Gaslighting Toxic Masculinity
“White as an angel is the English child…
but I am black as if bereav’d of light…
when I from black and he from white cloud free…
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy…
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear,
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee.
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me…” (1)
Much as William Blake’s little black boy looks forward to the day, in heaven, when he’ll at last be white and loved by the Father, there are woke men who, having seen the light, yearn to be purged of their toxic masculinity.
Former President Obama recently remarked to a crowd in South Africa, “I don’t know what it is with men these days. But I’ll tell ya, they give me a pain.” This from a man who’s set for life and needn’t worry about losing his job, his family, his standing in the community or his self-esteem.
Shaming others for who they are, not for what they do, is an act of violence.
You’ve heard that before.
The pairing of “toxic” and “masculinity” undergirds the ideology of identity politics whose conceptual framework depends on the belief that the individual is primarily a member of a collective, only secondarily an individual.
An individual may take steps to ameliorate the collective attribution by personally internalizing and affirming it, becoming its apologist and promoter. Many approval seeking men are doing this.
It’s good to discourage toxic behavior. The effort falters when it tries to turn toads into turtles: for example, to define masculinity as inherently toxic so that for masculinity to be non-toxic it must no longer be masculine.
“Bu we’re only talking about men’s attitudes and behavior, not their being.”
Not so. Look more closely at the literature both verbal and written, pop and professional/academic. There’s a “war” on men’s souls today, and it’s been going on for a long time. Many men, betraying themselves, have become its prisoners.
In our neo-puritan climate, masculinity has become the secular equivalent of original sin, male-specific as opposed to “sin” being “catholic and universal,” human frailty to which we’re all inclined and for which we’re all in need of redemption.
Thus genderized, the gaslighting of toxic masculinity, like the self-denigration of Blake’s little black boy, becomes a distorted mark of Cain.
Cain’s penalty for murdering his brother, Abel, was to be, in the words of the Lord, “a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth.”
Cain replied, “Then everyone who findeth me shall rise up to slay me.”
The Lord shot back, “Whoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken upon him sevenfold.”
The Lord then “set a mark” upon Cain to warn off anyone who might wish to harm him.
Why did the Lord put a mark on Cain to protect him and, further, promise to take vengeance on anyone who might harm him when Cain deserved the death penalty?
Apply the myth to the moment. The light that comes from gas pours fuel on the flames of discord and makes hotter the fire of strife.
(1) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43671/the-little-black-boy
