Update 10/6: More men speaking in girls' 'dialect', study shows
Yesterday I posted a link to Leon Podles' book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. Podles devotes a substantial part of his work showing the causes of feminization within the Church (e.g., medieval "bridal mysticism"), but is sure the case as well that the Church has been feminized from without. As feminism is a corollary of Western liberal-leftism, and as that ideology has permeated Western culture since the late 18th century, we have all been caught up in its zeitgeist all our lives. Consequently, I think we Westerners have unconsciously adopted beliefs and attitudes deemed "normal" by our culture that are anything but normal when viewed in light of the Christians doctrines of creation and redemption. We've brought these beliefs and attitudes, with their corresponding pathologies, into the Church. Just to cite one example, but a key one, I think Western egalitarianism accounts for why otherwise traditional churches capitulated so quickly and thoroughly on the issue of women's ordination.
The zeitgeist proceeds from bad to worse, and in so doing provides the Church with the rationale to do an entire rethink of Western liberalism. This morning a Facebook friend posted his experience at a high school football game:
I worked an High School Football game this weekend and watched two great teams of boys play with passion and developing skills of teamwork, camaraderie and leadership. I was down on the field standing next to a play when a Ref unexpectedly threw a flag at the end of the play. This took me by surprise since I was standing right there and I didn’t see any kind of a foul. The Ref marched out to the center of the field and indicated the foul – no one, not even the Public Announcer knew what the Ref had just indicated. The 5-yard penalty was paced off and the game continued. I asked one of the coaches what the heck had been called – Answer: The Ref felt that the winning team was being “too aggressive” and penalized them for it. The wussification of the American male will not help America survive. I’m sure the Ref would have been “booed” by both sides, if anyone knew what the call really meant.
Later this morning I stumbled upon this article:
Students warned: Bulging biceps, big guns advance unhealthy masculinity
The Vanderbilt week kicked off with a lecture by the first man to minor in women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Jackson Katz. (His alma mater now offers a bachelor’s in women, gender and sexuality studies.)
The self-described “anti-sexist activist” and filmmaker said that sexual violence and domestic abuse are men’s issues and that men would “benefit tremendously from having this conversation.”
Katz founded a consulting firm that “provides gender violence prevention and leadership training to institutions in the public and private sectors” and has pioneered the use of bystander training in the U.S. military, according to his website. . . .
Athletes and fraternity members are a risk to themselves and others because of the pressure put on them to act masculine, according to other events from the week.
One event featured a screening of the limited-release documentary The Mask You Live In, which blames “America’s narrow definition of masculinity” for the deteriorating mental health of boys and men.
“The three most destructive words that every man receives when he’s a boy is when he’s told to ‘be a man,’” former NFL player Joe Ehrmann says in the film. Now a minister, Ehrmann spoke on an all-male panel in 2013 titled “Breaking the Male Code,” which was organized by Vagina Monologues writer Eve Ensler.
“Whether it’s homicidal violence or suicidal violence, people resort to such desperate behavior only when they are feeling shamed and humiliated, or feel that they would be if they didn’t prove they were real men,” psychiatrist James Gilligan, a professor at New York University, says in the The Mask You Live In. . . .
This is the second consecutive year Vanderbilt has hosted a discussion about masculinity. The Center for Medicine, Health, and Society hosted “The Politics of Masculinity” last year.
Rory Dicker, the director of the Women’s Center, told The College Fix by email that it hosted the week to “further the conversations” in response to Katz’s “provocative ideas” about masculinity.
But this year’s masculinity series was roundly mocked in national news outlets in the week leading up to the observance, including by a panel of four women and one man on the Fox News show Outnumbered.
Host Andrea Tantaros claimed the organizers were trying to “demasculinize men” and turn them into “thumb-sucking little beta males in skinny jeans.”
Asked about the Fox News pundits’ criticisms, Vanderbilt’s Dicker said they “missed the fact that … there are many ways to be masculine, but American society pressures boys and men to adopt” the version that prioritizes “being competitive, stoic and aggressive, for example.”
Boys and men should also be taught that “emotional vulnerability, cooperation, and sensitivity are valuable human traits,” Dicker said.
Ick. Just, ick. It's time for us to exercise the Benedict Option in earnest in order to escape this and other pernicious mentalities of Western unbelief. There's nothing wrong about boys and men being "emotionally intelligent", but feminism is interested in much more than making them so. They want to make unmanly, and we simply will have none of it. Our boys need to be taught both the military and gentlemanly virtues of chivalry. They need to learn about Christian monks and warriors. They need to master the outdoors. They need to learn to use tools and weaponry. They need to taugh how to relate to women in a virtuous, but steadfastly male way. In his essay The Necessity of Chivalry, C.S. Lewis touted that medieval code as the best way to make Christian men:
The medieval knight brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate toward one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. . . .
If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections - those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be "meek in hall", and those who are "meek in hall" but useless in battle - for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed. When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair. . . . The man who combines both characters - the knight - is not a work of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.
In the world today there is a "liberal" or "enlightened" tradition which regards the combative side of man's nature as a pure, atavistic evil, and scouts the chivalrous sentiment as part of the "false glamour" of war. And there is also a neo-heroic tradition which scouts the chivalrous sentiment as a weak sentimentality, which would raise from its grave (its shallow and unquiet grave!) the pre-Christian ferocity of Achilles by a "modern invocation". . . .
(However), there is still life in the tradition which the Middle Ages inaugurated. But the maintenance of that life depends, in part, on knowing that the knightly character is art not nature - something that needs to be achieved, not something that can be relied upon to happen. And this knowledge is specially necessary as we grow more democratic. In previous centuries the vestiges of chivalry were kept alive by a specialized class, from whom they spread to other classes partly by imitation and partly by coercion. Now, it seems, the people must either be chivalrous on its own resources, or else choose between the two remaining alternatives of brutality and softness. . . . The ideal embodied in Launcelot is "escapism" is a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable. . . .
We simply can't turn our boys over to men who major in women's studies. Come out from among them, and be ye separate.