The Disappearance of the American Man
Yet Another Casualty of the Recent Panic
“Where have all the men gone?” wrote a woman to me in 2020 on my (now cancelled and deleted) LinkedIn account. She had just watched my first interview with South African podcaster Jeremy Nell, on the subject of masculinity. A truly beautiful, divorced woman in her mid-fifties, she had been searching without success for years for a man to share her life with. “Everyone I meet is a little boy in a man’s body, looking for a mommy. I already have two adult children. I don’t need one more.” She thanked me for explaining why she was finding it so difficult to locate the man she wanted. “You put into words what I have been feeling for the past two years.” What she had been experiencing was the profound anguish of a woman deprived of masculinity in her life. The American man has become an endangered species, as masculinity has been systematically uprooted from American society. A decades-long process, over the past three years the American man has fallen victim to a cultural genocide led by feminists, the educated elite, and proponents of the manufactured medical panic of 2020.
Everything deemed masculine is under attack. Any expression of courage, strength, risk-taking, leadership, pragmatism, or reason is condemned, cancelled, and punished. Standing up to bullies is deemed “abusive.” Supporting traditional (and natural) gender roles is criticized as “patriarchal.” Using force to fight evil is decried as “toxic.” Expressing sexual desire for a woman, a necessity to keep the human species alive, is dismissed as nothing more than “objectification.” The attack on the masculine now extends into the realm of children, as boys are encouraged to dress like girls, adopt female names, and submit to the will of emotions dictated to them by unhappy, angry, resentful women.
This is an exercise in mass suicide, made possible by a decadent society protected from the reality of suffering and delivered by a vehicle of emergency mandates, orders, and dictates no nation of real men would ever have accepted. A form of self-castration, a majority of American men accepted the dehumanizing act of covering their faces with diapers, being prevented from working out at gyms, and even earning an honest living through their own labor for over two years. They had been softened up—tenderized—by years of criticism, devaluation, and diminishment of their worth as men by educators, political activists, and media who convinced them that they were neither wanted nor needed in contemporary America. It’s time for men to step aside and allow women to run things now, they were told. So they did.
Karen is now making the decisions. We live in a nation unbalanced by toxic femininity, driven entirely by uncontained emotion and the complete absence of rationality. Our so-called leaders and role models are weak, castrated men wearing dresses and scornful, mean, angry women who view the world through the lens of a victim. This leaves the remaining real men who still self-identify through their masculinity thoroughly isolated in a sea of eunuchs; the remaining real women find themselves utterly alone, drifting aimlessly in a near-hopeless quest to locate what they truly need—not a PhD or a career, but a strong man who will stand beside her, protect her, and provide the containment necessary for her to express her femininity.
A society that fails to revere and honor masculinity quickly grows weak. Its foundations crumble. Its children lose their way. It does not survive. We are on a path to extinction. If we are to survive as a nation and as a people, we must reaffirm the primacy of masculinity and return it to its proper and necessary place of centrality in our lives. Anything less is an attack on reality, ourselves, and our future.
Mark McDonald, M.D.
Psychiatrist and author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis and Freedom From Fear: A 12 Step Guide to Personal and National Recovery
So true, Dr. McDonald. Now that women are dominant in most of the professions--medicine, veterinary medicine, law . . . ) we see what happens. Yes, yes, we all know that women are capable (this is written by a fairly assertive woman), but that's not the issue. The much maligned patriarchy served us very well for centuries. The sexual revolution was one of the most destructive movements our culture encountered and we are reaping the results. When I see a young, healthy man wearing a mask in public, I feel disdain, a bit of pity, but mostly disdain. They symbolize the weakness and cowardice that have replaced the traditional attributes of real men. As you point out, we are teetering as a culture, the stakes are so high, and there aren't many warriors in sight.
So so good. I am so happy that you have the balls to say all that you do! (I saw your recent Jerm Warfare interview and loved it!!) You validate so much of my own work with men and with couples. I have developed a rather healthy "male psychology" practice which focuses very much on what you have written about here from a more archetypal perspective. Clearly you are talking about the puer aeternus ...the eternal boy. Which Jung and Hillman and Von Franz wrote so much about.
I would say it has been the number one topic in my practice with men. And actually has been a problem, albeit a smaller one, for decades. It occurred naturally at one time, due to dysfunctional mother issues, but now it is being encouraged intentionally by the "agenda"...I would not have seen this 10 years ago, but now it is very easy to connect the dots. I no longer think our movement toward a society of weak males is just a natural evolutionary process--it is clearly intended.
Thank you, in particular, for pointing this out. I think the esteemed Dr. Peterson would agree, and although he has big balls, I think yours are bigger! Thank you for your deeply informed insight.