A Real Man or a Fake

Another day, another study demeaning men. Masculinity, we learn from serious researchers, is a fragile thing. It is easily threatened. A mere hint at the notion of a female breadwinner makes men rush out to vote for Donald Trump.

You see, being the breadwinner has been what The Harvard Business Review’s Dan Cassino and researchers call the “linchpin” of American manliness.

And where, pray tell, has that not been the case?

In the vast majority of cultures throughout most of human history, being the breadwinner has been the basis of masculinity. And, lest we forget, going to war to protect and defend women and children has also been a linchpin of masculinity throughout human history.

Nowadays, of course, strong and powerful women no longer need anything like male protection. They can protect themselves. Or so they say while they are militating for extra added government protection, especially the kind that deprives anyone they accuse of due process rights.

Being stupid and ignoring the evidence seems to be a salient characteristic of our feminist gender-bending age. Why bother with facts when you can wallow in ideology?

When you caricature men as delicate flowers you are engaged in male bashing. You are demeaning and degrading their pretense to being strong? Do you really want to fight that one out? And do you not understand that insulting people causes they to feel a need to defend themselves, at times, with less than genteel methods?

After all, a minimal knowledge of human nature, the kind that we often call scientific, will tell you that men are constitutionally stronger than women. There ought to be no question about it. Yet, when you ignore that fact and treat men as weaker, in the interest of allowing women to pretend that they are stronger, you are likely to provoke a reaction.

Of course, if you fight back, if you defend yourself, you are an abusive pig, worthy of being locked up forever.

So, whatever feminism has done for women’s rights, it has done so by launching a full frontal assault on men. It’s not about equality as much as it’s about diminishing men in order to exalt women.

Let’s see. Researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University ran a survey. They wanted to test people’s preferred presidential candidates. While doing the survey they asked men a question about breadwinner roles.  They were not concerned with finding out who wore the pants in which family, but they wanted to know whether consciousness about role reversals would influence a man’s choice of a presidential candidate.

They found that it did, markedly. Men who were made aware of a role reversal early in the questioning tended to prefer Donald Trump. Men who were made aware of a role reversal late in the questioning, after they had been asked who they preferred as a presidential candidate, were more likely to prefer Hillary Clinton.

The mere hint or suggestion of a role reversal caused men to prefer the more manly over the less manly presidential candidate.

It isn’t about ideology, because the men surveyed did not show a different preference when asked about Bernie Sanders.

The Harvard Business Review reports:

Merely asking the question about spousal income led to enormous shifts in men’s preferences in the upcoming presidential election. Men who weren’t asked about spousal income until late in the survey preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in a hypothetical general election matchup by a 16-point margin; men who were asked about spousal income only a few questions before being asked about the Clinton-Trump matchup preferred Trump by an eight-point margin — a 24-point shift in preferences. The conclusion that this is about gender is reinforced by the fact that the spousal income question had no effect at all on a matchup between Trump and Bernie Sanders. Men who had been primed to think about a threat to their masculinity preferred Sanders by four points; unprimed men, by three.

As I suggested, the researchers have skewed their interpretation to denigrate men. They assume that the match-up between Trump and Clinton is a match-up between Anyman and Anywoman. They might have noted that it is a match between a manly man and an ersatz man. And that they prefer the real thing to the fake.

Of course, it is fair to say that Trump does come across as a caricature of a man. But, next to Hillary and Barack, he looks like he’s all man.

And it might just as well be the case that the men surveyed are especially sensitive to threats to their masculinity because today’s culture has been organized to attack their sense of manliness. Beginning in school they are being told that women are better and that men are weak, ineffectual losers.

Naturally, people who have received such indoctrination saw Barack Obama as a manly man and are currently happy to accept Hillary Clinton as a manly man.

Of course, the researchers fail to notice that what they call gender stereotypes have a great deal to do with biological adaptation. Hasn’t Darwin taught us that many human behaviors are innate and that they evolved the way they did because the people who practiced them were more likely to survive and to thrive? Does it take an advanced knowledge of Darwinian theory to ascertain that women who are more aggressive and who lean in more, who get in men’s faces were, are over time, less likely to survive and to reproduce?

Some will say that the human species can evolve over time. True enough. But, as Chomsky said, such a transformative evolution takes around 50,000 years. Let's talk about it then.

A culture that is attempting to equalize the number of men and women in executive positions, to demasculinize the roles of warrior and leader is probably doomed to defeat.

Perhaps men know that this is a bad idea, but are no longer allowed to say so.

Worse yet, men and even many women do not believe that women leaders have earned their way to the top. They believe that women in charge have either inherited their position, rode in on their husbands’ coattails or were promoted in order to fulfill diversity requirements. Obviously, Hillary Clinton is a case in point. The absurd palaver about how qualified Hillary is merely masks the fact that, for all of her government jobs, she has no real achievements to her name.

This leads men and women to disrespect women leaders. And it leads men, in particular, to harass such leaders.

The Harvard Business Review reports:

A study published in the American Sociological Review in 2012 looked at the factors that led to reports of sexual harassment in the workplace, and found that women in supervisory roles were 130% more likely to have been the victims of sexual harassment than those in nonsupervisory roles, with the harassment often taking the form of leering or sexual comments. Just as men can symbolically reinforce their masculinity by doing less housework or supporting Donald Trump, they can respond to the threat posed by a female manager by engaging in sexual harassment, making antigay jokes, or mistreating other women in the workplace.

Of course, these studies are always designed to show that men are bigots. Since the researchers seem to know nothing about human biology and its influence on human behavior they end up peddling their own ideological bias about male and female gender roles. Does anyone really think that the nation will be a better place if men stay home and bring up children while women are put in command of armies? Do you think that the formula will lead to victory on the battlefield? Or that children will be better off without mothers?

Perhaps the people who insisted that women be promoted beyond their qualifications are setting them up for abuse.