A manly man bears troubles without complaining. No safe spaces for him, no new pronouns, no government programs, no personal accusations either launched or answered, no mentors, no assurances, no therapy, no wellness, no correctness. He doesn’t notice microaggressions. And he has no shame or apology for failing in the daily performances of dutiful submission, and he doesn’t much care for the more sensitive male who does.
Not concerned for himself, he can, however, complain of the treatment accorded to his kind. This is what Senator Hawley has done, with some effect, in a recent (October 31) and notable speech on the “deconstruction of men.” He points to the plight of unemployed men transformed from husbands and fathers into mere consumers and given to “idleness, and pornography, and video games.” They suffer not so much as victims of angry women or universal, impersonal causes as from loss of responsibility, from loss of employment as men. Their sex is said to be either a fanciful construction with no substantial meaning, or if it has a meaning, it is one that misleads men into toxic misadventures of harmful violence. The video games they love seem to show what they really want to do.
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