“Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it’s true.”         [McIntyre, ad nauseam]

It is an axiom of the Righteous Left that masculinity is synonymous with toxicity.

Evoke the former and you infer the latter.

And, so the logic goes, because half our society is toxically infected, males must be castigated, fettered, retrained and emasculated, all in service of becoming better men.

Our culture’s fashionable ‘grand project’ of the last 20 years was rather an easy sell, employing, as it did, some rudimentary control tactics.

Through the prism of weopanising consent, outlawing bawdy humour, conflating bad dates with deviancy, vilifying male adolescence, and creating Jordan Peterson panic, it is now a truth universally acknowledged that masculinity poses a danger to society, packed as men are with toxic potential.

***

Work with males aged 15-25yrs, and you will readily observe the consequences of such a battering. Among Gen-Z guys there is a reticence to socialise, a regression in sexual exploration, a bifurcated decision tree offering only denial or splurge, and a pole-vault in proxy living by way of gaming and porn. Each is attended, or perhaps contextualised, by a collapse in male academic participation and performance.

It is little wonder that young men, Leftist through the gift of youth, are marching Right.

***

In 2012, American journalist Hanna Rosin published ‘The End Of Men’.

The book was greeted with fanfare in Coastal Elite circles. Its subtitle ‘…And the rise of women’ firmly situated the sexes as locked in a zero-sum battle. Her then-husband, journalist David Plotz, whom I know as a spectacularly talented person with the wisdom one seeks out in times of crisis, must surely have questioned his wife’s premise.

At least, I hope he did.

In retrospect, Rosin’s rhetoric was part of a drumroll which would culminate in Me Too protesters using banners and hashtags declaring ‘Believe all women’, ‘Defund the police’, and ‘Men are trash’ – fatuous propositions which contradicted natural justice, and were unsafe around the elementary logic of an 8-year-old.

And yet – somehow – each claim was fashionable. Importantly, each claim won social media ‘likes’.

***

In Zuck’s algorithmic society, the bland act of supporting safe causes now masquerades as stunning and brave leadership. Opinions are performed to affirm one’s valour, not to better society.

Like Aesop’s wren who soared by hiding in the eagle’s wings, valour needs to defer to a cause or victim of the hour. The cause or victim will then gladly be leveraged; stolen until the world moves on.

I’m thinking Charlie Hebdo. I’m thinking Black Lives Matter. I’m thinking preferred pronouns. Perhaps one should keep an eagle eye on Ukraine; on Palestine.   

If you doubt that such a mechanism exists, scroll through twenty LinkedIn original posts, and meditate on the authenticity of what’s being said, the doublespeak employed, and the humblebrag which too often is the post’s divine inspiration.

Like most 8-year-olds, I too understand that exceptions exist.

***

This, then, is the sandbank upon which our society is currently beached.

Indeed, any essay with a title praising men reads suspiciously like an act of misogyny.

But I say balls to all that.

***

Today I listened to a duet from Bizet’s opera The Pearl Fishers. In it, two men affirm that they will remain loyal to their friendship, despite having fallen in love with the same woman. The music – sung by a tenor and baritone – is sublime, giant, feisty.

High ideals deserve such a form.

The performance, by Kauffman  and Hvorotovsky, is a weave of beauty and power. At the high point, the men – one German, one Russian – place a hand on each other’s shoulder.

‘No. May nothing ever part us’.

It is music unlike any other. It speaks to the pursuit of the highest human motives, expressed in a uniquely masculine way.

Yes, I thought.

Men are amazing. Different. Complementary. Essential.

We’re not perfect. And nor are we essentially toxic.

Enough of being leveraged by the virtue hunters. Enough of that bollox.

I wish for us men that, shoulder to shoulder, we again will stand tall.

I celebrate men here.

This is my contribution.

Note on image: This pencil drawing by 16-year-old Irish artist, Shania McDonagh, won the 2014 Texaco National Art Competition in Ireland. Her subject is fisherman and seaweed harvester, Coleman Coyne.