A new campaign seeks to "evolve masculinity" by turning men into emasculated weaklings. But this does not represent an evolution. The new version of masculinity is a devolution from the traditional version. And that's a problem because this country desperately needs masculine men. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| So it seems, I'm sure you've noticed, that there's always some kind of campaign going on with the aim of dismantling the dreaded masculinity. | |
| And the latest campaign comes to us courtesy of a menswear company called Bonobos. | |
| I'm not really sure how to pronounce it. | |
| But this week they launched their hashtag Evolve the Definition. | |
| That's what the campaign is called, Evolve the Definition, which they hope that through the sale of pink blazers and through Twitter activism will change society's conception of masculinity. | |
| Because, of course, pink blazers are very unmanly, as opposed to this, I don't know what I have on, this baby blue weird shirt I have, which is, of course, very manly. | |
| But according to, is this, I don't even know what color. | |
| See, I, anytime I wear an unmanly color, I have an excuse because I'm colorblind, so I really don't know. | |
| I never know what color I'm wearing. | |
| I just, I just put something on, and then I judge based on the reactions of other people. | |
| And if people start making fun of me, then I know that, okay, I wore an unmanly color. | |
| Anyway, according to the company, the traditional definition of masculinity is broken and outdated and tired, they say. | |
| And it needs to be updated to fit our enlightened understanding of things. | |
| Now, if you haven't, I wrote a piece about it yesterday and I linked to it, but if you haven't had a chance, when this is over, go watch the video that the company used to launch this campaign because it's really an amazing video. | |
| It's amazing only because it's exactly what you would expect. | |
| You know, it's like, imagine a campaign by a trendy menswear company to change the definition of masculinity. | |
| And it's just, without even seeing the video, it's exactly that. | |
| What you have in your mind, that's exactly it. | |
| It features this kind of collection of stylish, feminine dudes with nice hairdos reading synonyms. | |
| So it starts with, they have their phones out, and then they pull up the definition of masculinity from the dictionary, and then they start reading synonyms for masculinity or for masculine. | |
| And the synonyms are like macho, manly, strong, brawny, powerful. | |
| And then all the men, they react. | |
| They react with horror at that definition. | |
| One of the guy goes, I'm not kidding, one of the guy goes, my goodness. | |
| I think he reads, you know, one of the synonyms for masculine is brawny and strong, and he goes, my goodness. | |
| And then another guy wearing a beanie says, I think that definition is a little scary. | |
| He says he's scared. | |
| He's scared by the definition of masculinity. | |
| And then the men all proceed to give their own definitions of masculinity. | |
| And those definitions include things like being able to smile and cry and being brave enough to be who I am. | |
| Now, I don't want to get off on a tangent, but of course my whole video, every video I do just consists of me getting off on tangents, so I don't know why I even say that, but I just want to begin by noting that, because it's kind of a pet peeve of mine, It's not brave to be who you are. | |
| You shouldn't be proud of being who you are. | |
| You don't have any other choice but to be who you are. | |
| That's who you are, so you have to be it. | |
| You don't get any credit for being who you are. | |
| You have no choice in the matter. | |
| So that's not, who else are you going to be, is the question. | |
| And by the way, if yourself is a person who's cowardly and weak, Then actually it's brave to not be who you are. | |
| So it's never really brave to be who you are because that's just who you are. | |
| But it is often brave to not be who you are and to become something better. | |
| It's just... I love when people do that. | |
| They go, you know, I'm just being myself. | |
| And they think that that justifies their behavior. | |
| It's something people say, especially when they want to justify some negative characteristic about themselves. | |
| And they say, well, I'm just being myself. | |
| And then the answer to that is, okay, well, have you considered not being yourself? | |
| Have you considered being something better than yourself? | |
| Because yourself is precisely the problem here. | |
| That's what needs to change is yourself. | |
| Yeah, you're being yourself. Exactly. | |
| That's the issue. Be something better. | |
| Because yourself isn't great right now. | |
| But that's kind of beside the point. | |
| The real point about this masculinity thing is I have three points that I want to make. | |
| Actually, I think five. Three to five. | |
| We'll see. First of all, if your objective is We're good to go. | |
| And so if something evolves, that means that it should now function better than it did previously. | |
| It happens on its own, naturally, and then by the end of it, this thing that evolves now should function better than it did before. | |
| So, okay, let's look at this new version of masculinity, this effeminate A man who cries and sobs and cares a lot about fashion trends. | |
| That's the new masculinity. | |
| How is that an improvement? | |
| In what way does a man now function better with this new masculinity than he did before? | |
| Because if we say that bears have evolved, Well, that should mean that the bear of today is an improvement upon the bear of 10,000 years ago. | |
| That's what it should mean. The bear of today is a better bear. | |
| He's better at being a bear. | |
| So, how is the new masculine man better than the older one? | |
| Let's think about it. The old masculinity, while it was... | |
| Maybe a bit scary, according to one of the guys in the video. | |
| It was a very scary thing, but at the same time, if you could get past the scariness of it, the old masculinity drove men, motivated men, to provide for their families, to protect their loved ones, to win wars, to build things, to build civilizations, among many other accomplishments. The new masculinity, now it may make men more comfortable in many respects, but what are they achieving? | |
| What are they doing that traditionally masculine men could not do as effectively? | |
| A traditionally masculine man will have actual skills, actual abilities that the new masculine man does not have. | |
| So what is the reverse of that? | |
| It seems to me that the so-called evolved masculinity is more likely to prevent men from functioning than it is to help them function. | |
| So then it's not evolution. | |
| Second point. We have this idea that we have to change the definition of masculinity because so many men today fall short of that definition, and so therefore it needs to change. | |
| But is that the right response? | |
| I would say no, it isn't. | |
| I would say that actually, that's the whole reason why we shouldn't change it. | |
| The fact that men are falling short of it is all the more reason to reassert the definition, to strengthen it, fortify it, to declare it from on high. | |
| It's not why you should change it. | |
| The fact that people falling short of the definition proves the necessity of the definition. | |
| You know, the whole point of having a concept like masculinity is to establish standards. | |
| It is to kind of draw lines and to kind of clarify things. | |
| And masculinity for men, just like femininity for women, has helped to answer some very important questions. | |
| Like, what are men supposed to do? | |
| What are women supposed to do? | |
| How are men supposed to act? | |
| How are women supposed to act? | |
| Men and women in society have always asked these questions about themselves. | |
| People will always look at themselves and wonder, what am I supposed to do? | |
| What is my role? | |
| What is my place in society? | |
| But by getting rid of masculinity and femininity, all we've done is we've removed the answer to the question, but we have not removed the question. | |
| People are still asking the question, but all you've done is you've taken away the answer, which means that now there's going to be confusion, there's going to be paralysis where there used to be clarity and action. | |
| The left seems to think, because the real problem that the left has is not even with the answers to the question, it's with the question itself. | |
| They don't like the idea that a man should do or shouldn't do anything, or that a woman should or shouldn't do. | |
| They don't like this idea that men and women are looking at themselves and each other and asking, like, what am I supposed to do given that I am a man? | |
| And what are you supposed to do given that you're a woman? | |
| That's the question that the left doesn't like, so they want people to stop asking it, but they can't get people to stop asking it, so instead they just get rid of the answers. | |
| Gender roles is another example related to this. | |
| You know, people in a marriage, man and woman, are going to naturally wonder what they're supposed to do, what their role is, how they're supposed to work together to accomplish the task of building and sustaining a family. | |
| And gender roles answered that question, but by getting rid of the gender roles and replacing it with nothing, which is what we've done now, people are still asking the question. | |
| They're still wondering. People in a marriage are still like, what am I supposed to do? | |
| How is this supposed to work? | |
| But now there's no answer because we don't have the gender roles, so now they just end up confused and marriages are dysfunctional because nobody has any idea about how they should function. | |
| So rather than changing masculinity or abolishing it, To compensate for the fact that men so often fall short of the label, I think what we should do is we should challenge men to live up to the label. | |
| Because it's true that not every man is strong, not every man protects, but every man should be strong. | |
| And I don't just mean physically. | |
| Obviously, an 85-year-old man is not going to be physically strong, but every man should be emotionally and morally strong. | |
| And I also believe that where physically possible, he should strive to have physical strength as well, because that's something that men are needed for in society. | |
| Not every man protects his family, but every man should protect his family. | |
| Again, not just physically, but spiritually. | |
| Yes, not every man does it. | |
| Not every man wants to do it, but every man should do it, and they should all want to do it. | |
| They should. | |
| That's the standard that they should aspire to. | |
| When you take the standard away, now we have nothing to aspire to. | |
| We have nothing to strive towards. | |
| Third thing, or am I, I don't know, what number am I? | |
| Second or any, it doesn't matter. | |
| A couple other quick notes. | |
| You know, we say that we are changing the definitions of things so that people can be different. | |
| Like we look at a feminine man, and we see that he's different than other men. | |
| And so we say, well, we need to change the definition of masculinity in order to accommodate this guy and his differences. | |
| But do you know what actually happens? | |
| When you change the definition, all you've done is you've taken away that guy's ability to be different. | |
| So even in the dark old ages when you had traditional masculinity and that was like the standard, there were still some men who fell outside of it. | |
| It was even okay to fall. | |
| Maybe some men just naturally kind of fall more outside of that. | |
| And so you still had this diversity and these differences in personality. | |
| But when you change the standard by which the difference is judged and by which the difference is recognized as a difference, then you've gotten rid of the difference. | |
| And so you've actually, by kind of expanding all definitions and opening everything up in this effort to welcome diversity, you've actually abolished diversity. | |
| Now nobody can be different because there's nothing to be different in comparison to. | |
| The last point I want to make here, I think it's an important point, and I had to do this video in my car, and I don't know if you can tell, I'm like, I'm burning up right now because it's hot out and I have to keep the windows up and I can't have the air on because that would make noise, it would be distracting. | |
| So I'm like sweating around, it's like 95 degrees in the car and I'm doing this. | |
| This effort to abolish masculinity is being imposed upon society by our cultural institutions. | |
| It is not something That most people want. | |
| That's why it's not a natural problem. | |
| Because when you, in fact, even you look at a campaign like this, change the definition of masculinity, most people react negatively to it. | |
| They think it's stupid and ridiculous. | |
| And you talk to the average woman, as long as you're not pressuring her to pretend that she's more progressive than she really is, she's going to admit that, yeah, you know what? | |
| I want a man who's a man. | |
| You talk to the average man, as long as he doesn't feel pressured to pretend that he's more progressive than he really is, he's going to admit, yeah, you know what? | |
| I want to be a man. I want a woman who's a woman. | |
| I want a woman who's feminine and who has a kind of maternal instinct and who has that womanly affection and compassion. | |
| That's what I want in a woman. | |
| I don't want a woman who acts like a man. | |
| That's not what I'm looking for. That's what men and women still naturally want, even now, even our progressive age. | |
| But it is our cultural elites and our institutions, academic institutions, the media, Hollywood, government, so on. | |
| They're the ones who are trying to impose this change on us. | |
| And so we should resist it, because we, you know, this natural inclination that we have is right, and it's good, and we should stick to it. | |
| All right. We're gonna cut it off there. | |
| Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening. |