Toxic Masculinity & The Emerging World Order
I have to admit I’ve always had a fear of the pendulum effect when it comes to societal developments. Like every other person who welcomes improvement in equality and the practice of tolerance and respect, I celebrate every step forward with a sense of joy and a sigh of relief. These steps go a long way to help restore my faith in humanity in general and those who take risks to benefit others in particular. But there has always been a faint murmur of concern at the back of my mind when those changes appear to be part of a wave of change rather than a constantly mounting ripple of reform.
Newtons Law of action and reaction comes to mind – for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s what I tend to call the Pendulum Effect.
Sometimes the backward swing of the pendulum can take no time at all, causing immediate conflict and on other occasions it can take decades, leading to serious swings resulting in outright war.
“Across the world – from Russia to China and from India to Egypt – macho leadership is back in fashion,” -Gideon Rachman 2016
The rise of the political “strongmen’ – a misnomer if ever I saw one – over the past decade in particular, has to some extent resulted in the reemergence of dictators across the globe. The misguided changes to laws allowing presidents to ‘reign’ for life, in effect reinstated de facto monarchies and diminished the efficacy of true democratic processes. Inevitably this would lead these ‘rulers’ to then face outwards to expand, or in some warped reading of history restore, the past glories of dead empires. In other words warmongering, such as the war Putin’s Russia has inflicted on Ukraine.
“When people defend masculinity as an inevitable part of our nature, it’s simply a way for men to avoid taking responsibility for their shitty behaviour, and allows them to inwardly justify a dangerous attitude on account of it being perceived as masculine.” –Jack Urwin
The outmoded perception of ‘man-the-hunter’ buys into the ‘strongman’ definition of masculinity that enlightenment throughout history has proven to be not only destructive for the individual, but for their family, community and indeed the world in general.
“Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.” ― Betty Friedan
The concept that genetic coding might require us to forgive this reversal in societal development is a weak one. About as weak as those leaders who have to generate aggression to feel like a man; to expand their fiefdoms based on mistaken and constructed identities; to inflict pain and suffering on others – mainly women and children – to feel superior; to reject the advances that new knowledge has given us.
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most urgent question is, what are you doing for others?” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s time we stopped trying to understand this reversal of progress made in more enlightened times and work to arrest the backward swing of the pendulum in whatever way we can.
