As the sun rose yesterday in the land of lawn signs, many a wealthy, educated, liberal may have awakened to some prose courtesy of The Atlantic.

These are the movers, the shakers, the thinkers, after all. What better a time than to ponder masculinity than on a Sunday morning? After all, in Christian America, families are still going to church to worship that man who died on the cross. The Atlantic wants to give all some food for thought on a Sunday morning. Enter career poet, Megan Fernandes and a poem entitled Masculinity.

Of what are you afraid? Not a bomb. In Dar es Salaam the men,
with guns as long as arms, bent under the car to check
for a ticking and you did not even flinch. Not of snow,
when in New Hampshire a white storm blanketed
the car in minutes and the highway transformed into
a blinding afterlife, skid red, and sightless sounds of metal colliding.
Not of dark, when the motorcycle’s headlight burned out
in the dead of night as we wound down a volcano’s steep body,
the road’s rocky jaw dropping to a rough sea, the free fall inches
from our feet.”--Megan Fernandes, Masculinity-The Atlantic

Men are fearless. Women need them. This is the set up. “Meg”, goes in for the kill, however. Think balls in purse:

You said, Meg, if you pull over to the side of the volcano, an angel will be dispatched, a donkey and a husband and a stable will appear, If you stop the car in the blizzard, three wise men will show up.”-Megan Fernandes, Masculinity-The Atlantic

Oy. We know where this is going, now…

I said, if I am saved by three wise men, what will this cost me? Will I have to drop to my knees? Because no man gives salvation away for free. But I said none of this. Because when I heard No one is coming to save me. I held you close like a good woman. Like all the women before me who know what destroys and remakes, and what is destroyed in the remaking.”–Megan Fernandes, Masculinity-The Atlantic

Let’s sum this up in a few sentences, shall we? Megs is not a fan of religion-to be specific, Christianity. She is also not a fan of “manly men” who go off to war and tote guns, or change tires. She thinks ALL men have “ulterior motives” when changing said tires, that there are strings attached to being the damsel in distress. She says “no man gives salvation away for free” as a dig to those who follow Jesus Christ. She believes all men destroy, remake and destroy again in the remaking. Pure feminist rage, I tell you.

Before being published on (oooo, ahhhh) The Atlantic, Megan Fernandes has been at this a good bit. Here is a description from her collection of poems, entitled (of course) Good Boys:

In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes’s Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene.”-Amazon.com

The Anthropocene. Gotta throw that word out there. Rolls right off the tongue. Say it with me now, Anthropocene. Good, boys and girls. Now, you smart, you educated. Here is Megan Fernandes reading one of her other classics:

The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the ‘hydrogen fruit’ of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.”-Amazon.com

Yeah, yeah, back in the day (before I knew any better), I threw a fit at a Tarot Reading in the desert, too. Before I grew the eff up and learned where to direct my mercy.

Here’s the deal. If Megan wants to get stoned in the desert and have a fit at a Tarot session and write a poem about it, that’s fine. If she wants to throw out labyrinthine literal references to craft a story via poetry, that’s fine. If she wants to throw out her feminist-shaved-head-on-one-side fury, that’s fine, too. Most poets do have a chip on their shoulder about something at some point in their lives.

The issue I have with this is academia and the ideology that it breeds. As a college student, I took creative writing classes and hung out with a few of these types of creatives. They would go off on benders and say they were “working on a piece” and then subsequently say, “but you would not understand it”. I remember one white guy poetry writer saying this to me once. I really wanted to ask him if why I wouldn’t “understand”. (Perhaps because I wasn’t doing heroin in the bathroom at my workplace like he was?) This same guy was friends with two other guys who wagered every weekend how many women they can sleep with by posing as “tortured poets”. They were good Democrats who came from a good, wealthy, Atlantic coast family. So yes, I guess I have a chip on my shoulder, too.

I could not live in the fantasy-driven, slow-clap world of coffeehouse poetry culture. Maybe, I just didn’t understand or maybe reality called and heralded hard. The issue I have with this brand of angry, feminist poetry is that it is so out of touch with the reality of today. The academic world of creative writing and the university system cranks out a certain brand of angry, feminist poet. One who does not see the abusers for who they really are. One who refuses to see that men, who pretend to be their allies and sympathize with them, are trying their best to destroy everything and anything that makes us women, women.

Classic misogyny claimed that men were better than women merely by dint of being born male. The new misogyny insists that being female isn’t an essential biological fact but a mutable identity, something anyone can be. It gives men permission to say to women: We can be women, too.”-Christine Rosen, Commentary.org

So, I will leave this little pin here. If men are men and women are also men, what has (and will) this cost us? And, whatever happened to “the hand that rocks the cradle, rocks the world”? And where is this victimhood coming from? We women also have the power to destroy and remake, and destroy in the remaking. Time to have light some copies of The Atlantic in the desert.

Photo Credit: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons