Dear Luv Doc,
I was asked out by a co-worker recently and as I am in a closed and happy relationship, I said no, kindly, with an abundance of tact as nice (and safety-conscious) Texas women are trained to do. However, the following week, this same co-worker decided to refuse to partner with me to provide services (I work in medical care) and I had to find an alternative person to help me, which delayed treatment for about a half hour. I was livid, of course, and subsequently confronted him with his super effed-up behavior and he sort of apologized. L.D., seriously! This man is OLD. He presumably has worked with females for the past 30-40 years already and it just boggles the mind how he could possibly think his actions are anything but the definition of toxic masculinity. I recently watched a single episode of Euphoria and I was appalled by how the girls were depicted/treated and now I’m just like WTF is there a worse post-Trump epidemic of misogyny now than I thought!?
– I’m Sure You Read Some Doozies
For the last several months, Texas school districts have been scrambling for funds to comply with the Texas Legislature’s master plan to curtail mass shooter casualties by putting an armed security officer on every school campus in the state. Now, I know all the lib cucks are going to point out all the glaringly obvious problems with the “good-Barney-Fife-with-a-gun” theory of school safety, but the Texas Lege is going first class all the way with this deal by appropriating a whopping $15,000 per campus for the hiring and … uh … training? … of those Fifes. It almost goes without saying that every disgruntled, power-hungry, incel, gun nut, McDonald’s fry cook in the state will find such a princely sum hard to turn down, but rather than dwell on the negatives of this imbecilic piece of legislation, I prefer to look at the positives: 1) Those legislators showed a lot of bravery keeping their gun lobbyists happy by completely ignoring the Uvalde shooting victims’ reasonable plea for a modest gun control bill, and 2) gun manufacturers stand to make a decent amount of scratch in sidearm and ammunition sales to campus safety officers. That’s what the Texas Legislature is calling a win-win for Texas public school students, who, to be honest, they would prefer to get rid of anyway because of their annoying tendency to suck up tax dollars for useless entitlements like public education.
I think you see where I’m going with this, right? It’s pretty obvious. While the Texas Legislature is off jousting at windmills – aka school shooters who haven’t planned well enough to put their first bullet in the back of the school safety officer’s head – they have been completely ignoring the ongoing, imminent crisis that’s been ravaging Western societies now for centuries: You’re probably thinking, “Erectile dysfunction,” right? But I’m actually talking about another lack of turgidity: the fragile male ego. HEADS UP TEXAS LEGE: We are grossly underspending on supporting male egos. While you empty-headed fucknuts are blowing money on legal fees for abortion narcs, single-sex shitters, and floating razor-wire bobber barriers on the Rio Grande, dudes all over the Lone Star State are getting butt hurt for no good reason. Seriously. It’s a crisis of masculinity. Apparently we need to build boys out of something other than snips and snails and puppy dog tails, because every time one of them gets pouty these days they want to cut loose with an AR-15. Clearly we’re raising them wrong, but god forbid we take away their ability to throw murderous tantrums while we figure out how to do parenting, because some gun company conned Billy Bob Camo Pants into “protecting his freedom” from the U.S. government with a Walmart machine gun.
Look, I know you’re not asking what you should do about your co-worker, but that motherfucker should be fired, stat (I believe that’s an appropriate term in the medical field). The fact that anyone’s medical care was delayed for even a second because this guy was feeling mopey and petulant about being romantically rejected is completely unacceptable. You’re right to be mad. We should all be mad – just as we should all be mad anytime some dude decides he’s allowed to throw a tantrum just because he has a dick between his legs. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know exactly how to fix toxic masculinity, but I’m pretty sure it starts by redefining traditional gender roles, and kids these days seem to be doing exactly that at a pace that is uncomfortable for those of us steeped in traditional gender mythology. The stridency of boomer backlash is evidence enough that progress is happening, but like anything truly worth achieving, it’s going to take time.
This article appears in August 18 • 2023.
