Will Smith is back. And like all good action heroes, just in the nick of time.
Before the release of his latest movie Bad Boys: Ride or Die this summer, the last anyone had seen of Smith was at the 2022 Academy Awards when he slapped comedian Chris Rock for making a rude joke about his wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith.
For defending his wife’s honour – something that would have been considered obligatory male behaviour a few generations ago – Smith was widely condemned for his “toxic masculinity” and banned from the Oscars for a decade.
Moviegoers had other ideas. After a long string of box office failures throughout early 2024, Bad Boys: Ride or Die was widely acknowledged to be the first legitimate blockbuster of the summer, earning over US$100 million in its first weekend and pushing the entire Bad Boys franchise past US$1 billion.
Such commercial success should be seen as evidence the public isn’t repelled by displays of traditional masculinity. Rather, they’re prepared to pay good money to see Smith rescue his kidnapped wife and pump the bad guy full of “toxic” bullets.
Despite plenty of noisy opinions to the contrary, there remains something vitally necessary about the qualities that have always defined manhood: courage, aggressive risk-taking and unfettered competitiveness among them. Rather than fretting about toxic masculinity, we ought to be encouraging all men to embrace their masculine nature. Canada’s future may depend on it.
These days, simply acting like a man risks public admonishment, if not a medical diagnosis. In 2019 the American Psychological Association declared traditional masculinity – which it defined as “achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence…[and] self-reliance” – to be a “harmful” malady in need of correction.
It gets worse. Despite ample and convincing evidence that a stable two-parent family is the best environment for raising healthy and successful children, today dads are widely treated in popular culture as incompetent buffoons. And feminist rhetoric is now explicit in its enmity. In a particularly vicious 2018 Washington Post column “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” feminist scholar Suzanna Danuta Walters declares of men: “We have every right to hate you.”
“There is this general anti-male animus in society today,” laments Janice Fiamengo, a retired professor of English at the University of Ottawa. “Everywhere is this sense that men are at best irrelevant to women’s lives, and at worst, a menace to society. I see almost no appreciation for men’s unique and distinctive abilities and gifts.” Perhaps the first step to publicly recognizing the many benefits of masculinity is to rebrand it from toxic to tonic.
The term “tonic masculinity” was coined by Miles Groth, a psychologist at New York City’s Wagner College, to highlight the positive and necessary aspects of manliness. Tonic, Groth notes, has two meanings. It is “an invigorating substance” as well as the home key of a musical composition. Tonic masculinity, in other words, represents both harmony and healing.
Groth observes the vast significance of the work that men do. Surgeons, garbage men, soldiers, loggers, miners, bus drivers and many others are vital to society. And much of what they do involves a high degree of personal risk and/or self-sacrifice. In Canada, men account for 95 percent of all on-the-job fatalities. The power of tonic masculinity, Groth writes, “is seen in men who pursue careers in public service such as first responders and… men who serve in the military.” Men push limits and explore frontiers.
No woman has ever landed on the moon. It was men who first circumnavigated the globe, climbed Mount Everest and reached the North Pole. The same goes for intellectual exploration. Of the 970 Nobel Prizes given out since its inception in 1901, 905 are men. And those 65 women winners are predominately in non-scientific fields such as peace and literature. The prizes in physics, medicine, chemistry and economics are thoroughly dominated by men.
It is important to note that, on average, men are not smarter than women. Rather, their performance in intelligence measures displays greater variability at either end. There are more very dumb and very smart men than women. Proving male stupidity is easy, as the Darwin Awards readily attest. At the other end of the spectrum, the most comprehensive population-wide intelligence tests (conducted in Scotland in the 1930s and 1940s) revealed that at an IQ of 140, what is considered “genius” level, there were twice as many males as females. A Duke University investigation of exceptional students in the U.S. and India reported that within the top 0.01 percent of SAT/ACT scores for math and science, there were more than 2.5 males for every female. The U.S. membership of Mensa is 64 percent male.
Crucially, these sex differences at the very highest levels are not related to any of the obvious physical advantages that men hold. Rather, this variability is an embedded masculine trait with no bearing on size or strength. Part of the secret may lie in the competitiveness that is essential to male behaviour.
Competition pushes men to constantly strive to outdo each other. The evolutionary origin of this trait can be found in the competition for mates, but it carries over to all other activities and fields. Beyond sports and business, this dominance extends to fields that have no practical or physical component. Men dominate chess, bridge and even Scrabble tournaments because their drive to succeed leads them to spend more time studying and practicing. And this gender divide has profound implications for Canada as a whole.
Since 2015, our country has had a self-declared “feminist” government, with all that implies. Justin Trudeau’s first official act as prime minister was to unveil a perfectly gender-balanced cabinet. On domestic policy, he has focused almost exclusively on redistributing Canada’s existing pool of wealth through programs such as child care, pharmacare, dental care and so on.
Meanwhile, Ottawa has proven openly hostile to resource development, agriculture and other “male” pursuits that involve creating new wealth, pushing frontiers and building big things. The result has been a chronic under-investment in new capital and technology and a decided lack of competitive fire across the entire Canadian economy.
Canada’s many problems, including faltering productivity, a shrinking military, a housing crisis and our damaged international reputation are best understood as evidence of a lack of competitiveness, independence and risk-taking at the national level, traits that are typically associated with traditional masculinity. Canada, in other words, needs to start acting like a man again. And soon.
Lynne Cohen is a journalist and non-practising lawyer in Ottawa. She has published four books, including the biography Let Right be Done: The Life and Times of Bill Simpson. A longer version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca.
