In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

A few weeks back commenter Nick MGTOW shared a link to a Men’s Health story about 43 year old Charlize Theron asking where all the good men have gone: Charlize Theron Says Somebody ‘Needs to Grow a Pair’ and Ask Her on a Date

“I’ve been single for ten years—it’s not a long shot,” she said. “Somebody just needs to grow a pair and step up. I’m shockingly available…I’ve made it very clear.”

I did some digging and while today she is complaining about the lack of traditional men, just a few years ago she was outspoken (in word and deed) in her rejection of tradition. People magazine quoted her in Charlize Theron Adopts a Baby Boy

Though Theron is surely thrilled about expanding her family, she has previously spoken out about not feeling the need to tie the knot. Marriage, she said last year, was “never something that was important [to me].”

But then I saw that she was taking her rejection of traditional roles a step further, and was dressing the unfortunate boy as a girl. I decided against a post on it, because Theron is simply too weird, too crazy to offer as an example of the trends we see all around us.

I reconsidered this decision today after Larry Kummer reminded me of her statement, and after reading an article from Fatherly.com linked from Instapundit. The piece is by Lauren Vinopal, and is titled Why Am I Unhappy? Because All American Men Are Getting Sadder. Fatherly warns that modern men are unhappy because they can’t shed their toxic masculinity in response to the triumph of feminism:

Unlike femininity, masculinity is regularly challenged, policed, and taken away. This causes more “toxic” men to behave badly and many other men to live unhappy lives. …the shrinking of the middle class and traditionally male dominated industries as well as the rise of dual-income family as a cultural norm has required men to pivot into unexpected roles and grapple with concepts at odds with internalized notions of manhood. Equally terrified of the #MeToo movement and being misconstrued as gay, men stumble down an untenably narrow middle path. “Although these shifts are exceedingly positive, they can be daunting and intimidating for men,” Manly says. “This is a rather off-putting shift for those who have found safety in the left-brain, ‘logic is superior’ mentality.”

The whole piece is unintentionally hilarious, and therefore very much worth reading. It reads like a propaganda piece that was somehow blended with the author’s diary entry obsessing over the fact that the propaganda clearly isn’t working.

After laboriously arguing that men need to free themselves from traditional ideas of masculinity in order to be happy, the article closes by inadvertently explaining that what men desperately need isn’t yet another invitation to talk about their feelings, but a chance to do manly things with other men, without women (like Vinopal) barging in:

…Manly and Moore agree that such groups can be far more casual and may attract more members if they are. A basketball league works as well as a talk session. “Men are desperate to be a part of groups of other men,” Moore says. “The opportunities for men to bond with one another have become fewer and fewer, and so they feel more isolated and less connected, and in come cases become depressed.”

But as unintentionally funny as all of this is, we shouldn’t celebrate. We lost, and the feminists won. We lost in large part because we had conservatives constantly assuring us that there was no feminist rebellion in progress. When women demanded to enter all male spaces, up to and including combat roles in all branches of the military, conservative Christians concocted a fantasy world where no such rebellion existed.

Now we are trapped inside the psychotic mind of modernism. On the one hand we have progressives, represented by Theron gleefully dressing a little boy as a girl. On the other side we have conservatives, represented by Theron denying reality and sternly admonishing men to man up, to grow a pair.

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