This week a particularly weird post ran at The Federalist. It’s an essay arguing against a piece by Freddie deBoer, in which Freddie calls for the destruction of the toxic masculinity that produced the Eliot Rodger murders. In response the author of the Federalist piece argues that dominance and violence are actually virtues, because, well:

“…to be a man is, in fact, to be violent, dominant, and powerful. One may even be right in saying that there is nothing else to being a man than to possess these qualities. And this is entirely sweet and fitting, for there may be no forces in nature more constructive than these. Someone may say: “How can this be sweet and fitting? These are obvious evils.” But this is not so. Our “someone” has made a simple mistake. He has made believe that the object of these qualities is some other: other people, women perhaps. Not at all. The object of a man’s dominance, power, and violence is himself alone, for to be a man is to have subdued one’s self entirely; and to do so is not at all a peaceable thing, for the bestial passions of man, his lusts and fears and selfishness are all quite strong, and so die hard.”

The argument is obscured by very bizarre language. But it appears to operate like this: men naturally have really extreme lusts and impulses, and to develop into a person who does not act on those wrong impulses is a violent process of self-domination. Now, this is taking some pretty extreme liberties with the words ‘violence’ and ‘domination’; Freddie invoked those principles to refer to a stabbing and shooting rampage, not the internal processes of ethical formation. And I do submit you could inflict violence upon yourself to aid in ethical formation, but I have a hard time imagining how that would actually play into a system of virtue ethics, which aim to develop a person who does the right thing without being coerced. (In the Christian framework this means developing into someone who desires God’s will.)

But that’s sort of secondary to my main problem with this analysis of virtue. The idea here is that masculinity is specifically the result of developing into a person who is inclined to better acts than worse, more impulsive ones. The author explains:

“A girl simply grows into a woman, or so most believe, whereas a man is something that is made. He is made because his masculinity consists in the destruction of his own nature, not in the maturity of it. He is born subject to a slew of desires, some more despicable, such as an unbridled lust for sex and drink, and some more acceptable, such as a desire for fame and affirmation. Though some of these passions are perhaps less unbecoming than others, they all make the man a slave for as long as he is in thrall to them and acts according to them.”

I can’t really tell what’s going on with this “or so most believe” clause; I was under the impression next to nobody believes that there are fewer cognitive differences between girls and women than between boys and men. In fact, I usually see people claim the opposite. Nonetheless the more extraordinary claim is that the subjugation of impulse to whatever framework underpins your virtue ethics can only produce masculinity, manhood, maleness. This seems a riff on the very old, very tired trope in which men are naturally scoundrels and women naturally angels, meaning male virtue is a greater accomplishment than female, and female vice is a greater scandal than male.

This author would probably be surprised to learn he has very odd bedfellows in resurrecting this antiquated take on gender and virtue. I noted a while ago in First Things that the phenomenon of “pearl-clutching” is a signal of a similar imagination, the idea being that people who express any kind of moral upset are feminine and matronly. The cool folks who do not express moral outrage aren’t ever painted in distinctly feminine terms; it’s only the uncool sticks-in-the-mud who are imagined as ladyish. Usually these kinds of smears pop up in feminist spots, though the habit has now radiated out into general discourse.

The result of both streams of thought is the conclusion that virtue is gender-slanted heavily in one direction, though the two sides differ on whether both sexes could use more virtue or less. Ostensibly people throwing around the ‘pearl-clutching’ saw wish everyone would clutch less, while people who imagine masculine virtue to be the result of a more difficult and necessary formation would have everyone shape up a little tighter. Nonetheless their anthropology is pretty similar. Men are inclined to lack virtue, women are inclined to have it. Ah, jeez.

My problem with this theory is that I think it seriously misconstrues the source of crappy ethical practice. I do not imagine that people who behave unethically generally do so because they’re just ethically un-formed, kind of brutishly rooting around in mud and acting like animals. On the contrary, I think truly horrible ethics usually come from very strong bad ethical formation, not a failure of formation. The men behind ISIS can explain their ethics to you, and though we use the word ‘barbaric’ for their practice it is not the case that they’re just sort of randomly lashing out on impulse: there’s a very considered, detailed ethic at hand here to which they’re adhering. It’s just evil.

This returns us to the core of Freddie’s original argument. There is such a thing as toxic masculinity, a cultural narrative about what one has to do and be in order to qualify as a man that actively instills bad ethics. But there is also such a thing as a healthy, positive masculinity that instills good ethics. Likewise there are toxic forms of femininity and healthy forms; the difference between them is not that one is the result of inaction and the other the result of action, but that one involves wrong action and the other right action. Some degree of managing impulses is clearly going to be required to properly be a good person regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman, therefore, because choosing what not to do is only a very minor part of the equation; choosing what to do is the thicker and more interesting half. Thus I’m not convinced that the management of impulses produces de-facto masculinity, or that the management of impulse comes anywhere close to producing good ethical practice, at least not on its own.

One more point. The guy writes this:

“It is not among the Christians alone that such an association between servitude and masculinity is made, for in all places as far as I have seen, the mastery of the self is given to correlate with this same self’s service for others.”

I don’t think there is actually that strong of a correlation between maleness and servitude in Christianity. In fact there appears to be a very beautiful mutuality of service imagined in the relationship between Christ and Church, which is imagined in terms of husband and wife. It’s notable that this plays out in an ethically formative discourse, where both sexes are instructed to love and to serve just as there is mutual love and service between Christ and the Church; in other words, there doesn’t appear to be any presumption that one sex just inclines to virtue, and further, we are given the hope that virtue can be positively developed in dialogue with exemplars and one another. Perhaps, then, ethical formation isn’t such an internal, isolated affair after all: indeed, there appears to be a lot more to it than just quashing down impulse. As usual, Christianity is way more radical than the culture that seeks to appropriate it.