I did not write this to be liked. I wrote it because I am sick of watching grown men audition for their own irrelevance and then demand a standing ovation for the performance.
The country is not โmysteriouslyโ soft. It is soft because too many of its sons chose the velvet knifeโฆthen had the unmitigated nerve to call the scar enlightenment.
You can smell it before you can name it.
The collapsed posture. The voice that begs the room for permission to finish a thought. The man who cannot carry a hard hour, a hard truth, or a hard woman, but can write a novella about his feelings the second anyone asks him to stand up.
They painted the surrender. They branded the vacancy.
They turned self-castration into a moral costume and now they wander around stunned that women started running the rooms they abandoned.
Do not insult me with the cheap defense.
This is not a tantrum about gay men, and it is not a sermon against emotion.
Men have always bled on the inside.
Hector wept. Lincoln walked through a haunted house of his own mind and still held a nation together with working hands.
The difference is that those men suffered and then they acted. This new type suffers and then he curates.
He metabolizes nothing. He outsources his spine to the nearest consensus, his sex to a screen, his shame to an ideology, and his future to whoever still has the bad taste to be competent.
That is the pathology.
Not small biceps.
Not โtoxicโ folklore.
A refusal to become load-bearing.
A nervous system that treats ordinary conflict as annihilation. A will so gelded it cannot distinguish kindness from castration.
And thenโฆthis is the joke that should crack a ribโฆhe looks at women lapping him in school, in the office, in the house he cannot govern, and decides they cheated.
Brother, she did not steal your throne. You never sat in it. You rented a personality and called it a soul.
I put the knife on the table in this piece.
Psychology. Bloodwork. Fathers who vanished.
Empires that rotted while the rhetoric stayed pretty. Nietzscheโs last man blinking under central heating. The court eunuch with WiFi. The whole costume department of modern male piety.
Read it if you can stand the smell. If you cannot, that is data too.
A civilization is a portrait of its men. This one has been painting with water. I came to talk about the missing grip.
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