by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
According to the current media narrative, using traditional male concepts as part of traditional male behavior is something to disparage. I’m very empathetic to the crux of this argument.
And, yet, just like the slogan “defund the police” is really more about “demilitarizing the police,” so, too, is “slay the patriarchy” really more about the male dominating world being forced to accept the equality of women on a basic level than destroying the world of men in its entirety. (At least, I hope so, for my own sake. Yikes.)
But both slogans are easily corrupted by the MAGA New Right as a bludgeon against a very crucial element of any democracy’s body politic — conservative Traditionalist men.
With this in mind, the conventional wisdom among Blue Check thought leaders in the West at the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian Winter War was that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, would fold and run away from Kyiv to a more secure location like Lviv in the western part of the country.
But this did not happen.
Instead, Zelenskyy did a very traditional male leader thing — he stood and fought.
That Zelenskyy would do something so basic, so human, so traditional, so masculine without the benefit of a flipping the script in any way came across as something of a shock to Western observers. Zelenskyy was just a traditional male doing traditional things in a traditional way. There was nothing particularly innovative about his leadership style other than it existed and he as just a regular guy doing leading his people in a time of crisis.
This definitely goes against the woke narrative where the only way we can accept leadership is if there is some spicy twist to things. Zelenskyy is not transgendered, nor does he quibble about his pronouns (as far as I know.) He’s just a dude.
So, I propose some discourse over the possibility of what I call New Masculinity. This would be an acceptance that we can both validate and update traditional male concepts without going out of our way to alinate Traditionalist men who are so enraged by the woke agenda that they turn to nothing short of fascism — the MAGA New Right.
It seems to me that there is a possibility that the entire Western world is careening towards a moment when the type of male leadership that Zelenskyy has displayed will be desperately needed. It does not take a soothsayer to notice how unstable the United States is growing and the high risk of a “Great Reset” or “Fourth Turning” around the 2024 – 2025 timeframe.
Maybe we could use Zelenskyy as something of an avatar, a totem that Traditionalists men could imbue with their own, non-woke narrative. I have my doubts that this Hail Mary plot to take the steam out of the misogynistic MAGA New Right will work. But it is something to at least discuss.
The reason I’m doubtful is what I’m proposing is nuanced and subtle. In the extreme polarization of Blue and Red that America currently exists in, the moment Traditionalists adopted my plan, Woke culture would freak the fuck out. Woke people would make fun of the New Masculinity and deride it for not being attune enough to the needs of the modern world. Slay the patriarchy, and all that, don’t you know.
But the New Masculinity of Zelenskyy does produce results. It seems as though Zelenskyy may soon be mentioned in the same breath as Lincoln, FDR and Churchill. He is doing what needs to be done to save his nation from tyranny.
The truly surreal element of all of this is, of course, that because the MAGA New Right is so beholden to the dream of a Russian-style autocratic white Christian ethno state for America, they are wilfully oblivious to the benefits of adopting Zelenskyy as their own.
As I said, I doubt anything will come of this. And if it does, it will probably be corrupted for selfish reasons so it seen as nothing more than the 90s Men’s Movement with a different name or, even worse, some variation of the freaky weirdo Incel movement. But, again, Zelenskyy’s bravery in the face of adversity at least opens the door to some discourse on how he might be an icon for New Masculinity.
