Masculinity

Out and about yesterday, I caught a bit of Dennis Prager's radio show. He defended Daniel Penny's behavior in his confrontation with Jordan Neely as masculine, using the word correctly. In our infantilized, feminized, and left-dominated and therefore crime-tolerant society, Penny's behavior will be called toxically masculine by our political enemies. But to anyone who can think straight, there is a difference between the masculine and the toxically masculine.

On the other hand, there are people to my right, politically speaking, who deny that there is any toxic masculinity.  I must oppose them too.  I say to them: Are you seriously going to maintain that there are no instances of machismo that are not reasonably described as 'toxic'?

Consider the sad case of Cynthia Garcia. This foolish middle-aged woman and mother thought it would be fun to party with the Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels in their Mesa, Arizona clubhouse of a Saturday night. The 'Angels' of course demanded sex; she showed disrespect, even after they stomped her, and so they brutally murdered her. There are differing accounts of the exact details.  But the upshot was indeed brutal. Two of them stabbed her to death and attempted to cut her head off,  dumping her remains in the desert proximal to the Rio Salado shooting range.

 

Of course, normal masculine behavior such as that displayed by Penny is not toxic, and the feminization of boys is a serious threat to social stability and the survival of the Republic. But just as a Nazi is no cure for a commie, a biker brute is no cure for a feminized boy.

 

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. 

 

You should no more allow the Left's theft of perfectly good English words than you should allow their question-begging and question-burying coinages such as 'Islamophobia' and 'homophobia' and 'transphobia.' I have gone over this many times and I am not in the mood to repeat myself.  Enough compromising with our political enemies; resist them on every front.

 

Addendum

 

William Voegli weighs in on the Penny-Neely encounter at City Journal: 

Are New York’s subways safer, its homeless population less dangerous, than is generally believed? Than Tarannum and, perhaps, Daniel Penny seemed to think? The Times pointed out in February that the rate of violent felonies on the subway system was twice as high in 2022 as it had been in 2019. The system saw ten people murdered in 2022, compared with an average of two per year from 2015 through 2019. On the other hand, the Times pointed out that even after this increase, there were 1.2 violent crimes for every 1 million subway rides, which works out to about the likelihood of being injured during a two-mile automobile trip. Readers deliberating how much reassurance to derive from such statistics may reflect on the Times’s utter lack of such restraint and sobriety following the death of George Floyd in 2020, when the paper made no attempt to caution against sweeping generalizations based on the anomalous death of an unarmed black man in police custody.

You might want to bear in mind that truth is not a leftist value, and that leftists have a strange propensity to celebrate the dysfunctional, the transgressive, the grotesque, and the socially worthless as part of their nihilist drive to normalize deviant behavior, all the while attacking the sane, the decent, the socially useful, including the subway commuters on their way to work.  

This brings up a second point raised by Rahnuma Tarannum, about how the authorities not doing their job puts civilians in a position where they either do it themselves or suffer the consequences of no one doing it. 

Abdication of authority has dire consequences. Leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote vigilantism. Remember Bernie Goetz, the subway gunman? In the same way, leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote increased gun ownership among civilians. Either unable or unwilling to distinguish weapon from wielder, lefties unrelentingly repeat that guns cause crime. But then demonstrating their lack of common sense, they agitate for the defunding of police, the ratcheting down of criminal penalties, etc. So the people arm themselves. Surprise! How stupid can a 'liberal' be?

I am a staunch supported of 2A rights, but being sane and reasonable I don't want more and more untrained civilians packing heat.

It is true, as Bouie says, that no one on Jordan Neely’s subway car had any way to know that he had been arrested 42 times, including at least four times for punching people, two of which occurred in the subway system. Nor could they have known that Neely was on “the ‘Top 50’ list,” which, the Times explained, is a “roster maintained by the city of . . . people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment.” Lacking such knowledge, Bouie contends, Neely’s fellow passengers were obligated to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Comments

[Connor Creegan]

(Speaking of the subversion of language,) a suggestion:

The popular terminology of "left" and "right" is, I think, unhelpful in many respects. In essence, it is the construct of revolutionary historians and parliamentarians who use it to model politics after the symbol of the National Assembly. It didn't come into frequent use in the United States until around the middle of the 20th century, likely because before the 20th century, U.S. politics most explicitly revolved around federalism v. anti-federalism, and insofar as we had a two-party system, the system tended to represent that tension. Since the U.S. became the global center of power, its politics became more and more modeled after the progress v. regress narrative, and at least since Nixon times the Republican Party has been the unprincipled and constantly-updating reactive force against the progress end of that equation. Because the movement has no principle other than "unify around reacting against 'the left'", the movement is constantly changing in order to keep up with left.

If "being further to the right" means dressing like some puff biker and assaulting women, and "being more moderately right" means having solidarity with and (yet worse) giving my attention to a Zionist and a pornography apologist, I'm really not sure I want anything to do with the label at all. I typically don't reject the characterization of "right wing" (out of humility), but if someone asks me where I "lean", I just say that I am a Christian in order to save myself the embarrassment and the false assignment of my values and beliefs. Two-dimensional models impose horribly inaccurate frame on political reality, which, if thinking geometrically, harmonizes much more with something like a self-assembling pyramidal structure.

[Will B]

I think it is Daniel Penny who is accused of manslaughter in the case of the death of Jordan Neely, and Daniel Perry who was recently sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing an armed BLM protester who approached his car in Austin. Both cases are miscarriages of justice.

[BV]

Will B,

Thanks for catching my mistake! Here is the PERRY case: https://nypost.com/2023/05/10/former-soldier-daniel-perry-sentenced-to-25-years-for-killing-blm-protester/

[john doran]

There is no "toxic masculinity".

There are perhaps "toxic males", such as the bikers in your example, but a million toxic males does not make for "toxic masculinity", any more than a trillion badly acting humans makes for "toxic humanity".

Look, by "toxic masculinity", the Progs mean to say that masculinity just IS toxic, inherently; they are NOT simply making the (asinine) observation that "some males act badly".

And this is their modus operandi: use words in a way that seems innocent enough, but alter the referents in just so subtle a way that their otherwise resistant interlocutors engage them in good faith on their novel usage, and thereby legitimize it.

What the Progs are actually attempting to do, is to systematize the feminization of men, by demonizing the genetic predisposition of males of the species toward physical aggression. They desperately need a compliant citizenry, and as long as there are "manly men" around, willing and able to go to war against threats to hearth and home, the position of the Progs will always be tenuous. So they're going to the lengths that they're going, in order to inculcate a generation of males with the idea that their masculinity is abhorrent, and "gurrl power!".

And so we have the widespread acceptance of male homosexuality, followed not-so-shortly by its valorisation, then gay marriage, and then gay adoption, and then the trans-craze along with its attendant drag-queen story-hour movement: men should be (second-rate) women, and women should be (second-rate) men, starting from the cradle.

These people do NOT respect and share your quest for intellectual and linguistic precision and clarity, man, and so, admitting to distinctions that, to them, have no difference, is to have lost the battle before you've even begun to fight.

My approach for years: I am having a conversation, and someone describes something as "racist". I promptly say, "There's no such thing as racism".

The stunned silence is typically ended by confused, red-faced blustering about how I must be mad.

Then I calmly say, "Okay: tell me what racism is."

To blank stares.

I usually get no answer at all (not even gestures in the direction of a definition), but only deflection and invective. But the more putatively thoughtful of my conversants (including fellow lawyers) eventually cobble together a definition that is either uselessly broad, or uselessly specific (i.e. either everyone is racist, or no one.)

Whether or not a seed is sown in them from such exchanges, the palpability of their discomfiture is delightful.

Anyway. Just some thoughts from the trenches.

[Kurt Schneider]

Regarding those conservatives who claim there is no such thing as toxic masculinity, maybe this is what they have in mind. I would argue that toxic masculinity is a perversion of the masculine virtues. Thus "toxic masculinity" is simular to "toxic justice", "toxic temperance" or "toxic fortitude". It's only toxic in the sense that it is a perversion, either in excess or deficiency, of virtue. With that said, there are many behaviors that would count as "toxic masculinity". I'm thinking of someone like Andrew Tate. He thinks he's real masculine, but he's just sexually perverse.