When I was a young man, my grandfather would tease us boys by telling us “In my day it was wooden ships and iron men. You boys will be lucky if you are wooden men in iron ships.” I’m not so old that my grandfather lived in the age of sail, so it was just a way for an old man to have some fun teasing his grandkids.

That said, he had a point. A boy coming of age a century ago was facing a much tougher world and would have to be tougher to live in it. There’s little doubt in my mind that men of my generation are softer than the men of father’s or grandfather’s generation. It’s not just the material excess we have today. When I was a little kid, I had it much easier than the prior generations. My grandfather, for example, quit school at 13 and went to work in a coal mine.

Steve Pinker has made a strong case that men have grown decreasingly violent over each generation. His data corresponds with the historical record, which is what makes it such a strong argument. We know, for example, that banditry was a serious issue in the Middle Ages. Traveling from one town to the next was dangerous. Today, we travel from town to town without thinking about bandits, other than cops running speed traps. The only danger there is to your wallet.

One of the reasons he points to for the decline in violence is the feminization of men, which he defines as a growing awareness of and respect for the interests of women by men. I’ve always paused on that one simply because it runs counter to what we know of history. Women have often been the cause of violence and I don’t just mean men fighting one another for women. I mean women instigating wholesale and particular violence. Roman history is littered with women who killed a lot of men.

That said, you can argue that women are less tolerant of wholesale violence, on average, than men so as women increased their influence over western society, violence dropped. At the same time, as the value of violence dropped, men less inclined to violent solutions rose in status, while the tough guys fell in status. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance plays on this theme. In a civilized world, the tough guys are marginalized and the smart guys rise to the top of the social hierarchy.

To circle back to where I started with this post, the pop heroes of my grandfather’s generations were gangsters and cowboys. In my generation, we still had some of that, but the male leads were more contemplative, using their wits and charm more than their brawn. Watch a current movie and the male lead is a small, wimpy guy, who cowers to women. The alternatives are cartoon tough guys that resemble video game characters, more than real males.

I’ve always wanted to think this is just Hollywood being overrun by social justice warriors and liberal fanatics. Fifty years ago, Hollywood cared about making money so they made movies to please the audience. Today they care more about making commentary so they make films that lecture the audience. That and the drop in skill means they are less adept at using subtlety to make their propaganda.

Still, events do make me wonder if there’s been a collapse of manliness and Western men have gone full Eloi.

A respected violence researcher has declared that the Cologne sex attacks show German men have forgotten how to fight, and it’s a good thing.

Jörg Baberowski gave a speech recently at the Philosophy Festival in Cologne on Thursday night saying that the New Years Eve sex attacks in Cologne prove that German males have forgotten how to stand up for themselves. He said the fact that the German men had not come to the aid of the women being sexually assaulted by large gangs of migrants showed a reluctance to be violent and commented: “We see that men in Germany no longer know how to deal with violence,” Stern reports. However, immediately following the remark Baberowski, who is a historian at the Humboldt University in Berlin, said “thank god” that German men no longer know how to stand up for themselves or face violent conflict. He claimed that is was good that German men relied solely on the state to take care of them and protect them. He claimed that the New Years’ attacks were a failure of the state to protect its citizens and that if the government can’t guarantee that safety then the confidence the citizens have it it will be shaken.

Thinking back to my youth, I recall hearing lectures about the importance of letting the authorities handle whatever trouble was brewing. Lecturing boys about using their wits versus their fists was common enough to stick in my memory. There was also the idea of “being the bigger man” and not responding to physical challenges. I was reminded of that watching this from Milo Yiannopoulos’s event at DePaul University.

One of the things that men my age will talk about with one another is how young white males never get into fights. I’ve had interns tell me they have never been in a physical confrontation with another male. I’ve never considered myself a fighter, yet I was in a scrape every week growing up. That was just what boys did. Even into my teen years, things we often settled physically, even if it was quickly broken up.

Getting back to the Milo event, I keep wondering what would happen if someone popped one of these BLM cunts in the mouth. If Milo had knocked her cold, I’m thinking that would be the last of these confrontations. The risk assessment by these people would change overnight. Taking on the honky would suddenly come with real danger. Whatever benefits there are, assuming there are any, of refusing to fight, there’s no doubt it encourages troublemakers like that woman to get increasingly aggressive.

Watching the reaction from his fans on-line, I feel like I’m from another planet. Frankly, I cringed watching that video. Yet, the reaction on twitter suggests most people think he was the winner in that exchange. If that’s “winning” then I don’t want to see losing. To my old eyes, that looked like a white guy being dominated by a scrawny black bitch and then slinking away. I get that he is a gay guy and maybe the rules are different, but still, it was hard to watch, much less cheer.

Maybe the great wimpening has reached the point of no return. Traditional forms of masculinity are dead in the West and will not be revived until sometime after the Caliphate is established. Those dusky fellows rampaging through the streets of European cities are unlikely to sit there and take a lecture from a mouthy twat from Black Lives Matter. If Western men can’t stand up to mouthy college twats, they stand no chance against the Mohammedan.

The Muslims are not wrong about everything.