Paul really hit it out of the park with this one. With "women and children first..." and all that as our cultural background, even in our post-feminist era, we are served a heavy dose of male disposibility from an early age.
Paul does that most revolutionary (and courageous) thing: demanding "why" in face of popular consensus. Specifically, he demands an answer to the question, what is a good man?
I think I like Paul's analysis so much because it conforms to my basic religious understanding, which tells me that we are, each of us, a special creation, that God loves us, as individuals, that we are put here not just as fodder for some social project, but we are endowed with an individual dignity and freedom. Indeed, spiritually speaking, we are all equal.
When Paul asks the question, what is a good man, he forces us to confront a very deep ontological question, and forces us to confront various ideologies that attempt to rob us of our basic dignity and worth.
Read the whole of his article here http://www.avoiceformen.com/men/mens-issues/all-this-goodness-is-killing-me/. Excerpts follow:
Recent events over at the Good Men Project have added a kind of Jerry Springer quality to the man-o-sphere of late. ... The psychodrama we witnessed was fitting and edifying. It was driven, I think, by the core question essentially posed in the name of Tom Matlack’s website, and the modern struggle to own the answer. What is a good man?
Please inform us of anything, one single quality, that you think constitutes a part of being a good man – that does not also apply to being a good woman. I am not taking the feminist path here. I understand and accept that there are differences between men and women, physically, psychologically, emotionally and intellectually. I would disabuse anyone of the notion that any of those innate differences constitute a difference in innate value or should result in different expectations or different rights.
After extensive consideration, I can find no quality in human beings by which I don’t measure men and women equally. Tom, can you? If so, please email that to me because I am genuinely interested in hearing the answer.
I understand it may be tempting here to claim that I am sinking all of us in semantic quicksand. What’s the harm, after all, in striving to be a good man as opposed to being a good woman?
Well, for me there is harm because it is ultimately used to control people, and to abuse them.
Case in point. At least 11 people died after the Costa Concordia cruise ship ran aground on January 13. One of the first criticisms of the emergency procedures that came to light came from Edwin Gurd, a retired police chief who was on the scene and assisting with rescue efforts. He said, “We were keen for women and children to go first, and men if they had babies or families. A lot of men regardless of that were trying to save themselves.”
And this is where the rubber meets the road; for Tom Matlack; for Lisa Hickey; for all of us. And it is still the crossroads where GMP will more likely opt for a dating column than an honest exploration of the real issue. In the end each and every one of us knows what our culture sees in men who try to “save themelves.” Cowards. Not good men.
Is Edwin Gurd a “good man” because he wanted to help women and children ahead of other men and because he wanted to enforce that on everyone? How about the men who ignored the call to stay on a crippled ship while strangers were put ahead of them on life boats? Are they bad men? Should they have stayed, willing to die, in order to live by a code of disposability they were born into?
If, Tom, you are really struggling to get to the idea of what makes a man “good,” I submit you can’t get there without taking this bull by the horns and answering the questions. Romantic notions of masculinity are understandably appealing, but please tell me how romantic you would find it to see your son’s body floating face down next to a lifeboat that would not take him because he had a penis.
Some of the people defending the men who chose to ignore calls to wait behind women and children had an interesting rationale. Why would a man choose to die that way for strangers if it meant taking himself away from protecting and providing for his family?
My, what a telling defense! It is as though we cannot imagine that a man would think his life of equal value to anyone else’s, simply because he exists. The reason those people thought he was worth saving was because he was already sacrificing for those he knew. His life did not have value, but his utility did. Does this kind of thinking reflect what we should call good humanity?
Again, is this the sum of a man’s “goodness,” his worthiness to live? Is this why he cannot hope to have the value of someone with a vagina?
These are the real questions, and when you strip away all the internal politics; when the histrionic fits of your former associates have faded away, you are still left with a need to answer them.
My position on this is pretty clear. I don’t trust the thinking of anyone, no matter how good their intentions, who wants to define what a good man (or woman) is. That is the guy who wants me to die while someone else gets to live. It’s the woman who wants me to shut up and quit complaining because “good” men don’t whine; they either go out quickly, or slowly bleed to death without bothering anyone else with their troubles.
Good men line up to die in illicit wars for corporate interests, and leave their families to take solace in folded flags and cheap pieces of tin.
And worse, good men die the much slower and painful death, laboring daily just to stay out of jail, quietly dying in poverty, in the absence of home and children that were stripped from them – because speaking up gets them a “man up” or a “fuck off,” from most of the world.
Just ask Bill Bennett, Kay Hymowitz and Penny Nance. All of them have their ideas on what a good man is, and how we should all shut our fucking mouths and be one whether it kills us or ruins our lives.
Similarly, when many feminists speak of good men, they mean the ones who stand by them in trashing men and painting them as human contagions, in need of being reengineered so as not to contaminate the lives of their human betters. These are the same men working right now across the globe to foster a system of governance that reduces men to less value than livestock.
Yep, the whole world has ideas on what makes a good man, all of it hinging on how they can be used by thoughtless, shallow ingrates and ideologues.
As a man I know the price of being good. I see it in saltwater graves, flag draped coffins and a patch of charred pavement outside a family court in New Hampshire. I see it in the self-loathing of male feminists and sycophants, even in men like Hugo Schwyzer that fuck their students and try to kill people – then publicly display a psychopathic lack of remorse for all of it. By and large they will remain in good graces with many feminists, as long as they don’t make the mistake of imagining their own autonomy, like Tom Matlack did.
But most of all I see the price of being a good man across the pages of A Voice for Men every day, in the stories of men who have been battered, butchered and belittled for their goodness. These are men who have been strung up by the very things that most people would find worthy in men. And they stand, understandably, at arms-length from anyone who furthers the mentality that ultimately destroyed their lives.
Do I think Tom Matlack is a good person? Yes, I sincerely do, despite not agreeing with him on many things. I just don’t think he is a good man. I would not wish that on anyone.
Second Chances on the Divorce Superhighway
15 hours ago
7 comments:
Hi Justin,
What an evil article you've found! (And what perfect Bonald-bait!) It really shows why there can never be anything but enmity between social conservatives and the manosphere, with their Jacobinical egalitarianism and Satanic autonomy-worship.
Given my own pet obsessions, let me not allow the principle of patriarchy to go undefended.
Normative gender roles valorize our bodies, elevating biological facts into distinct callings to self-sacrifice. Men throughout the ages have known that their duty to defend their families and their patria, if necessary with their lives (a holy calling the cretin who wrote that article despises), gave them a special dignity and a fuller self-actualization. Men could never flourish in their distinct way in the world "A Voice for Men"--not this one, by God--would create. Women, in turn, have their own unique calling to self-sacrifice and their own special dignity. Of course, the cardinal virtues--prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance--are common to the sexes, but they are analogically defined; a woman's proper courage is different from a man's. A man finds it in his protector role, a woman in accepting vulnerability (that of trusting her husband, that of allowing her body to be used to nurture new lives).
Eliminate the specific duties of men and women, the ideals of a good man and a good woman, take those away from us, and what are we left with? When we cease to be men and women, we are nothing but "persons", "human beings", and this is a very impoverished state. It has neither the excellence, nor the depth, nor the poetry of either distinct sex. A person has no distinct calling to excellence. It's just a naked will, with no telos but its own gratification.
No, men are not equal to women. Men are neither "greater than", "equal to", nor "less than" women. Those sorts of relationships only exist between numbers. The real question is whether there can be no legitimate difference in role between men and women. The Bible rejects such a stand when it gave the husband authority over the wife. Indeed, the traditions of mankind are unanimous on the point. They differ over details of which role does what (although less than we are often led to believe), but they all agree on the basic principle of distinction.
I don't buy that men have a unique authority over women, and saying that a woman's courage is in being VULNERABLE is incredibly simplistic to me.
It's true, Justin, there are few qualities that men and women don't share to some point. The difference is in how we use them, in our RELATIONSHIPS. And this can be very hard to express, but no less true. We fight differently, for one thing, even in grade school; guys can be quick and brutal, while girls can cloak swords in words and have fights that last much longer. We know what hurts more, we work with expression, and we generally take things more personally. A good example of our visible and subtle differences can be shown in motherhood and fatherhood: both teach discipline, strength, kindness, but are they the same? No, and they never could be. Which is why it's angered me when I've heard single parents say, "I have to be the mom and dad" or, moreover, that a person COULD be both. They can't, pure and simple. You're either one or the other.
Thanks for the comments.
bonald, I agree that men are indeed created for the role of protector, and the roles of the sexes are not the same. In that, Paul Elam is wrong. We as Christians can indeed define differences between a Good Man vs a Good Woman.
However, I do see P.E.'s article as useful to free us from the false ideology of Male Disposibility.
In short, I see no evidence that our God-given role as protector obligates us to follow the self-sacrificial propaganda of the Victorian liberal welfare-warfare state. Self-sacrifice in a lifeboat scenario is no more incumbant upon the Christian male than the Christian female.
This was indeed a powerful read. As a Christian, we need to put others first. This doesn't mean we need to stand passively by and die, and never does it mean we need to see ourselves as disposable. Men who think first of women and children are honorable and brave, knowing them to be weaker. But helping others, and standing still while the water rises, are different things.
Justin,
Did you notice that Paul Elam at the end of his piece asks men to imagine their own autonomy? That's something of a giveaway.
The bigger picture, I think, goes something like this. Feminists have run a movement seeking to maximise the autonomy of women. The role of men has been to prop up this autonomy. This unequal treatment was justified on leftist grounds that men were an oppressor class and were therefore privileged and did not need society's concern.
Neither conservative men, nor increasing numbers of liberal men, are willing to accept this anymore. We aren't willing for our lives to have no more meaning than propping up female autonomy.
But there are two different approaches to changing things. Conservatives would argue that we should quit making autonomy the sole, overriding aim for both sexes and return to complementary relationships.
Liberals MRAs, though, want to keep autonomy as the overriding aim, but to reject the idea that men are privileged - they believe that it is the autonomy of men that needs attention.
It is liberals who now dominate the men's movement. Although it's a good thing that liberal men are starting to reject the "man as privileged oppressor" line, the "let's imagine ourselves as autonomous" approach has its own drawbacks.
If you really want to be autonomous as a man what does that mean? It might mean not committing to any one woman, but keeping your options open as a player. It might mean "going your own way" and rejecting a commitment to family and fatherhood. It might mean rejecting definitions of manhood or masculinity as being too limiting. It might mean downplaying sex distinctions as being predetermined rather than self-determined. It might mean rejecting the constraints of a protector/provider role in the family.
What we're going to get are moderate reform versions of liberal masculism and radical ones (for an example of a more radical MRA thinking through autonomy for men see here).
Very intelligent post, Mark.
Mark, I would say Paul's post is liberal in the original meaning of the word: FREE-ing, liberating. In that, I will not condemn it.
I do not stand with the "Satanic automony worshippes", as Bonald puts it, and you are right to warn us of that tendency. I thank you for that service, your essays are always enlightening.
Post a Comment