Contemporary culture has become so dominated by feminist thought that many people have come to think of women as the default “human,” and thus condemn men as “defective women,” Suzanne Venker argues.

This is largely a result of our extraordinary affluence as a society, where people in the culture-making elite take for granted the needs at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. If you don’t have to worry about food, clothing and shelter, and if war and violent crime are distant enough as to pose no threat to your safety, then it’s possible to think that masculine traits are no longer essential. The journalist or academic dining in a Boston cafe doesn’t think about the manpower involved in providing her meal. Somebody had to pick that arugula, load it in a truck, drive the truck to a produce company, so on and so forth until it arrived on the cafe table as a salad, but as in the famous story of “I, Pencil,” the consumer never has to think about all the labor involved in getting her meal on the table. And if your experience in life has sheltered you from the reality of life among the laboring classes, as is true for almost everyone in the culture-making elite, it is easy to underestimate the value of masculinity.

For the woman raised in the more affluent sectors of our society — the college-educated journalist or academic — the manly virtues may seem superfluous. If she has absorbed the precepts of feminist ideology (either through a Gender Studies course, or by secondhand osmosis in a culture suffused with feminist thinking), she takes for granted that equality is the highest ideal, and that any deviation from that ideal is oppression, for which men are automatically to blame. Thus, as Venker remarks, such women are apt to make nitpicking complaints about men failing to measure up to the standard of equality, in terms of doing housework or performing “emotional labor” in relationships. It does not occur to such a woman, in the air-conditioned comfort of her existence, that a man might have inherent value as a man, and so she condemns him according to a feminist standard that necessarily undervalues masculinity.

The past few days, I’ve been re-reading The Robert E. Lee Reader by Stanley Horn, and I recall that in my youth, Lee’s character was held up as a model of the Christian gentleman that every boy should strive to emulate. When Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg was repulsed, and the defeated survivors came staggering back from their bloody ordeal, Lee told them: “It’s all my fault.” He took full responsibility for the failure, and offered his resignation in a letter to Jefferson Davis.

Many Americans have forgotten what war is, just as we have forgotten what it is like to live without the comforts our affluence provides. And so it is that authentic manhood has become undervalued. One wonders what will happen to such people if they ever confront the kind of crisis in which the masculine values are their only hope of survival.







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