David French Would Like to "Rap" About Masculinity to Smooth, Sexy Young Men

David French, the world's femmiest alleged heterosexual, wants to "rap" with you about what makes a Man Hard, and, PLOT TWIST, conservatives and evangelicals have it all wrong and in fact are "emasculating" themselves.

Weird how every David French column, paid for by the leftwing NYT, just happens to perfectly flatter the vanities and bigotries of the NYT's gonzo leftwing readership, huh?

Must be all that Integrity.

By the way, the column leads with a picture of Josh Hawley, intending to mock him as not quite Manly Enough according to the musky-thewed standards of David French.

There is a certain irony in discussions of masculinity. The group that is most convinced of a crisis of masculinity, the American right, is also busy emasculating itself before our eyes. It correctly perceives that young men are facing an identity crisis, yet it is modeling precisely the wrong response.

The release of the Missouri senator Josh Hawley's new book on manhood is the latest peg for a national conversation about men, but the necessity of such a conversation has been apparent for some time. If there's anything that's well established in American social science, it's that men are falling behind women in higher education, suffer disproportionately from drug overdoses and are far more likely to commit suicide.

Indeed, the very definition of "masculinity" is up for grabs. In 2019, the American Psychological Association published guidelines that took direct aim at what it called "traditional masculinity -- marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression" -- declaring it to be, "on the whole, harmful."

David French is part of the movement to redefine masculinity, of course.

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I should note here that traditionally "masculine" virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us. On my recent visit to Kyiv, I was struck by the restraint and courage of the men and women I met. In the face of the greatest of challenges, they exhibited a degree of calm conviction that's all too foreign to our domestic politics.

If you doubt the need for such stoicism in our own country, I'd point you, ironically enough, to the side of our political divide that is most critical of the A.P.A.'s conclusions: the American right. In its words, the right claims to uphold traditional masculinity; in its deeds, the story is very different.

Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "If--" is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words "If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you." The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage. Do not allow yourself to become too high or too low. ("If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.") Persevere.

It's a compelling vision -- although one that can become an emotional trap, to be sure. Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the patience and perseverance that mark stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun those values. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.

Instead, the new right chooses to shriek about "groomers" on Twitter.

If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media -- especially Twitter these days -- or listening to right-wing news outlets, you'll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.

In 2016, for example, the single most important intellectual work of the new right was an essay by Michael Anton entitled "The Flight 93 Election." It began like this: "2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You -- or the leader of your party -- may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don't try, death is certain."

That's right: The argument was that electing Hillary Clinton, a thoroughly establishment Democrat, would mean the end of America. It's an argument that people never stopped making. In 2020, I debated the Christian author Eric Metaxas about whether Christians should support Donald Trump against Joe Biden. What did he argue? That Joe Biden could "genuinely destroy America forever."

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let's go back to the "groomer" smear. It's a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you're not just wrong; you're a "groomer" or "soft on pedos." Did a senator vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court? Then he's "pro-pedophile." Did you disagree with Florida's H.B. 1557, which restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity? Then "you are probably a groomer."

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness. Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

David French is compelled by Sacred Honor to once again attack the right because his Very Good Fren Jonah Goldberg complained of being insulted on Twitter.

Twitter, even in its pre-Elon Musk state, seemed as if it had been constructed in a lab to contribute to a constant state of hysteria. Every single perceived left-wing outrage or excess is shared far and wide. "How can you be calm?" right-wing activists demand to know. "Didn't you see that the North Face is using drag queens in its ads?"

Last month, my friend Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. "Everywhere I look these days," he wrote, "I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks." As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows "courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted."

I guarantee you he wrote this in response to people demanding he account for his serial errors (errors? Or malign intent?) in getting every story about Russiagate, the laptop, and the FBI and DOJ wrong for six years running now.

I've omitted the bit about Hawley -- it's the standard leftwing smear that he saluted Trump supporters on January 6, and then "ran" when the "unruly" crowd got too close. He omits noting that he was ordered to a safe place, along with every other Senator and staffer in the building.

Because David French lies. He lies constantly, he lies effortlessly, he lies remorselessly.

Not only did this supsected closet case attack Josh Hawley as not quite manly enough, but he had his haggish wife join in in the attack, merely for taking a shot back at French.

When a Twitter user named Sara Gonzales made a joke about Nancy French having a boyfriend -- which is a joke about David French's sexual inadequecy, not Nancy French at all -- he pretended not to know that, and began Damseling up a storm, claiming that Gonzales had viciously attacked his wife as an adulteress.

It's very masculine to constantly lie and smear opponent. And it's very manly to begin shrieking like a damsel in peril whenever someone (in this case, a girl) snaps back at you.

Below, David French's ideal of manhood.

posted by Ace at 05:25 PM

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