Last week, Clint Eastwood got in some trouble.
"We're really into the pussy generation," the 86-year-old actor told Esquire in an interview that also included his 30-year-old son, actor/model Scott Eastwood. The elder Eastwood described his distain for political correctness and overall loss of masculinity in millennial culture. Eastwood lamented that today people are "walking on eggshells" and there's a general lack of hard work, even in the White House. "And that's the pussy generation – nobody wants to work."
Eastwood and his ‘60s spaghetti westerns became the personification of testosterone. A walking, talking, gun-slinging icon of masculinity.
For the past few decades, study after study has popped up confirming that testosterone levels are dropping, sperm counts have diminished and most recently, the Journal of Hand Therapy found that men are weaker than they were 30 years ago.
The study took 237 healthy millennials aged 20-34 and found they have lower grip and pinch strength than the same-aged men did three decades ago. They also found that the average grip strength for men ages 25 to 29 is 26 pounds lower today. Grip and pinch strength, the study reports, is a good way to measure overall predictive strength when it comes to pushups, leg extensions and leg presses.
"The fact that you have a weak grip is important because you probably are weak elsewhere," Richard Bohannon, a physical therapist and professor of health studies in North Carolina told the Sydney Morning Herald. "It's a window into your world. It provides a peek behind the curtain at your health status."
You don't have to be a genius to connect the dots. Besides the alleged lack of libido in millennial men, which Gary Wilson explained with his "Coolidge Effect" theory in a 2012 TEDx Talk, they are also much less likely to be employed in manual labor and have retreated to the cubicle to type and text the day away with the rest of us. Even if you are hitting the gym a few days a week and weight training, this regimented exercise does not produce the same results as constant physical labour.
According to a 2007 study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, testosterone levels in American men have rapidly declined. The long running, age-matched study examined blood samples from groups of men in the Boston area of varying ages over time. The participants were asked about everything from demographic to lifestyle choices like smoking habits or physical activity. They found out some wild shit. Smoking increased testosterone, while antidepressants pushed a massive decrease. The decline was age-dependent.
"It is a little troubling," one researcher commented. "The average differences are not very large, but they are big enough and occurring over a short enough time period to be the cause of some concern."
A few years ago, dissident feminist and author, Camille Paglia published an article in TIME magazine, "It's A Man's World, And It Always Will Be." As predicted, 50 per cent of the readers gasped and seethed with anger. A professor herself, Paglia says the greatest mistake of third wave feminism has been convincing "indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with the careless fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology." Women, she argues, were "enslaved" by the necessary and practical division of labour required for the reproduction and survival of the human race. "Over the past century, it was labour-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from the daily drudgery."
Pay credit where credit is due. Civilizations rise and fall. When ours eventually does, we will need men to do the work of rebuilding it all over again. It is primarily men who do the dirty, dangerous and necessary work of building roads, pouring concrete, sewage maintenance, tarring roofs, laying bricks and excavating natural gas. But these jobs are increasingly under-appreciated today.
I was at my family farm last month hanging with my Uncle Janek. When I was a kid on the farm, Janek would take me with him up the road to a junkyard owned by this old Italian immigrant named Mr. Patroni. I was fascinated by Patroni's yard filled with scrap metal and car parts. The landfill junk that everyone chucked away, he could salvage. My uncle often took me along when he had to grab stuff from the old solider for his own projects. In the ‘70s, when Janek was a young buck and Patroni wasn't so beat with wrinkles, my uncle noticed a custom job he had done building his deck into the lake. Curious about his process, my uncle asked Patroni what tools he used. Patroni looked at him puzzled, held up his thick, weathered hands and flatly said, "These are my tools."
