You've Got Male

Photo: Diego Floravanti

     --Note the highlighted update at the end of the post, regarding the newly-signed reconciliation bill--

      Call it what you will but there seems to be an upswell in testosterone as displays of male-ness (vs. manhood) seems pervasive in the never-smiling commenters on Fox & NewsMax (contrary to their promo page) to the White House and its proud "boys" cabinet.  And not just here in the US but in other areas of the world as well as "tough guys" and power-hungry male bullies seem to take pleasure in muscling their way to power.  Or so it would seem.  Throw in the masses peacefully protesting the developing monarchies (the next mass protest happens July 17th) and you have to wonder, why does the press devote so much time to such a small minority, whichever side you may view as being "the" minority?  But this testosteroned blob doesn't seem to be totally age-related, despite all the aging Congressmen patting themselves on the back.  It may not even be race-related as daddy and self-esteem issues allegedly made their way into the election results, wrote analysts.  So what's going on?  Why this period of time for men to seemingly feel so unmanly, almost as if they're fearing that they're edging closer and closer to accidentally touching their female side?

     But first, let's go way, way back and peek at how we grammatically divided the sexes with "male" and "female" in the first place (or man/woman)?  Why wasn't it decided to instead say "male" and "unmale?'  The Latin beginnings of those words tell more about just how far back this male-leaning began, a time when (according to most historical dictionaries) all sexes and ages were simply called man (huMan).  The Latin (and later French) version showed the word "male" originating from "masculus," and "female" from "femina."  And as long as we're talking about the French origins, wouldn't that have been a good time to change the labels to "femme" and "nonfemme?"  Mais oui.  But reference most any fan of etymology (such as Adam Aleksik) regarding the Latin and Proto-Germanic origins and it always returns to what seems a male-oriented basis, causing one reader to comment: The most plainly stated malevolent sexism I have ever heard in my life.  Wow.  Men really think they came first and are the ‘basic human’ and being women is an attribute of a man.  Wow.  But then one might wonder, can this bias play both ways?   Why do we keep saying male nurses and not just, well, nurses?

     The Sun asked this in an interview with Richard Reeves, founder of an institute for boys and men, who pointed out that women have 18% more bachelor's degrees than men.  Said Reeves: From 1979 to 2019 the proportion of women who were employed grew by more than 20 percent across all age groups, while for men the proportion fell across all age groups—with men under thirty-five hit hardest.  Currently one-third of men with no more than a high school education, a group of about 11 million Americans, have dropped out of the labor force entirely...boys lag behind girls in school readiness at the age of five, and that gender gap is larger than the one between rich and poor children, or Black and white children, or kids who attended preschool and those who did not.  Boys are six points behind girls in reading scores in fourth grade; by eighth grade the gap is eleven points.  When high school students are ranked by GPA, girls are two-thirds of the top 10 percent, while boys are two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent.  Young men are more likely to drop out of college than young women.  With all that, is it any wonder that, noted Reeves, "suicide has risen most among young men?"  Our state of Utah recorded 22% of its deaths as suicide related.*

     Back in my old school days, we "guys" didn't think much about any of this, at least not in the circle of friends I knew.  Sean Connery was 007, suave and a suit-wearing ladies man.  Gunsmoke and the Marlboro Man (many of whom later died of lung cancer, wrote The LA Times), and an aging John Wayne still fought to keep up that he-man impressionable machine (at least in the TV & movies).  And while in high school, I honestly don't recall ever seeing a gay guy or girl.  It was just school, movies, and maybe a few sports -- the world was on cruise control (okay, I was pretty innocent overall).  Once out of school men were just expected to find a job, make a living, and pretty much navigate life's waters on their own, mainly because our parents were busy doing the same thing.  If your teenage hormones got a girl pregnant, you married her.  No ifs, ands, or buts.  But in today's world, tough guy tobacco smoking is out (and now comes news that disposable vapes are proving far more damaging than actual cigarette smoking).  And as to playing cowboy on that ranch?  Heck, renting an apartment is tough enough, much less entertaining the thought of owning a ranch.  But spin that lens around a bit further and I have to question how illegal sex trafficking and Epstein-type sex rings continue to increase in popularity.  One AI "sorter" in Kenya (such hires work for Meta, Google, Open AI and others, often for just $2 an hour and flagging what is and is not appropriate content to help AI "learn") told 60 Minutes that he had to watch days and days of disturbing sex content, everything from men sexually abusing children & animals, to torturing and actually killing women.  How is this possible in today's world?   Not only does the illegal sex industry generate approximately $173 billion for the traffickers, but enslaves nearly 50 million people, 12 million of whom are children, wrote the humanitarian group, Our Rescue.

 

 STOP...STOP...STOP.  What follows is a viewpoint from a woman who was raped and may prove disturbing...please skip over this paragraph is you feel that you may find her description (or my views) offensive.      

    We may as well call such sex trafficking for what it is...rape.  Underage, generally immigrant girls deceptively taken from their families, each imprisoned with little chance of escape (either physically or from their shortened young life).  But while I fail to understand how this worldwide "appeal" is still so prevalent and has so many customers, and of all income brackets, it is entirely (in my mind) one-sided, so said because its "customers" (or offenders) are primarily male.  So consider for just one moment the viewpoint from a brave writer who was raped by a stranger at knifepoint, an article she penned in The New Yorker: A predominant definition of rape is sex without consent.  Susan Brison [Dartmouth Professor of Philosophy] points out that the notion of violation is built into our understanding of the acts of murder and theft, but this understanding of violation fails when rape is defined as sex without consent.  Did you consent to be punched in the jaw?  Did you consent to have your company embezzled?  Is theft gift-giving minus consent, she asks, or is murder assisted suicide minus consent?  Why in rape alone is violation not utterly embedded in how we define it?...Let's think about those two words --"consent" and "sex"-- so central to rape's legal lexicon in a philosophical context.  They rely on an entrenched idea of a concerted autonomous individual and the rights that accrue to him or her.  In acting without my "consent," my rapist "has denied me my autonomy;" he has "violated my rights."  This is anemic, bathetic.  He did not violate my rights; he violated me...The rapist invades our bodies against the background and possibilities of our loves,  against the intimate, trusting, and wondrous ways we may welcome passionate embraces, rapture, the chance of betrayal, tears, and laughter.  The rapist forces himself into us, onto us.  But we do not share anything with the rapist...My rapist was not merely oblivious to me, to the idea that I had a life to lead as had he.  My degradation was not a side effect of his assault but its point.  It was this sheer ability to ruin and despoil, to decide whether I should live or die, that made him feel he could take the place of God.  Such force was as intoxicating to him as it was annihilating to me.  To be raped is to confront this particular evil, a staining, ineradicable harm that is not reducible to physical, or even psychological, trauma.  [Personal note: I thank the author for being brave enough to give all of us a partial glimpse into this horror, and I personally apologize that our male culture continues this form of aggressive crime with seemingly little regard.** Whether rape happens in a marriage, a relationship, a date, or randomly and for no real reason, there is no justification for it and is an act that is selfish, cowardly, and anything BUT manly...rape damages and destroys, and the victims and survivors of a rape show more courage and strength than any "man" ever could.]

 

                                  END OF PARAGRAPH...CONTINUE

    While watching the movie Blitz, I watched as people sought shelter in The Underground to avoid the German bombs (something my wife's mother did, at the age of 14).  It was a mix of people of all ages, and incomes, and colors, and abilities, each forced to cram together with what little they could carry...a blanket and pillow, or a small bag of whatever.  Everyone seemed to get along as they realized they were all in the same boat, all just trying to survive.  And when there was an argument of "this is MY area" or something of the sort, volunteer patrol workers would have to intervene.  In the movie, one such worker tells the arguing people that "this is exactly what Hitler is trying to do, to divide us.  We are all in this together.  If you can't recognize that then perhaps you should seek shelter somewhere else."   It would seem that even as fraudsters and criminals are pardoned, as Comfederate alliances are re-energized, as women's rights are slowly sledgehammered away, that is what is happening...a concerted effort to divide us, to make some feel that they have more wealth or power or righteousness, but more importantly, that others have less.  Once considered the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr. was the subject of a new biography reviewed in The New Yorker which wrote: Buckley believed that the great threat to civilization was egalitarianism.  He once said that the suffering of the man who lost his "Mona Lisa" was no less than the suffering of the man who had to sleep under a bridge.  He was personally generous to the underprivileged.  He just thought that they should not be allowed to participate in the political process.  Since democracy is pretty much the essence of the American experiment, it seems fair to say that Buckley was, at bottom, anti-American.  This is often the case with people who make a big show of patriotism.  We can "make America great again" -- if we only get rid of due process, or judicial review, or the separation of powers, or birthright citizenship, or the freedom of the press.  We might be great if we got rid of some or all of those things.  But we would no longer be America. 

     Such divide tactics were used by the Romans, as implied by historian Elaine Pagels.  At the time, the main religious belief of Gnosticism was having the individual look inward, that doing so enabled each person to find and believe in themselves and through that, find God.  As she wrote in her book The Gnostic Gospels:  The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis.  As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself.  And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny.  According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140-160), the gnostic is one has come to understand who we were, and what we have become; where we were…whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth.  Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis.  Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says: Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort.  Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point.  Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.”  Learn the sources of sorrow: joy, love, hate...If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.  Pagels continued: A heretic may be anyone whose outlook someone else dislikes or denounces.  According to tradition, a heretic is one who deviates from the true faith.  But what defines that “true faith”?  Who calls it that, and for what reasons?  We find this problem familiar in our own experience.  The term “Christianity,” especially since the Reformation, has covered an astonishing range of groups.  Those claiming to represent “true Christianity” in the twentieth century can range from a Catholic cardinal in the Vatican to an African Methodist Episcopal preacher initiating revival in Detroit, a Mormon missionary in Thailand, or the member of a village church on the coast of Greece.  Yet Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agree that such diversity is a recent–and deplorable–development.  According to Christian legend, the early church was different.  Christians of every persuasion look back to the primitive church to find a simpler, purer form of Christian faith.  In the apostles’ time, all members of the Christian community shared their money and property; all believed the same teaching, and worshipped together; all revered the authority of the apostles.  It was only after that golden age that conflict, then heresy emerged: so says the author of the Acts of the Apostles, who identifies himself as the first historian of Christianity.

     Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote: Someone may say: "But we need only to go on until the men who at present have power in the world and who believe in force are gone."  But when in the past has there been a time when such men did not exist?  If our civilization is to survive and democracies are to live, then the people of the world as a whole must be stronger than such leaders...It seems to me a challenge to women in this period of our civilization to foster democracy and to refuse to fall a prey to fear.  Only our young people still seem to have some strength and hope, and apparently we are afraid to give them a helping hand.  Someone said to me the other day that, acknowledging all the weaknesses of human nature, one must still believe in the basic good of humanity or fall into cynicism and the philosophy of old Omar Khayyam.  I do still believe that there is within most of us a basic desire to live uprightly and kindly with our neighbors, but I also feel that we are at present in the grip of a wave of fear which threatens to overcome us.  I think we need a rude awakening, to make us exert all the strength we have to face facts as they are in our country and in the world, and to make us willing to sacrifice all that we have from the material standpoint in order that freedom and democracy may not perish from this earth.

     If you've made it this far then I commend you, but again ask, why does the press seem to continually focus on such a small minority?  Whatever this may have sounded like, I do NOT believe all men are horrible bearded beasts looking to rape, pillage, and plunder as in days of old; or slick Willys playing golf while Rome burns.  But neither are all men saints and gentlemen.  But then, I am male.  Amateur ornitologist, Jennifer Ackerman, told The Sun that birds: ...have had to solve some major problems, just as we have: How do you find decent shelter?  How do you get food under difficult circumstances?  How do you defend your territory?  How do you find your way to wintering and breeding grounds?  How do you find a good mate?  How do you get along well with others?  How do you elevate your status in your group?  How do you communicate with your mate and your flock? 

      We are not so different in those same quests, so again my question would be to ask, why the effort to divide, real or artificial?  It doesn't matter your party, your leanings, your love or hate of Trump, or guns, or immigrants, or inequality, or fairness, or women, or any of a thousand other topics.  Why the effort by some to keep pushing for division?  As The New Yorker pointed out, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ...that during times of extreme inequality, the wealthy distract those who might resent them by fostering a "mutual hatred and distrust, by setting the rights and interests of one against those of another."   We are all different but that shouldn't mean we are not in this together, both as people and as a country.  We share many of the same concerns and values.  So why do the feeds and the press releases and the newscasts and the podcasts keep trying to say that we are at each other's throats?  Turn off the feeds and look outside...is that what you see?  The Romans saw that by having the masses stop believing in themselves and instead align with a charismatic leader such as Jesus, it would be much easier to control them.  Is that what's happening now, a concerted drive to lessen our belief in ourselves and instead circle around a few political evangelists, all so that it would be easier to control "the masses"?   But WE are the masses, the ones protesting and the ones with financial struggles, the ones needing help with health care and mortgages and student loans.  But we're also the ones still saying hello to our neighbors and passersby, the ones still making room for cars to get out of a driveway, the ones still smiling because we share and we care (as but one example, data from 2024 showed that individuals --we, the masses-- gave $392 billion to charity while corporations gave just $44 billion).  You are part of that; I am part of that.  And that "part" is not the minority but the masses, those not getting the publicity or the photo ops or the credit.  The British have a saying, "all talk and no trousers."  That seems to be the machismo I'm witnessing, the false bravado, the tough talk when surrounded by scared semi-loyal bobble heads, the effort to tear down any previous rules and rulers (just as Trump is doing by having stored data and history removed, Emperor Constantine, now converted to Christianity, ordered all traces of Gnostic writings destroyed throughout his empire).  But imagine the masses --us-- looking not at the screens and broadcasts but within ourselves, once again finding and believing in our individual selves, our strengths and our collective power, much as the Gnostics did.  Divided we fall, but there is indeed strength in numbers.  And we are far from alone, far from divided no matter the airwaves.  We, all of us, are the masses...

     And so I end with words from my old school days, a song by Steven Stills which said, in part: Would you knock a man down if you don't like the cut of his clothes?  Could you put a man away if you don't want to hear what he knows?  Well it's happening right here, people dying of fear by the droves.  And I know most of you either don't believe it's true, or else you don't know what to do, or maybe I'm singing about you...who knows?

Cartoonist/Illustrator: Vin-An Nguyen

 *That statistic is from 2023, the last year tallied.  If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, or simply wants to talk to someone, call or text 988.  Another important number to bear in mind is that of reporting sex trafficking.  The National Human Trafficking Hotline is at 1-888-373-7888. 

**While Elon Musk alleged that Trump was a client and on the list of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (such a list was released by the courts) Trump's "justice" department has now changed its stance and denied any such list exists.  Trump was earlier convicted by a jury of "fingering" E. Jean Carroll against her will but according to New York law, forcibly assaulting a woman in this manner is not considered rape, the charge of which Carroll accused Trump.  Said the site Find Law: The federal jury implicitly found that Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll with his fingers in the 1990s.  As a result, it found him liable for sexually abusing her.  Trump denied all the allegations, even after paying the multi-million dollar damages.  Trump's newly signed "beautiful" bill would have granted him immunity from corruption charges and could have made other legal charges such as this unable to proceed, at least with using government money for prosecution (the language in the House bill would have also prevented any past or present corruption charges to proceed against Trump.  In the end, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that Section 70302 violates the Byrd Rule, which governed what provisions could be included in budget reconciliation bills; it was "successfully defeated as a violation of Senate rules and removed from the final bill"