OPINION:
The Chinese Communist Party has just kicked off a cultural campaign to make sure men are dressing and behaving like men and that the “effeminate” look — dubbed by the government as the “masculinity crisis” — won’t cripple President Xi Jinping’s push to become the leading world power.
Yes, the commies are cracking down on “sissy men,” as the communist censors put it. Dictatorial tactics to the side, America might want to take a memo.
Manly men are becoming hard to find.
America’s boys are being taught to play with dolls, to cry when upset, to wear dresses if they want, to paint their fingernails and pick out their hair bows and put on their pretty as they prepare for school — and to think of their gender selves in any way they wish. Don’t want to be a boy today, Johnny? That’s quite OK. Be Josephine, instead.
The Boy Scouts of America, one of the nation’s signature training grounds for raising moral and useful men, has crumbled to feminist, leftist peer pressure. Rather than learning to love God, country and family and earning badges for wilderness survival and tough-to-conquer skills, today’s Scouts are more apt to be treated to campfire lessons on transgenderism while their female leader treats them to a rousing rendition of Ariana Grande’s “God is a Woman.”
Today’s boys are celebrated for their girliness. Lia Thomas, the swimming sensation boy who’s busily scooping up all the girls’ athletic records, proves that.
This is not to say that Marlboro Man macho must make a cultural return.
But this is to say that today’s boys are being taught that boys are one and the same as girls, and that to suggest differences between the sexes is not just old-fashioned and outdated, but somehow discriminatory, narrow-minded and even cruel. To even suggest there are only two sexes is to become the target of ire of the far-left loons.
But it’s these far-left loons who’ve usurped the culture to such extent that America’s become outright hostile to the notion of manhood, to the idea of masculinity, to any definition of male that includes a role of leadership. Today’s far-left loons want to take their lunacy and drive it deep into even the military, putting inclusiveness above biological truths, pretending women are as physically as strong as men and thereby advancing the idea that men don’t have to be men — women can just as easily do the job.
What will become of an America that downplays the importance of traditional maleness?
“The vast majority of boys in western culture are not taught how to be a man,” The Good Men Project wrote. “There is no authentic rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. We grow up watching movies, listening to celebrities and consuming content that gives [men] absolutely no clue about how a man shows up, let alone how to be one.”
Churches used to do the job of teaching young boys in the ways they should go; so, too, fathers with firm grasps of how the Bible expected them to behave. And these traditional teachings were underscored by the expectations and standards set by society and by those functioning within society’s circle — from teachers in public schools to Hollywood film stars to workplace bosses and fellow employees. Divorce was once a hushed occurrence; hookups and fatherless homes are now norms.
No wonder today’s boys think they can go into the girls’ dressing rooms.
They have no solid foundations from which to draw a concept of masculinity.
In China, television regulators recently banned “sissy men and other abnormal aesthetics” from the TV screens, barred male celebrities from wearing earrings during public appearances and cracked down on several popular social media profiles, to make sure new “toughness and strength” standards for men were being applied. Magazine covers that once showed one of the nation’s top male singers wearing makeup and sporting blond-colored hair bangs now showcase him in full bicep-bulging glory, wearing baggier jeans.
It’s China’s way of ensuring the Communist Party’s attempt at world dominance isn’t stymied by sissified men.
“A nation is strong if its youth are strong,” Xi has said.
In context of China’s national rejuvenation and quest for global power, that remark’s unstated message is that girls are weak. That’s ridiculous, of course.
But in America, there’s a warning to be heeded. Feminizing boys to level the playing ground for girls, scolding boys for the crime of being boyish, denying the differences between the two sexes and failing to celebrate the God-ordained differences between the two sexes can carry serious societal consequences that range from the destruction of homes and families to the outright demise of military might. America cannot have men who’d rather play video games than marry their kids’ mothers, and who are taught that their feelings matter more than their responsibilities.
America, if America is to last and lead, cannot continue to squash masculinity and condemn manhood and pretend as if men are just girls in pants.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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