Language is a funny thing. Something that is crystal clear for one generation can get muddled by the next and vice versa. But there are some things that we thought would be universal.
Like masculinity.
Well, we can cross that off the “No Shit Sherlock” list because the Left has been trying to reshape the idea over the past few years. The latest salvo in this war of words came from New York Magazine and its men’s style issue. And who just happened to be at the forefront of the issue? Elliot “The Artist Formerly Known as Ellen” Page.
Yeah, the irony of having a trans man as the epitome of masculinity isn’t lost on me, but it opens the door to discussing it further. Or at least it gives me something to write about until the Left does something else mock-worthy!
masculinity
What the Left thinks it means – a fluid concept that encompasses the best and worst of male traits
What it really means – a specific concept that defines male traits
Having been a man all my life, except for a brief stint in college when I was drunk and needed the money, I have an insight on masculinity the Left doesn’t. That’s not exactly a major accomplishment, mind you. My dog has insights the Left doesn’t and she eats her own shit.
Then again, maybe the Left does, too…
Anyway, the point is masculinity used to have a set stereotype. Think Ron Swanson. A man who likes his whiskey, a steak, and to build shit. Often at the same time because, dammit, that’s what men do. Can you tell me Elliot Page could replace Ron Swanson without ingesting copious amounts of illicit drugs?
No, but that’s not going to stop Leftists from trying.
In fact, this isn’t the first time the Left has tried to redefine masculinity. During the 70s, the Left tried to get us to see Alan Alda to be the epitome of manhood, mainly because he exhibited traits that were decidedly not masculine. Being in touch with your feelings and unafraid to show them are nice traits, but they’re not exactly masculine. But it worked well enough that men, including your humble correspondent, felt they had to be “good guys” to get female attention.
Works great in romcoms. Works like shit in real life.
This is because heterosexual women like masculinity, even if they don’t want to admit it. You’re going to find most women (and a good number of men) lusting after Jason Momoa than after Jack Black because the former exudes masculinity and the latter is, well, Jack Black. It’s biological hardwiring, kids. At our most primitive levels, women like men who look like they will protect them from a T-Rex or a drunken asshole, and men want women to like them. That way they can make babies and the bloodline will continue.
And when you consider the Left considers sex to be more for pleasure than procreation, it explains a lot about why they don’t get what masculinity is. That and their 406,193,248 genders bullshit.
Now, this is going to come as a shock to some of you, but the Left loves to try to make things more difficult than they actually are. Their constant attempts to redefine masculinity is part of that, but it’s also a part of their attempts to make trans women “real women.” After all, if they can get enough people to think of Dylan Mulvaney as a real woman instead of a man with a weird Audrey Hepburn/Ariana Grande fetish, they can get people to see Elliot Page as a real man.
They do this by preying on our humanity, and by having a social media mob that would make the villagers going after Frankenstein’s monster look positively pacifistic. It’s the classic iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove approach. If you don’t respond to their softer attempts, you’ll get a 10 ton five knuckle shuffle across your jawline.
But now they’re running into some unexpected resistance in the form of people just saying “fuck it” and not playing along. The Left’s kryptonite with any of their current attempts to reshape manhood (oh myyyyyyyyy!) is getting people outside the Leftist hivemind to agree with them on the freakier shit they support. The slippery slope is a thing, but it’s hard to overcome the lack of traction on that slope when someone throws out sand, salt, and common sense.
And guess what the “fuck it” is.
What the Left and their cohorts fail to see is how tired most people are of the near-constant assaults on reality. We don’t want trans people to feel like second class citizens, but we need them to meet us halfway on the respect front. If you want to dress like Judy Garland trapped in the body of an NFL linebacker, go for it! Just show us the same respect for the way we live our lives. And as it stands right now, the majority of the Left so little respect for alternate opinions that Nick Fuentes is suing them for intellectual property theft.
Joke’s on him! There’s nothing intellectual about Fuentes.
And there’s even less intellectualism about the Left’s attempts to turn Elliot Page into the new face of masculinity. Remember, these are the same assholes who tried to get us to believe Tim Walz was the modern “real man” because he coached football and can change parts on a truck. This is “Naomi Wolf teaching Al Gore about manhood” levels of dumbfuckery. And it didn’t work either time.
The real kicker here is how the Left has to put qualifiers on masculinity. If you lean more towards the Ron Swanson side of masculinity, it’s “toxic.” If you lean more towards the Tim Walz side of masculinity, it’s “healthy.” In other words, if you want to be popular in Leftist circles for your masculinity, you have to be an utter buffoon.
And even then, you can be replaced by a trans man.
If I could offer TIMMAH Walz some advice, it would be this. Stay down. Don’t even try to get up again. Just stay down.
As far as the Left is concerned, my advice is to stop trying to redefine masculinity into something that is the Bizarro World version of it. Men are men, and not even clever wordplay can change that. Elective surgery, yes, but not clever wordplay.
And to Elliot Page, I say live your life, but don’t let yourself become the face of a concept you didn’t come to naturally. You can be your version of masculinity, but it’s not the masculinity most people recognize and that’s always going to make you an outsider, and not of the Pony Boy variety. Juno what I mean?
See what I did there?
Tag: masculinity
Leftist Lexicon Word of the Week
As Election Day looms over our heads like the Sword of Damocles, Queen Kamala the Appointed is trying to shore up as many voters as she can to try to deny Donald Trump. Let’s just say it hasn’t gone well. Even captain of the Exxon Valdez Joseph Hazelwood is saying the Harris/Walz campaign is a disaster.
And speaking of reaches for humorous intent, there’s a group called White Dudes for Harris who recently put out a…well, one of the dumbfuckiest ads I’ve ever had the misfortune of seeing. And it only cost $10 million! Not to be out dumbfucked, some genius decided to put professional actors in an ad about how real men support Queen Kamala the Appointed.
Someone get Bath and Body Works on the horn. I think I may have found who okayed their snowflake candle packaging!
Either way, I find it interesting the Left is suddenly interested in masculinity as a positive attribute. Usually, Leftists hate all men, even the ones who agree with them in an attempt to get a laid…not that I know anything about that, mind you. Meanwhile, we have a Lexicon entry to get to!
masculinity
What the Left thinks it means – the way a man acts, talks, dresses, and so forth
What it really means – a subject about which Leftists know nothing, which isn’t that different from any other subject when you think about it
One of the things I like best about my life is I remember what things were like before the shit hit the fan. Back in my day, men were men and women were men and everybody was really confused. Seriously, though, we may have any number of men as role models each representing a different facet of the male experience (think Tom Selleck and Boy George), and people were okay with it.
Except for Leftists.
Somewhere between the second and third wave of feminism, men became an appendix with a credit line: fun for a while, but ultimately useless. Soon, the only way a man could get anywhere near a woman without being called a rapist was for the man to completely reject his masculinity, and even then you weren’t safe from scrutiny. Being a guy in the late 80s and throughout the 90s was a minefield of potential bad mistakes. And I’m not just talking about the 3 AM hookups…not that I know anything about that, mind you.
This attitude found its way into politics. (The man-hating, not the 3 AM hookups.) You couldn’t swing a dead cat (and, really, why would you) without hitting a horndog male politician who got caught in a sexual situation because, well, men. But even when that aforementioned cat hit that aforementioned horndog, there had to be exceptions for politicians who acted poorly, but supported the right politics.
And the biggest example of the eternal Hall Pass was Slick Willie himself, Bill Clinton. Leftists went from hating white male politicians to wanting to service the Commander In Briefs just for protecting abortion rights. To the Left, Clinton was the epitome of masculinity, genital warts and all.
As funny as it was to see Leftists throw away their self-imposed standards to back a man who only used them for his own satisfaction (and also to win elections), it gave me insight into just how the Left feels about masculinity.
They don’t know what the fuck it is, but they’re damn sure going to try to define it.
And as you might expect, they’re doing a shitty job of it. When they’re not saying gender is a spectrum or is a social construct, they’re saying men can have periods, have babies, and can even redefine womanhood. And you thought outsourcing jobs was bad!
Yet, in spite of their attempts to remake men into Dylan Mulvaney clones, not every guy wants to get rid of masculinity. They’re happy doing guy shit, like working on cars, hunting, and so forth. So how do Leftists try to win over these potential voters? You guessed it, by talking down to them like they were idiots. Granted, depending on where you go the odds might be in their favor, but from a political standpoint, it’s a losing strategy.
Just as Queen Kamala the Appointed found out. When she saw her numbers among white male voters sink lower than an earthworm’s cock ring, someone had the brilliant idea of trying to appeal to male voters by…hosting a White Dudes For Harris Zoom call with Leftist white dudes! Sign me up for that!
For any Leftists out there reading this, that was sarcasm.
The Harris/Walz campaign has leaned heavily into what they think masculinity should be. And their lapdogs in the media are helping. Reuters devoted time and energy to painting Tim Walz as an evolved man (all while trying to appear to be a normal guy working on his truck and hunting). Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is being fawned over for redefining masculinity. (His first wife could not be reached for comment.)
And the whipped cream on top of this shit sundae (or any day for that matter) is the term Leftists have created to describe the Walz/Emhoff model of masculinity: nontoxic masculinity. I’ll save you a click: it’s basically being a man that would make Richard Simmons look like Chuck Norris.
That opens up a whole new Costco-sized can of worms that loops back to the point I made earlier about how little Leftists understand men. The Left have defined toxic masculinity as a series of negative traits like dominance and emotional distance that are typically seen as preferred masculine traits. Apparently, the people behind this concept have never been married. (PS, I love you, honey! Please stop watching “Deadly Wives.”)
Although there is some merit to not exhibiting the more negative elements of masculinity, there’s a lot more under the surface that complicates things. For one, men are different than women. I know. It shocked me, too. But even I have to repeat this fact to the Left (who are soooooo much smarter than us, by the way) because of how little the Left knows about masculinity.
Some of the traits attributed to toxic masculinity are hard-wired into the male experience. Back in the old days (affectionately known as my childhood), men didn’t have time to process emotions because they were too busy trying to survive. Men were (and still are) hunters and gatherers at heart. If they fail to come through in providing for their families, there are negative implications. Granted, these days those implications may be limited to having to spend the night on the old musty futon in the basement, but the principle is the same. Men are seen as providers, and with that comes a lot of responsibility and psychological baggage.
And the Left thinks putting a flannel shirt on a guy who doesn’t know a fuel pump from a pumpkin spice latte is better.
Here’s the thing. Masculinity, much like Queen Kamala the Appointed’s policy positions, is vague, can cover a lot of ground, and is often contradictory depending on the day. As a result, trying to redefine it to fit a current political need is pointless. And extremely comical, as the most recent “I’m a man supporting Kamala Harris” ad was.
What made this ad so funny was in how superficial the men were in it. The more I thought about it, the more it reminded me of something. Then, it hit me.
The guys in the ad…were the modern day Village People. The cowboy, the gym bro, the farmer, all stereotypical male archetypes. And the old guy could easily pass as a biker! All they needed was a cop and a sailor and they could go on tour. Maybe they could open for man-turned-pretend-woman Dylan Mulvaney, who could sing his rendition of a song from “The Book of Mormon” called “Man Up.”
Trust me, Leftists. That tour will bring out tens and tens of fans.
The other comparison I can make involves a talk radio network I affectionately call Err America. Billed as the liberal alternative to talk radio, they did their best to copy the success Rush Limbaugh and others experienced. And they failed, mainly for the same reason the Harris/Walz campaign is failing with men: they went with the stereotype instead of finding the deeper context that would have made them at least somewhat credible as an alternative.
So, that’s where we are with the Leftist view of masculinity. In their attempts to attract male voters, they have exposed a glaring weakness in their philosophy about it, and they are getting slammed for it. And rightly so.
Plus, it’s hypocritical (and, therefore, utterly mockworthy) for the Left to say gender is whatever you want it to be while at the same time extolling the virtues of what they think are real men…who just happen to want Queen Kamala the Appointed to be President. The whole concept of masculinity doesn’t revolve around what box you check on your ballot in November. It’s goes a lot deeper, and the Left clearly doesn’t want to take the time to figure it out. As a result, their “outreach” becomes a comical attempt at pandering that is all show and no go.
But I’m sure the Left would never try that backwards approach with people of different races…or genders…or sexual orientations…or religions…