Toxic masculinity

Madison Cawthorn, the one-hit-wonder congressman from North Carolina who was defeated in his primary earlier this year, used his final address on the House floor yesterday to condemn “soft metrosexuals.” In the spirit of not kicking a guy when he’s down (Cawthorn will be gone by January), let’s cut him some slack and acknowledge that, melodramatic language aside, his speech made a valid point. Social media is to blame, at least in part, for weakening American culture. “America is weak,” Cawthorn declared. “Her sons are sickly, and her daughters are decrepit. Our country now faces the consequences of enabling a participation trophy society. We’re no longer the United States. We’ve become the nanny state.

“Why don’t more men take their wives’ last names?” asked the Washington Post in a recent piece about a Maine husband who took his wife’s name. And why is it less common for a woman to keep her existing last name, which accounted for only about 20 percent of marrying women in 2015? Amazingly, even in our progressive era, women are still choosing to assume the names of their husbands. It’s obvious what side WaPo comes down on. Their article quotes an author who labels women taking their husbands' last names “bizarre and anachronistic.” It quotes the mother of another husband who took his wife's name, praising her son’s decision for “subvert[ing] the dominant paradigm.

There’s an expression that’s been mainstream for a couple years now that most people refer to in its abbreviated and more G-rated form as “BDE.” (I am too proper to write it out, but you can be enlightened by HuffPost here.) The term, denoting the magnetism of the manly, “strong silent type,” has apparently been around since at least 2020. But it’s been trending over the last month as Kari Lake, the Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate, and Kim Kardashian, the reality star who recently beat Hillary Clinton at a legal knowledge trivia game (it’s not her fault; the laws don’t apply to her) both used it.