For your reading pleasure Kim du Toit’s timeless classic essay:

The Pussification Of The Western Male

We have become a nation of women.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.

There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)

There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.

There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.

We’re not like that anymore.

Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.

Now, men are taught that violence is bad—that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.

Now, men’s fashion includes not a man dressed in a three-piece suit, but a tight sweater worn by a man with breasts.

Now, warning labels are indelibly etched into gun barrels, as though men have somehow forgotten that guns are dangerous things.

Now, men are given Ritalin as little boys, so that their natural aggressiveness, curiosity and restlessness can be controlled, instead of nurtured and directed.

And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction—and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.

How did we get to this?

In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.

But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media—and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (ie. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.

I am aware of the fury that this statement is going to arouse, and I don’t care a fig.

What I care about is the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a concerted campaign to denigrate men, to reduce them to figures of fun, and to render them impotent, figuratively speaking.

I’m going to illustrate this by talking about TV, because TV is a reliable barometer of our culture.

In the 1950s, the TV Dad was seen as the lovable goofball—perhaps the beginning of the trend—BUT he was still the one who brought home the bacon, and was the main source of discipline (think of the line: “Wait until your father gets home!”).

From that, we went to this: the Cheerios TV ad.

Now, for those who haven’t seen this piece of schit, I’m going to go over it, from memory, because it epitomizes everything I hate about the campaign to pussify men. The scene opens at the morning breakfast table, where the two kids are sitting with Dad at the table, while Mom prepares stuff on the kitchen counter. The dialogue goes something like this:

Little girl (note, not little boy): Daddy, why do we eat Cheerios?

Dad: Because they contain fiber, and all sorts of stuff that’s good for the heart. I eat it now, because of that.

LG: Did you always eat stuff that was bad for your heart, Daddy?

Dad (humorously): I did, until I met your mother.

Mother (not humorously): Daddy did a lot of stupid things before he met your mother.

Now, every time I see that TV ad, I have to be restrained from shooting the TV with a .45 Colt. If you want a microcosm of how men have become less than men, this is the perfect example.

What Dad should have replied to Mommy’s little dig: Yes, Sally, that’s true: I did do a lot of stupid things before I met your mother. I even slept with your Aunt Ruth a few times, before I met your mother.

That’s what I would have said, anyway, if my wife had ever attempted to castrate me in front of the kids like that.

But that’s not what men do, of course. What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and [bleep] his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom.

You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.

When I first started this website, I think my primary aim was to blow off steam at the stupidity of our society.

Because I have fairly set views on what constitutes right and wrong, I have no difficulty in calling Bill Clinton, for example, a f***ing liar and hypocrite.

But most of all, I do this website because I love being a man. Amongst other things, I talk about guns, self-defense, politics, beautiful women, sports, warfare, hunting, and power tools—all the things that being a man entails. All this stuff gives me pleasure.

And it doesn’t take much to see when all the things I love are being threatened: for instance, when Tim Allen’s excellent comedy routine on being a man is reduced to a f***ing sitcom called Home Improvement. The show should have been called Man Improvement, because that’s what every single plotline entailed: turning a man into a “better” person, instead of just leaving him alone to work on restoring the vintage sports car in his garage. I stopped watching the show after about four episodes.

(“The Man Show” was better, at least for the first season—men leering at chicks, men f***ing around with ridiculous games like “pin the bra on the boobies”, men having beer-drinking competitions, and women on trampolines. Excellent stuff, only not strong enough. I don’t watch it anymore, either, because it’s plain that the idea has been subverted by girly-men, and turned into a parody of itself.)

Finally, we come to the TV show which to my mind epitomizes everything bad about what we have become: Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Playing on the homo Bravo Channel, this piece of excrement has taken over the popular culture by storm (and so far, the only counter has been the wonderful South Park episode which took it apart for the bullschit it is).

I’m sorry, but the premise of the show nauseates me. A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” (ie. more acceptable to women): changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music—for f**k’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?

Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big f***ing deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.

You know the definition of homosexual men we used in Chicago? “Men with small dogs who own very tidy apartments.”

Real men, on the other hand, have big f***ing mean-ass dogs: Rhodesian ridgebacks, bull terriers and Rottweilers, or else working dogs like pointers or retrievers which go hunting with them and slobber all over the furniture.

Women own lapdogs.

Which is why women are trying to get dog-fighting and cock-fighting banned—they’d ban boxing too, if they could—because it’s “mean and cruel”. No schit, Shirley. Hell, I don’t like the idea of fighting dogs, either, but I don’t have a problem with men who do. Dogs and cocks fight. So do men. No wonder we have an affinity for it.

My website has become fairly popular with men, and in the beginning, this really surprised me, because I didn’t think I was doing anything special.

That’s not what I think now. I must have had well over five thousand men write to me to say stuff like “Yes! I agree! I was so angry when I read about [insert atrocity of choice], but I thought I was the only one.”

No, you’re not alone, my friends, and nor am I.

Out there, there is a huge number of men who are sick of it. We’re sick of being made figures of fun and ridicule; we’re sick of having girly-men like journalists, advertising agency execs and movie stars decide on “what is a man”; we’re sick of women treating us like children, and we’re really f***ing sick of girly-men politicians who pander to women by passing an ever-increasing raft of Nanny laws and regulations (the legal equivalent of public-school Ritalin), which prevent us from hunting, racing our cars and motorcycles, smoking, flirting with women at the office, getting into fistfights over women, shooting criminals and doing all the fine things which being a man entails.

When Annika Sorenstam was allowed to play in that tournament on the men’s PGA tour, all the men should have refused to play—Vijay Singh was the only one with balls to stand up for a principle, and he was absolutely excoriated for being a “chauvinist”. Bullschit. He wasn’t a chauvinist, he was being a man. All the rest of the players—Woods, Mickelson, the lot—are girls by comparison. And, needless to say, Vijay isn’t an American, nor a European, which is probably why he still has a pair hanging between his legs, and they’re not hanging on the wall as his wife’s trophy.

F**k this, I’m sick of it.

I don’t see why I should put up with this bullschit any longer—hell, I don’t see why any man should put up with this bullshit any longer.

I don’t see why men should have become feminized, except that we allowed it to happen—and you know why we let it happen? Because it’s damned easier to do so. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed it to go too far, and our maleness has become too pussified for words.

At this point, I could have gone two ways: the first would be to say, “…and I don’t know if we’ll get it back. The process has become too entrenched, the cultural zeitgeist of men as girls has become part of the social fabric, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

But I’m not going to do that. To quote John Belushi (who was, incidentally, a real man and not a f***ing woman): “Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”

Well, I’m not going to quit. F**k that. One of the characteristics of the non-pussified man (and this should strike fear into the hearts of women and girly-men everywhere) is that he never quits just because the odds seem overwhelming. Omaha Beach, guys.

I want a real man as President—not Al Gore, who had to hire a consultant to show him how to be an Alpha male, and french-kiss his wife on live TV to “prove” to the world that he was a man, when we all knew that real men don’t have to do that [bleep].

And I want the Real Man President to surround himself with other Real Men, like Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft, and yes, Rice (who is more of a Real Man than those azzwipes Colin Powell and Norman Mineta).

I want our government to be more like Dad—kind, helpful, but not afraid to punish us when we [bleep] up, instead of helping us excuse our actions.

I want our government of real men to start rolling back the Nanny State, in all its horrible manifestations of over-protectiveness, intrusiveness and “Mommy Knows Best What’s Good For You” regulations.

I want our culture to become more male—and not the satirical kind of male, like The Man Show, or the cartoonish figures of Stallone, Van Damme or Schwartzenegger. (Note to the Hollywood execs: We absolutely f***ing loathe chick movies about feelings and relationships and all that feminine jive. We want more John Waynes, Robert Mitchums, Bruce Willises, and Clint Eastwoods. Never mind that it’s simplistic— we like simple, we are simple, we are men—our lives are uncomplicated, and we like it that way. We Were Soldiers was a great movie, and you know why? Because you could have cut out all the female parts, and it still would have been a great movie, because it was about Real Men. Try cutting out all the female parts in a Woody Allen movie—you’d end up with the opening and closing credits.)

I want our literature to become more male, less female. Men shouldn’t buy “self-help” books unless the subject matter is car maintenance, golf swing improvement or how to disassemble a f***ing Browning BAR. We don’t improve ourselves, we improve our stuff.

And finally, I want men everywhere to going back to being Real Men. To open doors for women, to drive fast cars, to smoke cigars after a meal, to get drunk occasionally and, in the words of Col. Jeff Cooper, one of the last of the Real Men: “to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”

In every sense of the word. We know what the word “is” means.

Because that’s all that being a Real Man involves. You don’t have to become a f***ing cartoon male, either: I’m not going back to stoning women for adultery like those Muslim azzholes do, nor am I suggesting we support that perversion of being a Real Man, gangsta rap artists (those f***ing [bleep]—they wouldn’t last thirty seconds against a couple of genuine tough guys that I know).

Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why rape is such a problem on college campuses? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?

It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.

Because only the strong men propagate.

And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful [bleep] available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could f*** 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.

And he won’t. Because Rummy’s been married to the same woman for fifty years, and he wouldn’t toss that away for a quickie. He’s a Real Man. No wonder the Euros hate and fear him.

We’d better get more like him, we’d better become more like him, because if we don’t, men will become a footnote to history.

Kim du Toit

November 2003