A Scenario
Imagine with me, if you will, a youth retreat of some kind, guys and girls at the same camp together. Imagine further that some young buck has been down in the dining hall, with a puffed-out chest, challenging girls to arm wrestle with him, and thus far he has provoked seven girls in a row to do it, and he has racked up seven straight wins.
Now the supposal gets really crazy. Suppose he tries to go back to the boys’ lodge in order to boast about his prowess. “Seven in a row!” he crows. “Gold medal me!”
But we must needs add another layer to this, but work with me. Suppose this camp were also run by a committee of deranged social justice warriors, of the kind who were willing to ruin the life of any of the boys who dared to make life difficult at all for our jaunty little peacock. The authorities will do whatever—revoke swimming privileges, get a kid fired from his cushy job at the canteen, or pull out fingernails. Whatever it takes. They will defend that puffer boy at all costs, provided of course, that the boy had decided not to identify himself, at least for the duration of the retreat, by the fact that he had unfortunately been saddled, at some earlier point in his life, with boy parts.
Who saddled him with these is still a mystery. The culprit is still at large.
There is little doubt that under ordinary circumstances, before I introduced the demented overseers of the camp into the scenario, that the strutting boy would have been thoroughly disciplined by the other boys. He would have been mocked mercilessly, such that it would be about three more centuries before any other boy ever tried the same stunt. And the only way to keep the boys from policing themselves in such a fashion would be by having your very own gaystapo available, one that would discipline them for shielding the girls from that lousy excuse of a boy.
So either all the boys discipline the one boy, or the powers that be discipline all the boys. I trust you are still with me?
True Toxicity
The other day I made this observation on Twitter:
“When you are trying to describe bio-males competing against women in women’s sports, that elusive phrase you are looking for is #ToxicMasculinity.”
Me, on Twitter
So let me explain what has happened to women’s sports. There really is “a thing” that can be called toxic masculinity. It is aggressive, ingrown, self-absorbed, sociopathic, and solipsistic. It is an ugly, tangled mess of testosterone, ego, and no discipline. And whenever such a man goes after the women in order to get what he wants, the women can’t stop him.
Now remember that what he wants may vary. In our current travesty of a human culture, he may just want a gold medal for bicycling faster than all the other girls. And how do I know that the women can’t stop him? Well, for starters, they gave him the gold medal.
If you doubt what I say, please remember this. Such men are currently invading women’s sports, from the lowest levels to the highest levels. They are destroying the very concept of women’s sports, while all the rest of us are watching it happen. As they are doing this, the women—who have been training for whatever event it might be for a number of years—can’t stop them.
Someone will say that, yeah, well, the men can’t stop them either. But this is where you can see just how pathetically toxic our entire culture has become.
Go back to my youth camp scenario. The boy really is a lame excuse for a boy, and so will be satisfied with paper-thin accolades, such that he makes this arrangement. He is going to beat seven girls in a row arm-wrestling, then he will go get the camp director to come with him back to the boys’ lodge, whereupon the camp director will point his gun at all the other boys, and then tell the peacock boy to recite his great accomplishment. “Everybody applaud now,” he then says, moving the gun back and forth.
So the problem is not how to discipline the lunatic boy. We know how to do that. The issue we are having is how to discipline the lunatic camp director. That might involve revolution and civil war. But if this nonsense keeps up, it is going to happen. And when it happens, it will probably arrive in quite a squirrely and indefensible form—like Donald Trump carrying all fifty states, along with British Columbia and Alberta.
When It Happens
When this recoil reaction happens, when the Demento Summer Camp is finally shut down, when sane people come in to investigate, and long think pieces are finally published in The Atlantic with titles like How Could This Have Happened?, certain cool realities will return. And they will prevail.
Women really do need to be protected and guarded from men. They need this because there really is a thing called toxic masculinity. But the only ones who are capable of protecting women from men are the men. The only thing capable of protecting women from toxic masculinity is masculinity.
Femininity can’t do it. The bureaucrats won’t do it. The SJWs are cheering it on. The cowards are keeping their heads down. But at some point a “preference cascade” will set in, and Ephraim will join in with the pursuit. Now there is a mixed metaphor to be proud of . . .
This means that a return to sanity will mean a return to an unapologetic acceptance of the fact that men are of necessity going to be dominant. The only choice we have as a society is between whether that dominance is going to be constructive or destructive. Because the poohbahs in charge have spent the last generation or so outlawing every form of constructive male dominance they can identify, we are now discovering that—far from empowering women—they have actually empowered destructive male dominance.
Put another way, when constructive male dominance is outlawed, only outlaws will have male dominance.
If you want to refute what I am arguing here, I suggest that it would make your case considerably stronger if you could figure out how to stop giving womens’ gold medals to dudes. But given your premises, you can’t do it.
Given your premises, there are only two options. One is a total change of mind, amounting to repentance. The other is to double down while you wait for the paddy wagon to arrive.
I end on this lofty and optimistic note for the simple reason that, in the long run, stupidity never works. Insanity is not a viable plan.