-Macbeth, 1.1.11-12

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.

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.