[THEFEDERALIST] Too often these days we hear about weak modern men, so-called beta males who are unwilling to risk their safety on another’s behalf. The embodiment of this new archetype was the man who did nothing as a man stabbed another man to death with a pocket knife on a crowded Washington DC, subway car the afternoon of July 4, and then took to Reddit to justify his cowardice.

Every man and woman should be able to say that we hope we’d react the way Mintz did last week.

Some readers were outraged when I wrote about that—not at the bystander but at me, for suggesting he was a coward and that I would have reacted differently. I do not claim to know how I would have reacted, either in that subway car or the community college in Oregon. None of us do. But every man and woman should be able to say, clear-eyed and without hesitation, that we hope we’d react the way Mintz did last week. He is the opposite of the beta male who defends his refusal to act, utterly dependent on the courage of others.

I say “beta male” to provoke, but also to describe. In our egalitarian age, it’s in vogue to say men should not be manly, they should not necessarily possess virtues like courage or valor, they should not “mansplain” things. Manliness is the legacy of a sexist past, we’re told, the mark of white male privilege, and should be discouraged from a young age. Indeed, many of our schools buy into this and punish boys, and sometimes prosecute them, for behavior that in an earlier time was rightly understood as natural and mostly harmless.

Expect More from Men
This weekend, in fact, The New York Times style section ran an odd piece entitled “27 Ways to Be a Modern Man” that exemplifies this view of masculinity. “The modern man has no use for a gun,” opines the author. “He doesn’t own one, and he never will.” “The modern man cries. He cries often.” In case it isn’t perfectly clear that this modern man is a rather fragile creature: “On occasion, the modern man is the little spoon. Some nights, when he is feeling down or vulnerable, he needs an emotional and physical shield.”

In a mass shooting on a college campus it’s most likely the men who will need to rush ahead and barricade the door.

This is nonsense—and not because “real men don’t cry” or some such, but because it assumes there is no significant difference between men and women, no virtues or qualities that can properly be called masculine or feminine. In an era when identity is ever malleable, when Bruce Jenner can decide one day he is Caitlyn, or when marriage between a man and woman is no different than marriage between two men, it’s understandable that some would deny there is any such thing as “masculine” traits or virtues.

But it is nevertheless wrong. Most men have a natural instinct to protect others, in part because men are naturally stronger than women, as a recent Marine Corps study found when comparing the performance of all-male units with mixed-gender units. That doesn’t mean women can’t be strong or heroic, but it does mean that in a mass shooting on a college campus it’s most likely the men who will need to rush ahead and barricade the door. America should expect that from her men, and men should expect that of themselves.