The End of Higher Education
I just finished teaching an upper-division US history course in which my students read — and I swear I’m not making this up — Kim Du Toit’s repellant 2003 essay on “The Pussification of the Western Male”. The class had just finished Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization (1995), a marvelous examination of the cultural transformations of gender between the 1880s and World War I. We used du Toit as a companion piece to the chapters on Teddy Roosevelt and the psychologist G. Stanley Hall — each of whom were, in their own ways, as anxious as du Toit about what they perceived to be the devaluation of masculinity.
Roosevelt, for example, was distressed by the tendency (as he saw it) for modern men to “shirk from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil.” In his famous 1899 speech on “The Strenuous Life,” Roosevelt proclaimed that the vigor of “the race” depended upon men being “glad to do [men's] work, to dare and endure and to labor.” Women, he added, “must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.” Any other arrangement would have risked what sociologist E. A. Ross termed “race suicide.” Roosevelt was particularly animated about the imperial demands of his age; he could not look kindly upon those men who feared “the strenuous life, the only national life which is really worth leading.” He commended England for taking hold of its colonies — especially its rule in Egypt and India — and called upon the US to do the same in the Philippines and elsewhere. He did not refer to his opponents as “pussies,” but he came frightfully close.
Hall, for his part, was preoccupied not with adult masculinity but rather with the incipient manhood of youth. Believing that developing children rehearsed the cultural evolution of the human race, he insisted that young boys should not be deterred from expressing “the instinct of the savage.”
Boys are naturally robbers; they are bandits and fighters by nature. A scientific study has been made of boys’ societies . . . . In every instance these societies have been predatory. All of the members thirsted for blood, and all of their plans were for thievery and murder
Allow the young boy to beat the shit out of his companions, Hall suggested, and his mental and physical development will proceed in a smooth and healthy fashion. Divert him from his natural course Hall warned, and you will produce “a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak.” Such a child “lacks virility, [and] his masculinity does not ring true.” Perhaps he will — as Hall himself did — grow up to be a chronic masturbator, a helpless slave to “the lonely vice.”
And then there’s du Toit — in one of his essay’s better milk-through-the-nose moments — working himself up into a roiling, gibbering mess over the lineup on Bravo:
Finally, we come to the TV show which to my mind epitomizes everything bad about what we have become: Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Playing on the homo Bravo Channel, this piece of excrement has taken over the popular culture by storm (and so far, the only counter has been the wonderful South Park episode which took it apart for the bullshit it is).I’m sorry, but the premise of the show nauseates me. A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” (ie. more acceptable to women): changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music—for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?
Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.
To be brief, my students were howling with laughter over this; they were also moved by his anti-Cheerio rant, about which the less said the better. Several of them simply refused to believe that du Toit had not, in fact, written this as a parody. I assured them of his pathetic sincerity — I even told them about the Worst Blogger Award he’d received a few years back — and they laughed even more.
But my students and I noticed something interesting. Speaking in April 1899 — just a few months after the Spanish-American war ended — Roosevelt condemned the “pussification” of American men while calling upon them to suppress the Philippine insurrection; over the next few years, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos would die as the country learned what “the strenuous life” was all about. Writing in November 2003 — just a few months after the Iraq War had supposedly ended — du Toit similarly condemned the “pussification” of American men while calling upon them to drive fast, get drunk, and emulate Donald Rumsfeld (who, he insisted at the time, could have laid nearly every woman in the country over the age of 50); over the past few years, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, in large part so that men like Donald Rumsfeld would not have to wake up in the morning and see a “pussy” staring back at them in the mirror. Kim du Toit, I suppose, should be so fortunate.
This reminds me of the Edmund Morris biographies of Teddy Roosevelt. It is hard to read them straight (in all senses).
Not only are they of mind-numbing length, even for biographies, TR’s manly self-transformation features a long index entry all to itself, with much detail on his physique.
“Everybody’s got sexual anxieties, performance anxiety, and gender identity anxiety at least sometime in their lives.”
This really must be a guy thing. The closest I suppose I can come to any of this is fear of rape.
I guess this is why men have a deep fear of homosexual sex, while women don’t have a corresponding problem with lesbianism.
numi asks one of the classic questions:
“Can anyone tell me why it’s necessary to wash the towel I use after my shower?”
I’ve wondered about that as well. Since you are simply drying a clean body, why this hysteria about washing bath towels? Now kitchen towels, sure. I wash mine at least once a month. But a bath towel? Why?
TR was ashamed his father hired a substitute for the Civil War, Douglas MacArthur was in competition with his war hero father’s legacy. Both were WASP,upper level,as young boys not exactly paragons of Frank Merriwells,and were momma boy’s deluxe. Both were 19th Century men in thought who played a significant part in shaping the 20th. Their later transformation into American Icons Republican version both by era rattling accomplishments and a highly developed PR machine can be seen revived in the current occupant of the White House’s mindset. Unfortunately there is no desire it seems for a Progressive movent in a WalMartized America and the conflict is beneath an American Caesar.
“Can anyone tell me why it’s necessary to wash the towel I use after my shower?”
You guys are literally channeling Wally from Dilbert, you know.
that class sounds like a lot of fun!
I enjoyed Bederman’s book quite a bit- particularly her chapter on Ida b. Wells.
“You guys are literally channeling Wally from Dilbert, you know.”
No I didn’t know. I have never heard of Wally and Dilbert; do they have blogs?
I guess this is why men have a deep fear of homosexual sex, while women don’t have a corresponding problem with lesbianism.
For most men, it’s not fear, but disgust. Of course the homosexualists like to characterize it as fear for political reasons.
I believe the reason men are, indeed, more repulsed is that in our culture, men are not as intimate with each other as women are. We don’t hold hands, touch as much and certainly don’t kiss each other on the cheek as a greeting. It simply seems more perverse to men to see two queers being intimate than to women.
Men should not be as disgusted as they are. Would you be disgusted if you saw someone that was bipolar or schizophrenic? Of course not. So treat those with normative deviations kindly.
I never heard of this ‘classic’ before it got dredged up today. But a little arm-chair psychoanalysis: This nut-job, Kim du Toit is a *conservative* male with a woman’s first name, and a French last name?!
No wonder the poor bastard is insane.
Naturally when ewan gets sympathetic its in some horrendous way.
aimai
Since Sara brought up the Edward Morris biographies of TR, I just had to vent about them. I found then extremely frustrating. It was as if I had been there and seen and heard everything, but didn’t actually understand anything I had seen and heard. The Warner Wolf school of biography: “Let’s go to the videotape.”
The so-called “feminization of males” is increasingly sounding like paranoid delusions. Limbaugh and Coulter, the Christian right rail on about this imaginary phenomenon, with no basis in fact or reality. They hand pick a few examples to inflate, such as QEFSG, or andecdotal evidence, but truly, where are all the wussies they seem to think exist?
Certainly not fighting the California fires, saving people from rooftops during hurricanes, rebuilding their homes in the aftermath of such disasters, and are not obviously evident in our day to day lives. This one is a much harder sell. Where are all the bands of roving wussy deviants? The creation of the masculinity cult is nothing more than hot air.
What is certainly at the heart of such rhetoric is an attempt to encourage middle and lower class males to act against their self interest; to compete against each other instead of partnering up, to fight instead of resolve conflict, to encourage males to remain in lower income laboring positions instead of enhancing their income potential through increased specialization, to remain emotionally estranged from their partners and children, to increase the fervor for conflict in TWOT, and make them feel good about it. After all, you’re a manly man, who cares if you lose your home to foreclosure, lose your pension to Enron-type corruption, your job is outsourced, your kids have no insurance, and you really don’t know WTF is going on in that country called Iraq that is sucking up all your tax money.
I forgot that I wanted to recommend to everyone here Bram Dykstra’s brilliant “Idols of perversity” which is one of the most compulsively readable books ever written on the subject of masculine images of women in the fin de siecle. The obsession with various kinds of femininity (gorgeous, drugged, dying, dangerous) went along with a hyper anxiety about masculinity and sexuality including the apparently everpresent problem of “tumescence.”
aimai
Is there a reason why ewan a) exists, and b) is allowed to post?
But a bath towel? Why?
Mold. And they get stinky.
TR and Patton both were mama’s boys to the Nth degree. Which is why they felt they had to massively overcompensate.
TR and Patton both were mama’s boys to the Nth degree.
MacArthur too, for that matter.
“Can anyone tell me why it’s necessary to wash the towel I use after my shower?”
Um – because even after you wash, you still shed skin onto the towel as you rub it over you. After about a week, the skin has begun to form whole colonies of bacteria – which make an odor.
Oh, thanks for that image, magicmama
(but I digress: also–headlice. Ask any parent of school aged child. )
“Can anyone tell me why it’s necessary to wash the towel I use after my shower?”
Um – because even after you wash, you still shed skin onto the towel as you rub it over you. After about a week, the skin has begun to form whole colonies of bacteria – which make an odor.
magikmama | 11.02.07 – 3:25 pm | #
Even I was wondering about this one. I don’t wash my towels all that often, and don’t notice anything. But now…Ew!
And I wasn’t even born with a penis – so was I already supposed to know this one? Dang.
Let’s see: about half of the non-TR comments have an obsession with my name (name-calling always worked SO well on the grade-school playground, after all), and another (un-)healthy percentage seems to be obsessed with the size of my penis.
And all this invective from people who have no idea who I am, but read their own facile interpretations about me from a single essay — and judging from some of the comments, an incomplete reading of the essay at that.
I applaud the use of my essay in colleges, however, because regardless of how much laughter it creates, there are going to be some people (male and female) who will think: “You know? The guy has a point.”
That would be my best revenge.
Damn right. You folks are a lost cause. That essay wasn’t written for you. The fact that you can’t really respond beyond saying twat over and over while giggling proves it.
When you grow up and join the real world, maybe we can talk.
Uh, do you mean to tell me there really is someone as stupid as Kim du Toit? Or, even more frightening, someone who pathetically aspires to be mistaken for him? Is there a psychological term for people impersonating comic impersonations of absurd viewpoints? Because if there isn’t I’m going to name it dutoitism.
aimai
I won’t make fun of your name.
I will say, however, that anyone who uses the word “pussification” non-ironically is either overcompensating for something or just very, very, very silly.
Please prove you are properly manly by starting a fight with a biker gang. It’s what the Duke would do, dammit.
Mr. du Toit,
As one of those who objected to the name mockery, let me make this perfectly clear: You have bean dip for brains.
As the West is about to change dramatically – you morons (teachers) are about to see what reality is really like. You and your students are not only dumb you really have absolutely no clue about anything- keep living in your dream world. Oh yeah and thanks for completely destroying the real US. I bet it was nice for you to actually have had a free country as you were growing up.