Toxic Masculinity Is Sickening Us

(Put the Women in Charge)

This guy in France who drugged and raped his wife continually — and the 50-odd Frenchmen who allegedly joined in over the years, shoving their dicks into a slack, unconscious woman — what is that? What kind of consciousness wants to do that, let alone gives the conscience permission to do it?

Those thousands and thousands of men who ogle pre-adolescent girls on Instagram, fostering 500,000 “inappropriate” interactions every day, says the New York Times — who are they? What happened to them to make them sexually turned on by children?

Those millions of men who say YEAH!! when the Teamster president praises Trump as “one tough s.o.b.” — and who think that “tough s.o.b.” is what this suffering country needs by way of leadership — where did their sense of compassion, wisdom, and truth-telling go to hide?

Those fossil-fuel CEOs who are willing to poison our Earth in order to win the game of wealth and do-whatever-I-want power — how did they develop such a warped, selfish sensibility?

And those millions of Republican men who comfort themselves and elevate themselves with racist hostility towards non-white immigrants, and call themselves patriots although they can’t recite ten facts about American history — what’s their story? Were they beaten by their fathers, humiliated by their mothers and teachers?

Look, I’m a man, as the great Muddy Waters used to boast, and there are lots of men I love and have great fun with. They’re hilarious, kind, knowledgeable, skilled at many things, and lovably loyal. Their masculinity — mine, too — is about being responsible and competent and protective and productive and smart and physically willing. But we’ve tamed our macho, our need to dominate, to prove it over and over. We’ve broken with the patriarchal culture that grooms men to treat women as latex dolls. And we’ve gotten better with age, as many men tend to do, evolving, as our testosterone slackens, into terrific human beings.

Men like us view most of those other guys, those problematic men, simply as jerk-offs — I mean, what were those 50-odd Frenchmen doing, if not jerking off? — but we still ask ourselves questions like Who are they? and Why are they that way? — questions prompted by the compassionate if naive belief that male violence and perversion are the products of trauma, not simply irreversibly baked into the male constitution.

I mean, naive or not, there’s no way we’re going to get out of the mess we’re in all over the world unless we proceed with compassionate hearts — and with the courage, even, to rephrase our questions as Who are YOU, man? Why are YOU that way?

At risk of having our asses kicked by Teamsters . . .

The problem’s got to be talked about, especially by our political leaders. They need to identify violent, sexist, racist, big-noise, angry masculinity as an overarching problem that festers within our society. It festers enough to get Donald Trump — that lying, groping, evil, ignorant prick —elected to the White House. It festers enough to turn superhero movies and kill-’em-all video games into multi-billion-dollar enterprises. It festers enough for more than a quarter of all American women to be raped or beaten or stalked by a man or by men in their lifetimes. It festers enough so that our circles of power view the world in terms of wealth, domination and force instead of cooperation and soul-power.

Good God — what politicians would dare? Instead, they all imitate the macho by yelling into their microphone with fight fight fight and tough tough tough rhetoric.

You think maybe at her inauguration Kamala will feel buoyed enough to poke the bear, to say something about the brand of masculinity that has very nearly destroyed our country?

At the very least, maybe she’ll invite Keb’ Mo’ to the ceremony to sing, “Put a Woman in Charge.”

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P.S. If you’re in my neck of the woods, please come to this pop-up art show: