My first thought before reading this review of Sen. Josh Hawley's new book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, was that the problems of modern manhood are likely historical, and that perhaps men should whine less and actually do more.
Sure enough, from the historical angle, the reviewer — the Times' Carlos Lozada, formerly WaPo's book critic — notes that "in 1958, Esquire magazine featured an essay by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called 'The Crisis of American Masculinity,' which almost reads like it could have been published today. 'What has happened to the American male?' Schlesinger asked. 'For a long time, he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society.' However, by the mid-20th century, Schlesinger wrote, men had come to see their maleness 'not as a fact but as a problem.'"
The problem, as I see it, is that at some indefinite time in world history, the soldiering of productivity, for want of a better word, changed from brawn to brains. Nevertheless men, by and large, chose to stick with brawn, while women have buried them with their brains. Digging ditches and heaving bales of hay are no longer required in our technological age, but men refused to accept what was always inevitable. This is on them, not society, not pushy women, not uppity minorities. So they should quite bitching about their lot in life. They opted for it.
As for the Missouri senator's silly Solomonlike take on "the problem," Lozada observes the book's central illogicality:
"In Hawley’s telling, the left regards men as the source of their own problems. 'In the power centers they control, places like the press, the academy and politics, they blame masculinity for America’s woes,' the senator writes.... But he seems not to notice the contradiction at the heart of his book: Hawley spends chapter upon chapter telling young men to stop blaming others for their troubles, urging them to take personal responsibility for their lives and failings … and then he proceeds to give those same young men someone to blame for their fate."
Here's my take. The left, the right, the power centers, the press, the academy and politics should shut the fuck up about gender — both of 'em, or however many there are these days. We've had gender debates and analyses and critical interpretations and feminist theories and masculinity theories shoved down our gullets so often and for so long, Just. Stop.
Stop it. Stop all of it. The more we have analyzed the problems(s) the more muddleheaded we have become. Let us take an earned break from all the talk-show theorizing and journal articles and Sunday features.
And above all, men and their loony senators should stop kvetching about the sorry state of masculinity. If they really wanted to advance themselves, they would, as just one example, cease showing up at football games with bare, painted chests, guzzling beer and hooting fanatical exhortations. It's demeaning. It's embarrassing. It's stupid.
Which is also the #1 sorry state of so many men, which they proved in 2016 and again in 2020 and are planning on repeating in 2024.
First, fix the stupidity. Inform yourself, guys, with something other than right-wing manifestos. If anyone if "keeping you down," it's the very people who claim they're propping you up. These are the Ivy League folks who denigrate higher education, into which women have plunged. And so women are walking off with the world. Because they deserve to, because today, it's brains over brawn.