Diesel Civil Trust

squashed:

Miss-R has linked to this remarkable article defending the antics of the Australian Rugby League. The argument is, essentially, that “boys will be boys.” In this case “being boys” involves violence, drunkenness, pubic urination, and (allegations of) gang rape. Her claim (which others, including John Eldridge, have made) is that feminism is trying to stamp out any sort of gender differentiation and leave some sort of homogenous, androgynous muddle. Or, as she puts it:

But decades of androgynous feminism have stamped on chivalry, deriding men who opened doors or stood back for women as being sexist and patronising.

I have no problem with opening doors (for anybody)—though if you’re opening a door because you think somebody is too weak to open it themselves, that might be a bit patronizing. Similarly, if I refuse to walk through a door a woman holds open for me, I need to get over my sexist self already. In the same role, I don’t have a problem with men doing “manly” things if they’re not hurting other or being pressured into them for fear of looking emasculated. In the same note, if a man wants to knit something I see no reason to deny him. Why not throw open a whole spectrum of activities to everybody rather than insisting that somebody was born one sex and thus must enjoy a certain set of things.

I digress. Coupled with the “men will be men” argument, we often see “men do horrible things they would not do if you’d just let them be men.” The claim is that things like rape and domestic violenc happen when men are expected to suppress their masculinity and they bottle up so much masculinity that it explodes out of them in particularly violent ways. We can’t blame the wife-beater. He was just denied a healthy outlet for these energies. Look what happened!

I probably shouldn’t focus on the “let men be men” people. Some people on the other end of the spectrum have used the same sort of flawed argument to level a sort of neo-Freudian critique of people promoting abstinence or of celibacy within the Catholic church. The argument is that suppressing the sex drive leads to the same sort of mind-deranging pressure that suddenly explodes in an uncontrollable manner. It’s a common trope in not-so-great movies (Clerks II). The Good Christian Kid has bottled his sex drive for so long that he gets a bit twitchy and once he or she finally lets go (so, maybe, one beer) he or she becomes insatiable.

The whole thing reminds me of old humoral theory where diseases and disorders were caused by an imbalance in various bodily humors and that the way to cure them involved purging one or the other. It’s an interesting historical artifact—but a terrible pseudoscience to base contemporary policy on.

Generally, things work the other way. If I cut my diet in half, I’m going to be quite hungry for a little while—then my body will adapt. If I stop showering on a backpacking trip, I’ll feel quite dirty for a few days, then I’ll get used to it. If I stop exercising (or, maybe in my case, start exercising) I’ll feel very energetic (or maybe very tired) for a few days and then get used to it. If I go to a much higher elevation, I might be bothered by the lack of oxygen for a while—but I’ll adjust. Similarly, if I make a habit of violence, I’m more likely to behave violently. We do a very good job at setting habits and adapting to our environments.

This is not to imply that all impulses can or should be ignored or that everybody is constructed the same way. You may be able to adapt to a larger or smaller diet—but you need to eat something. And we get screwy results when we try to both feed and suppress an impulse (say, by putting teenagers in a sexually saturated environment and then telling them they shouldn’t have sex). But it is wholly misguided to suggest that men need drunkenness, violent, and sexually aggressive in the same way people need food and water. Rather than forcing men into some constructed notion of masculinity, let them be themselves. And when men do inexcusable things, don’t excuse it on the grounds that boys will be boys.