Men femininized the world
“Girls were girls and boys were boys when I was a tot, Now we don’t know who is who or even what’s what. Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide, Nobody knows who’s walking inside. Those masculine women and feminine men” - “Masculine Women Feminine Men” by Irving Kaufman, 1926
A masculine world is a world where the fittest will survive. It’s a fight to the death, a high-risk game. An exertion of dominance, full of wild screams and hard knocking fists. As Commander Mike Metclaf in “Top Gun” tells a young Naval Aviator (played by Tom Cruise) and his fellow students at the Naval Fighter Weapons School, “Gentlemen this school is about combat. There are no points for second place.” Soldiers, knights and gladiators fight to the death. There is no gradient, no nuance, no diversity, no in-between or middle ground. Either you win, or you die.
The “in-between” is a space reserved for the feminine, where resources are shared and the most well-connected win. There are no overt fights to the death, no loud noises or roars. The in-between is a space filled with quiet, dreadful silent treatment and hidden plots. A woman’s world is like an underground web of intrigues, gossip, rumours and emotional storytelling. You can’t win in an overt fashion, that would be rude and unseeingly. You must hide your power and exert it subtly. Women live longer and they don’t kill bodies the way men do. Theirs is a silent killer that inflicts the soul.
In today’s world you find masculinity in sports, war and high risk, manual jobs. Femininity is anything that requires time, quiet, concentration and an intertwined web of connections, like educational institutions, politics, management and living in a civil society.
Men who fear the femininization of the world, are a little too late. They should have said something thousands of years ago. According to Malcom Gladwell, the fight between David and Goliath was a breach of combat traditions. When the Israelis sent David to fight the Philistine’s Goliath, David did not show up in heavy armour and a weapon that requires physical strength to carry and close approximation to hit the target. In stead he carried with him a sling shot with the stopping power equivalent to the bullet from a .45 calibre pistol. It was not a fair mach. David did not beath Goliath through physical strength, but through strategy.
For thousands of years men have unknowingly been telling the story of a feminine victory. They have been laghing at the giant’s masculine traits and hailing the victory of a slim little boy with a sling shot. Still today the biggest winners in the world are the men with the greatest intelligence. Metrosexual is just a fancy world for feminine men. The strong masculine men have not been oppressed by femininine women, but by feminine men. And they have been fine with the femininization of society, a world where most don’t have to die to win, where not the fittest, but the smartest survives. For the most part, they accepted the notion that brute force and masculinity became known as primitive and unintelligent traits.
Most men welcomed the shift from long days out in the fields, in the coalmines or cloudy factories, to the comfort of the office space and the pressing of buttons so that machines could do the heavy lifting. No man had a problem with the school system when only boys were granted the right to an education. They were fine with sitting quiet for long hours, conforming to an etiquette of subtleness, even though their nature was to be loud and physically active. Men supported the development of a world where interconnectedness, arguments and debate were more effective than brute force. At least they were supportive until women wanted to be part of that world as well.
With women as active participants in a femininized world, it was only a matter of time before they outperformed men. No man complained when competing against each other and loosing to the smartest man, but they got really annoyed when they lost to a women. In an interview with the “Humans of New York” photographer, Hillary Clinton recounts her experience during her Harvard Law admission exam.
“I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. (…) And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’”
Suddenly women’s entrance and advancement in school was the reason for men to feel deprived of the opportunity of an education. Never mind that the rules were still the same, that the most intelligent had always outperformed the less intelligent. No, when women entered universities, businesses and politics, suddenly their advancement was attributed to unnatural expectations of men and the suppression of male biology.
There is no question that society has been exploiting masculine attributes to power the development of a feminine world, while at the same time discrediting and even mocking the value of these attributes. Still, men need to realize, that women were not the ones to initiate the downfall of masculinity.
If men want to tear down the feminization process, they must disclose to themselves what that actually means. Do they want to go back to living in caves in hunter gatherer societies? Do they want to go back to a time when women were considered a man’s property? According to Irving Kaufmann, men where complaining about the lines between feminine and masculine being too blurry as far back as the 1920s. What exact timeline are men yearning for and are they willing to embrace all aspects of that timeline?