JD Vance Does Some Real Manly Whining About How No One Will Let Men Be Manly Anymore
Apparently we are forcing everyone to be 'androgynous idiots.'
There's this one scene in 1939's Dark Victory in which stablehand Humphrey Bogart — in an Irish brogue, mind you — starts talking to fancy society lady Bette Davis about how hard it is to be manly. "I guess I was born out of my time, Miss Judith," he says "I should've lived in the days when it counted to be a man. The way I like to ride and the way I like to fight. What good's riding and fighting these days? What do they get you?"
And because it's Humphrey Bogart, in an entirely fictional movie about brain tumors in which your only other option is Ronald Reagan, it's honestly pretty fucking hot.
What is not at all hot, however, is almost literally any other man in any other context blathering on about how they don't get to be manly anymore.
If those three paragraphs sound at all familiar, that is because I used them for a post in April of 2022 about Tucker Carlson’s weird video montage for a documentary he made (that I never saw!) about how no one will let men be manly and do manly things like rassle, chop wood, milk cows (???) or get naked, stand atop a mountain and put their dicks into some kind of … tanning machine, I guess?
Anyway! I was actually writing close to the same thing, re: JD Vance’s very normal interview with Mercedes Schlapp all about — you guessed it! — how we won’t let men be manly anymore and feminists keep telling men that they’re bad because they’re men. Or something. Anyway, when I realized I’d written it before, I figured I’d just save myself the trouble and just recycle it. I mean, if they’re gonna keep going on the same whiny bitch rants about how no one will let men perform masculinity anymore, I shouldn’t have to keep coming up with new material to refute it. It’s only fair.
Joe My God’s got the transcript:
I think that our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge. You should you should try to cast aside your family. You should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place.
And I think that my message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.
The cultural message — and I think the president’s and mine is the exact opposite –but our cultural message is I think that it wants to turn everybody, whether male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same.
We actually think God made male and female for a purpose. And we want you guys to thrive as young men and as young women. And we’re going to help with our public policy to make it possible to do that.
No one has said that men are not allowed to be manly. No one has told anyone to “cast aside their family” (unless their family members are assholes, in which case, that’s up to them). No one has said anyone is a bad person because they are a man, and certainly not because they “tell a joke.”
Though it certainly does depend on whether or not the joke is actually funny.
No one has said it’s bad for anyone to have a beer with their friends or even to be competitive, as long as they are not being drunk assholes who won’t let anyone else have a turn at the skee-ball lanes.
No one is demanding that anyone become an “androgynous idiot,” though we do love that one Green Day song.
In fact, allow me to enter into evidence my lewk for a Valentine’s Day event at the Field Museum last week, which involved a goddamned pink fuzzy dress covered in bows.
What we have said is that men should not feel compelled to adhere to some definition of “manly” invented by someone else and should instead be whoever the hell they want, so long as that person is not an asshole. If people do want to adhere to that, if they feel that God demands that they crush beer cans up against their heads or do whatever it is that they think is super macho, that is their business (again, so long as they are not assholes to other people).
What we do want is for there not to be a culture that tells men they have to adhere to strict rules for being a man that are ultimately harmful to them, or that they are failing at masculinity for enjoying things that society has coded as “feminine.”
None of this is hard! If people want to adopt an androgynous aesthetic, they should do that. If people want to get their gender performance on, they should do that. Or sometimes do one and other times do the other. This is America! Which is why I can be a full-on professional feminist while also liking makeup and dresses, and Tucker Carlson can self-tan his balls with abandon (which, really, is one of the least objectionable things about his entire personality).
Personally, I think the weakest shit on earth is complaining that no one will let you be manly. This is why JD Vance, for all his talk about masculinity, still comes across as a fucking twerp.
Ultimately Vance’s war is not against any kind of enforced androgyny or childlessness, it’s against people deciding for themselves who they are and want to be. He doesn’t want to live in a world where people can do that, he wants a culture in which gender roles are enforced, where homogeneity is enforced, and there are social repercussions for failing to fit the mold — because he’s an extremely boring and weak person who, sorry to say, hates our freedoms.
And as ever, when they say "masculinity" they just mean belligerent and domineering.
I honestly expected him to start singing YMCA, with that message to Young Men.