Toxic Humanity

How Ruth Whippman is So Foolish and, When You Come Right Down to It, Wrong

Well, my sixteen year old who is only a week away from being seventeen was finally persuaded to take her permit test, so now I get to reenter that horrible time of sitting in a car with a person who doesn’t know how to drive.

File:The Glass of Lemonade, attributed to Gerard ter Borch.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Anyway, not to change the subject away from my personal pain or anything, but Ruth Whippman has another piece in the New York Times about Masculinity. I wrote about her for WORLD a bit ago. I listened to her book even, an excersize which irritated me to no small degree. We all have our various subjects that we go on about, that we manage to make every news cycle fit into. This time, Whippman is mashing up election tribulations with her gospel of men not needing to worry about being masculine. They should escape that narrow paradigm for something that she calls “full humanity.” Let’s see what she has to say:

Perhaps it’s a predictable irony that in an election cycle that could realistically deliver the first female president, so much of the commentary has been about men. Or rather, not about men exactly, but about “masculinity.” Because somehow, in 2024, we still find ourselves unable to talk about men and boys without using masculinity as the basic frame of reference.

The electorate is faced with a choice, the story goes, between two models for masculinity. Toxic versus positive. In response to the vein-popping, furious, felon model of the right, the left is offering us a more morally upstanding and expansive “positive masculinity.”

“Positive masculinity” has been around for a while. Most likely coined in early 2000s by psychologists as a way of working with male patients in therapy, the term has now become the go-to framework for the wider progressive discussion about boys and men. It has also inspired a spate of programs and initiatives aimed at enticing boys to embrace more feminine-coded virtues such as emotional vulnerability and nurturing.

Before anything, I must say that trying to escape things like “basic frames of reference” is not only a fool’s errand, but kind of wicked, if I’m going to be honest, which of course I always am.

I know, I know, for the last hundred years we—and I speak here, of course, as one who excludes myself from the common “we” that makes up this post-post-post-modern dystopia—thought that it would be clever to dismantal things, to deconstruct them, to take all the bits apart and lay them all around the living room floor because putting them back together in a different kind of order will not only be easy, but make everything better. The trouble is that “we” don’t have a conception of the human person in the first place, which means that there can not be a corporate or common understanding of anything, and ultimately, no nice things for any of us.

Just ponder, for a hot second, telling young children, for example, that they are basically bits of things that can be assembled in any particular order. They are a little bit of a mind, a little bit of a heart, a little bit of a libido, a little bit of an attraction, a little bit of a higher consciousness, a little bit able to manifest what they want from the universe, a little bit of a girl, a little bit of a boy, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Here a little, there a little, as the Bible says. Nobody—nobody at all—can possibly tell darling little [insert most popular non-binary name of the year here] anything about xer-self. Everything must be decided from scratch. Then go to the grocery store and try to pick out the best kind of butter or bread or cereal. Try to pick out what kind of food you prefer. Try to pick out a car or a house or a god or anything.

It’s unutterably cruel.