IN THE foregoing entry, a mother wrote in to ask for advice. Her teenage son is receiving painful physical taunts from friends. This is not a case of harassment by enemies, she said, but of horseplay or teasing that has gone too far.

Here a reader responds when I asked him what she should do. He makes an interesting point. Men today often urge their sons to endure. They do this because they know that the boy who fights back when he is wronged may receive no sympathy or support, and actually may end up in serious trouble. “Since society no longer stands behind men who are victims of injustice,” he writes, “these men are left to shift for themselves.” Self-defense, or defense of the weak, becomes guilty. However, men should not give in, he says, to this emasculation no matter what the cost.

Expatriot writes:

This is just the beginning of an answer to your question. There are three separate questions: what Mrs. C. should do, what her husband should do, and what her son should do. For her son, the only possible course is to resist and fight back in any way possible within the bounds of prudence. If there are too many of these guys, if they are too strong or too vicious, his options may be limited, but in any case he should never accept the wrongs they have done him. Without realizing it, that’s what the boy and the father are doing when they try to minimize the seriousness of the offense. Men downplay outrages like this because it is humiliating for them to acknowledge their own impotence in the face of the challenge—an impotence which they see as impugning their manhood.

In the past it was different, however. Men were not impotent in the face of outrage because they had the support of society behind them. Men were jealous of their honor because society took the side of men who fought for justice—if justice for others, they were considered heroes; if justice for themselves, they were considered men. It was believed that the least a man could do was to fight for himself, and that a man who wouldn’t even do that could not be counted on to fight for anybody else and was thus not a man at all.

Of course, nowadays it’s just the opposite: the man who fights back is condemned equally along with his wrongdoers, if not more so. When I said that if he fights back, he’ll just end up being the one punished, I didn’t mean that he shouldn’t fight back. I just meant he would have to be prepared to have insult added to his injury.

Since society no longer stands behind men who are victims of injustice, these men are left to shift for themselves. Thus there is no good answer to the question of what to do. But understanding what I’m saying here is a start. The main point I’m trying to make is that when men downplay the gravity of attacks like this, dismissing them as boys-will-be-boys horseplay, they are unwittingly playing along with the anti-masculine zeitgeist of today. It’s a pose that is ostensibly masculine in its stoicism, but upon closer inspection reeks of self-deception and abject surrender. Pretending the shame does not exist does not make it go away. But I don’t know how Mrs. C. can get her menfolk to see this without only exacerbating the situation.

Please follow and like us: