11 thoughts on ““Toxic” Masculinity”

1. It is always prudent to remember that it takes two sides to “wage war” but only one side to “wage massacre” — the attacker and the victims. Si vis pacem, para bellum indeed. Think of it like building and staffing fire departments locally … when you need them you really need them.

2. This is an area where I think the Christian concept of the nature of man is so true: that we are capable of good, and of knowing good from evil, but we often do evil anyway. The benighted progressives who think that if we just treat people nice they’ll treat us nice are tragically wrong. It may be true of most people most of the time – in a well ordered society – but it isn’t true of every person, or every nation. Hence we must always be prepared to fight and sometimes we will have to fight. There is no alternative, only a deluded naivety.

   1. Beautifully stated.

3. Just to follow that previous thought, there is something “fair and terrible” about men that stirs the heart when the enemy is at the gates and the stakes are victory or death. Tolkien captured that perfectly in this passage from Lord of the Rings:
   https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9909146-at-that-sound-the-bent-shape-of-the-king-sprang

   1. Stirring words I suppose but I just finished rewatching on YouTube the special from PBS made late 90’s on World War 1 the one that was narrated by Salome Jens quite a different perspective showcasing the futility and pointless waste of most warfare. Unless one is fighting Orks of course….

      1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_the_Shaping_of_the_20th_Century

4. Larry Niven once wrote a short essay titled “Why Men fight and what you can do about it”. It was short.
   Reproduced in entirety: “Because they like it and there is nothing you can do about it”

5. “I personally find the idea of combat almost unimaginable.”

   May it ever be so.

6. To be peaceful, a man must be capable of committing great violence, otherwise he isn’t peaceful – he is harmless.

   1. I said I found it unimaginable, which means I have no idea what I would do if I had to do that. I would hope that, as a man, I have it in me to be able to defend what and whom I found important.

7. Evolution ‘designed’ males to fight. To compete. To be more like apex predators in other parts of Nature.

   Males would never have been ‘a thing’ without aggression. Females never seemed to be able to singularly hunt Mammoths, Bison, Fish, or Rabbits.

   Effective Masculinity.

   The rest is BS.

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