Tea at Trianon: Why Masculine Men Matter

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 13, 2023

Why Masculine Men Matter

From Newsmax:

In today’s increasingly muddled and manipulated world of sexuality, it may be worthwhile to stand back and ask anew "What is a masculine man?" Next, we can ask if women need masculine men as protectors, if children need masculine men as a parent, and if men need masculine men as comrades? Finally, we can ask "If so, then why?" This subject has been approached and analyzed by psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, theologians, and philosophers for centuries, but along with other gender preoccupations like Feminists’ demonization of "toxic" (masculine) men it happens to be a hot emotional subject right now.(Read more.)

From First Things:

Peter commands husbands to treat wives as a “weaker vessel” (1 Pet. 3:7). Pearcey links this with the recurring biblical exhortation to care for the vulnerable, since women are physically weaker than men and, in many societies, lack social power. For decades, evangelicals have debated the meaning of male headship (Eph. 5:23), staking out positions as egalitarians, patriarchalists, or complementarians. Pearcey cuts through the fog by arguing that a husband’s love and respect for his wife, and his commitment to his marriage and family, are more decisive than his theory of headship. Christian husbands and fathers are most effective when they act like Christians. Who could have predicted it?

A long section of the book traces the emergence of the Real Man ideal within American Christianity. Like Ivan Illich, Allan Carlson, and, more recently, Mary Harrington, Pearcey targets the Industrial Revolution as a primary cause of the disruption of traditional sexual order. Prior to the Civil War, some 90 percent of Americans owned their own farms, businesses, or shops, most of them family enterprises where husbands, wives, and children worked together. Industrialization separated work and home, and this evolved into a two-ethic social world, split between the cutthroat, amoral world of labor and public life, and the kinder, gentler world of the home. The two worlds were, of course, sexually indexed. Men were identified with secular work and the rough-and-tumble outside world; women became economically unproductive goddesses of sacred domesticity. Men were profane Real Men, women naturally religious.

At home, working men inhabited an alien, feminine world. Strangers in their own houses, they were apt to become strangers to their children. To the extent they were involved with their children at all, they were playmates, because, while the home was feminine workspace, it was masculine leisure space. During the nineteenth century, boys’ movements emerged to subject them to masculine disciplines and introduce them to manly pursuits. Scouting, for instance, was a rite of passage to help boys cross from the maternal private world into the wide world of men.

Reform movements, often led by women, were intent on re-moralizing public life. Though the phrase “toxic masculinity” wasn’t current in the Victorian age, the concept was already there: Men are savages, naturally promiscuous, unsuited to monogamy, parenthood, and home, unfit for civilized life until tamed by a good woman. Reform efforts had predictable effects. Men recoiled from being treated as brutes or bossed around, and they sought refuge in Real Man activities or fantasies like American Westerns, where men escape the petticoats and the refinements of city life to plunge into the wilderness, where they can be the primitive loners they naturally are. Muscular Christianity tried to win men back to religion, but in the process injected a Real Man ethos into the church.

The problem with the reform movements, Pearcey says, is that they let men off the hook. After all, if a man is naturally brutish, he can’t really be blamed for his bad behavior. Reform movements presented a shrunken, distorted view of human nature and manhood, ironically reinforcing the Real Man ideal they were trying to correct. Reform and Real Man ideology to the contrary, monogamy and fatherhood aren’t unmanly; rather, the home is one of the primary arenas for developing and manifesting masculine responsibility, virtue, and strength. (Read more.)