wokeism, on the other hand, looks at universality as its enemy. A wokester thinks of treating everyone equally as early-stage prejudice. In their view, we should have different standards for different people because there are different ways of knowing, thinking and being. To help the reader better understand this, let me try to come up with an actual woke argument in this very realm.
The hypothetical wokester would probably read Douglas Murray’s article and take offense at the very idea that “men should cultivate strength and bravery”. Strength itself, in their view, would be a masculine cultural construct that has historically dominated society. To see strength as a virtue and weakness as a vice would mean looking at the world with an exclusively male lens and this marginalizes non-males in a fundamental way. Therefore, what one really ought to be doing is normalizing and destigmatizing weakness as a human quality. You get the idea…
Obviously, this is an absurd and self-defeating line of reasoning that does absolutely no good in the world. It is the very opposite of universal liberalism, which is the ideal that I am trying to advocate for.
Forgive the oxymoron, but in an ideal apocalyptic scenario, we must encourage everyone, no matter their sex or gender to step up in their courage and to defend the home turf. At this very moment, there are brave Ukrainian and Israeli men and women that are doing exactly that. We live in the twenty-first century with amazing combat technology that enables both men and women to fight for their country. If we still lived in an era of knife fights, swords and brawls on the battlefield, maybe Paglia’s point would make more sense.
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