The American Psychological Association just made it harder to maintain strong marriages

Guest Post by Suzanne Venker

I‘m finishing up a manuscript for a new book that helps women find Mr. Right and keep him by embracing sexual inequality, aka the innate differences between women and men. So-called gender equality presumes the sexes are interchangeable, and they are not. Masculinity and femininity represent the yin and yang of any romantic relationship and are crucial for lasting love. When they cease to exist, children suffer and families disintegrate.

So you can imagine my shock and disdain for the American Psychological Association’s new guidelines that claim traditional masculinity is “harmful.” We’ve known about the war on men for years, but to have the the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the country formally reject the inherent nature of men is both profound and appalling.

The APA guidelines understandably triggered a huge backlash. They emphasize such absurd ideas as “gender role strain,” defined as “a psychological situation in which gender role demands have negative consequences on the individual or others,” and “gender role conflict,” defined as “problems resulting from adherence to rigid, sexist, or restrictive gender roles, learned during socialization, that result in personal restriction, devaluation, or violation of others or self.”

As a result, the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities of the American Psychological Association issued a rebuttal to its own guidelines in an effort to appease the masses. It reads:

Sorry, APA, you can’t backtrack on your own report by suggesting you were only referring to outliers. Your missive, which you concede was years in the making, is about men and masculinity in general.

Like all card-carrying members of the Left, your members clearly believe that anything that smacks of tradition is harmful and must be changed or fixed. You can’t see what everyday Americans can see for themselves: It isn’t masculinity that causes pathological behaviors (such as the belief that a “real man” is violent). Bad behavior, on the part of both sexes, is learned behavior. It’s a problem within the individual that stems from his or her upbringing and environment. Are you not aware that the vast majority of prison inmates come from violent, broken, or otherwise dysfunctional homes?

Not only is traditional masculinity not bad, it is necessary for children, marriages, and a stable society. The boys and men with whom you appear so concerned become pathological because they lacked a traditional model of masculinity.

Since you appear not to know what traditional masculinity looks like, allow me to enlighten you. The traits you refer to in your report (such as stoicism, aggressiveness, breadwinning, and even dominance) are admirable traits, not destructive ones. Here’s a doozy for you: Women like those traits in men. They make women and children feel safe and secure. They elicit women’s respect, which is crucial for a marriage to last. By every measure, studies have shown that when men are feminized, there’s a break down of marriage, families, and society.

As for your fantasy about men’s and women’s interchangeability with respect to gender roles, you’re clearly unaware of the data. Or perhaps you ignore it (I’m not sure which is worse). For decades, feminist academics and intellectuals believed the sexes would become more alike as we sloughed off our supposedly confining sex roles and became more free, more self-actualized human beings.

They were wrong.

The freedoms conferred by effective contraceptives and women’s economic independence have made men and women similar in some ways, yes. But the cruel irony is they’ve also allowed sex differences to become more pronounced. In other words, the more the line between masculine and feminine behavior is blurred, the more the innate differences between the sexes appear.

I think you may need some new guidelines.

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