When a group of ordinary citizens in Sydney put aside all thoughts of personal safety and rushed to subdue a bloodstained jihadist nutcase running amok with a knife, there wasn’t a single Antifa, blue-haired feminist or gender-fluid pronoun queen among them. They were just ordinary men, doing what men do best.
This isn’t to say that women shouldn’t have or can’t do what those men did, but the undeniable fact is there: when it comes to the sort of stuff that stops terrorists and wins wars, let alone builds cities and industries, or even just collects the garbage, men are by far in the majority. Women most certainly can and do contribute to all of those, but almost always, the brute, grunt-work is overwhelming masculine.
The men who stopped further bloodshed have been called heroes, and they will be recognised for their courage. In passing, can we praise masculinity too? Or is that too controversial in an age when masculinity is raised only to condemn what is wrong with men and to preach how to change them.
What was most telling about the four who took down Ney was not just their ordinariness, but their matter-of-factness. In the movie Sully, hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger is nonplussed and embarrassed by adulation. He was just a man doing his job.
Lawyer John Bamford picked up a wicker chair from the cafe he was in, raced outside and chased the attacker, 21-year-old Mert Ney, who was bloodied, jumping on a car bonnet while wielding his knife and screaming at passers-by. Ney was jammed to the ground by men using a milk crate and two chairs. Bamford returned the chair to the cafe and ordered a pie.
Traffic controller Steven Georgiadis tried to tackle Ney to the ground. “As soon as I saw the knife I moved to the side so I could crash tackle him sideways so he wouldn’t stab me,” said Georgiadis, who managed to stand on the bloody knife.
From their office window, brothers Luke and Paul O’Shaughnessy saw the mayhem unfolding in the street below and raced down to help. They followed a trail of blood to the man who is alleged to have murdered one woman and stabbed another. “(We) were like ‘Right, where is he? Where is he?’ […] I’m shouting, because I’m a bit more risk-averse than Luke, (who is) straight in there.”
The heroes were all men exhibiting traits now routinely derided as part of traditional masculinity — brute force and aggression, taking charge, adrenalin pumping, taking risks.
[Emphasis added.]
This is all the stuff that modern “progressive” culture routinely vilifies as “toxic”. Not only do “liberals” deny the biological existence of gender but the very innate characteristics of maleness are determinedly attacked, in a way that other innate characteristics like skin colour or sexual preference would never be.
Do we fear praising masculinity in case it leads to a scolding for encouraging toxic masculinity?
It’s not an unreasonable fear because the conflation of masculinity with toxic masculinity, to use the phrase favoured by the roving gender police, has become routine. This common sleight of hand to use gender to confect some crudely defined phenomenon stokes pointless gender wars and risks harming both men and women […]The conflation of traditional masculinity with the poorly defined “toxic masculinity” won’t stop bad behaviour.
theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/let-us-now-praise-masculine-men
If anything, as a generation of young men are left sidelined, frustrated and confused, it will only encourage bad behaviour. It’s no coincidence that “male feminist” has become a byword for creepers, predators and violent abusers, even murderers. Even Guardianista feminists are starting to notice: For every male feminist horror story I have lived, I’ve been told a dozen more by equally-frustrated female friends.
There’s a reason women’s literature is studded (pun intended) with traditionally masculine romantic heroes, from billionaires and cowboys to truckers and bikies. For all feminism’s emasculating zealotry, women know what they want, and it’s not cowed, low-testosterone soy-boys who write for Buzzfeed.