No Place Left for Men in America?

Does manhood die when there are no man-clubs left?

The following words are a collection of related thoughts on manhood in the public square, no more, no less. Feel free to comment, disagree, whatever. I’m still just thinking out loud on this subject, forming ideas. The ideas don’t always flow naturally from one to another, but I am attempting to throw out a bunch of thoughts that are connected by common threads.

William (Lea) Thomas has been rightly vilified by all sensible people for claiming to be a woman, and then, to prove it, joining a women’s swim team. On that team, he dominates when he wants to. Why? Because he is a man and they are women. If men can compete with women in sports, where can women go to get away from men? The bathroom? Not any more. “Transgender bathrooms,” are now a thing.

As strange and tragic as women losing their all-girl spaces, the problem is worse for men. When a man invades a woman’s space, at least he pretends to be feminine. Femininity is maintained. When women invade men’s spaces, the men cease to be as masculine in order to accommodate the intruder. Furthermore, the vast majority of men have no interest in competing with women as they know they are not really competing, only stealing glory. The majority of men will never respect such behavior in other men, therefore, they will choose to let the women have their teams and spaces. But when women break up men’s clubs, they never go back to how they were.

If men lose their dedicated spaces, all of society loses the benefits of masculinity. Did I say, “benefits of masculinity?” Yes, I did. I know, in our culture the preferred adjective that precedes the word masculinity is the word toxic. Masculinity is not seen as virtuous or enviable. Masculinity must not be celebrated in our patriarchal culture for fear that sexual abuse, violence, self-reliance, and emotional repression will lead to cycles of oppression for women, and destruction for men, or so our culture claims. The best way to keep men from acting masculine is to stop them from being in places where women do no dominate.

Allow me to piece together some illustrations and examples from my lifetime to demonstrate what I am saying. In the 70’s and early 80’s some courageous women journalists demanded the right to go into the locker rooms of sports teams. They claimed, and rightly so, that in the locker rooms of winning teams some of the most candid and spontaneous interviews were not available to them; only male journalists were allowed in the locker rooms. The women won this fight, and the locker room culture changed, because men don’t act the same when women are around. Of course, the corresponding allowance of men in female locker rooms never came about. Why not? Well, you cannot put men in a woman’s dressing room, silly! Am I saying that women journalists should not be allowed in men’s locker rooms? Yes, I am. Yes, they do lose a scoop that their male counterparts get, but the alternative is we all lose men behaving as men do when around only men.

The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute both lost their fights to keep their schools all-male. Is this a problem? Yes.

Basic training in the military was not co-ed when I was a child. Growing up in Fort Benning and Fort McClellan, I was aware that when women trained, they trained with women. They were known as WACs. They did not train with the men because they were not men. Now, basic training is often co-ed.

Men act differently when women are around. Men should be around women, but they need time without them. Men compete over everything. Men understand that in being second, third, forth, or fifth in the ranking is not unfair, but a necessary reality. In a group of men, every man knows who the one or two leaders are in the room. They don’t have to vote on it, they know. When they gather for backyard football, they know who the quarterback is going to be. If there is a dispute, all the boys know to tell the lesser man to shut up or go home. This might not seem fair or kind to our woman-ized culture, but it is efficient for getting the most cohesive team on the field. Men weigh competence, power, and rank when in a group of men, and fall in line accordingly.

When men hear the women’s US soccer team cry they they don’t get paid as much as men, they don’t understand the complaint. Men think, “earn more money, and you’ll get paid more. No one wants to watch what you do, so you don’t get paid.” It’s not personal. There are jealousies among men to be sure, but on the whole, we understand why Michael Jordan got paid more than Scottie Pippin, and it seems fair to us.

When women complained that the Augusta National Golf club did not allow women, men thought the following: So what? Don’t like it, start your own club. Sure, there were some men who said, “Well I don’t think that’s fair. Let the women in,” —other men knew that such a sentiment was the minority. If men are stopping women from having a club, that would be bad, however if men made a club and women were simply jealous to not be included, there is no foul.

So where can men go to be men, without women in the mix? Not on a Navy ship. Not in basic training. Not in a men’s college. Not even the boys scouts, anymore. No where. The last bastion for men is sports, especially football. Football is a tough sport where people push one another down on every play. Women will never compete with men on a football field unless the rules change.

I played 5 years of organized football as a youth. I hated practice. Five days a week I had to exercise in ways I did not like, do repetitious drills that I did not enjoy, all while being yelled at by grown men when my effort was less than adequate. But we all had to do it, because we were training for the game that was played on Saturday, and we all loved playing on Saturday. Every week we had to compete with one another to earn and keep the right to play the most on the weekend. The competition did not always seem fair, as some coaches did not see my obvious talents nor let me play where I wanted. I sometimes argued with coaches, resulting in me being told to watch my mouth and run laps around the field. I had no choice but to comply with their decisions for they were in charge. If I wanted to quit, I could, but something in me quickly learned that quitting was not manly.

I did not realize it at the time, but the lessons of masculinity were built into my thinking during those five years. There were no moms on the field. There were no female coaches to appeal to for sympathy. There were simply rules, routines, and big men who allowed no disobedience. Some boys were faster than me on every team I played on, but I was always faster than most. No one could take that from me. No one could say it wasn’t fair. Physical abilities were what they were.

Several years ago I saw that a high school football coach was recorded at practice yelling at a kid on the team. The recording was used to show that he was abusive, and the public was outraged that a grown man would yell at a kid like that to motivate him. He did not hit him or call him names, just yelled at him pretty good. Regardless of whether thinks coaches should raise their voices or not, most men who have played the game would think, “Hey, kid needs to stop whining and play.” Football coaches yelling at players for doing something stupid in a game is pretty standard stuff. That happens at all levels of football. With the exception of Tom Landry and Tony Dungy, I’ve never seen a coach who didn’t yell at a player for a bone-head play. And you know what? It’s okay. Most coaches, even when they are loud, are fair.

Women do not understand this, but men do. Men are going to yell at each other sometimes, but that is no excuse to cry or to quit. Men do that so a young man better learn to how to handle it. Men compete, they push, they fight. And, men also pull together and play as a team. And, when men persevere through the blood, the sweat, and the mud together, they generally don’t have hard feelings about the process. In my five years of playing, there were times I lost my temper and paid for it, times I fought with fellow players, times when I thought my coaches did not measure my performance correctly. The result? I played my best and hardest because I wanted not only to prove myself to my fellow men, I wanted the coaches to be proud of me. No hard feelings.

Playing football did not make me want to beat up women, or be a violent brute dedicated to patriarchal systems of oppression. Rather, it made me more self-controlled, and more respectful of rules in society as a whole.

As I look back on my life, I see that those five years—as well as the years on a few other sports teams—were the only all-male efforts I experienced (except for the elders’ meetings at my church, but few men even experience those). I thank God for football.

Make no mistake, I love the friendship and society of women. In fact, I delight in the presence of women. They are, in my mind, the more interesting sex. I have never been shy in the presence of women, and I love interacting with them in work and in play. But men need time with men, because we are different than women.

Jim Harbaugh has hired a woman to coach quarterbacks for the university of Michigan. Anyone who has played in sports can tell you that if you have never played, it is hard to coach. Why this woman? Is she the best qualified for the job? Of course not. She is a symptom of a culture that has lost all respect for masculinity.

The military is no longer singularly-masculine in its basic training. This is foolish of course, because men are better at strategic and deliberative destruction of other people and their property for the purpose of defense of home and ideals than women are. We were made for it. But our society cannot abide a military that looks for a few good men. Why not a few good women? Women have a place in the military in support roles. But when it comes to running across rugged terrain with a weapon to slay dangerous poeple, they are not as good at it.

Furthermore, men who are properly trained, when fighting along side other men, will behave in generally predictable and efficient ways. If you add a woman to the mix, anything could happen. Why? Because men do not behave the same when women are around. When a woman is around, if she is attractive to the men, then a new kind of competition arrises, and new kinds of jealousies. Even if she is not attractive, there is a sense that either she needs to be protected, or being paired with her is a punishment. Men understand these things I am saying. A woman might say, “Hey, what does attractiveness have to do with anything! You should treat us the same regardless of our looks.” That might even sound reasonable to a woman. But every man knows that attractiveness means something, and that being paired with a woman is different than fighting along side a man. Ladies, you don’t have to understand it, but you cannot change it. And that is a good thing.

Masculinity is a good thing. Strength, competition, rule-following, teamwork, and compartmentalizing of emotions are all virtuous and useful in war and sports and even many jobs. Men barking at other men for not acting in a manly fashion is also a good thing. Men ought not yell at women for not acting in a manly fashion for two reasons: One, she is not a man, and two, it doesn’t work. There’s a reason obvious to every man why Tom Hanks’ line from the movie about female ball players rings true: “Are you crying? There’s no crying in baseball!” Men do cry, but generally not as often as most women, and for different reasons and at different times. You don’t cry in practice, and you don’t cry when there is a job to do. “If you catch me crying at those times, yell at me and tell me to get back out there!” is the response of manhood.

So where can men go? The NFL is putting women in as referees (and if they do a good job, no problem here). The modern world cannot seem to stand the thought of male dominated institutions. Football is a problem for them. Every sportscast has a woman announcer these days. Why? Because there are so many female personalities knowledgeable about the games that they should be hired before their less-qualified male counterparts? That is not the reason, to be sure. Some women know their football, but they are few and far between, and none of them know it as a player. The audiences of football games are overwhelmingly male. Men, who have played on teams as kids, played in backyards, and watched thousands of games, who know quite a bit about the sport, are being talked to by many female sports talk personalities who have never tackled anyone and did not grow up dedicating every weekend to studying game after game. Why? Because our society thinks it unfair that women are not in every arena that men are. Women are in the locker rooms, in the press box, at the sports desks, acting as umpires, and now even coaches. If only they could find a way to actually play against men!

I have an idea. What if men played the game, and the most knowledgable and talented people announce the games, ref the games, and coach the teams? Yes, that would make the female the rare exception in these jobs—the occasional side-line reporter, or even a play-by-play announcer if her skills were good and people found her conversation interesting. What would be wrong with that? Football may be the only place left in America where men can be men. But for how much longer?

(For the record, and for football fans only: Jim Harbaugh is a girly-man and the wolverines are sissies who can’t find real men to coach them).