Say what you want about hashtags but they’re one of the most useful ways to start a conversation I’ve ever seen. Just a few words scrunched together behind a pound sign (it’s still a pound sign to me) can cause an avalanche of support, stupidity or hate, but mostly stupidity.

If there’s one kind of hashtag that really gets around, it’s the hashtags created by feminists, and like another bothersome womanly thing, a new one makes an appearance at least once a month.

This dose of feminist weirdness came in the form of #MasculinitySoFragile. It’s a hashtag that was about as smug as it sounds.

Apparently fighting for economic, social, and political equality of the sexes is emasculating. #MasculinitySoFragile https://t.co/bNZdElrUx1 — Michael Rizzi (@MikeRizzi) September 23, 2015

#MasculinitySoFragile that men threaten, hurt & even kill women who say no to their advances, while others wonder why we don't just say "no" — Delia Mary (@DeliaMary) September 24, 2015

#MasculinitySoFragile that the moment it's challenged, men turn into whining, defensive babies. — Brian Eisley (@brianeisley) September 23, 2015

#MasculinitySoFragile Straight guys live in fear of being objectified/harassed by gay guys. Basically being treated the way they treat girls — Brandon Evers (@BrandonEvrs) September 23, 2015

As you can see, feminism took a welcome break from self-victimizing and decided to instead focus on tearing men down by inferring that a major aspect of their sex is very weak, and causes them to hurt people to make up for it. Of course, feminists would have you believe that wasn’t their point at all, despite the entire tag being filled with hateful messages about how awful men are.

For clarity: #MasculinitySoFragile is not making fun of men. It is making fun of the ridiculous ways people define what is "manly." — Zalka Csenge Virág (@TarkabarkaHolgy) September 23, 2015

The hashtag started when Buzzfeed created an article titled “23 Gendered Products That Prove How Truly Fragile Masculinity Is.” In it, author Luke Bailey showed various tweets of people taking pictures of products marketed towards men. How products designed to attract men is indicative of a weakness in masculinity, but products marketed toward women are not, has yet to be explained. I’m also quite sure we won’t see a “23 Gendered Products That Prove How Truly Fragile Femininity Is” from Buzzfeed anytime soon.

As you can guess, the feminists saw their opening, latched on to the idea and began to do their best to emasculate masculinity – because equality. As is the way of these things, the hashtag was fawned over by the media. A Google search as of the writing of this article shows all the top hits to be articles singing its praises.

“Perhaps one of the most egregious effects of the fragility of masculinity is in how when men’s advances are rejected, it’s almost expected of them to react violently,” writes The Mary Sue’s Jessica Lachenal, adding her own two cents about the hashtag. “There’s this requirement to lash out verbally or even physically at whoever’s rejected them. There’s always this need to ‘prove you’re a man’ by responding to perceived threats–even if those threats never existed in the first place.”

Digital Trend’s Lulu Chang was more than happy to point out the angry reaction to the hashtag, stating: “Operating that masculinity is inherently tied to physical strength, a number of users have pointed out that masculinity, or proving oneself to be ‘manly,’ often manifests itself in violence toward women or displays of physical strength.”

Even AskMen.com – whose tagline is “Become a better man” and sports such articles as “This Lingerie For Men Will Have Guys Looking As Fancy As Women” – had author Ian Lang rolling over in submission and encouraging other men to to do the same.

Ol’ fem-faithful itself, The Huffington Post, attempted to whitewash the whole thing by nitpicking what seem like sensible views of the hashtag under the title “The Reaction To Twitter Movement About Masculinity Is Exactly Why It’s So Important.” Of them all, this one is my favorite, because I feel it summed up the whole affair. Feminists are just making humorous, innocent observations, and men are totally getting nasty over it. Thus we are justified.

Masculinity is so fragile and stupid af. pic.twitter.com/EXpAIWHFmQ — flesh-colored (@haitreason) August 23, 2015

Nah, I’m sure it’s all in fun.

According to the feminists I argued with, it was the reaction to the insults flung at us on Team Phallus that really proved its point. In fact, it was the comeback I received regularly from the feminists who responded to my defense of men and masculinity.

@TheBrandonMorse you just proved our point honey #MasculinitySoFragile — ❌✖️ (@calmjuxtin) September 23, 2015

But this is a rigged game that can’t be won. If we react to the accusations of violence and misogyny, then we as masculine men are as thin-skinned as they say we are. If we didn’t react to the insults, then feminists would have had free reign to accuse men of all that nastiness in a vacuum with no counterpoints, and we would have been guilty anyway. No matter how this went down, the end result was to be the same: Men are evil, selfish, violent, misogynistic, and introducing…insecure!

I’ll gloss over the fact that the need to create a hashtag that insults men is indicative of insecurity on its own, or that by their own logic, the feminist’s angry reaction to the men defending their own honor makes them just as guilty of fragility.

Let’s also, for now at least, ignore the fact that the movement that came up with the #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag is constantly demanding trigger warnings, are in apparent need of safe spaces when things get just a bit too mildly disagreeable and attempted to ban the word “bossy” because they felt it was demeaning.

Instead, I want talk about masculinity, and why men were justified in their angry reaction to the attack on it.

What the feminist tends not to understand, is that masculinity is at the very core of a man. It’s why when masculinity was attacked, men took it personally. Women would have reacted similarly if femininity was attacked for the exact same reason.

We take pride in that aspect of our sex. Strength, virility, vigor and toughness – just a few qualities that define masculinity – have been our hallmarks since time immemorial.

Somewhere down the line, feminists skewed these qualities in the public mind so they elicited fear and worry. They, with the media as their workhorse, associated masculinity with rampancy, violence, sexual aggression and abuse. You can easily see the outcome of their efforts every time a boy runs afoul of a school’s zero tolerance policy for drawing a picture of a soldier or throwing a make-believe grenade at make-believe bad guys. You can see it whenever a college student is kicked out of school without due process after simply being accused of rape.

Feminists are half right. Masculinity is dangerous. It’s capable of horrible things, but where feminists are fully wrong is that this is only when that masculinity is perverted by horrible people. Danger, in itself, can be just as beneficial a force as it is a detrimental one. You rely on dangerous people to protect you when evil rears its head, and the more masculine that dangerous protector is, the better.

If a woman is cornered by a sexual predator and screams for help, she wants to see this guy show up…



Photo: CURAphotography / Getty Images

Not this guy…



Photo: PeopleImages / Getty Images

The first one is liable to stop the predator in his tracks, and punish him for his misdeeds. The second one is liable to call for the first one’s help, then turn around and create a hashtag that insults him later on.

Despite the obvious existence of good men who utilize their masculinity as it was supposed to be used (i.e. the vast majority), feminism does its level best to blur the line between the good dangerous man, and the bad dangerous man. It wants to convince whoever it can that being capable of perverted masculinity makes you guilty of it.

If I had a week I couldn’t list all the reasons that this is a joke of an idea, but the punchline is the collapse of society as we know it. If you make a man feel guilty and/or ashamed about his masculinity, he won’t utilize it to do what nature made it for, which is to protect himself and others – like the feminist – from harm. As I’ve stated before, if you take away a man’s natural inclination to be dangerous, you take away society’s barrier between you and harm.

All this to say, that contrary to the derision it receives from feminists, masculinity is a great thing. It’s not the bad guy the media likes to sensationalize it to be. In fact, we NEED masculinity, and not any kind pre-approved by the feminist hivemind. I mean masculinity as defined by its primary wielders: men. The kind of masculinity that femininity finds dangerous, scary and gross, but also finds highly attractive for some reason.

It’s laughable that the movement that lives and dies based on how well it can claim victimhood would create a hashtag that attempts to paint the very quality that has kept the proverbial and literal wolves in the hills as weak and soft. You’d figure that thousands of years of human history would have put that notion to bed, but history and logic aren’t the point here.

The point of hashtags like #MasculinitySoFragile is to eliminate masculinity on men’s terms and allow feminism – not femininity mind you – to fill in the gap left behind. They truly believe that men hold all the power. That somehow, masculinity gives us full run of everything within our domain. Clearly, feminists have never met a standard American wife.

Hailing from Austin, Texas, Brandon Morse has been writing about politics and culture across many websites for the last six years, with a heavy emphasis on anti-authoritarianism. Aside from writing articles, he is also known for voice acting and authoring scripts. He is an avid gamer, dog person, and has a bad habit of making vague references to things no one has heard about or seen. Follow him at @TheBrandonMorse on Twitter.

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