Kim Du Toit has a rant that has swept the blogosphere by storm called The Pussification of the American Male. He pulls no punches in this one, and sometimes steps over the line… but in the end, he’s damn right.
But the tides are turning.
Look at the heros of our time – they’re not the kind of emasculated American male that Kim DuToit writes about. They’re the men who threw themselves without fear or hesitation into two burning high-rises not knowing if they’d ever get out alive. They were throwbacks to the days when knights on white horses would fight dragons to save the damsel in distress. Except this time the knights wore Kevlar helmets instead of steel, held hoses instead of swords, and fought fires rather than dragons. They still saved those in distress.
Look at the bookstore. Right next to the usual pussyfied fare are books like The Greatest Generation. Those were real men. They went to places like Omaha Beach and faced a horror like nothing anyone’s ever seen before. You want to know what a real man is like: talk to a veteran. Talk to someone who charged a German machine gun nest, or even someone who rode a ship in the middle of the South Pacific not knowing if the next minute would see them blown apart by a Japanese submarine.
There are real men in Iraq right now, doing what real men do. They’re not only out there blowing the hell out of anyone who would fuck with them, but they’re helping kids learning how to play baseball, building hospitals, building schools, and fixing things. Your average GI is just as good as a wrench as he is with a rifle.
As Mr. Du Toit says:
But I’m not going to do that. To quote John Belushi (who was, incidentally, a real man and not a fucking woman): “Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?“
Well, I’m not going to quit. Fuck that. One of the characteristics of the non-pussified man (and this should strike fear into the hearts of women and girly-men everywhere) is that he never quits just because the odds seem overwhelming. Omaha Beach, guys.
I want a real man as President — not Al Gore, who had to hire a consultant to show him how to be an Alpha male, and french-kiss his wife on live TV to “prove” to the world that he was a man, when we all knew that real men don’t have to do that shit.
And I want the Real Man President to surround himself with other Real Men, like Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft, and yes, Rice (who is more of a Real Man than those asswipes Colin Powell and Norman Mineta).
I want our government to be more like Dad — kind, helpful, but not afraid to punish us when we fuck up, instead of helping us excuse our actions.
I want our government of real men to start rolling back the Nanny State, in all its horrible manifestations of over-protectiveness, intrusiveness and “Mommy Knows Best What’s Good For You” regulations.
I want our culture to become more male — not the satirical kind of male, like The Man Show, or the cartoonish figures of Stallone, Van Damme or Schwartzenegger. (Note to the Hollywood execs: We absolutely fucking loathe chick movies about feelings and relationships and all that feminine jive. We want more John Waynes, Robert Mitchums, Bruce Willises, and Clint Eastwoods. Never mind that it’s simplistic — we like simple, we are simple, we are men — our lives are uncomplicated, and we like it that way. We Were Soldiers was a great movie, and you know why? Because you could have cut out all the female parts, and it still would have been a great movie, because it was about Real Men. Try cutting out all the female parts in a Woody Allen movie — you’d end up with the opening and closing credits.)
I want our literature to become more male, less female. Men shouldn’t buy “self-help” books unless the subject matter is car maintenance, golf swing improvement or how to disassemble a fucking Browning BAR. We don’t improve ourselves, we improve our stuff.
And finally, I want men everywhere to going back to being Real Men. To open doors for women, to drive fast cars, to smoke cigars after a meal, to get drunk occasionally and, in the words of Col. Jeff Cooper, one of the last of the Real Men: “to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”
Amen to that.
Didn’t both Al Gore and Colin Powell serve in Vietnam? Granted, Gore went as a journalist, but he did go. What brave thing has John Ashcroft ever done, or John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, or Bruce Willis for that matter. Lee Marvin would have been a much better example, he was wounded in WWII and is now buried in Arlington National Cemetary.
Real men are good, but why does our President seem like such a petulant child?
I’m all in favor of a Real Man in office. Maybe we could try it sometime.
Also, there’s nothing unmanly about introspection. A true man recognizes his faults and works to fix them. But that shouldn’t become an obsession with self, by any means.
Guns are for pussies. Any asshole can point a gun and kill someone. (Or pick up a phone and order an air strike.) A real man takes the responsibility of fighting seriously enough to study exactly when and where it’s the most appropriate.
BTW – Rumsfeld and Ashcroft aren’t Real Men. They’re scared pussies who are so terrified of boogyman terrorists that they’re willing to sacrifice the Bill of Rights and as many brown people as it takes to make their fear go away.
Oh yes, those terrorists are just boogeymen. It’s not like they could kill thousands of people in an major American city or anything…
I don’t consider the author of these statements to be much of a “real man”, but I must admit it takes balls to suggest that John Ashcroft, who deferred his way out of Vietnam a stunning seven times (!!!) as a real man and that war hero Colin Powell is a “pussy”. I guess it’s just living proof that armchair warriors believe that their role in simply “promoting war” is of greater importance than those who actually carry the rifles. Yes, Kim du Toit clearly fits the “South Park Republican” model.
As for the other “real men” touted by du Toit and Reding, the same firefighters and police officers you pretend to praise after 9-11 were on the receiving end of your rampage of wrath 25 months ago. As civil servants working for above-average salaries under a union contract, you guys would have done anything on September 10, 2001, to relieve them of their duties and marginally train in non-union part-time replacements at a fraction of the salary to pick up the slack. Most likely, you’d do the same thing to your “heroes” today if given half a chance. Come to think of, you allowed Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to do that very thing here in Minnesota so you wouldn’t have to sacrifice a penny more of “your money.” After all, government needs to “live within its means, and doggone it, I want MYYY money back!”
However, du Toit does make a commendable point, even though he used the worst imaginable examples and moronic support for his thesis. There is a clear immasculation of the American male. Attend nearly any college class, watch nearly any TV commercial, and listen to nearly any song on the radio, and the evidence is right there on display. The male viewpoint is no longer just “different” as the female viewpoint, it’s “wrong” and it’s “dangerous.”
Oh yes, those terrorists are just boogeymen. It’s not like they could kill thousands of people in an major American city or anything…
More people die of inadequate housing, starvation, disease, or any number of totally preventable causes than have ever been killed by terrorists. You stand a better chance of being killed by lightning than by a terrorist (unless you’re camping out in their country, of course). So why not have the Department of Not Getting Killed by Lightning?
We lose as many Americans to work-related deaths each year as we lost in Korea. Glad to see that the men in charge of protecting America AND promoting the general welfare are so happy to cut OSHA regulations. Nope, good thing they’re focused on more important matters, like using the Patriot Act in exactly the way opponents have feared all along, or hand-picking a governing council that we now want to discredit.
So sayeth the party of George Will and Rush “Anal Leakage” Limbaugh.