WWTD
Make Masculinity Non-Toxic Again!
It’s that lame time in American life again in which it is effectively impossible not to think about Donald Trump. This appropriation of my interiority is the aspect of his ascent I selfishly most resent. Why in God’s name spend any time at all thinking about Donald Trump, this virtueless television that cannot be turned off?
Maybe there’s a way to paint some silver linings around our national disgrace. It occurred to me the other day that he could be a very useful figure viewed in the negative. If you were to turn him inside-out, to invert this marquee idol of toxic masculinity, might not you be left with an index of manly virtues?
It’s good I think that we’re still talking about toxic masculinity: so long as we’re appending the qualifier there seems to be hope for the noun. But it feels much easier in 2024 to define toxicity than to agree on virtues. John Wayne is dead as hell. Atticus Finch didn’t last through his own sequel. And it just isn’t culturally a moment for uncomplicated manly iconography. Who today is willing to risk dubbing a living person in the public eye an embodiment of admirable, emulatable masculine virtue? Who, after Cosby?
Not everyone has a sufficiently blameless dad or grandpa or uncle or godfather to steer by closer to home. It’s helpful to make celebrities of virtuous people—or to make celebrities of people at least in part for their character rather than for their more readily commodifiable talents. Virtue, in fact, seems rather stupendously uncommodifiable compared to the rest of the field of human endeavor, doesn’t it? Which helps explain why our once and perhaps future president finds the whole concept so repellant: what’s the point of something you can’t sell?
Maybe the kids are already doing this on social media, I don’t know. Maybe a whole tranche of influencers exist garnering views Mother Theresa-style. (Maybe #MT-s is already a thing.) But if not, and even if so, why not be resourceful and reverse engineer the world’s most visible toxic asset into a paragon of salutary masculinity?
Of course there’s Jesus. And I certainly don’t mean to diminish the healthfulness of trying to live a Christlike life. But he wasn’t really down in the trenches with us. He wasn’t apparently in the market for romantic love, for instance, and we know nothing of his professional ethics as a carpenter. We don’t know how he’d have fared had his better thirds taken the cup of suffering from him down there in the Garden of Gethsemane and left him to live an ordinary life in an ordinary family, say.
Permit me to propose that, as a corollary to asking ourselves, at any given fork in the ethical road, what Jesus would do, we could additionally ask: What Wouldn’t Trump Do?
Trump is boastful and untrustworthy, mistreats women, discounts other people and the future, is a bad neighbor, exploits weakness, encourages enmity, and acts in the world generally without shame, mercy, or forethought.
Turn that dirty sock inside-out and look what you have!
There is a growing interest in stoicism, which emphasizes the life of virtue. Of course it’s not limited to men, but for men, it is a good guide toward healthy masculinity.
The idea of juxtaposing Jesus and Trump is interesting and there could be and I'm sure there have been some theological debates about Trump as the anti-Christ. He's definitely some sort of Jungian shadow figure, at least to half the population, and to the other half he's a savior. It definitely feels like there's no longer an American narrative that works for a majority of people, and every culture needs a dominant narrative to remain relevant.