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1. PRJ

   Posted December 19, 2009 at 2:06 AM

   If we are to reestablish a healthy, positive, and self-respecting understanding of masculinity in society, then homosexual conduct must be viewed as so ignominious, so disgraceful, so shameful that “nobody would assume that a good man would engage in it.”

   Actually, that is kind of exactly what I was raised to believe. But on this campus, virtually no one would agree with this view, and this is probably why (even though I don’t express this sort of view to any but my friends) I’ve had some difficulty fitting into the PC culture here.
2. Mongolia101

   Posted December 19, 2009 at 6:09 AM

   Your second to last paragraph is wonderful. I’m sure that if we all went around behaving like apes and cretins again, we would certainly all be better friends.
3. LB

   Posted December 20, 2009 at 6:32 AM

   The most probelmatic part of the article:
   “…how do men, and particularly adolescents for whom the personal pressures of approaching manhood and the social pressures of insecure peers are most acute, prove that they are men, that they aren’t gay?

   So, gay men aren’t actually men? I thought part of your argument was to “divorce masculinuty from sexuality,” but you obviously are still conflating the two.
4. poeta

   Posted December 20, 2009 at 4:23 PM

   mcginley is nostalgic for a manliness he does not entirely understand. what we lauds is far from what he finds in philadelphia — not the land of the homophobic but land of the heteronormative.
   he might be well suited to examine virtus (manliness in the roman world) and examine it within a classical context. a course is being offered in the classics department next semester on those marginalised by roman ‘virtues’. other suggestions for readings on the manliness of the past include the works of cicero in de amicitia as well as its inspiration: plato’s symposium.
   mcginley’s ignorance of the emotional constraints imposed on men by limiting their animalistic (and natural) desires is blinding. it is why, i assume, he is willing to extol a compassionless repression of same-sex sex.
   it could just be robbie george’s catholicism speaking through mcginley.
5. excusemewhat?

   Posted January 11, 2010 at 7:09 PM

   this is literally the dumbest thing i have ever read. i sincerely hope your future employers google you, find this article, and laugh.
6. Molly A

   Posted January 12, 2010 at 5:10 AM

   Brandon, I was almost intrigued by your argument until you said that the only way to preserve masculinity is to divorce it from sexuality, which must be accomplished by not allowing homosexuality to be included in any definition of masculinity. That is inherently heteronormative, meaning that your definition of masculinity presupposes heterosexuality. Which is a version of sexuality. Hence, a logical fallacy.

   But that’s not my main critique. Brandon dude, I don’t think you realize how offensive this is. You basically just said that gay men can’t be “masculine.” Masculinity is a social construct, so anyone on earth can adopt its norms.

   I am so not convinced by your argument that you actually think that stigmatizing gay men is bad.
7. Stephanie Jones

   Posted January 13, 2010 at 4:20 AM

   Hi mate, I really like your site. With the abundance of misinformation regarding marriage on the internet, it’s great to see some refreshing content. Keep up the good work!
8. JL

   Posted January 13, 2010 at 5:53 AM

   point of irony: pittsburgh is the setting of the well-rated showtime program “Queer as Folk”, which centers on the lives of gay men and women living there.
9. Braeden Kepner

   Posted January 13, 2010 at 2:51 PM

   Certainly the conclusion that McGinley arrives at presupposes many things that he has not elucidated in his essay. First, there is the bold, but apparently unsubstantiated claim that it was the stigma against homosexual conduct that laid “the foundation for a healthy, powerful, and beautiful conception of manhood” in the past. This is on its face not the most plausible of arguments. I take the argument as McGinley presents it to be that men in the past were able to have emotionally open friendships because it was assumed tacitly that as a man you were a heterosexual. Since this was the case, there was no need to wonder whether two affectionate male friends were romantically involved.

   The problem now, according to McGinley, seems to be that you can’t have affectionate male friendships without people wondering if the two might be gay. There are two major flaws with this reasoning. First, there’s the “so what” argument, in other words, so what if people think two affectionate males might be gay? The obvious rebuttal to this argument is that there is a stigma against homosexuality, and thus the appearance of being gay is something to be avoided.

   The solution that McGinley suggests would be most preferable, and “obvious”, to remedy this, is to have an even stronger stigma against homosexual intercourse. The second objection then, is that this solution is far from obvious, or at the least that there is an opposite, and just as obvious solution: remove the stigma altogether. If the stigma didn’t exist, then we could all say “so what” when two affectionate males were conjectured to be gay.

   I think there are a variety of other problems with the essay’s arguments – it’s not clear from where this supposed vision of masculinity comes from (and it seems likely to me that it may never have existed as imagined). Certain historical claims are also made about how masculinity was in ages past, but it’s not clear when that past was. Certainly at many points in the past the prohibition against homosexual sex was not what McGinley makes it out to be. Aside from the Romans and Greeks, in the beginning of the 20th Century during the campaigns in Haiti, homosexual acts were surprisingly common among American troops stationed there – it was only a stigma to be the receptive partner.

   If you want to trace some thread through most masculinities of the past, I might suggest not fear of homosexuals, but dominance. Certainly what has had to be downplayed with the acceptance of sexual equality has been the maxim that to be a man, you must be in a position of power within your social group. Whatever happens to define power in a particular group has often been associated with masculinity. This idea too is in need of complication, but I think it would provide a much stronger starting-point, and is also visible in the whole Dockers Man-ifesto that seems to have touched the whole discussion off for McGinley.
10. Lucretius

    Posted February 16, 2010 at 8:40 AM

    “Meaty sandwiches and hearty soups” are destroying the environment and ruining the lives of animals and people. Greens are delicious, and it is instructive that McGinley’s view of masculinity must be expressed through participation in the institutionalized violence of agribusiness.
11. David Salsa

    Posted February 22, 2010 at 5:16 AM

    This is genius.
12. Molly A

    Posted March 4, 2010 at 5:21 PM

    The day that you can give me workman’s comp when I saw my arm off at work and social security in my old age is the day that I’ll agree with your argument about the welfare state.

    The welfare state does not replace charitable interactions between humans in society. Last time I checked, Americans were doing loads of socially conscious and charitable acts. The beauty of the welfare state is that it makes us all a part of a “brother’s keeper” society that recognizes that everyone is entitled to some basic standard of living, no matter the cards that are dealt to them in life. The welfare state recognizes that people fail to take care of one another in society because of things like, oh I don’t know, racial prejudice, or prejudice against the poor, or against the indigent.

    And like it or not, Brandon, Americans enjoy and expect to receive some level of care from the state, especially in hard times. Think about food stamps in the past two years. As the stigma attached to them has faded due to the pressing need induced by the recession, more and more families have gratefully used SNAP to supplement their family’s earnings. The American people made this possible through their taxes. We are all our brother’s keeper in this respect.

    I think you should re-evaluate your distaste for the welfare state, since your quick brushing off in this article is ill-conceived.
13. Matthew Sanyour - Epilogue

    Posted March 10, 2010 at 6:14 PM

    Fair is foul and foul is fair
    Hover through the fog and filthy air.

    -Macbeth, 1.1.11-12

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