Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.” Bob Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm,” (1975).
If my memory serves me well, John Carroll in “Paranoid and Remissive: The Treason of the Upper Middle Class,” (in R. Manne (ed.), The New Conservatism in Australia (1982)), argued that the Left typically had families with weak fathers and strong mothers. Presumably this led to some sort of mental imbalance. But today it is more likely that the family has no father at all. Or a “new” family of two women.
In this scheme of things, there is no place at all for the traditional “John Wayne” man. Feminists, in general, see this version of traditional masculinity, based on the warrior model of man, tried and proven over all of human history, as flawed in their opinion. Effeminate conservatives probably do too, also falling into this model, having weak male role models, and dominant mothers.
However, one iconoclastic feminist – Camille Paglia – will have none of this. Famously she said: “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” And, masculinity is the “most creative force in history.” (See C. H. Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men, (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000), p.8)
As reported in B. Weiss, “Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues,” The Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2013, (my god, I got exhausted just typing that URL and had to lay down), she also said, observing the contemporary destruction of masculine virtues: “What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide.”
This depressing decadence is seen in the softening of modern people, especially men, as exemplified in the belief that “people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too.” She sees in people in the West a loss of “any sense of evil or criminality.”
A good example of this is the rape epidemic in Europe. Former Labor minister Peter Baldwin (“Regressive Left Puts Bigotry on a Pedestal,” The Weekend Australian, September 17-18, 2016, p. 19), has made some relevant remarks about this, noting that the Establishment seems to actively support its own dissolution:
“The kind of moral catastrophe this can induce is shockingly displayed by events in the northern English town of Rotherham. Across 16 years, 1,400 girls, most from dysfunctional white families, were subject to sexual abuse of organised gangs of sexual predators of Pakistani Muslim background. As two subsequent official reports disclosed, all arms of government that should have protected the girls – the police, social services, schools, the Labour-controlled local council – were paralysed by the dread of being labelled racist or Islamophobic.
I think of regressive leftism as a mind virus, a paralytic disease that is severely inhibiting the ability of Western societies to properly debate some of the most important issues they face. It is suffused with civilizational self-loathing – severely condemnatory of “white” post-Enlightenment Western societies yet prepared to overlook or apologise for the most egregious defects in other kinds of society.
To see what can result from this paralysis, look at Europe as it grapples with the consequences of its leaders’ decision to effectively dissolve its external borders with North Africa and the Middle East.
Consider the enormity of the transformation Europe is undergoing and imagine how it will look in several decades if this continues. Yet Europe’s elite seem incapable of conducting an honest debate about the implications of this, since this would involve asking some tough questions about whether Islam, with its undoubted violent and supremacist aspects, is ultimately compatible with liberal societies.”
Hard hitting words indeed. And it is no coincidence in my opinion, that the two global leaders with the most ethnomasochistic obsession with denigrating Western civilisation and traditional manhood are women – Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton. Oh, relax, I’m an old lady and I will say what I believe to be true.
Camille Paglia may or may not agree with the above analysis, but she has gone further. Gender politics is “all about neutralization of maleness,” so there are “no models of manhood” and “no room for anything manly right now.”
In another article (S. Dorman, “Paglia: ‘Transgender Mania’ is a Symptom of West’s Cultural Decline,” November 3, 2015) she said: “Nothing …better defines the decadence of the West to the jihadists than our tolerance of open homosexuality and this transgender mania now.”
Transgenderism in the West, she believes, is a symbol of cultural collapse, probably because of its radical deconstruction of traditional masculinity.
There is no easy answer to all of this to be neatly given in the last paragraph to give us a warm glow, beyond recognising what the problem is, and where it is coming from.
Clearly, if the West does not regain masculine virtues then it will be destroyed by cultures that have preserved them. Europe is well along that path of disintegration, but Australia is soon to follow. It is time to man up.