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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 25, 2004
Girlie men
"Action action action" is the characteristic phrase of Arnold Schwarzenegger I'm told. (I have to be told because I have only seen one of his movies and that without the sound in an airplane.) The phrase "girlie men" is instead from Hans and Franz a couple of bodybuilding wannabes on Saturday Night Live. (You have no idea the lengths I go to research these columns.) It follows that Mr. Schwarzenegger -- now governor of a state called California the very existence of which I have sometimes doubted -- must have been trying to be funny and possibly even self-deprecating when he called his Democrat opponents in the state legislature "girlie men". He called them this because they had walked away from state budget negotiations having allowed them to run over the deadline for the fiscal year and because they were refusing to acknowledge the special interests for whose benefit their tactics were deployed. The next day for good measure Mr. Schwarzenegger described the Democrat legislators whose seats are protected by a degree of gerrymandering that is itself risible as "dug in like Alabama ticks". The response was humourless. It focused almost entirely on the earlier remark. I gather "Alabama ticks" is a Jesse Ventura phrase. Arachnids are not well represented in American politics and metaphors not always understood so that only a little outrage was expressed on behalf of ticks. But "girlie men" rattled the cage of the legislature's "Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender" caucus earned a stolid "not funny" from the assembly speaker and stirred a chorus of execration from the whingie boys and shriekie sisters across "liberal" America. I mean: what made this so funny was seeing so many "girlie men" so readily self-identify. Mr. Schwarzenegger was accused of "homophobia" but more generally of delivering "a third-grade insult". Yet it was less ambiguously a third-grade response: for what marks the difference between an adult and a child in rhetorical exchanges is the ability to laugh things off. To be fair to California it is still nowhere near to Canada in its slide into the civilizational ditch of "political correction". We had a national election campaign up here last month in which during the televised debates at least not one candidate for public office even once dared to be intentionally funny. It has become too dangerous. Our entire media are on gaffe-alert. The trip-wires are laid all over and strict standards of moral and intellectual cowardice are now enjoined throughout our political system. And not without a purpose. The trend in political life especially on social questions over the last few years has been towards prescriptions and policies that would be too easily mocked if mockery were allowed. The livid frothing hysterical response to the person who makes a joke or the person who laughs at it is a necessary means of advancing causes that are frankly insane. The expression girlie men (or men without chests as C.S. Lewis called them) while it might be taken as a reference to a stereotype of the male homosexual has much broader application. Not only in the North American society of the 1950s but in all societies before the post-modern the man who does not act like a man but instead "acts like a girl" has been a figure of mirth. And there was no "almost" in that last sentence: it has been quite universally held as contrary to nature that a man should not behave as a man -- that he should not even aspire to such "manly" virtues as courage honesty loyalty steadfastness. Not that these virtues are restricted to men nor that they are easy for anyone to master. This has truly nothing to do with homosexuality: for the ideal of manliness was especially advanced in such homosexual cultures as the Spartan. The current notion of "gay" with its celebration of effeminacy in men is itself a post-modern deviation. I often think the word should be applied equally and indifferently to all "girlie men" regardless of their sexual preferences. And that "gay marriage" is a suitable way to describe any "union of two persons" in which the respective roles of husband and wife remain indistinct. The elevation of "manliness" to the ideal of the "gentleman" is a high cultural construction achieved here and there in our civilizational past. In our degenerating culture manhood has again been reduced to testosterone. It is a joke. It might be a bad joke but it should be accepted as a joke. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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