Hawley: Why men are struggling
Josh Hawley thinks “men are the real victims,” said Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com. The Missouri senator, building his brand in anticipation of a 2024 presidential bid, recently accused liberals of undermining men with their criticism of “toxic masculinity,” which he claimed is an attack on “courage and independence and assertiveness.” Because liberals won’t let young men be men, Hawley insisted, they are retreating into “idleness and porn and video games.” Sorry, but no feminist or liberal has condemned men for being responsible adults, husbands, and fathers. What we have called “toxic” are men who think it’s their right to sexually harass women and bully gays and minorities—men who are like Hawley’s friend Donald (“grab ’em by the pussy”) Trump. Hawley knows his audience, and it’s “the whiny babies who are throwing a childish tantrum because women told them to make their own damn sandwiches.”
Actually, Hawley is “dead right” about a fundamental problem: “the disintegration of the American family,” said Conn Carroll in the Washington Examiner. In progressive culture and the globalist economy, men have been “devalued,” leaving them unable to find good jobs, marry, and have families. Rather than just complaining, Hawley offered real solutions: creating more well-paid manufacturing jobs and giving a major tax bonus to married couples and young parents. It’s unfortunate Hawley framed that very real problem as a partisan culture-war issue, said Mona Charen in TheBulwark.com. Today, women earn 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees, “male labor-force participation” is steadily declining, and men are more likely to be imprisoned and “die of diseases of despair.” Our society must rebuild its foundations to “raise healthier, happier, and more successful men.”
“There certainly is a crisis in masculinity,” said
Joe Berkowitz in FastCompany.com, but Hawley and his defenders mistakenly think “the cure is the disease.” The traditional masculinity they idealize taught boys that “women are objects, queerness is a sin, and violence is a solution to everything.” In recent decades, many men have embraced a broader, kinder definition of masculinity, and even wash dishes and take parental leave to—gasp!— care for their kids. That generally earns them nothing but “soy boy” insults from traditional men. Those guys “are still free to shackle themselves” to rigid gender roles, but hopefully, “the next generation of men will feel freed from it.”