Bringing Up Baby

Recently articles about the new masculinity, masculism, and the anti-feminist diatribes of the religious neo-cons have started to grate on my nerves. New masculinity, a buzz term with a nebulous meaning and various interpretations, has been co-opted by organizations like Focus on the Family as a call to men to be more “manly.”

My girlfriend teaches masculinity studies, and sometimes she’ll put things in perspective for me. It’s handy to have a professor around the house. She says the call for manliness is nothing new. Muscular Christianity was a Victorian era movement telling Christian men to embrace physical strength along their devout Christianity.

The current interpretation, however, is a mess of anti-feminist diatribes. Religious neo-cons say feminism has turned men into a society of wimps. They want you to git yer wives back to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant like they should be.

But it’s not just women’s independence that’s shrinking the collective American phallus; teenage sexuality also makes a mockery of manly dominance. Father-daughter purity balls, formal events almost like anti-debutante balls, want to keep daughters away from the world rather than present them as adults. The balls promote female sexual abstinence; no nookie until marriage. Oddly though, teen boys aren’t subjected to rituals like these. Girls, apparently, carry the burden of saying no and fending off boys. Boys will be boys, after all.

These balls, purity rings, virginity pledges and the like a ritualized ways of containing female sexuality. In other words, a woman’s body is not her own, it belongs to dad until it’s contracted to her husband. It’s more than a little creepy and sexualizes teenage girls unnecessarily. Who says every teen girl wants to go around banging pimply boys? By making her promise not to the movement puts young girls’ sexuality in the spotlight. Why not teach your kids to respect themselves and their sexuality. Instill them with self-esteem but give them the freedom to make their own decisions.

Puritanical American culture, sigh, is so weighed down by obsession with youth and virginity. We’re facing a backlash against female independence that wants you to remain a child forever.

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