The Great Estrangement

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal had a long, detailed front-page article on what I will call the great estrangement. Men and women disagree so fully about all things political that they end up being incapable of getting along with each other. They have become warring camps.

Another victory for feminism.

Men feel increasingly that they are the designated victims in today’s culture wars. They feel beaten down and abused by women. And they have turned to a certain male politician to express their grievances.

At times, the grievance descends into caricature, as happened when President Trump brought out one Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. 

One can easily dismiss Hogan as an empty caricature, without offending too many people, but the truth remains, as sociologists have pointed out, when a society becomes female dominant, manliness tends to reduce to a vulgar caricature, as in machismo. See Michael Carroll’s book, The Cult of the Virgin Mary.

And yet, one can easily praise J. D. Vance for presenting a better example of manliness, for his ability to protect and provide for his family. And yet, the unfortunate Vance has been wildly excoriated for saying the wrong thing about childless cat ladies. 

Of course, men will watch the piling-on and begin to think that it is not worth the trouble to be a good man, a good provider and protector. Better to be like Hulk Hogan and not give a shit.

Anyway, yesterday I received a new essay by Heather Mac Donald. It appeared in the City Journal. In it she demonstrated how the Boy Scouts, a venerable institution dedicated to turning boys into men, had eliminated the Boys part and had gone completely woke. 

Those who are whining about how American men are less manly, when they are not caricatures, ought to care about what happened to the Boy Scouts, now called Scouting America.

Effectively, the Scouts have sold out. They have devoted themselves to the propagation of gender ideology. And they have chosen to downplay more manly skills.

It’s all about male bonding. Naturally, those who want to feminize and girlify the culture have declared war on male bonding.

Mac Donald explains:

The value of an all-boys organization was self-evident to the Boy Scouts’ founders and to the Scout leaders who followed them. Masculine comradeship underlies males’ willingness to undertake military and civic sacrifice. Boys compete with one another, torment one another, but also sometimes elevate one another. They seek adult males to emulate—ideally their fathers but, in the absence of their own father, a father figure embodying masculine virtue. That father figure can even be imaginary; boys’ aspirations are fired by tales of male courage and the accomplishment of great feats.

In today’s America, she continues, far too many boys are growing up fatherless.

Today, American boys are plagued by fatherlessness, both real and symbolic. Whereas in the early twentieth century, boys lost their biological fathers to industrial accidents and tuberculosis, now they lose them to parental irresponsibility. In 2022, 40 percent of all American children were born to single mothers. Black newborns faced a catastrophic 69.3 percent illegitimacy rate, while more than 53 percent of Hispanic children were born to unmarried females. Whites had a 27 percent illegitimacy rate; the rate among the white underclass is twice that. Already in 2016, 59 percent of births to white women who did not finish high school or obtain a GED occurred outside of marriage. Boys suffer the most in the typical fatherless household, with its lack of structure, parade of shiftless boyfriends, and inconsistent discipline.

And you think that the most important political issue is-- abortion.

Women want to gain power. They want to be in charge. They want to be girlbosses. And then they become single mothers, and cannot figure out how it happened.

So, there has been an all-out war on men. It has not been an effort to afford men and women equal opportunity. It has wanted to replace men and especially to overthrow fathers, i.e., the patriarchy.

The disintegration of the family coincided with the devalorization of males, making the possibility of even a symbolic father figure remote. Feminism was zero-sum: it championed females by tearing males down. The concept of toxic masculinity was active decades before the American Psychological Association declared traditional masculinity (which the APA defined by such civilization-creating traits as competitiveness, stoicism, and the desire to provide for others) a malady. Positive male characters in television and movies were replaced by dolts and abusers. And a cascade of female-uplift programs started pouring out of the government, foundations, corporations, and universities.

Of course, putting women in military combat units does not improve combat readiness. Refusing to allow male bonding, as though it is a conspiracy against females, has undermined group cohesion and group effectiveness.

Females have been injected into military combat units, the ultimate male-bonding group, for reasons having nothing to do with improving the military’s battle readiness and everything to do with qualifying females for top military brass positions. 

Putting women in military combat units counts as a grand social experiment. And yet, when you introduce people who are weaker, and who diminish the effectiveness of a team, you are guaranteeing that they are not going to be treated as equals. Nor will they be respected as leaders.

Putting politics aside, the great estrangement is a sign that American society is disintegrating. The family has been undermined. Children are brought up outside of an organized family structure. Perhaps they vote for one party. Perhaps they vote for the other. The truth remains, if men and women in America cannot get along, cannot function within family groups, cannot respect traditional roles and rules, we are in very serious trouble.

Don’t imagine that other cultures around the world have not noticed. The last thing they are likely to do is to emulate our bad example.