For years, masculine men seem to be morphing into slight and often feminine creatures.

Outside action films and with the possible exception of some Deep South truckers, mixed martial artists, and rugged Texas cowboys, crackling masculinity is getting harder to find in America and is greatly missed by many of us.  These hardy men used to provide good examples for young boys and dreamy musings for young women.  Happily, such men may be on the ascendancy once again.  But first, a circumspect glance at today's pale male.

Aside from some notable Hollywood tough guys and basement-dwelling techies, the urban New Man is thinner, softer, and more feminine than the bulkier men who constitute the history of maleness.  Their voices are higher.  In the last few decades, strident feminists decided that men were too toxic and should be more like women.  They banished testosterone-fogged males to the outer darkness and then excused the softness of the New Man by citing "different times, different tastes."  Maybe.  But maybe not.

Many men agreed with feminist hand-wringing, growing beards but not testosterone.  They adopted a professorial image with the slightly malnourished persona of a Starbucks vegan.  They are more "Queer Eye" (Netflix), more breathless, more drag, more "sensitive," and more prone to bodice-ripping.  In short, they are bearded caricatures of women, which many of us find weirdly dissonant.

In 2022 Wokestan, we have lost many of our iconic real men, the ones who protect women from Dexter and Darth Vader, who hold the door for us, who pull out our chairs, who provide for us, who are fathers to their children, lovers to their wives, and soldiers for our defense.  They were gentlemen in the truest sense of the word, but they were authentic men.  Most women had few objections.  But outside Hollywood's fantasy sound stages and streaming studios, where veteran masculine actors like Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood can be found, masculine men are not all that visible.

One reason for the proliferation of the fragile, flaccid male is that male role models are often absent in the home.  Boys imitate what they see, and sometimes all they see at home is feminine behavior.  Could it also be that some men wonder if they could be gay, even if the thought is fleeting, causing the LGBTETC culture to not waste a moment jamming that fleeting square-peg thought into a round hole, insisting, "You had the thought, therefore you must be gay"?  This is the kind of tortured cultural misalignment that encourages men to be delicate.  While it is true that not all gay males are effeminate mewling menfems, discerning who is and who isn't is getting predictably tedious and only irritates those of us who miss masculine men. 

Many mothers are sacrificing their little boys on the altar of wokeness by feminizing them in the bird-brained belief that being a woman is always better than being a man.  Or they are sentencing their sons to government pre-K, where boys become pale and frail before they are even out of grade school.

Drag-queenery and transsexual indoctrination are casually experimented with, both by teachers and by the boys themselves.  Little boychicks are encouraged to play with dolls and to trans up in heels, dresses, and makeup while Mama Medusa in the background is proudly squealing like the nose-ringed, demented TikTok influencer she likely is.

But take heart, because there is a ray of sunshine: some film stars such as Timothy Olyphant, Tom Hardy, Keanu Reeves, Vin Diesel, and Mark Wahlberg are setting more erect masculine examples, injecting a hard shot of masculinity into the American male's soft unter-psyche.  If box office receipts are any indication, life for the masculine American male may be getting more hospitable.  Movies and TV programming with gay and trans themes are not doing well beyond home court.  For archetypal males, genuine masculinity is returning after a long absence, while fem-flam is fading.  Many of us happily welcome the rugged masculine American male home again.  While this newer kind of maleness may horrify progressives who decry what they imagine in their fevered nightmares to be antediluvian behavior, it delights the rest of us.

"Gender confusion" is almost entirely the hate-child of the progressive left: if little boys and little girls are left alone to follow their birth certificates, there will be little to no confusion between pink and blue.  Parents would do well to nurture their young boys to be stronger than women, protective of women, lovers of women, respectful of women.  Little boys should be left alone to play in the dirt, trash their bedrooms, and obey their biology, not to be raised believing they can be "birthing persons" if the mood strikes them.  They should be encouraged to be little men who will grow up to be high-functioning big men rather than appendage-intensive women.  

It is not healthy for boys to mature in a hyper-feminized culture where things have gotten so out of gender-whack that a female Supreme Court nominee cannot define what a woman is.  Worse, large men with long, stringy beige hair and a five-o'clock shadow are posing as women, and a man who couldn't cut it as a male swimmer joined the ranks of the estrogen-rich and destroyed the lifetime dreams of legitimate female swimmers.

This is the real toxic masculinity.