Post-Bondi, a Woman Applauds Male Courage

“‘Guns don’t kill people; men and boys kill people,’ experts say,” read an October 2017 USA Today headline. The next month, Democrat Dana Nessel, running for Michigan attorney general, told state residents to support her, not a man. She meant any man because, her reasoning went, a woman won’t likely commit sexual harassment. (Nessel won her race; now, in 2025, she’s being investigated for ethics violations.)

Yet these sentiments by Americans, issued in a time of perhaps peak misandry, had nothing on the Swedes’ anti-male machinations. Ahead of the curve in 2004, their country’s Left Party (its actual name) proposed a “Man Tax” (its actual name). As you may guess, this was a special levy on men designed to compensate society for male violence’s cost.

(By the way, I’ll be happy to pay my man tax. That is, as long as I also get royalties for all of history’s man-birthed inventions and innovations. I’ll then use what’s left over to self-fund a presidential run.)

Ironically, despite the above and 1,000 other similar attacks, many people still wonder something about teen boys and young men. “Why are they gravitating toward the manosphere?!” they’ll ask. Yes, it’s quite the mystery.

Woman-splainin’ it for Ya’

One woman to whom it’s perhaps not a mystery, however, is one Jemima Kelly. In fact, Kelly, a journalist, recently penned an article in the Financial Times titled “In praise of male courage.” Referencing an event that has shocked the world, she writes (in a piece behind a paywall):

Sunday December 14 was a day of horrific male brutality: a father and son slaughtering 15 innocent people including a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. But it was also a day of astonishing male courage. Two men (one of them the Holocaust survivor) died while protecting their loved ones; another was killed while trying to disarm the attackers before they began shooting.

Still another, an unarmed 43-year-old shop owner and father of two named Ahmed al Ahmed, has become a global hero after being filmed managing to wrestle one of the gunmen’s weapons away, saving the lives of an unknown number of people. “I’m going to die,” he said before taking on the attacker, according to his cousin. “Please see my family [and tell them] that I went down to save people’s lives.” He was shot five times in the arm and shoulder, but survived.

Our largely peaceful, rather decadent age offers few opportunities for such acts of great physical courage and heroism. We spend as much time talking about “psychological safety” as physical safety; silence is equated with violence on issues in which only one opinion is deemed morally acceptable. Yet when physical bravery is needed, it is often one particular group of people who are ready to risk their lives and sacrifice their bodies for the sake of others: men.

(Hat tip: Commentator Silvio Canto, Jr.)

Taming Nature

Of course, a feminist response here is that no one would have needed protecting if there hadn’t been men around in the first place. Men are responsible, too, for most direct murder, virtually all forcible rape, and the majority of the violent crime generally. And, having governed civilization historically, they have prosecuted almost all history’s wars.

Something else is also true, however. Men are virtually all those who rush to crime scenes, forest fires, floods, and other danger zones to save lives. This and the fact they perform almost every perilous, dirty job is why men constitute 92 percent of workplace deaths.

Little men sometimes step up to the hero plate, too. Just consider the story of six-year-old Wyoming boy Bridger Walker. In July 2020 he was walking with his four-year-old sister when a vicious dog lunged at her. Without hesitation, Bridger intercepted the canine, which then dug its teeth into the boy’s cheek. Though he suffered injury, he saved his sister, who emerged unscathed.

“If someone had to die,” tiny Bridger later said, “I thought it should be me” (video below).

Update: Five years on, both kids are flourishing.

Whence the Modern World?

Yet it isn’t just male courage that has preserved life and limb. The science, medicine, and other modern wonders that have saved literally billions of lives are almost exclusively male domains. These triumphs have propelled the average life expectancy from 33 in Paleolithic times to 78 (in the United States) today. They have also enabled women to outlive men, whereas the reverse was true in much earlier ages.

These advances are, in fact, why we have an eight-billion-plus strong world population now. This population can, too, only be sustained with the resources (e.g., modern food-production and water-delivery methods) male endeavor has provided. In other words, masculinity, often demeaned as “toxic” today, has brought many benefits.

Of course, feminist dogma states that all this could have been accomplished without men. Women just needed the opportunity, they say. Yet one feminist, Camille Paglia, begs to differ. “If civilization had been left in female hands,” she once famously said, “we would still be living in grass huts.” (A naturally imposed grass ceiling?) What reality was Paglia alluding to?

Men are the actuating sex, the wilder one, which accounts for both their dynamism and their dangerousness. They’re two sides of the same coin. They give men the capacity to be a Churchill or a Hitler, to write the Communist Manifesto or the Constitution. So, yes, a small minority of men have been killers. But many more lives have been saved because a large number of men have been curers. (I examined this in greater depth here.)

Conclusion

So what’s the takeaway on this? First, and contrary to woke prescriptions, we don’t need to “change the way we raise boys” and dispense with tradition. We need to resurrect tradition in its fullness. Regarding this, both sexes (though men are the focus here) must be raised with those good moral habits: the virtues.

Second, the 1970s/’80s/’90s/’00s feminist sameness-of-the-sexes dogma — which dictated raising boys and girls identically — must be completely rejected. (And it has lost some favor.) Just as we treat cats and dogs somewhat differently because we recognize their different natures, so must a correct understanding of the sexes’ natures govern our treatment of boys and girls.

An implication: What’s demonized as “sex stereotyping” is often a good practice. It’s not the behavior “straitjacket” some lament. Rather, its best elements amount to tailoring, to a sex-specific training regime designed to cultivate the characteristic strengths of the given sex. It’s much as how we provide a musically gifted and inclined child far different training than an athletically gifted and inclined child.

In other words, many people today love touting “diversity.” Well, a real diversity we can trumpet and act upon is that between the sexes.

To breed good men (or women), we need to raise boys recognizing what they actually are — not what some ideologue wants them to be.