Where have all the good men gone?

Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the gods?

Where’s the streetwise Hercules, to fight the rising odds?

Isn’t there a white knight, upon a fiery steed?

When I was younger, this song was my syllabus.   It was who I wanted to be – the good man.  The hero, at whatever sacrifice or cost.  And there was sacrifice in my life.   There was cost.  I lost 7 years to a marriage trying to be the self-sacrificing hero instead of leaving the first time she hit me.  I have scars from stepping in between a knife and a victim. 

I tried to be a good man.  But not anymore.  Somewhere I fell off of that path, and in the last few years I’ve been reflecting on that.  (Amazing what wonders therapy will do for you.)   Somewhere along the decades, I watched the buy-in of “toxic masculinity” by the media and society at large.  That’s where the song (still idolized and beloved by many) became impossible.   The good men are gone – they’ve been burned by a system and a narrative that paints them as the bad guys. 

After nearly two generations of teaching young men that they’re predators, that they’re misogynists, and that their natural urges make them ‘wrong’ – the good men are gone.  Because you can’t have a white knight, if you’re going to teach the squires that holding a sword is a micro-aggression.   And you can’t have Hercules, if you teach him that being openly muscular and daunting is creating an ‘unsafe space’. 

That’s a sad but true statement.   The genre of the good man is fading – what’s left are remnants and wayfarers, tossed on distant shores clinging to faded memories of Cary Grant, Percival and Indiana Jones.  Faded photographs and still frames in the mind, Frank Sinatra songs in black and white, a dingy white trench coat hanging over an old oak coat rack in the corner and a feeling of something that should have been but never was. 

This isn’t a piece about the loss of the current generation of boys and men.   Better scholars than I have already gone there and proven it time and again through research (Christina Hoff Sommers, Helen Smith, Jordan Peterson) and logic.  We’ve failed a generation of boys and spent a lifetime shaking our heads while they grew up into thugs, neo-nazi’s, self-hating effete apologists and rapists.  And make no mistake – we’ve failed them.  Boys don’t magically turn into bad men overnight. 

We’ve stripped punishment out of incarceration after years of psychological research proving that punishment makes things worse…but we still use it while raising boys and expect a better result.  

Did the boy act on his natural urges by playing Doctor?   Punish him.

He peeped in the locker room, because he’s afraid of talking to girls?   Punish him harder.

He committed a micro-aggression by sitting with his legs spread, so his genitals won’t be crushed?   Punish him hardest.

He went to a party, got drunk and picked up a drunk girl, because he’s too afraid to talk to her when they’re both sober and risk her saying no?  Punish him most of all.

Are the young men blameless in this?   Not at all.   They made bad choices that seriously hurt other people. 

But at what point do we ask why they made those choices?  At some point we have to look past the rising tide of campus rape accusations and young men joining extremist movements searching for an identity – and we have to ask why.    Why now?   What did we do, over the last thirty years, that led to a generation of young men with no concept of actual, positive masculinity?  

If you couldn’t hear the sarcasm dripping, let me try again.   Actual.  Positive.  Masculinity.

Not something designed by third and fourth wave feminists as the most inoffensive, culturally sensitive ‘masculinity’ possible.   Not some mani-pedi wearing spastic receiving ‘good boy’ carrots for tripping over himself to point out the flaws in other men.

Actual.   Real.  Genuine.   Naturally evolved.   Positive.  Healthy.  Strong.  Resilient.  Masculinity.

You know – good men.   White knights on a fiery steed.  A man who walks down these dirty streets, trying to stay as clean as he can. 

Instead, these boys (and they are boys – somewhere along the lines they lost the process that should have turned them into men) go searching for an identity in a world that tells them that healthy masculinity is non-existent.   They rebel by joining up with extremist movements, when simple mentoring could have kept them on the path to being a good man.  They fall into gangs and try to earn their manhood by stealing and robbing.  Or they become self-hating effete emasculists who betray their own gender for a “good boy” from society at large.

So, where have all the good men gone?

They’re in prisons.  They’re in “men’s lodges” trying to remember what it was like to pass a rite of manhood.   They’re in therapy as victims of domestic violence who are afraid to speak out to a system that says their gender means violence against them is ‘okay’.  They’re in ghettos treating drugs and crime like a badge of merit.  They’re right in front of you – and they’re too afraid of “micro-aggressions” to risk standing up and being a man.

You don’t let a dog tell a cat how to be a cat.   You don’t let a criminal tell a cop how to wear a badge.

So why are we letting a media with an anti-masculinity agenda tell men how to be men?