Male Fragility is Ruining Everything
By: Joe Duncan
Tags: Culture, Politics, Women, Equality, Men

Male Fragility is Ruining Everything

Looking around and I see angry men behaving badly

In the months since the untimely murder of George Floyd went viral, we’ve heard a lot of discussion around Robin DeAngelo’s book White Fragility. It seems that race is the issue of the moment and that we’re finally inching closer toward a day of reckoning that’s been long overdue, one where we finally have the collective sit-downs and joint conversation that needs to be had about race. One can only hope. But in that pursuit, we’d be forgiven if we’d forgotten about the male question. What about male fragility?

Everywhere I turn, every place I look, with every click I make, every screen that loads, I see images flashing, images of male fragility ruining everything.

Male fragility on display as anti-mask protesters rail against basic scientific knowledge, common sense, and public health.

Male fragility when men armed with rifles storm a state capitol building demanding the right to be able to put their communities at risk, all while bemoaning the fact that wearing a simple mask and the inconvenience it implies is somehow a supposed infringement on their rights. For such men, the same men who’ve spent years fighting for their rights to keep their guns, the desire to keep and bear arms was never about safety and public health, but about looking and feeling cool, masculine, and tough in all the wrong ways. If these guys were really protesting for public safety when they went to their open-carry firearms protests, they’d gladly dawn a mask and try to persuade their peers to do the same in the event of a pandemic which quickly became the leading cause of death in the United States back in April. Fragile men still minimize the problem, saying some people just have “the sniffles” and that “it’ll all just disappear.”

Male fragility on display as four men held George Floyd down while former Officer Chauvin choked him to death by placing his knee on his neck. Male fragility by way of a police force that’s taken over America that looks much more like a gang of hypermasculine bullies that never felt good enough or felt loved enough, and they felt like the only way to accomplish anything resembling some self-esteem was to hide behind the protection of a badge and a gun and bully innocent civilians.

Male fragility on display on the television every single time the President of the United States opens his mouth to double-down on yesterday’s bad idea that he carelessly spewed out and into our reluctant ears to protect his ego, an ego that was taking fresh heat for his episodes in male fragility the day before.

With this president, male fragility is a daily affair, one constant and never-ending stream of narcissistic insanity that his lapdogs lap up with an alarmingly fragile male joy.

Looking around and I see male fragility is ruining everything. Even on the less obvious fronts, I see fragile, white, woke men running around berating black people under the guise of being helpful, telling them that they know what’s best for black communities as they stuff their fingers in their ears and refuse to listen to the black communities who are simply saying, “Hear us! Hear our pain!”

I see society coming apart at the seams with destruction rampant, as the streets are destroyed and the only response my government knows how to use is the reflexive and fragile response of male violence and charged aggression. When the only tool you have is a canister of teargas, everybody looks like a criminal.

I see men sitting around deciding that because the fragile male leader so chose, all our children must risk dying by being scuttled and rushed back to school so as to not make the important man in the White House look bad. Before you breathe a sigh of relief and announce that you’ve got me, Betsy DeVos isn’t a man, I’ll just as quickly and politely remind you that even when women make headlines, it’s merely to reinforce the patriarchal and authoritative standards set forth by men.

Remember a woman named Sarah Palin? She was only allowed to seem tough and aggressive because she used that aggression to reinforce patriarchal norms — not challenge them. Had she challenged such norms, she’d have been written off as crazy or a liar (or both) like Christine Blasey-Ford.

Male fragility is also on display as our leaders turn a deaf ear to the pleas and cries of poor, middle-class, and working families who are struggling to get by during a pandemic, a pandemic that’s caused us to double-down on our male insistence that science can be ignored because all problems can and must be solved with brute force alone. More than 140,000 Americans are now dead from the COVID pandemic and our leaders are trying to gaslight us into believing that the real reason working families want another stimulus package is because they’re lazy and don’t want to get off of unemployment.

Everywhere I turn, I see men doing what men often do, trying to use the bluntest and most harsh instruments conceivable for the most precise tasks. Trying to force the world into a comfortable nook that doesn’t offend their delicate and precious worldviews, trying to bend the Universe itself to their will, by hook or by crook.

When you stop and look around, when you gather the headlines and moments that have made this year the atrocity that it’s been, you’ll notice that each of those instances has a patriarchal, aggressive, male figure in tow who’s calling the shots, making the moves, and shaking things up to remain in control and reinforce the status quo power structures we know so much. And this isn’t to take away from the racial discussion, one that needs to be had thoroughly and with a similarly surgical precision as the male question. But it makes me wonder what healthier masculinity would look like.

Fortunately for us, I don’t have to look far. In fact, there was a slew of great examples all over the news just earlier this year and at the close of last year.

There was Julian Castro’s incessant fight for the rights of minorities and the disabled. There was Corey Booker’s longstanding battles for animal welfare and his bold willingness to put forth reparations legislation. There was Andrew Yang literally crying at an event in front of onlookers because he cares so much about gun safety and the lives lost in America every day as a result of gun violence. Not to mention, he wanted to usher in a new era of economic security where families could have some extra dignity in their lives, a dignity that would replace a cold and heartless abject poverty so many of us have grown used to.

And then there was this one guy named Bernie Sanders. Bernie wanted to make sure that everyone lived in a safe place, had food to eat and clothes on their backs, had a fair chance at education and work opportunities, and he wanted to make sure everyone had healthcare, something all too many American families are hoping desperately to still have as the COVID pandemic rages through America much longer than it needs to. When asked to define the meaning of his presidential campaign in a single word, Bernie Sanders chose the only word that I think any of us in our right minds would apply to him: compassion.

While it is true, that male fragility is ruining everything everywhere I look, that’s not because men can’t be good men. It’s merely because the fragile, aggressive, and toxic men just so happen to currently have the levers of power under their control, levers of power that they stole undemocratically, be it through voter suppression, laughably undemocratic electoral college victories, Russian electioneering, gerrymandering, and other dirty tactics.

But there’s a silver lining in this dark raincloud and nightmarish vision of men behaving badly everywhere I turn — and that silver lining is the fact that this can all go away the moment we say we’re tired of it — the moment we vote them out and replace these toxic, fragile men with people of character and thoughtfulness, and yes, even compassion.

The good news is we’re getting wise to these tactics, we understand them better, we know what to look out for and how to protect ourselves from them, and that means they’re starting to lose their potency. And with the new and bright possibilities that we look forward to in November, perhaps we should use this opportunity to put more women in power, for a change.