Stand up to your man
Woe to the modern man, his masculinity diminished to little more than a rapist-inwaiting, committing multiples aggressions, large and small every day against women in a feeble attempt to conserve his patriarchal power.
From an evolutionary biology standpoint, men are little more than bags of flesh and bone, prehistorically hardwired to be violent, sexual predators.
From a social science perspective, men could be good but they’re corrupted the instant they leave the womb by society, culture, history into cruel, selfish and entitled monsters.
Men died in 2009, according to Hanna Rosin in her award-winning piece in The Atlantic called The End of Men and then expanded upon in her 2012 book with the same name. That was the year women out- numbered men in the U.S. workforce for the first time, finally catching up to the gender reality seen across colleges and universities years earlier.
As the economy continued its rapid transition away from good-paying jobs in manufacturing, trades and unskilled labour, the men were kicked to the curb by the millions and educated women were far more ready for knowledge economy careers in health, education, communications, marketing, entertainment, law and technology.
Except for a few isolated sections, Daemon Fairless is not overly concerned with the social and cultural construct of manhood in his book Mad Blood Stirring: The Inner Lives of Violent Men. A Toronto-based journalist with an academic background in neuroscience, Fairless devotes the vast majority of his book to what’s going on between the ears of men (insert joke here), starting with his own.
Part memoir, part journalistic inquiry, part academic review, Fairless paints a dreary image of men, trapped by both biology and upbringing into endless waking and sleeping fantasies about sex, violence and control – preferably all at once – from puberty to advanced old age. Even the men who pet the gentle in gentlemen, he argues, are, to varying degrees, wearing masks to hide their inner rage and desire to fight. Yet all is not lost for men.
From the first villages and farms to the earliest civilizations to the modern age, men have engaged in a noble and worthy struggle to channel their inner demons towards morality and justice, trying to get along with one another and with themselves. If they must fight, it’s in defence of their families, their communities, their countries, their beliefs and their ways of life. Becoming husbands and fathers encourages most (but certainly not all) men to focus on being providers, partners and parents and to care less about pride, honour and glory and the battles and blood necessary to attain them.
Fairless makes a passionate plea on behalf of all men for understanding, from society, from men and from each man. Men should be unashamed to be sensitive and self-aware enough to assess their own dark tendencies and then openly discuss them, with women and men but also with their sons and daughters. Men should learn from boyhood that they are more than the testosterone running through their veins, that their feelings are common and that there are socially responsible ways to channel their anti-social urges.
That’s the irony of the book’s title. The mad blood stirring is a constant, the inner lives of all men is inherently violent. But that doesn’t need to be a man’s destiny.
The sooner and the more fully men accept who they are at their core, the better men they can be for themselves, their loved ones and the world around them.