By : In 2010, Paul Elam penned a stunning piece. It is only in recent months that the full significance of his words illuminated themselves for me. I feel that it is his greatest ever work.
The article is, of course, The plague of modern masculinity. In it, he outlines the traditional notions of masculinity in terms of alpha, beta and omega, and charts the road that this has taken us down in recent times.
He writes:
The article is, of course, The plague of modern masculinity. In it, he outlines the traditional notions of masculinity in terms of alpha, beta and omega, and charts the road that this has taken us down in recent times.He writes:
They [young men] have come of age in a time of coerced impotence, their nascent masculinity gutted and stripped long before having the opportunity to shape their character and their destiny. In that they are suffering from the loss of things never held, from things missing but never known. They are, quite literally, a lost generation of the walking wounded, wandering blindly from a battlefield on which they never knew they stood.
In that light, the path they are on is not really a road to manhood, but simply a retreat from the effacing malice woven into the very fabric of their developmental lives. And it takes them not to safe ground, but directly into a dismal culture of shallowness and self-indulgence; a realm of options without obligations; of self-gratification without self-awareness or self-discipline. It is the death march of the western male, destined for a withering end ensured by intellectual, psychological and moral atrophy.



