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Why 'Toxic' Masculinity was the Key to my Success
🕑 Added 2023-08-09 11:19:04 +0000 UTCThis morning, I interviewed Rachel Wilson, author of the book Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation. Her book argues that like many ‘compassionate’ movements nowadays, feminism was basically yet another product of looking at the world from a Marxist perspective and putting everything in terms of ‘oppressed and the oppressor.’ This kind of lens leads to a knee jerk reaction of ‘do the most compassionate thing first and worry about the downstream effects later.’ Like most Marxist things, that which carries a label of compassion for the disenfranchised deserves at least a closer look.
I realize the notion of being critical of something like feminism sounds like it would have to be misogynistic, but the point of Rachel’s book is to analyze whether the tenets of feminism are 100% good for women or not, or maybe if there is some downstream collateral damage from the movement. After all, her goal is to piece out what do women actually want and what is actually good for women?
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One thing that stood out during my interview with her was her claiming that there were more women against the women’s suffrage movement than there were women who were for it. And that those women had good, logical reasons for why women’s suffrage wouldn’t necessarily be to the benefit of women.
Here is part of the description of Rachel’s book’s page on Amazon.
In modern society, it is simply assumed that women’s liberation was a good thing. But what if it was never an organic, grassroots movement for social justice? Did feminism liberate women from an oppressive, evil patriarchy? Or did it rip away the fundamental structures that afforded them stability, security, and purpose, turning them into wage slaves for corporations and tax revenue cash cows for governments? What if feminism left women more vulnerable than ever by destroying the family?
I understand these sound like wild accusations, but for them make sense you really need to read Rachel’s book or you can wait for my full interview with her to come out. Rachel’s book isn’t actually the topic of this Substack post, but I’m letting you know who she is since our since I’m sharing a clip from my interview with her.
Before the clip starts, we were talking about some of the differences in upbringing with daughters and sons and how boys learn a lot about emotions and boundaries through rough and tumble play. A son might be having fun wrestling with his Dad and he gets frustrated because he can’t ‘win’ so he figures a good punch to the face might be a good move. He will very quickly be sharply informed of a new boundary - that punching others in the face is not an appropriate way to act, even if it is what your emotions told you to do.
We also talked about how that can extend to a son learning the so-called ‘masculine’ way to deal with emotions. That is, the son will learn from his father the boundaries that inform what is the appropriate, ‘masculine’ way to let your emotions guide your behavior.
Rachel discusses men being told to be more emotional and I tell a story about how I sent a letter to my Dad telling him about how he was totally in the wrong for making me work a job doing manual labor and ignoring my emotions and being so harsh on me. Then, something had me realize just how necessary his so called ‘toxic masculinity’* was and I wrote him another letter thanking him for the job.
*In case it wasn’t obvious: I use the term ‘toxic masculinity sarcastically.
FYI the voiceover of this post has the audio of the clip attached.
See this post for the video clip.
Rachel
And we have just this dominant way of thinking that masculinity is violent and problematic and bad and it's completely untrue. And I think I benefited quite a bit from I've been married for 16 years to a masculine, really great, virtuous, strong man. He's 100% in control of his emotions. He's as reliable he could ever be. And it's such a stabilizing force in my life that I'm like, I don't think women who've never experienced that don't know what that's like. I don't think they understand the stabilizing security factor of having competent men who are in control of themselves and can handle their business. It actually prevents all of the chaos and violence and problems that we're talking about. So I would love to see a return to men being masculine.
It's just that the whole culture and all of society just like it does, beats the motherhood out of young girls. It beats the masculinity out of men at a young age. Because I've heard my dad talk about this, about how female teachers, female authority figures, his ex wife, these people have always told him, like, he's the problem. You're not emotional enough, you're not. This, no matter what he did, was never enough. Even though he's building everything and paying for everything and taking care of it's just never enough. And you see this a lot with modern women where they say, oh, I want the man to be six foot tall and I want him to make six figures and I want him to provide me with this high standard of living.
But I'm also going to complain if he works too much and doesn't pay enough attention to me. Again, there's trade offs for everything, right? So if you want this high status, successful male, he's not going to just sit there all day and do it on you and give you endless amounts of attention and focus all of his energies on you. So I think it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between the sexes and that those are not bad things. We can cooperate together and the world works great. And now we are stuck in this quagmire where we're trying to get the women to act more like men and the men to act more like women and everything's broken.
Joseph
Yeah, there's this kind of thing, this thing about what you're saying about the female authority figures telling your father that he's not emotional enough and that's a bad thing. I don't think it's good to teach men that in general, of course, there's always context, always different situations where it makes sense. But in general, saying it's better to be more emotional - who does that help?
When you're trying to do your work, focus on your studies, be diligent and not play video games and not mope about whatever, this or that. Instead of doing your work and building up your life, you're focusing too much on your emotions, you're kind of using them, let's say, as a guide.
The way I see it is if you have an emotion, it pops up, it's really strong, and then you immediately feel that there's an action that you should take based on that emotion. What I think is a lot more effective is to watch the emotion arise. Let it arise. Watch the type of action that you feel that you should take based on that emotion. Let that intention arise too, and then wait for it to pass away. And then once the emotion has finally passed, you should be able to say, okay, this emotion rose for a reason. What was the reason for that? Why did this happen? Okay, what is the most practical thing to do based on that? What is the most practical solution to do based on these situations that created that emotion? And then you have your answer.
But if you just go, problem, emotion, action … it's usually going to be something that is not really effective and is not really going to get the best outcome for you and your community. And so, for example, it goes back to what you're talking about with the boundary setting that a father will do with their sons. You're doing that rough and tumble play, and then you get taught about a boundary. So you start to learn that, like, oh, my emotions aren't necessarily telling me what the best action to take is … considering my anger told me that I want to punch my dad in the face. Okay, I have to learn this process of suppress the emotion, stop, assess what the best action is, and then go with that.
It's really embarrassing to say, but when I was in high school, I was quite addicted to video games. And I think that the only thing that really saved me from becoming a total loser in my adult life was the fact that my dad had me work at his business for I think it was two years, maybe the longer that. Ut was really hard work, a lot of manual labor. Even when I was on summer break, I was expected to work even when I had school, I would sometimes have to work after school.
And then I sent him this letter several years later about how you should have made me feel more involved or, like, made the job more fun, or like you shouldn't have made it so hard - something like that. You should have thought more about my emotions and made it fun for me or something. And then after a while, on my own, I just kind of came back and realized, wait, there was some sort of stupid narrative out there that was telling me what he did was wrong, even though it was exactly the thing that I needed. And it is the whole thing that made me, I would say, the key thing that made me successful today. If I have any success today, it's thanks to that.
But I had to take a step and realize there was some sort of narrative playing in the space around me, in the books that I was reading, in the TV shows that I was watching, that … ‘oh, he was wrong, because he did not value my emotions.’ He wasn't paying attention to the fact that it was so hard for me that I had to work or whatever.
I saw this video, and it was like some Starbucks barista complaining that they had to do an eight hour shift and oh…
Rachel
I saw that.
Joseph
I laughed, and I was like, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Like, how can someone not tolerate an eight hour shift? And then something kind of flipped in my head.
I was like, well, why am I able tolerate an eight hour shift? Or even a twelve hour shift? Or like these 16 hours days I put in sometimes to tweak my YouTube videos and all that.
It was thanks to my dad's masculinity, maybe some people would say ‘toxic masculinity,’ which was actually the exact thing that I needed. And so I came back, wrote him a letter. I said: I was a total idiot. Everything I said was totally wrong, and you basically saved my entire adult work ethic. So, I mean, my point is, it's kind of a hard thing to process because I think nowadays there are some instances when it’s not good to tell men to repress their emotions and … try and think about why you think this way. Analyze your childhood, etc. But then sometimes it can go a little too far to where it's a too feminine solution to a masculine problem. Sorry about my rant, but are there kind of any other things you see going on there?
Rachel
It's a good rant, and I totally agree. And this is something that me now at 43, my oldest daughter's 22. I've done a little bit of living myself, and I think we should do more talking about the virtues of masculinity. Right? So what you just talked about with your father is kind of like this idea that men know that a certain level of adversity in life is necessary for your happiness. And we don't see that with the feminist and especially the field of psychology, which is now 80% female. It's like 80% of psychology degrees are earned by women. The self help explosion. Everything has to be soft and nice.
There was a comedian who used to do a bit about this, about how playgrounds 50 years ago were like death traps, and now everything is soft and squishy and close to the ground and really safe. And it's like a symptom of this, like women taking over everything, right? They launched a campaign at the public school near me called Be Nice. And I thought, I know people hear that and they think, yeah, why wouldn't you want people to be nice? Of course be nice. But there's a lot of times where being nice isn't necessarily the best response. We hear a lot of emphasis put on empathy. You have to have empathy. We have to make children more empathetic. There's this feminine idea that the problem with the world today is not enough empathy and not enough focus on everyone's emotions.
I would say it's the opposite, right? If you make everything easy and soft and free of adversity and no harm to anyone and everything's kind, then people don't ever learn how to overcome anything. They don't ever learn how to overcome themselves. That's something I actually wish I had more of when I was younger because I was very smart and school was super easy for me and I didn't get in trouble. So when I became an adult, I really had to learn to push myself. And it took me screwing up some things to realize, oh, I should probably work on having better control over what I'm putting in my mouth and making sure that I'm exercising and making sure that I have I had to do a lot of self improvement type of stuff that was not helped at all by this feminist, be kind to yourself mental health awareness, like all this soft psychology that's just everywhere. It was like, no, I'm the kind of person who could have used a little nudge or a little push, and that would have been really beneficial for me. And I think the reason we see two parent homes with mom and dad being by far the best outcomes for kids is because you have that balance, right? If you fall and skin your knee, your mom's going to kiss it and bandage it, and that's good for kids. We don't want to take that away.
But also there's times where if they've been laying in bed playing video games for a week straight on summer vacation, dad needs to come in and be like, okay, come outside, you're doing some yard work with me, right? You're going to earn your keep around here, and you're going to learn to get out of bed and get off your butt and do some things. And the dads are good at putting down boundaries. Like I said, we have four daughters, and there was a period where they were all, like, between ten and 20. Like, most of them were teenage or preteen age. And my husband always say, every day, I'm going to make somebody cry. Doesn't matter what I do. Doesn't matter what I say. Someone's going to run off crying for some reason. But now the older ones, they'll call you or they'll text you and they'll be like, oh, my gosh, Mom. I used to think that you and dad were so mean, or I used to think I had the weird, strict parents.
But I'm so thankful now that I did. Now I'm so glad because I have a good work ethic. I can make good decisions. I know how to take care of myself. I feel more mature than my peers. And that's the best thing you could hear as a mom, right when your kids tell you, hey, you guys did a good job. I know I got mad at you sometimes when I was a teenager, but thanks for doing a good job. That's what I think we should all be striving for. And we need the necessary male element there. Without Masculinity, nobody's going to make it. Okay?
