Unpacking the Term "Crisis of Masculinity"

It is in the character of today's gender politics that those given platforms by the mainstream media from which to speak of such matters refer to the feminist ideas associated with "woke gender politics" as if they were indisputable material facts that only the most stubborn denier of reality would find at all disputable--even as those ideas are so ill-described that even academic specialists are not terribly clear on what they mean, frequently rest on a host of highly contestable and oft contested premises, and frequently fall apart quickly under any sort of rigorous examination. Thus does it go with the way in which certain proponents of these politics throw around the term "objectification" and its derivatives--a little digging into the matter readily exposing it to the charge of being an abuse of philosophical terminology for questionable political ends (at its worst, making of male heterosexuality a thought-crime).

So does it go with the ubiquitous "crisis of masculinity," a term that must sound strange to many ears. After all, the term "masculinity" is definable as what is characteristic of males and therefore by definition existent as long as males are around. How could that be "in crisis?" Certainly it seems strange if we think in terms of maleness as a matter of biological sex. However, those insistent that there is such a crisis in that "indisputable material fact" way think not in terms of biological sex but socially constructed gender instead--of masculinity as a role that one learns, and performs. They also hold that recent changes in social life, particularly the advances women have made in widening and deepening their participation in the labor force and gaining societal acceptance of their exercise of many personal freedoms, have deprived men of their traditional "script," leaving men directionless and increasingly dysfunctional, claims they substantiate by pointing to men's poorer educational outcomes in comparison with women in recent years, and the numbers of men "dropping out of society" by failing to land steady jobs, move out of their parents' homes, marry and form households and families of their own--"becoming hikikomori"--and we are told,

The insistence on gender and not sex, on men having had a script and being unable to get by without it but having lost it, are not claims everyone would agree on, while even the sympathetic will note the inconsistency of this thinking. Theorists of the matter are strident about male heterosexuality being constructed, learned, performative, but rather less insistent on this in regard to any and every other gender identity they recognize--all as one doubts they would be very amenable to being told that women "need" to follow a societally-established and approved script for their own lives, with, indeed, the rejection of such a script for woman at the heart of feminism. Thus does it also go with the premise that male troubles are a "crisis" for that gender specifically, and that this crisis is specifically rooted in gender relations. After all, men are hardly the only ones having a tough time these days--women having their own problems, among them many of the same problems, likely in even worse degree in cases. (That more women graduate college than do men probably means that women even more than men are suffering from the crushing student debt loads and the underemployment of the college graduate so widespread today.) Meanwhile one may plausibly see the troubles of both men and women as a matter of changes that have nothing to do with gender per se, such as the neoliberal turn of economic life with its associated financialization, deindustrialization, socioeoconomic inequality, that are making the life course cultural authority insists upon as the middle class norm in a society where middle classness is supposed to be the norm less and less practicable for the young, of whatever gender, as the gap between the cost of living and people's actual, real, inflation-adjusted incomes just gets wider and wider, and any hope of comfort or security plummets.

It is as telling as it is appalling that the discourse should ignore that--those leading it speaking as they do of gender precisely so they can avoid speaking of class, and a crisis of masculinity so they can avoid speaking of a bigger crisis of contemporary society, identity-status politics-minded "bourgeois" feminism here being very, very bourgeois indeed, all as its bourgeois conservatism seems evident in the fact that contemporary gender theory is hardly the beginning of this discussion. After all, a half century ago George Gilder, before becoming the most notorious of shills for the prevailing claptrap about the entrepreneur as God on Earth and Silicon Valley as the embodiment of their entrepreneurship via his appallingly sacrilegious propaganda, was writing book after book about said crisis--and one might add, in those books Gilder as strident as any gender theorist about the "instability of male identity." The difference was that Gilder thought the solution to the crisis was turning back the clock on "women's liberation" and the social safety net in favor of an insistence on traditional family structures--on women following the old script so that men could follow theirs. Still, in spite of the feminist's stance that turning back the clock is out of the question it can often seem that proponents of this theory are hostile to the idea of men going too far in rejecting the old one. Thus while feminists staunchly support the right of women to choose whether to marry or not, have children or not, and regard those who look at the situation and choose not to do these things as having made not just a valid choice but a valorous one, they see something very wrong and worrisome in men claiming the same right, in men looking at marriage and deeming it unattractive and accordingly "going their own way"--such that they hasten to identify any male inclining this way with the alt-right reaction about which they are in a state of moral panic (while finding said alt-right influence a convenient explanation for political developments they find untoward, plausibly or not). Amid the muddle one can argue that the best they can offer is that men should still expect to follow the old life path, but without expecting in return for its sacrifices (which would appear to be rising) any of the traditional compensations that went with being able to say like Ulysses Everett McGill, "I'm the pater familias!" all as they hold that those frustrated in this path should not just direct the blame solely at themselves, but submit to the disapprobation of the community in a display of what a certain social scientist of an earlier generation would have characterized as "convenient social virtue."