Is masculinity toxic? Or is there a toxic war on masculinity?

To answer that question, the Daily Citizen spoke with Nancy Pearcey, Professor of Apologetics and Scholar-in-Residence at Houston Christian University.

Professor Pearcey is the author of an important book, The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes. She has been described by The Economist as “America’s pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual.”

The Roots of “Toxic Masculinity”

According to Professor Pearcey, the idea of “toxic masculinity” goes back much further than most people would expect — in fact, it goes back to the Industrial Revolution which began around 1750.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, “men and women worked side by side — on the family farm, family business or family industry,” Prof. Pearcey told us. “Husband and wife didn’t necessarily do identical jobs, but they were sharing in the economic support of the home.”

“Work was not a matter of the father’s job, it was the family industry,” Prof. Pearcey writes in her book. “Work was imbued with a clear moral and spiritual purpose: A man’s goal was to love, serve, and support his family.”

However, after the Industrial Revolution, “work — and therefore working fathers — were taken out of the home,” Professor Pearcey told us.

In his latest book, The Anxious Generation, renowned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues smartphones and social media damage young people’s mental development — and contribute to Gen Z’s unprecedented levels of mental illness.

American teenagers conservatively spend between six and eight hours on “screen-based leisure activities,” Haidt writes, with most spending at least five of those hours on social media services like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt identifies four ways excessive screen time compromises young people’s success in the “real world.”

Social Deprivation

Haidt says healthy children need face-to-face, unsupervised group play to develop social skills resilience. But kids and teens have increasingly forgone these crucial interactions since social media and smartphones went mainstream around 2013.

Haidt cites data from the American Time Use Study showing people ages 15 to 24 hung out with friends an average of 45 minutes per day in 2020 — more than an hour and 20 minutes less than they did in 2013. Time with friends fell so drastically among this age group between 2018 and 2020 that a graph of the data shows no abnormal decline in social interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In lieu of face-to-face interactions, most teens socialize virtually with vast numbers of online friends.

If you are not familiar with Judith Butler, you should be.

She is arguably the most influential gender theorist living today. Her revolutionary book, Gender Trouble, published over thirty years ago, is widely considered the most influential and consequential work in the field of gender studies.

It helped establish so-called queer theory as an emerging sub-category of radical feminist thought. It also served, ironically, to erase the essential human category of woman itself.

This is because Butler infamously holds that gender (which is the same thing as sex) is not rooted in biological fact but is merely “performative.”

For Butler and her revolutionary adherents, male and female — if they exist in any real sense — are rooted only in how individuals choose to perform what they understand male and female to be. She says as much in her 10th anniversary preface to Gender Trouble,

“The view that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”

Thus, male and female don’t really exist in any objectively real sense, but merely in the ways subjective interpreters (all human beings) act them out. And the acting is the authoritative, but subjective, determinant.

Butler and her adherents are delighted with this conclusion.

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon signed a “Help Not Harm” bill prohibiting physicians from providing children and adolescents with experimental transgender medical interventions.

The bill (SF 0099) is named “Chloe’s Law.”

It allows for the revocation or suspension of the license of a doctor who provides minors with puberty blocking drugs, opposite-sex hormones and surgeries as a part of a “gender transition” plan.

The legislation is named after Chloe Cole, a young woman whose body was damaged by transgender medical interventions, who provided testimony in favor of the bill in front of the Wyoming Senate Labor, Heath & Social Services Committee.

SF 0099 passed overwhelmingly in the Wyoming Senate in a vote of 26-5 on Feb. 27.

On Mar. 4, it passed through the Wyoming House by a wide 55-6 margin. Gov. Gordon signed the bill into law on Mar. 22.

Despite signing the bill, the governor gave only a halfhearted statement supporting the legislation.

“I signed SF99 because I support the protections this bill includes for children, however it is my belief that the government is straying into the personal affairs of families” Governor Gordon said.

“Our legislature needs to sort out its intentions with regard to parental rights. While it inserts governmental prerogative in some places, it affirms parental rights in others.”