Did Feminism Kill Masculinity?

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

For the past twenty years, David Brooks has been The New York Times’ lone columnist daring to be occasionally conservative.
His most recent piece, “The Crisis of Men and Boys,” gropes for causes of the withering away of masculinity in American life.
Statistics abound. Girls do better than boys in school and stay longer. More women than men go to college. Women are more responsible than men. They strive harder and survive better in adversity.
One in three American men with only a high school diploma — ten million men — is now out of the labor force. While men’s lifetime earnings have fallen, those of women have risen.
Men lack ambition. They are demoralized. They lack initiative to achieve and to succeed. They account for almost 75 percent of suicides.
Thus far the statistics. Brooks searches for causes, but the best he can do is surmise. He comes closest to the core when he observes family breakdown, but two years ago he praised it: Two years ago, he answered his own question. “The nuclear family was a mistake,” he wrote in Atlantic Magazine.
Let’s face it. The very real symptoms that Brooks can’t face point towards a factor so huge that many don’t consider it a cause — it’s just “reality.”
I’m talking about the sexual revolution. And that means The Pill.

Of Malthus And Men

A century ago, Margaret Sanger, foundress of Planned Parenthood, began a eugenics campaign to eliminate the unfit — which meant just about everyone who was black, brown, southern, or dumb. Her approach was called eugenics — mingling the Greek word for “good” with the Latin word for “people” — with an evil twist, of course.
Eliminate all but the “good” people, said Sanger. Because a century ago, there were too many “bad” people.
Sanger was one of eleven children born in an Irish Catholic family. I wonder how many of her siblings would have passed muster in her Brave New World.
The masthead of Sanger’s magazine, Birth Control Review, boasted its goal: “Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.”
After World War Two, commentator R.C. Martens parroted the Malthusian lie in the Review when he wrote: “Within the next few months millions of human beings, mostly Europeans, will starve to death. The crash which will cost uncounted millions of lives.”
The crash never came, of course, but that didn’t stop Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich from predicting it once more a generation later in The Population Bomb. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” he wrote in 1968.
Wrong again, but so what? This time around, the culture had been prepared as population planners lay the grounds for eliminating not only the “blacks and browns” but also the “surplus population.”

A Silent Church Greets The Great Society

In the mid-1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s bureaucrats began funding contraceptive programs as part of the federal government’s intrusion into family law (the code word was “family planning”). The initiative had bipartisan support from population controllers, both on Capitol Hill and among the elites.
Although the use of taxpayer funds for abortifacients flies in the face of natural law and Catholic teaching, historian Donald Critchlow found little resistance to these programs among America’s Catholic hierarchy.
Unfortunately, our bishops ignored those among the laity who called upon them to renounce the government’s immoral initiatives.
What caused them to fail so profoundly in their consecrated duty? Were they among the men whom Brooks describes as “demoralized” and “lacking initiative”?

Enter The Feminists

Archie Bunker sure was, and he was not born in a vacuum. He was the product of a determined ideology bent on destroying the family. Yes, government programs played their part, but feminists focused on the culture.
In the 1960s, the feminists targeted “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche” — “Children, Kitchen, and Church” — and The Pill became their preferred weapon. The “contraceptive mentality” this created quickly led to abortion, of course, and its impact was universal.
As the sexual revolution got under way, so did the cultural version. The strategy was as simple as it was vile: As women became more dependent on their own income, they were suddenly invited to see children — their own flesh and blood — as an impediment to their income and thus to their lifestyle. The argument: The lives of homemakers with a lot of children were now decidedly less financially attractive and more socially burdensome than the alternative.
Or so sang the sirens. But the lie was laid by a troika of traitors.

A Deadly Trio

The deal was done some fifty years ago. Government, business, and radical feminists united to “liberate” some 20 million women to leave the home and join the paid workforce.
Cui bono?
Government gained twenty million more taxpayers, as women left their family (or never began one) to work outside the home. Millions more replaced them to perform the work that mothers had formerly done at home — daycare workers, housecleaners, gardeners, and the like.
We note that both groups of new workers had never paid taxes before, even though they had worked very hard inside the home.
But it worked: In those days, a blue-collar worker in my hometown could afford to raise a family on one salary in a home they owned.
Not anymore.
Business benefited from Supply-and-Demand 101: 20 million new workers were suddenly in a marketplace which offered far fewer available jobs. Employers could call the shots, and they did. It’s no mystery that middle-class incomes in America have been flat ever since.
So while government and business profited, feminists, the third member of the cultural cabal, cheered. Soon women would have Roe v. Wade, free love, and their own money! What could go wrong?
Lots.
Suddenly, a woman “was responsible for taking her own family planning measures.” And in the prophetic words of Pope St. Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, the man could “reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”

Loretta Lynn Dies,
Her Message Lives On

Country star Loretta Lynn died this week.
Fifty years ago, she recorded a song that, in my view, is a linchpin of cultural history.
When I first heard Now I’ve Got the Pill, I knew we had lost. It was downhill from there.
“All these years I’ve stayed at home while you had all your fun,” she sang, “and every year that’s gone by another baby’s come. There’s a gonna be some changes made right here on nursery hill. . . . Oh daddy don’t you worry none, ’cause mama’s got The Pill.”
Isn’t that considerate of Loretta? She wants to party just like her husband apparently does, but she assures him, she’s still sexually available. “Don’t you go runnin’ off now!”
Well, in 1972 I was working my way through grad school as a musician in Nashville. When this song appeared, country music had been a first cousin to Gospel for years. These were the only genres of music that the entire family — grandma, mom and dad, and all the kids could listen to in the living room without somebody being shocked — or bored stiff. But later in the 1970s, “pop music” got so squalid — remember Disco? — that country music moved into the mainstream, and by that I mean it caught up with “the spirit of the times” — and, translated, that means the sexual revolution.
Yes, a lot of pointy-headed intellectuals knew about Ehrlich’s best-seller. But Loretta Lynn was the most popular country star of her generation, and her message reached millions of ears that would never hear Paul Ehrlich’s.