The end of manliness

I don’t normally comment on articles written elsewhere, but there’s an article on Cracked I read over the weekend that actually depressed me. It’s called 5 Manly Things That Are Going Away Forever, and it discusses how cultural changes are eliminating some of the things that are traditionally considered bastions of “manliness.”

What depressed me wasn’t that these things are going away, but rather author’s gleeful, nearly hopeful tone that they will go away. All these evil, un-PC things like loud cars, red meat, and eewwwww icky war heroes. It’s about there that you realize that the author really wants these things to go away, and though he tries to hide it behind a veil of jokes, you can really tell that he views all of these things as “bad.”

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Now, we can discuss at length whether or not the author is right or not that those things are going away. I don’t necessarily think he is, but that’s not really what we’re talking about with this article, or how this connects to the gun culture. Because it does, and it’s part of the changing social landscape. The reason that car culture is changing is the increased urbanization of America. That change has had ripples in the gun culture as well, as fewer and fewer new shooters are introduced to firearms via the “traditional” means. It used to be that fathers and grandfathers would take their children hunting, and that would be their introduction to the gun culture. While that still happens, it happens less.

But that doesn’t mean that gun culture is going away. It means that it’s changing. Kids are getting introduced to guns by video games and media, and if we don’t acknowledge that fact and engage with them on their terms that’s when the gun culture really will start to go away. Now, if we want to talk about how modern society has dis-incentivized traditional male behaviors in an attempt to produce a generation of sniveling beta-males, we can do that, just not here.

The point here is that we in the gun culture can and should take cues from articles like the one on Cracked. Not that our culture is going away, but how to keep the gun culture strong and vibrant for ages to come. And if we do that, we’ll also be saving the human race, because gun ownership promotes a whole lot of other un-PC things like self-reliance and personal responsibility.

13 Comments

  1. That guy is a little focused on phallic symbols, it seems. I’m glad I don’t live in HIS world. It sounds dull, and insecure, there. That article rolls into the theory that its bad to ‘be a man’. Which segues into the observation that manliness these days looks a lot more like prehistoric man than anything much else. By villifying ‘manly’ things, the current culture has destroyed the learned positive aspects of manliness and left only the instinctive, base aspects in place. Nice job, dingbats!

  2. The linked piece is mostly wishful thinking by a guy who is threatened by manly things. If you click his name and look at his picture you’ll get an idea why.

    Outside of a few metro-sexual hipster neighborhoods in big cities, every twenty something has a car or wishes they did.

    There are more muscle cars with more power and quicker ET’s right now than there were in 1968. And for the price of a used Hyundai you can buy sportbikes which go from 0-150 mph in ten seconds.

    More people own more guns and support for the RKBA has never been stronger.

    The most serious damage being done by “progressive” asshats in in the public schools’ where their war on boys seeks to turn young men into “David Wongs”.

    If that article depressed you, this vid might make you feel better…

  3. I think what we consistantly see now is a division in this coutnry. Libral, progressive, urban vs. self-relient. We see all of this crap, including the pushing of beta male, because they control the mainstream. As is pointed out here in the previous comment, there are a whole lot of muscle cars out there. And let me tell you, there are more guns and gun people than ever before. As their factions have grown, so have ours. We just need to make sure it stays that way.

  4. The article seems kinda yes and no to me.

    Yes, I’m all about institutional approval of bullying going the way of the dodo…seriously, that’s how we get Columbine and all that junk that doesn’t do much to help the shooting culture.

    No, I’m pretty sure red meat will stick around. Prices may jump to the price of fish in 50 or so years, but red meat will stay. (side note, heart disease is also likely here to stay, even if red meat goes away, because red meat is no more likely to cause heart disease than eating a forkful of broccoli is to prevent it)

    No, I’m pretty sure there will always be an interest in classic, fast, and otherwise awesome looking cars and bikes. After all, how else would you explain those what…7 fast and furious movies and a movie based off of a video game about street racing?

    Yes, unfortunately, football is being gradually turned into two hand touch, and will thus lose its fan base. But with guys like Bob Costa, do I even care? Nope. Hockey on the other hand, is the shizzle. And it would be cool to see an American Rugby League.

    And lets face it, being a war hero hasn’t done anything for anybody since the era of Audie Murphy.

    1. agree that if they FU football it will be the birth of rugby on a large scale in the USA…a nastier game in many ways….

  5. The great and scary thing about the future is that we really don’t know what is going to happen. We can try to predict what may happen from current trends, but things come along that toss the whole business right off the rails- WW 1 for instance.
    Thus, this calm prediction of the demise of manly things is pretty much on the same level of the flying cars and regular trans-Atlantic zeppelin service from the bygone days of old.

  6. I read the article. David Wong’s mangina is about the same size as his Smart car.

  7. Very interesting note about the effect WW I by Joe in PNG. That sparked a few memories on my end of what our country was like for some who lived through the decades at the end of the 19th century. That Teddy Roosevelt headed west to try cowboying & ranching, because the eastern cities were becoming too “sissified”. And that Baden-Powell and his colleagues like Dan Beard, Tompson-Seton, and Kephart were pushing the “woodcraft” way because they could see that (A) it was a healthy way to raise boys (and coincidentally, girls through the Campfire movement), who otherwise were (B) becoming too removed from wild things and essentially their healthy connection to their own inner animal. Even on the eve of and through WW II, Bernard Mason was continuing this push to keep kids connected to the wild things – his doctoral thesis became the work connecting outdoors, wild recreation for kids as that time’s Benjamin Spock.

    The push for sissification by those who have named themselves the cultural elite has occurred before, and it will occur again. So far, it has always been eventually fought off by the nature of our animal, and the actual effects that us being animals will have on a society that from time to time seeks to deny the obvious facts of nature.

  8. I read it when it came out (I follow Cracked, too), but I don’t know if I noticed the same tone as you did; I didn’t get the sense that he was hoping for it.
    I do have a feeling his argument has a grain of truth, at least from the way the media portrays the world around us.

    Maybe it’s my personal bias, and I didn’t necessarily want to hear that. Or maybe you’re the cynical one, here =P

  9. Manliness is an action, it’s not the tattoo you get, the leather jacket you wear, or whether you can bench press 200 pounds. A man is able to defend himself, not like an ape with his paws but like a civilized man with a gun. I’m not against metrosexuals, if you have a gun, you are my equal, if you don’t have a gun, I will be your master if you ever try to cross me.

  10. “at least from the way the media portrays the world around us.”…..

    Talk about a distorted view.

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