Wuss

Kim DuToit writes an essay - sometimes brilliant, sometimes maddening - on the "Pussification of the American Male".

Money grab:

..."little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of 'good guy vs. bad guy' that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.

Now, men are taught that violence is bad -- that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to 'give him what he wants', instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.

Now, men's fashion includes not a man dressed in a three-piece suit, but a tight sweater worn by a man with breasts.

Now, warning labels are indelibly etched into gun barrels, as though men have somehow forgotten that guns are dangerous things.

Now, men are given Ritalin as little boys, so that their natural aggressiveness, curiosity and restlessness can be controlled, instead of nurtured and directed.

And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like 'swaggering', 'macho' and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, 'cowboy'. Of course he was bound to get that reaction -- and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.

How did we get to this?"

He explains some of it, hitting some, missing others.

Du Toit has a great piece on the ritual castration of the male in advertising:

Little girl (note, not little boy): Daddy, why do we eat Cheerios?
Dad: Because they contain fiber, and all sorts of stuff that's good for the heart. I eat it now, because of that.
LG: Did you always eat stuff that was bad for your heart, Daddy?
Dad (humorously): I did, until I met your mother.
Mother (not humorously): Daddy did a lot of stupid things before he met your mother...

...What Dad should have replied to Mommy's little dig: Yes, Sally, that's true: I did do a lot of stupid things before I met your mother. I even slept with your Aunt Ruth a few times, before I met your mother.

There's much more.

The Professor notes:

IN RESPONSE to Kim du Toit's essay on manhood, which I linked earlier, I just want to note two things: First, that it's come back to me already via multiply-forwarded email from all sorts of friends and acquaintances who don't seem to realize where it originated, suggesting that it's taking on a life of its own, and second that I actually think the strongest part of his essay was his reflection on how television and advertising reflexively denigrate men -- and especially fathers -- nowadays (sort of the Berenstain Bears syndrome writ large).

Advertising and education are the two greatest forums for this phenomenon.

In advertising, the "Fred Flintstone" archetype has taken complete hold; Fred was impulsive, stupid, lost to his self-centered and wrong-headed desires. Wilma was the inevitable voice of wisdom and reason. It's gotten to the point where kids today accept that as the norm (the fathers on Lizzie McGuire, Boy Meets World, Even Stevens and so many other kids' shows follow that model. It wasn't always that way; compare fathers on TV produced in the fifties and early sixties (Andy Griffith, Robert Young, even Hugh Beaumont - all of whom were on a level field with their TV wives and girlfriends) and TV set in the fifties and early sixties (Tom Bosley's ridiculous father in Happy Days, or the impotently tormented Dan Lauria in Wonder Years). You're talking about two drastically different samples of men. Why is that? I think Kim has it right.

Education is, if anything, worse. TV is a drug you can turn off. But if your son doesn't respond to ostracism and suspension for petty offenses that involve acting like a boy (as has my son, who was suspended for a day recently for bringing, not only a toy gun to school, but a tiny one at that), they start pushing Ritalin. It makes boys act more like girls, which makes the utopian, fabian, feminized educational-industrial complex much more comfortable.

Expect much more on this later today.

Posted by Mitch at November 6, 2003 06:53 AM