War on masculinity disarms us from the inside

While western feminists continue emasculating men and gaslighting anyone who disagrees with them, be assured our enemies aren’t following suit, writes Miranda Devine.

For my sins, last week I was called on to debate Gillette’s infamous “toxic masculinity” ad with two ball-busting left-wing feminists, twice in one day on live television.

On the ABC was Guardian journalist Bridie Jabour. And on Channel 9 was Clementine Ford, best known for her hashtag #KillAllMen.

Both women chose to use the same tactic to defend Gillette.

“What I enjoy most about these ads is the insane reaction it brings out from people like Miranda. The reaction to it is just so overly sensitive it just makes me laugh,” said Jabour.

“I’m really confused about the backlash towards this ad,” said Ford. “I can’t see how anyone would see that as anything other than a celebration and championing of good male behaviour. It’s just very confusing to me.”

This faux confusion is a tactic known as gaslighting, where you attempt to defeat your opponents’ argument by pretending their grasp on reality, even their sanity, is awry.

MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: When man hating is your marketing plan

This is how the left has handled the extraordinary explosion of outrage against Gillette for depicting men as clueless savages who need marketing department scolds to teach them that bullying and sexual harassment are wrong.

The gaslighters pretend the ad is not part of a relentless ideological campaign to depict all of human history as a tyrannical patriarchy which only oppressed women.

MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Can we quit with the gender whining?

In their alternative reality, there is no war on masculinity, male suicide is not triple the rate of female, males are not outnumbered at university and falling behind at school, and all women are saints whose every word should be believed.

#Gillette blew it w/ their stupid ad
Not because bullying & harassment aren't wrong

But because we don't need this constant barrage of virtue signaling lectures
Real men already know this
cc: @KurtSchlichter @JesseKellyDC @SebGorka @BPattySSG @JackPosobiec & many more good men pic.twitter.com/FfdBNASVTL

— Jim Hanson (@Uncle_Jimbo) January 16, 2019

The problem for the gaslight crowd is that they are in the minority, judging by the global reaction to the ad on YouTube, where it’s registered a staggering 20 million views since it was posted on Monday.

At more than one million dislikes so far, the public mood is running two to one against Gillette and negative comments are about ten to one against. All over social media people are posting photos of Gillette razors in the bin or down the toilet, with the hashtags #BoycottGillette and #getwokegobroke.

If we’re all making a fuss about nothing, then why would the firefighters at Newtown fire station be forced to apologise last week and take down their witty sign, “House fires are toxic. Our masculinity isn’t”? Unless there’s doubt about the nature of their masculinity.

Newton Fire Station were forced to apologise and take down this sign. Picture: Facebook

That’s the message sent by their lily-livered bosses at NSW Fire and Rescue, who rely on their courage, strength and, dare I say, masculine derring-do to save lives, yet force them to apologise for defending their honour.

Included in the Gillette backlash was a flood of images on social media showing brave, competent men doing heroic things: firefighters carrying women and children safely out of a burning house, a soldier running into gunfire to rescue a small girl, the off-duty British SAS trooper in Nairobi last week who saved dozens of lives after storming the building single-handedly.

How’s that for toxic masculinity.

Grown men can defend themselves, but the real victims of the war on masculinity are little boys being raised in a soup of negative messages telling them their intrinsic nature is diseased. Their rowdiness, adventurousness and biological inability to behave like girls is deemed a pathology.

In primary school they are banned from playing rough and tumble games and then doped up with attention deficit drugs.

Our boys are at risk of growing up thinking their intrinsic nature is diseased. Picture: Gillette

As they get older, their interest in the opposite sex is damned as “rape culture”.

Laying the groundwork for an escalation of hostilities, the American Psychological Association last week issued an extraordinary call to arms, declaring “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful”.

In its “Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men”, the APA claimed “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful”.

It decried masculine attributes of “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence”.

But those traits, even, arguably, violence, are what have allowed western civilisation to progress and survive. Far from stamping out masculinity, we all need more of the manly virtues to rebuild our broken institutions: stoicism, courage, humility, discipline, honour, for starters.

And while we are busy emasculating the next generation of men, don’t think that jihadists in the Middle East or the vast Chinese army are following suit. By neutering men, you disarm your society from the inside.

This is why the Gillette ad hit a raw nerve. People are waking up to the tyrannical trajectory of identity politics, the pet project of the radical left, which divides us into rival victim groups and now seeks power by overthrowing a grotesquely make-believe patriarchy.

Pitting women and men against each other is not a recipe for the survival of our species.

Originally published as War on masculinity disarms us from the inside