Milo: If You Want to Stop Mass Shooting, Try Treating Boys Better

Provocative piece with some truth in it, but I think it's mostly off the mark. I'll explain why after a quote (but I suggest reading the whole thing).

I might be a raging homo, but I still innately understand the male need to conquer, crush and win. Men need to express that dark, powerful part of themselves, or it can abruptly overflow. If it is suppressed, derided and ridiculed, it can show up without warning and with horrible consequences.

That’s why I'm so distressed that heterosexual men are being told, constantly, by the media and even in schools, that what they are is bad. This, I submit, is at least in part what’s driving the recent spate of shootings.

The media trash-talks everything men love: guns, booze, boisterousness, drugs, sex and video games. Economic pressures are relentlessly stripping away male spaces like the traditional pub, where blokes can drink and bond. Social pressures are opening up male-only golf and social clubs to women, destroying what made them precious and essential.

...

Masculinity isn't fragile, as a spiteful, sociopathic feminist Twitter hashtag recently claimed. But -- and here’s where some man-hating feminists almost get it right-- it is powerful, and exciting, and it does have a flip-side if not properly respected. At its best, male competitiveness is the driving force behind most of society's progress. We would be nowhere without the patriarchy, from the internet and space travel to the road under your feet and the roof on your house. The same thing that drives mass shooters inspires courage, too.

It is certainly true that masculinity, and the urge to "crush and conquer" Milo mentions, is a driving force in civilization, for good for ill. If this force is not channelled into useful ends, you get ISIS -- blood, rape, war and fire.

When it's well-channelled, you get guys like Sean Spencer and Chuck Yaegher.

But here's the part where I think Milo goes wrong: Almost all men have this desire to "crush and conquer." It's deep-seeded in men. But the problem is, and the problem has always been, there are some men who are ineffectual -- losers, in the vernacular; Failed Men, men who have failed to really satisfy their sense of what a man is -- and thus are always frustrated in their primeval urges to "crush and conquer."

And radical feminism doesn't really have anything at all to do with that. Someone who wishes to be the ultimate winner, but is more like a sad loser, is going to have some very tender psychological wounds due to that fact.

And there's always this sort of Failed Man in every society. Japan has a lot of Failed Men. In Japan, there has been a response to realizing one was a Failed Man: Suicide.

In America, these Failed Men still long for suicide, but they wish to be famous, and they're lonely for company in their way to the grave.

I agree with a lot of what Milo says about the dysfunctions society creates when it insists that male traits not be directed into useful channels (such as competitiveness or honorable violence, like in the armed forces or the simulation of physical combat, sport). It causes a lot of problems.

In fact, I'd say it's the cause of common criminality among the subgroups likely to join gangs: This is their idea of being a "warrior," and society isn't offering them better alternatives into which they can work out their warrior impulses.

But these mass shootings aren't about that. They're about men who usually understand the "warrior" spirit all too well; however, understanding it is not the same as being any good at it, or being any good at anything at all, which is the problem.

These killers are full of the desire to crush and conquer, but, being losers, headcases, and diagnosable near-morons, have no chance of crushing or conquering anything.

The most they can do is shoot a bunch of unarmed people by ambush. That's really the most they can do. They sure the f*** aren't going to be building any houses or bridges. They don't have the mental equipment for that.

This particular Failed Man tried to fulfill his fantasy of being a man by joining the Army.

Surprise: He was discharged before he finished basic training. Because he was hopeless, and possibly just because he was crazy.

That really doesn't have much to do with "feminization." In fact, in this particular lunatic killer's case, we might actually have wished that the progressives' project to turn men into women would have worked a little better.

I don't know what to do about the Failed Men of society. They're always a problem, whether they're petty criminals (usually of the crueler type) or wife-beaters, child-abandoners, or even child molesters.

They always will be a problem.

posted by Ace at 03:13 PM

| Access Comments