The Irritable Male Syndrome?

From our buddy Joe Manthey:


After reading Jed Diamond's Basket-Brawls, The Irritable Male Syndrome, Torture at Abu Ghraib and the End of Civilization essay, I wondered why it was published on a website that calls itself "The Journal of Conscious Masculinity," as not only is his thesis sexist against men, but it's not supported by credible factual evidence. Indeed, it's simply a transparent attempt to sell his latest book. Nothing wrong with that except that he's exploiting a news hook to force-fit his model.

Diamond writes about "Males, all males, with fists raised and aggressive eyes looking for a fight" regarding the recent violence in professional sports by fans and players alike [Emphasis mine]. For the record:

- Female sports fans have also been in the news for yelling and throwingobjects at professional athletes, e.g. Texas Rangers.

- Girl's violent and abusive high school powder puff games and hazing have been well documented in the past few years.

From the Toronto Star: "The president of the Greater Toronto Hockey League says he's 'aghast' over an alleged incident at a hockey game in Mississauga where an irate mother of an 11-year-old boy hockey player apparently taunted parents and fans of opposing players by lifting her blouse, revealing her bra and shaking her breasts "from side to side."

Diamond says, "Everyone wants to know what's going on here." Really? He is so bound and determined to use unrelated instances of boorish human behavior to push his bizarre thesis that men are somehow in the throes of violent impulses that have never been expressed by human beings until recently that he forgets such facts like when professional football began, players did not wear pads. Professional boxers used to fight bare fisted - sometimes until death. The history of Western Civilization disproves Diamond's claim. We have been a warring people in the sports arenas and battlefields since the beginning of humankind.

As many women as men in our culture express the vast majority of behaviors to which Diamond ascribes the comical name "irritable male syndrome". Women can be course and vile; they can cut off drivers in traffic while giving the finger; they can abuse and kill their children and commit a host of violent acts to get their way; they can be rude and self-serving. Just last week it was reported, http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1295199/posts that "a St. Augustine woman is charged with attempted murder after she allegedly ran down two brothers and tried to hit a third brother in her SUV after a seemingly harmless accident with a golf ball Sunday afternoon."

Men can do all this too - and we sometimes do. Humans can be nasty. Breaking down supposed differences in nastiness based on sex might serve Diamond's career interests. It may get him speaking gigs before some gender feminist groups and talk shows, especially those who profess to be angry with the many thousands of years of white male dominance...

But do we need this divisive ideology now, when Americans are by all accounts already more divided than we can afford to be? One could also counter argue that so-called "male menopause" only affects men who live with women with hormonal imbalances (as children or as adults suffer from PTSD) and hence suffer from the exposure to the female symptoms of PMS, post-partum depression/psychosis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome. Lupus, borderline personality disorder, menopause etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

How about we try another path? Let's admit that sometimes men can be pigs, and women too. The idea that men are uniquely susceptible to "irritability" at this stage of human history is implausible to the point of being laughable.

But Diamond is doing precisely what gender feminists do: viewing authentic masculinity as pathological with the hope of creating the gender feminist utopia - an androgynous culture.

He quotes Theresa Crenshaw, M.D., author of The Alchemy of Love and Lust, who refers to testosterone as our ‘warmon,’ triggering aggression, competitiveness, and even violence. Notice how they view all three of these traits as negative when the only one that is - violence - is in fact not caused by testosterone. Diamond, a licensed psychotherapist with no background in science, concludes the section with the false statement that "It’s clear that violence can result when we try to keep testosterone levels artificially high or when they fall below healthy levels."

Another example of his social constructionist agenda comes when he begins a section of his essay entitled, "The Destruction of the Twin Towers, The War in Iraq, and the Torture at Abu Ghraib," by stating, "With humor, and more than a little insight, comedian Elayne Boosler says, 'When women are depressed, they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.'" Not only is this "women stand for peace; men for war" stereotype incorrect (ever heard of Margaret Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice, Madeline Albright....?), but entertainer Boosler makes her living as a male bashing comedian, not historian. She even hosted the Presidential Democratic Candidates forum at the National Organization for Women's Washington convention last summer.

His interpretation of the "symbolic meaning" of 9/11 is "the destruction of the phallic towers represents the destruction of the power of traditional masculinity" - which Diamond views pejoratively - while he ignores the heroic masculinity shown by the 343 FDNY Firemen who perished and the male passengers who attacked and successfully obstructed the armed terrorists on Flight 93.

Instead, Diamond continues to reveal his pro-androgyny, anti-masculinity agenda:

"Although most women have shed the demands that they act like ladies and avoid being seen as 'masculine,' this has been more difficult for males, says Diamond. "When our phallic Towers went down, core symbols of traditional masculinity went with them. Traditional males with insecure egos felt they must regain their manhood at any cost" and that one of the reasons the U.S. invaded Iraq were because "we are trying to recapture our lost manhood."

Referring to masculinity as "traditional" implies that it is culturally conditioned. Social constructionists like Diamond fall into what Dr. David Buss, full professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas, call the "romantic fallacy": I don't want people to be like that, therefore they are not like that."

Diamond actually attributes the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib to be a result of male insecurity as he pontificates, "When the phallic Towers fell, the leading male of America had to make someone pay. The fact that he was re-elected suggests to me that many other men in America also felt a loss of male identity and sought to reclaim it by making other men feel the same humiliation we felt. When will it end? Who will stop the cycle of abuse?"

For the record: - 48 percent of female voters voted for "the leading male in America" in 2004.

- The officer in charge of the Abu Ghraib Prison was female.

- Many of the prison guards doing the torture were female.

In a section entitled, "The Future of the Masculine Principle and the Future of the World," Diamond summarizes with racism as well as sexism by paraphrasing Daniel Quinn, from his "eco-anarchist" (Def: argues that small eco-villages of no more than a few hundred people are the correct scale of human living, and that infrastructure and political systems should be re-organized to ensure that these are created. It combines older trends toward eco-feminism, pacifiism, and primativism. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-anarchism)

"It's a story dominated by an elite group of white male leaders who areguided by their interpretation of the directions they receive from a whitemale god. It's a story that has been with us for nearly 10,000 years. It'salso a story, as Deloria suggests, that is leading us down a path ofextinction." In fact, Quinn suggests that a structure without man as thecenter would create a healthier world than the current culture hasconstructed. This would "allow the Earth and everything on it to exist in amore wholesome way in which diversity among species ensures a brighterfuture for mankind in general."

Diamond also quotes Native American activist Vine Deloria, Jr., from his book God is Red to bash white males, implying that they are leading us into "total extinction." which bodes well for his elitist, mythopoetic fear mongering:

"People who are willing to see the truth of our situation recognize thatindustrial civilization is not sustainable. It never was. We will find a newway to exist on the planet or we will die. It's that simple. Our current"wars on terror" are like fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic. They areour addictions to keep us from thinking the unthinkable, that the ship ofcivilization is sinking."

And Diamond's answer? Another surprise here: do away with another inherent male trait: hierarchy, as he writes, we need to "come to recognize the wisdom of indigenous people throughout the world is the need to abandon the hierarchy that is the cornerstone of civilization and return to the egalitarian network that is at the heart of tribal living. We were born into the tribe and it is the tribe to which we must return."

Diamond shows his us vs. them, good vs. evil world view, when he concludes, "What we are seeing is an old way of life that was never sustainable going down like the Twin Towers. Some will do anything they can to keep that way of life alive. They are heavily invested in its succeeding. These people will lie, cheat, steal, and kill. They'll do anything except admit that there is a better way to live. Others will get off the Titanic, get into small boats of their own, link in with other like-minded people, and will go back to the future-back to the tribal way of life that is our human birthright."

Is Diamond so caught up with his own precious inventiveness that he has lost touch with how goofy his meanderings sound to the ear of those who don't live their days or nights with fascinations about ways in which we humans can scapegoat each other on the basis of gender - or race - or geography?

Perhaps he might want to consider interviewing Courtney Love for a different perspective on gender and being irritable and violent.

Long-outmoded ideas like a social constructionist theoretical framework that has no empirical or theoretical warrant will continue to fade away. In the meantime, I imagine most of the individuals who purchase Diamond's men's health books are gender feminist women who do so as an attempt to help "feminize" their husbands/boyfriends. After all, male bashing is a wise marketing strategy since it's no secret that it's primarily women who buy self-help books. It just isn't very manly.

Joe Manthey
joemanthey@comcast.net

http://www.joemanthey.com