“The War on Men”: A conversation with Owen Strachan

Why has the American culture become so hostile to masculinity? And even more importantly, how has that damaged our communities and our country? In his new book The War on Men: Why Society Hates Them and Why We Need Them, Dr. Owen Strachan takes on the claims of “toxic masculinity,” and lays out the damage done by a decades-long attack on the masculine.

“Soft men make for hard times,” Owen writes in his book, “but hard times produce strong men.” But in what form should that strength come? Earlier this week, Owen and I sat down and discussed his new book and the ways in which we can restore the status and dignity of men. Cultural confusion has indeed produced toxic variants of masculinity, Owen tells me, but only because the natural and beneficial forms of masculinity have been devalued and at times actively suppressed.

Based on a rough transcript, here are a few highlights from our interview:

Q: Obviously the whole gender ideology thing is trying to completely demolish the idea of biological sex and whatever roles are adapted for those biological sexes, you can make an argument that there’s almost a war on women at the same time that there’s a war on men.

A: That would be my quick summation of the problem. … People don’t know what a man is, people don’t know what a woman is, and that’s the way forces in our culture —  that’s the way the modern left sadly wants it.

Q: As a culture, we’ve become Pontius Pilate. What is truth? I’m going to wash my hands of it. That is the thing I reflect on when I see people say Well, there’s no such thing as truth — I have my truth, you have your truth.

A: The conversation over New Atheism, for example, twenty years ago might seem disconnected from where we are today. You might think, oh there’s all this secularism or atheism or skepticism, however you want to frame that. And now we’re in this time where nobody knows what a man is or nobody knows what a woman is. Actually, the two are directly connected, because if you give up on creation — if you give up on there being any stable sense of the cosmos — you’re not going to be able to understand ultimately that there are men and there are women.

This is a Christian book, it’s a biblical book intentionally, and so I’m going to Creation and I’m saying God. There are men and there are women because God made them that way. He didn’t just give them incidental biology with a few slight tweaks but men and women are the same. No, He actually makes them distinct from one another. Women have capacities men don’t have, just to put that on public record, men have capacities or callings that women don’t have.

Q: The whole idea of a strong man now has become toxic itself. I mean, it’s not even just toxic masculinity. Strength in men is [itself] considered toxic these days, and that has real world consequences. What happens? Male strength is not just discounted, but penalized, attacked, and disfavored. What are the outcomes of that?

A: That is such a great question. And this is where, in a common grace sense, Jordan Peterson has been such a good voice in our culture. Because Peterson is really the one who has made the essential point that men need to be dangerous. When you say that, you don’t mean men should go attack anybody within arm’s reach, especially women and children. What Peterson means is that you should have strength under control so that you can defend people from evil men.

Q: This brings up a almost a theological point, really, that I think is very much misunderstood. We read the Gospels, and we hear about “meekness,” blessed are the meek. And meekness does not mean weakness. Meekness means strength under control. And Jesus makes this point — “Take my yoke upon you for I am meek.” That doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t have power. It means that Jesus is putting aside His power to for the benefit of the people who follow Him, the men and women who follow Him. … 

We need strong, dangerous men who have a set of core values that allows them to channel this only when necessary and only in the cause of public good.

A: That’s exactly right. … Our culture doesn’t understand strength and it doesn’t understand weakness. It doesn’t understand weakness, it doesn’t understand either side. And and so I’m sure that a good number of folks out there just hate, you know, creation, order, they hate the world as God has made it.

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Owen has much more to say about The War on Men, and how we can turn our culture back to truth and an honest vision of both masculinity and femininity — not by putting one over the other or forcing some sort of artificial “equity” on men and women. The path forward has to recognize the truth of Creation and biology, and recognize the complementary gifts of men and women and the equal dignity those gifts have. His book will hit the shelves on Tuesday, but as I explain in the podcast, it’s important to preorder now before the October 3rd release date!

As a bonus, here is my other podcast this week from The Ed Morrissey Show — an interview with my friend and veteran Vaticanista, Francis X. Rocca from the Wall Street Journal. We spoke about the fallout in Central and Eastern Europe from Pope Francis’ remarks on Russian imperialism, and how Catholics there are beginning to perceive the pontiff as a parochial and naive leader. We also talk about the upcoming Synod on Synodality, and what we can expect to happen … and not to happen, too.