In the wake of the UCSB mass murder by the pathetic nerd loser who couldn’t get a date, left-liberal writer Freddie de Boer says that “traditional masculinity has to die.” Excerpt:

The association of male value with aggression, dominance, and power is one of the most destructive forces in the world, and so it has to be destroyed. Traditional masculinity has to die in just the same way that sexism and racism and homophobia have to die. It can’t be reformed, it can’t be rescued. It has to be replaced. It’s utterly infected, with the celebration of violence, sexual entitlement, throbbing misogyny, and a fake self-confidence that is almost always hiding total self-loathing. If the kind of sick masculinity that leads to these  crimes were a religion, people would call it incompatible with modernity. If it were a race, Fox News would talk about that race’s culture of violence. If it were a political ideology, it would be classified alongside white supremacy or anti-Semitism. How could it not be, given the spasms of horrific violence that we now expect to happen over and over again? I don’t excuse Rodger or anyone else for the terrible, unforgivable choices they make. The sickness within our culture is not an excuse. But it is part of the explanation, and it needs to be cut out like a cancer.

The masculinity that replaces it will not be “anti-male,” whatever that could possibly mean. It won’t be anti-strength. It won’t be anti-confidence or anti-leadership or anti-toughness. It won’t be anti-sex. (What could be more anti-sex, really, than this person’s determination to destroy other people for the explicit reason that they had consensual sex and he didn’t?) But it will reject utterly the strangled, stupid, pathetic association between male strength and the capacity for violence.

Well, look, the male capacity for violence is hard-wired into our biology. There’s no killing it off. The civilizing process requires teaching and conditioning young males to channel it toward morally good and socially constructive ends. Does Freddie want to turn men into Mr. Van Driessen? Sounds like it. He doesn’t mean to, but what he’s calling for is what C.S. Lewis described this way:

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

Anyway, Ross Douthat, in a definitive take-down, says:

De Boer says he wants a 21st century model of masculine heroism that isn’t ”anti-strength … anti-confidence or anti-leadership or anti-toughness,” that isn’t “anti-sex,” that avoids a simple “association between male strength and the capacity for violence,” and that doesn’t reductively associate “a man’s value with the number of women he has sex with.” I’d like that too! But I don’t see what’s particularly anti-traditional about that vision, since an image of masculinity that fulfills all of those conditions was not only present but ubiquitous all across the popular entertainments of the 19th and early 20th century.

A Humphrey Bogart, a Jimmy Stewart, a Cary Grant, a Spencer Tracy — these were icons whose characters often dealt with female stars as equals, who had sex appeal to burn but weren’t defined by their libidos or their list of conquests, who dealt in violence sparingly or not at all. Likewise in Victorian fiction, in books as eagerly devoured by the masses as any blockbuster entertainment today: How often is a rake or cad presented as a worthy model, how often is a killer celebrated for his body count? How often does a Dickens or a Tolstoy or a Trollope leave the impression that the masculine ideal involves dealing violence indiscriminately and sleeping with every blonde who catches your eye? Is Steerforth the hero of “David Copperfield”? Is Wickham the male ideal held up by “Pride and Prejudice”? In Western literature, who better embodies “traditional masculinity” as an aspirational ideal — Vronsky or Darcy? Angel Clare or Gabriel Oak? Raskolnikov the murderer or Raskolnikov the penitent?

And so then for today’s toxic, self-deluded bachelors, it’s worth asking which image of masculinity is more likely to be leading them astray — a doomed attempt to “think their way” into some traditional, pre-sexual revolution masculine ideal, with its stress on self-mastery, self-containment, and self-possession, or the hapless pursuit of an ideal that I called “Hefnerian” in my Sunday column, with its vision of the world as primarily a field for sexual conquest, and traditional morality as the prison that needs to be escaped? Is it reasonable to describe today’s young male chauvinists, whether they’re running Silicon Valley startups or lurking in the darker corners of the internet, as prisoners of chivalry, as slaves to antiquated fantasies of dignity and honor, as straitjacketed by an ideal of gentlemanly conduct? Or are they trying to live up to a very different, much more current vision of the male good life, one that gained ground almost simultaneously with modern cultural liberalism, and that partakes more of post-1960s ideas about liberation and expressive individualism than it does of anything that deserves to be called “traditional”?

You really should read the whole thing — it’s terrific. Douthat identifies something that drives me crazy about debating with many liberals. You will find very few conservatives aged 50 and under who, thinking about gender roles and relations, would like to have the Fifties back. Talking to women (like my mom) who lived through those times, I see where feminism came from, and I am glad that my daughter is growing up in a world that has been made more just and bearable for women thanks to feminism. To my way of thinking, feminism served as a civilizing force insofar as it compelled men to be more humane.

But that only goes so far. An amazing paradox is that as feminism has advanced across popular culture, the culture in many ways has become much cruder, animalistic, and anti-woman. Watching that Elliot Rodger video, it was so clear to me that he saw in popular culture a cartoonish icon of masculinity, and felt it ought to be his. As Douthat avers, this guy was not taking his cues on what it means to be a man from the pre-feminist male icons, but rather their cretinous successors. What many on the cultural left don’t seem to understand is that when you throw aside restraints on human instinct, when you tear down the walls built up carefully over generations, instead of mending their inadequacies, you lose the capacity to keep the beasts at bay.

I agree wholeheartedly with De Boer that the kind of masculinity celebrated by various pop-culture communities (e.g., hip-hop, pick-up artists) is repugnant. But his answer to it is utopian and silly, and only likely to be embraced by SWPL grad students. Seems like for latter-day Sexual Revolutionaries like the utopian De Boer, there is nothing wrong with human sexual behavior that can’t be solved by extirpating whatever remnants of traditional masculinity remain.

Because of feminism, men have learned a lot about how to treat women, and women have learned a lot about how they should expect to be treated. But both have forgotten a lot as well. It’s a false choice to say that the only alternative to the degraded situation we have now is Don Draper.