New Captain America: Time to End the ‘Death of the American Male’

Dang. Now I wish I’d gone to see the new Captain America film. 

Well, perhaps that overstates things. But still, Anthony Mackie deserves some attention and credit for his quiet wisdom on the “death of the American male,” a death for which his own industry bears significant responsibility. Perhaps remarkably, the Hollywood Reporter featured his argument yesterday. At first Mackie talks about raising his sons to be “humble,” but he’s teaching them more than humility:

The Avengers franchise actor went on to explain why it’s important to him to build his children’s character — especially in today’s society. “So, it is just that thing of in the past 20 years, we’ve been living through the death of the American male. They have literally killed masculinity in our homes, in our communities for one reason or another. But I raise my boys to be young men.”

Absolutely true. But I wonder who Mackie has in mind with “they.” I’m not faulting him for leaving that ambiguous, since this is mainly a personal story for THR, but that really is the question. 

And the reason I raise this — while praising Mackie for making the point — is Hollywood’s contributions to that death. This goes beyond “girl power” stories, which are fine on their own and sometimes very entertaining. Hollywood — and Madison Avenue, which may be more guilty — have gone out of their way to make men and fathers not just irrelevant but outright alien to their culture. They exist largely in entertainment and advertising as foils for female characters, either villains or idiots, and denigrate masculinity as at best an annoyance to be overcome, and at worst as a toxin to society. 

“Girls rule boys drool” is funny as a joke among pre-adolescents. It’s degrading to everyone as a principle in culture.

Let’s get back to Mackie’s main point, which is his effort to instill a particular quality of masculinity in his sons — chivalry: 

Mackie told his sons since they were two years old, they need to always say thank you, open doors for women and take care of their mom. “Every time I left for a job, I tell my 15-year-old, ‘You’re the man of the house. You make sure these doors are locked. Every night this alarm is on. You text me or you call me every night before you go to bed and you wake up.’ I love that because we’re men,” Mackie said.

Mackie believes all the “money” and “celebrity” in the world “means nothing” if he’s not there to protect his family. “So, for me, it’s always that idea of American masculinity is very different.”

A thousand times yes on this argument. It brings me back to a fundamental misunderstanding of Paul’s instruction in Ephesians regarding “submission.” Paul is in fact advising both women and men to be submissive to the needs of the other, or better put, to sublimate the self for the good of the relationship between the spouses and the Lord. We are called to become servants in our love for each other, and the role of men in marriage is to sacrifice himself for the good of his wife and family “just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” 

Mackie is teaching his sons that kind of servant leadership as an expression of that masculinity. That is the same approach that chivalry played in our culture for centuries, until modern thought denigrated it as condescension and stoked enmity with it between the sexes. It comes from the same assumptions that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, which might be true — but isn’t unique to females. Men need or don’t need women either, from the same selfish perspective. The point isn’t co-dependency or condescension, but an ordered expression of masculinity to benefit society generally — and a way to keep masculinity from getting expressed in dangerous or damaging ways.

This reminds me of something Damon Wayans said about his sons quite a few years ago, who are now grown. He told a stand-up audience that his then-young sons were the opposite of cool, focused on learning and education rather than the entertainment-culture nonsense all around them. I wish I could find the clip (I tried), because Wayans’ wisdom stuck with me. Joking that they were actually kind of nerdy, Wayans felt proud of that. He’d rather they be nerdy and alive than cool and dead, or words to that effect. He made it clear that he intended to model positive masculinity to them and expected them to learn it too, rather than either immature hostility or shame for being young men. His son Damon Jr seems to have learned that well enough to work with his father on projects now, in fact. 

I’m glad that Mackie made a point of discussing this. Perhaps he can direct the attention of his industry to that problem and help them find ways to bolster boys as well as girls, men as well as women, and incentivize more portrayals of responsible masculinity on films and TV screens.