Feminised Men
On dereliction and failure.
Gents, I said it would be your turn next, so this is keeping my promise.
The world has gone to hell in a handbasket. That handbasket is made up of both sexes.
This is the follow up to the stack that revolved around Chapter 1 of McDonald’s book, The United States of Fear.
The masculine and feminine are better understood as spirits born out of the collective, inter-connected bodies of each physical sex. So, the feminine spirit is born out of the network of all women and accordingly for men and their masculine spirit.
I love sports stadiums as a thought experiment tool.
Imagine two separate football stadiums with a capacity of 100,000 each. Now imagine one has 100,000 women in it and the other has 100,000 men it. Now imagine that you are standing, by yourself, in the middle of the field, with your eyes closed. Does each stadium “feel” different? If your answer is “yes” then you are in touch with the “spirit” and if your answer is “no”, you are not paying attention.
A simple thought experiment can prove this true. Imagine a planet without humans, not that hard, pick any, let’s say Neptune. Where is the masculine and feminine spirit there?
Now, that being said, each “spirit” is found in the body and being of the other sex. The question is one of degree and/or balance. Hence a feminised male.
This spirit then connects higher up with a symbolic, mythological relationship to Chaos (the feminine) and Order (the masculine). Here are two short but decent explanations by JP:
We each are both.
We are the building blocks of society, so society is both. It’s a question of balance.
But on one end the women lost their balance (and got terrorised) tipping society in a bad direction, and on the other end men abdicated their “balancing” and “calming” duty, and in that dereliction and failure tipped society in the same bad direction.
And so, we lost our balance collectively with both sexes and spirits to blame.
McDonald recently wrote a new book, please support his work: Freedom from Fear: A 12 Step Guide to Personal and National Recovery
With thanks to Dr. Mark McDonald.
Chapter Two (United States of Fear)
Dereliction of Duty: How Feminized American Men Failed Their Women
In late 2020, a woman was overhead commenting on how she felt leaving her house every morning and seeing men, both alone and with their wives, walking on the street with masks covering their faces: “This does not make me feel safe. On the contrary, it scares me. If I were married to one of these men, what would he do the moment a real threat appears? He would throw me under the bus and run for the hills. I’d be left to fend for myself.”
Her view is not an isolated one. Hundreds of women across the United States have reported the same experience to me directly.
For over a year, I have been traveling the country and speaking before audiences of Americans hungry for truth. They are bewildered and confused, and many feel they have been let down by those in positions of authority and influence—including the medical profession, the national media, and our political leaders. But many women express a more personal concern, one that is focused on their partners and that mingles feelings of impatience, disappointment, and outright contempt.
Whenever I talk about the emasculation of American men, I see heads start to nod. Without fail, at the end of every talk, a number of women come up to thank me for calling out one of their greatest concerns. These women struggle to put into words what they have been feeling very strongly for many years—a loss of masculinity in the American man.
“Where have all the men gone?” one young single woman asked me. Another pointed out that her son refuses to move out of the house—at age twenty-four—because he fears embarking on an independent life. A married woman opposed to her children wearing masks complained that her husband told her to “shut up about the masks at school” because he doesn’t want “the family to get in trouble.”
In this stack I said it another way:
If this is a war, and it is, we need to develop the disagreeable part of our nature. It doesn’t mean we need to set out to argue with everybody, but it means we need to practice and develop being comfortable sitting with the psychological tension of “possibly” having an argument.
That’s what it means to develop the disagreeable part of our personality. Many people lean towards being naturally agreeable and conflict avoiding, that’s fair enough, but the world has changed and, as I have written before, the border and the territory between you and the State is being reset, and if you are to have any chance of defending some of that personal territory, you need to start training the disagreeable part of you to be comfortable with “the possibility” of some confrontation.
Men especially need to be “comfortable sitting with the psychological tension of “possibly” having an argument.” If they are not, they are not much use to women in a crisis.
In short, these women recognize that American men have been rendered all but useless to them in a crisis.
Australian men, he’s also talking about you!
Women know this instinctively because they rely on men for physical security. This instinct transcends politics and culture—it is biological. Conservative women tend to know and understand this intellectually and are more or less at peace with it. But liberal women often suffer cognitive dissonance between their feminist philosophy that tells them they do not need men to be happy and their timeless biological necessities.
I see this split when I speak at churches, primarily Christian evangelical churches. All the women congregants are religious conservatives. When they speak to me after my talk, they indicate how my words and ideas closely align with their religious views. On the other hand, liberal women in my clinical practice often struggle to accept that much of their emotional pain comes from pursuing a feminist approach to male-female relationships, one where it is the woman who should express strength, while the man is largely superfluous outside his role of remaining agreeable and emotionally supportive. Political orientation thus plays a critical role in how women develop their expectations of men.
Regardless of where a woman falls on the political spectrum, however, her emotional stability suffers when she feels unsafe. For this reason, today’s feminized American men do not typically play their traditional role, which is to ground and contain women’s anxiety in a crisis. Instead, they amplify it.
According to women themselves, it is the expression of masculinity that provides comfort to women. A woman I know who recently began a new relationship learned that the man knows how to use a gun and keeps one at home. “I hate guns,” she told me, “but when he told me that, it made me feel safe.” He had demonstrated to her that he possesses the skills and the tools to protect her. This quality is becoming increasingly rare.
When I work with male patients, I often discover that they have no idea how to express anger. This is because they tend to confuse healthy aggression with rage and destruction. They go through life—and their relationships with women—suppressing these healthy and normal feelings, choosing to remain silent when conflicts arise, inhibited from taking appropriate and necessary action during a crisis. Only when I explain to them that setting boundaries with others and defending them assertively and forcefully is essential for their own health and the health of their relationships do they realize why they continue to fall short in those relationships.
One patient I’ve been working with for years had been stuck in a never-ending series of arguments with his long-time girlfriend. When he moved into a new house by himself, his girlfriend felt scared about being left out. So she insisted on making all the decisions about how the house would be furnished and decorated. Initially, he allowed her to take over, but I could clearly see this was not only upsetting him but also adding to the tension and discord in their relationship, bordering on resentment on his part.
On my suggestion, he stood up to her and firmly said, “No. I understand my moving into a new house makes you uncomfortable and may even scare you, but I will be deciding how to furnish my home. If I need your help, I’ll ask for it.” She backed down, let him take the lead, and returned to a more supportive role of offering suggestions only when asked for them.
The expression of anxiety is, for women, often a plea for help, a request for the man in her life to step up and take action. When a man remains inert and defers decision-making to the woman, her anxiety worsens, often converting to hysteria and unwanted efforts at control. In other words, much of the time, so-called “controlling” women are simply reacting to a vacuum of male assertiveness in anxious or fearful situations.
I’ve seen this dynamic in business over the years also. The CEO is typically male, and the head of compliance or human resources is typically a woman. The heads of departments instead of “advising” the CEO so that he can make risk weighted decisions, they give “instruction” or an actual “decision”.
They are often asked to “make the decision” because the CEO is too cowardly to “take on the risk of that decision”.
Either way, the tail ends up wagging the dog, either because the tail expects to wag the dog, or because the dog wants a tail to blame. Whichever way you come at it, it’s a failure of risk taking and decision making. It’s a failure of men and women and the two spirits.
A part of the modern CEOs tendency is to “keep the peace”.
Two generations ago, a woman would still turn to her husband and other men to fight threats, protect her and her children, and offer reassurance and security. She could then focus on her own physical and emotional well-being and that of her dependents. Not anymore. Her inability to do this today is largely the fault of men themselves and their acceptance of emasculation.
The stigmatizing and decline of traditional masculinity has had disastrous consequences for both men and women and their relationships with one another. Perhaps the most recent damaging effect has been a vacuum of male courage in American society. In 2017, over 7 million American men aged twenty-five through fifty-four were living in their parents’ basement, not working and not looking for work. They had retreated from the world to avoid facing the threat of failure and rejection.
To protect themselves from the unavoidable, they have paid a psychological price—weakness. Their numbers continue to rise. In fact, the presence of homebound and unproductive children is one of the most common complaints I receive from parents. “My child graduated from college two years ago, doesn’t work, still lives at home, and won’t leave.”
Adult dependency is not limited to single men, either. Married men suffer from a similar passivity and self-victimization in their relationships with their wives. Despite holding clear views on finance, health, and childrearing, many husbands and fathers in my practice often admit that they do not confront their wives when there is a difference of opinion. When I ask why, the typical response is, “It’s not worth it,” or “I’d rather just let it go and move on.”
As a result, they often feel ineffectual. Their sexual virility suffers. They become resentful. By failing to display courage in their marriage, they have defined themselves as men who will not fight for what they believe in and matters to them. This lack of courage expands into all other aspects of their lives: childrearing, work, and even self-care. A man who lacks courage lacks self-respect, and a man who does not respect himself cannot effectively engage with women.
The vacuum of male courage in our society has been growing for many years, but it recently made possible the societal hysteria that led to a mass delusional psychosis disproportionately affecting women.
By all measures, American men have been feminized. This is not a metaphor. Testosterone levels in men have been dropping for decades since at least 1987. Even after accounting for age, smoking, and obesity, the decline persists. The average drop has been about 1 percent per year, meaning that a sixty-year-old man in 2004 had testosterone levels 17 percent lower than of a sixty-year-old man in 1987. The actual causes are still unknown, but many believe that greater exposure to environmental toxins, such as pesticides and chemicals common in household products, are to blame.
How about toxins injected? Vaccines and the dose explosion since 1986…?
Watch: 1986 Act
This trend has very likely been exacerbated by economic shifts. With a decrease in demand for manual labor, more men have been pursuing careers in desk jobs that require no physical strength or movement. Here’s an intriguing statistic: In 2016, researchers found a significant drop in grip strength in male millennials age twenty to thirty-four, from an average of 117 pounds of grip force in 1985 to only 98 pounds in 2016. Surprisingly, grip-strength loss was also detected in women. Loss of muscle mass is associated with lower testosterone levels. Is it at all surprising that between 2000 and 2013 the use of supplemental testosterone in men has skyrocketed?
Moreover, during this time, women have increased their representation in higher education and professions previously dominated by men, such as law, medicine, and business. With a greater supply of workers, wages have been driven down as men now face increased competition from women entering the workforce. This undermines the confidence and self-esteem of men and confuses them as to their proper role in women’s lives.
Societal views of masculinity have substantially changed as well. Two Pew Research Center polls taken in 2017 and 2019 reveal several important ones. Only 31 percent of men viewed themselves as “very masculine,” with white men in the lowest subgroup at only 28 percent. The more educated the man—a four-year college degree or higher level of education—the less masculine he felt.
Also, views on masculinity appear to track with political orientation. While 49 percent of Republican men view themselves as very masculine, only 23 percent of Democrat men do. And while 78 percent of Republican men view masculinity as a good thing, only 49 percent of Democrats do. Perhaps not surprisingly, the poll also found that younger women do not view themselves as especially feminine—only 19 percent of millennials compared to 36 percent of boomers. White educated Democrat men do not see themselves as masculine or value masculinity in society, while young women as a whole do not see themselves as feminine.
Meanwhile, married women who work full-time understandably expect their husbands to shoulder a greater share of domestic work, including child-rearing responsibilities that previously fell under the exclusive domain of mothers. This has given rise to a huge amount of social commentary and a raft of therapeutic books that attempt to address the problem, from Joshua Coleman’s The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework to Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution to When You Have Too Much to Do.
However, some female authors have continued to champion the “all-in” model of career and mothering, such as Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which exalt the working woman’s capacity to simultaneously succeed at the highest level professionally and maintain a full-time, hands-on role as both mother and micromanager of the lives of her children.
The result of these cultural changes has been catastrophic for the mental health of both men and women. Although part-time work has long been found to have a beneficial effect on the psychological well-being of married women, a 2018 US Census report shows that two-thirds of working mothers have been working fulltime. This appears to have led to increased stress and greater marital conflict. Men married to women who earn more than they do report feeling less fulfilled. In 2017, Harvard Business Review published research revealing that wives who held higher status positions than their husbands were more likely to feel resentful or embarrassed, leading to less marital satisfaction and increasing the likelihood of divorce.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics published similar findings in 2015, noting, “In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce.” Furthermore, as the American Sociological Review reported in 2012, when a married man’s share of traditionally female domestic chores increases, couples have less frequent sex. The unfortunate consequence has been a disproportionate number of divorce filings by women: Between 2009 and 2015, women initiated 69 percent of all divorces. Among college-educated women, that number rises to a staggering 90 percent.
Clearly, most women are not happy with the contemporary redefining of traditional gender roles in male-female relationships. Many are afraid to speak up—intimidated into silence by their fear of being seen as unsupportive of feminist doctrine.
This doctrine began in the 1960s, as Gloria Steinem’s popularization of the phrase, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” announced to the world feminism’s assertion of the irrelevance of men. Unlike the suffragettes of the early 20th century who fought for equal voting rights, post-WWII feminism, with its successive waves, each more radical than the last, quickly came to reject equality under the law and instead sought to rewrite the entire social contract.
For the past twenty years, feminists have increasingly taught young women the virtues of competing with men rather than partnering with them. Instead of encouraging women to marry and supporting their natural inclination to raise children, feminists have derided marriage, lauded singledom and single motherhood, and fought for abortion on demand. Where has this taken us?
The rise of feminism empowered women professionally but at the same time changed relations between the sexes in ways that were self-defeating for women and left them more vulnerable than before, with the loss of male protection and respect for female modesty. Many women in the dating market complain that men treat them as sexual objects and send them pornographic pictures in lieu of engaging in traditional courtship. Apparently, proclaiming the sexual empowerment of women has given rise to a culture of diminished expectations where romance is concerned. As women now belatedly discover, this has given men the mistaken impression that women do not need or want to be treated differently.
One especially unfortunate byproduct of contemporary feminism is the false teaching of toxic masculinity. This term has come to mean, essentially, that men—particularly straight white men—are unhealthy, sick, and dangerous to women, children, homosexuals, minorities, immigrants, and anyone else who doesn’t conform to their narrow and reactionary norms and expectations. Democrats neatly co-opted this prejudice when they argued that “angry white men” were the driving force behind the elections of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
What we now know as toxic masculinity has its cultural roots in the 1960s and ’70s with the promotion of questionable rape and domestic abuse statistics intended to justify legislation that would increase female protection from violent fathers or husbands—a laudable goal, but one that led to an overgeneralized fear of men and a fixation on what is now called “rape culture.” Since then, the presumption has spread that men and boys are inherently violent and need to be completely resocialized.
Healthy expressions of masculinity—strength, assertiveness, the inclination to protect—have all been redefined as universally unhealthy, often dangerous, and certainly unwanted, as the 2019 Pew Research Center poll showed. Any woman in the presence of a man who displays these qualities is expected to resist by challenging his authority and virtue. If he refuses to concede that he has wronged her, then she is encouraged to redefine herself as a victim and announce that he has made her feel unsafe. In response, several generations of American men have undertaken to expunge these formerly admired male characteristics and become fathers, sons, and husbands in a new and much more passive egalitarian mode.
Surprisingly, this misguided movement continues to grow despite attempts by many men to feminize themselves as a way of purging their toxicity. The social conditioning of women to fear masculine men runs counter to evolutionary biology yet flows quite smoothly from modern feminist theory that denigrates men and views them as obstacles to the success, accomplishments, and safety of women.
Rape culture has also been invented by feminists as a rationale for female fear of men. The term is intentionally vague and includes everything from sexually explicit jokes to unwanted kissing to forcible rape. Media frequently report that one in four college students has been sexually assaulted—an alarming statistic. If it were true, it would be hard to imagine any parent allowing their daughter to attend college. Yet it is simply another lie invented to malign and intimidate men and frighten young women.
In reality, rates of sexual assault of all types in the United States have been in decline for years, with college campuses thought to be, in general, safer for women than most other places. One would never know that, though, given the alarming propaganda put out by college administrators advertising “sexual violence” workshops that only serve to remind new female arrivals of the danger lurking in their male counterparts. I frequently hear from my female college student patients how these teach-in sessions have become a common and accepted component of new student orientation.
As part of my new patient interview, I ask about their history of sexual abuse or assault. Many women say they have been sexually abused or assaulted. When I ask for more detail, however, I often hear them describe awkward encounters with men who made clumsy passes or sex acts with men while one or both were intoxicated with alcohol or drugs, leading to regret and embarrassment the following day. These women have been primed to castigate the man involved or displace their own shared responsibility onto him.
This way of thinking, which completely contradicts the feminist teaching of female sexual agency, has turned women into professional victims and men into de facto aggressors. The natural consequence is for women to become fearful of men in general and, specifically, men who express any romantic or sexual interest in them.
Is it simplistic to reduce all this to the effects of feminism? Perhaps. But it is a fair conclusion to state that, essentially, feminist indoctrination has wrecked the bond between men and women, consigning men to a state of perpetual confusion and impotence. As feminism exults in its triumph over men, both sexes lose. Authors Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly describe in The Flipside of Feminism exactly how women have become less happy as they have gained more freedom, more education, and more power. In this view, feminism at its core is actually an anti-female movement founded on grievance ideology that fuels resentment against men while simultaneously exhorting women to discard their femininity in place of more masculine traits such as aggression, competitiveness, and dominance.
Our own Australian, the wonderful Bettina Arndt talks and writes extensively about this:
It is also a fact that more divorces are initiated these days by restless women seeking greater personal fulfillment. It’s a female version of the classic midlife crisis. Instead of working out their problems with the men in their lives, they throw themselves into the dating market in their fifties where they are bitterly disappointed to find that men their age want younger women—and can get them—whereas they must date men older than themselves.
Men who choose to participate in this unnatural and unhealthy crusade find themselves sidelined, with no relevant role to play in their relationships with women. Women emboldened with ersatz courage are then abandoned by the men in their lives to engage in life’s battles alone and unsupported. The surrender of real courage by men inevitably produces fearful women, and fearful women channel their fear into controlling others.
I encountered a consequence of this dysfunctional dynamic on a local level in early 2020, when the homeowner’s association (HOA) in my neighborhood in Los Angeles closed the nearby park after receiving a report that several small children were seen rolling on the grass. To make the park “safe,” the entire ground was sprayed with a disinfectant. The disinfecting of the grass was simply a pretext to close the park, however, because once the spraying had ended, the park remained closed for nearly an entire year.
When it finally re-opened, new regulations appeared on signs posted at the entrance ordering all park visitors to wear masks and banning children from playing with one another. Mothers of the children—overwhelmingly upper-middle-class liberal women—dutifully complied. Many voluntarily policed unaccompanied children who violated the new rules and threatened to report them. These women also delighted in scolding the nannies, lesser-educated black or Hispanic women who generally ignored the signs and encouraged the children under their supervision to continue to play freely.
The HOA then sent out a series of email announcements shaming residents for violating the rules, warning that the park might need to be closed once again if the violations continued. Security patrols hired by the HOA began harassing visitors and evicting them from the park when they refused to wear masks or stand six feet apart from one another while playing.
As far as I know, no men stepped forward to point out the lunacy of the park closure, the masking and distancing rules, and the coercive tactics encouraged by the HOA. The movement to control was driven exclusively by women, many of them mothers, who defended their fear-driven behavior by repeatedly announcing that they were only trying to protect the safety and wellbeing of the children.
I think it is safe to say that if their husbands had stepped forward to offer a rational, reassuring voice that there was no need to worry, most of the women in the neighborhood would have been able to re-direct their protective instinct toward more traditional, and helpful, mothering. Yet the men remained silent, leaving a void that was quickly filled with female hysteria and rage.
With the near disappearance of courageous men, women’s fear and anxiety was amplified by both local and national media, whose concerns no longer lay with reporting news but rather with pushing partisan agendas and capturing as many viewers as possible. In the next chapter, we will consider the role of media and government in amplifying and magnifying the climate of fear to the point where it became a pandemic and, ultimately, a national psychosis.
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As a fan of United States of Fear, having just read it for the second time, I enjoyed this pair of articles and the notes on McDonald's text.
In fact, I live in McDonald's own neighborhood (West LA) and I can verify that his description of fearful wives and their husbands who abdicate masculine responsibility is right on the money.
McDonald makes a tangential remark that testosterone has steeply declined over the past few generations of men, but I would go so far as to say that is the primary cause of the decline in masculine behavior.
To be a masculine husband and father, it is not sufficient to read the right books and think the right thoughts. One must actually be biologically masculine. Male sex hormones drive behavior in a way that simple cognition does not.
To be biologically masculine, a man must avoid toxins, eat species-appropriate food, get plenty of sunlight and fresh air, lift heavy weights, perform physical labor, and regularly take physical and social risks.
All of these prerequisites are in very short supply among men in Los Angeles, and as I have noticed for years, it is the women who suffer most. The emasculated men are content with what we might call "simple pleasures."
I have tried to live a different example for my wife and daughter, especially after reading McDonald's book on its release, and it seems I have largely succeeded, as my wife turned decisively against Covid fearmongering after an initial period of indecision. Neither she nor my five-year-old daughter wear masks, which is unusual in their demographic. My daughter has not received any vaccines at all -- and she is now the healthiest and most intelligent child I know. My wife is now firmly in the Covid-skeptic camp, but I'm sure things would have turned out more darkly, had I been one of those men who masked up fearfully, embraced the experimental gene therapy, and hesitated to challenge his wife's less rational fears.
I am convinced my positive influence was not because I was particularly intelligent, well-read or persuasive, but simply and reassuringly masculine. Consider all this my anecdote in support of McDonald's thesis.
BTW, it would have been nice to post some of these thoughts on McDonald's Substack, but as you may know, he restricts comment to paying subscribers. So, thanks to Dr. Hughes for allowing public comment on her notes to this important book.
Fantastic read! Thank you