Revenge of the Real Men » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

“They were paying us to nail the thief, right?”
“You destroyed a two-thousand-dollar television set tackling him,” Cork said.
“It was showing The View,” said Slade.
From The Washington Trail by Lou Aguilar

For once in their history, the Democrats were right. Masculinity proved to be toxic in the end. To the Democratic Party. The feminists in charge of it spent so much of this century demonizing men, they mistook male avoidance for acceptance. They paid a heavy price last year when young men abandoned the party in droves to elect the ultimate “toxic male,” President Donald J. Trump. Now, they’re ready to pay $20 million to lure men back. Yet with no clue as to what they are beyond the Left’s caricaturization of them.

The New York Times’ last week broke the story on the Speaking with American Men (SAM) Project. But even Times national political reporter Shane Goldmacher couldn’t keep the mockery out of his piece.

Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places … One new $20 million effort … aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online … and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”

If syntax, language, and content had any political cache, White Dudes for Harris would have made a cackling hyena President, and her quasi-macho beta-male running mate VP. Instead, this group became a target of ridicule for all involved, including the once cool actor, Jeff Bridges. Because there are few beings more embarrassing than feminist men, even in the Left-started Culture War. The archetype of the breed, whose very name still defines it, resurfaced last week in a sweet X post that nonetheless illustrated the problem.

Honoring his late M*A*S*H costar, Loretta Swift, who died Friday at age 87, Alan Alda tweeted, “Loretta was a supremely talented actor … But more than acting her part, she created it. She worked hard in showing the writing staff how they could turn the character from a one joke sexist stereotype into a real person — with real feelings and ambitions. We celebrated the day the script came out listing her character not as Hot Lips, but as Margaret.”

I remember that day too. It was in Season 4, when M*A*S*H stopped being funny and became an insufferable liberal sermonette, courtesy of Alda. He drove off the show Wayne Rogers, who played Hawkeye’s chauvinistically amusing fellow medic, Trapper John. In one episode, Hawkeye chastises the Nurse-chasing Trapper, saying “Aren’t you married?” “That’s a rumor started by my wife,” Trapper says.

Rogers’ Trapper had to go, replaced by the more acceptably sensitive, subservient to Alda Mike Farrell as B.J. Hunnicut. His character spends an entire episode whining about how he betrayed his wife after a one-night stand with a nurse. In another, Hawkeye wastes the duration trying to learn what Hunnicut’s initials stood for. When it was over, my humorous friend Tom said, “I could have told him what B.J. stood for.”

The Reagan 80s displaced the Alan Alda model for the rest of the century, restoring dominant masculinity to the screen, both small — Sonny Crockett, Magnum P.I., Clint Eastwood, the A-Team, Knight Rider, Spenser for Hire, etc. — and large — Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, and more. And women became sexy again, like Kathleen Turner, Kim Basinger, Catherine Bach, Heather Locklear, music video girls, and Shannon Tweed, the star of my first screenwritten movie, Electra.

There were a few exceptions, of course, Cagney and Lacey on TV, Thelma and Louise in the theater. But for the most part Reaganesque men ruled. Then the wimpish George Bush (yes, despite his World War II heroism) got elected, followed by Bill Clinton, regenerating girl power in politics and the culture.

In the 00s, the movie business became more equally divided between regular male-centric artists — Tarantino, Scorsese, Eastwood, Fincher, Mann, and the early Marvel Comics Universe producers — and the female variety. Superheroes like Iron Man and Obie Wan Kenobi (in the George Lucas Star Wars sequel trilogy) were classically masculine, as was politically incorrect comedy like Tropic Thunder, Wedding Crashers, Blades of Glory, and more.

Normal women wrote good romantic comedies such as The Princess Diaries, Legally Blonde, Mamma Mia!, and What a Girl Wants, where girls and boys like — even desire — each other, men weren’t idiots or jerks, and women couldn’t beat them up. Kathleen Kennedy, Barbara Broccoli, and Victoria Alonso didn’t yet have the power to turn Han Solo, Indiana Jones, James Bond, and the Marvel Comics heroes into sad foils for sexless unfeminine fantasy amazons.

In came Barack Obama, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and DEI. The weenies that ran Hollywood ran for the hills. And batty nags took over. They thought they could erase real men and traditional women from the outside world as easily as from the screen and the audience. That these groups had nowhere else to go. Ah, but they did — male territory — sports and fights — where no fake women can compete. And the woke could only watch in horror as the deplorables gave the devil one standing ovation after another, while the athletes and combatants saluted him.

Last November, real men voted for Trump, as did the women who love them and want to be with them. And once he’s through delousing Harvard, he’ll be coming for Hollywoke. Along with a new wave of talent. I hope to be part of it.

READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:

This Memorial Day, New Respect for the Military

The Left’s Collapsing House of Cards