AMERICAN MASCULINITY IN DECLINE

   During the Summer of 1945, President Harry Truman announced to the nation that the Second World War had officially ended; and that the menace of global Fascist tyranny had been neutralized. The task of rebuilding and returning to normal lay ahead. Truman reached out to the Allied Powers who'd shared in the mission to help rebuild. The international situation was still very unstable; but the general mood of the nation was upbeat. While in the midst of a severe economic downturn, the attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed most of military capability; but we'd come together, rallied, and came back to win a two-front war within four years.

   But somewhere between then and now, the American people collectively lost it. The cracks in our society began showing not long after the war. It first really became apparent during the Korean War. Military veterans of WW2 remarked that the quality of personnel had declined radically from just a few years before. In 1950, the American Army was in full retreat: the North Koreans had beaten us down to a mere beachhead and were poised to push us off the Peninsula. Had General MacArthur not come out of retirement to execute a brilliant military maneuver, it would have concluded in a massive defeat. 

   Social scientists and medical professionals also saw ominous signs. As early as 1948, psychiatrist Theodore Reik published Masochism in Modern Man, were he noted a sharp increase in masochistic and submissive tendencies appearing in postwar male subjects. "It is important to note" he writes, "that masochism as a perversion is rare among women while it certainly is the prevailing perversion among men... it is the most frequent and the most significant sexual perversion in our society and as such determines the sexual behavior of innumerable representatives of our civilization. The masochistic attitude is of still greater importance because it proves the possibilities of cultural utilization of the deviation."

    Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the weakness of postmodern men was becoming alarmingly apparent. To their credit, the Mass-Media of the day tried to counter it with heroic cultural archetypes. The patriot, the Western hero, the soldier, policemen and detectives, secret agents, and astronauts were---along with the strong modern family man were held up as ideals. But the ideal and the reality were becoming widely separated. Advertisers noted that the primary audience for these shows were American women. They were obviously seeking what they didn't find in their own lives. Psychiatrist Frank Caprio noted in the 1950s that: "While modern man is more sex conscious than ever before, he is still a sexual ignoramus...many men are egocentric and uninformed and are anything but 'God's Gift to women'. Their ignorance {and indifference} towards the average woman's emotional make-up and of the proper sex technique is colossal."

    Postwar social scientists saw especial concerns here, because most of them had spent the war itself engaged in research of the psychological and social conditions in Axis countries. It really became apparent through these studies that nearly all of the Axis leaders were perverts and sexual degenerates of long standing. Some who dug a little deeper learned that other totalitarian and radical movements had the same tendencies well-represented among their own leaders. There was a strong consensus that sexual dysfunction and attraction to authoritarianism had at least a statistical correlation. But even more troubling was the fact that the same weaknesses and degeneracy among the American male population manifesting in the 1950s and 1960s were noted by European scientists during the 1920s and 1930s. Wilhelm Stekel, who lived in the heartland of where the Nazi Movement began, wrote in 1927 that among German men: "Sexual inadequacy is increasing to an alarming degree and impotence has come to be a disorder associated with the rise of modern civilization (i.e. the situation in Weimar Germany after WW1)...The percentage of relatively impotent men cannot be placed too high. In my experience hardly half of {postwar German} men enjoy normal potency."

    

   When the U.S. entered the Vietnam War, the problems noted by military leaders in Korea had become infinitely worse. In WW2, American military units were characterized by effective teamwork; in Vietnam the responsibility fell mostly on the individual soldiers who able or willing to do the work. Needless to say, this had a terrible effect on morale and discipline. Domestically, this was made even worse by widespread Draft evasion and an open revolt among American men against anything even remotely resembling traditional masculinity. Men compensated for their growing effeminacy by advocating for 'free love' and shirking familial responsibilities. The archetype of the American became a slovenly, self-centered, drug-addicted loser sponging off society and giving nothing in return. 

   By the 1970s, American women joined in the general decline. Most of them until then had rejected Feminism which was always promoted by the defectives among their gender. By then though American men had sunk to the point where they were willing to let women take over their social responsibilities. We've never recovered from this decline and it's highly unlikely that we will. It's interesting to note that modern so-called 'Conservatives' look back to men of the 50s as role models while modern so-called 'Liberals' find the 60s male appealing. They are really two sides of the same coin. 

     It's difficult to decipher exactly what led to this decline. The wars we fought that we fought between 1898 and 1945 cost about 400,000 of our best men dead and another 880,000 wounded, as well as another 80,000 missing. That's a huge toll to take on a nation's best men. Consider that 3/4 of these numbers were from World War II alone. Unlike previous warfare which consumed a lot of cannon fodder, modern warfare calls for the sacrifice of the best and most able men. The conditions that Stekel had described in Germany likewise occured after the Germans had lost a whopping 15% ---about one in six---of its young men during WW1. 

   Another factor to consider is that family men who served in WW2 were absent from home on average of from 3-6 years. That's about double the time absent during the wars with Spain, WW1, and some of the other conflicts of the period. During the 1898-1941 period, even a professional military man was rarely away from home on the battlefront for longer than six months. The situation during WW2 left a lot of children de facto fatherless during their most formative years. We can well imagine that the transition from extended military service to traditional family wasn't very smooth for many of these fathers. 

   While an interesting theory, it doesn't tell the whole picture. The fact is we didn't see anything like this kind of an impact on the generations who followed the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, or the US Civil War earlier. Those wars were not only costly; they were fought mostly on American soil and impacted the average American even more than the later ones did. In fact, they seem to have had the opposite effect and produced men even more virile and robust than before. 

   Other possible explanations include other environmental factors such as the proliferation of narcotics, less healthy diets, environmental pollution, etc. Those aren't sufficient explanations however. As noted in the psychological abstracts, the decline effected men much heavier than women in the 50s and 60s; and it really wasn't until the 70s and 80s that women were taking on the same defects. Actually, even during that period, it was mostly reactionary and it's been from the 90s and later that we've seen a parallel rejection of femininity. If the causes were organic, it would have impacted both genders simultaneously---which is not what happened. 

  Another theory is that masculinity declined through defective education. The Long March of Cultural Marxism seized our institutions mostly through the schools during this period. But this explanation, too, is inadequate. Just like Radical Feminism, Cultural Marxism could have been stopped if it had met with even a shred of resistance. Instead, American men mostly capitulated to it and even encouraged it. Actual Communism is friendlier to traditional masculinity than the latent homosexuality of the American 'woke' Left is today.

    What is responsible for the decline and fall of American Masculinity? All of the theories proposed so far are doubtless contributing factors, but none alone actually explain the root cause. It would be interesting to consider opinions on the subject, because understanding the fundamental cause is a first step towards fixing it. Looking back to our ancestors' examples isn't enough at this point. Younger men can't relate to it and the sociopolitical infrastructure doesn't support it. Nonetheless, it's a problem that can't be ignored any longer. As of this writing, 1 in 8 American men under the age of 30 are clinically impotent and about 1 in 6 identify as not exclusively heterosexual. Suicides and narcotics overdoses rank higher than most diseases and accidents as a cause of male mortality. Recent studies indicate that high percentages of American men don't believe in God or believe that life has a purpose, have no interest in starting families or raising children, and consider work of any kind meaningless. It's obvious that we can't sustain this kind of a decline. But how do we find our way out? That answer is not so obvious.